Theology Today - Vol 39, No. 2 - July 1982 - ARTICLE

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The Person and The Theologian
By F.W. Dillistone

"I have now written four biographies ... All have been theologians, though they have represented differing theological outlooks and ways of doing theology ... I have also found that many people are prepared to consider theological issues when presented in biographical form who would hesitate to tackle a more systematic or philosophical treatise."

UNTIL roughly twelve years ago, I never anticipated that I should one day attempt to write a biography. Even when the suggestion was first made to me, I declined. Later I reconsidered the invitation, and the result has been that I have now written four biographies (though the last of these may never be published).

I have been exceedingly fortunate that those about whom I have written were all persons I admired and with whom I enjoyed either some acquaintance or a close friendship. All have been theologians, though they have represented differing theological outlooks and ways of doing theology. So I have been able to compare their respective contributions to the total theological enterprise and to ask whether their life - stories shed any light on the particular nature of their theological output. I have also found that many people are prepared to consider theological issues when presented in biographical form who would hesitate to tackle a more systematic or philosophical treatise.

As I first contemplated this new venture, I tried to discover what had been written about the art of biography by those who had gained experience in this kind of literature. Like the novel, biography is a comparatively recent form of writing, dating mainly from the eighteenth century. Up to that time, there had been celebrations of the exploits of

F.W. Dillistone has had a long and distinguished career as teacher, theologian, churchman, author, and biographer. He has served on the faculties of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto; Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia; Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Oriel College, Oxford University. For several years he was Dean of the Liverpool Cathedral in England. He is the author of numerous volumes on theology, and for the past several years he has been writing theological biographies. This present article grows out of that experience. His recently issued book, extending the comparative biographical approach, Religious Experience and Christian Faith, has been published in England by the SCM Press. A charter member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY, Dilly, as he is known to a host of friends, has been a frequent and valued contributor.

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great men and women through stories, ballads, and written annals. But in 1683, the word "biography" makes its first appearance, being defined as the history of particular men's lives. The age of the individual had dawned and from then onwards, through biography and fiction, more and more attempts were made to portray the total life - experience of an individual rather than the extraordinary deeds of a hero or a saint. Not that the individual was viewed in isolation from environment, but interest increased in the way in which environment, natural and social, could be seen to have contributed to the patterning of an individual's career.

During the nineteenth century, religion occupied a prominent position both in biography and in fiction, sometimes illustrating the effects of firmly held religious beliefs upon the attitudes and behavior of an individual, sometimes exposing tensions created by the struggle between belief and doubt. But gradually religious considerations became less prominent. Increasingly, psychological and sociological factors were regarded as exerting major influences on an individual's life, and it has even been declared by a leading writer of biography that any preoccupation with theological issues can ruin the effort of a would - be biographer.

The moment that any emotion (such as reverence, affection, ethical desires, religious beliefs) intrudes upon the composition of a biography, that biography is doomed. Of all such emotions, religious earnestness is the most fatal to pure biography. Not only does it carry with it all the vices of hagiography, but it disinterests the biographer in his subject. A deep belief in a personal deity destroys all deep belief in the unconquerable personality of man. Nor is this all. Religious earnestness tempts people to think in terms of dualism; to draw, that is, a sharp line between the material and the spiritual, between the body and the soul, between the mortal and what they would call immortal. This sort of thing is very bad for biography. There is no such dualism in man; there is personality and that is all, and if one thinks of personality in terms of dualism one is, in fact, not thinking of personality at all. It is this religious earnestness which is responsible for the catastrophic failure of Victorian biography. Just as in the seventeenth century the early current of pure biography was checked by metaphysical preoccupations, so was the full and sparkling stream of our riper tradition rendered fat and sluggish by the evangelicalism of its Victorians (Harold G. Nicolson, The Development of English Biography, 1968, pp. 110f.).

In spite of this warning, I decided to proceed. It seems to me a counsel of despair to say that the biography of a theologian can never be written by an author possessing theological interests. It is certainly easy to fail in sympathy toward a subject because one's own theological convictions are not quite identical with those of the biography. It is equally easy to be uncritical because of close affinity. Above all, there is the constant danger of hagiography, just because of the general suspicion or even condemnation of those who do not appear to practice what they preach. A biographer is loathe to record what seem to be breaches in personal living of codes of conduct expected of those who embrace a particular theological system. But to investigate the possible relationships between

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life - experiences and theological formulations has, for me, proved a fascinating exercise. I have tried to deal honestly with the evidence that has come my way, while recognizing that in each case there must have been inward tensions and outward struggles of which I know little.

