Dr. William E. Hull: A Different Kind of Saint
A Memorial Sermon 16 December 2016
Mountain Brook Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL
by Walter B. Shurden
“In his holy flirtation with the world,” said Buechner, “God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints” (Wishful Thinking, 83). Bill Hull was a different kind of saint. The challenges he leaves us are not simply about private devotions and public worship, about prayer and scripture reading and Christian generosity, traits of conventional spirituality. All of those were natural parts of his spirituality, as natural to him as breathing. But they are not the cardinal characteristics of his peculiar kind of sainthood.
So here at the beginning rather than the end, I give you my summary statement: there was a Quality to the man. The word is Quality, with a capital Q. Other synonyms come begging to be used. They are words such as Excellence, Distinction, Class, Eminence, and Superiority. But the best word, from my angle of observation, is Quality. It was the Quality of the man that made him a different kind of saint.
Six years ago Kay and I were in Birmingham for a Baptist meeting and we spent the night with Bill and Wylodine. The next morning Wylodine prepared us a super breakfast, and we enjoyed ourselves around the table. After breakfast, when Wylodine and Kay had gone to their rooms, I saw Bill pick up a dish towel, folding it carefully so that the sides were completely even. And he began to clean that kitchen counter. He cleaned that kitchen counter like I had never seen a counter cleaned before in all my life. Methodically, meticulously, he hygienically scoured and mastered that counter. He had a strategy: he went from back to front, from end to end, into crevices and corners, around faucets, carefully vacuuming every millimeter of that counter. A soiled spot, unnoticeable to most human eyes, or an innocent little crumb did not have the slightest chance of survival.
And when he finished, that counter looked just like every sentence he ever constructed, polished, shiny, not a word out of place. That counter looked just like every tie he ever tied on himself, in a perfectly balanced Windsor knot. That counter looked like the Sermon on the Mount that he so exquisitely outlined and every sermon he organized so symetrically. That counter looked like every biblical text he ever exegeted, every committee report he ever wrote, every speech he ever made. He cleaned that counter exactly like he compiled that three ring notebook after he was stricken with ALS. It was entitled “End of Life Agenda,” and it covered everything that he, Wylodine, David and Susan needed to know about his dying, his death, and the aftermath of it all.
Ours is an era where people know more and more about less and less. But one of the questions that will always remain for many of us about Bill Hull was: Exactly where did Hull’s expertise lay? He seemed to do everything so well. Is there a plural to expertise? Expertises, maybe?
He could be unrivaled teacher, insightful theologian, profound biblical interpreter and incomparable preacher of the gospel—all of us knew he could do those ministries in spades. But if you turned your head, he would become a sociologist whose footnotes indicated that he had read the literature, a historian with an imaginative and nuanced interpretation, a student of leadership who sounded as though he should be teaching the course, a pastoral strategist who somehow saw far and deep and around corners, an institutional mapmaker who sensed the change that should transform structures and policies. Some of us wondered what he could not do. My bet is that when he died he knew as much about ALS as any non-medical person in this country.
So what kind of different saint was he?
Part of his peculiar saintliness was that he was himself. If I asked you whom did Bill Hull preach like? Whom did Bill Hull teach like? Most of you would be stumped. Because Bill Hull preached like Bill Hull. Others of us have tried to imitate him, but he was the original. If you tried to imitate him, you ended up being a stereotype or at worse a caricature. He was just that unrepeatable. He did not have to find out what others thought. He did not dress his soul in others piety. He had his own spirituality, and it never dawned on him that it should be like somebody else’s.
I have a file folder on my computer designated “Hull.” I made that file long before Bill got sick. The historian in me wanted an oral history of him. So I sent him “20 Questions.” He answered those twenty questions for me just as he cleaned that counter that morning after breakfast.
In one of the questions I asked him who had influenced him in his ministerial career. He gave me four names: Louie Newton, Duke McCall, George Buttrick and John Claypool. But Bill Hull was not like any of them and they were not like him. He lived his own life. If the primal freedom is the freedom to be the self and if being one’s self under God is a part of saintliness, his legacy, his different kind of saintliness, is that he was unsparingly himself. So far as I know, he never went on a journey in search of himself. He knew who he was. He was Bill Hull.
Another part of his peculiar saintliness was, of course, his brilliance. It is a shame that we do not
more often associate the mind with sainthood. Saints, we say, are the martyrs and the mystics, people who die heroic deaths and pray long prayers. But I would like to lift up “smarts” and intelligence as characteristics of some of the greatest of all the saints. After all, we call them “Saint” Augustine and “Saint” Thomas and “Saint” Hildegaard. I measure my words when I tell you that in the last fifty years there has not been a smarter minister of the gospel among white Baptists of the South than Bill Hull.
