9 A New Beginning? Trinity College, Bristol
9
A New Beginning? Trinity College, Bristol
On 4 August 1969, it was announced that Packer would become the Principal of Tyndale Hall, Bristol. It was a good appointment, which was widely welcomed within the evangelical constituency, allowing Packer to use his talents to good effect. Yet Packer’s optimism about his future quickly evaporated, as the future of theological education at Bristol – especially at Tyndale Hall – was called into question by a series of decisions made by the Church of England in early 1971 about the direction of ministerial training. Given the importance of this difficult period for Packer, we need to look at these developments in Bristol in some detail.
Tensions at Bristol: Clifton Theological College and Tyndale Hall
In the summer of 1969, the Church of England had two accredited evangelical theological colleges in Bristol, namely, Clifton Theological College and Tyndale Hall, both of which had connections with the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society. The relationship between the two colleges was not easy, in that the origins of Clifton lay in a serious rift between the staff of Tyndale Hall and the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society back in the 1930s. As the memories of this split faded into history, the question of why there should be two evangelical theological colleges so close together in Bristol began to be raised. Surely there was a case for a merger? Two senior members of staff at each institution – John Wenham at Tyndale and Alec Motyer at Clifton – had been talking about the case for a merger since 1960.
Any hope of the reunification of Bristol’s two theological colleges was dashed, however, by a series of events in February 1965. A serious dispute between the Principal of Clifton Theological College and his teaching staff led to three of the five members of staff being summoned before the College Council late at night and summarily dismissed. Two other staff members resigned in sympathy shortly afterwards. These events caused consternation and distress far beyond Clifton, particularly at Tyndale Hall. Most of the staff there had good professional and personal relationships with their colleagues at Clifton and were shocked at the dismissals. Colin Brown, a member of the Tyndale staff, publicly criticised the developments at Clifton in a paper set before the Church of England Theological Council. It was inevitable that institutional relationships between Clifton and Tyndale would become severely impaired.
Nonetheless, news of this rift did not filter through to the senior echelons of the national Church. In February 1968, the Church of England published a report entitled Theological Colleges for Tomorrow. Its most striking recommendation was that theological colleges should have an optimum size of 120, and a minimum of eighty. The creation of institutions of this size could only be achieved by mergers between existing ones. The report’s main author, Sir Bernard de Bunsen, seems to have assumed that, as Clifton and Tyndale were both evangelical colleges located in the same area of Bristol, a merger between them was natural and unproblematic.
A joint meeting of the teaching staff of both institutions to discuss this possibility was arranged for 18 June 1968. Tensions between the two staff bodies flared up, leading the Tyndale staff to request that negotiations should cease. The College Councils, who acted as trustees for the institutions, saw no reason to take these conflicts into account, and agreed to work towards a merger. The decision was announced to both College communities in October 1968. It was very badly received at Tyndale, especially when it became clear that the merger plan included an explicit decision not to appoint Colin Brown to the staff of the new College, on account of his criticism of the dismissal of staff at Clifton in 1965.
On 18 October 1968, a ‘declaration of intent’ to unite the two Colleges by September 1970 under the leadership of a new Principal, Michael Baughen, was jointly issued by the two College Councils. Yet Packer had not been considered by the College Councils as a potential Principal of the new college. There was growing discontent on the part of staff and students alike at Tyndale Hall over the conspicuous absence of a person of scholarly or theological distinction on the proposed staff of the new College.
In the end, the final blow to the merger came from the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society, who had a continuing interest in the governance of Tyndale Hall. Aware of the growing criticism of the merger from within their constituency, they resolved at an extraordinary meeting in May 1969 not to support it. Without that support, the merger could not – and did not – proceed.
