Book Review: “Axioms of Religion” by E. Y. Mullins
A Baptist leader in the wrong direction.
The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith. By Edgar Young Mullins. Philadelphia, PA: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1908.
Introduction
Edgar Young Mullins was one of the most influential Southern Baptists of the early twentieth century. He was born in Mississippi on January 5, 1860, graduated from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas in 1879, baptized by his father at the then-named Corsicana Baptist Church in Corsicana, TX, in 1880, and entered post-graduate school at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in 1881.[1] Shortly after his graduation from SBTS in 1885, Mullins accepted an invitation to become the pastor of Harrodsburg Baptist Church in Kentucky and married Isla May Hawley. Over the course of the next several years, Mullins pastored in Kentucky, Maryland, and Massachusetts, and in 1899 he left the pastorate to become a professor of theology and the fourth president of SBTS.
It was in this academic and public denominational role that Mullins exercised his peacemaking leadership, and he became esteemed among Southern Baptists. He was eventually elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention and served in the office from 1921 to 1924. Mullins also chaired the committee that formed and published the Baptist Faith and Message (the twentieth-century confession of Southern Baptists), which the convention adopted in 1925. The influence of Mullins’s writing, speaking, and leadership is hard to overstate for twentieth-century Southern Baptists, and his book The Axioms of Religion might be his most significant.[2]
The Fundamental Principle
With The Axioms of Religion, Mullins aimed to present “a fresh statement of the Baptist position” to “enable the world to understand us better.”[3] The substance of the book came from a series of Mullins’s earlier addresses in which he “set forth in one form or another the principles” articulated and explained here in greater detail.[4] Mullins wanted to counter what he perceived as “a marked movement toward anti-institutional, anti-ecclesiastical, and wholly individualistic Christianity.”[5] He offered his axioms as a “cohesive principle strong enough to give unity to… religious bodies” in order to propel them in “their careers of usefulness.”[6]
Explicitly, Mullins wrote, “The aim of this book is to make this statement [of fundamental principles] from the point of view of the Baptists.”[7] Ironically, Mullins argued that individualism and voluntarism were the solutions to “wholly individualistic Christianity.”
For this titanic Southern Baptist leader, all the principles or axioms of Baptist belief and practice originated from the basic affirmation that the individual soul is competent to commune directly with God. Mullins wrote, “The sufficient statement of the historical significance of the Baptists is this: The competency of the soul in religion” (emphasis added).[8] And again, he wrote, “what we are maintaining is that the doctrine of the soul’s competency in religion under God is the historical significance of the Baptists” (emphasis added).[9] And yet again, he said, “as comprehending all the… particulars, as a great and aggressive force in Christian history, as distinguished from all others and standing entirely alone, the doctrine of the soul’s competency in religion under God is the distinctive historical significance of the Baptists” (emphasis added).[10]
There is no doubt what critical weight Mullins placed on soul competency.
From this “mother principle” (i.e., “the competency of the soul in religion under God”), Mullins contended, “six simple propositions” emerge as “branches from that one trunk.”[11] These six principles or axioms are as follows:
(1) The theological axiom: The holy and loving God has a right to be sovereign.
(2) The religious axiom: All souls have an equal right to direct access to God.
(3) The ecclesiastical axiom: All believers have a right to equal privileges in the church.
(4) The moral axiom: To be responsible man must be free.
(5) The religio-civic axiom: A free Church in a free State.
(6) The social axiom: Love your neighbor as yourself.[12]
Mullins confidently claimed these axioms are “self-evident” to all “who accept Christianity,” they are “the very alphabet of the Christian religion,” and they are “the great New Testament assumptions, which are the very basis of our Baptist faith.[13] Indeed, he said, “in America no member of any of those churches known as ‘evangelical’ will dissent from any of the principles enunciated in this list of six axioms.”[14] For Mullins, not even “the great multitude of unbelievers – men who reject Christianity… will [deny] these axioms.”[15]
The only ones, he believed, who would “repudiate” his axioms were those “who are wedded to the union of Church and State,” such as Roman Catholics and those Protestants who favored a “religious establishment” of one sort or another.[16] Thus, we discover where Mullins identified his own understanding of the divide – either established religion or Mullins’s religious and civic individualism.
