1. Returning from the Distant Country: On Becoming a Theologian
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Returning from the Distant Country : On Becoming a Theologian
I NEVER EXPECTED to be a Christian theologian, mainly because I never expected to be a Christian. In February 1953, when I was a few weeks old, I was baptized into the Church of Ireland in Down Cathedral, built next to the grave of Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland. By the time I won a scholarship to study the natural sciences at Oxford University some eighteen years later, I had long since migrated to a ‘distant country’ (Luke 15:13) – an empire of the mind shaped by the converging influences of 1960s Marxism and an aggressive scientism, which held that nothing could be known beyond the natural sciences, for the simple reason that there was nothing beyond them to be known. I assumed that this scientific atheism would be my permanent intellectual homeland; in fact, it turned out to be a temporary place of exile, from which I would later return, wiser and somewhat chastened.
The University of Oxford is central to my story. It was here that my youthful love of the natural sciences was consolidated, given intellectual rigour and depth by those who taught me and supervised my research. I began by taking an undergraduate degree in chemistry, specializing in quantum theory, and then earned an Oxford doctorate for my research in molecular biophysics, working with Professor Sir George Radda in Oxford’s Department of Biochemistry. But by then, I had changed. I still loved the sciences; they were, however, now supplemented by a growing sense of the intellectual and imaginative depth of a rediscovered Christianity. I now became focussed on the question of how these two could be brought together, and plausibly held together.
I had arrived at Oxford in October 1971, increasingly aware that my early scientific atheism, though aggressively asserted, was correspondingly inadequately evidenced. I had once seen Marxism as a grand theory, a way of making sense of everything which explained away religion as an outcome of human alienation. Yet reading Karl Popper during the early months of 1971 had raised some difficult issues about both scientific positivism and Marxism. Although I continued to see Marxism as illuminating some aspects of social reality – such as the implications of the fact that we are historically situated – I no longer saw it as offering a totalizing account of reality. Yet Marxism had expanded my mind, creating an intellectual appetite for ‘Big Pictures’ of reality. I found myself idly wondering whether I would find another that might be more satisfactory.
I had hoped that my growing doubts about atheism would be resolved at Oxford. In fact, they were merely intensified through long conversations with academics and fellow students, as a result of which I came to appreciate the limits placed on human reasoning, and began to grasp for the first time the intellectual capaciousness of Christianity. I never lost my love for the natural sciences, and the methods it had developed for investigating and representing our complex world. Nor did I lose sight of the Marxist insight into the importance of social and historical location in shaping human thought. These insights, acquired during my period of sojourn in a ‘distant country’, have helped shape my theological agenda and method. Like Augustine of Hippo before me, I now regard these as being like the treasure that the people of Israel took with them as they fled from Egypt, to resource their wayfaring and mould their true identity as they journeyed through the wilderness to the Promised Land.
I began to read C. S. Lewis in February 1974, and soon became aware that his seemingly simple reflections on faith rested on a deep intellectual and imaginative assimilation of the Christian tradition, acquired over decades. Lewis became my gateway to this tradition, creating a longing on my part to immerse myself in Christian theology, so that I might grasp what he had seen before me. I could, however, see no way of studying theology formally at the level which this required. Then, in the first year of my doctoral research in molecular biophysics, I was awarded a Senior Scholarship at Merton College, Oxford, and discovered its terms of reference could allow me to continue my scientific research, while at the same time studying for an undergraduate degree in theology. By the summer of 1978, I had gained my doctorate in molecular biophysics, first class honours in theology, and a complete set of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, purchased with a generous Denyer and Johnson Prize in Theology, awarded by the university for the best theology degree that year.
