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Dr. Russell Fuller shares his side of the story concerning his termination at Southern Seminary with details not previously shared publicly.
#sbc #sbts #almohler #crt #criticalracetheory #highercriticism
Okay, well this evening they wanted me to give a sort of a testimony of my adventures, especially at the end of my time at Southern Seminary. I taught at Southern Seminary. It's the, at the time, it still I think is the largest seminary in the world, and it's in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was founded before the Civil War, and it wasn't founded in Louisville, though it came there later, and it became a very liberal seminary really in the early 1900s, and by the 1970s and 80s, I mean, it was just, I mean, really liberal, okay, accepting you name it, they would accept it basically, but there was a so-called conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention.
I think it was a real thing, it was real, and in that they changed the seminaries and put them more in a conservative pathway, and the man who took over at Southern was a man named Al Mohler, and he would be my boss for, you know, 22 years.
Mohler was a liberal as a student. He denied the doctrine of inspiration. He was very much for women pastors and things of this nature. I mean, he was the liberal there, you know, and he was like the assistant to the president at that time, a guy named Roy Honeycutt, so when I heard that they had hired Al Mohler as the president, I'm like, what are you doing?
Because this was Roy Honeycutt's right-hand man. There's no way he could be a conservative. Well, he started getting rid of the liberal faculty, and I thought, wow, this guy's the real deal. He's a real conservative, and he's changing things.
Then he hired me. I said, he has to be conservative, you know, but even when I first got there, it didn't take long, and I noticed certain things going on that troubled me. One thing is a professor, for instance, got up in chapel, and he denied justification by grace through faith.
I mean, one of the cardinal doctrines of Scripture, he denied it. As a matter of fact, I can still remember his statement. He goes, I looked for forensic justification, and that's what we believe. In other words, forensic is sort of a legal term, the idea of being declared righteous.
We're not infused with righteousness. That's Roman Catholicism, you see, and they can confuse, of course, justification and sanctification, but it was a... he was denying the notion that we are declared just in the sight of God because of the work of Christ.
Well, it just so happened that day, I was sitting on the platform, because I could look out there and look at the professors and look at their faces, and boy, their faces told the story. I mean, they were looking like this, and I'm like, oh, and so, and we're on television, so, you know, I have to be careful what I, you know, looking over at Moeller, but I could hear Moeller's Bible, and I'm like, uh-oh, and as soon as he finished the sermon, the man came back.
He was standing beside me. Moeller wheels between both of us and says, I'll see you in my office right now, and I'm thinking, you? Is that singular or plural? You know, did he want to see me? I didn't do anything, but I thought, I'll just go to my office and be quiet.
He'll call me if he wants me, and he didn't call me. It was the other guy, of course, because he was denying this, but the man never had to get up and say, you know, you remember that last chapel sermon?
I kind of messed a few things up. Nothing. It was just put under the carpet. That bothered me, and then later on in one of the classes where we were, all the professors would be together, he gets up and says that the author of Chronicles either just made a mistake or corrupted his sources.
Well, that's not exactly the doctrine of inerrancy there. He's denying the infallibility of the Scriptures, and again, nothing was done. Absolutely nothing. So I already had kind of, and then when I would ask about it, the response would always be, well, you got to understand when Al hired him, he couldn't bring in a real great conservative at the time.
He just didn't have the power, you know, and so you've got to, you know, okay, okay, but this didn't ring as truthful to me. It just didn't do it. The problem came in, matter of fact, my last conversation with Moeller in his office, he goes, do you have confidence in me, which was a very good question, to which I told him, I'll tell you when I lost my confidence in you, when you accepted sexual orientation.
Now, sexual orientation, of course, is the idea, because usually the way it's described, if you push him, he won't answer you. I know of people, Brian Fisher, as a sort of a, he was a radio talk show host, Christian radio talk show host, and he kept trying to contact Moeller and say, what do you mean by that?
Are you, is a person born homosexual? He wouldn't answer. The reason why, he couldn't answer, because if he says yes, I mean, people are born homosexual? If he says no, then the question is, when do they become, and how do they become, you see, and so he won't answer that question, but yet he uses the very language, which, by the way, he wrote just three years earlier, that that was the linchpin doctrine of the homosexual movement for it to be accepted in America.