America: A Baptist State
Mullins represented an American Evangelical optimism about the civic experiment in democratic government and Baptist advancement in every arena of American society (as well as others abroad). He wrote, “We are approaching the Baptist age of the world, because we are approaching the age of the triumph of democracy.”[17] According to Mullins, America built its social and political structures on the foundation of Baptist principles (not merely generic Christian ones). He said, “we may regard American civilization as a Baptist empire, for at the basis of this government lies a great group of Baptist ideals.”[18]
He went as far as to claim, “One might in a certain sense say that the primary election which determined whether or not there should be an American government was held two thousand years ago on the shores of the Mediterranean when the little Baptist democracies assembled to worship.”[19] In other words, the manifestation of Baptist polity in the original Christian churches reverberated through history until the emergence of an American polity wherein civic leaders applied Baptist ideals to the political sphere.
To make his case on this point, Mullins believed each of his religious axioms had an American civic and political expression. He argued,
“The theological axiom, ‘A holy and loving God has a right to be sovereign,’ has its counterpart in the recognition of God’s sovereignty by this government in granting to the church the rights of an imperium in imperio; that is, in giving independence to the church.
The religious axiom, ‘All souls have an equal right to direct access to God,’ finds its political counterpart in the American axiom, ‘All men are created free and equal.’
The ecclesiastical axiom that ‘All believers are entitled to equal privileges in the church,’ finds its political counterpart in the American axiom that ours is a government ‘of the people, for the people, and by the people.’
The moral axiom that ‘To be responsible, man must be free,’ finds its counterpart in the franchise and in all our American practice in legal and criminal procedure.
The religio-civic axiom, ‘A free Church in a free State,’ has become naturalized in our speech until it is as much political as religious.
The social axiom, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself,’ has its political counterpart in our political axiom, ‘Equal rights to all and special privileges to none.’”[20]
“In short,” Mullins wrote, “the Baptist axioms of religion are like a stalactite descending from heaven to earth… while our American political society is the stalagmite with its base upon the earth rising to meet [it]. When the two shall meet, then heaven and earth will be joined together and the kingdom of God will have come among men.”[21]
It was Baptists, according to Mullins, who gave rise to religious freedom, which is the fundamental freedom for a free society. He wrote, “all forms of human freedom are ultimately grounded in religious freedom.”[22] He went on to say, “Democracy and its attendant blessings in the State in modern times has gone hand in hand not with sacramental and sacerdotal Christianity, but with the Christianity of free grace and the direct relation of the soul to God.”[23] For Mullins, it was this primary contribution of Baptists – soul competency in religion under God – that provided the essential rationale for all other freedoms. He said, “Individual freedom, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of action, industrial freedom, civil liberty, these are all imperishable treasures of the human spirit, achieved as working principles… ultimately they all rest on religious freedom.”[24]
Thus, according to Mullins, religious liberty – a uniquely consistent Baptist contribution to the world (and especially to America) – is the fundamental freedom which itself depends on soul competency – the historic significance of the Baptists and the preeminent axiom from which the others spring. All American freedoms depend on the distinctly Baptist principle of soul competency.
A Self-Contradictory Strategy
Mullins’s repeated and constant adversary throughout this book is coercion. He rejected coercion in religion, as he saw it, in the form of infant baptism and any religious establishment. However, Mullins did affirm that Christians should be socially and politically active. He wrote, “It is by means of regenerated individuals associated together as churches that Christianity becomes a leaven to transform the social order. This is primary and fundamental.”[25]
Mullins said flatly, “The Church ought to exert a powerful influence upon the State. The Church cannot take the State but it does take the citizens of the State into itself.”[26] Further, he said, “Christian men cannot hold themselves aloof from public questions and public service if they are to embody the principles of Christianity in their practical conduct.”[27]
The Christian, according to Mullins, is not to be a monastic, shrinking from public service, a mystic, satisfied alone in his own personal communion with God, or a moralist, seeking to obtain the fruit of morality without the roots of genuine conversion. Rather, the Christian is to be a missionary, “mastered by the moral and evangelistic impulse.”[28] Such a one is “an aggressive advocate of a saving gospel and of all morality and social righteousness (emphasis added).”
