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In the forty-sixth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Andrew Davison, the Regius Professor of Divinity and Residentiary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, University of Oxford. Davison begins by discussing the arc of a vocational discernment process that led him from completing a D.Phil. in chemistry at Oxford to completing a Ph.D. in theology at the University of Cambridge as well as ordination as an Anglican priest. In addition to the wisdom offered by theologians past and present, critical influences in that process also included service with a hospice program and as a parish priest. While not his original intent, Davison’s unique background in chemistry and theology eventually led him to study the complex relationship shared by science and religion. Davison discusses the vocational satisfaction he receives from service as a priest-scholar as he leads students through their courses of study, working on the various articles and books, and leading religious services. Regardless of the way he may be serving at a given time, Davison’s theological vision is defined by his understanding of participating and mediation. As a priest-scholar and one who views all of the roles in which he serves as complimentary components of a common vocation, Davison closes by exploring ways the Church and theologians can be of greater service to one another in the months and years to come.
- Andrew Davison’s Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
- Andrew Davison’s Participation in God: An Exploration in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
- Andrew Davison’s Blessing (Canterbury Press, 2014)
- Sioned Evans and Andrew Davison’s Care for the Dying: A Pastoral Guide (Canterbury Press, 2014)
- Andrew Davison’s Why Sacrament? (Cascade, 2013)
- Andrew Davison’s The Love of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy for Theologians (SCM Press, 2013)
- Andrew Davison’s For the Parish: A Critique of Fresh Expressions (SCM Press, 2013)
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 Andrew Davison, the Regius Professor of Divinity and Residentiary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, University of Oxford. Thank you for joining us.
Andrew Davison: Thank you very much for having me and for all the great work you do.
Todd Ream: Your educational journey alone makes for a story that we could commit to our entire conversation, or perhaps two or three conversations. But just to start, you earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry and then a DPhil in biochemistry from the University of Oxford. What initially drew you to chemistry?
Andrew Davison: Well, it would be honest to say I think the prospect of, you know, pouring things together and they make wonderful colors or being able to cause explosions and that, that, that kind of thing. So there is a kind of spectacular angle to chemistry.
Um, but I think maybe something that stayed with me my whole, my whole life is how things work, what stuff the world is made from. Um, it’s one of the great just exploratory sciences, I think. And that appealed to me and probably hasn’t gone away, although it might have been rooted into other directions as well.
Also, it’s what I was good at, I suppose. You know I, I just was good at the sciences and chemistry in particular. And in England, of course, you’ve got to make a decision pretty early. It’s not like you come to university and study lots of things and then work out what your concentration is going to be. But I knew it was chemistry, and it suited me very well.
Todd Ream: You’ve mentioned that it’s lingered with you even though it’s been, you know directed in maybe different ways or opportunities. But in what ways do you think that those formative experiences that define the study of biochemistry, especially at the level that you did, still shape your vocation and how you go about the work that you do today?
Andrew Davison: Well, I do think that the sciences are a good preparation for theology, although people might find that a very strange thing to say. But I do because you’re always understanding things at arm’s length. The days when you could become a great scientist just by stretching springs or doing things that are sort of human size in front of you, it happened a lot in Oxford of, you know, hundreds of years ago, but that’s all been done really.
So the science that we do nowadays tends to be things that are too small to be seen or too complicated to be observed, you know, the workings of a whole cell or something like that. So you are always, I think, having to have a certain humility before the thing that you’re studying, that you’re never going to get your head around it, and that you are always working with models or simplifications.
Um, I’m a realist. In the philosophical sense that I, I don’t think I’m just making models up. I think I’m trying to respond to something that’s out there and speaking to me, but I’m only going to hear part of it, and I have to realize that something profound is being accommodated to the limits of my mind. And that feels to me very much what theology is like as well. So that felt like a very natural transition.
And then in terms of the sort of content of my work, I was a scientist through to my DPhil. I then went, went to Cambridge and read a theology degree in preparation for ordination. I think we’re going to come onto that and these questions of vocation are very important. I thought I’d left science behind really, and my first two teaching jobs were purely in systematic doctrinal theology. Um, and it was only then after both of those that something came up in theology and natural sciences at Cambridge, and I threw my hat in the ring and held that position for 10 years. So even the very subject of science actually came back into my purview as an academic. But I’m really glad I laid the foundations of becoming a theologian through and through before I tried to integrate the two.
So I didn’t, for instance, at university as a theologian, do the theology and science papers because I thought, I can’t really think theologically about science until I’ve learned to think theologically. Um, so that’s to maybe run ahead a little bit to, to future levels. But I’d say both methodologically and then eventually even the content of science has come back into my academic life.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. You mentioned that you then studied theology at Cambridge, eventually earning a PhD, also preparing for ordination as a priest in the Anglican Church. The discernment process then that led you to study theology, but then also submit to the process of ordination and the calling to the priesthood.
