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In the second episode of the fourth season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin, President of St. Mellitus College and Editor-In-Chief of Seen and Unseen. Tomlin begins by discussing the changes that occurred over the course of his lifetime in terms of the preparation of clergypersons. Including both opportunities and challenges, Tomlin and his colleagues then sought to factor those changes into the design of St. Mellitus College, now the largest theological school in the United Kingdom. Those changes were also woven into Tomlin’s The Widening Circle. Tomlin goes on to discuss the students who seek formation for ministry at St. Mellitus along with the faculty who lead educational experiences focused on forming the whole person. Tomlin discusses his own calling to ministry, one that included turning away from the faith during his teenage years and a return to the faith that was nurtured by reading works such as Pascal’s Pensées. Pascal’s own life story is now the focus of Tomlin’s most recent book. In addition to the leadership he provides for St. Mellitus, Tomlin also explores his service as the Bishop of Kensington and editor-in-chief of Seen and Unseen. Tomlin closes by discussing the virtue of humility and the manner in which it aids theologians whose proper object is an infinite and loving God.
- Graham Tomlin’s Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025)
- Graham Tomlin’s The Widening Circle: Priesthood as God’s Way of Blessing the World (SPCK, 2014)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is Right Reverend Graham Tomlin, President of St. Melitus College and Editor-in-Chief of Seen and Unseen. Thank you for joining us.
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Nice to be with you, Todd, and, uh, I’m looking forward to the conversation.
Todd Ream: Formation for service for the ministry is undergoing a considerable transition here in the United States. The challenge is that while we’re certain transition is occurring, we’re also equally uncertain as to where it might lead in both the near and long term. I wonder then if some insights can be gleaned from our brethren who are forming clergy for the next generation on the other side of the Atlantic, particularly there in the United Kingdom.
If I may start by asking then, in what ways, if any, has formation for service for the ministry in the UK changed over the course of your lifetime?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Yeah, it’s changed a fair amount. I mean, I first got involved in theological training back in, uh, 1989 when I took a post at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford which is where I live now, in Oxford. Wycliffe is an Anglican seminary that’s part of the University of Oxford. I taught there for 16 years on the whole. I had been a student there beforehand.
So taught theology within the University of Oxford, but also mainly focusing on, training clergy for, uh, ordained ministry within the Church of England, and I’ve been involved in that, you know, pretty much most of my my time at Wycliffe Hall and then on at St Mellitus a little bit later on.
So it’s changed a great deal. I think some of the key changes, I think one is the development of something I guess I was partly responsible for, which is the growth of what we call context-based training. When I started, when I did my training, when I started teaching at Wycliffe, most of it, the training on offer in the Church of England was residential.
You basically had to leave your home, your Church, to go somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge or London or Nottingham or whatever, uh, with your family. You would be there for two or three years. You would do a theology degree, then you’d move on to a church to be a curate or a kind of a, you know, assistant minister for three years, then you’d move on again, uh, to become a sort of maybe a full-time pastor or vicar of a Church. Um, that was the predominant way of training.
There were a number of part-time routes that you could do as well. And I guess within St Mellitus, we pioneered a new form of training, which is context-based, which is where students spend half their time learning on the job in a church, in a parish doing evangelism and pastoral work and preaching and worship and leading and so on, uh, and the other half of the time in the classroom learning their theology, writing essays, listening to lectures, engaging in discussion, and so on.
And that took off really, really in a big, big way in, in the UK. St Mellitus very quickly became the largest college in the Church of England, partly due to the attraction of that model. So I think that’s one big thing that’s changed, uh, the formats of training. I think the other thing that’s changed also is in the past in the Church of England, we had a very kind of distinct element of, you know, that you, you try either trained at an evangelical college or a more Catholic college or maybe one that was more kind of liberal in tradition.
Some of those boundaries have blurred a little bit over time. And there are some interesting alliances that have developed. So that’s a factor I think that’s changed. And I think the other thing that’s related to the first one, I think, is that, that the link between theological training and the life of the Church has grown. That has been an increasing sense that doing theology just for the sake of doing theology without a connection to the life of the Church, there’s something quite slightly odd about that, that theology kind of belongs within the Church. Uh, and therefore, uh, I see more and more sort of links between the work of theology and the life of the Church growing over time. I think those are some of the things I’ve seen changed over the time, uh, that I’ve been involved in theological education.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways then have these changes given you hope, but perhaps also in some cases maybe given you some pause?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: I mean, they’ve given me hope in the sense that the the context-based training that I was describing a moment ago has drawn out a quite a number of people offering for ordained ministry, who I think wouldn’t have offered otherwise, because they would’ve thought that the prospect of going off to a residential seminary for three years and then moving again, and then moving again was too much of a disruption for their families.
