Student’s Letter Stirs a Campus Investigation : Education: He accused his professor of wrong teaching. The resulting response reflects the volatile political climate within the Southern Baptist churches.

A single student circulated a letter accusing a widely respected, longtime seminary professor of wrong teaching. The jarring result was an extensive investigation involving the interrogation of nearly all the professor’s students about his views.

The drastic, inquisitorial process at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., flagship of the denomination’s ministerial education, reflects the mistrust pervading the country’s largest Protestant body.

If it hadn’t been for that strained, uneasy atmosphere, “we would never have resorted to this kind of procedure,” said the Rev. Roy L. Honeycutt, the seminary’s president.

“It was an unusual response because of the particular circumstances among Southern Baptists in which seminaries and professors are placed under attack.”

A fundamentalist wing steadily gained domination over the 14.8 million-member denomination in the last decade, leading to control of boards of trustees of seminaries and other institutions and putting pressure on personnel to conform to fundamentalist views.

The attack on the Christian ethics professor, the Rev. Paul D. Simmons, was only the latest such episode, but the individual questioning of 50 of his students was something of an investigative dragnet. The student’s complaints, mailed to trustees and extensively through the denomination, were found to be unsubstantiated.

“It’s symptomatic of what Southern Baptists are into, so much mistrust, so much animosity,” said church historian Bill Leonard, president of the seminary’s faculty club. “The peculiar climate produces peculiar measures to resist it.”

A student from Jeffersonville, Ind., Clark Kirkbride, wrote the letter about a class Simmons taught on “The Church and Sexuality.” The letter was not made public.

Simmons said a main--and false--accusation was that he portrayed Jesus as “sexually active.” Actually, he said, he taught that Jesus was “truly man,” a male, sexual human being “who was celibate and single.”

Jesus’ full manhood is classic Christian doctrine, as well as his full Godhood. Denial of either was considered an early heresy, although the church sometimes has stressed his divinity to the point of obscuring his humanity.

“We’re subject to a lot of harassment that should be unnecessary and intolerable,” Simmons said. But he added that such investigations seem needed because “we’re living in such a volatile political climate.”

“The fundamentalists’ agenda is against theological education,” he said. “They want to find anything on professors who don’t agree with them and get them dismissed for any reason.

“The best thing we can do is protect ourselves by very scrupulous, investigative processes. It’s a sick climate, a kind of religious McCarthyism, but we have to be very honest and open in terms of what we teach.”

Simmons, 53, who has taught for 20 years at this oldest Baptist seminary, founded in 1864, added: “The whole issue is part of a larger battle over academic freedom and responsibility. This faculty here is committed to solid, academic integrity, and we won’t let this kind of thing erode that commitment.”

The Rev. Larry L. McSwain, dean of the seminary’s theology school, conducted the drawn-out quizzing of Simmons’ students, concluding that Kirkbride’s charges were “patently untrue.”

Considering the suspicions stirred by fundamentalists and the wide circulation of the letter among critical people, McSwain said, “it was important to determine the facts and set the record straight.”

In ordinary circumstances, a lone student’s complaint would be resolved simply by clarifying consultations, but in this case, the detailed findings were relayed in a conference call to trustees, who affirmed them.

“Certain persons are quite distrustful of the educational community, and it was necessary to demonstrate with hard evidence that the charges were not true,” McSwain said. “Rumors are very believable in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

The denomination’s dominant fundamentalist wing insists on a literalist view of the Bible, that it is factually “inerrant” historically, scientifically and religiously. The fundamentalists also demand that personnel adhere to this view.

Many other Baptists, including other fundamentalists, stress the historic Baptist principle of the “soul competence” of believers to interpret the Bible as they understand it.