Dear Chuck . . .

That’s the way Paige Patterson’s hand-written letter begins.  What follows is a bizarre confluence of quasi-apology, explanation, shaming, historical and literary errata, and condescension.

Anyone who’s received one of Patterson’s many missives knows the pattern. We suspect Dr. Charles Kelley, Jr. has had more than his fair share of such knee-jerk epistolary blisterings through the years.

The letter opens:

“First, I apologize for jumping you as strongly as I did on the women in chapel issue. I know that you did not schedule them. So, I do regret the temporary vehemence of the encounter.”*

Patterson continues:

“Chuck, in all candor, a couple of things happened at the SBC which confirmed (in my mind) what I had begun to suspect. What you said to Charles Stanley about running was mostly very good. But toward the end you used a line which suggested to all at the table that your own comprehension of what is happening in the SBC is at best limited, at worse skewed by environment.”

There it is in plain English. Patterson had developed growing concerns that his brother-in-law — a man who’d completed his undergraduate work in philosophy at Baylor University and successfully completed his doctorate in preaching at New Orleans Seminary without so much as a single failing grade — was (1) limited in his ability to comprehend issues in the Southern Baptist Convention and (2) predisposed toward osmotic influence by liberals who — in Patterson’s mind — were pulling the levers of theological education in the Crescent City.

The letter goes deeper:

“You indicated to Charles [Stanley] that you felt his emphasis, focusing on evangelism rather than theology, would be what the convention needed as a healing agent . . . The controversy is not a grab for power. It does have a political ramification in that it seeks to dipose (sic) an SBC oligarchy of 35 years reign and return the decision making processes of the SBC to the people who pay the bills and do the real work. But while that aspect is undeniable it remains periphreal (sic) — and temporary.”

The next two paragraphs:

“In other words, this controversy will not go away even in an evangelistic whirlwind. One cannot ignore a tiger in his bedroom. He may shoot him, try to domesticate him, abandon the house to him, etc. — he cannot ignore him. So, here, the issue must be dealt with only because it, like Schaffer’s (sic) God, is there, but also because the whole issue of world evangelization, what kind, how, and when, is bound up in the issue.

“By now it should be apparent that while the Judge, Russ, and I have provided the stackpole, we are hardly alone — or even a minority. Suppose, for example, that we took all of those employed by the convention or its agencies out of the voting process. While all the rest of us go to the convention on our own nickel or that of a local church, almost every member of every seminary faculty was there on the co-op program nickel (or at least on convention money). In other words, thousands of us paid the expenses of denominational employees to come, and for the most part vote against us. Approximately 1500 votes would be eliminated if everyone had to come at either church expense or his own.”

Question: When was the last time Paige Patterson attended a convention at his own expense?  Or did much of anything at his own expense?  As of today, he’s still living in a house that he doesn’t pay for.  But we digress . . .

What proceeds thereafter is a list of assertions, which Patterson “simplifies” for Chuck. These include (1) An enormous number of “our people” (Patterson’s words) want a change; and (2) Southern Baptists were losing confidence in SBC entities and their leaders.

Sound familiar?

Then comes the point, and the patronization:

“These situations cannot be remedied by evangelism alone. They must be addressed and even solved . . . Now Chuck, I am not suggesting that you ought to lead the parade. Still less that you need to be the Patterson/Pressler man on campus . . . A vote for neutrality or for noninvolvement is, in fact, a vote for the status quo and for bureacratic (sic) inertia. In Luther’s reformation, Grebel’s Zurich, and Helwy’s (sic) England, non-participation was a vote for the establishment. As Dante so well put it, ‘the hottest places in hell must be reserved for those who, in a day of moral crisis, remain silent'”

Really? The hottest place in hell?

We’ve read Dante’s Divine Comedy and painstakingly translated portions of the original Latin at various times. That quote isn’t from Dante.  Instead, it’s from John F. Kennedy. But let’s forgive Patterson for mistaking a 20th century philandering politician for a 13th century Florentine poet. The point was to shame his brother-in-law, not give a lesson in Italian renaissance literature.