Um, or because they felt that that form of learning where you were basically full-time writing essays, listening to lectures, that’s not really the way they learn. They learn by practice, they learn by doing stuff as well as thinking about it at the same time. So I think it’s opened up a whole range of forms of, you know, opened up training for people who otherwise wouldn’t have thought they could do it.
One of the other strands I think I’ve noticed relating to your first question is that we’ve, here in the UK, we’ve been a bit more focused on particular groups of society who wouldn’t normally have thought of themselves as being material for ordained ministry. So for example, in St Mellitus, we pioneered something called a Peter Stream, uh, which is aiming for people who maybe didn’t have a very strong academic background growing up or maybe because of their ethnicity or their gender or their background, they didn’t think of themselves as, you know, the kind of people who get ordained because they think ordained people, they’re not really like me.
We made a distinct attempt to reach out to those people to make it easy for them to kind of see themselves in, in ministry and to provide a pathway into ordained ministry for them. And that’s been a really encouraging sign, certainly within St Mellitus. We’ve seen our numbers of people from different ethnic backgrounds. The proportion of people training has been really encouraging. Uh, we’ve developed a partnership with Pentecostal denominations so that we’ve been able to to help with the theological formation of Pentecostal pastors training alongside Anglicans, which is a really good and creative mix.
And the kind of blend of traditions where, uh, we found, you know aspects of the kind of more Catholic tradition of the Church of England, uh, learning from the evangelical and charismatic sides and vice versa. That’s been a positive thing at the same time. I mean, having said that, there are things that give pause.
I mean, certainly since COVID, since the pandemic, uh, numbers of people offering for ordination within the Church of England have dropped quite significantly. They are beginning to creep up again. But that was a real kind of, you know, bit of a, a hiatus in recruitment and therefore that’s something which kind of needs to be addressed.
And I think, you know, there’s still a long way to go in terms of a, really providing the numbers and the quality of pastors and leaders for the Church, the Church needs at the moment. So those are some of the questions I think that are around right now.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As indicated at the top of our conversation, you presently serve as the president of St. Mellitus, but you previously served as the principal of St. Mellitus. And as you echo too, St. Mellitus is the largest provider of theological ministerial formation in the United Kingdom.
Would you describe, uh, something of St. Mellitus’s history, but also then its mission, uh, in greater detail in terms of how it seeks to serve students who will go on to ministry in a myriad of ways?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: The story is an interesting one. As I said earlier on, I was on the staff at Wycliffe Hall here in Oxford for 16 years, teaching theology within the University of Oxford, you know, very bright students you know, supervising PhDs, writing books, the usual kind of academic pathway. But, I suppose I increasingly felt that this particular form of training or residential training was great for some people. It was great for me, uh, for someone who was heading into academic life.
But for many pastors, it maybe wasn’t the best way of training. And I was thinking, could we find a way whereby we could help people to train where they got the best of, of good academic theology but were able to integrate that with the reality of ministry within local churches?
I then had a conversation with a couple, a number of people in the Diocese of London here in the UK. So one was Nicky Gumbel, who was the pioneer of the Alpha Course in Holy Trinity Brompton. Another was Bishop Richard Chartres, who was Bishop of London at the time. And they both, in different ways, were having a sort of vision for something in London, uh, because London is obviously our capital. It’s a massive international city.
And at the time, there wasn’t really a college that served the mainstream traditions of the Church in central London. So basically out of those conversations came this vision of, of a college that would serve you know, a wide range of traditions within the Church of England that was based in central London with all its dynamism, its energy, and to do something really new within theological training.
So I suppose the distinctive elements of it were that we, we set out on a, something that would blend together the kind of evangelical charismatic tradition that Holy Trinity Brompton inhabited, with the more kind of Catholic side of the Church that that was present within the Diocese of London, in a way that would learn together.
And we adopted this phrase, generous orthodoxy, as a way of expressing that. It’s a phrase that actually goes back to Hans Frei in Yale back in the 1960s, I think. But we adopted it as a phrase that, that captured a commitment to a kind of classic Christian orthodoxy, uh, which the, the orthodoxy of the Nicene Creed, which is extraordinarily rich vision of the Christian life, which gives you room to play, gives you room to kind of, to discuss and debate, uh, but with boundaries around it.
