Book Review: "Baptist Beliefs" by E. Y. Mullins
A culture of belief and practice without the trappings of dogma.
Baptist Beliefs. By E. Y. Mullins. Valley Forge, PA. The Judson Press, 1925. 0-8170-0014-3
Introduction
Edgar Young Mullins was a prominent Southern Baptist, filling the role of president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1899-1928) when he published this short book summarizing Baptist doctrines. The Baptist World Publishing Company first produced Baptist Beliefs in 1912, and The Judson Press published an updated edition in 1925, as well as reprints 1977 and 2009. The 1925 edition is especially notable, since that was the year Mullins led the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to adopt the Baptist Faith and Message as its formal confession of faith during its annual meeting on May 14 in Memphis, TN.[1]
Mullins was the president of the SBC from 1921 to 1924, and during the 1922 convention meeting, messengers voted to form a special committee (which Mullins chaired) for the purpose of drafting a statement of Baptist doctrine. By the early 1920s, what became known as the Modernist Controversy was at its height – theological liberalism (i.e., Modernism) came in direct conflict with traditional orthodoxy (i.e., Fundamentalism).
Southern Baptists were largely fundamentalist, but modernists had made significant inroads among Baptist academia and leadership. Mullins’s conciliatory personality, academic competence, and notable leadership made him the sort of man who could lead the SBC through controversy toward greater unity.
It is no surprise that Mullins’s preferred historic Baptist confession (the New Hampshire Confession of Faith, 1833/53) became the basic structure and substance of the Baptist Faith and Message. So too, one can easily see the shape and language of Mullins’s Baptist Beliefs both reflecting the New Hampshire Declaration and shining its own light upon the Baptist Faith and Message.
In this way, Mullins’s Baptist Beliefs served as a promoter and an explainer of the confession Baptists embraced under his leadership.
Summary
In his introduction, Mullins affirmed, “there are a number of excellent Baptist creeds in existence already.”[2]What he “proposed” in his short book was “not the setting up of another [creed], but rather a restatement and interpretation… [or] a general survey of the beliefs commonly held by Baptists.”[3]
In other words, Mullins believed that his contribution to the creedal or confessional material of Baptist faith and practice was not novel. Rather, he believed he was merely articulating the basic and common convictions of Baptists everywhere.
However, because Baptists are not a monolithic group, and because Baptists have often differed on matters of soteriology, ecclesiology, and socio-political activity and responsibility, Mullins’s aim to unite all Baptists under a statement of general beliefs has proven problematic.
It is true that Southern Baptists continue to loosely affirm the Baptist Faith and Message (now in its 2019 iteration), but one can hardly say that this confession is a uniting force among Southern Baptists, much less other Baptist sects in America. In his own day, at least, Mullins did seem to foster a kind of unity among the SBC, but it is not evident that such apparent unity was a result of the substance of Mullins’s book or creed.
Appeasing Everyone
Mullins’s affirmations follow the typical order of most historic Baptist confessions of faith, and nearly all of the articles he included are present (in one form or another) in the historic documents as well.
Like many Baptists before him (and many other Protestants, for that matter), Mullins began by affirming the sufficiency, certainty (or reliability), and authority of the Old and New Testaments. It is here, in divine revelation, that Baptists (indeed, all Protestants) find their ultimate source of faith and practice.
However, Mullins stopped short of defining what Baptists mean by claiming that the Scriptures are “inspired” by God. He said, “There are many ways of explaining the method of inspiration which men have adopted.”[4] And yet, it was precisely here that modernists (i.e., theological liberals) could hide their spurious views of inspiration. It was not the word “inspiration” that usually distinguished modernists and fundamentalists, but the meaning of it.
It was the latter half of the twentieth century, in the SBC and its various institutions (especially in the seminaries), where the battle between theological liberals and conservatives came to a head over the precise definition of inspiration.
Mullins took a similar approach on the doctrines of God’s providence, God’s election of sinners unto salvation, and other doctrines related to soteriology (e.g., regeneration, repentance, faith, and the perseverance of the saints). For example, on election, Mullins affirmed “God’s choice of man is prior to man’s choice of God.”[5] But then he spent the rest of this article defending the “free-will in man” and “man’s choice of God.”[6]
Mullins’s chief concern in Baptist Beliefs (as with his magnum opus, Axioms of Religion) is the competency and freedom of the individual soul. In an effort to appease modernists and fundamentalists, as well as those Baptists who were more Calvinistic in their soteriology and those who were not, Mullins placed freedom, voluntarism, and individualism as the highest and best. He wrote, “The voluntary principle is at the heart of Christianity. The right of private judgment in religion is a right which lies at the core of Christian truth.”[7]
Conclusion
It is hard to overstate the influence of E. Y. Mullins on the Southern Baptist Convention, Baptists in America, and American Evangelicalism more broadly. With his leadership, the SBC survived the modernist controversy. Under his leadership, the SBC adopted its first and only convention-wide confession of faith. After his leadership, the SBC is still today a big tent in which Baptist churches cooperate together despite their theological and practical differences.
Baptist Beliefs represents a kind of doctrinal ambiguity (e.g., neither modernist nor fundamentalist) and a culture of convictions (e.g., prominent individualism, personal responsibility, and practical cooperation) that enabled Southern Baptists to rally around their shared culture more than any shared doctrine. A similar kind of loose cultural unity is observable among Southern Baptists today, but time will tell whether that’s enough to sustain them and their institutions.
[1] See pp. 70-76 of the 1925 annual. http://media2.sbhla.org.s3.amazonaws.com/annuals/SBC_Annual_1925.pdf
[2] E. Y. Mullins, Baptist Beliefs (Valley Forge, PA: The Judson Press, 1925). p. 5.
[3] Mullins, Baptist Beliefs. pp. 5-6.
[4] Mullins, Baptist Beliefs. p. 12.
[5] Mullins, Baptist Beliefs. p. 26.
[6] Mullins, Baptist Beliefs. pp. 26-27.
[7] Mullins, Baptist Beliefs. p. 6.