When I was a student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky (1967-71), Glenn Hinson was a seminal figure in the shaping of my life in a number of important ways. Not the least of which I learned from him to think of as “spiritual formation.” Such a concept would have been, at the time, foreign to me, hardly something most Southern Baptist youth of my generation and religious/cultural circumstances would have had much cause to consider. Since, as Hinson had presciently discerned, post World War II Southern Baptists had become baptized into the business world’s criterion of culturally defined success–the marketing of a commodified Christianity.
Reading Professor Hinson’s recently published autobiography, Miracle of Grace (Mercer University Press, 2012), has, for me, evoked both gratitude and grief. For just as Hinson reveals moments and persons of grace in his life, so do I identify such moments and persons in my life as well. None more profound than in my experience as a seminary student. While at the same time, he describes in painful detail how that very seminary where I studied–where he, in a previous student generation, studied and later taught for so many years–how that seminary has subsequently been hijacked by the propositional theology of Southern Baptist fundamentalists. Over which he and I and others who value the integrity and faithfulness of what that seminary once was will, I suspect, forever grieve.
As a child born into a dysfunctional alcoholic family, characterized by economic deprivation and violence, Hinson acknowledges early coping strategies which he would come to identify as seemingly innate. In particular, a tendency to try to avoid conflict at all cost. Even though, ironically, in the later years of his tenure as a Southern Baptist Seminary professor, he would become the lightning rod for attacking inerrantists.
Realizing early on that he was academically gifted, despite rather primitive educational settings, Hinson describes himself as developing an “intellectualizing” approach to living designed to distance himself from his fear of emotional closeness and the risk of being hurt. Until such a defense got co-opted by his lovely wife, Martha. Regarding their marriage: Glenn describes them as being “wounded healers” for one another.
Between the crisis he faced as a doctoral student at Southern Seminary, specializing in the study of New Testament Greek, which involved a devastating hearing loss that would affect his speech; and his later encounter, as a church historian, with the rich moral and spiritual tradition of Roman Catholic monasticism, incarnated so profoundly in his life through his friendship with the late Thomas Merton: Hinson describes his own developing “pastoral identity.” Which I personally experienced in particularly redemptive ways. For here was a man with an encyclopedic mind, who seemed to have read and remembered everything in the theological/historical disciplines (in several languages), yet who had embraced his own vulnerability in ways that such erudition paled in comparison to the authenticity of his human-ness.
Likely more from him, as from anyone else, I learned from Glenn Hinson what it means to be a “Christian humanist,” rooted in a radical incarnational theology with its emphasis on Jesus, the Christ, as “the human face of God.”
Reading Hinson’s exhaust-ive and detailed accounting of his schedule across the years of his ministry–writing projects, courses developed and taught, graduate students supervised, preaching and teaching in churches, leading workshops and conferences, participating in professional affairs and associations, international travel–is exhaust-ing. Such driven-ness he again attributes to his Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACOA) tendencies: “Among my many weaknesses,” he writes, “none is more glaring than my difficulty in saying ‘No.'” A need still to try to please and prove.
Hinson’s emergence as something of a token Southern Baptist engaged in extensive ecumenical relations and inter-religious dialogue reminds me of the “in the world, but not of it” cliche often offered as instruction in Christian living. In Hinson’s case, and that of others he mentored, when applied even more particularly to the exclusivity and imperialism of institutionalized Southern Baptist theology and ecclesiology. Ironically, in the context of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Glenn Hinson learned and taught others to understand ekklesia as including all, across the centuries, who have confessed Christian faith in its many and varied expressions. Even as his influence extends to those of us who believe that if we, as Christians, know God most and best in Jesus, all of who God is can never be confined to anyone’s religion.
Given his family of origin circumstances, that Hinson would have become a devoted and discerning Christian, even a Baptist, such a “miracle of grace” he attributes significantly to the influence of his Aunt Fleta and Uncle Ossie Marsh–members of the First Baptist Church of Affton–whom he went to live with in St. Louis in 1949. “They didn’t talk much about faith,” he explains, “they just lived it . . . I found their example compelling.”
Who am I to argue theology with Glenn Hinson? Yet the title of his autobiography strikes me as limiting. In that it speaks of “grace,” which is un-conditional (Romans 5:20b), but not of “providence” which is con-ditional (Matthew 25:14-30). The latter being, when reading the book, clearly implied. For instance, how is it that some people are born into circumstances which hold such promise; while others, like Hinson, inherit greater challenge than privilege and opportunity? Or again, despite his discipline and driven-ness, few among us possess the intellectual giftedness–even the pastoral sensitivity–of a Glenn Hinson.
Legend has it that President James A. Garfield once defined education as “Me on one end of a log and (his beloved teacher) Mark Hopkins on the other end.”
In Miracle of Grace Glenn Hinson cites various incarnations of Mark Hopkins in his life, none more seminal than Miss Bertha Brown, who first nurtured, instructed and inspired him, teaching in a crude one room school house in the Missouri Ozarks. This, from a man who went to college at the prestigious Washington University in St. Louis and earned a second doctorate (in church history) from Oxford University in England.
Indeed, a Mark Hopkins–symbol of the beloved teacher–has also been present in my life and learning in the person of various gifted and challenging mentors along the way. None more important than Glenn Hinson, who, out of his marginalized, blue-collar Baptist roots and remarkably sophisticated accomplishments, so grace-fully embodied the subtitle of The Christian Century: “Thinking Critically, Living Faithfully.”