You know, that orthodoxy does have boundaries, but yet it’s held in a generous way, not in a way that uses theology as a sort of stick to beat other people with. And they gave space for different traditions to learn from one another. And so we found, for example, that the charismatic tradition and the Catholic tradition, both had a very strong belief in the Holy Spirit. The charismatics, when they lay hands upon people and they pray for the Holy Spirit to come, they expect something to happen. When Catholics pray over the elements of bread and wine they expect something to happen. The Holy Spirit is not just an idea in your head. It’s not just a kind of concept, uh, on the pages of a doctrinal textbook. It’s a reality within the life of the Church and the Spirit.
The expectation of the presence of the Spirit in the worshiping life and the personal life of believers, uh, and within the Church was something that both traditions had in common. So that was one of the things we found, you know, blending together some of the traditions, learning them from them together.
And again, as I say, as saying earlier on, finding a way for students to learn in this integrated way where they learn how to integrate theology and the practice of ministry by doing both at the same time, rather than, you know, filling your head with theology and then trying to work out how to do it when you’re in a kind of ministry context a little bit later on. Those are some of the distinctives, I think, of what we, what we provided.
I think we also had the youthfulness of a new college that, you know, had a nimbleness, an ability to respond, to be innovative, to be entrepreneurial. I think that’s one of the reasons why the college grew so rapidly in those early years.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned the outreach, uh, that St. Melitus has made to students who otherwise might not have considered ministerial formation and a call to the ministry.
Can you say something, though, about the faculty who are called to serve there at St. Melitus, and what characteristics or charisms, if any, sort of unite them?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: I mean, I think, firstly, a commitment to the theological life of the Church. You know, we don’t want to compromise on getting the very best faculty we can, who are real experts in their field. And one of the advantages of a seminary the size of St. Mellitus was that we were quickly able to recruit specialists in all areas. Some of the colleges within the Church of England are quite small, in which case you have to get maybe one person who can cover Old Testament and New Testament and ethics and liturgy at the same time. That’s quite a stretch from one person.
Because of the size of the college and the way it grew, we were able to kind of recruit people who were specialists in their different areas and people who were real, up-and-coming stars in that area. And I think the second thing I’d say we tended to go for younger theologians, people who had maybe recently finished their doctorates, people who were, you know, brought an energy and a kind of vision and a sense of some kind of older, uh, tutors. We had Archbishop Rowan, Rowan Williams has been on our staff for the last few years as a kind of elder statesman, someone who could bring the wisdom of years to it. But most of our tutors tend to be kind of younger tutors at the early stages of their careers, with energy and vision and a kind of real enthusiasm to teach.
Secondly, I think their students, their faculty who are committed to the life of the Church. And they’re happy to go around visiting students in their parishes, uh, rather than thinking, “Oh, I want to be in my study writing books all the time.” So they’re people who have a kind of strong academic commitment, people who are committed to the life of the Church, the life of ministry, and the kind of development of the students who are there.
And I think the third thing is they are committed to the process of formation, because that’s really what we’re about. We’re not just about theological education, we’re about the formation of people into, uh, the image of Christ, because that is what our understanding of priesthood would be, you know. When we talk about priesthood within the Church of England, a priest for, in my book, is someone who’s called to be a reminder of Jesus for the sake of the Church.
So we are forming people into the likeness of Christ so that they’re able to be those reminders of Christ, to enable the Church to be what it’s called to be. And so therefore, the people we recruit have to be themselves being formed in that way. They’re not all necessarily ordained but they are, you know, people who have that commitment to theology, commitment to the life of the Church, a commitment to the formation of the people that they’re serving. And, you know, are willing to go the extra mile in that process of forming the students that come to us.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to talk now, if I may, about your own formation for ministry. You’ve mentioned some of the components of it, such as your study at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and your undergraduate, uh, efforts, which were both in literature, which were in literature, at the University of Oxford. And then you eventually earned a PhD in theology from the University of Exeter.
What experiences played a role in your discernment process for formation for ministry and commitment to the ministry as your calling?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Well, as you say, my first degree was in English, uh, in, in Oxford University. I did that back in the 1970s, and I suppose at that stage I was involved in student ministry as a student, giving me really valuable learning experience. I made all kinds of mistakes, you kind of learn from your mistakes when you’re a young, uh, person, put into a position of leadership there.
I went on to do kind of a bit of youth work within the Church when I moved to London after university. You know, one or two kind of older Christians took me under their wing and helped to sort of shape my expectations of ministry and the way that worked. I suppose it, uh, I worked for an insurance company for a few years in London which was kind of all right. Didn’t fire my imagination. I found that I loved to study. I loved spending time with books, trying to understand my own faith.