Andrew Davison: Yes. Well, happily those things very much went together. I was able to go to Cambridge and read another undergraduate degree because the Church of England paid for that. So have quite a different funding model than some churches in the States, although some perhaps will be like us. The, the, where no one’s allowed to get into debt, for instance. Um, and that debt’s quite serious. You’ve got to, you know, talk that through with the bishop before you can be ordained. So we’re certainly not going to get people into further debt. Um, so all that is paid for by the Church.
So in a way, the ordination discernment came first, and then I didn’t really have to twist anyone’s arms to be able to study a theology degree. But I think they still have this idea that sometimes they’ll designate someone as a potential theological educator. And to be honest, it doesn’t mean a great deal after you’ve finished your ordination training, but it, I mean, it doesn’t, there are no doors opened up for you, particularly with that, which is probably right. You’ve got to, you know, find your own way.
But it does maybe mean that some degree courses that might be a bit more expensive would be open. So it was a matter which will come on to, I’m sure, of discernment for ordination and there was never really much question that that would involve a theology degree. The PhD is a different story. But do you want to talk about ordination first?
Todd Ream: Yeah. If you would, what key experiences maybe that led you in that direction?
Andrew Davison: Uh, the danger is I’ve probably told this story a few too many times, and I feel like I’m in danger of recalling the story that I tell about this rather than the thing itself. But I still think it’s true. I think, you know, I, this is a distillation of what happened. So one thing was that I’d had quite a crisis of faith as an undergraduate. I’d, I’d grown up in a middle-of-the-road, Church of England, liturgical kind of parish, and then at school I’d got involved with the school, Christian Union, which was quite evangelical, and I ended up going to a independent charismatic house church as a later teenager, which has done me all sorts of good. I, you know, I certainly got to know the Bible for instance, but there were things about it that were maybe also less helpful, and it was not of a tradition that took theology very seriously or the academic life and or science, was pretty, I think pretty threatened by science.
So I came up to university thinking that science and theology were in conflict and with some view, let’s just say with some views about the nature of the world that turned out to be not very scientifically plausible. And that did really precipitate a crisis of faith, which wasn’t really about the science, it was about authority and what could be trusted. Um, it was about the, it was about the Bible, but it was also about that the tradition that I’d come from had made, I think, some pretty disreputable use of science, kind of discredited science to, rather than look in the world in its face and, and, and, you know, trying to work, work out what the world’s like.
So anyway, for one reason or another, I had a crisis of faith. I did, I carried on going to church. In fact, I threw myself into things all the more really, sort of by force of will trying to hold it together. But of course, in the end, you, you realize it’s all grace and not your own effort. But when, when that had sort of sorted itself out, and that was partly because I’d come to know the medieval theological tradition, which just seemed to me to be able to take any and every question in its stride, and the things that worried me, they would’ve just loved to think about all sorts of things in biology and they, they, they, they could have just, they, they loved posing questions and responding to them.
And also just my style of Christianity changed a little bit. I started going to my college chapel, and it was more liturgical, and I kind of, it held things very beautifully so that it didn’t really matter what I felt like. Um, it was about this great unfolding story of the year and the splendor of God. And I used to say I couldn’t really sing the worship songs that are about how God made me feel wonderful because they weren’t, God wasn’t making me feel wonderful. But I could bow my head during the Sanctus because God is holy. Anyway, that’s a different, that’s a different story.
But once the dust had settled on that and, and I was, I think, pretty secure in my faith again, I realized that all the things that had kept me awake in an anguished kind of way were still keeping me awake in a fascinated kind of way. I was just lying awake thinking about these theological things, and I wasn’t lying awake thinking about biochemistry. And I take that if your, if your viewers are after a kind of principle of discernment, then what you lie awake thinking about or what you want to read in your spare moments isn’t a bad indication amongst many. So that was one story.
The other was that I’d started working as a volunteer in the hospice in Oxford, once or twice a week. And it was just so much the most satisfying. That’s, I mean, that’s a terrible word. Like, just rewarding. I mean, awful in all sorts of ways and absolutely the, the most, um what would you say, quite privileged thing that I did. And I also felt like it was really using all of me, including sometimes all you could do is just sit with someone. And in a very cerebral kind of world, sometimes you would have, you know, amazing conversations with people, and sometimes it was just your physical presence was all you could bring. And I just found that very fulfilling.
So I, on the back of that, I thought pastoral ministry is for me, not only will be sort of giving up on science, but even on, I wasn’t going to be an academic. Um, so I trained and served my curacy in a wonderful council estate in southeast London. Uh, quite deprived in, in, in many ways was, they were wonderful years. Um, so in the end, I didn’t make escape velocity from the university, and, and I, and I came back. But I had thought that I’d laid that aside.
And let’s just say one other thing, which is, or maybe two other things, which is I think it’s very difficult to beat putting yourself in a situation,, kind of standing in the shoes and seeing what it feels like. So I did a year when I was doing my DPhil of occasionally going off and doing a week in a parish somewhere or, I was, and I was doing the kind of, I was, I was serving in my parish church, and I, and I was doing these things in the hospice. And I think there’s not every line of work that you can do that for. It’s quite difficult to do a trial run of being an astronaut, for instance.
