A Pilgrim's Progress

By Theodore J. Wardlaw

One of the most striking things about Paul Kenneth Hooker is his gift for erudite conversation about … just about everything. For instance, ask him a hard Old Testament or theology question and he will furrow his brow, look up at the sky for a moment, and cock his eyes sideways as if you’ve flummoxed him. But then he will take that deep breath and squinch up his face just so … and he’s off to the races. He will conjugate a few Hebrew verbs, rehearse various wars and rulers before, during, and after this or that great disruption, cite the foremost Hebrew scholars, and finally he will tell you something profound.

And he’s not just an expert in Hebrew Bible! He can talk music: jazz, the bass guitar, the tenor section in the University Presbyterian Church chancel choir, medieval chanting, four-part harmony, you name it. Same with Presbyterian polity, Scottish, British, and American history. Same with homiletics. Same with poetry, liturgy, and St. Augustine—both the actual saint and the oldest town in Florida from which the Presbytery of St. Augustine, which Paul served as executive presbyter and stated clerk before coming to Austin, got its name. Same with chemical engineering (more on that momentarily).

In this festschrift, when we take the measure of Paul’s impact not just on Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary but also on the church, I’d like to suggest that Paul Kenneth Hooker is a Renaissance human being. But it’s not just what he knows; it’s also the way he conveys what he knows, his amazing capacity to recite his answer as though he’s reading from a manuscript. On the spot, he is ready to answer the question, and every sentence of his answer takes its important place in every paragraph. There are no hesitations. You are getting pure descriptive, informational, inspirational Hookerisms. This dialogue is always sheer beauty from a beautiful mind.

This is what I love about Paul. And sometimes, to be honest, this is what I hate about Paul. I often say to myself (never out loud): “Why can’t I be more like Paul Hooker?”

Paul grew up in the Manse. His father, Oscar Floyd Hooker (“Floyd”), second youngest of seven children, was a carpenter’s apprentice for the Tennessee Central Railroad. When the United States entered World War II, Floyd and all five of his brothers enlisted in the Army and fought in Germany and the Pacific. All five returned uninjured. By the grace of the G.I. Bill, Floyd Hooker enrolled in Peabody College (now part of Vanderbilt University). While a student at Peabody, Floyd met Norma Wilmoth Porter, a local Nashville girl. They married in 1948, and in 1950 they moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where Floyd enrolled in Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Upon Floyd’s graduation, the Hookers began a lifelong commitment to parish ministry, and along the way welcomed into the world Paul and his younger sister, Susanne.

Paul finished high school in Birmingham and enrolled in the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, intending to major in chemical engineering. He landed a prestigious internship in the Research and Development Lab of the Dupont Corporation in Old Hickory, Tennessee. His primary responsibility was testing the heat retention properties of Reemay, which, as we all know, is “a spunbonded, white, non-woven polyester fabric with continuous filament construction so as to minimize fiber migration and add strength.” At the end of the summer, he triumphantly submitted his report to the lab director.

It wasn’t long before the lab director summoned Paul to his office. If Paul had been expecting effusive praise for his efforts, he was disappointed. The lab director’s evaluation was terse: “More numbers, less words.” “I knew then and there,” Paul told me, “that I was not going to be a good chemical engineer.”

Returning to the University of Tennessee in the fall, he switched his major to psychology, or what his engineering buddies called “the waystation of the lost.” Then, rummaging through the UT catalogue for elective courses, Paul discovered an intriguing class: “Ancient Israel’s Religious and Historical Traditions.” He signed up. On the first day of class, just as the bell was ringing to start the period, the professor arrived, talking from the moment he entered the door until the hour was over. “He was talking,” Paul told me, “about a way of looking at the Bible that I had never seen or heard before.” This was not Sunday School, not a collection of Bible stories. “Instead,” said Paul, “he was weaving together archaeological artifacts, historical inscriptions, data from the biblical narratives themselves, and showing how a culture—ancient Israel—used the stories of its past to address the crises of the present.”

Hooker was hooked. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UT, he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (now Union Presbyterian Seminary) and moved to Richmond. This is where Paul and I met and became fast friends.

Paul was mesmerized by biblical scholars like John Bright, Patrick Miller, James Luther Mays, and, above all, by the renowned Old Testament scholar and Presbyterian minister Dr. W. Sibley Towner, a Nebraskan who earned his BA, MDiv, and PhD at Yale. Towner was Paul’s most influential mentor. I imagine it was Sib Towner’s love for both biblical studies and the Church of Jesus Christ that influenced Paul so effectively. At Union “I fell in love with biblical studies,” Paul told me, “but I also fell in love with the church and discovered the joys of being a parish pastor.”