The plans for a merged College were now unworkable. What, then, would happen to Tyndale Hall? Could it survive on its own? The future seemed highly uncertain. Perhaps inevitably, the Principal of Tyndale Hall announced his resignation following the failure of the merger negotiations, with effect from the end of December 1969. Tyndale now needed a new Principal. Student enrolments had fallen sharply as a result of concerns about the merger negotiations within the College’s core constituency. The parlous state of the College was evident: only twenty-eight students had been enrolled for the academic year 1969−70. The financial situation was serious, with significant losses being predicted. There was an urgent need for Tyndale Hall to reconnect with its support base, by appointing a Principal who commanded respect within that group, and who possessed the theological competency that staff as well as students regarded as essential to the College’s future.
On 21 July 1969, Packer was invited to a meeting of the Council, and spent two hours in general discussion, addressing a series of specific questions put to him by Council members. Although there were other applications, the Council clearly felt that Packer was the right man for the job. They did not waste time in letting the General Committee of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society know the identity of the various applicants, as well as their belief that Packer was the obvious choice as Principal. When the Committee met the following day they warmly endorsed the invitation. On 4 August, the outgoing Principal of Tyndale Hall was able to write to students, confirming that Packer would be his successor, and that all current full-time teaching staff, including Colin Brown, would remain in their positions.
A Reforming Principal: Changes at Tyndale Hall
Packer would be a reforming Principal, alert to the need to restore the reputation of the College within its constituency, as well as to refresh the structures and curriculum of the College itself. Packer’s first objective was to review and reform the governance of Tyndale Hall, and eliminate as much of its traditional paternalism as possible; his second was to establish an outstanding faculty whose reputation would attract students to the College. Packer got to work on both these matters before he formally took up the Principalship of Tyndale Hall on 1 January 1970. First, he set up a working party to oversee the revision of the government of Tyndale Hall. At its first meeting in October 1969, Packer announced that he had appointed Alec Motyer as lecturer in Old Testament. Motyer, who had been Vice-Principal of Clifton Theological College until the ‘events of 1965’, was at that time serving in parish ministry at St Luke’s, Hampstead, in London. The appointment was well received by the student body, and helped boost Tyndale’s profile and appeal. The working party met for a second time from 31 October to 1 November 1969, aiming to identify key objectives for the College, and plan its internal restructuring to ensure a sense of partnership and ownership across the Council, staff and students. Three main changes were proposed.
First, a new body, the ‘Tyndale Hall Association’, would be created with responsibility for administering the College. Its membership would be by subscription. One quarter of the College Council would be elected directly by Association members. In this way, Packer believed that the College would remain sensitive and responsive to the concerns of its supporters, and be able to resist centralising and standardising pressures from Church authorities.
Second, all full-time teaching staff would serve on the Hall Council ex officio, ensuring that the serious communication breakdown between Council and staff of 1968 would never happen again. And, third, the College syllabus and pastoral training programme would be reviewed to ensure that it met the needs of the Church, while retaining Tyndale’s distinctive emphasis on the importance of theology.
Having been involved in planning for the College’s future throughout the second half of 1969, Packer formally took up his position as Principal on 1 January 1970. He presided over what was recognised at the time as an outstanding group of colleagues: Alec Motyer (Deputy Principal, with teaching responsibilities in Hebrew and Old Testament); Colin Brown (Dean of Studies, with teaching responsibilities in church history, historical theology, and the philosophy of religion); Anthony Thiselton (teaching responsibilities in New Testament theology, biblical interpretation and the philosophy of religion); and John Tiller (teaching responsibilities in the area of worship and church history). No English theological college, before or after, has ever managed to pack in quite so great a concentration of theological talent. There was every confidence that Tyndale had a vibrant future ahead of it, now that the difficulties of the last few years had been laid to rest. All that was needed was time to allow things to settle down, and to enable Tyndale’s new vision to become more widely known and appreciated within the English Church.