The first subject presented to me was Charles Raven, born in London in 1885, Regius Professor in the University of Cambridge, from 1932 until his retirement in 1950. One of the first requirements, I felt, was to find out who were his contemporaries and their cultural climate. To my surprise, I found that virtually all the persons whom I regarded as outstanding in the theological world of my own time were born in the 1880s. William Temple, Teilhard de Chardin, Lionel Thornton, C.H. Dodd, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth were all born within the period 1881 - 1886. They all attained their maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. They were all plunged into the devastating horror of World War I, some actually in the trenches, some at home, wrestling with the problem of the breakdown of Western civilization.

These figures had lived out their young adulthood in a halcyon period when it was still comparatively easy to speak of the hope of the Kingdom of God. They became leaders of thought at a time when all theological convictions were being challenged by the spectacle of mass slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Hopes and ideals which had seemed so secure within the divine purpose seemed now to have been shattered by human rivalries and passions. How could theology not be affected?

If British theology had been set within a framework of idealism and German theology within a framework of expectancy, both alike were forced to come to terms with a crisis that shook all conventional frameworks. Theologians born in the 1880s were destined to wrestle with absolutely new problems between WW I and WW II.

The 1914 - 18 War was not, of course, the only development in their natural and social environment. Already astonishing advances were being made in science and technology. The theories of Freud and Marx were gaining widening audiences. The peoples of Asia and Africa were awakening to the importance of their distinctive cultural backgrounds. Vast numbers of people could still carry on, living with little knowledge of these world - movements and with the vague optimism that the "Great War" was the end of all wars. But theologians who were prepared to face the realities of the world situation could hardly fail to be influenced in their own theological expression.

A biographer must maintain a balance between heredity and environment, between family and the wider society, between tradition and new experiences. A recent reviewer of a biography on Kafka revealed the complexity of the task:

As for the circumstances in Kafka's life which made him the kind of person he was, Mr. Hayman writes, as any biographer must, of Kafka's much - hated

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and feared father; of the position of German - speaking Czech Jews like the Kafkas, sundered, on the one hand, from the religious traditions of their forebears, and doubly isolated, on the other hand, from the largely Czech speaking Christians around them; of the situation of Prague as a provincial capital within the remote yet autocratic Austro - Hungarian Empire. Inevitably, these circumstances account for Kafka's life and his writings, and fail to account for them; there were hundreds and thousands of such half assimilated, German - speaking Jews in the Austro - Hungarian Empire, some of whom no doubt had boorish, overbearing fathers - only one of them became Franz Kafka. The biography is successful, however, in showing how strong was Kafka's attachment to many aspects of Jewish life: he loved the sentimentalities of the Yiddish theatre; he dreamed of starting a new life in Palestine, as his literary executor and first biographer, Max Brod, was eventually to do; all his men and women friends were Jewish. But only in one (Kafkan) sense can his Jewishness be called hopeful or positive: for him, a life lived without the kind of sanction once provided by the Mosaic Law remained forever intolerable. As Jorge Luis Borges puts it, in his introduction to the new translation by J. A. Underwood of the stories published in Kafka's lifetime: His stories ... presuppose a religious conscience, specifically a Jewish conscience. (London Review of Books, Dec. 13 - 16, 1981, p. 19).

In many, if not in most lives, there are tensions with parents and often with the theological outlook of parents. There have been tensions, as Tillich so brilliantly showed in his autobiographical reflections, between home and alien land, between social classes, between religion and culture, and in all cases theological issues arise." In the hands of a great writer, " Pearl K. Bell recently wrote", the tension between tradition and experience is the crucible of art" (Commentary, June 1981, p. 66).

It is equally true that the tension between traditional symbolic religious forms and the experience of actual situations in the contemporary world provides the crucible of living theology. It is one of the fascinations of biographical writing to see how these varying tensions manifest themselves in the experience of a particular person.

