Schools of Faith

Essays on Theology, Ethics and Education

David Fergusson, Bruce McCormack, David Fergusson, Bruce McCormack

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780567695550
• eBook ISBN: 9780567667953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Schools of Faith represents a diversity of essays from scholars in several continents. The contributors, all leading theologians and ethicists, offer reflections on historical and contemporary themes which are significant for wider debates in theological education and church life in today's world. The range of contributor and content provides a fitting tribute to the work of Iain R. Torrance over many years.

Amid the numerous subjects discussed, the authors focus on liturgy, textual criticism, public theology, the ethics of war, Christian doctrine, divine action, ecumenism, inter-faith dialogue, spiritual formation, the office of the minister, and the interface between religion and literature. The multi-faceted nature of this collection signifies its importance for historical, systematic and practical theology

1

West Midlands Foray

Nicholas Peter Harvey

Iain came to the Queen’s Theological College in Birmingham from the Shetland Islands, where he had been a minister, with interesting tales to tell of his pastoral experience there. This, to our landlocked habits of mind, was already rather an exotic world. In any case, Iain was not an obvious fit with the college, for the Kirk was not otherwise represented there, the nearest to it in churchmanship being an occasional student from the URC. Iain plunged into the life and work of the place with such remarkable and sustained intensity that a senior colleague soon became seriously concerned about his health. Whether or not Iain knew of this concern he was undeterred.

Tutors at Queen’s, as in other theological colleges, were expected to do much more than lecture. This is where Iain came into his own, expending an extraordinary amount of time and energy in pastoral care of students. His teaching subject at that time was the New Testament, but he was already exhibiting a polymathic tendency, epitomized in the words of the principal Gordon Wakefield: ‘He knows everything’. This dramatic overstatement was typical of one side of Gordon’s character: it would have been more accurate to say of Iain that he could take us all by surprise with the scope of his informed opinions. His ecumenical sympathies were never in doubt, indicated, among other things, by the range of his friendships and the eclectic nature of his reading. He was impossible to pigeonhole in any theological or ecclesiastical frame of reference.

One manifestation of this was the Scottish Journal of Theology, which he edited from Queen’s. This was in no sense a parish pump production. Indicative perhaps of pressure behind the scenes which he had to withstand was a particular response to my article ‘Christian Morality?’ published in the journal, which argued that Jesus was unconcerned with morality in any of the usual senses of the word. Soon afterwards I received by post a copy of his father’s pamphlet against abortion, accompanied only by the author’s compliments slip. This can hardly have been intended as a compliment.

Iain’s lively interest in questions of Christian ethics found another focus with my departure from the college. There was a hitch in the process of appointing an ethics tutor to succeed me, so Iain relieved the principal’s anxiety by volunteering to step into the breach. This was typical of his intrepidity in taking on unfamiliar tasks and challenges. Likewise, he became secretary of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics, a body founded to promote that study in theological colleges, and therefore among the clergy, at a time when interest had seemed to be on the wane. As so often in such institutions it was the secretary who did the lion’s share of the work of planning and administration. Iain formed an effective partnership with Oliver O’Donovan as president.

Iain’s characteristic energy and efficiency were most dramatically demonstrated on the day of Princess Diana’s funeral. The society’s annual conference was taking place, and the televised funeral was just drawing to a close, watched by a tearful throng, when Iain, mindful of the conference timetable and his secretarial responsibility, stalked in and turned off the television. A supreme irony was provided by the fact that the following lecture, which Iain was not prepared to delay or cancel, was on the subject of euthanasia. Whether this decision was quite fair to the unfortunate lecturer is a moot point. In any case, a significant number of us were not quite in the mood!

Iain’s approach to the subject matter of Christian ethics was complex. On the one hand, he relished recommending my book The Morals of Jesus especially to students inclined to fundamentalism in the name of the Bible. Yet he once told me that his starting point was ‘somewhere between Stanley Hauerwas and Jonathan Sacks’, both from my point of view distinctly conservative thinkers. His much more recent work as convener of the Church of Scotland’s Theological Forum, where he is reported as finding no theological reason against same sex marriage, suggests further development.

Meanwhile, in his time at Queen’s, he did not flinch from engagement in necessary conflicts. Two examples, one theological and the other practical, will serve to illustrate this. He had considerable reservations about some ways of contextualizing theology fashionable in the college at that time. The tension generated at staff meetings by this concern was described by Iain as ‘locking horns’, a phrase that shows he was up for the fight, but also that he never lost a sense of proportion. The practicality over which he was embattled was the conversion of the college administration to computers. Iain was strongly in favour of the change, while our bursar, Duncan Fairfax-Lucie, stoutly opposed it. This conflict was conducted largely indirectly, with scrupulous politeness on both sides. A dispassionate observer inclined to betting would certainly have put money on Iain, but Duncan had remarkable reserves of stamina and resilience.

