Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 65:1 (Mar 2022)
Article: Temptations Of An Evangelical Theologian
Author: R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

JETS 65:1 (March 2022) p. 1

Temptations Of An Evangelical Theologian

R. Albert Mohler Jr.*

^* R. Albert Mohler Jr. is President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40280. This article is a revision of the ETS Presidential Address given at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the ETS, Fort Worth, 17 November 2021.

The Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) has come a long way since its first meeting at the downtown Cincinnati YMCA in 1949. Yet, from its inception, the Society was formed for a distinct, confessional purpose. Indeed, speaking of the Society’s first meeting, Carl F. H. Henry described the formation of the ETS as “a convocation of evangelical scholars that would encourage conservative theological literature.”1 This Society has maintained that commitment to evangelical identity. It must maintain that commitment.

Moreover, the ETS specifically encouraged a renaissance in evangelical publishing and scholarship. That came as an honest response to the absence of such scholarship from evangelicals in North America. During the 1930s and 1940s, evangelicals struggled to produce scholarship that was distinctively evangelical in character. The ETS was established, in the main, as an attempt to open the floodgates of scholarship among evangelical Christians.

As Henry recounted:

When the summons went out in December 1949, calling together evangelical faculty members in the American schools for a discussion of the predicament of modern theology and the possible organization of what has since been denominated as the Evangelical Theological Society, there was a gratifying response. Men gathered in Cincinnati from the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards and their stature and numbers spoke well for the future of evangelical theology in the nation. Historic Christian theism had not been reduced in our times to a possession only of unlettered disciples.2

Henry spoke of the theological urgency already clear by the middle of the twentieth century. Evangelicalism, by Henry’s estimation, faced an internal issue that undermined the doctrinal depth of Protestant orthodoxy. In an address Henry delivered at the first meeting of the ETS, he argued that the gathering highlighted what he called a “basic evangelical failure.” He wrote, “The concentration on evangelism and missions in terms of the redemptive uniqueness of Christianity, which had become the exclusive task of the evangelical enterprise … had been permitted to obscure the responsibility of evangelicals for a competent literature reflective of

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