III

I was specially fortunate that each of the subjects of the three biographies assigned to me and subsequently published had a distinctive interest and endeavored to work out a theology in close relation to that interest. I can describe the three results as: (1) a theology of nature; (2) a theology of history; (3) a theology of religious cultures.

(1) Charles Raven (1885 - 1964) grew up in a London suburb, but at an early stage began to share with his mother a passionate interest in all living things, observing them, naming them, painting them, and ultimately photographing them. He frequented the London parks, went on holiday to the banks of the River Dee, and acquired a phenomenal knowledge of butterflies, birds, and fish. His was no more than a conventionally religious home. It was not until he graduated from Cambridge University that he determined to study theology. He had been trained in the discipline of classical languages and ancient history,

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and was well qualified to work on the theology of the New Testament and the early Church Fathers. But almost from the beginning, his central aim was to relate traditional theology to the theory of the origin and development of natural life by way of Darwin's theory of evolution.

His own life - work was the unfolding of a new natural theology. He gained expert knowledge of the way in which theologians interpreted the world of nature in the course of Christian history. At the same time, he studied biology and psychology while carrying on field research into the behavior of living creatures. All this he attempted to hold together within a trinitarian theological system with God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. His magnum opus, the fruit of fifty years of involvement with the natural world, on the one hand, and the development of Christian doctrine, on the other hand, was his two - volume series of Gifford Lectures, entitled Natural Religion and Christian Theology (1953). (Some judge that the finest volume to come from his pen was the remarkable biography of John Ray, the seventeenth - century field naturalist and author of The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation.)

Raven's great enterprise might well have been largely theoretical and academic had it not been for the fact that he encountered evil, in two of its grimmest forms, at first - hand. He saw it, first, in the slums of England's industrial cities, and, secondly, in the trenches of Flanders. He could never rest content with a natural theology which set forth God as creating and sustaining the natural order by some kind of remote control. Instead, he tried to set forth God as continually involved in the travail both of nature and of humanity. Time and again he returned to the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans and quoted verses 18 - 26. He saw the whole created order "groaning and travailing" But through all the pain and suffering, he believed that God was working out a divine purpose, "the manifestation of the sons of God."

There is little doubt that Raven was a fine natural historian, possessing a consuming interest in all manifestations of life and an artist's eye for the wonders and beauties of the natural world. He was convinced that this world was no product of blind chance or even of some process of undesigned natural selection. He was sure that the living God was behind and within it as programmer and energizer of an evolutionary process. He was conscious of human evils that seemed to damage this process, particularly war, whose abolition he believed could be achieved by sacrificial action. His theology was in many respects a reflection of his own life experiences and ideal hopes. Consequently, it was bound to be only partial and incomplete. But can any theology be more?

(2) C.H. Dodd (1884 - 1973) grew up in very different circumstances from those of Raven. His father was headmaster of a junior school in Wrexham, a Welsh market town just inside the border between England and Wales. Only recently had education become available to all children, and the class arrangements in the school which Dodd attended

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in his early years would today seem primitive in the extreme. But the way was open for him to graduate into a local high school, and there he was taken in hand by an outstanding teacher of the classics. Dodd responded eagerly and succeeded, at the end of his school career, in gaining a scholarship to Oxford. His knowledge of Latin and Greek and of the ancient classical world was already comparable to that of his best trained contemporaries.

An even greater influence, however, had been at work in his developing life. His family were devoted members of one of the Wrexham Chapels, a community bound together by bonds of loyalty to the doctrine and worship of their congregation and so to one another in social relationships. Behind the whole life of the community stood the Holy Scriptures whose authority was unquestioned. Calvin was still recognized as an authoritative interpreter and, following in his tradition, the Wrexham congregation had a high sense of its own responsibility within the ongoing purpose of God. Sunday by Sunday Dodd heard the Scriptures expounded, and he seems scarcely to have questioned his own vocation.

A brilliant scholastic career at Oxford might well have led him on to research and teaching in classical disciplines. But his larger commitment was to the Christian ministry with the confidence that his knowledge of the Hellenistic age could illuminate the whole background of early Christianity. To acquire an extending knowledge of the significance of the Christian Gospel within the ancient world and to apply that knowledge to human needs and hopes became his dominant aim. He never ceased to wrestle with the languages of the social milieu into which Christianity came - Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Syriac, Latin - believing that through a mastery of language a way could be found to enter into the deepest recesses of a people's cultural life.

