I owe many debts to R E O White, Principal of the Scottish Baptist College during my training for ministry in the mid 1970's. His insistence, against my lesser judgment, that I should go to Glasgow University and do an Arts degree before coming to College, enabled me to experience the mind broadening and deepening of a degree in several disciplines, majoring in Moral Philosophy. Intellectually, I began growing up at Glasgow University. His lectures were carefully written, delivered with customary restraint, open to questions if you knew enough to ask the right question, and with handouts that were hand typed and duplicated at considerable labour to himself.
But my primary debt has been a lifelong love affair with the New Textament - its text and background, the history of its interpretation, and a humble recognition that in diving into those deep waters you can both sink and swim. His lectures on NT Introduction and Exegesis were eye opening, mind awakening, cold water in the face of sleepy and lazy piety more or less content with uncritical devotion complacently read off the surface of the text. REO in full flow was a wake up call, with his persistent questioning of assumptions, insistence on weighing evidence, teaching us to listen to other voices in the conversation, and his patient valuing of insights and questions from his students. Time and again during or after a discussion, the Parker pen was taken from his top pocket and a note placed in the margin of his lecture notes. He taught by showing and doing. His Greek Testament
That interest in the New Testament has cost me a fortune in books - that isn't a complaint, more a sideways glance of gratitude. Amongst the pleasures of having more time to myself has been a further immersion in the New Testament world, in particular the reception history of the New Testament and the history of interpretation. So I'm currently working through William Baird's 3 volume History of New Testament Research, having reached volume 3. Many of the names are of scholars I read in College and the years after, some of them I can still hear REO pronouncing - Metzger, Bultmann, Jeremias, Kasemann, Conzelmann, Beasley-Murray, Cullmann, Barrett, Moule, Arndt and Gingrich, Kummel - all of them significant figures in mid 20th Century NT scholarship. Since College days many of those names have faded and their contributions in some cases now either overlooked or even dismissed in the light of new approaches and developments.
Which brings me to the point of this post. These scholars were disciplined and innovative, some of them soaked in learning and expertise across several disciplines, each of them inevitably shaped by their historical and cultural context. Close scrutiny, wide ranging study and creative engagement with the New Testament brought these and countless other scholars to differing conclusions as they argued, contradicted, presented alternative interpretations, called in question the methodology or results of years of research, and produced what can only be described as a heated conversation that is still going on. It is that conversation that is crucial to faith,our own and the faith of the church.
By our own reading and thinking, exegesis and analysis, experience and inner commitments, we each develop our own voice, and begin to take part in that conversation. That process began for me in REO's classes; it has gone on now for 40 years, and I'm still not tired of listening to those voices, old and new. Today names like Sanders, Dunn, Wright, Hays, Schnelle, Luz, Bovon, Martyn, Hengel, are part of that conversation / chorus; they are thankfully joined by the voices of women scholars, Schussler-Fiorenza, Gaventa, O'Day, Thompson, Lieu, and the late Margaret Thrall whom I mention specially because she knew and greatly respected REO - both of them Welsh!
So how do you fill your time in retirement? Apart from a couple of part time ministries that is, and an underlying commitment to read, think and learn. I talk and listen; I read and think; I do what I was taught to do as a biblical scholar, pastor and preacher. I engage with the NT text and dive into the discussions about meaning and message, puzzles and enigmas, histories and stories, people and places, social theories and literary approaches, theological earthquakes and groundbreaking discoveries, the whole blessed thing that is New Testament study.
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