RICHMOND — The struggle between moderates and fundamentalists for control of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1979 into the early 1990s is often called “the controversy.” Yet it was really just the latest controversy.
In 1899, William Heth Whitsitt (1841-1911), the third president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., was forced out for reluctantly presenting historical evidence about early Baptists that is widely accepted today.
New light is being shed on that controversy by historian Jim Slatton, pastor emeritus of River Road Church, Baptist, in Richmond, who gained exclusive access to Whitsitt's personal diaries. Those insights will appear in an in-depth biography of Whitsitt due out in the near future from Mercer University Press.
Photo by John Pierce
Jim Slatton (left), pastor emeritus of River Road Church, Baptist, and Fred Anderson, executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, visit Whitsett's grave site.
While doing research in England in 1880, Whitsitt, a church historian, found evidence (“proofs that are irrefutable”) in primary sources that Baptists did not practice baptism by immersion until about 1641. That finding discounted popular Landmark claims that traced Baptists through “a trail of blood” to the beginning of Christianity.
“I tell people he made the mistake of telling Southern Baptists the truth,” said Slatton in a recent interview with Baptists Today.
Whitsitt suppressed the public revelation of his research, however.
“To show how careful he was, he did a couple of short monographs while he was in England that summer but never published them,” said Slatton. “Because friends advised him the Baptist public probably was not ready for that.”
The first publication of what Whitsitt called his “discovery” appeared as an anonymous series of articles in a New York newspaper (with ties to Henry Ward Beecher) called The Independent.
“Even then, Whitsitt avoided too explicit a discussion of the issue of Baptist origin and succession in his classes,” said Slatton. “In my view he was an institutionalist and had very carefully avoided making this a public issue.”
Only when asked to write an entry on Baptists for Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia did Whitsitt include his conclusion that the practice of immersion did not begin until around 1641.
The article might have garnered little attention had Whitsitt not also claimed that early American Baptist Roger Williams was not immersed when baptized in 1639 and that the church he started in Providence, R.I., (regarded as the First Baptist Church of America) had ceased to exist at one point.
Providence pastor Henry Melville King vigorously defended the church's history and brought to light Whitsitt's conclusions about baptism. Then Baptist newspapers picked up the story.
“[Whitsitt] was very alarmed when this controversy broke out,” said Slatton.
“There were over 100 Baptist newspapers at that time — including ones we remember best,” said Slatton. “Most were privately owned … and editors recognized immediately that this [controversy] might sell newspapers.”
Landmark leaders such as T.T. Eaton, editor of the Kentucky Western Recorder, and Whitsitt's own pastor, drove the effort.
“The ‘Baptist brag' was that there had always been Baptist churches all the way back to John the Baptist, Jerusalem, Jesus and the Jordan,” said Slatton. “Landmarkism was widespread and more influential in what was then the West — Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas — than it was in the Southeast.
During a three-year period from 1896-1899, Baptist state conventions and local associations voted disapproval of Whitsitt's position.
“It came before the Southern Baptist Convention — or tried to — three times,” said Slatton.
In 1896, seminary trustees (who met just prior to the annual SBC gathering) kept the issue from coming to the floor. When the SBC met the next year, Whitsitt presented a written five-point statement to trustees.
Photo by John Pierce
“Then on the floor of the convention he was asked to read his statement, and when he finished they gave him a great ovation,” said Slatton. “So he prevailed there.”
Again in 1898, seminary trustees refused to take Whitsitt to task. Yet that same year, the faculty met secretly in Hopkinsville, Ky., in conjunction with the state convention and concluded that the tide was turning.
“The faculty no longer were encouraging him to stay,” said Slatton. “When you think of it in terms of a contemporary situation, it is hard to imagine the president of a seminary or university going on for three years at the center of a controversy.”
Feeling abandoned by the faculty, Whitsitt announced he would retire at the end of the next full school year — in the spring of 1899.
“But the controversy continued because it wasn't clear what the outcome would be — whether his resignation would be accepted or not, whether he would no longer teach at Southern — so it sputtered on and continued in the newspapers,” said Slatton. “When the actual meeting of the trustees took place, they voted to accept his resignation — as both president and professor.”
Whitsitt moved on to teach philosophy at what is now the University of Richmond, where he was revered.
Etta Nachman had expressed interest in joining River Road Church a few years back and Slatton paid her a pastoral visit. In conversation, he learned she was the granddaughter of William Whitsitt.