I’d actually had come from a, my dad was a minister. He was a Baptist minister. I’ve been through a period of teenage atheism, where my rebellion against, you know, God was not sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It was reading Nietzsche was my way of rebelling against everything. But I kind of came through that, found myself being drawn back into the life of the Church, and then I discovered this desire to really dig into the faith that I had.
And so, you know, all the way through my English degree, I was fascinated by those figures who were engaging with faith, people like John Milton or, you know, Samuel Taylor Coleridge or, or Edmund Spenser or whatever, people who had a theological interest to, in the world of English literature. And so therefore, it was a natural thing to go on, to go on to study theology. But more than that, I think it was that thing of being involved in a Church, being involved with the life of young people, seeing the potential of young people to, uh, to, to grow in, in Christ. And I think it was those experiences, both my kind of academic interests and calling as an English student and then as student of theology, but then also, this, you know, real, I found myself, you know, finding a real love for the Church and wanting to see the Church grow and wanting to see the Church deepen its, its life, and those two things coming together.
And, you know, trying out various things in leadership contexts, both in the student context and the Church context. They all led me to begin to think, “Well, you know, maybe ordained ministry is the way for me.” And to begin to push that door and see where it might go. And the door seemed to open, and I found myself, uh, walking through that door towards ordained ministry in the Church of England.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned you served in a variety of roles then, uh, back at Oxford, Jesus College, Wycliffe, and then the theology faculty there. From 2015 to 2022, you served as the Bishop of Kensington. Can you describe the discernment process that led to your appointment and your embrace of that appointment?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Yeah, I think I’ve always felt, uh, I think what I originally felt was a calling to two things, to be a, to be a priest, to be a, a minister within the Church, and to be a theologian. I think over time I gradually realized that’s one calling, not two. It is to be a kind of priest theologian, a minister theologian, someone who’s committed to the life of the Church, but particularly within that calling to the teaching ministry of the Church.
I mean, Martin Luther used to talk about how a doctorate is becoming a doctor of the Church, someone who attends to the health of the Church. Um, you know, and you need doctors for your body. You need doctors for the life of the Church, too. And so that’s, that’s always been a key part of my calling.
And the calling to be, to be, to be a bishop happened really while I was, uh, involved in heading up St Mellitus College. I used to talk quite often with the Bishop of London at the time, who was, I guess, a bit of a mentor for me, Bishop Richard Chartres. Uh, he, I think, discerned a call to episcopal ministry oversight. And I think that calling is that ministry to kind of put your head above the detail, to begin to look at the whole and see how the different parts relate to each other. That’s what episcopal ministry is.
The process of the particular role I held was led by him. There was a post of Bishop of Kensington within the Diocese of London, uh, that he wanted to appoint to. He set up a process of, uh, of discernment around that. He approached me, would I be willing to put my name forward for that alongside others. We were interviewed by a panel of people discerning our calling to episcopal ministry in this particular, uh, role as bishop. And I think he was particularly interested in someone who had a theological teaching element to their ministry, because that’s what they needed within the Diocese of London at the time. So he was a great encourager for me, someone who was saying, “Yeah, I, I think you are called to this.”
There’s a strong tradition in the Church of always saying, you know, well, you’ve, know, you must never want to be a bishop. You know, when you look at the stories of St Augustine and Gregory the Great and some of the early figures, they all kind of run away from it. And I think there’s quite, there’s something quite good about that, because you should never, one says you shouldn’t desire this as if it’s like some sort of promotion. Um, And the way I came to think about episcopal ministry is actually the opposite of a promotion. It’s a demotion, so that I became the servant of the servants of the servants of God.
If you like, the servants of God in the world are the laypeople who are living out their faith in their workplaces, in their families, in their streets. Those are, if you like, the front line of the Church. ministers, they’re the servants of the servants of God. Bishops are those who serve the servants of the servants of God, if you put it that way. And so, I often had to say to people, would say, “Oh, you’ve risen to the top of the Church.” And I’d say, “No, no, no, it’s the other way around. I’ve gone to the bottom of the Church,” um, which is the bishop who supports the ministry, uh, of others. And so that was really part of that discernment that I could exercise my ministry as a teaching ministry within the life of the Church as a bishop and having that influence over quite a number of churches in my area. So that was part of that discernment process.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of that service to the servants of the Church then, what did you find as the unique needs of priests within the diocese there in Kensington?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: I think that the main thing they needed was encouragement. And I used to find that’s probably the main thing I did, was to go around encouraging clergy. A minister in a church can be a lonely life. It can be a difficult path to tread when you’re dealing with struggles in your congregation or divisions within it. And most of the time, it was a matter of going around clergy and saying, “Look, you know, you’re loved. We want to support you. You’re doing a great job. Keep going, be faithful in ministry, keep praying, keep reading the scriptures, keep preaching the Gospel, keep reaching out in love for people.” And, uh, reassuring people on the goodness of the calling that they had. Now, obviously, there were times when you had to issue rebuke and call people up for things that they had done which maybe weren’t quite right. But by and large, a lot of it was encouragement.
