When she was forced off the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and accused of heresy, Molly Marshall found “a scandalous providence preserved my vocation and my life’s work,” she recently recalled.
Marshall, now president of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, gave the annual Susan Draper White Lecture at the Minnesota school. A major part of the lecture included a viewing of the 1997 documentary film Battle for the Minds, which was created by filmmaker Steven Lipscomb, whose own mother was a second-career theology student at Southern Seminary in the 1990s.
That film, which later aired on PBS, centers on the battle for the Bible in the Southern Baptist Convention — called by its advocates the “conservative resurgence” — and particularly the controversy over whether women should study theology, teach theology or preach theology.
Three decades later, the SBC has banned women from preaching and carrying the title “pastor.” Marshall, who in 1983 became the first female hired to teach in Southern Seminary’s School of Theology, also became a lightning rod for conservatives’ criticism of what they deemed encroaching liberalism in the SBC and its six seminaries.
Why she resigned
In 1994, she chose to resign her position rather than face a “heresy trial” demanded by trustees and the seminary’s new president, Al Mohler, who was on his way to becoming the leading theological apologist for the conservative movement.
Archival photo of Molly Marshall
Baptist Press reported Aug. 22, 1994: “Marshall’s resignation had been sought by the administration at the Louisville, Ky., seminary, according to seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. The administration had received complaints from students and others who charged Marshall’s teaching fell outside the parameters of the Abstract of Principles, the seminary’s statement of faith, Mohler said.
“Marshall, an associate professor of Christian theology, has drawn fire from conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention throughout her decade of teaching. Yet Mohler said the current concerns were new and did not relate to previous criticisms of her. He said it would be inappropriate to publicly discuss the nature of the concerns about Marshall.”
Mohler also said Marshall being a woman teaching theology was not the issue: “The gender of the professor has absolutely nothing to do with this issue. The issue is not the gender of the professor, but the substance of what the professor teaches or advocates.”
Currently, there are no women teaching in Southern’s School of Theology.
At the time, Mohler said he believed the New Testament forbids women from serving as pastors of churches but does not prohibit them from teaching seminary courses. Currently, there are no women teaching in Southern’s School of Theology.
Marshall said in her Feb. 24 lecture and question-and-answer session framing the film that she assumed she would spend her entire career teaching at Southern Seminary. Even though the seminary and the entire SBC were in the midst of schism, at the time few people on either side could have envisioned the total domination conservatives would achieve over the SBC and its seminaries. In the early 1990s, conservative trustees were demanding “parity” on Southern’s faculty — a balance of conservative and moderate viewpoints — not total control.
Faced with an ultimatum from the new president with no specific charges, Marshall said she chose not to pursue the trial she was entitled to have because she did not want to harm her colleagues and her Ph.D. students. The trial would have been heard by a panel of eight trustees and five faculty members.
“I would have put five faculty members at risk,” she explained in answer to a question from the floor. “Had they stood with me, they would’ve been out soon. Also, I had four more Ph.D. students to finish, and if you’re not in theological education because you love students, you’re in the wrong thing. And so because the department was falling apart, they allowed me to finish those four students, which will tell you something about hypocrisy. I guess they thought Ph.D. students were too far gone anyway, but they just didn’t want me messing up any more M.Div. students at that point.”
‘Be deeply rooted’
The Oklahoma native urged students and young ministers facing challenges today to “find supportive folk and be deeply rooted and grounded in your faith. Learn to pray. Learn to listen. Learn to express your rage.”
Leaving Southern Seminary “was a deeply wounding thing,” she said. “It was a decade before I could sing the Southern Seminary Hymn without weeping. … And so it was my downward humility from the grandeur, from the grandeur of Southern. You can tell it was a rich, rich place.”
In the Q&A session, Marshall again raised the notion of a “scandalous providence” that sustained her.
“I hope I learned that from one of my professors along the way, which I think providence is that very, very challenging doctrine. … The fact that I got calls (from two other schools) the same weekend that I was fired or forced out … (the message was), ‘OK, your vocation is not over. You can go and do something fresh.’” (The quote came from Frank Tupper, a colleague at Southern Seminary.)
That same kind of scandalous providence eventually brought her to United Seminary, she said.
At every juncture, she determined, “I’ve got a choice. I can spend the next however many years I have in theological education, lamenting what I have lost or I can give myself to a new place, learn its ways, join its story and be grateful for the preservation of vocation.”
She referenced the Benedictine vows of stability and conversion as guides. “You give yourself to a place. You give yourself to a people’s conversion. … It means continuous conversion of all ways of life, conversion of speech, conversion of habit. And so I thought those vows will serve me well if I can live into those.”
Film reaction
Having watched the film showing events that happened before many current seminary students were born, those in the audience wanted particularly to know what parallels Marshall sees between the “conservative resurgence” and modern-day politics in America.
Her answer: Plenty.
“I was a tenured professor and I’d won the faculty teaching award just the year before, but I was a threat as I challenged the patriarchal system.”
Having fought her way into the School of Theology as a student — women were assigned to the School of Church Music or the School of Education — she knew the challenges of a patriarchal system even as she sought to overcome them.
“I saw and experienced how women were treated in the church. I believed theological education had to get better. It had to create space to encourage the leadership of women and only then would churches fully or begin more fully to embrace their gifts.”
The system pushed back against these advances, she explained. “I brought some baggage as a fledgling professor, at least in the eyes of an institution caught in the crosshairs of a fundamentalist takeover. I was ordained. I had served as a pastor. I believed in inclusive language for humanity, even worse and more alarming, for God, and I was introducing feminist theology into the curriculum. Horrors!”
The “lurch in the Southern Baptist Convention paralleled the Reagan years with its own conservative resurgence,” she said. “The board of trustees at Southern became more and more conservative during my 11 years teaching there, and finally in 1993, they elected a young ambitious president who consented as a part of getting the job to get rid of that troublesome woman. The whole of my time there, my lectures were taped and shipped off to the Southern Baptist War Room in Dallas where every lecture was scrutinized for heresy. Some of my colleagues saw me as a lightning rod and kept their distance while I sought to prove I was an asset, not a liability in forming students theologically and spiritually.”
Unspoken in her comments was the obvious parallel to university professors and researchers today who are being forced out of positions for teaching Critical Race Theory and embracing diversity paradigms.
‘Chilling parallels’
Overall, there are “chilling parallels” between the experience of the Confessing Church in Germany and the fundamentalist movements that have shaped both the SBC and the United States, she said in answer to a question.
“Now is the time for progressive Christian witness and progressive people of good faith in all traditions to speak clearly and if need be (exercise) the kind of civil disobedience that will not succumb to what is clearly wrong.”
Marshall explained: “You really cannot separate the history of evangelicalism of the mid-’60s from political movement. And that’s why I contextualized it in the Reagan years at the parallel of when some of this was beginning; that was the beginning of the return to white supremacy. It was hyper nationalism. It was this toxic rule of civil religion with some skewed nationalism. I can’t believe I called out nationalism in 1990. … And of course now it’s on steroids compared to then as more and more galvanizing power has been accrued.”