Three years later, he's saying, I agree with it. He agrees with it, you see, and when I pressed him on it, I said, well, let me ask you this, is there, if there's a sexual orientation, is there an orientation for thieves?
And he said, yes. Is there an orientation for adulterers? Yes, and I just kept going, and finally I said, why don't you just call it a sinful nature? And he blew up at me. He didn't like that, but it's a, it's a, it's just, it's not serious.
He's, he's accepting the views of the day. That's when I said, we've got a real problem. Now, if you understand, he became president around 93, and if you go out about 15 years, that's when you see Mueller starting to go back to his liberal ways, and the reason for that gap there, I believe, is because, I'll give you an inside scoop into how, you know, the presidents basically can handpick their trustees who they're accountable to, and so he's picking these guys who will be like, more like bodyguards to him than people who will ask difficult questions when difficult questions need to be asked.
So by the time, when he started turning back to accepting things like sexual orientation, he had the trustees where he didn't have to worry about them, he had handpicked these guys. Then, as I already mentioned, I was talking about my first contact with John Harris, the mention of critical race theory, and there was a man named Matthew Hall, who Mueller was going to have as his heir.
He was going to be the next president at Southern Seminary, and that's when I knew I had to do something, and Mueller was afraid we were up to something, because normally we had, what is, the issue was, it was time to promote him, and not only was he going to be promoted, but we're going to promote him to the second highest position at Southern Seminary, the first guy under Al Mueller.
He's going to be Al Mueller's right-hand man, and normally we're given a week's notice in advance so we can look at their stuff, you know, what they've taught and different things. This time, Mueller gave us barely over 24 hours, so I knew something was going on, and when he said, I want to make, you know, Matt Hall this position, I knew then if I don't say anything now, there's no reason to ever say anything, because if this guy gets this position, then Southern Seminary is fully committed to critical race theory, and of course, critical race theory is what's so popular, I'm sure, at Wisconsin University and all the major universities.
As a matter of fact, Matt Hall, the man I'm talking about, he went to the University of Kentucky, and that's where he says he was, he doesn't use this term, but I'll use it, infected with critical race theory, and it's, it's a very, you know, when they say critical theory, they're, and again, the word critical, think of the word criticize.
It's sort of a scathing criticism where you're tearing down so that you can sort of rebuild up in a very leftist way, but now, you know, are you using, let's say, extreme criticisms to tear down, but you're using race, and you know how volatile that is in our society.
Race is the, you know, the, the issue, it's the original sin of America, and so forth, and there's racism in every organization, or what's the term, institution, every institution. Well, see, this is systemic racism, and so Moeller and a guy like Matt Hall will say, look, you can have an organization and not even have a racist in the organization, but your organization is still racist, and so what Matt Hall said was like Billy Graham and the Billy Graham organization was racist.
It was, it was white privilege, it was, had systemic racism. Now, I have my disagreements with Graham on some things, that's for sure, but at the same time, his problem wasn't that, but yet they were looking at it again from, again, so white privilege, systemic racism, all the buzzwords were being used on the campus, and so forth, and it was being taught by principle, so it wasn't just, you know, well, we're just taking these terms and using it our way, which is very deceptive, by the way.
Anytime you hear people say that, Moeller does this all the time, it's very deceptive. Why are you using the language, and then when people call you on it, well, I don't mean the same thing that the whole world means by it.
