Bill Hull’s Twenty Questions
BY Walter B. Shurden
1. In your sermon, “This is My Story,” you paint the picture of a rather financially deprived childhood. Am I reading too much into your comments when I say that you were “financially deprived?”
My father lost everything in the Depression, forcing us to move to a chicken farm where my mother toiled as housekeeper and cook for the bachelor owner to keep a roof over our head. The family did not really recover financially until after World War II. However, our financial deprivations were never discussed with me as a child, even though I seldom got what I wanted for Christmas. Instead, we majored on enjoyable relationships with family and friends, most of them as hard-up as we were; thus I never felt financially deprived because I had never known what it was like to have plenty.
2. You describe your salvation experience almost in Bushnellian terms: You grew up as a Christian and never knew yourself otherwise. Is this the case? Is there a pivotal religious experience in your life? Your calling account sounds very experiential. Experientially, my spiritual pilgrimage is like an ellipse with two foci. To borrow from William James, my conversion was that of the “once born” which unfolded as naturally as other aspects of growing up. My call to ministry, however, was like that of the “twice born,” a total surprise both to me and to everyone else, representing a complete break with my vocational aspirations to that point, which had been defined in terms of a medical career.
3. Can you still play the violin? Has music been a big part of your life?
I studied violin for 12 years and got so good that I was chosen as concert master of the Alabama State Student Orchestra. At that level, I either had to practice several hours a day or fail to continue to grow musically. Thus, in college I shifted to choral directing which led naturally to conducting the BSU choir and then on to youth revival music leadership. I have not played the violin seriously during my adult years but music has always been extremely important to me.
4. Can you say more about your call to preach than what you wrote in “This is My Story?” pp. 10-11. Had you been thinking of the ministry? Was there any particular person that made the difference for you?
As implied above, my call to ministry was entirely a matter of divine initiative. I had never had any relatives in the ministry, had never been talked to by anyone about becoming a minister, and had not thought of entering the ministry. As Paul put it in Galatians 1:12, “I did not receive my ministry from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” Indirectly, I was influenced by the youth revival movement coming out of Baylor after World War II, particularly Charles Wellborn and Howard Butt, although I never had any direct contact with either of them about entering the ministry.
5. After I joined the faculty at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I heard a professor say that if one were not one-eyed one should not be a theological professor at SBTS. He meant, I think, that one had to focus on a single discipline in a very academic way. You were never one-eyed. You preached, you taught, you administered. Could this explain your return to the pastorate, that you were three-eyed?
The scientific revolution has carried specialization to an extreme, causing us to lose some of the synthesizing strengths of the Middle Ages. I loved New Testament as a scholarly discipline and, with the example of Robertson and Davis before me, could have studied it as a one-eyed professor for the rest of my life. However, I soon saw that the specialists did not know how to integrate the knowledge of theology with the practice of ministry (a phrase coined by Krister Stendahl to describe the purpose of the D.Min. Program). Therefore, I always balanced the two whether working in a seminary, a church, or a university. Some people work well approaching their vocation as a one-eyed person. I chose to be three-eyed because the need was greater. At Southern, faculty were losing focus on how to build authentic communities of faith, partly because of the stress on specialization in the academic guilds, while at Shreveport, pastors were in danger of losing the intellectual moorings of their ministry, putting out stuff that would be an embarrassment to any thinking layperson. While I did “return to the pastorate” in 1975, that did not change my determination to maintain a healthy dialectic between head and heart throughout my entire ministry.
6. If you had your life to do over again, what vocational part of it, if any, would you change? I guess I wonder where you received the most satisfaction in your ministry. Let me force you to rank these three: Southern Seminary, Shreveport, Samford. I do not assume that your ranking diminishes any of the three, because I know how much you have enjoyed each. However, if I put a gun to your head
and said, “choose,” what would you say?
All of my life I have been asked whether I enjoyed preaching, teaching, or administering the most. Each has assets and liabilities not shared with the others. For example, at Southern I loved to work daily with a cadre of sharp doctoral students, all of us having access to a major research library. In Shreveport, however, I loved the interaction with every age group, with whole family units, and with the entire city as a civic advocate on behalf of the Christian faith. At Samford, I loved getting outside the inbred ministerial hothouse and seeking to apply the Christian faith to life as it is actually lived by lawyers, school teachers, nurses, pharmacists, and all the rest. In terms of administration in all three places, those sheltered from the complex tasks of strategizing, decision making, and consensus building among diverse groups simply miss a huge part of what life is really like and, to be honest, become epistemologically naive. So if you put a gun to my head and said “choose,” I would reply that if you threatened my chance to grow in all these areas, you might as well just pull the trigger and end it all because I do not want to be a one-sided person. (Even a violin has four strings!)
