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 Dr. E. Glenn Hinson is a world-renowned church historian and a respected and sought-after leader in Christian Spirituality. He has written numerous books, including such classics as Jesus Christ, The Integrity of the Church, and everyone's favorite answer to “why pray?” – A Serious Call to a Contemplative Lifestyle. Having retired from two Baptist seminaries, and presently teaching at a third, we sat down with Dr. Hinson, shared some great pizza, and asked him a few questions.
FL: Tell us about teaching at Southern Seminary.
HINSON: I taught church history, and I tried to help the students to embrace church history as the history of us all. At that time Southern offered freedom to do things like I did in 1960 – taking my first class to the Abbey of Gethsemani. That was Providential in my view.
FL: Did you take them to meet Thomas Merton?
HINSON: I didn't really know about Thomas Merton. I took the students to expose them to the Middle Ages. I thought they'd learn more about the Middle Ages by going to a monastery than they would about talking about it. Merton was our host. Immediately after we were there he wrote to me, “Glenn, I'm coming to Louisville, I'd like to stop in and see you.” I got our faculty together, and we spent two hours with Merton. That was great because it meant that many of those that were very suspicious of my taking students to Gethsemani got to know him.
FL: How long were you a Southern Seminary professor?
HINSON: My formal tenure on SBTS faculty was from 1962-1992, but I did teach three years before that – a full load.
FL: When did you become a favorite target of the fundamentalists?
HINSON: I became a target when I responded to Bailey Smith's comment in 1980, “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” I was really a “fair-haired boy” before that.
FL: Your response was . . . ?
HINSON: I made five points in response to Bailey Smith: (1) Jesus was a Jew – you may have disenfranchised Jesus' prayers; (2) You disenfranchised everybody from Abraham to Jesus; (3) The Bible teaches that God hears the prayers of unbelievers; (4) This conflicts with centuries of Baptists' respect for every person's religious belief; (5) This is the stuff from which Holocausts come. I think the last point may have ignited the tinder.
FL: Do you still see yourself as a Baptist?
HINSON: I still see myself as very much a Baptist. Although I am a Bapto-Quakero-Methedo-Presbyterio-Lutherano-Episcopo-Catholic. The Baptist tradition depends on a minority consciousness. And having become the majority, Baptists in the South could no longer think like Baptists, they thought like medieval Catholics.
FL: Or, perhaps, CEOs . . .
HINSON: My first published article was in 1973, “How Far Can the Churches Go Using the Business Model as a Pattern for Church Life?” I pointed to a problem that I call “corporatism” – and this is a result of Baptists in the South growing up with American business. It goes back to just before the Civil War. The Transcontinental Railroad drove a spike in Odgen, Utah in 1849, just on the heels of the forming of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Baptists in the South really got caught up in corporatist development. Gaines Dobbins at Southern Seminary became Professor of Church Efficiency and published a book, The Efficient Church, in 1923. He followed it up with subsequent books all based on this idea: Jesus was the “great entrepreneur.” This whole thing – the church – is the most important business in the world, you have to operate it like a business. The Southern Baptist Convention would do anything to achieve the bottom line which is always, of course, how many souls were saved; how many buildings are we building; very pragmatic things.
FL: They never put it like this in our Baptist history lessons back in the days of Training Union on Sunday evenings.
HINSON: We need to take a new look at what the object of the Landmarkists was. The Landmarkists were really the farm crowd who had their reservations about the corporation model. And, they were right! You keep on with this . . . it's a mentality that has serious moral problems. Mainly, you have to get rid of anybody who makes waves in the corporation. See, just like big business. Huge salaries, bonuses, everything. All that feeds into my ability to turn loose of the Southern Baptist connection.
FL: Since leaving Southern Serminary, you've since been a part of two new seminaries – the Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond and now the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky.
HINSON: Put them all together, there are at least a dozen of these moderate seminaries which have reacted to what happened with fundamentalist dominance of Southern Baptist seminaries. You always regret the changing of great institutions. Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has always been one of the most prestigious seminaries in the world.
FL: You sound a little mournful.
HINSON: I look on that with great regret. But it was a loss – such an important institution to these narrow-minded, parochial . . . . But on the other hand, there is something we have gained by having to form smaller seminaries where we can do things that are almost impossible to do in older, established seminaries. One is to emphasize spiritual formation for ministry as the heart as to what is being done. I think that must be seen as a plus.
FL: Back to Merton. How did he influence you?
HINSON: Living life informed by prayer out of this attentiveness to God in all of life. I put this together in my book A Serious Call to a Contemplative Lifestyle. That was in a way a tribute to the influence of Thomas Merton in my life.
FL: They say Merton had a great sense of humor.
HINSON: You know, had he not ended up at Gethsemani, he could have been Jay Leno.
FL: Merton on late-night TV . . . that'd be something worth watching! Are you hopeful for our nation and our world?
HINSON: Things look very bleak at the moment. But, I'm hopeful, not because of what's being done by politicians. I think hope is in God. I think that if we look at the course of things and history, read the history of civilization, you have to feel very uncertain. What happened in the Roman Empire is happening in the United States now. When you talk about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, you have to see some of those same things that are present which create concern. One, the Roman Empire had these great disparities with very few rich and the vast majority poor, where you had no middle class. Increasingly, we have no middle class. Things like that make me wonder about the future. We are over-consuming. The sort of thing Wendell Berry and others have pointed to.
FL: Excuse me, but can you pass the Prozac . . .
HINSON: I don't see great leadership. When you think at times we had great leaders come along to lead people through periods like this. But for America, we've had worse than the pits! Supposedly we are the one world power, and it's turned out to be nothing but a big fart!
FL: What is the one thing the world needs more of that it doesn't already have enough of?
HINSON: Saints! I think that basically, from the church's point of view, what we need to do is form saints – people of faith, hope and love.
FL: And football! Wait, wrong Saints . . .
HINSON: I think fundamentalism is a movement that is frightened, instead of encouraging a search for God in the midst of life, it turns to absolutes . . . If that sort of fear-ridden platform wins, then I think we have little hope of making it through. But if we can get people grounded on the reality of God in the midst of life, then I think we have hope. To quote Martin Luther King, “We don't know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future.” That's the faith I have to live by, with reference to my grandchildren. Looking at the world today, at the United States today . . . I feel anxious for them. But we have to trust God.
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