I cannot emphasize adequately the importance of this period in shaping my grasp of theology. I was a scientist, steeped in an empirical methodology, who was suddenly plunged into a strange new intellectual world governed by methods and assumptions that never seemed entirely clear. Had I studied these and other aspects of theology on my own, I would probably have floundered. I would have been unable to fully comprehend and assimilate the articles and books I was reading, or realize when I had misunderstood someone or something. But Oxford’s traditional tutorial system meant that I was being taught individually by leading scholars, including John Barton (Old Testament), Paul Fiddes (Systematic Theology), Andrew Louth (Patristics), Robert Morgan (New Testament), and Edward Yarnold (medieval theology). My good questions found better answers, and my misunderstandings were graciously corrected.
I now felt I was ready to begin serious advanced study of theology. But what form would this take? Noting that two major contemporary theologians who I studied under Paul Fiddes – Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg – began their academic careers with impressively detailed historical studies of earlier theologians, I decided I would do the same. In 1978, I moved to Cambridge University for two years, having been awarded the Naden Studentship for Research in Divinity at St John’s College, Cambridge. I began to research the gradual emergence of the ideas of the German theologian Martin Luther in their late medieval context, under the supervision of Professor Gordon Rupp, then Britain’s leading authority on Luther, who had just retired as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge. At the same time, I began to prepare for ministry in the Church of England, seeing my future as a theologian lying in some combination of academic and pastoral roles.
My work with Gordon Rupp proved fascinating, and it mushroomed into three interconnected lines of historico-theological research over the next nine years. The original project, which looked at how Luther’s distinctive doctrine of justification gradually emerged over the period 1509–19, led me to plan a rather more ambitious engagement with the development of this doctrine from its origins in ancient Israel to the present day, something that had not been attempted since Albrecht Ritschl’s pioneering study of 1870. This flowed naturally into a study in the emergence of the theologies of the sixteenth-century Reformation, focussing on the diverse theological methods deployed within this movement, set against the context of the intellectual methodologies of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
I returned to Oxford in 1983 as lecturer in Christian doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, a theological college of the Church of England with close links to Oxford University, and quickly became involved in the research and teaching of the Faculty of Theology. This gave me the time and access to library facilities needed to complete these three projects, which were published as Luther’s Theology of the Cross (1985), Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (1986), and The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation (1987). I continued developing this solid foundation in historical theology, giving the 1990 Bampton Lectures at Oxford on some issues in this field, and becoming Oxford University’s Professor of Historical Theology in 1999.
Yet my real interest lay in engaging the interdisciplinary field of science and religion, which I considered to require both a detailed immersion in a scientific research culture, and a thorough familiarity with the history and development of Christian theology. By 1995, I felt I had a good enough knowledge base to begin work in this field, and tentatively mapped out lines of approach that I felt might be productive, including those assembled in the three volumes of A Scientific Theology (2001–3). This exploratory work considered possible lines of engagement and interaction between science and theology, grouped around the main topics of ‘Nature,’ ‘Reality,’ and ‘Theory’. It was quite clear to me that there were significant ways in which this interaction could be productive, both theologically and apologetically.
I need to stress the apologetic importance of studying the relation of science and theology. In 2002, I took part in a three-way private debate at Balliol College on the rationality of religious belief in the light of the natural sciences. My two atheist opponents in this debate were Peter Atkins, an Oxford physical chemist (who incidentally had earlier taught me quantum theory) and Richard Dawkins, an Oxford evolutionary biologist.
This debate convinced me that there was an urgent need to engage the field of science and religion, as I was now certain that an increasingly important public debate on the rationality of faith was in the process of emerging, with the natural sciences as the chosen weapon of its opponents. Since it was clear to me that Dawkins would be a major voice in this debate, I researched his writings carefully and thoroughly, and shortly afterwards published Dawkins’ God (2004), the first major critical scholarly account of his understanding of the relation of science and religious faith.
I was right. Two years later, the ‘New Atheism’ made its noisy appearance, creating massive media interest in questions of religious faith on account of its aggressive rhetoric, its simplistic slogans about religious irrationality, and its vague promissory notes of the end of religion. It was clearly what many wanted to hear, in the light of rising public disquiet about the implications of religious extremism in the wake of 9/11.
