Criswell College

The Rev. Paige Patterson, a key strategist in the fundamentalist rise to dominance among Southern Baptists, was reinstated as president of Criswell College a week after he was fired. College trustees, who dismissed him for spending too much time in church politicking, reversed themselves after fundamentalist leaders and students rallied to his support. "We just prayed and came together in the spirit of the Lord," said the Rev.

The Rev. W.A. Criswell, whose decades-long impassioned defense of a literal interpretation of the Bible led to the Southern Baptists' return to their conservative roots, died Thursday. He was 92 and had been in failing health for more than a year battling cancer. The pastor for 50 years at the influential First Baptist Church of Dallas, Wallie Amos Criswell is credited with launching a conservative reformation among evangelical Christians in the late 20th century.

The Rev. W.A. Criswell, whose decades-long impassioned defense of a literal interpretation of the Bible led to the Southern Baptists' return to their conservative roots, died Thursday. He was 92 and had been in failing health for more than a year battling cancer. The pastor for 50 years at the influential First Baptist Church of Dallas, Wallie Amos Criswell is credited with launching a conservative reformation among evangelical Christians in the late 20th century.

The Rev. Paige Patterson, a key strategist in the fundamentalist rise to dominance among Southern Baptists, was reinstated as president of Criswell College a week after he was fired. College trustees, who dismissed him for spending too much time in church politicking, reversed themselves after fundamentalist leaders and students rallied to his support. "We just prayed and came together in the spirit of the Lord," said the Rev.

The Rev. Paige Patterson, a chief architect of the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, has been nominated president of a Southern Baptist seminary whose increasingly fundamentalist direction has made it a center of controversy since 1987. Patterson, 49, president of Criswell College in Dallas, announced there Tuesday that he had been unanimously nominated by a search committee to become president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

A former president of the Southern Baptist Convention has publicly reiterated his belief that Jews can't find salvation without Jesus, renewing a controversy that first erupted seven years ago. "I'm not against the Jewish people," the Rev. Bailey Smith told 2,000 Southern Baptist evangelists last week in St. Louis. "But unless they repent and get born again, they don't have a prayer."

Antony Thomas' troubling and incisive "Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done" (at the Nuart through Sunday) opens with a fleshy TV evangelist exhorting his flock: "It's time for God's people to come out of the closet and change America!" In his documentary--pulled from the Public Broadcasting Service's "Frontline" series in May, 1987, but now to be aired on KCET-TV Channel 28 on April 6 at 10 p.m.--Thomas reveals how born-again Christians mean to effect this change through political means.

In a move that American Jewish leaders assailed as a "spiritual declaration of war," the Southern Baptist Convention this week launched a drive to convert Jews to the Christian faith. Meeting in New Orleans, delegates to the annual meeting of the 15.6-million-member denomination--the nation's largest Protestant group--approved a resolution to "direct our energies and resources toward the proclamation of the Gospel to the Jews."

Jewish leaders have expressed dismay at a renewed assertion by a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention that Jews cannot find salvation without Jesus. The Rev. Bailey Smith's comments to 2,000 cheering Southern Baptist evangelists last week in St. Louis has renewed a controversy begun in 1980, when Smith stated that "God doesn't hear the prayers of a Jew." The latest comments were reported in Friday editions of the Dallas Times Herald.

The vacant presidency of a Southern Baptist seminary near San Francisco, a non-controversial school far from the heartland of the denomination, has become the object of a behind-the-scenes "tug of war" between fundamentalists and moderate conservatives. Fundamentalists, anxious to reap the rewards of thier annual success in electing the denomination's president, hope that one of their own will be selected to fill the opening at Golden Gate Theological Seminary in Mill Valley.

When the Rev. Jerry Vines got up in front of a sea of Southern Baptist pastors last month and described the Prophet Muhammad as a "demon-possessed pedophile," many people thought it was an ill-informed slip of the tongue. Ergun and Emir Caner, the authors of a new book on Islam, knew it was not.