On a lighter note, there was an occasion when the entire resident population of Queen’s was invited to the farewell party of a teaching colleague who was a strict teetotaller. I was uncertain how to cope with this, so I was invited to Iain and Morag’s flat for gin and tonics immediately beforehand. I gladly acceded to this before floating across the lawn to our departing colleague’s house. It was a lovely summer evening. On arrival, I started and led improvised community singing which continued more or less throughout the party. Our host did not seem best pleased but could not swim against the tide. One of our Methodist students artlessly commented on how pleasant it was to enjoy such festivity without a drop of alcohol. The contributions of the Church of Scotland to the corporate life of Queen’s were not always fully transparent.

From the benign vantage point of the Department for Continuing Studies at Birmingham University, the great biblical scholar Michael Goulder opined that the period when Iain, David Parker and I were together at Queen’s was a golden age for the college. Karen, David’s wife, lest we should succumb to narcissism, spoke of us less benignly and certainly less reverently as ‘the Three Wise Men’, while David himself pointed out that the period was very brief. Iain was restless, and having considered other possibilities, found a job in the University of Birmingham, reverting to the New Testament as his main teaching subject. Here, he continued to demonstrate his capacity and readiness for learning new things. Especially noteworthy is what he wrote to Michael Goulder: ‘I enjoyed marking your students’ papers, and learned from them’. The papers referred to were written by students in the Black and White Partnership, a project designed primarily for pastors of independent black churches in the city, of which by this time there were many. Michael taught New Testament for the partnership, and Iain was the university’s double-marker in this subject.

‘So generous a compliment might be unique’, wrote Goulder afterwards, with reference to Iain’s tribute.¹ Apart from other implications, it was not commonplace at that time for academics to acknowledge that they had learned anything from students’ essays. One colleague of mine even went so far as to claim never to have learned anything from a student’s essay. Such a frame of mind presumably reflects a conviction that a teacher’s authority is somehow impugned by allowing such a possibility. Iain in Birmingham was light-years away from that form of self-imposed academic imprisonment.

Iain’s positive link with Goulder is also of interest in another sense. When Michael resigned his orders as an Anglican priest and declared himself an unbeliever, while continuing to teach New Testament, he acquired a certain notoriety. The pastors in the partnership were consulted as to his continuing suitability to teach them. They decided that as faith is a gift it cannot be demanded of anyone. Michael tells the story slightly differently, saying that the bargain was that he should be allowed to continue to teach while they would try to convert him.² The Birmingham theology department in those days included some self-appointed guardians of Christian orthodoxy whose attitude put Michael under some pressure, but Iain was not among them and clearly wanted to support Michael as an independent voice.

Scarcely mentioned so far in these impressionistic reflections is one name: Morag. Living on the Queen’s site, with two young children in tow, she had virtually no public profile in the college, whether by accident or design. Iain, after all, was already very anglicized in virtue of having been to Monkton Combe School in Somerset and later to Oxford. Morag lacked these advantages, if such they were, but more than compensated for them by the strengths of character which made her vital to keeping Iain’s show on the road and the family together. Of course, there was and is much more to Morag than that, but my task here is to write about Iain, who once told me that Morag is the only person whose opinion he takes fully seriously. It would be impossible to overrate her hidden role in the story I am telling.

What then are my concluding reflections on Iain in the years of this all-too-brief foray into the West Midlands of England? He was an outstanding colleague, with great gifts of encouragement. When he directed his full attention towards you, it was both flattering and taxing. Flattering because you were left in no doubt that you were being taken seriously. Taxing because such concentrated attentivity necessarily makes demands. Iain’s disapproval was expressed with a mixture of directness, clarity and proportion which made it difficult to disagree, or to fail to learn something helpful about oneself. I did not know what to make of him when he first arrived among us. But he became and remains a very dear friend. Maybe we were thrown together by the accident of belonging to minority denominations at Queen’s, Iain to the Kirk and I to the Roman Catholic Church. He certainly adapted very well to the joint course between Queen’s and the seminary at Oscott, which now alas no longer takes place.

To end in a more Bellocian/Chestertonian vein, there is no better man with whom to consume barley brew – or gin for that matter. Ad multos annos.

Notes

1Cf. Michael Goulder, Five Stones and a Sling: Memoirs of a Biblical Scholar (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 88–89.

2Ibid., 88.

