Book Review: Freedom and Authority by E. Y. Mullins
Christian experience is no way to combat subjectivism.
Freedom and Authority in Religion. By Edgar Young Mullins. Philadelphia, PA: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1913.
Introduction
Edgar Young Mullins was the fourth president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1899-1928), and from that post (spanning nearly all of the first three decades of the twentieth century) he exercised dominant leadership among the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as American Evangelicalism more broadly. In 1908, Mullins published his magnum opus (Axioms of Religion), and this book (Freedom and Authority in Religion) may be considered his underlying epistemological philosophy (or the method of reasoning) by which Mullins arrived at his axioms.
The task, as Mullins saw it, was to provide a basis for perceiving and depending on a true religious authority which would not undermine Mullins’s chief conviction that the individual soul is competent and free to experience direct access to God. The result was an academic engagement with the epistemologies of his day and a jumbled and incoherent argument for Mullins’s unique epistemological method.
The Problem of Authority
Mullins began by stating the “specific problem” which he aimed to solve:
“to indicate the origin of authority, its permanent necessity and value in religion as elsewhere; its peculiar characteristics in religion which distinguish it from other forms of authority; and, further to point out the relations sustained by the principle of authority in religion to our scientific and philosophic culture; to show how the principles of freedom and authority are implicated the one in the other, each being necessary to the realization of the other, and finally to indicate how in the Christian religion the ideals of freedom and authority meet and are reconciled by harmonious blending into the higher unity of the spiritual life.”[1]
In particular, Mullins rejected what he viewed as “the inadequacy of subjectivism” and the external ecclesial or creedal authority, which he believed was represented predominantly by the Roman Catholic Church.[2] For Mullins, truth is assimilated not merely by rationalistic inquiry and deduction, nor by an utterly subjective personal perception, but by “religious experience” wherein the individual submits his will to God and enters into fellowship with God, thereby entering “a world of new realities.”[3] Mullins said, “The only method of proof here is that of immediate contact with God, the immediate experience of the power we crave, the redemption from sin and its power we so much need.”[4]
He went on, “We make the will a prime factor in our theory of knowledge, and learn truth as we could not have learned it otherwise.”[5] In summary, he said, “Religious assimilation then is after its kind. It is verification through actual experiences of life. It is progressive and cumulative in the individual life and history.”[6]
Defining “knowledge,” Mullins said it is “(1) That which is self-evident in the nature of reason. (2) That which is immediately given in experience. (3) That which is cogently inferred from the given.”[7] Thus, Mullins asserted that “Christian experience” is a method for arriving at “real knowledge” that is superior to that which can be deduced from the scientific method or from philosophical inquiry.[8] Even the Bible is insufficient by itself to acquire real knowledge. Mullins said the Bible “is the output, in its ‘divers portions and divers manners,’ of individual experience of God and his grace.”[9]
For Mullins, science and philosophy were not in conflict with religious experience as long as each epistemological method did not overstep its definitional boundaries. So too, the Bible and religious experience were not conflicting methods of knowing or combative candidates for the ultimate seat of authority, but complementary and mutually necessary. He said, “the authority of the Bible is… due to the fact that it preserves and brings to us in literary form the truths acquired by mankind in the free interaction of its individual units with God.”[10]
He went on, “The literature [of the Bible] arose then as the expression of life-adjustments and life-experiences.”[11]In other words, the authors of Scripture experienced God and adjusted their lives accordingly, recording those experiences and adjustments on the pages of Scripture. In a confusing jumble, Mullins claimed that “the literature is indispensable to the life… The rise of the life in turn always creates a demand for the literature… [and] only a literature could give us the original form of the revelation in its purity and distinctness.”[12] Mullins was not clear when he spoke of this “life;” at times he indicated that it was the life of Christ and at other times he was explicitly referring to the life of the individual experiencing Christ.
A Subjective Answer to Subjectivism
Mullins repeatedly rejected subjectivism; indeed, he saw it as a foolish and inevitable loss of any objective truth or authority. However, Mullins seemed to have missed the contradiction of his own view in statements like this one: “Spiritual energies are at work in the soul of the Christian directly and immediately. This constitutes the most vital and fundamental fact for him.”[13] It seems that Mullins’s eagerness to retain soul competency, individualism, and voluntarism made him a self-contradictory and inept opponent of subjectivism.
In seeking to combat subjectivism he proposed an epistemological method and an authority which is both subjective and unalterable by outside claims of truth and authority. Mullins said, “For him” – that is for the Christian who has experienced the direct, immediate, and spiritual energies at work in his soul – “the Bible cannot be destroyed, since it performs a function in his life which the rational-critical process never touches at all.”[14] In other words, since such a one has experienced God and has had his life affected by such an experience, this knowledge which he has attained is impervious to rational arguments and critical analyses that might contradict his experiential knowledge. Such a man retains a belief in the Bible, but only in so far as his experience affirms it. A more subjective rationale than what Mullins proposed is inconceivable.
Conclusion
In this huge volume (just over 400 pages), Mullins sought to reconcile science, philosophy, and religious experience as distinct-but-interactive ways of knowing. He believed that his epistemological method represented something superior to scientific methodology and philosophical reasoning, but something that was not in conflict with either one.
So too, Mullins repudiated what he perceived to be the solution offered by some of his contemporaries, a solution that pulled religious knowledge into the realm of pure subjectivism. However, Mullins’s argument arrives at a conclusion that is subjectivism par excellence. Mullins’s “objective and authoritative truth” was a “progressive discovery [of] its meaning through interaction with it.”[15] Thus, for Mullins, the highest form of objective truth and the chief authority in the life of a religious person is his own (very personal and radically subjective) experience.
American Evangelicalism is suffering today from the pervasive embrace of Mullins’s epistemology, and it is a deadly disease. What we need is a recovery of epistemological authority that stands outside of the individual experience. Mullins was right to denounce the Roman Catholic placement of such an authority in the priestly office of the church, but he was wrong to seat authority in the heart and experience of each individual who might claim to know Christ.
Many Protestants (including Baptists) before and after Mullins have offered us a better way – the chief authority of Christ as mediated by His word and through His people.
[1] Mullins, Edgar Young. Freedom and Authority in Religion. Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1913. p. 6.
[2] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 7.
[3] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 162.
[4] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 164.
[5] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 165.
[6] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 165.
[7] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 259.
[8] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 259.
[9] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 342.
[10] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 342.
[11] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 345.
[12] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 349.
[13] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 360.
[14] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 360.
[15] Mullins. Freedom and Authority in Religion. p. 401.