I think the second thing I think people needed was teaching. I think I, I’ve always felt that the bishop’s ministry, you are a, you’re a leader in mission. You’re trying to help the Church keep focused on its mission, its outward-looking focus. You’re a focus of unity for the different churches of different kinds that you oversee. You’re a pastor of the people and pastor of the clergy in particular. But you’re, you’re also a teacher of the faith, and that was the bit for, for me was the most important part of the bishop’s role. Other bishops would find different emphases. But for me, being a teacher of the faith was an important thing.
So every year, I would, I would do a kind of teaching tour of my area, uh, visiting churches, visiting sort of clusters of churches, and doing a teaching evening on maybe prayer, upon, you know, on a theological understanding of freedom or something that’s going on in culture or some of the things that were going on in our, our national life.
And I found that really helped clergy because they needed to be fed theologically and to be inspired theologically and to be reminded of how good and rich and nourishing the Christian gospel is. And so I felt that was a key part of my ministry and what I needed to give them.
So I found, you know, encouragement was a crucial thing. Theological resourcing and teaching was a crucial thing. And appointing good people was a key part of the role. I often think as a bishop, most important thing you do is put good people into positions and let them fly. Um, And that was a key part of my role, trying to look, trying to discern and find and appoint really good people to, to, to parishes in my area and give them the freedom, the encouragement, the teaching, the resources they need to be able to flourish in that ministry.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Someone who has thought long and hard about the formation of individuals for Christian service, in what ways, if any, did having served as a bishop then impact your views of what priests, future priests, the next generation of priests need when it comes to their formation?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Well, during the time when I was principal of St Mellitus, I, I wrote a book, uh, on priesthood. It was called “The Widening Circle.” It was basically trying to think about what priesthood is, and particularly, I suppose, for people who maybe came from the more evangelical kind of Protestant part of the Church, for whom language of priesthood, which is the language we use within the Anglican Church, was a little bit alien. You know, that language was very, you know, very comfortable for people in the more Catholic tradition of the church. But within the more evangelical side, they would say, “Well, I, I know about the priesthood of Christ, I know about the priesthood of all believers, but I’m not really sure about this idea of individual priests.”
And yet, yet we use that language within the Church of England and the Anglican tradition. So I tried to write about how, how, you know what a priest is. And it struck me that a priest, you know, if we think about the priesthood of ministers, you cannot think about that apart from the priesthood of Christ.
Christ is the true high priest. Every idea of priesthood we have comes from His priesthood. And in fact, it’s a sharing in His priesthood. It’s not separate from Christ’s priesthood, it’s a sharing in that priesthood. Just as we share in His sonship, we share in Christ’s son of the Father. You know, we call ourselves sons and daughters of God, whereas He is the true Son of God.
In the same sort of way, we can share in His priestly ministry within the Church. And that priestly ministry is about, you know, wanted to define it in tightest terms as you can, the priestly ministry of Christ is to bring God to us and to bring us to God. In his incarnate nature, He brings God to us. He shows us who God is. He brings God to us in, in His incarnate flesh.
But at the same time, He brings us to God. He redeems humanity and offers us to God a kind of sacrifice, as an offering to the Father. And therefore, that’s Christ’s priesthood. He is the only one true high priest who can bring God to us and bring us to God. And yet he graciously shares that ministry with the Church as the priestly people of God.
And our job as the Church is to bring God to other people within the world and to bring people to God. Um, and yet if you think about the Church, how does the Church exercise that ministry? How does it organize itself? How does it focus? How does it keep focused? Well, God calls out of the Church particular people, uh, who are called to that priestly ministry of keeping the Church true to its calling. And therefore, it seems to me that, that priests or in other, in, you know, other traditions use different language for a ministry.
It’s back to this thing about a, a priest is someone who is a reminder of Jesus, uh, who is the true high priest. That’s what you do. At the heart of what you do as a priest, you remind Jesus. You remind people of Jesus through what you, through what you are, through what you say, and through what you do. Through what you are, by the very fact that you’re there, you know, sometimes wearing a clerical collar or whatever your, the sign is that you bear, that you are that person called to that ministry. By the very fact that you’re there, as you walk around a neighborhood, you kind of remind people of Jesus.