He also discovered that she had 16 volumes of Whitsitt's personal diaries as well as four class books and an unpublished manuscript. The manuscript by her mother (Whitsitt's daughter) Mary Whitsittt Whitehead, called Hold the Mirror Up, was based on letters Whitsitt had written to his wife, Florence, from 1873 until they married in 1881.
“I said, ‘You ought not have those at home. You should put them in an archive,' and suggested the Virginia Baptist Historical Society,” Slatton recalled. “Fortunately, she was agreeable to that.”
The diaries contain Whitsitt's personal impressions from 1885 until 1899 — when he left the seminary. Inside some of the covers he wrote: “Keep me for a hundred years and you shall find a use for me.”
“The family … interpreted that as meaning he wanted the diaries kept for 100 years before they saw the light of day,” said Slatton.
He speculates that Whitsitt did not want his candid comments about seminary colleagues and Baptist icons such as James Broadus, James Boyce, A.T. Robertson and John Sampey to be revealed in their lifetimes.
“Probably, he wanted a hundred years to pass by so none of the participants would be around to resent anything that was said,” Slatton surmised. “Yet as a historian, he had a saying that an eyeball witness account now was worth far more than a memory later.
“My take on it is that Whitsitt was a true churchman and institutionalist who … didn't want to cause trouble for the SBC or the seminary by being outspoken, assertive or aggressive with his opinions,” said Slatton. “But at some point, I think when he did that encyclopedia, it was ‘fish or cut bait' time.”
Therefore, Slatton calls him the accidental martyr.
“Here is probably one of the best Baptist historians in the world at that time who is being asked by the publishers of this encyclopedia to give them an article on Baptist — and he knows that he knows the true origins of Baptists,” Slatton continued. “And he knows he has never been credited with this position. I think he was a truth-guardian and decided if there is any appropriate place that's non-showboating or asking for public attention it is [this format].”
In his upcoming book, Slatton reveals and details what led Whitsitt to throw in the towel.
“One of the things that happened after the 1898 convention was that B.H. Carroll of Texas, who was a Landmarker, threatened to move that the convention sever its relations to Southern Seminary,” said Slatton. “Everybody thought that was a big threat … but Whitsitt was prepared to take the seminary out of its relationship with the convention.”
Fred Anderson, who provides safekeeping of the Whitsitt documents at the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, said, “One of the things Jim kept sharing with me is that Whitsitt almost had the same quality as Forrest Gump in that he always managed to be at the right place at the right time to rub elbows with the notable people of the period.”
Slatton explained that Whitsitt, as a Confederate soldier, served under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest at the Battle of Chickamauga. Twice he was put into Union prison camps.
“After his second release, he walked all over hell and half of Georgia to try and catch up to his troops,” said Slatton. “He finally found them and they were escorting Jefferson Davis.”
Slatton also learned that Whitsitt bought property in Louisville from Mary Todd Lincoln's sister, claimed kin to the wife of President James Polk and discussed his Baptist history findings with Charles Haddon Spurgeon — who “was not much taken” with his view of Baptist history.
“Most amazing to me, he was in Germany when Richard Wagner made his main performance of his work in Berlin,” said Slatton. “Whitsitt went back stage and met him because he had assisted in the translation into English of his book on Beethoven.”
Whitsitt also sat in on lectures by the famous German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and witnessed the students shuffling their feet as he entered — signaling an esteemed teacher.
“To cut to the chase, I think the importance of this book is an insight into how deep the fault lines were then and are still among Baptists of the South,” said Slatton. “There were regional fault lines, progressive-conservative fault lines, educational fault lines.”
He added that those who went through the more recent SBC controversy will find similarities and realize how long these tensions have existed.
“It is also important for showing the struggles the churches had with modernity and with the fruits of scholarship,” said Slatton. “The bottom line is this guy was a martyr to academic freedom and to freedom of inquiry — the freedom of the scholar to research and then to report, teach and publish what he has discovered.”
Slatton said a natural tension is created by having a “people's church” that is directed by a democratic process while trying to make “room for the complexities and integrity of scholarship, inquiry and investigation.”
As a modern example, he pointed to conservative SBC leader Adrian Rogers' statement in 1987 that if the majority of Southern Baptists declared “pickles have souls,” then that is what seminary professors should teach.
“One of the polarities is the priesthood of the believer and the need of each soul to make that soul's own journey and, on the other hand, the desire for conformity of opinion to drive these democratic church bodies,” said Slatton. “What Whitsitt wanted was a denomination that could cooperate efficiently in mission and ministry and education but that keeps breaking up on the shoals of insistency of doctrinal conformity.”
John Pierce is editor of Baptists Today, in which this article originally appeared.