We should note, however, in Dante’s Inferno both the gluttonous and the greedy were located closer to the inner circles of hell than were the indecisive.  Even deeper were those who used language — particularly flattery — to manipulate others. But we digress again.

Patterson concludes:

“My brother, how proud of you we are. Your (sic) a man of God and a man with a mission. You are not to be in my image or my pattern, but His! But neither must you allow your environment to shape you . . . Because I believe in you so much and love you so greatly, I plead with you to sort out these pressing issues with the Lord — your face in an open Bible. And do not let Satan deceive you into believing that to do so would cause evangelism to suffer. I have been directly involved in over 2500 conversions and ten new church starts in the past five weeks.”

As for some remaining portions of the letter, we have already published them here. 

Some brief, though incomplete, reflections on this letter:

1. The only reason The Baptist Blogger has a copy of this intensely personal and private handwritten letter is because it is found in the papers of Russell Kaemmerling located in the publicly-available archives of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. In other words, Patterson sent a copy of this letter to his other brother-in-law, Russ Kaemmerling. We wonder if Chuck Kelley knew the letter was being copied and distributed, which has been a decades-old pattern for Patterson. Piecing together the volumes of Pattersonian correspondence on the back-end through the Kaemmerling and Pressler Collections is time-consuming, but not impossible thanks to the Red Bishop’s penchant for blind-carbon-copying unrelated parties. And he was especially crafty at bcc’ing letters that the primary recipient had reason to believe were personal and confidential. Some of them are even marked so.  The archives don’t lie. Patterson loved to breach confidences — even with close family members — but more on that later.
2. Chuck Kelley has had one consistent heartbeat throughout his years of service to Southern Baptists as a professor, dean, and now president of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary: evangelism. This passionate commitment has never been a liability to the convention, but an asset.  In fact, Chuck is at his best when he is talking about evangelism.
3. It’s quintessential Paige to suggest that his own “vehement” response to Chuck Kelley’s advocacy for evangelism was shared by others. Paige is notorious for projection; he simply cannot fathom that intelligent, godly people would ever disagree with him.  That vanity bleeds through in this letter, and one is left wondering how much better off the SBC might have been with Chuck Kelley’s passion leading the charge instead of Paige’s.
4. What’s with that line about Patterson’s having been “directly” involved in 2500 conversions? What braggart says such things?  And, while we’re on the subject, what happened to those “ten new church starts” Patterson boasts having accomplished?  The Artful Dodger spent years assailing Jerry Rankin about the survival rate of the IMB’s new church starts. One wonders how Patterson’s “church starts” panned out the moment his jet left the tarmac.
5. The women issue has been a fixation of Paige’s for decades. He simply cannot handle a woman speaking in chapel, despite the fact that he’s had his own wife speak in chapel a number of times. It causes one to ask questions about everything the Pattersons have touched when it comes to biblical anthropology: The Danvers Statement, the 1998 BFM, the 2000 BFM, and the list goes on.  Here is a man who has a serious issue with women. Not just his mother, or his sister, or any other of the women whose  names appear in the correspondence he secretly shared with men across the convention. That he would have blasted Chuck Kelley for not openly opposing a female chapel speaker at NOBTS, and then shared the letter detailing it with unrelated parties, would require teams of psychiatrists to dissect.  We are not psychiatrists at the Baptist Blogger, but we can identify mommy issues when we see them.
6. Paige Patterson hasn’t paid his own way to the annual convention in decades, if ever. And when he had the power, he sent his professors and staff as voting messengers and paid their way on the “CP nickel” too.  This sort of hypocrisy knows few limits. Having fought the “bureaucracy” for so long, Patterson was all too eager to use the bureaucracy to further his own eccentric agenda. In fact, Paige hasn’t been paying much of his own living costs, food costs, or automobile costs for years.  The main reason he is STILL in the presidential home at Southwestern is because he’s never learned to live on his own.  Without CP-provided luxuries and staff, he and Dorothy have been at a loss. And where have all of those millionaire home-building donors been for the last four months?

To be continued . . . in book form.

_____

*Handwritten letter located in the Russell Kaemmerling papers, Archives and Special Collections, Library at Southeastern, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, NC.