The SBJT Forum: Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism

SBJT: Whom would you name as someone whose impact has been underestimated? Timothy George: Basil Manly, Sr. (17981868) was one of the most significant shapers of the Southern Baptist tradition, although his legacy has been somewhat eclipsed by his illustrious son, Basil Manly, Jr., one of the four faculty founders of Southern Seminary and sometime president of Georgetown College. For many years in the SBC, figures such as Manly, Sr., if noticed at all, were mere objects of affectionate obscurity. Now that it is once again acceptable to evaluate the theology and historic importance of such figures, Manly, Sr. deserves to be brought down from the shelf of historical curiosity and refurbished as a model of pastoral integrity, theological fidelity, and denominational statesmanship. Manly was born at Chatham County, North Carolina, on January 29, 1798. His father was a Catholic but, like his mother, Basil became a Baptist. Converted to Christ through the witness of a slave, he was baptized in 1816 in the Haw River. Soon thereafter he was licensed to preach in the Sandy Creek Baptist Association. At age twenty-eight Manly was called as pastor of the oldest and most prestigious Baptist church in the South, the First Baptist Church of Charleston, succeeding the venerable Richard Furman. Manly had a great influence on an entire generation of younger ministers, including his own son and James Petigru Boyce. Manly was Boyce’s mentor and father in the ministry. A strong advocate of theological education, Manly called for the creation of an Education Convention, which played an important role in the eventual formation of Southern Seminary, over which Manly also presided as chair of the first board of trustees. Manly is doubly significant in Baptist history in that he served as a bridge between the more settled conditions of Baptist life on the eastern seaboard and the expansion of Baptist life into what was then the western frontier, that is, the Alabama wilderness. Manly served as the second president of the University of Alabama and also as pastor of the First Baptist Churches of Tuscaloosa and Montgomery. After an interlude of four years back in Charleston, he returned to Alabama in 1859 as a church planter and The SBJT Forum: Overlooked Shapers of Evangelicalism