Yet Packer had hardly settled in to his new position when ominous storm clouds began to gather on the horizon. Tyndale’s future was unexpectedly called into question again. And to make things even worse, Packer’s longstanding and increasingly brittle friendship with Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones came under new stress, and finally ruptured.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The Parting of the Ways
In his final report of October 1969 to the Latimer House Council, Packer mentioned a number of projects which were now coming to completion, including a short work entitled Growing into Union. Its four authors were Graham Leonard, E. L. Mascall, Colin O. Buchanan and Packer. Buchanan and Packer were evangelicals; Leonard and Mascall were leading Anglo-Catholics (that is to say, members of the catholic wing of the Church of England). Packer would later comment on the ‘happy fact’ that within the last few decades, the previously felt ‘convictional and kerygmatic gap’ between conservative evangelical Anglicans and conservative Anglo-Catholics had shrunk.
At this time, however, it was highly unusual for evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics to collaborate on such projects. Packer nevertheless felt that it was necessary for evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics who were theologically orthodox to challenge the liberal ideology that seemed to lie behind proposals for a union between the Church of England and Methodists in England. Packer and his three colleagues stressed the importance of theology, and especially the need for theological orthodoxy, in any plans for a church union. It was a strategy that Packer believed was essential in the light of a rising tide of liberalism within the English churches – namely, affirming common ground between evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics within the Church of England, while noting genuine points of disagreement over other issues – such as the authority of the Bible or the nature of sacraments.
Growing into Union was published in May 1970. It received strongly negative reviews from many traditionalist Protestants, such as David Samuel of the Protestant Reformation Society. The most important and damaging criticisms, however, were voiced by Martin Lloyd-Jones and his circle. For Lloyd-Jones, the book represented a compromise, brought about through a weakening of evangelical convictions. Lloyd-Jones, supported by John Caiger and David Fountain (the other Free Church members of the Puritan Conference Committee), wrote to Packer to terminate the Puritan Conferences. In the circumstances, they believed, it was impossible for them to continue – despite Packer’s crucial role in founding those Conferences. A meeting of the Westminster Fraternal in November 1970 requested that the Conference should be reconvened in an appropriately modified form in the following year, under the new title of the ‘Westminster Conference’.
Packer now found himself being shunned by evangelical organisations which would once have counted him as their friend and ally, with some even suggesting that Packer could ‘no longer be regarded as an evangelical’. Arrogant and misguided though this judgement now seems, it reflected the hardening views now settling in within the Lloyd-Jones camp, which decided to take an absolute stand over what was actually a secondary issue.
This public rejection of Packer by the Lloyd-Jones contigent was painful for Packer, not least on account of the very high esteem in which he held Lloyd-Jones. It was little comfort that the strategy proved abortive. Without the cachet afforded them by Packer’s reputation, many of the bodies who had frozen him out found themselves lacking figures of substance to support them. Packer had been one of the relatively few influential evangelicals within the Church of England to champion links with Lloyd-Jones. With that connection so publicly broken by Lloyd-Jones himself, the scene was set for the further marginalisation of his influence within the English national Church in general, and evangelical Anglicanism in particular.
Although this termination of an important friendship was distressing, Packer soon discovered that he had other things to worry about. By the end of 1970, the future of Tyndale Hall itself was thrown into serious doubt. Having just emerged from one crisis, Tyndale now found itself plunged into another.
A New Crisis: The End of Tyndale Hall?
To understand the crisis that overtook Tyndale Hall, we need to reflect on the changing fortunes of theological education in the Church of England during the 1960s. The decade opened with the Church of England in a buoyant mood. From 1961 to 1964, ordinations exceeded six hundred a year for the first time since before the First World War, and there was a widespread expectation that these numbers would rise still further. In an influential report of 1964, the sociologist Leslie Paul optimistically – and, as it turned out, wrongly – predicted that there would be more than eight hundred ordinations a year by the 1970s.
