Well the jaunt to St Deiniol's as always didn't go exactly to plan. Yes, I did read chunks of Balentine on Job – but only a few and I decided I prefer the slow piece by piece approach. No I didn't get very far with Psalm 119 as I was sidetracked by Hermeneutics of Doctrine by Tony Thiselton. This is tough going but I'm learning just how much I don't know – and hoping that reading this will fill some hiatuses in my hermeneutical up to dateness. More immediately rewarding was Andrew Purves, Pastoral Theology in the Classical Tradition, which is a good concise survey of several ancient treatments of pastoral theology and how the values and theological commitments of the past remain relevant today – albeit with considerable adjustment for changed context and knowledge.n
But as usual I found the people as interesting as the books. And as varied. And as much a matter of taste. But I made two new friends – Peter from Arizona (pictured below) and Steve from Cardiff (pictured on the right). You know you need friends around when a retired Canon asks "What's a Baptist doing in an Anglo-Catholic library?" Could have said giving it some credibility – or – I'm here to do some personal witnessing – or take the more diplomatic route of murmuring that Baptists also honour divine learning, as Gladstone the Library's founder knew very well!
So I appreciated the friendship, conversation and shared learning Steve, Peter and I enjoyed at the meal table, the farm shop (where we had Italian coffee and Welsh tea bread), and over post dinner tea. Steve is well into a PhD on inter religious dialogue and wrestling with hermeneutics and religuous discourse in the public sphere, via Habermas et al. He's responsible for church based learning and Practical Theology at St Michael's College Cardiff and is Vice Principal; he was at St Deiniol's to get his head round some of the hard stuff in one of his PhD chapters. So I learned a bit more about Habermas.
Peter is doing research on the early 18th century non-jurors which got us into a conversation about Susanna Wesley who knew a thing or two about non-juring! Peter's great enthusiasm is Schleiermacher – he is a native German speaker and his area of expertise is 19th Century rational theology.This
photo is from Peter's profile on the University website – the moustache
was gone, so had the cowboy tie, by the time we met – but he tells me he and his wife have three horses in the garage / stable!
One of the joys of email is that it enables such friendships to go on being nourished by conversation and the stimulus of learning and sharing in that fellowship we call Christian scholarship.
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