Fifty years ago today, on Dec. 17, 1974, I had my initial interview at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. With one semester to go toward completing the Ph.D. program at Boston University School of Theology, I mailed my resume to assorted religion and history departments across the country. (I still have a file full of rejection letters, some of which were from folks who later became close friends.)
Then one December afternoon, the red dial telephone in our parsonage at First Community Church, Southboro, Mass., rang and I answered. The caller was William Hull, provost at SBTS, inviting me to the Dec. 17 interview for a position as assistant professor of church history with a specialty in American Christianity. It was the only interview invitation I received.
Bill Leonard
After flying to Louisville, I was ensconced in a dorm guest room and picked up for lunch by church history professors E. Glenn Hinson and Morgan Patterson, who took me to the Oriental House restaurant. Only later would I learn that was one of Professor Hinson’s favorite eating places, frequented many Wednesdays by the church history colloquium composed of Ph.D. and Th.M. students who joined the history faculty for great food and conversation.
Lunch was followed by an interview with the faculty search committee who asked questions related to my education, research, dissertation, approach to classroom teaching and four-year pastoral ministry at a New England church founded in 1865.
At the end, Christian ethics professor Henlee Barnette asked with a wry smile: “We’ve had several native Texans on this faculty, but they’ve never lasted very long. Do you think you can?”
I told him that like most any Texan, I’d give it my best shot. He laughed, and our long friendship was under way. (I lasted 17 years, until it became impossible to remain.)
Returning to Massachusetts, I waited for a phone call or a turndown letter. The call came, inviting me to return in January 1975 for a full faculty interview and vote on my candidacy. Not long after that, Provost Hull called again to invite me to join the faculty. Candyce and I moved to Louisville in June, bringing our 9-week-old daughter, Stephanie, with us.
SBTS was founded in 1859, just 14 years after the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination born of divisions over slavery that split Baptist missionary cooperation North and South, and ultimately the nation. The four founding faculty members were outstanding theological educators, educated at Harvard, Princeton Seminary, and the University of Virginia. All four owned slaves.
The school’s recent study notes, “The seminary faculty supported the righteousness of slaveholding and opposed efforts to limit the institution.” It is a legacy that still haunts the SBC and many of us who were raised therein.
When hired at SBTS, I was 28 years old. Southern Seminary provided a context that informed my teaching, learning and listening for learning to teach. Where the classroom was concerned, I went there “as green as a cabbage patch,” as one of my Massachusetts church members described my first pastoral experience. A half-century later, and 32 years from my departure from the school, I’ve tried to reflect on certain lessons I learned in that process, lessons formed in the context of classroom and culture, spiritual experience and denominational conflict. It’s going to take more than one BNG column, I think.
Glenn Hinson
Many of the continuing lessons I learned there came from E. Glenn Hinson, historian, patristic/matristic scholar, mystic and Baptist dissenter extraordinaire. Of the many mentors in my life, none formed me as student of history, a teacher, and yes, a Baptist more than Hinson.
Now in his 94th year, Hinson is a Baptist who gravitated to the fathers and the mothers of the early church, delighting in their insights, struggles and dysfunctions. As one student observed: “You have to take him seriously. Hell, he can even read Latin.”
He taught us we belong to those ancient people and they to us and no matter how hard we try to act as if all our dogmas came pristinely from the New Testament, we’d better tarry in the early Christian centuries if we want to understand ourselves.
From our first meeting half a century ago, Glenn Hinson modeled to me and countless others what it means to be a teacher. I think those words aptly describe the man I know and love. He knows history is important because it informs our living. Yet I would turn that title around. Truly Glenn Hinson is a historian’s historian and in his 40-odd years (take that any way you like) of teaching he has refined the historian’s craft brilliantly.
“Glenn Hinson modeled to me and countless others what it means to be a teacher.”
Yet he is, pure and simple, a crafty historian who knows how to push us, touch us, shape us, exacerbate us, and force us to come to terms with pieces of history and pieces of our selves we’d just as soon keep buried deep and wide. I have seen him do it hundreds of times in the infamous weekly colloquium, that Wednesday gathering of faculty and the great church history grad students.
The declaration is made, the territory staked out by one or more students, and then Hinson would ask a question, barely able to disguise what Phyllis Pleasants calls “that little smile.” The question was out, the thesis challenged, the dialogue off and running. The historian’s craft is mirrored in the crafty historian.
Yet Hinson’s vocation as teacher is inseparable from his holistic spirituality, articulated in his many books including A Serious Call to a Contemplative Lifestyle. On April 18, 1961, a mostly unknown Trappist monk named Thomas Merton wrote in his journal:
A good group from the Southern Baptist Seminary here yesterday. Very good rapport. I liked them very much. An atmosphere of sincerity and understanding. Differences between us not, I think, minimized. Dr. Hinson, the church history man, a good and sincere person, with some of the other faculty members, will come down again. We will talk, perhaps, about the church. I am glad they will come.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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