Opinion Columnists
Email
Print
Veteran of 'Baptist wars' helped build divinity school
Journal File Photo
Bill Leonard, who has has announced that he will step down as dean of the Wake Forest University Divinity School in 2010, has written extensively on the history of Baptists in America.
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: March 22, 2009
In the beginning, there was Bill Leonard. Make that the beginning of the Wake Forest University Divinity School. He became its first dean in 1996 and led in starting the school. His boyish looks and constant smile belied the fact that he was a veteran of "the Baptist wars."
But then he'd start to talk, using wit and wisdom forged as conservatives took over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s. The takeover included the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., where Leonard taught. He left in 1992, one of many faculty members who did so as the school took a hard-right turn.
"You know, negotiating with Baptists is not too different from negotiating with Bosnians," Leonard told me, only half in jest, back in 1998. "There are deep divisions and wounds."
Leonard, who was raised Southern Baptist in Texas, announced earlier this month that he'll step down as the dean of the divinity school in 2010. The school has graduated 163 students, most of whom are serving as pastors or chaplains. Leonard will take a year's sabbatical, then serve as a professor of church history in the divinity school and in the religion department.
We'll need his continued input. He's been a source for me and numerous other journalists nationwide. We watched and listened as he helped build the divinity school, a venture that some Southern Baptists lampooned.
Leonard, a progressive who describes himself as "a Baptist in the South," was ideally suited to the school's mission statement of being "Christian by tradition, ecumenical in outlook and Baptist in heritage." Planners wanted the school to carry on the best in Baptist tradition: an emphasis on free thinking and individual spiritual experience. The university, which had broken free of being ruled by the church, honors its Baptist heritage, and so would its divinity school.
Leonard is an ordained pastor and scholar of Baptist history who came here from Samford University, an Alabama school with loose Baptist ties. He pulled in heavyweights such as feminist theologian Phyllis Trible, Benedictine monk Samuel Weber, and James Dunn, a renowned Baptist advocate of religious freedom. Leonard once said about Dunn: "There's a Texas directness about him that passive-aggressiveness Southerners don't always know what to do with."
Leonard, a white man who attends a predominantly black church, intentionally sought out a black person for the job of professor of homiletics, or preaching. He somehow made that strategy seem natural. "I think it is a good time for a school like the divinity school to remind Baptists that we belong to a broad family in the South … and that being Baptist involves a variety of great traditions," he said during his search.
He hired the Rev. Brad Braxton, who was just starting out in his career, for the job of teaching homiletics. Bennett earned respect both on campus and off campus here, and is now the pastor of New York's famed Riverside Church.
Leonard, too, earned respect among town and gown. He wasn't afraid to speak out. When a coalition of local leaders promoted President George W. Bush's faith-based initiative at Winston-Salem State University during a 2003 meeting, Leonard suggested that the initiative could amount to government intervention in religion.
He also spoke out after the Rev. Jerry Falwell said that pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, the ACLU and People for the American Way had helped the terrorist attacks to happen by trying to secularize America.
Falwell "can get by with his outlandish statements because people in his constituency think he's ‘prophetic,' " Leonard said. "When it gets put into the broader marketplace, it sounds bigoted."
Religion, Leonard realizes, is about having a sense of belonging. He touched on that back in 2000, as conservatives pushed the last moderates out of the Southern Baptist Convention.
"I think for many congregations that remain in, I think they're not going anywhere. The ties are just too deep. They're about belonging. Your momma was a Southern Baptist; your grandma was a Southern Baptist. You just can't let it go."
Leonard said last week that he left his "Southern Baptist identity years ago.
"But the Baptist identity is probably stronger in me than when I came to Wake Forest, in part because I've written or edited four books on Baptist history."
Leonard has taken a different route than many of the Southern Baptists he grew up with, and often been critical of the Southern Baptist Convention. But his criticism has always been reasoned and civil, recognizing that his roots are in that denomination -- even if he is now "a Baptist in the South."
Many of us have learned from his journey. We'll continue to learn from it in the years to come.
■ John Railey writes local editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at 727-7357 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com.
Email
Print
