Ever since I discovered the joy of reading, and the more disciplined joy of study, I’ve been developing the discipline of indiscipline. I’ve never wanted to specialise, though there have been times when particular interests have commanded attention, provided focus, called for sustained study and the work of writing. But overall I’ve learned to be at ease with a wide range of interests, exploring a variety of subject fields and allowing ideas and arguments to cross fertilise, inviting insights and questions to set up tensions, creating inner conversations between voices which don’t usually talk to each other.
Just looking over recent posts, there might be a case for suggesting chaos theory underlies my reading choices. Abraham Heschel a Jewish theologian with hasidic forebears, and philosopher in close conversation with Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran, theologian, witness and martyr, and extraordinary writer whose fragments of theological reflection are the antidote for spiritual complacency; Elizabeth Johnson, feminist Catholic theologian whose contribution to a contemporary understanding of God expresses the creative and constructive possibilities of feminist theology; Samuel Rutherford, Scottish Presbyterian of adamantine certainty, ferocious polemical outbursts and overflowing devotional sentiment; Hans Kung, disqualified Catholic theologian yet deeply qualified apologist for global Christianity and its place amongst the world’s faith movements; John Owen the quintessential Puritan, and as Carl Trueman has argued, a thoroughly Renaissance scholar and foremost exponent of Trinitarian spirituality.
Asked what my research interests are I always struggle to reduce my interests to such limited menus as ‘the seventeenth century Cambridge Puritans’; or ‘the viability of kenosis as a motif for understanding pastoral care as a communal process of self giving’; or ‘Scottish Protestant piety from the Reformation to the present’; or ‘theological loci as separately or together, clues to the nature and practice of pastoral theology’; or the history of the interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount and the connection between such interpretations and cultural context; or ‘Julian of Norwich, George Herbert and Charles Wesley’s spirituality of love in a broken world. So I move happily and freely from church history to systematic theology, then to spirituality and pastoral care, then there’s biography as a form of theological performance, biblical studies from theological exegesis to the history of interpretation – which then opens up further history, biography, philosophy, exegesis of scripture and life……….
None of this is a complaint. More a gentle warning to those who might think that there is neither rhyme nor reason to my reading choices. Major focused projects apart, and conscientious (and usually much enjoyed) reading required for specific teaching responsibilities assumed, most other reading is decided by a kind of impulsive openness to conversation with interesting folk. So Brian Kay’s book on Trinitarian Spirituality not only introduces me to John Owen but to the fascinating connections between Owen and Julian of Norwich, the Cloud of Unknowing and Thomas a Kempis; Gordon Mullan’s book on Scottish Puritanism goes to the pulsating core of Scottish Covenant Theology; Sabine Dramm is clearly a highly skilled interpreter of Bonhoeffer’s voice for a post 9/11 world, and without the damaging reductionism of those who want to use Bonhoeffer against his own grain.
Each year I ensure specific areas of intellectual interest are included in a planned reading list – but that list always leaves room for the large number of unexpected guests that are likely to come knocking – and often is not completed. Both Kay and Dramm were noticed while I was looking for something else – but I’m glad to have spent time in conversation with them – I learned from them. So I’ve never been an enthusiast for specialism, though I recognise that in scholarship we are all faced with choices – and I’ve made some too. Evangelical Spirituality as expressed in the lives of significant exponents; the hymns and theology of the Wesleys; the poetry of George Herbert; James Denney who is less a specialism than an important orienting theological landmark.
But such openness to conversation does mean that personal convictions, opinions, life experience, limited knowledge – are each likely to be challenged, corrected, deepened, now and then downright contradicted. Which is an important part of growing in the knowledge of Christ, slowly and humbly accumulating wisdom, the heart enlightened even as the mind is informed, as ‘together with all the saints’, heart and mind come to know the length and breadth and height and depth of the love of God in Christ.
And maybe the true Christian scholar isn’t the specialist at all, but the wide ranging explorer of a faith that is as vast as the Gospel and is expressed in story and song, biography and theology, philosophy and conversation, in text and human life, in community experience and individual encounter with God. I have never envied those whose reading and study are restricted to this or that aisle in the supermarket of ideas, or whose theological vision is deliberately narrowed to systems, schools, publishers or traditions selected for their capacity to confirm what they believe they already know, or know they already believe.
Time now without number I have been made to think again, and to discover or remember, what it means to be open to the infinite, eternal reality of God who in Christ ‘accommodated himself’ to human capacity. Coming to know the love of God ‘together with all the saints’ for me has meant that I owe more debts than I can pay or even remember, to such people as…. well how would you finish that sentence? Who do you owe a debt of gratitude to, who has taught and shown you the love of God?
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