One of those rare ten talent persons about whom the Bible speaks, Bill Hull would have knocked the top out of any profession he had chosen. But he chose and he was chosen for the Christian ministry. Within that broad calling of ministry, he superbly served as teacher, preacher, theologian, administrator, and pastor. What is not reflected in those specific roles, however, is the enormous contribution he made in each of those roles as a denominational leader among the Baptist people.
Wherever he served…Southern Seminary, First Baptist Shreveport, Samford…he led the Baptist people. Dr. Hull really could not help being a leader. He stood on a higher hill than the rest. He saw more. He not only saw a bigger picture than others, he also saw connections, intersections, and nuances that others did not see.
But here is yet another part of his different kind of saintliness. Bill Hull was not simply smarter than most of us; he worked harder than most of us. Part of his genius, often hidden to his listening and reading public, was that he knew how to work, and he worked hard. He was often the first one at the building and the last one to leave. For all of his brilliance, Bill Hull did not just wake up one morning and bam! produce those quality sermons and quality lectures. You don’t become a person of quality by simply being born smart. Sure, much of it was genes, but much of it was grit. It took work and desire and dedication to churn out the quantity and quality of work he produced. After all, the man wrote five books while dying with Lou Gehrig’s disease!
And he absolutely loved the work God gave him! I got the feeling that he worked his whole life in the Toy Department. He loved what he did.
Some will be surprised when I say that Bill Hull would have been a good monk, if Baptists had monks. You know what monks do. They worship. They sing. By the way, he loved music. When a youngster, he studied violin for twelve years and became the concert master of the Alabama State Student orchestra. And monks study. And monks work. I believe he would have been right at home, if they had given him a classroom or a pulpit as an outlet for all that work and study.
Another aspect of Dr. Hull’s distinctive sainthood was that he had deep roots and wide wings. He was unapologetically rooted denominationally but decidedly ecumenical in attitude and actions. His little booklet, The Meaning of the Baptist Experience, is the best book on the Baptist vision of the Christian faith that I have ever read. Yet he was never threatened by the best of world scholarship that came from widely divergent sources. He embraced all Christians, indeed, all of humanity.
Another part of his peculiar sainthood was the major theme of his life, and that theme was Reconciliation. When I asked him in my “20 Questions” to identify the pivotal points in his spiritual journey, this is how he answered: 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.
Bill Hull wanted to reconcile everything; he did not want to live dualistically, dividing life into “them” and “us.”
He wanted to reconcile theological education with practical ministry, the campus with the congregation, churchmanship with scholarship, preaching with teaching, profound research with practical wisdom, specialists with generalists, left with right, moderates with fundamentalists.
This penchant for “bringing together” was not born of cowardice or of hugging the middle of the road where the yellow line is. Not a few times he found himself in boiling hot water because of stands he took, making enemies he did not intend and certainly did not want.
And this obsession with reconciliation was not born of secular wisdom but of biblical conviction. He spelled it out in his 1981 book, recently revised. The title should be noted: Beyond the Barriers: A Study of Reconciliation for the Contemporary Church.
With one foot neck-deep in the best of New Testament scholarship and one foot resolutely set in the Christian pulpit, he gives a sterling exposition of Ephesians 2:11-22, one that will make a preacher want to preach like Chrysostom and, if you are not careful, get run out of town like Roger Williams.
Tell me if you can, what greater legacy can a Christian minister leave in our polarized age than a passion for breaking down these earthly walls we build.
An unusual kind of saint: he was himself, he was intelligent, he was a worker bee, he was rooted but expansive, and his theme was reconciliation. I must speak briefly of one more characteristics of his atypical sainthood. Actually this is not atypical of saints in general but it is grossly overlooked in Bill Hull.
Dr. Hull was a spirit person. I have noted with interest the public statements that have circulated about his death. Most have headlines such as “Scholar, author dies at 83.” One can never nit-pick that description, because he was a Baptist scholar of the first rank.
I quibble because Bill Hull was more than head. And if you missed that, you missed something very important about him. What birthed his scholarship, his writings, his sermons, and his entire life was a calling, a calling that he experienced his second year of college. It was a calling that took him away from the study of medicine toward the ministry.
His salvation experience, so he told me in my “20 Questions,” was a natural unfolding of a life nurtured and marinated in the faith. But “My call to ministry,” he said, “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.” He says in his helpful autobiographical sermon, “This is My
Story,” that “entering the ministry was for me a leap in the dark. . . and yet it was the most certain thing I have ever done, a resolve from which I have never wavered.”
William Stafford’s poem reminds me of Bill Hull.
The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die;
and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
The thread never changed for Bill Hull. It was a spiritual calling to do good in life in the name of Jesus Christ. As far as I can read his life, he never let go of that thread.
We err when we equate holiness and sanctity with moral perfection, flawless personalities or world denying asceticism. Bill Hull was none of those. He was a man of QUALITY, a different kind of saint.
There is an old Jewish Hasidic teaching that says: “There are three ascending levels of how one mourns: With tears— that is the lowest. With silence—that is higher. And with a song—that is the highest.”
Let us sing.