2

The Life of the Text

David Parker

Those students of divinity at St Andrews who sat in Matthew Black’s lectures on the Double and Special Tradition in 1972 will recall that he described B. H. Streeter’s theory of the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels as ‘one of the few assured results of modern scholarship’. Forty-five years later, there are several reasons why one might feel less confident, without one’s respect for the speaker being in any way lessened. Apart from alternative theories,¹ it is arguable that in 1972 the techniques for studying the Gospels and their development, as well as methodology in editing the Greek New Testament, had not significantly changed since Streeter published his famous work half a century earlier.² As a matter of fact, in 1972, Roland Barthes’s ‘La mort de l’auteur’ was already five years old, and the first work applying computers to the study of the New Testament (Ellison’s text-critical work on manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel) had been completed a decade earlier.³ But so far as study of the Gospels was concerned, the opportunities for new ways of imagining both their emergence and ways of recreating and analysing them were all in the future. Both critical theory and the computer have had a profound impact on our attitude to the written word. And a third change, also highly significant for textual analysis, has been changing many aspects of human life and thought: genomics.

Approaches to the task of editing the Greek New Testament, and thus of providing a published text of writings with a central role in schools of faith and in theological and ethical reflection, have diversified during this period of time. Almost every aspect of it has been challenged, most notably the concept that there is a single authoritative form of text to be recovered.⁴

It might be thought that this approach, in which the equal significance of different (even incompatible) wordings for interpreting scripture, played havoc with the traditional view that the task of the textual critic is to recover a definitive and authoritative form of the text. The reality is more complex, not least because of the new ways of considering the data that are available to modern researchers. The editors of the major critical edition of the Greek New Testament currently in production (the Editio Critica Maior) are dealing all the time with textual questions in a complex theoretical framework.⁵ The computer makes it possible for modern scholars to access more information and to scrutinize their own theories much more carefully than ever before. Before discussing the significance of this, a brief explanation of the way it is achieved is necessary. The examples will all be taken from the Gospel of John, which the writer is editing.

The process begins with making an electronic transcription of the text of each manuscript that is included. This transcription contains the precise wording of the witness, with corrections indicated, labelling the first hand and each separate corrector with its own tag. With further tags to mark every page, column and line break, as well as markers for the beginning and end of every verse, we have the data both to publish an accurate transcription of the witness, and to compare it with every other witness. The full set of transcriptions is then collated automatically, verse by verse, using a program called CollateX.⁶ The output is then refined using a front end that gives the editor a full set of options to refine the collation as necessary. This includes screening out spelling variations and spelling mistakes (obvious ‘noise’) and setting the length of variation units. When this is complete, the result can be sent to a database that records the reading of every witness at every variation unit. This data can be used to compare each witness with every other witness. For example, we can know that two manuscripts agree in 92.381 per cent of the variation units in the Gospel of John (4,874 out of 5,276 where both are extant).⁷

The following stage consists of studyi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Very Rev. Professor Iain R. Torrance
• 1 West Midlands Foray
• 2 The Life of the Text
• 3 Creation: A Catalyst Shaping Early Christian Life and Thought
• 4 Theodore of Mopsuestia and the Allegorical Method in Liturgical Commentaries
• 5 Study as Spiritual Formation
• 6 The Logic of Incarnation and the Problem of the Extra Calvinisticum
• 7 The King James Bible in Scotland
• 8 Jonathan Edwards: Panentheist or Pantheist?
• 9 Scotland and Princeton
• 10 Schleiermacher’s Trinitarian ‘Realism’
• 11 The Place of Prayer in Theological Method: A Conversation with Sarah Coakley
• 12 Christian Self-Formation and the Meaning of Baptism
• 13 Real Insights along False Paths: With Karl Barth and Against the Stream in Theological Ethics
• 14 Telling the Story of Gaudium et Spes: George Lindbeck and the Catholic Rediscovery of Eschatology
• 15 The Divine Action ‘Problem’? An Eastern Orthodox Challenge to Science and Theology
• 16 Christianity and China: Looking Forward
• 17 Mainstream Minority: The Public Identity of the Church of Scotland
• 18 Can We Trust the Church?
• 19 Military Chaplaincy, Christian Witness and the Ethics of War
• 20 Religious Discourse and the Public Forum
• 21 God, Discipleship and Meaning in Rainer Maria Rilke and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali
• 22 The Theological and Educational Promise of Scriptural Reasoning
• 23 The Minister: Some Literary Perspectives
• 24 The Significance of New Humanities for Current Theological Education in the Context of the Korean Church
• 25 Searching for Gravitas
• 26 Wisdom in a Wikipedia World: Education, Ecumenism and Leadership in an Age of Globalization
• Index
• Copyright Page