Edgar Young Mullins

1860-1928. Southern Baptist theologian and educator. Born the son of a Mississippi minister, he graduated in 1879 from Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College and in 1885 from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He intended to become a foreign missionary, but poor health altered his plans. He held pastorates in Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Maryland until 1899, then joined the faculty of his own seminary and subsequently became its president. He was president also of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1921 to 1924, the stormy years of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that divided other Baptist groups, and of the financial crisis. For five years from 1923 he was president of the Baptist World Alliance.* His theology was clearly conservative, but he avoided the polemics of fundamentalism. His main interest was in apologetics. Paradoxically his standard work on systematic theology contains no section on ecclesiology. His major works include Why Is Christianity True? (1905), The Axioms of Religion (1908), Baptist Beliefs (1912), The Christian Religion in its Doctrinal Expression (1920), and Christianity at the Crossroads (1924).