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Brief Intellectual Biography: Influences and Key Publication Themes

It is often hard to explain the genesis and development of the cluster of themes which have dominated one’s writing over a number of years. But here I attempt a very short analysis of how my thinking has developed from my earliest interests and publications, and who or what (up till now) has particularly influenced me at crucial moments of transition. I organize what follows under a cluster of headings which characterize the main themes of my publications to date.

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Below, you will be able to navigate the different sections of this page using the table of contents. 

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1. Christology: Historical Method, Metaphysical Claims and the ‘Identity’ of Christ

At Cambridge as an undergraduate I found, initially to my disappointment, that most of the impetus of the ‘Tripos’ examinations was still directed to biblical languages and biblical studies (in the great Westcott-Hort tradition of the later 19th century), although in the latter parts of the degree it was also possible to develop specialisms in Philosophy of Religion and Systematic Theology - my more natural interests. Nonetheless, I have no regrets in retrospect about the time I spent in my undergraduate degree on intensive Hebrew and koinÄ“ Greek (I had been a classicist at school), nor on the very formative teaching I received in Bible, from Ronald Clements and Ernest Nicholson in Old Testament, and from Charlie Moule and John A. T. Robinson in New Testament.

 

It was Bishop John Robinson at Trinity who supervised me in NT throughout my three years as an undergraduate; and although he had certain eccentricities as a teacher (e.g., I was left to decide for myself each week the topic on which I wished to write my essay), each supervision was truly memorable and a real testing of ‘wits’: there would be a genuine debate on every occasion which witnessed to JATR’s willingness to take his pupil’s views (even if wayward and unformed, as mine certainly were) with utmost seriousness. When I came, increasingly, to protest the strange ‘Lockean’ presumptions of the Cambridge NT tradition – that Jesus’s status as ‘Son of God’ could somehow be justified from the NT historical/critical evidences – JATR encouraged me to probe the philosophical and historiographical presumptions that puzzled me here. Meanwhile, lectures on Kant from Donald MacKinnon and supervisions on modern systematic theology from Stephen Sykes led to a developing interest in post-Kantian German theology and philosophy of history, and particularly to the thought of Ernst Troeltsch, to which Sykes originally introduced me. I also started to be interested in figures like Wilhelm Dilthey and R. G. Collingwood, and their ‘idealist’ theories of history.

 

By the time I went to Harvard in 1973 to pursue a Masters degree there, I was already sure that I wanted to clarify and assess the cumulative reasons for Troeltsch’s abandonment of classical Christology, especially in relation to his philosophical and historiographical presumptions; and whilst my Cambridge teachers initially roundly discouraged me in this project (partly, I think, for reasons of a Barthian prejudice against Troeltsch), I found at Harvard (in James Luther Adams and Gordon D. Kaufman), and at Chicago (in Brian Gerrish) much positive encouragement for the undertaking. Slightly later in my Cambridge doctoral programme, and after I had already started to teach at Lancaster University, Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor at Oxford, took me on as his supervisee. His excellent, professional, guidance, and his commitment to a fearless ‘liberal’ critique of the classic trinitarian and Christological tradition, was an enormous tonic and encouragement at the time (see my first book, Christ without Absolutes, 1988), even though I later came to question Wiles’s own doctrinal and Christological presumptions (see The Making and Remarking of Christian Doctrine, co-ed., 1993, a Festschrift to Wiles). A further sea change in my own approach to Christology occurred as a result of my re-thinking my approach to the resurrection (see Powers and Submissions, ch. 8, 2002), something that could not have occurred without also developing a sustained account of the relation of prayer and doctrine (see ‘Prayer as Crucible: How my Mind has Changed’, 2011/2012).


Christology has thus been a life-time’s interest for me, and I have recently returned to it in The Broken Body: Israel, Christ and Transformation (2024). Although I continue to value here the insights of Troeltsch’s ‘social typology’ for Christology, my thoughts on Christological method have changed drastically since my earlier writings, and now focus on the problem of Christ’s ‘identity’, the ‘apophatic’ dimensions of Christology, and the centrality of Jewish-Christian relations for any future Christology. (I must acknowledge here my indebtedness to Bishop Krister Stendahl, who strongly urged me, on my return to Harvard in 1995, to take part in regular Jewish-Christian discussions at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.)

2. The Body: Religious Studies and Interdisciplinary Approaches

My appointment to the Dept. of Religious Studies at Lancaster University in 1976 brought me under the influence of its hugely creative founder, Ninian Smart, and a range of other new friends and colleagues (including the social scientists Adrian Cunningham and Paul Heelas, and the philosophers of religion Patrick Sherry and John P. Clayton, later to be joined by John Milbank in his earlier career). The intellectual atmosphere was electric; and I remain enormously grateful, as a theologian and philosopher of religion, for the extraordinary stimulus of these Lancaster years. Not only did I become convinced of the irreducible significance of inter-religious reflection for theology (see Religion and the Body, ed., 1997), but my social science colleagues convinced me that probing the depths of ‘messy’ religious associations was not just the preserve of reductive accounts of religion, but could also greatly illuminate the theological task. (This insight of course also happily aligned with what I had already learned from Troeltsch.) At the same time I was deeply immersed in re-thinking the relation of prayer and theological traditions (see 3. and 4., below), and in developing a new and distinctive approach to what was then called ‘feminist theology’, which not long afterwards transmuted into post-modern ‘gender studies’ in America.


