Pending Name Change for Central Seminary

[JE Pettibone]

Some of you have heard that Central Baptist Theological will be changing names in the near future.

We have received notice that they plan to start official use of the new name as of January 2018. The new Name will be The Marshall School of Theology.

[Rvaughn]

Among other things, that will differentiate from another one by that name in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thinking of that made me wonder if there might be a lot with that common name Central. There may be others, but I only found three. CBTS in Shawnee, KS, Minneapolis, MN and Virginia Beach, VA. The latter recently changed their name as well, to Virginia Beach Theological Seminary.

[JE Pettibone]

[Haruo]

[Tim Bonney]

[JE Pettibone]

[Rvaughn]

[Tim Bonney]

[JE Pettibone]

[William Thornton]

Reminds me of how SBC mods rued the fact that by being saddled with "moderate" they forfeited being known as "conservative" even though their allies at BP tried to piggyback "conservative" onto the label anyway. Didn't take...didn't work.

[KeithE]

[Dave Roberts]

I think the labeling to which William refers was that of the 1987 Peace Committee chaired by Charles Fuller (who interestingly was having an extra-marital affair at the time). They used two labels: the more conservative were tagged as "fundamental conservatives" and the less conservative group was tagged as "moderate conservatives." Neither label stuck.

[JE Pettibone]

[William Thornton]

Dave is right. The tags never stuck. I use mod/lib which has turned out to be a pretty good fit.

A of B was never in the running for any lable that contained "conservative".

[Rvaughn]

[Tim Bonney]

[Rvaughn]

Tim, I get your point, but this is really a matter of perspective, according to whether one was to the right or left of the "fundamental conservatives/moderate conservatives" in the SBC. For example, there are fundamentalists (who are not Baptists) who would have thought the SBC "fundamental conservatives" were a bunch of namby-pamby liberals.

[William Thornton]

[William Thornton]

[Tim Bonney]

[Haruo]

[Tim Bonney]

[William Thornton]

Delayed response...

Shurden, in his book "The Struggle for the Soul of the SBC" attributes the manufacture of the two hybrid, hyphenated labels for SBC cons and mods to Baptist Press. The labels were "fundamentalist-conservatives" and "moderate-conservatives." This was a prime example of BP's bias, since "fundamentalist" was a highly charged term familiar to all Americans. The state Baptist papers at the time could still be counted on for mod bias and the made-up labels appeared for a time but wasn't swallowed by most and it disappeared.

The problem for mods was evident. They didn't have much of a standard bearer. The angry Chafin, the irascible Shermans, et al didn't help. BP did their part in trying to hang the positively viewed "conservative" on SBC mods while at the same time hanging the negatively viewed "fundamentalist" on SBC cons. Manifestly didn't work, as mods continued to lose every SBC presidential election. The most salient comment any mod ever made was when one of the Shermans, I don't recall which, said, "I understand numbers."

https://books.google.com/books?id=7F6fC ... 22&f=false

[Tim Bonney]

William, I agree those terms just made everything muddier.

Right now the UMC is looking for solutions to what quite possibly could be a split and main difference between “liberals” and “conservatives” is the issues around sexuality and Biblical interpretation related to that. On all the other areas that divided Mod/conservative Baptists in the SBC both sides in the UMC are equally Mod/lib. Go figure.

[Sandy]