Abstract
Baptists are commonly considered to have a distinctive emphasis on the priesthood of all believers, which came to be translated early in the twentieth century by the premier Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins as “soul competency” (Axioms of Religion, chap. 3). Mullins’s version has fallen on hard times as he has been criticized in Baptist life from both the right and the “moderate” sides as too individualistic and captive to American culture. This article revisits soul competency in light of the more recent emphases on the “capable self” in the philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Paul Ricoeur. Nussbaum’s approach concerns human capabilities in terms of global political distribution of goods (Creating Capabilities) as well as does Sen (The Idea of Justice); Ricoeur considers the capable self in ethical, political, and religious terms (“Asserting Personal Capacities and Pleading for Mutual Recognition” and “Religious Belief” in A Passion for the Possible). In contrast to Mullins’s more modernistic optimism about the self, Nussbaum, Sen, and Ricoeur consider the suffering self along with their emphasis on the powers of the self; as such, in the light of their thought, soul competency or capability could be seen to presuppose not the autonomous Enlightenment self but a thoroughly situated self immersed in social bonds with other people.
Such a dialogue, I propose, can inject fresh twenty-first century meaning into Mullins’s ideas of a century ago. Although the ideas of the priesthood of all believers and soul competency have been distinctively Baptist emphases, they are certainly not uniquely Baptist nor even of Baptist origin; their understanding has ramifications far beyond Baptists. In that sense, their revivification can have reverberations beyond Baptist life. In addition, such a dialogue injects a religious dimension into the wider global and philosophical discussions of Nussbaum, Sen, and Ricoeur.
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