Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | B | Baptist History and Heritage

The Baptist ecclesiology of E. Y. Mullins: individualism and the New Testament church: most observers consider E. Y. Mullins to be the most influential Southern Baptist theologian and denominational leader of the twentieth century.

Article Excerpt
Even literary critic Harold Bloom has said that Mullins is America's most neglected theologian. (1) Mullins served as president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (1899 to 1928), the Southern Baptist Convention (1921-1924), and Baptist World Alliance (1923-1928) a worldwide Baptist community. His Axioms of Religion (1908) was hailed as virtual Baptist orthodoxy at home and abroad. (2)

Mullins still has admirers who value his focus on freedom and find the voluntary principle relevant to this postmodern age. Some believe that he models an effective theological method: a focused balance between individual religious experience and biblical authority that is firmly orthodox and warmly pietistic. (3)

Critics of Mullins have abounded in recent years across the theological spectrum. Mullins's focus on the individual has been described as a hyper-individualism that leads to doctrinal minimalism and the loss of biblical authority. According to critics, Mullins was seduced by the Enlightenment's obsession with the autonomous individual. The practical stress upon the individual's relationship to God "was to make every man's hat his own church." (4) Because Mullins authored a survey of theology without a separate chapter on ecclesiology, critics contend that he cared little for or had little or no doctrine of the church. (5)

Mullins would, of course, disagree with the critics of today. To follow his theological method would not lead to a loss of biblical authority or a vapid ecclesiology. On the contrary, Mullins believed that the proper focus on the voluntary faith of individuals was the simple and only model to embody the New Testament church--in his view the only authentic ecclesiology.

Soul Competency

Some scholars call Mullins a "theologian of religious experience." (6) Methodologically, he considered religious experience to be the starting point for theological reflection. Experience was the "the holy of holies of theology." (7) Mullins unequivocally touted the authority of the scriptures and opposed modernist attempts to redefine elements of traditional historic orthodoxy, such as the deity of Christ. Mullins also argued that the truths of scripture were verified, not by an ecclesiastical authority or by church tradition, but by "discovery" through the "experience of His Grace working in us." (8)

From this experiential base, Mullins created and popularized the term "soul competency"--the term most associated with his legacy. He defined soul competency as the right of each individual (soul) to relate directly to God. Baptists, of course, had highlighted the idea of "soul liberty" and the sacredness of the individual conscience since their origins in the seventeenth century. In particular, Baptists had said that each person must be free to follow (or not follow) God according to the dictates of conscience because each individual will stand before the judgment seat of God. Consequently, Baptists believed they were upholding the essentials of the Protestant Reformation when they advocated the sole authority of the Bible and insisted upon the right of individual interpretation of the scriptures. Mullins continued each of these ideas with even greater focus on the individual's direct relationship to God. (9)

Mullins highlighted soul competency as the "peculiar teaching" of the Baptist tradition and the "religious axiom" of the "axioms of religion," a set of six principles that he considered to be the essence of New Testament Christianity. (10) Soul competency, according to Mullins, was not simply individualism, because a human "is more than an individual. He is a social being. He has relations to his fellows in the Church, and in the industrial order, and in the State." (11) Mullins actually used 'individual' freely in his writings--often as an interchangeable synonym of soul competency--but he made a concerted effort to insist that soul competency was not excessively individualistic.

Much has been written, by supporters and critics, about how much Mullins was indebted to Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern liberal theology, who articulated an experiential-based methodology. (12) Mullins indisputably frequently cited numerous nineteenth-century theologians, especially Schleiermacher and pragmatist William James. Mullins asserted that his focus on the individual, however, was New Testament Christianity rather than the pantheistic subjectivism of modern liberalism. (13) According to Mullins, the "corrective" to excessive individualism was loyalty to the Lordship of Christ and to the Bible. A personal experience and relationship with Jesus Christ--the heart of Christianity and the conversionist base of Baptist life--was guided by the Holy Spirit and was anchored to the objective revelation of "facts" about Jesus Christ recorded in the Bible. (14) Loyalty to Christ was the "center of liberty." (15)

Could soul competency be abused? Of course, but the freedom inherent in biblically based regenerate individualism--a voluntary personal relationship with Jesus Christ--was worth the risk. In vivid terms, Mullins wrote that when a person was denied the right to think for him or herself, the person would "remain intellectually and spiritually a moron under a system of compulsion and repression." (16) Mullins also acknowledged the risky but necessary freedom found in the corollary of soul competency: the right to the private interpretation of scripture:

The right of private .judgment is a dangerous word, but it is a winged and emancipating word. It is the sole guaranty that man will pass out of the childhood to the manhood stage of religion .... It was the hammer with which Roger Williams broke the chain which united church and state .... The right of private judgment kindled the vision of world evangelization to the faith of William Carey and transformed western Christianity. The right of private judgement; yes, a dangerous word, but a word which started man on a new voyage of spiritual discovery. ... It is true it produced the sects of Protestantism. But these, after all, are not comets or wandering stars without central control, plunging blindly through space. ... Loyalty to Christ balances their right of private judgment and is the guaranty that the faith of the New Testament shall not perish from the earth. (17)

An Authentic New Testament Church

A Spiritual Community. According to Mullins, voluntary individual faith did not lead away from the church, but led toward the creation of an authentic New Testament church. While Mullins willingly employed a "Baptist definition" of the church as "a voluntary association of believers united together for the purpose of worship and edification," he emphasized that the church was a spiritual community grounded in a common individual experience of grace, a common faith and a common loyalty to Jesus Christ. The church was the "spiritual home of the saved." (18) There could be no community of faith without converted individuals. The church was a believers' church. In Baptist lingo, it had a "regenerate church membership."

The church was created by the "initiative of...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!