St. Thomas Schreiner, the Patron Saint of Baptist Exegesis

Icon by Aaron Long of SEBTS.

A couple of weeks ago Dr. Thomas R. Schreiner, a brilliant Pauline scholar, celebrated 25 years of service at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Schreiner is a generous Christian scholar, who is wonderfully personal, pastoral, and is genuinely insightful as a New Testament scholar. In my formative years in seminary, I particularly enjoyed his Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ and of course his Romans commentary in the BECNT series (FYI, I prefer the first edition over the second edition). It is always educational and edifying to read anything by Schreiner.

So, as it goes, I have written an Onion-esque tribute to Thomas Schreiner and his exegetical abilities.

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Baptist Professor Set to Be Declared a Living Baptist Saint

There is nothing strange about professors being popular with students, but Thomas R. Schreiner’s popularity with students at Southern Seminary went from stratospheric heights to positively heavenly. A group of students, led by Billy-Joe Wachowski III of Lexington, have started venerating Professor Schreiner as a living Baptist saint. Billy-Joe and his friends are convinced that Schreiner’s textbooks not only contain sound biblical doctrines, but impart supernatural wisdom to students, and even emit divine healing powers. The Saint Hilarius Herald’s NASCAR and religion correspondent Michel Vogel went to Louisville to find out what all the fuss was about. He spoke to Billy-Joe in Southern Seminary’s on-campus BBQ house.

Billy-Joe chewed down a family-size portion of pork ribs and a gallon of ice tea, and then related his story to Vogel: “One day right before an exam for my Romans class I went totally insane, I lost the plot, I couldn’t remember a thing. I couldn’t remember how many chapters were in Romans, who wrote Romans, or anything about Romans. My mind went blank and I panicked. So there in the hallway I prayed, and after a few seconds, nothing happened, brain still empty, zip, nada. I was so nervous and anxious, I was sweating like a Reggae artist at a GOP convention, folks were asking me what was wrong, but I couldn’t speak. So I just picked up my copy of Tom Schreiner’s Romans commentary and gently tapped it against my head as I prayed, ‘Lord help me remember.’ And then, all of a sudden, with each tap, memories came flooding back. I could see the entire Greek text of Romans in front me like it was an open book, sentence diagrams flashed before my eyes, and bibliographies were downloaded into my head. With each tap of Prof Schreiner’s book on my head, I got smarter and smarter, until I was knocking that thing on my forehead like I was headbutting an overly amorous moose. And it worked, I calmed down, I took the exam, and got an A triple plus. I normally gets C’s, so this was a miracle. Then I told everyone my story, and word got out.”

Word indeed got out, soon hundreds of Southern Seminary students were banging Schreiner’s books against their heads or just touching his lecture notes in hope of securing a blessing before exams. As a result, the average GPA of Southern students in New Testament studies jumped to a whopping 4.0 up from a previously modest 2.9. Sale of Schreiner’s books soared as everyone on campus purchased every book by Schreiner that they could get their hands on. Students were not only carrying the books around in their bags, they even began attaching them to chains and wearing them around their necks as jewelry. One young man nearly had his ear torn off when he tried attaching Schreiner’s New Testament Theology to his earing. Soon there was only standing room in Schreiner’s lectures, students cued up for hours asking to be anointed with oil by him, and a riot broke out at a nearby Lifeway store over the last copy of his book on Hebrews.

It was then that Billy-Joe, with the permission of the SBTS administration, built a small shrine to Tom Schreiner in an unused office on the south side of the campus. It is a place where students could come to receive the shrine of Schreiner blessing to help them with their studies. Students light candles, thank Jesus for Professor Schreiner, touch his books, and can be anointed with holy oil siphoned out of Schreiner’s Toyota Carolla sedan by one of Professor Schreiner’s teaching assistants. “We believe Professor Schreiner is a living saint,” Billy-Joe said from the small and crowded room, “God is blessing us students with grades and achievements through Professor Schreiner that are just not humanly possible. That’s fact.” Which is why Billy-Joe and a number of his friends launched a campaign to have Tom Schreiner canonized as a Baptist saint and to have his iconic image erected in Southern Seminary’s beautiful chapel.

The Campaign to Canonize Thomas Schreiner as a Saint

Professor Brian Vickers, Southern Seminary’s Vice President for Baptist Saints, Relics, and Iconography said that we should not be surprised at what is happening at Southern. “There is a long tradition of Baptist saint veneration. From John the Baptist, to Lottie Moon, to Johnny Cash, to Mike Huckabee, we’ve always believed that certain Baptist believers were given special spiritual gifts, that our communion with them is more powerful than death, and that God still guides us through their example and the relics they leave behind. For instance, I keep an autographed Johnny Cash guitar in my office which I use as a prayer aid, and Southern Seminary’s President, Al Mohler, never preaches without a cigar case full of Billy Graham’s toenail clippings in his pocket, not for luck, for divine empowerment.” When asked if this was controversial Prof Vickers acknowledged that it was, “Yes, some folks accuse us of idolatry, but Southern Seminary has two theological distinctives, Reformed theology and iconic liturgy. And we’re proud of both of them, very proud!”

Kenwood Baptist Church is in the process of changing it’s name to Saint Thomas the Exegete in honor of Professor Schreiner. Billy-Joe will be leading a delegation to the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual conference to campaign for the election of Prof. Schreiner as a living Baptist saint. Already former US Presidents Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush have co-authored a letter sent to both Pope Francis and the Patriarch of Constantinople to secure their recognition of Schreiner’s canonization, and initial reports suggest that both the Catholic and Orthodox churches are warmly disposed to recognizing Schreiner as a Baptist saint. The decision of course rests with the SBC, but if the students at Southern Seminary have anything to say about it, Saint Thomas the Exegete could prove to be the most popular Baptist saint in SBC history.