E. Y. Mullins— Reluctant Evangelical -- By: Thomas J. Nettles

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 03:4 (Winter 1999)
Article: E. Y. Mullins— Reluctant Evangelical
Author: Thomas J. Nettles


E. Y. Mullins—
Reluctant Evangelical

Thomas J. Nettles

Thomas J. Nettles has served as Professor of Historical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary since 1997. He has taught previously at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (1976–1982), Mid-America Seminary (1982–1988), and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (1989–1997). Dr. Nettles is a prolific author and has written extensively about Baptist history. Broadman and Holman has recently published a revised and expanded edition of Baptists and the Bible co-authored by L. Russ Bush. A book titled Baptist Profiles is forthcoming from Christian Focus Publications.

Mullins—A Theological Pivot

During the years that E. Y. Mullins was president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky (1899–1928), he was caught in the middle of the Fundamentalist-Liberal controversy. Though he wrote an article for The Fundamentals,1 he grew to dislike the style, rhetoric, and confrontive spirit of many fundamentalists, calling them “big ‘F’ fundamentalists.”2 Particularly disturbing to him was the public agitation of Southern Baptist J. Frank Norris, who wanted to “put the screws on everybody” by pinning his “brethren down to stereotyped statements.” Mullins was uneasy with what he perceived (probably misperceived) as a fundamentalist reliance on scholastic logic, syllogistic deduction, as a theological method. While not taking issue with the conclusions of his fellow fundamentalists, he stressed his reliance on the inductive approach with Christian experience as a major, if not the chief, source of raw data. On the other hand, the Modernists were certainly outside the parameters of his fellowship. Their profession of openness to the advances of modern science Mullins found to be untrue. They were subjectivists, anti-supernaturalists, and just as assertively dogmatic as the most “hyper-orthodox” of the Fundamentalists. Russell Dilday has accurately reflected Mullins’s perceptions in saying, “As a moderate conservative Mullins faulted both fundamentalists and liberals for their extremism which led to name calling rather than fruitful communication.”3

Today, being dead, Mullins still speaks. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, as in the first two, Mullins plays the part of the middle-man in a theological controversy among Southern Baptists. In God’s Last and Only Hope, Bill J. Leonard’s 1990 book on “The Controversy,” the complexities concerning Mullins are noted.

Mullins’s appeals to both Scripture an...

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