6. Unpacking the Treasure Chest: Theological Education
6
Unpacking the Treasure Chest: Theological Education
MY PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE suggests that I am widely seen, not as a significant original thinker, but as a learned and accessible theological gateway to a rich tradition that needs introducing and explaining. I am widely considered to be a theologian who is particularly good at introducing other theologians, enabling them to be better understood and appreciated. So how did this happen, and how does it fit into my vision of theology?
I began to study Christian theology at Oxford University in 1976. I found it very difficult to make the transition from chemistry to theology. Not only did these two disciplines use quite different methods of inquiry; I also had a huge amount of new information to accumulate and absorb. In the case of chemistry, advanced learning in the field was made easy on account of several excellent textbooks – such as March’s Advanced Organic Chemistry, and Cotton and Wilkinson’s Advanced Inorganic Chemistry. There was no theological equivalent back then. I had to learn everything from ground zero.
Happily, Oxford University uses the tutorial system for teaching at undergraduate level, and I was fortunate to have some of Oxford’s leading theologians and biblical scholars to introduce me to the field, and help me find my way. With their help, I gradually began to grasp how theology worked, and catch a glimpse of its enormous potential for spiritual enrichment and cultural engagement. When I myself later began to teach theology at Oxford to both university students of theology and students who were preparing for ministry in the Church of England, I had a good sense of both the obstacles that they would face, and how the riches of the Christian theological tradition could be explained and applied.
For a period of twenty years, from 1983 to 2004, I gave an introductory course of lectures on theology at Oxford, and gradually identified and developed approaches to teaching theology that my audiences found accessible, and ways of explaining core theological ideas that they found persuasive. I did not see my role as a teacher in terms of telling my audiences what they should think, but rather as explaining what had been thought, thus allowing them to craft their own understandings of theology.
An Oxford publisher heard of the impact these lectures were having, and asked me to develop them into a textbook. We gave it the unimaginative title Christian Theology: An Introduction. It appeared in 1993, is now in its sixth edition, and has been translated into twenty languages. Encouraged by its success, I developed other theological textbooks, including sets of readings with detailed introductions and commentary, aiming to encourage students to engage primary sources, rather than being dependent on secondary studies such as mine.
My textbooks focused on Christian theology, drawing on C. S. Lewis’s notion of a shared consensual orthodoxy that he termed ‘mere Christianity’. Like Lewis before me, I did not see any need to prioritize or limit myself to any specific form of Christianity, but to display the riches of that tradition in its totality. Catholic, evangelical, Orthodox and Protestant contributions were all woven into my narrative, and discussed respectfully and fairly.
The gospel image (Matthew 13:52) of a householder opening up a ‘storehouse’ or ‘treasure chest’ (thesauros) and ‘bringing out new things as well as old’ captures something of my approach. Rather than needlessly reinvent wheels, theology can reach into its past and retrieve and reinvigorate ideas so that they can find a new lease of life or fresh application today. Yet the only way of alerting today’s theologians to the value of the past as a present theological resource is through immersion in the tradition, learning how the Bible was interpreted in the past, and how theological ideas were developed and put into practice.
The past can refresh us. C. S. Lewis made this point well, in his 1944 preface to a translation of Athanasius of Alexandria’s de incarnatione. To read classic works of theology is to ‘keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds’. We all need such refreshing breezes. Reading other theologians, past and present, enables us to see the Christian faith through other eyes, perhaps discovering something they have seen that can enrich our own vision of faith.
So will I be remembered as a theologian? I doubt it, except perhaps in one sense. Future theologians need will help in getting started – as I did. Maybe my legacy will turn out to be helping young theologians find their feet, so that they can develop their own visions of theology. I’m very happy with that modest thought. It’s good to have been useful.
__________________
C. S. Lewis, ‘On the Reading of Old Books’ in Essay Collection (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 440.