Tweet for the day

“I clearly remember the air of fear around him.” This has the ring of truth to me. The viciousness of the fight for the SBC is well-documented; the dismissal of Russell Dilday as president of Southwestern Seminary in 1994 is instructive:

The request that the 63-year-old president retire came as a surprise at the end of a contentious three-day board meeting, but it was apparently planned. Within minutes of the vote, the locks on his office were changed, Dr. Dilday said.

In a telephone interview from his home near the seminary’s 200-acre campus, Dr. Dilday said he was caught off guard because the board’s executive committee had given him a glowing appraisal one day earlier.

They smiled in his face while they were unsheathing the knife — and he was only one of dozens who were treated with similar shabbiness. Contemporary Southern Baptists like to traffic the half-truth that “nobody was fired” during the Resurgence, a literal truth intended to deceive; unsuspecting seminary faculty, and seminary presidents, were given no-nonsense notice that a failure to resign immediately would result in firing.

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