By the late 1960s, however, the surge in ordinand numbers faltered, and then declined. There was no way in which all of the Church of England’s existing theological colleges could survive, given this unexpected and serious decline in students. Some began to run at a loss, and faced the threat of bankruptcy, including Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, where Packer himself had trained for ministry. A significant reorganisation of theological education within the Church of England was necessary to cope with this unforeseen reversal in the number of students who felt called to ministry. The de Bunsen report of February 1968 led to the formation of a Joint Planning Group, which outlined two possible strategies for the future: allowing the present situation to continue, so that student numbers would be determined by market forces; or making a centralised decision concerning the future of individual theological colleges.
In February 1970, the Church Assembly debated the future of theological education, aware of falling numbers of candidates for ordination. Although the debate raised wide-ranging questions, there was no doubt about its outcome: decisions over the future of individual theological colleges would be taken centrally. Some colleges would be merged; others would be closed. In April 1970, Packer reported that it was now expected that the number of theological colleges would be reduced from twenty-one to fourteen. One in three colleges would cease to exist in their present form. The threat to Tyndale was evident: student numbers were low, the College was facing a deficit for the year 1969−70, and another was projected for 1970−1. Its economic viability was open to question and it could not continue on its own. Closure or merger seemed inevitable.
Six of the seven evangelical theological college councils decided to set up a working party to explore their options, chaired by John Stott. On 25 September, Stott and his colleagues issued their report. There seemed to be only two viable solutions for the situation in Bristol: a merger between Clifton, Tyndale and Dalton House; or a merger of Clifton with Wycliffe Hall, Oxford; and of Tyndale with Dalton House. The group, however, noted that the removal of Clifton would probably lead to the demise of Tyndale Hall, and hence the ending of any evangelical theological presence in Bristol. The group therefore suggested that the most realistic option was for a merger of the three Bristol Colleges.
Important though this report was, it was purely unofficial, and carried no weight within the Church of England. The official Commission, chaired by Robert A. K. Runcie (Bishop of St Albans, later Archbishop of Canterbury), recommended that theological training should cease in Bristol altogether. Clifton was directed to move to Oxford, where it would merge with Wycliffe Hall; Tyndale was directed to move to Nottingham, where it would merge with the relocating London College of Divinity (which would be known as ‘St John’s College, Nottingham’). There would be no remaining theological colleges in Bristol. The Commission made it clear that it had given careful consideration to a possible merger between Clifton and Tyndale in Bristol, but had been advised that it stood little chance of success: ‘We cannot help being impressed by the Faculty which is being assembled at Tyndale Hall, and the new curriculum which is being worked out, but we believe that they would be of better service to the church if they combined with St John’s to form a strong united college at Nottingham.’
The proposal to end theological training in Bristol came as a thunderbolt from the blue to both Tyndale and Clifton. The Tyndale Hall Council, meeting the following day, decided to write immediately to St John’s College, Nottingham, to sound them out over the recommendation that they should merge. The resulting consultation between representatives of Clifton, Tyndale, Wycliffe and St John’s led to a consensus that an Anglican evangelical theological college should remain in Bristol, in that the suggestion that Tyndale should move to Nottingham was impractical.
The final decision, however, rested with the bishops of the Church of England. After due consideration, they announced their decision in February 1971. The outcome was bleak for Tyndale Hall. The bishops had decided that Tyndale was to be closed with effect from 1 October 1971. Three other colleges were also earmarked for closure; however, in each case, it was proposed that they be reopened in the future if student numbers increased. No such provision was made for Tyndale. The bishops endorsed the recommendation of the Runcie Commission that Clifton should merge with Wycliffe Hall on the Oxford site.
The Bishop of Bristol, Oliver Tomkins, however, objected to the ending of Anglican theological education in the south-west of England. He urged reconsideration of the decision, arguing for a theological college to remain in Bristol, despite his own theological differences with evangelicalism. As a result of Tomkins’ vigorous last-minute lobbying, the bishops announced a significant revision of their earlier recommendation a few weeks later:
In the opinion of the House of Bishops, the continuation of training for ordinands at Bristol is only possible if Tyndale Hall, Clifton and Dalton St Michael’s agree to amalgamate on the Clifton site . . . The House, therefore, asks that the Governing Bodies of the colleges concerned should immediately explore this possibility and submit their decisions to the House of Bishops not later than 1 May 1971.