In other words, do we have to have a now Moeller dictionary, you know, as opposed to the dictionary we all use, so it's a real problem when they claim that, well, I use those terms, but I don't, I don't believe in Marxism, so therefore, I, you know, our cultural Marxism, where, you know, Marxism is sort of like a perpetual warfare between the haves and the have-nots, okay, and so being white, we are privileged, so we're like the landowners, and so we're the bad guys, and we're the oppressors, you see, and if you're white, that's what you are, so what Matt Hall did, and you can see this on YouTube, he goes, I'm a racist, and I'll always be a racist, and all this stuff, well, that's, he's not saying that he's a racist, but he's believing, and he's totally, you know, swallowed this critical race theory, and because he's a white person, and he's got the privilege, all the privileges of white people in our society, and so forth, there, you know, this is just critical race theory, pure and simple, being taught, which is very counter to Scripture, in Christ, there's neither Jew nor Gentile, you know, these types of things, and so again, it's very much anti-Scripture, that's not the only problem, we have like post-modernism being taught, and it's hard to describe post-modernism, but let me just say what the professor was teaching, he would say things like this, I'll make it more concrete for you, Isaiah 53, a very famous passage in the Old Testament, he says, has nothing to do with the Messiah, has nothing to do with Jesus, no Jew, he would say, would ever read it that way, only Christians, who've been brainwashed to read Christ in the Old Testament, would see it that way, well, he's never read the rabbis, because I can show you rabbi after rabbi, who says, that verse in Isaiah 53, is talking about Messiah, that verse, that verse, they do, and you can even look at the official Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 53, it's called a Targum, and the very first line there is, my Messiah will prosper, you see that, starts back in 52 to them, so they take Isaiah 53, and really back it up a few verses, but again, the first few verses, they even use the word Messiah right there, so to say, only Christians have been brainwashed to read it that way, he doesn't even understand the Jewish reading of the text, has no clue what he's talking about, but yet, he believes that we've been brainwashed to read Christ in the Old Testament, there's a lot of problems with this, one is, the New Testament quotes Isaiah 53, and says, this is referring to Christ, you see, and we had professors on campus, you know, there was verses, you know, there's verses, I'll raise up a prophet, like unto me, this is Moses talking in Deuteronomy 1818, and one of our professors said, well, just because Peter and Stephen say that, does that mean we've got to believe that?
And of course, the implication was, no, but where I would say, yes, if Stephen and Peter says it, or if just Stephen, or if just Peter says it, we must believe that, you see, because that's, they are, especially Peter, is an apostle, he has apostolic authority in his teachings, and we must believe this, you see, but again, they would reject, they thought they knew more than the apostles, and things like this, so it came time where, if I didn't say anything, what was going to be the use to say anything in the future?
This was the time, this was the place, it's always easy to say, no, the big battles to come, you know, hold the powder dry, all those kind of, you know, statements, I knew I had to say something, and I would, I was having trouble sleeping, you know, it was hard to, how do you look those students in the eye?
You know heresies being taught, and you go along, and these students are being corrupted, and I'm seeing students corrupted. When we hired one student who, one professor, who said, the Bible teaches mythology.
Now mythology, by definition, is error. How else can you say it? So I was one day on the campus, and one of the students asked me, they said, Dr. Fuller, I hear we're hiring an Old Testament guy, and I said, that's correct, and he goes, what do you think about him?
And I shook my head no, and I said, look, he believes the Bible teaches mythology, and that's outside the line, and he said to me, that's why I asked you, I know I'd get a straight answer from you. This guy, I have a great respect for him, he was Indonesian, and he's the most well-known Indonesian preacher, and the Muslims have a bounty on his head in Indonesia to kill him, so he understands what, you know, he understands what this battle is about, and so that he asked me, I was gonna tell him, and when I was in the principal's office getting in trouble, I brought it up, he did not tell on me, and I said, let me tell you, any student in good faith comes to me and asks about these professors, not just him but the others, I'm gonna tell him the truth, and I still remember Randy Stinson, Moeller's right-hand man at the time, if you do that, you'll be fired, and I said, you better fire me now, because when a student asks me something, I'm gonna tell him the truth, I will not lie to these students, and I wasn't about to do it, and so when it came time to get up in front of Moeller and the rest of the faculty and make a speech, I'm a little guy, I'm like Barney Fife, you know, and so I can feel my heart beating, and it was beating quite well, let me tell you, it was, it was the, I could feel the blood pressure, I was shaking, I had to read from notes, and I was like this, you know, and it was, it was, it was not, wasn't pleasant, and one time I looked up, and it's like everybody's eyes were like this big, you know, watching me, and one guy said to me later, he says, I was watching Moeller the whole time you were speaking, and he was getting angrier and angrier and angrier, and so at the very end of my speech, here's what I said, I said, this vote will be the most important vote I've taken in 22 years at this institution, this vote will tell us where we are theologically and where we're going theology, theologically, whether we're gonna be faithful to the gospel or not gonna be faithful to the gospel.