Yet the immersion in language never caused Dodd to forget the task of the preacher who seeks to interpret the Scriptures and apply them to the present - day situation of the individual and of society. The title of a book consisting of lectures given to large audiences from all faculties in the University of Cambridge was simply The Bible Today (1947). He was convinced that the Bible bore witness to the purpose of God; that his own life was being directed along a particular path within that divine purpose; and that it was his abiding responsibility to bring the past (as nearly as could be determined and understood) into the present.

All this involved a theology of history. Dodd lived in a period when the pursuit of historical facts and details had become almost the major academic discipline. Some scholars were content simply to amass facts; some tried to classify them under schemes of "cause - and - effect;" some even attempted a philosophy of history as a whole. Dodd never swerved from the conviction that history is under divine control and that the particular sequence of events recorded in Scripture holds a place of supreme importance as the key to the understanding of God as Righteous Judge, Compassionate Savior, and Truth - Inspiring - Spirit.

His was a singularly one - directional life, uninterrupted, it would

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seem, by serious crises either of an internal or external kind. Perhaps his interpretation of history was too uncomplicated. He tried to deal adequately with the crises which arose in the experience of the people of God as recorded in the Old Testament. He focused attention on the critical nature of the events recorded in the New Testament. But it is open to question whether he experienced or realized sufficiently the critical nature of the period in which we are now living, critical for the very survival of humanity.

(3) Max Warren (1904 - 1978) spent the first eight years of his life in India, the fourth child of Irish parents devoted, to the missionary cause. The sights and sounds of India and his boyhood friendships with Indian children left on him an enduring mark. In addition, his early education as an independent and somewhat lonely child instilled in him a deep love of books which remained with him throughout his life. It only needed the stimulus of an enthusiastic history teacher at his English public school to make him a lover of history in the widest sense. The Bible was always accorded the first and special place in his reading, but thereafter, whatever he could read about world events - past, present, and forecast for the future - fascinated him. In what way was the mind and hand of God directing and controlling happenings in the world at large?

Belonging to a missionary family, and having a much - admired older brother who was preparing for missionary service, it was not surprising that at an exceptionally early age, in his first term as an undergraduate at Cambridge, he committed himself to go out in due course to Nigeria to engage in pioneer work in a Muslim - dominated area. This commitment was not allowed to interfere with his academic work in which he gained the highest distinctions. After four years at Cambridge, he set sail for Nigeria and proceeded at once to concentrate on language - study while assisting in every way possible in the school and dispensary at the mission base. For a long time he had stretched himself to the limit, and before the end of his first year he was stricken by a devastating type of tuberculosis. He was hurried back to England critically ill, and for three years lay incapacitated with his whole future uncertain.

At last he was restored to reasonable health, though there could never now be the possibility of living overseas. Instead he accepted the call in 1942 to become leader of Britain's largest missionary society, and for twenty - one years spent himself in pastoral concern for approximately a thousand missionaries, in travel to all parts of the globe, in initiating theological inquiries, and in sharing actively in wider ecumenical movements. With his headquarters near the heart of the city of London, he reveled in opportunities to receive news from those active in political and international affairs, as well as from missionaries in Africa and Asia. He became vividly aware of the rise of new nations and of the upsurge of the desire for independence in politics, in culture, and in religion. The Christian church, he believed, was being challenged, almost as never before, to reconsider its own vocation in a rapidly changing world.

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Theologically, this meant that be felt bound to ask with increasing urgency what had been the nature of God's activity in the hearts and surroundings of all peoples everywhere, whatever their cultural and religious traditions revealed. It was unthinkable that God was concerned only for those within the Judeo - Christian tradition. Were missionaries to go out with the assumption that God had been there before them or not ?

Warren enlisted the help of those who had lived among non - Christian peoples and bad gained expert knowledge of their religious beliefs and practices. He invited them to write in a series entitled The Christian Presence, with the general aim of showing that in a real sense the Christ is present among those to whom the Gospel is taken even before the arrival of missionary - evangelists.

