"Am I therefore your enemy, because I tell you the truth?" Gal.4:16
We have names. Danny Roberts is chairman. Other reported members are:
Developing…
The Baptist Blogger got in an hour or so of reading between meetings on Southwestern’s campus today.
“In the course of his report to the alumni, Dilday gave his assessment of the financial condition of the institution. He particularly noted a $250,000 revenue decline for the seminary and then pointed out, ‘Donors, reluctant to invest in the seminary during these tense days, are changing their wills, placing revocable clauses in their trusts, shifting donations to non-convention institutions, etc.” One wonders, looking back, if Dilday had any influence on the decline of Southwestern’s donor base.”
And:
“On October 25, 1993, Russell Dilday preached to the Baptist General Convention of Texas a message entitled ‘The Family of Faith.’ In his message, he stated: ‘Let’s give up some of our grandiose schemes and repent of unlovely denominational triumphalism and get back to a plain and simple concentration on missions and evangelism. Let’s get back to basics, saying with Paul, ‘This one thing I do.’ Then our critics will have no ammunition with which to ridicule us except to say, ‘They are one-sided in their desire to win the world to Christ.’”
(All quotes taken from The Baptist Reformation by Jerry Sutton, pg 377.)
The campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is truly a beautiful place. But as a native, often homesick Texan, the Baptist Blogger is possessed of an innate appreciation for almost every plot of Lone Star soil.
There is a sense, however, of architectural and stylistic dissonance. There are hints of Greek revival here and there, American neoclassical, Spanish colonial, Brutalist, Georgian, and modern nondescript blobs. There is a “performing arts center” with a minaret tower and lots of brick walkways and a giant goldfish pond and bronze statuary and stone friezes and iron gates and Texas Stars and terra cotta and the list goes on.
Standing in the center of the campus and taking it all in panorama can feel, at times, like the campus Master Plan over the last fifteen years was drawn up by someone with very little sense of style. Like someone who is accustomed to getting dressed in a darkened closet — a boudoir noir, if you will.
Or like an haphazardly constructed Christmas creche incorporating figures from wildly diverse cultures into a single nativity. As a whole, the campus architecture is athematic and inconsistent.
It’s like an ill-fitting suit with matching tie and printed silk pocket square. Or a fat foot squeezed into an acrylic slipper. It’s simultaneously intriguing and sad. Even the signage around campus can seem a little superfluous with notices everywhere alerting visitors to the constant patrol of gun-toting sentinels.
Yes, if aliens or archaeologists were to find Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary three millennia hence, they would almost surely render an Ozymandian verdict: Paige and Dorothy Patterson once lived here. Behold their works, and despair.
But what’s done is done, and the Baptist Blogger in no wise suggests the trustees commence a programme of demolition. Enough of the school has been wrecked already.
But there are some things that need to change forthwith.
For starters, the stained glass windows have to come down. In fact, the very next chapel speaker whose likeness — or near likeness — is found on one of those damned windows should muster the courage to call for their removal immediately. They were a dumb idea manifest in appalling and grotesque art, if you can call them art. Not even the Anabaptists would have tolerated their commissioning.
They simply have to go. Take them down, one-by-one, and use the East Dining Room of Pecan Manor to store them until the presidential home is vacated. Or somewhere else, but get them out.
To be continued . . .
The Baptist Blogger 