The opening salvo was Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006), which offered a decidedly under-evidenced naturalist account of religion which he apparently believed marked the first occasion on which anyone had thought scientifically about religion. I debated the core ideas of this book with Dennett in London in March 2006 at the Royal Society of Arts. My talk, entitled ‘The Spell of the Meme’, argued that Dennett rightly raised some interesting critical questions – but did not turn them against his own position, which he seemed to think was exempt from these concerns. I thought otherwise, and highlighted his inconsistent use of the ‘meme’ in his argument. It soon became clear this epistemic asymmetry was a hallmark of the ‘New Atheism’: Dennett and Dawkins both failed to judge themselves by the criteria they used to judge others.
A few months later, Dawkins published his God Delusion, which became one of the most influential books of the year. After debating Dawkins’ views with him on BBC Television that summer, I realized a Christian response was needed, which called into question Dawkins’s understanding of both the natural sciences and religion. Knowing his views on these matters better than anyone else, it was not difficult for me to write such a book, focussing on the arguments he set out in The God Delusion. In February 2007, four months after I began to write the work, I published The Dawkins Delusion?, which became an international bestseller. Other more detailed and considered responses from religious writers followed; this book, however, laid down the core lines of debate. It lacked the detail and depth to be found later in Rudolf Langthaler’s magisterial intervention of 2015, but it was what was urgently needed at the time: a short, clear, and convincing response to Dawkins’s core lines of argument.
Public engagement now became a major theme of my writings and lectures. I found that my public lectures on science and faith attracted very large audiences, and allowed me to engage theological questions that were now clearly seen as relevant and important within a wider culture, beyond the traditional academic world. Academically, I began to work on the field of ‘natural theology’ – a family of ways of understanding how the natural world might disclose or signpost God – and was astonished at the level of interest this created. My 2008 Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastleupon-Tyne, 2009 Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen, and 2009–10 Hulsean Lectures at the University of Cambridge all focused on this topic. My interest in this field remains, although I am now more interested in exploring how a ‘natural philosophy’ can serve as an interface between science, philosophy, theology, and personal character formation.
One of the questions that preoccupied me at this time was how Christian clergy could be prepared to deal with such debates about the rationality of religious belief, which were obviously impacting on their congregations. Unpersuaded that the Church of England was taking this question seriously, I left Oxford in 2008 to take up the Professorship of Theology, Ministry, and Education at King’s College London. This position allowed me to interact with many clergy across denominations who were studying part-time at King’s College to deepen their understanding of their faith, and explore questions of apologetics – a topic on which I was now writing and speaking extensively. It was deeply rewarding to be able to teach students who already knew that these issues were important to their ministries. I was also able to engage in major public discussions of these themes in London, including some significant events at St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.
Finally, I returned to Oxford University in April 2014 to take up the Andreas Idreos Professorship of Science and Religion. This provided me with a platform for developing my ideas about the relation of science and theology, while also exploring a broader and perhaps more significant academic theme – the need for theology to engage with other disciplines. I also served as the Gresham Professor of Divinity from 2015–18. This public professorship, established at Gresham College London in 1597, allowed me to continue my work of public engagement, and attracted large audiences. I shall retire from the Idreos chair in September 2022, although I hope to continue to be part of Oxford’s outstanding intellectual research culture in some way in the future.
So what are the core theological themes that have excited me, and which I explore in my writings, teaching, and public lectures? In later chapters, I shall reflect on four major themes of my theological vision. I begin, however, by sketching my overall understanding of the nature and purpose of theology.
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I provide a detailed account of my transition from atheism to Christianity and my initiation into the mysteries of Christian theology in Alister McGrath, Through a Glass Darkly: Journeys through Science, Faith, and Doubt (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2020).
Rudolf Langthaler, Warum Dawkins Unrecht hat: Eine Streitschrift (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2015).