Southwestern Ends Largest Evangelical Archaeology Program

Coronavirus interrupts excavation projects across Israel.

The nation’s leading evangelical archaeology program is closing, partly in response to COVID-19. Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) will shut down the Tandy Institution for Archaeology in May, terminating five professors and discontinuing its degree program, which currently has more than 25 graduate students.

The decision came as “part of campus-wide budgetary reductions necessitated by the financial challenges associated with COVID-19,” according to a statement SWBTS sent to Christianity Today.

The change is also part of an “institutional reset,” according to the statement. The former president of SWBTS, Paige Patterson, was forced out in 2018 after the board of trustees determined he had mishandled two cases of seminary students reporting they had been raped. The following year, the new president, Adam W. Greenway, said the seminary needed to “recalibrate” and return to its core commitments.

The archaeology program was not part of that vision. “We will no longer offer degrees in archaeology,” the SWBTS statement said, “because they are incongruent with our mission to maximize resources in the training of pastors and other ministers of the gospel for the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

The Fort Worth, Texas, school is the third-largest Protestant seminary in the United States, measured by full-time enrollment. The Tandy Institute was started in 1983 with a $100,000 donation and a vision for training committed Christians who believed in the historical claims of the Bible to lead the field of biblical archaeology. The school launched a graduate program in 2007 and is currently the only evangelical institution offering a doctoral degree ...