After graduation from Union, Paul served for five years as the associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Kingsport, Tennessee. In 1984, he entered the PhD program at Emory University in Atlanta, where he encountered such luminaries as John Hayes, J. Maxwell Miller, Gene M. Tucker, and Carol A. Newsom. He did his residency, got through his comprehensive exams, and began work on his dissertation. While writing, he was called in 1986 as associate pastor of Shallowford Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, where he met Pat Thiede. The two married in 1990.

Paul finished his dissertation in late 1992 and prepared to defend it before his dissertation committee. Dissertation defenses were normally scheduled in the late morning or early afternoon, to allow students to refresh their memories of the details of their dissertations. But on the morning of his defense, Paul received word that a young couple in the congregation had just given birth to a stillborn child, and Paul wound up spending the morning at the hospital with them. Shortly before going into his defense, he received another call: one of the patriarchs of the congregation was dying of bone cancer and was not expected to live through the day. Paul’s dissertation defense was sandwiched between these two pastoral crises.

Most defenses consist of questions directed from faculty to student, but Paul’s consisted mainly of an argument between two of his professors over historiography and the nature of history itself. After answering a few desultory questions, Paul was ushered out of the room to await the committee’s decision. When they brought him back in, they offered him a choice: take another year to work more on the dissertation, or accept a B-minus (the lowest passing grade for a dissertation) and be done. “I was torn. I cared about the work I had done on that dissertation, and I wanted to make it a better piece of scholarship,” Paul said. “But then I thought about that grieving couple and that dying old man, and I knew.” Paul took the B-minus and walked out of the room: he was now a PhD, but more importantly, a parish pastor.

Over the next twenty years Paul served in ministry. He left Shallowford in 1993, and served as pastor of Rock Spring Presbyterian Church in Atlanta from 1993 to 1999. He moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to accept the call to the Presbytery of St. Augustine as its executive presbyter and stated clerk, where he worked to coach and support pastors and congregations for thirteen years. Along the way, he developed expertise in Presbyterian polity and served on the task force that wrote the current Foundations of Presbyterian Polity and Form of Government in the PC(USA) Book of Order. Ultimately, in 2012, he accepted a teaching and administrative position at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

At Austin Seminary, Paul remained faithful to his commitment to parish ministry. In all his teaching—in biblical studies, poetry, church polity, and the mechanics of ministry—even as he has drawn on his considerable academic learning, the voice and needs of the church have always been evident.

A few years ago, at one of our annual faculty retreats, I asked each one of us to write and share an essay about the sense of call at the root of our various vocations. I will never forget what Paul wrote and shared. He wrote about a monk in one of his favorite novels, Arthur M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Brother Francis Gerard was a novice seeking his vocation on a Lenten vigil in the desert. Francis has an encounter with a wiry old stranger that Francis thinks might be the Blessed Leibowitz, patron of the order of which Francis is part. Francis believes his calling is to preserve and promulgate that encounter as a source of faith. But his abbot crushes his hopes and visions, and year after year sends Francis back to the desert to seek his “true” vocation. Over the seven Lenten vigils Francis spends in the desert, he becomes unusually effective in building stone hovels and imitating wolf calls in the night. During the rest of the year between vigils, Francis also becomes adept at copying and illuminating ancient manuscripts. Francis is beloved in the monastery for his skills, but the whole of his life he waited to receive a vocation that never came.

At the end of Paul’s essay, he reflected on the difference between constructing his own call and waiting for God’s vocation. While waiting for his vocation as a professor of Old Testament, Paul answered all sorts of other calls: scholar, pastor, preacher, presbytery executive, poet, faculty and ministerial formation director at a seminary. Paul never did serve as the sort of professor he had prepared to be. And yet, all these things were the elements of God’s call to Paul—his own version of hovel-building, wolf calling, and illuminating manuscripts. “The thing I thought I wanted would probably have been a disaster,” Paul once said to me. “But I can’t imagine having served a ministry more fulfilling than the one I served in all those calls while I waited for my vocation.”

Being, in this sense, a pilgrim has allowed Paul to wander—to wander into the very lap of God’s intent.

Ted Wardlaw is President Emeritus of Austin Seminary. A graduate of Presbyterian College, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and Yale Divinity School, he is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), having served congregations in Atlanta, Georgia; Setauket, Long Island; Germantown, Tennessee; and Sherman, Texas, before becoming Austin Seminary’s president (2002–2022).