Through what you say, through your preaching, through your teaching, you need to be someone who’s a reliable teacher of the faith because in your conversation, in your sermons, you need to be someone who speaks authentically and reliably about Jesus that shows people the real God, the God of Jesus Christ, not some fake God of our own making.
And so therefore the, you know, the theological training, the theological depth of clergy is crucial. But we also remind people of Jesus by, by who we are, the kind of people we are, by the compassion that we show, by the pastoral care that we offer. And therefore forming people into people who actually like other people and who love other people and who are basically good to other people that is crucial too.
There’s something, in some ways very simple about ministry, which is just kind of being nice to people in the spirit of Jesus. And it’s not that complicated in some ways. And so I think those three things, being someone who was a good reminder of Jesus through what you say and through what you, what you are and what you do and shaping people into that, those are the crucial things that clergy needed, I think.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. After you completed your formal term of service as the Bishop of Kensington, you launched the Center for Cultural Witness, which is now known as Seen and Unseen, describing its mission, uh, it reads, “An invitation to see the world differently. In a world often fixated on the seen, but blind to unseen realities.”
Would you describe the audience that you and your colleagues with Seen and Unseen are seeking to serve with the distribution of the content that publication curates?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: When I was Bishop of Kensington, I would often go around our churches and see how they were doing a really good job at trying to share the Gospel, share the love of Christ in practical ways and verbal ways. But very often it was a bit like it was falling on stony ground. I often used to think of that parable of the sower. You know, he’d go out and sow the seed, and some of it would fall on stony ground, on thorny ground, and some of it on good seed. But very often the ground was a bit stony. It was kind of hard. There are parts of the world where you share the Gospel and, you know, the, the, the fruit is immediate. Um, but it was quite hard work in the European context.
And so I began to think about that maybe we don’t just need to sow the seed. We also need to plow the ground a little bit, uh, prepare the ground, prepare the kind of cultural narrative that, that is either able to receive or not receive the Gospel. So as I thought about this, I began to think about, I mean, I would find that I, I love writing and I would write for national publications like The Times in London or The Spectator magazine or, you know. As a bishop you get, you have a bit of a voice in public, and so I, I found, I would find opportunities for that.
And I found myself thinking, how, how can we do more of this? How can we get younger voices develop those voices into kind of a commending and talking about faith in public life? And so the idea of the Centre for Cultural Witness was formed. And the idea was we would reach out to those people who are you know, both those things inside the Church, but mainly people outside the Church to try and see how we would communicate faith to them.
Communicate faith to them not, not in this kind of standard apologetics way of, you know, let me give you 10 Reasons why you should believe in God or why the resurrection happened. But by presenting Christian faith as a way of seeing the world differently. Um, what difference does it make?
If you’re a Christian, what difference does it make when you look at, you know, the United States economic policy or, you know, the war that’s going on between, you know, America and Israel and Iran, or the kind of cost of living crisis or artificial intelligence or whatever. Because these are the kind of things everybody’s talking about. And if Christian faith has an impact, it should make a difference to the way you see these things.
So we set out to do three things within the Center for Cultural Witness. One which was content, to produce material that would really, if you like, give a Christian commentary on what’s going on in our culture. So we formed this website called seenandunseen.com, which has around, I know, maybe a couple of articles coming out every day looking at different aspects of stories in the news or cultural questions that are around. And a lot of it was trying to think about how we, how we get the world of theology into the world of, of, of witness.
A lot of theology, the world I was very familiar with, was tied up in long 400-page books that no one ever’s, no one’s ever going to read, let’s be honest. Um, and so my question was, how do we get that material, this deep reflection on the Christian faith, from a, a kind of small academic circle of people who read these books into a format that people outside the Church would read? And so the format in Seen and Unseen is articles that are probably between 800 and 1,000 words expressed in a more journalistic rather than academic style, often written by theologians, and we try to help theologians to discover how to write in a more journalistic way rather than academic way. So that when people access the site, they are seeing, uh, they are seeing a whole new way of looking at the world, which Christian faith gives.
We adopted this title Seen and Unseen, based on the line in the Nicene Creed that God is the maker of all things seen and unseen, which is of course comes from 2 Corinthians 4, where St. Paul talks about what is seen, is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal. And the idea was to look at the seen, what everyone sees, politics, economics, arts science and so on, but through the lens of the unseen, through the lens of the reality of God, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the importance of prayer the possibility of miracles, the, all these sort of unseen things, and try to see life whole, if you like.