7. Another way to get at the previous question is to ask: Where have you felt most at home: in the classroom, the pulpit, or the administrative office?
None of my family or friends had ever been a classroom professor, a congregational pastor, or an educational administrator; thus I had to learn all three jobs on my own largely by trial and error. At first I did not feel “at home” in any of these roles but I determined to stay with the job until I felt completely at home, which eventually became the case in all three areas. So my answer would have to be developmental. I did not feel at home in
any of these roles at first but eventually felt at home in all of these roles when I had mastered them. Once I felt I had gone as far as I could in one of these roles, I became restless to try another, feeling that endless repetition is not the best way to grow. I suppose I am like Margaret Mead who confessed to her biographer that she was guilty of the sin of gluttony because she was always hungry for new experiences!
8. You say in “This is My Story” that you “have experienced a full measure of setbacks and defeats.” Where, specifically have you experienced such? I don’t know of anyone who knows you who thinks you have experienced setbacks and defeats!
At Southern, as dean and provost, I was never able to get the faculty to truly integrate their scholarship with the most pressing needs of the churches, thereby avoiding the disasters that fell upon them following my departure. In Shreveport, I was not able to get the city to outgrow its ingrown provincialisms and cross artificial barriers constructed by race, class, and culture. At Samford and in higher education generally, I was never able to build a consensus about how to apply the Christian faith to higher education, thereby sparing us the kind of debacles we have seen in recent years at Baylor. Denominationally, of course, I was never able to build a viable middle ground between fundamentalism on the right and fundamentalism on the left. Incidentally, many of these failures were a matter of timing. In my senior years, a host of folks from Southern, Shreveport, and Samford have insisted on telling me that I was right about some important issues that those views could not be implemented because I was “ahead of my time.” In other words, many of the “setbacks and defeats” of the past have become the advances and victories of the present. I believe that the essential stance of a Christian is to live ahead of his or her time, but that is hardly a way to
seek success.
9. Critique your preaching for me. Almost all of my preaching has been an effort to mediate the best insights of serious Christian scholarship to laypersons not satisfied with simplistic and even anti-intellectual, mindless sermonizing from the pulpit. In Shreveport, for example, First Baptist was clearly the last stop for thoughtful Baptists on the way to Presbyterian or Episcopal churches. In a sense, I tried to make the gospel creditable to thinking people of whatever faith or of no faith who were put off by the mindlessness that is epidemic in many pulpits. I knew that my preaching would be appreciated best by a minority, but I quickly realized that Christianity must speak persuasively not only to the majority who follow but to the minority who lead.
10. You said, “I have sought to base my ministry on the primary of preaching” (17, Harbingers). Did you do that even when you were a seminary professor?
At Southern, I am sure that I used much of my preaching, particularly chapel appearances on campus, as an outlet to share insights from my New Testament studies in popular fashion. However, I itinerated across the land almost every Sunday trying to set an example in a multitude of churches as to what could happen if preaching were taken seriously. I would have to say that the seminary culture I knew did not magnify the primacy of preaching because of its preoccupation with disciplinary skills. When I became a pastor responsible for building an energized community of faith, I quickly realized that bland preaching set the tone for a bland week.
11. Bill, what are the three most formative and shaping influences on your life? What are the pivotal points in your journey?
(1) In the first quarter century of my life, I lived deeply across the entire
spectrum of Baptist culture from the simplistic fundamentalism of my grandparents’ church to the theological sophistication of Southern Seminary. I loved the entire venture and thus developed a deep passion to reconcile rather than to alienate these contrasting groups within the wider denominational family.
(2) Shortly thereafter, Louie Newton taught me, and by example showed me, how the minister is to be a man of public affairs who takes the faith into every corner of society where it can shape the very ethos in which people live and work.
(3) My two sabbaticals at Goettingen and Harvard taught me not to chase after what other denominations might offer but rather to try to do for Baptists what the best representatives of other traditions have done for their part of the Christian family. Stated differently, the pivotal points in my journey were the moves from Birmingham to Louisville, Louisville to Shreveport, and Shreveport back to Birmingham. It was not the geographical transfer that was important, since I could have reinvented myself by staying in one place. Rather, each of these moves presented fresh challenges and demanded new learning experiences.
12. Like the previous question, name the four most influential people in your life, apart from Wylodine and the children and grands.
Most influential in my ministerial life have been Duke McCall, John Claypool, Louie Newton, and George Buttrick.
13. A bit different from the former question, tell us who shaped you theologically and ministerially and spiritually. Where did you go to feed your own soul?
Theologically I was shaped by Theron Price who gave me a grander concept of living in the sweep of Christian history. Ministerially, I was shaped by those listed in the previous question. Spiritually, I
never had one mentor but rather was nourished by a number of group relationships such as kindred spirits in the pastorate that I came to know through the Metropolitan Pastor’s Conference. Much of my spiritual nourishment has come through reading and reflection.