Oliver Tomkins wasted no time in getting this process under way. He immediately wrote to Packer and the Principals of Clifton and Dalton, informing them that he would be prepared to chair the joint meeting which would negotiate a merger between them, on condition that all members of staff and governors submitted their resignations, to allow for a new college to be formed. Not all those currently involved with the three existing Colleges could expect to serve the new institution. This unsettling precondition was nevertheless agreed, and negotiations for the creation of a new theological college in Bristol began.
The Creation of Trinity College, Bristol
There was unequivocal agreement on the relatively simple matter that the new institution should be named ‘Trinity College’. Other affairs, however, took longer to resolve. The financial basis of the merged College was more or less settled, as was the question of its doctrinal ethos. The leadership was conceived as a triumvirate of three senior staff: a Dean of College, a Dean of Studies and a Dean of Women. The working group made it clear that it had specific individuals in mind for each of these positions: an existing member of the Clifton staff was mentioned in connection with the first; Packer in connection with the second; and Joyce Baldwin (Dalton) in connection with the third. No mention was made of a single Principal with overall charge of the institution. In addition to the three deans, there would be three other teaching staff members. The House of Bishops met on 11 May and gave broad approval to the proposals; yet discussion continued, as some Clifton representatives believed it was essential that the new Trinity College should have a Principal, not merely a senior management team.
On 6 October, agreement was announced. The Church of England would recognise a new united theological college at Bristol, with Alec Motyer, a former colleague of Packer’s at Tyndale Hall, as Principal. Packer would become Associate Principal, with a brief to develop theological education and maintain links with similar institutions in England and overseas. This gave him a major role in the future direction of the College, while allowing him time for writing and research. No members of staff of any of the three Colleges would be made redundant as a result of the merger. Joint teaching between the three Colleges would begin in October, and operations would move entirely to the Clifton site with effect from 1 January 1972. The combined College would have about eighty students and hopes were high that this would grow over time.
With the completion of the merger negotiations between the three Bristol Colleges, a period of relative calm settled over Packer and his Bristol colleagues. While the practical preparations to merge the three Colleges into a single unit proved to be challenging, if not exhausting, theological education in Bristol was no longer under any threat. By the middle of 1972, a degree of normality had been restored. Trinity College had come into being and was attracting students. There was no longer any need to worry unduly about the future, at least in the short term.
Under Motyer’s leadership, much of the vision for theological education which had emerged at Tyndale Hall under Packer was carried over into the new united College. For many young evangelicals, Packer and Motyer together represented a form of evangelicalism which possessed both intellectual rigour and spiritual integrity. Under their joint leadership, Trinity College began to attract more students than before from college and university Christian Unions. Prospects seemed secure.
While Packer was no longer Principal of a theological college, his new situation gave him more time to read, think and write. Freed from much of the crippling burden of administration which is the inevitable lot of a theological college Principal in England, Packer was free to begin to start writing and thinking again. He had been under more or less continuous pressure from 1970 to 1972, making it difficult for him to undertake major research or writing projects. As Trinity settled down, Packer again found he had time and space for thinking, speaking and writing. He was able to develop a link with St Edyth’s Church, Sea Mills, a local Anglican parish, which helped Packer embed his theology in a pastoral context.
Perhaps more significantly, Packer was able to negotiate an arrangement with the College Council to allow him to spend the autumn and spring terms focusing on his teaching in Bristol, leaving the summer term free of commitments so he could spend time in North America. Packer’s North American tours, which would last up to ten weeks at a time, enabled him to develop personal contacts and his theological horizons. Increasingly, Packer became a well-known figure in North America – not simply through his books, but through his personal presence at seminaries as a teacher and lecturer.
One of the books which resulted from Packer’s new situation would gain him a substantial international reputation, far beyond any he had known in the past. The book? Knowing God.