Some years later, when - after two, very rich and educative, years at Oriel College, Oxford (see 6., below) – I was transplanted to Harvard and its Divinity School, I was given a strong ‘steer’ by its then-Dean, Ronald Thiemann, to be the Divinity School representative in the new Harvard ‘Mind, Brain, Behavior’ interdisciplinary initiative. This brought me into contact with a range of influential Harvard faculty, including the medical anthropologist, Arthur Kleinman (with whom I subsequently co-taught a course at Harvard Medical School), and the law professor and human rights advocate, Carol Steiker (with whom I later co-taught a course at Harvard Law School). Following on from my earlier book on Religion and the Body 1997, I later produced, as a result of these and other inter-disciplinary collaborations, two further interdisciplinary volumes on the body and its religious meanings: Pain and Its Transformations (co-ed., 2007), and Spiritual Healing (ed., 2020). Together, then, these three edited volumes represent a sustained set of reflections, over a number of years, on ‘bodiliness’ and its spiritual and theological meanings.

3. Re-thinking Feminism and Gender from a Spiritual and ‘Ascetic’ Perspective

Starting already at Lancaster, then, and extending into lectures given at Oxford in 1991-3 (and later at Harvard), I had begun to develop a way of re-thinking the theological feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s, and bringing them into critical conversation with the emerging cultural critiques of ‘gender theory’ (and much later, of ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ studies). At the heart of this approach has been a primary theological focus on the sui generis ‘vulnerability’ of the person-at-prayer, a vulnerability not to be confused with any sort of mute acceptance of worldly subordination or abuse, whether political or personal, but rather as a source of powerful resistance to such. The book which first enunciated this thesis clearly was Powers and Submissions (2002), which was later followed by a more extensive account of what ‘ascetical theology’ might look like in our contemporary arena, and especially in the context of the divisive debates in the churches on homoerotic ‘orientation’: see The New Asceticism (2015). There is no doubt that the debates and interrogations I was involved in at Harvard Divinity School and elsewhere in the USA (with many other feminists and gender theorists) in the 1990s were crucial for these developments of thought, even though I was often at odds with other, then-prevailing, perspectives.

4. Patristic Interrogations: Prayer, ‘Spiritual Sensation’ and the Theological Task

As I was developing these lines of thought, I was increasingly immersing myself in a study of how the ‘patristic’ period dealt with the nexus of prayer, theological reflection, asceticism, and gender. I began to see that modern textbooks on the history of doctrine had arbitrarily forced this nexus of themes apart; but coming afresh at doctrinal themes in the patristic period precisely via a consideration of accompanying forms of ascetic practice and theories of prayer was life-changing. Ultimately this was to lead to the production of the first volume of my ‘systematics’ (5., below); but in the interim I was finding myself especially drawn to the work of Gregory of Nyssa (Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, ed., 2002/3) and then to ps.-Dionysius the Areopagite (Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, co-ed., 2008/9), as highly creative conversation-partners in this project. The question remained, and still does: how was an appropriately ‘apophatic’ understanding of doctrinal exposition to be understood (this is itself not a monolithic question, as it turns out), both in the light of prayer, and also of certain pervasive and recurrent political and personal challenges, including – as I increasingly saw – in connection to contemporary issues of ‘gender’ and ‘race’? I want to record my special debt to my erstwhile Harvard colleague Nicholas (Fr. Maximos) Constas, for all that I learned from him in my latter years at Harvard on these patristic figures and their wider significance. At the same time, a group of scholars (originally convened on Friday afternoons in my drawing room in Watertown, MA), was reconsidering the patristic and medieval doctrine of ‘spiritual sensation’ – already retrieved by the Catholic ressourcement theologians in the earlier 20th-century – and seeking to understand its further contemporary epistemological and moral importance: see The Spiritual Senses (co-ed., 2012), my contribution to Perceiving Things Divine (eds. Aquino and Gavrilyuk, 2022), and my Père Marquette Lecture, Sensing God? Reconsidering the Patristic Doctrine of ‘Spiritual Sensation’ (2022). I am greatly indebted to Paul Gavrilyuk for the original collaborative development of these themes. But much earlier (back in the 1980s) it was Andrew Louth who first alerted me to the significance of ‘spiritual sensation’ in the patristic tradition in general, and especially in the thought of Jean Daniélou, SJ, and that was what originally piqued my interest.