For Mullins, “The Christian who understands the meaning of his religion… will be a force for civic, commercial, social, and all other forms of righteousness. Thus Christianity in America will become the religion of the State, although not a State religion.”[29]
With all of Mullins’s emphasis on individualism and voluntarism in religion and civics, his practical application of intentional and communal Christian citizenship seems to be lost in the Baptist political theology and ecclesiology which resulted (at least in part) from Mullins’s influence. In 1959, another Baptist academic, Winthrop S. Hudson, wrote critically of Mullins’s portrayal of the doctrine of soul competency. Hudson said, “Not only did [Mullins] fail to provide detailed guidance on questions of church order… but [his axioms] also served to dissolve any real concept of the church, for it interpreted the faith as a one-to-one relationship between God and the individual.”[30]
In a condemning summary statement, Hudson wrote, “The practical effect of the stress upon ‘soul competency’ as the cardinal doctrine of Baptists was to make every man’s hat his own church.”[31]
Another Baptist academic, R. Stanton Norman, named (in his 2001 publication) Edgar Young Mullins as the origin of what he called the “Enlightenment” tradition, especially Mullins’s highly influential volume Axioms of Religion.[32] Norman believes that Mullins’s work on Baptist distinctives was “dominant” in its influence because Mullins “provides careful argumentation for the philosophical and biblical bases for Christian experience” and because “others regularly appeal to Mullins’s arguments as the authoritative precedent.”[33]
At least from Mullins onward, personal and individual Christian experience is the epistemological starting point for many Baptists, and this includes political theology.
Conclusion
Once again, it is hard to overstate the influence and significance of E. Y. Mullins on the landscape of Baptist doctrine and practice in the twentieth century. His publication of Axioms of Religion has played an enormous role in the shaping of Baptist political theology and ecclesiology. The unfolding narrative has proven that Mullins did nothing to quell the rise of individualism in his day, but he seems instead to have encouraged and fortified it for the decades ahead.
For anyone wanting to understand the political and ecclesiastical landscape of the twenty-first century, Mullins is must-read. Mullins’s own contradictions – individualism to combat individualism and a completely separate Church and state for intentional Christian activism in society and politics – reveal an untenable strategy.
The wake of his legacy ripples through the sea of Baptist doctrine and practice (both in the Church and in the political world), and it is for present-day Baptists to recover and reclaim what Mullins obscured in the Baptist tradition.
[1] “Edgar Young Mullins.” https://sbhla.org/biographies/edgar-young-mullins/
[2] See R. Stanton Norman, More Than Just a Name: Preserving Our Baptist Identity (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2001). pp. 41-63.
[3] Mullins, E. Y. The Axioms of Religion: A New Interpretation of the Baptist Faith (Philadelphia, PA: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1908). p. 7.
[4] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 7.
[5] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 19.
[6] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 19.
[7] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 26.
[8] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 53.
[9] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 56.
[10] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 57.
[11] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 73.
[12] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 74.
[13] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 74.
[14] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 75.
[15] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 75.
[16] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 75.
[17] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 275.
[18] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 255.
[19] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 273.
[20] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. pp. 273-274.
[21] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 274.
[22] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 295.
[23] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 283.
[24] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. pp. 282-283.
[25] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 204.
[26] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 205.
[27] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 206.
[28] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 207.
[29] Mullins. The Axioms of Religion. p. 207.
[30] Winthrop Hudson, ed., Baptist Concepts of the Church: A Survey of the Historical and Theological Issues Which Have Produced Changes in Church Order (Philadelphia, PA: The Judson Press, 1959). 215.
[31] Hudson. Baptist Concepts of the Church. p. 216.
[32] Norman, More Than Just a Name. p. 41.
[33] Norman. More Than Just a Name. p. 50.