So that’s really what we try to do. So we do that. We do the communication piece. The second piece is what we do is, is training. We do a course for younger writers, helping them to develop their skills as writers in a more journalistic mode. We do training for, for new bishops in the Church of England to think about their public role. And then we do research projects, which are writing projects book-length offerings.
We’ve got two, two new books coming out this year, one on the theme of cultural witness, one on the public role of the Church of England. And I’ve written a biography of Blaise Pascal, one of the great cultural witnesses of our time. And so those are the three broad areas we do, communication into public and the public realm through Seen and Unseen, uh, training of new leaders and new voices in the area of public witness, and then research projects that kind of underpin the Church’s understanding of witness and what it means today.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. That love of writing that you have is, one of the ways you’ve expressed that is through the publication of approximately 40 books, the most recent of which is the book that you just mentioned, Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World. Would you describe the interest that led you to such a study and such a, to take such time to grapple with Pascal’s legacy?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Well, I first encountered Pascal as a teenager. I read the Pensées as you do as a teenager. Part of my sort of rediscovery of faith after my atheist phase was, was reading Pascal. And then when, when I started to think about what I was going to do for my PhD, uh, doctoral studies, I was reading Pascal again, and it struck me that he actually fitted quite well into what I was going to study. So I ended up doing a doctorate in, uh, this, this theme called the Theology of the Cross in St. Paul, in Luther and Pascal.
And to be honest, I slightly put Pascal to one side at that stage because although I was fascinated by him, uh, I needed a job and uh, there was great, there was, there wasn’t really much call for teaching on Pascal in, uh, theological seminary circles, but there was in Luther, so I was really specialized on Luther for the next 10, 20 years. But I always thought to myself one day I would return to Pascal because he was such an interesting man, and I always wanted to write a biography of him.
And so when we started the Center for Culture Witness, when I started thinking about it four or five years ago I thought, right, now’s the time to write something on Pascal. It was also coming up to the 400th anniversary of his birth in 2023. Um, I kind of slightly missed that deadline, but that wasn’t too much of a problem. But I found him fascinating, but partly because he’s this extraordinary polymath. He’s a, he was at the cutting edge of mathematics at his time. He basically invented probability theory. He did all kinds of groundbreaking work in things like conic sections and cycloids and so on.
He was a physicist. He did a, again, a groundbreaking experiment in, on the existence of the vacuum, which is sometimes has been described as the first modern experiment, which is, you know, done several times, measurements taken carefully, uh, repeated for accuracy, published for everybody to see peer-reviewed, if you like. He was a pioneer in the whole world of experimental science.
He was an entrepreneur. He built a calculating machine, one of the very first functioning calculating machines in Europe, this thing called the Pascaline, which, which could do addition and subtraction and multiplication and division up to hundreds of millions, and it actually worked. When the story of the computer is told, often Pascal’s, calculating machine is often told as part of that story. He invented buses. He constructed the first proper urban transportation system in Paris in the middle of the 17th century, uh, before anybody else had thought of the idea.
So he’s this extraordinary man, but he’s also a profound thinker, a philosopher, a, a theologian. And so he has this really interesting life, but I suppose I was particularly interested in his theological contribution. He went through this particular experience late in, in life in 1654. He uh, I say late in life, he had a very short life. He died at age 39 in 1662. But, uh, about eight years before that, as a, as a result of a kind of long period of spiritual searching, he had this experience which is sometimes called the Night of Fire, which was a, an encounter he had, a very, very visceral, personal, direct encounter with, with God that he had on November the 23rd, 1654.
And he wrote about it. Never told anybody, but he wrote it down, kept it in a, uh, in the lining of his jacket, and it was only found after he died. And one of the results of that experience was a desire to reach out to his sophisticated, urbane, slightly skeptical friends in Paris to, to convince them that their true happiness would be found in God. And so he started writing this apology for the Christian faith. And he would write down notes, uh, some of them are, are lines, some of them are paragraphs, some of them are more like long essays. And he would write these things down, and he was presumably one day going to them all together to write into a kind of great apology for the Christian faith.
He never finished it. He died before he was able to, uh, to round it off. And so when he died, his friends found these papers in his room, and they published them as the Pensées of Monsieur Pascal. So when you buy a copy of the Pensées, that’s what you buy. You buy the notes for this great apology he was going one day going to, going to write.
There’s a number of really interesting themes in the Pensées, one of which is the hidden God, the idea that, he takes on very clearly the idea that God is not obvious. You know, you can’t see God, you can’t feel Him, you can’t touch Him. He doesn’t tend to speak out of the clouds to you at every moment. It’s quite possible to think there is no God because you can’t see Him anywhere. But on the other hand, there are indications that there might be a God.