When it was over, Moeller's response was simply to call me an idiot at the top of his lungs, but yet he could not refute one thing I said, I said, Matt Hall says this, Matt Hall says that, he says this, all of these things are contrary to the gospel.
He could not come back at me at one, that's why I had to read it, I couldn't be off a word, I wanted it to be precise, and then he started saying, you don't believe in systemic racism? I said, how do you define systemic racism?
Of course, he wouldn't do it, and again, he was simply, again, defending critical race theory, that's what he was doing, and this is not a pleasant thing to go through, but at the same time, I knew I had to, and I knew in my heart I was doing the right thing, and when you know you're doing the right thing, even though the heart's beaten, the blood pressure's up, you can do it, in the grace of God, and at the end of the day, I knew I was gonna lose my job, I mean, I was dead man walking after that, I knew my time was, and I'll take this one more quick story, when I got finished, I'm walking down the hall, and it's sort of like, one guy's coming toward us, we're coming across this, you're like crossing a T, and all of a sudden, I hear somebody scream my name, Russell, Russell, and I'm thinking, oh no, I'm about to get worked over, you know, somebody's about to kill me for what I just said, and he was a philosophy guy, and he goes, that was good, he goes, we needed to hear that, he was gone too, and all the, by the way, we almost got a third of the faculty to vote against their boss, the guy we were voting on, but almost every one of those people, they've all been, pretty well gotten rid of now, of course, when they got rid of me, they wanted me to sign a statement of non-disclosure, I was due to get paid, if you know, if you've been in teaching, when you're done in, let's say, May, you're really done all the way through the summer until you start up again in the fall, so I've completed all my stuff, so technically, I should be, not technically, but I should be paid the rest of the time, but they said, listen, if you want to get the rest of your pay, then you sign this statement that you can never, ever say anything negative about Southern Seminary, or anybody associated with Southern Seminary.
Now, look, if we were making, you know, and I had special information about the chips of this or something, I could understand me signing a statement of non-disclosure to go to another company and giving out all the secrets of this phone here or something, you know what I'm saying?
We're talking theology here, we're talking Bible, why are you asking me not to say one word? You see, I wouldn't sign it. Never would I sign that. He couldn't give me enough money to sign that statement, and so when it was over, I called John Harris and I said, John, when are we gonna have an interview?
When are we gonna talk? And I still remember your words. He said something to the effect of, he goes, I was hoping you was gonna say that, and it was during COVID, and we met in Sioux City, Iowa, and it was, everything was a ghost town, if you remember, because of COVID, and we cut the three videos, and you can go on YouTube and see it, just put my name and his name in, they'll probably pop up right away, and I go into detail on what I'm talking about.
At the end of the day, again, do you love your job more than the truth of the gospel? Does your job mean more? Can you look, can you even look in the mirror? Look at yourself and not feel like I'm being disloyal to the Lord, and I just couldn't do it.
I had to say something. I had to for the sake of the students, I was getting a call from parents, calling me on the phone and saying, you know, I tried to contact you within 24 hours, you and I are talking on the phone.
They said to me, I've been trying for three months to talk to Al Mohler, to tell him how his professors have corrupted my son, he won't talk to me. I can talk to you in 24 hours, and she told me, and she started using names that, you know, she started giving all these scholars names, and I know exactly who she was talking about, and he's been reading this guy, and this guy, and it's destroyed, you know, this and that and the other thing.
She was just saying, you know, and I saw this time and time again, where students would be corrupted from believing the gospel. What I want to see students do is when they leave a seminary, they have more faith when they leave than when they came, but what you were seeing was people's faith damaged and destroyed, and that's what's going on right now.
