When they set the annual Evangelical Theological Society meeting in Fort Worth this year, I knew I’d have to piggyback a run down to Tehuacana to see my old friend and colleague, Jim Parker, who runs Trinity Institute on the site of a old Cumberland Presbyterian school, Trinity University. Jim’s turned it into a Christian study/conference/retreat center, and a lot of interesting people come through its gates. (You can check it out here.)

Both he and I retired from teaching at SBTS in 2019, and I very much miss his company. Dr. Parker (with credentials from Princeton Theological Seminary and the University of Basel) is one of the most clear-headed, plain-spoken, and congenial profs I’ve ever worked with, especially gratifying since we shared departmental interest in apologetics and aesthetics.  

Neither Jim nor I ever lived in Louisville during our teaching days at the seminary. His home was in Texas, mine in Illinois (where I church planted) and Tennessee (where I directed the Nashville extension). He’d stay on campus during the terms, in an apartment provided by the school. I’d commute to Louisville and stay in the seminary hotel, the Legacy Center. (Near the end of my last semester, the desk clerk observed that I’d checked in there over four hundred times, beginning in 2002.) This meant that we ate a lot of meals in the campus cafeteria, and this was Jim’s special domain. He’d always be in the company of students, regaling them with stories and observations, fielding their questions, suggesting paths for study, tracking with their life developments, commiserating and counseling as appropriate, and linking them with opportunities beyond the seminary. He was a residential, ministerial treasure both to students who took his classes and to those who didn’t.

In this connection, he gained special honor when he was a prof at Criswell College in Dallas back around 1990. Mike Bryan, a non-believer, came to campus for a season to get a fix on what these “fundies” were up to. The resulting book, Chapter and Verse: A Skeptic Revisits Christianity gives special attention to Jim for his thoughtful and amiable engagement with Bryan’s concerns. 

The affection Jim prompted from his students was evident on my recent visit when I found myself in the company of one of his former doctoral students and his wife. They, too, had made the pilgrimage to Tehuacana before heading back up to the Fort Worth gathering, and we all had a good time in nearby Mexia over supper with Bro Parker. 

And yes, he’s got a couple of donkeys, one of which you see here, along with two of us old philosophical donkeys. In BC Athens, Socrates irritated enough folks with his probing questions (which cut through the sophistical conceits and popular delusions of his day) that they felt they had to kill him to get relief. Jim is no stranger to that Socratic  tradition, but I’m happy to see he’s still kickin’. And pastoring and blessing to the benefit of many, including this old donkey who got to spend a few hours with him “deep in the heart of Texas."