As regards missionary methodology, this meant that an ever greater emphasis would be laid on learning and on dialogue rather than on direct preaching. Over the past two centuries there have been countless, magnificent records of missionaries gaining facility in foreign languages, but there has been less readiness to learn the significance of imagery and ritual forms which constitute the structure of common life. What is their theological significance?

Though unable to serve overseas himself, Warren had the immense satisfaction in the last years of his life of keeping in constant touch with his daughter and son - in - law who were endeavoring to work along these lines in the holy city of Varanasi. His son - in - law enrolled as a student in the Hindu university and thereby sought to penetrate to the heart of Hinduism, its ancient language, its religious exercises, and its expression today. How far can any preparation for the Gospel be discerned? What evidences of the working of the Holy Spirit can be seen?

This whole area of Christian theology bristles with difficulties. Those who have never been exposed to life in non - Christian lands, or to living close to those of other faiths in their own land, may scarcely be aware of the challenge confronting the Christian theologian today as a result of the unification of the world through new facilities for travel and inter - communication. In Warren's case, his experience as a person must surely be regarded as a major influence on his work as a theologian. Though he never produced a large theological treatise, all that he wrote was inspired by a particular theological outlook which saw God at work amid all the nations of the world, leading them in a multitude of wondrous ways toward the revelation of the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.

The relation between genetic inheritance and natural environment, between the individual and society, between tradition and experience, between a person's life - story and creative contribution, whether in art or science or philosophy or theology, remains a mystery. It may be possible to discern all kinds of possible connections, but it is impossible to make any neat correlation between life - story and creative work. One has only

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to read a life of Dostoyevsky to learn that a ragged and often dissolute life can include within it the production of superb works of creative literature.

Yet the connection is not entirely mysterious. It is possible to see the effects on Dostoyevsky's fiction of his imprisonment and of his actually facing a firing - squad. And a theologian, whose task it is to bear witness to the nature and activity of God, cannot fail to be influenced by what is seen, heard, learned, and suffered in the course of a human life.

I have recently encountered a simple example. A memoir has lately been published of the late E.C. Hoskyns who exercised a considerable influence as a teacher of New Testament studies at Cambridge, between 1925 and 1935. From 1932 onwards, Raven, to whom I have already referred, was also lecturing in the same university. There was a widespread feeling that the two men represented very different standpoints, very different theological affirmations, even though each would have claimed that his aim was to expound a full trinitarian theology. Yet whereas Raven constantly referred to the wonder of God's revelation in and through the world, Hoskyns sought constantly to draw attention to the wonder of language and to the way in which God became known through inspired words.

The two men were born in successive years; they were undergraduates together at Cambridge. But whereas Raven was offered the opportunity to do post - graduate work in Germany and declined, Hoskyns, given a similar offer, accepted, quickly learned German, studied in Berlin, and, as his biographer has written, entered into the world of German theology which, even when Harnack was in the ascendant - indeed not least then, had a passion and urgency lacking in Cambridge. (G.S. Wakefield, Crucifixion - Resurrection, 1981, p. 37). In 1933, Hoskyns' English translation of Karl Barth's R�merbrief appeared. At the same time, Raven was attacking Barth, largely on account of his dismissal of all natural theology.

Hoskyns became a close friend of Gerhard Kittel and shared his enthusiastic interest in the words of the Bible. Raven distrusted German theology and concentrated on what he regarded as his mission to express theology in terms of process, evolution, and the development of human personality rather than in terms of crisis and person - to - person encounter. There can be little doubt in my own mind that Raven's involvement with the social problems of an English industrial city in contrast to Hoskyns' exposure to the theology and culture of Germany constituted at least one major factor in forming their respective theological contributions.

Have we not been too eager in the course of Christian history to establish a single definition of orthodoxy, a single confession of faith? In disciplines other than theology music, drama, literature, architecture there surely have been common forms and instruments for expression, but also a rich variety of creative visions and patterns of sound. There is always the danger in theology, it is true, of resting

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content with an easy relativism. Nevertheless it can, I believe, help us to be tolerant and to increase our understanding of another's theological position if we view it in the context of the total life of the individual who produced it and the society which gave its assent to it, as representing a valid witness to the nature and activity of God.