5. The Systematic Project of ‘Théologie Totale’: Methods and Scope

I gave the Hulsean Lectures (‘Three-Personed God’) in Cambridge in 1991-2, whilst teaching at Oriel College, Oxford. It was out of this project on the Trinity (in part inspired as a riposte to the then-regnant ‘social trinitarianism’ of Moltmann and Zizioulas and their followers) that, many years later, the first volume of my systematic theology finally evolved (God, Sexuality and the Self, 2013). It took a long time for me to grasp the potential for a new form of ‘systematic’ project, one which is crucially undergirded by the practices of contemplative attention, yet also inclusive of the many interdisciplinary insights that come from philosophy, the social sciences, and the arts; yet willing too to tackle afresh the contested (and deeply neuralgic) contemporary topics of ‘gender’, ‘race’ and ‘class’ as new loci in the ‘systematic’ project. I called this new method a ‘théologie totale’, and I explain its contours in some detail in God, Sexuality and the Self, chs. 1-2 (esp. pp. 88-99). I shall not repeat my arguments for this method here, but it will readily be seen how they drew together the evolving themes of paragraphs 3 and 4, above. As I write this reflection I am in the process of completing vol 2 of the systematics (Sin, Racism and Divine Darkness); and if life and health remain, I hope to complete two other volumes in due course (vol 3 on Soteriology: Punish and Heal; and vol 4 on Christology and the Eucharist: Flesh and Blood. On these plans see God, Sexuality and the Self, p. xv, which originally announced them).

6. ‘Natural Theology’ in a New Key: Evolution, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Cooperation

I have so far said rather little about the my short time at Oxford (1991-3), and its enormous impact on the development of my thinking in the area of analytic philosophy of religion and, from there, on my understanding of contemporary ‘apologetics’ and the relation of philosophy of religion to modern science. Almost daily sparrings with Richard Swinburne over lunch at Oriel in those years (1991-3) meant that I learned a huge amount from him about the whole field of analytic philosophy of religion, to my great benefit; but that I also increasingly resisted some of his presumptions, most especially in the way that he saw arguments for God’s existence being made credible solely by Bayesian probability, and in the correlative way that he failed to understand the more subtle roles of affectivity, desire and ‘apophatic’ sensibility in religious faith. Nonetheless, I remained committed to the project of ‘natural theology’ (in a changed key) at a time when most other theologians were marching in the opposite direction and altogether eschewing arguments for God’s existence. Hence, I was later, in my Gifford Lectures (2012) to map out a fresh understanding of ‘natural theology’, and to align it to both philosophical and theological reflection on the ‘cooperative’ phenomena of evolution, about which I had learned deeply in my work with the mathematical evolutionary theorist, Martin Nowak, at Harvard. And it should also be mentioned that from the beginning of my teaching period at Harvard I was immersed in a new, and (to me) unexpected entrancement with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, one which however swam against the tide of the then-effervesent ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement (exciting and generative as it was), with its eccentric reading of Aquinas and its insistence on the wholly-baleful impact of ‘modernity’ in all its guises (including scientific ones). In contrast, I was drawn in my Giffords to a modified form of Thomist metaphysic (along with a revived neo-Aristotelian ‘teleology’), but I combined it with a respect for modern science and for some elements in the Kantian and neo-Kantian tradition of metaphysics and ethics. I also continued to explore the patristic world of ideas in relation to the theme of ‘spiritual sense’ and its application to scientific insights through the notion of physikÄ“.
 

Once I had arrived back in Cambridge in 2008, I was able to plan an ambitious conference (Faith, Rationality and the Passions, ed.) which invited a range of leading modern philosophers and theologians to think afresh on how modern philosophy and philosophy of religion has actually been richer than is generally thought in its attention to the ‘passionate’, the affective and the erotic, and how ‘rationality’ has been implicitly expanded in the process.

7. Clarifying the Significance of ‘Mystical theology’ and ‘Apophasis’ in a Post-Modern and ‘Secular’ Age

During my final years at Cambridge I was also busy developing a set of exploratory philosophical essays and lectures on the problem of the meanings and significance of ‘mystical theology’, ‘apophaticism’ (and its Western parallel, ‘negative theology’), divine ‘darkness’ and ‘hiddenness’, and the relation of all these to the epistemological insights and practices of ‘contemplation’. Whilst analytic philosophy of religion has only recently started to work intensively with this cluster of themes (except insofar as it has seen ‘hiddenness’ as an a-theological problem), continental philosophy of religion has been much engaged with them throughout the post-Heideggerian period. However, there is still a great deal of work to be done in sorting out different types of ‘apophaticism’, both in terms of linguistic strategy and in relation to the presumed underlying metaphysical picture in play. I have published several essays on this nexus of themes in recent years and more are in the pipeline, particularly with reference to the thought of the 16th century Carmelites (Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross) which have so greatly influenced me throughout my career. It may be that these gathered essays will eventually make up a third volume of Gesammelte Schriften (in the wake of Powers and Submissions and The Broken Body). In addition, I have been much exercised of late by making philosophical and psychological sense of the Christian tradition of (already mentioned) ‘spiritual sense’, and to spelling out how it relates to traditions of ‘mystical theology’ and the intentional ‘unknowing’ of contemplation. Finally, in taking part gratefully in the movement called ‘Analytic Theology’ from its outset (eds. Crisp and Rea, Analytic Theology, 2009), I have attempted to stretch its boundaries by giving closer attention to these topics.

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