14. What is the most important idea in your life? Grace? Calling? Stewardship? As the Christian Century once asked. “What idea has used you?”
In a word, my controlling idea is Reconciliation. I seek to overcome that polarization by which we keep apart those realities that belong together. Fear and anger almost always lurk where alienation is allowed to flourish. I deplore the ideological rigidity that has rent both our denomination and our country into competing groups. I realize that since both ideas and people differ greatly, some type of uniformity is both impossible and undesirable; but I am always striving to achieve balanced complementarity even when it involves holding in tension a great deal of diversity.
You are hard to pigeonhole. Your theology strikes me as basically conservative or middle of the road. I know that you have offended fundamentalists in some areas, especially in your view of the Bible, but you are a rather orthodox person, are you not? Where are you progressive? Are you more liberal than you have said? Have you kept silent at points so as not “to offend” a weaker brother or sister? In the Deere Lectures at Golden Gate Seminary around 1980, I argued that one must be simultaneously both conservative and liberal as the “not destroy/but fulfill” dialectic of Matthew 5:17-18 makes so clear. In four presentations I argued that this was the overwhelming testimony of the Christian faith biblically, historically, theologically, and practically. The Bible is central to me, and there is no way to make a 2000-year-old book central
without being basically “conservative.” And yet the central message of Scripture is that God is continually in the business of transforming human life, which is an essentially liberal idea. I have not deliberately tried to keep my liberalism in the closet, which is one reason why my ministry has often been controversial. However, I would have to say that I have found it as hard to commend conservatism to liberals as I have to commend liberalism to conservatives. I can live with the idea of being labeled as “orthodox,” but do not prefer that word since I find that, for most people, orthodoxy harbors more conservatism than liberalism and therefore is somewhat unbalanced. I do try not to “offend” a weaker brother or sister, but I try to do so by “speaking the truth in love,” making sure that I am offering them as much love as I am truth.
16. Tell me about Wylodine.
The question is not out-of-bounds, but my ability to frame an adequate response is. Like me, she came out of a background that was economically, culturally, intellectually, and even religiously deprived. Thus we grew together as we were offered far more opportunities in all of these areas than any of our parents had ever known. Her faith is fed primarily by relationships, which offered a good balance when I was working in highly academic settings where faith was shaped primarily by ideas. Her capacity to love is limitless; thus I have spent our entire life together trying to catch up in that area but am certainly not there yet!
17. Tell me about Wylodine’s influence on your ministry.
When I was involved primarily in graduate theological education, my work was so technical that her influence was minimal. When I moved into administration, however, and had to deal with many confidential matters involving persons, she was always a trusted confidante.
Her greatest influence was probably in the pastoral ministry where she exercised an enormous influence partly because we both worked in the same context. As a shrewd judge of human nature, she knew who could be trusted, knew how to tell me when a sermon was a dud, and knew how to cheer me up when I was unfairly criticized.
18. What moves you to tears? Tears may flow from either joy or sorrow, in my case almost always from the former rather than the latter. I do not find it helpful to cry because of anger, frustration, or defeat. Rather, the eyes begin to glisten when I see ordinary people do acts of simple kindness and display incredible generosity without thought of recompense. Just now, for example, tears of joy can come as our children outperform even our highest expectations of them.
19. Over the years, what has kept you up at night and robbed you of sleep? Or do you simply sleep through the storms?
I have always slept well and have seldom used the midnight hours to rehash the work of the day. Probably the nearest that I have been robbed of sleep is when struggling over a major career decision. Both Wylodine and I get very deeply rooted where we are and form so many loving relationships that it is heartbreaking even to contemplate the move to another place, such as moving from Southern to Shreveport or from Shreveport to Samford. Those struggles were always more intense than any of the controversies in which I was involved.
20. Would you rather prepare a sermon for a congregation or a theological paper for professors?
By now you know that I cannot choose between these options but rather would strive for a balance between them. When I go for a long
stretch only preparing sermons, I have to stop and do something rigorously critical to keep another part of my mind alive. Likewise, when all I do is theological research, I hunger to say something that makes greater use of the imagination and more skillful use of symbolic language. I would soon become cognitively impaired if I did not do both with some regularity. That is why, throughout my ministry, I have always insisted in having one foot planted in academia and the other in the church. For me this is as essential as using right brain/left brain, or as breathing in/breath-ing out, or as the two sides of a single piece of paper. Right now, for example, I have just finished preparing the sermon to be preached at Mountain Brook Baptist Church, which I greatly enjoyed doing; but the next day I started writing a technical paper on Southern Seminary at its Sesquicentennial and relish that work just as much.