And so he’s very skeptical about attempts to kind of prove God. Um, but then he thinks on the other side, there may be the atheists who say there is no God, but he says, “Well, maybe there’s a third possibility, that there is a God, but He’s a hidden God. He’s a God who hides himself.” And he says, “All of nature proclaims a hidden God.” And then he says, “What, what religion speaks about a hidden God?” And he says, “Well, actually Christianity does,” because when you think of the place where we say that God is most clearly revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, even there, God is hidden because you could meet Jesus, you could shake his hand, you could talk to him and still miss the fact that you were talking to God. Because even in the person of Jesus Christ, God is hidden.
And so there’s a kind of match between the way in which he sees God within the natural world, that He’s hidden there, He’s not obvious but present, and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. And so he sees that as a match. He also drives a really interesting kind of, uh, line between the modern and the postmodern. He sees on the one hand the modern, modern sort of rationalist tradition, which in his day is represented by Descartes. He also sees the skeptical tradition, which in his day was represented by the philosopher Michel de Montaigne. And he shows how Christian faith can both explain both of these and offer an alternative to both in the Christian doctrine of creation and fall. So he’s a thinker for his own time. He’s also a thinker for our time. I think he’s a fascinating man to get to know.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Perhaps, as an extension of the spirit that you describe in this biography, but thinking about the times in which we live then too, for our final question today, I wanted to ask you about the intellectual and moral virtues that you believe theologians need to cultivate in order to flourish in their vocations.
And then perhaps also too, for what theological virtues do you believe theologians need to pray to receive in order to flourish in their vocation?
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: I think one of the key theological virtues is humility. It is the humility to recognize how little you know. And it’s one of the things about theological study, isn’t it? The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. So it’s that humility to recognize that however much I know about theology, uh, that is no occasion for pride. That is no occasion for thinking I can lord it over other Christians.
I am just sort of, you know, dabbling my feet into the ocean of what it is to be to know God. And all the great theologians had that. There’s that story of St. Augustine kind of walking onto a beach and seeing a little child, you know, filling up a hole in the sand with his seashell of water um, and saying to the, saying to the boy, “What are you trying to do?” And he said, “I’m trying to put the ocean into this hole.” And Augustine says, “Well, that’s ridiculous. You can’t put the ocean into that hole.” And the boy turns to him and said, “Well, what you’re trying to do is ridiculous as well, trying to describe God in the books you write.”
And, uh, that was a lesson for Augustine in humility. And that’s what I think what Christians need is, so I think first thing is humility and a readiness to learn and to keep on learning and never to feel you’ve sort of got this mastered. Second, I think is a worshiping life. If theology that is not rooted in prayer and worship becomes a very dry and arid and rather unsatisfying thing, and that’s when I think it begins to feed pride, which is perhaps the besetting sin or vice of the theologian, because I know all this stuff, I’m somehow better than other Christians.
And worshiping life and a prayerful life where theology is rooted in the, the living of the Christian life, the knowledge of God, uh, is a crucial thing. And I always find the fact that in the Eastern Church, theology was always seen as the highest form of prayer. It wasn’t an academic thing to be done over in there in universities. It was the highest form of prayer. Theology was about knowing God, about addressing God in the right language so we could sort of see God as clearly as we possibly could. And so, I think, uh, you know, theology rooted in the life of worship and prayer is quite crucial at the same time.
I think focus is like an important virtue. There are theological readers who are kind of like magpies, and they’re just picking up things from all over the place, and it just lacks focus. There’s something about the theologian’s life where you need focus on what are you actually trying to, what puzzle are you trying to work at? What is the issue you’re trying to address? What’s the question you’re trying to think through?
And so I always try to find a focus for my reading at any particular time, and that’s usually focused about what book I’m trying to research for or write about, and that gives me focus. So I’m not just dipping in here and there all over the place because of unfocused, undisciplined, uh, program of reading really doesn’t help. And I think having a focus is a crucial thing.
So yeah, those are the things, the virtues, I think. Humility and a readiness to learn, a deepen, uh, in rooting theology always in a life of worship and prayer, both personally and corporately within the Church, and focus. And then also being aware of the, the great, you know, temptation of the theologian, which is, which is pride. It is that thought that I’m somehow better than others because of what I know.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been the Right Reverend Graham Tomlin, President of St. Melitus College and Editor-in-Chief of Seen and Unseen. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Rt. Rev. Graham Tomlin: Thank you, Todd, very much indeed, and very good to be with you and all your listeners.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
