Columns: Glimpses of a Seminary Under Assault.

Hawkins, Merrill M., Jr.

Columns: Glimpses of a Seminary Under Assault. By Russell H. Dilday. Macon, Georgia: Smyth and Helwys, 2004. 346 pp.

From 1978, when he became president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, until his forced removal in 1994, Russell Dilday wrote 146 columns for the seminary's news magazine. To prepare to write his new book, Columns, Dilday reviewed each of the articles he had written, a task that allowed him to offer a picture of his role in the denominational controversies of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). After a preface that gives Dilday's perspective on the fundamentalist takeover of the seminary, as well as the rise of right-wing influences in the SBC, the book gives a year-by-year summary of each of his columns. The book also provides, in each chapter, a summary of events for that year.

In addition to providing a valuable primary text of one person's experiences and conflicts with religious fundamentalism, this book yields a secondary summary of moderate-fundamentalist conflict. Each chapter in the book provides the names of key leaders invited to the seminary campus, the fundamentalist churches that invited Dilday to preach, his speaking engagements to enlist support for the moderate cause, and his assessment of the status of the seminary year by year.

The book opens with a good introduction to the rise of fundamentalism in the SBC and the particular effect of that rise on Southwestern. While the introduction has an editorial tone to it, the tone is not inappropriate. Dilday describes the people involved in changing Southwestern's character as "grinches who stole the Convention and Southwestern Seminary." He also puts forth his reasons for understanding participants in the fundamentalist/conservative movement as governed by political loyalty, not character and competence. Dilday, without providing many names in his introduction, paints his opponents as people of questionable personal ethics. Citing many examples without names, he concludes that the people backing Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler were "inexperienced, anti-institution, even anti-education." One especially strident example is that of a new trustee who announced with pride the fact that he thanked God each day that he never attended a seminary, to the loud amens and affirmations of many of his colleagues on the board.

Columns will be most valuable not so much as a record of what happened in the SBC from 1979 to 1989 as it will be as a record of how Russell Dilday experienced those years. His experiences provide valuable information for historians, as well as people with an interest and affection for Baptist identity. Readers of this journal owe Russell Dilday a word of thanks for his efforts in recording this painful story.--Reviewed by Merrill M. Hawkins, Jr., associate professor of religion, Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, Tennessee.