 Glenn Hinson lectured twice on what he learned in 50 years of teaching and what he projects for the future of theological education. |
Glenn Hinson, senior professor of church history and spirituality at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, told a crowd gathered March 6 to celebrate his 50 years of teaching that the issue of faith and science, “more than any other, divides Christians from one another today.”
Since his backyard in Louisville, Ky., abuts the campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Hinson said he is “keenly aware that those who now run that institution have chosen to dismiss the world view given by science and to affirm more or less literally the one found in the Bible.”
Hinson said Kurt Wise, who heads the seminary’s Center for Theology and Science, has declared it impossible to both accept evolution and believe the Bible and teaches that the Earth cannot be more than 10,000 years old.
Interestingly, Hinson said, Wise’s conclusion is shared by atheist author Richard Dawkins. Hinson said Dawkins also insists one cannot accept both the Bible and conclusions of modern science, but for him the proper place to stand is with science and against faith. Dawkins devoted three pages to Wise in his 2006 best-selling non-fiction book, The God Delusion.
Hinson also pointed out the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum is located in Kentucky. He said he is told many Southern Seminary students go there for “hands-on learning” about young-Earth creationism.
Hinson taught church history at Southern for 30 years before departing as the seminary shifted from being a moderate-to-progressive institution toward biblical literalism and fundamentalism in the 1990s. He said the seminary now offers a master’s degree in biblical counseling.
“Implicit in that is the rejection of the painstaking effort Wayne Oates made to employ the best insights of modern psychology in pastoral care,” Hinson said. Oates, who died in 1999, taught psychology of religion and pastoral at Southern Seminary from 1947 until 1974.
 Glenn Hinson addresses former students, colleagues and friends at ceremony honoring his half century of teaching. |
Based on a conversation with a recent Southern Seminary graduate, Hinson said, “I gather that biblical science supplants insight from contemporary psychology, psychiatry, or psychotherapy.”
Hinson said the graduate “seemed quite unaware that Wayne Oates saturated everything with an essentially biblical theology,” noting that Oates studied the New Testament at the graduate-school level.
Hinson called the relationship between faith and science “a big issue” for theological education.
“Should we prepare ministers to equip people to live in a world that has not existed for a century, if ever?” he asked. “Should ministers stick to teaching the Bible and not assume a responsibility to help people to relate their faith to findings of science? This is the issue that stands behind the shibboleth that the Bible is inerrant and infallible on any issue it touches.”
Hinson said letting such a view of Christianity prevail would result in “the reduction and deprivation of any meaning of this faith.”
“If you open the Bible and read it, you will find it directs us and invites us to seek God in the world we live in and among the flawed people whom God brought into this world,” Hinson said. He quoted former Southern Seminary President E.Y. Mullins, who commented during an earlier evolution controversy that the Bible “does not tell us how the heavens go; it tells us how to go to Heaven.”
“We do not rely on the way primitive people spoke about their world to understand how we should speak about our world,” Hinson said. “The Bible is a book of faith.”
“We must not divide life into compartments: here’s our religious life, yonder the life of everyday,” Hinson said. “What distinguishes the preparation of ministers at this seminary [the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky] from the preparation of students at a fundamentalist seminary centers precisely on this issue.”
Hinson said future ministers must be able to help church members understand the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and philosopher who died in 1955: “Nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.