I was just told by a student there, he's a former student, that now he saw where, even on Facebook, there was a couple students, couple guys holding hands, so now guys are holding hands on campus sometimes.
That's where it's at right now, and but the Lord, let me just say this, the Lord's been very good to me, and you, when you, the Bible talks about living by faith. You've got to do what God's Word says.
You're gonna, sometimes you're gonna pay a price, but just be faithful and see what the Lord does. I lost my job, they took my benefits away, I was without insurance, you name it, but just depend on the Lord and watch the Lord at work, but you've got to walk by faith.
I didn't know what I was gonna do. Someone asked as soon as I got, what are you gonna do? I don't know what I'm gonna do. I have no idea, and what happened, let me tell you, they, matter of fact, it's the iPad I have right over there.
They called me up. I wasn't in the best of moods, and they called me up and said, hey, you can buy your iPad if you want to. Well, you know, I'm not exactly wanting to have any, you know, exchange of money with Southern Seminary, and I was like, I was about to say no, and they go, hey, listen, the guy who gets the prices really likes you.
Just get a price. I said, okay, and he did. He gave me a great price. I said, okay, and so I went to pick it up, and when I went to pick it up, the guy looks at me, and he goes, you know what you ought to do?
You ought to go online and start teaching what you've always taught. Teach your theology. Teach the Old Testament. Start teaching it online, and I gave him a little grin, and I said, well, thank you. You know, I'm 60 years old.
You don't start your own business at 60 years old. I mean, you know, and so I just acted like, okay, I'm thinking, that's the craziest idea, but I didn't say anything. I said, thank you. I lived four minutes from the campus, basically, and by the time I got home, I went, you know, why don't I try something like that, and I have two real close friends, and they'll tell me like it is, and I thought they were gonna say, Fuller, you've lost your mind, so I called up the one guy.
I said, now, don't laugh at me, please, you know, don't make fun of me, but I'm thinking about this, and immediately he goes, you must do it. You've got to do it, and I said, really, and then I called my other friend, and again, he'll be just brutal with me, and I go, now, please don't laugh at me.
Please don't, but what do you think of this idea, and again, he said the same thing. You've got to do it, and the Lord has been very good. I'm teaching more people now than I ever taught at Southern Seminary.
Many more people. I can't get on, I can't go on details, but if you want to hear the details, talk to me after this, or not after this, but we've got to do a, yeah, go to RussellTFuller .com, and you can get information on the classes, and I tell you what, you contact me, and you want to just try out a class.
What I can do is just send you some videos of me, and I make it where, you know, I've got people over 80 years old in my class. I've got people who've never been to seminary, people. I don't try to be complicated.
I just try to teach the Bible. If you want the languages, that's my specialty, so, you know, if you want that, we have that as well, so if you want to just contact me, I'll send you some videos to show you what I've done, and what we do in class, and if you like it, take some classes.
It's very affordable, very affordable, and I even have a trustee at Southern Seminary working for me, Tom Rush. He teaches classes for me. I'm sure Dr. Moeller enjoys that one of his trustees is taking, is teaching for me, but great man, great man.
He teaches a lot of the ministry classes. Fantastic guy, you know, and I have another, I have a couple other guys that help me out too, but if you're interested, you know, give it a shot, and again, you're not, you know, with the stuff we do online, if you can't make it to class one night, we have it on video.
We can send it to you, so you don't lose anything, so again, if you're interested in that, let me know, but I want to tell you, and this is what I'm going to conclude it with, God, if you'll walk in God's ways, it could be difficult, but God is faithful, and He will bless you, and I'm here to testify to God's faithfulness.
Walk by faith. I don't, I didn't know by sight where I'm going next, and when I first heard it, I thought it was crazy, but the Lord has been very good. Just do what we're supposed to do, walk in His ways, be consistent with the truth, and watch God work.
Count it all joy when you enter into trial, because that's when you can see the Lord really working in your life. You know, when things are good, we don't trust in the Lord very well, but when difficulties come, it forces us to exercise our faith.
Let's be faithful. Let's be able to sleep well at night, to be able to look ourselves in the mirror, and to look at students in the eye, and not feel ashamed.