William Wade Burleson – Posted in his Facebook page. Extracted on 6/26/2026.
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SLAVERY, SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY, WOMEN, AND THE FOUNDERS OF THE SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION
… History possesses an extraordinary ability to humble every generation that believes it has finally learned to read the Bible correctly. Few examples illustrate that truth more vividly than the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention.
When delegates gathered in Augusta, Georgia, in May of 1845 to organize a new Baptist convention of cooperating churches, they did not believe they were defending Southern culture, preserving an agricultural economy, or protecting a political institution.
The Founders of the Southern Baptist Convention believed they were defending the authority of Holy Scripture against liberals and progressives.
The men who became the intellectual architects of the Southern Baptist Convention – Basil Manly, Sr., James Petigru Boyce, John A. Broadus, Richard Fuller, Patrick Hues Mell, and others – were not theological amateurs. They were among the finest exegetes, pastors, educators, and theologians of nineteenth-century America. They loved the Bible. They memorized it. They preached it faithfully. They built schools to teach it. They sent missionaries around the world to proclaim it. Their commitment to the inspiration and authority of Scripture cannot honestly be questioned.
Yet they were wrong. Not merely in practice. They were wrong in their biblical interpretation of slavery.
That statement should not be made lightly, nor should it be made triumphantly. It should be made with the sobriety that history demands, for these men sincerely believed they were applying the grammatical-historical method of interpretation with unwavering consistency to the issue of the day.
1. Richard Furman declared in 1823 that “the right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.”¹
2. Richard Fuller insisted that because Abraham possessed slaves, Moses regulated slavery, Christ never abolished slavery, and Paul instructed both masters and slaves concerning their duties, Christians possessed no authority to declare sinful what God Himself had regulated.²
3. Patrick Hues Mell reached the same conclusion, arguing that slavery was “neither a political, moral, nor social evil” because Scripture recognized its legitimacy.³
4. Basil Manly, Sr., whose Alabama Resolutions precipitated the birth of the Southern Baptist Convention, maintained that slaveholding could never disqualify an otherwise qualified missionary from gospel service.⁴
5. James Petigru Boyce would later confess without embarrassment, “I have been, and am, an ultra pro-slavery man.” ⁵
These Southern Baptist Founders did not arrive at their conclusions about slavery by rejecting Scripture. They arrived at their pro-slavery sentiments because they believed they were defending Scripture.
Their hermeneutic was straightforward.
* The Old Testament regulated slavery.
* The New Testament regulated slavery.
* Neither Testament explicitly abolished slavery.
* Paul sent the slave Onesimus back to his master, Philemon.
* Therefore, the SBC’s founding fathers concluded that slavery itself could not be inherently sinful.
To argue otherwise, they insisted, was to elevate human sentiment above divine revelation.
Today, Southern Baptists almost universally reject the SBC Founder’s conclusions about slavery. We have not done so because the biblical text has changed. No new Greek manuscripts have appeared. No lost epistle of Paul has been discovered commanding masters to emancipate their slaves. The words of Ephesians, Colossians, Philemon, Titus, First Timothy, and First Peter remain precisely as they were when Furman, Fuller, Boyce, Broadus, and Manly first read them.
What changed was not Scripture. What changed was the APPLICATION of our hermeneutic (“study of”) the sacred Scriptures.
We Southern Baptists eventually came to recognize that the New Testament apostles addressed slavery as an existing social institution while simultaneously proclaiming gospel realities that would ultimately undermine the ungodly institution from within.
THIS IS KEY: We Southern Baptists eventually learned to distinguish between apostolic regulation in a fallen social order and the larger redemptive trajectory of the New Covenant Gospel, inaugurated by Jesus Christ.
This raises a very important question for Southern Baptists today.
If one generation of Baptists (1840s and 1850s) could confuse the apostolic regulation of slavery with permanent divine prescription, might this generation of Baptists (2010s and 2020s) possess a blind spot in their confusion over Paul’s apostolic regulation of ‘that woman’ in Ephesus with a permanent divine prescription for the silencing of all Christian women?
The error in applying biblical hermeneutics is the same. The issue for the SBC at the beginning was slavery; today, the issue is spiritual authority, not necessarily women.
How you apply your interpretation of sacred Scriptures regarding spiritual authority determines how you understand ‘the functions of pastors,’ elders, ordination, spiritual gifts, congregational life, the priesthood of all believers, church government, and even the relationship between Christ and His Bride. It determines whether you believe spiritual authority ultimately resides in an office, an institution, an ordained class, or in Christ Himself ministering through His Spirit-indwelt people, all of whom are called His Bride and ‘a Royal priesthood.’
Let’s not make the same hermeneutic error our Founders did.
Perhaps the greatest danger facing every generation of Southern Baptists is not that we reject Scripture. Our greatest danger is that we defend Scripture while quietly reading it through ecclesiastical, social, or institutional traditions inherited from those who came before us.
Southern Baptist history, in the question of slavery, has already demonstrated that possibility. Whether misapplication of the sacred text remains a possibility in this present generation of SBC’ers is the question that lies ahead.
If the Mohler Amendment passes a second time in the 2027 Indianapolis Convention, and gifted women are excluded from Christ’s Kingdom ministry, and the SBC changes its Constitution to say only ‘ordained males with spiritual authority over His Church,” can fulfill “the functions of a pastor,” the SBC will make the same error of biblical hermeneutics that was made by its Founders in 1845.
The issue before us is not, “Do we Southern Baptists believe the Bible?” That answer is unequivocally, “YES!”
The issue before us in 2027 is: “Do we Southern Baptists believe Christ alone is the authority over His Bride, and that gifted men and women in Christ are His Bride, and that all of us (males and females in Christ) compose ‘a Royal priesthood’ to this fallen world?
The Gospel has the power to tear away and destroy the deeply rooted ecclesiastical biases of male spiritual superiority within the SBC in the same manner it eventually disintegrated the deeply embedded cultural institution of slavery.
In 2027, I am pressing for the Good News and a consistent application of the biblical hermeneutic of the infallible Scriptures, and I reject the wooden, prescribed enforcement of an ecclesiastical tradition inherited from SBC forefathers.
I promise you that future SBC generations will see my love for the sacred Scriptures, my resistance to enforced ecclesiastical traditions via the Constitution of the SBC, my defense of the Bride of Christ and her Master’s sole authority, and will say, “He nailed it!” They’ll also either say: “We are grateful the SBC listened to him,” or “Why in the world was the SBC not listening to him?”
Wade Burleson
President, Istoria Ministries
FOOTNOTES:
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¹ Richard Furman, Exposition of the Views of the Baptists Relative to the Coloured Population in the United States (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1823), 12.
² Richard Fuller and Francis Wayland, Domestic Slavery Considered as a Scriptural Institution (New York: Lewis Colby, 1847).
³ Patrick H. Mell, Slavery: A Treatise, Showing That Slavery Is Neither a Political, Moral, nor Social Evil (Macon, Georgia: Burke, Boykin & Co., 1844).
⁴ Basil Manly, Sr., “The Alabama Resolutions,” Alabama Baptist State Convention Proceedings (1844).
⁵ James Petigru Boyce to H. A. Tupper, 1865, in The Correspondence of James Petigru Boyce.
For further information, read Fraudulent Authority: Pastors Who Seek To Rule Over Others (see https://www.amazon.com/Fraudulent…/dp/1520323441… )
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