But in as much as you can just inhabit the space, tag along with someone that, I think that’s quite important for discernment. Also other people know us better than we know ourselves. Uh, so I think understanding yourself as it’s reflected back to you from conversations with others is important.
And then the other thing I’d say is, at the end of it all, I felt sort of calmly, it was right. And I thought to myself, there are wise Jesuits and so on who have much more to say about spiritual direction than I can say. But I thought the fact that I didn’t feel like it was a moment of fervor, a kind of settled like, “Ah, ah, there we are. Who knew?” It seems like that’s the way it’s going to be. I found that quite reassuring, and I would generally trust a kind of calm, settled sense of, yeah, that seems right than I’m fervor, which I think can do you know what I mean by that? It can, we can trick ourselves, I think. Um, so all, all those things point to that direction, and I think it’s been a wonderful direction for me.
Todd Ream: Yeah. As you went through this process then, were there any mentors perhaps who walked alongside you or shared their insights or offered their encouragement?
Andrew Davison: Too many to say really. Um, and that again is probably all of the things being equal quite healthy, because apart from anything else, it’s probably not ideal to lay the responsibility for a big life decision like that just on the shoulders of one person. If it’s distributed, that’s, that’s good.
Um, there was a chaplain of Lincoln College, wasn’t my college, but I’ve talked to him on some occasion and he was the one who pointed me towards doing the hospice work. I think he still is the master of the temple in, in London, the legal church. Uh, so I, I owe that to him. All the theologians that I talked to that then helped me with the sort of stepping into a theological way of thinking and the fact that that was so fascinating to me, I owe them a debt.
And then the people that set me an example, you know, again, like it’s the, imagine doing what they do? My college chaplain at Merton College who just died last year, Mark Everett, he was, he was fellow in Russian as well as tutor in as well as being chaplain, and his faithful enhabiting of the role gave me something that would be a, a, could be a role model. But no, no one, one person. And of course, some of them are sort of long, long dead like George Herbert’s Country Parson. It’s not only the guides are not necessarily the people who are alive and talking to you. They can be from the tradition as well.
Todd Ream: That was going to be my next question. Any authors, present or past, you know, with whom you felt a certain affinity and then spoke to you not only in ways that you found intellectually important or stimulating, but also were guides for you to think about yourself as a theologian as these habits were shaping and your purpose was taking identifying its direction?
Andrew Davison: Yes. I would say that my great inspirations would be obviously, everyone’s going to say this, but the Scriptures and the Fathers, maybe especially Augustine. Um, I’m also fond of Irenaeus of Lyons, but, but all the fathers. I really like John of Damascus. He comes at the end of the Patristic period and is a great summator. And then above all amongst theologians, Thomas Aquinas which is I mean, everyone loves Thomas Aquinas now, but I think I can say I got there kind of ahead of the curve. Um, and we, we should come back to him because I think he’s stupendous.
And then Karl Barth, I think, you know, everyone should get to know Karl Barth. You can love Karl Barth without being a Barthian. I don’t necessarily adopt his whole system, but he is, I mean, he just is so extraordinarily creative. And you’ll read a, you’ll read something and you’ll think like, “No one’s ever said that in the history of Christianity and yet it’s completely traditional, you know, faithful to the tradition. And then, then four pages later, he’ll, he’ll, you know, he’ll bring a rabbit out of a hat again. So Barth is Barth’s important to me in that way.
Um, I’m reading more of the Protestant scholastics at the moment, so that great flowering of Protestant theology in the 17th and 18th century, which I think the Protestant world has, well, it’s recovering it, but I, I said really has, you know, lost a treasure there that is not better known. But Aquinas, because he is simultaneously a biblical theologian, a philosopher, a doctrinal theologian, he knows the Western Church but also peculiarly for his time in the Eastern Church.
Um, he knows Aristotle and Plato. In one way, he is just one of the greatest minds that has ever been and one of the greatest theologians. But if you asked him, he’d probably just say, “Well, I, I’m a synthesizer of these great things that have been laid at my disposal.” But if you, if people don’t know Thomas Aquinas get to know a bit.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. You, yourself are the author or editor of 11 books, and when you look back over the arc of those efforts, are there common iterations of themes that emerge or perhaps common questions that are driving the inquiries that you’re seeking to pursue and then in turn offer?
Andrew Davison: I suppose I’ve tried almost always to, to fill a gap or meet a need. So almost every book that I’ve written, without exception, I’ve just thought, “There should be a book on that.” And so probably the one that I’m most proud of, if pride isn’t a sin, is the book on the idea of participation. We can, we can come onto that. But I originally started that as being a very short book, because I thought, “Who am I to write a book on this great theme? But I’ll, you know, I could write a short one.” And then I thought, “Well, no one else actually has quite tried to do what I’ve done in a synthetic way across different doctrines and, and different parts of what it means to be a Christian and to be a human being.” And so in the end, I did dare to write it because I thought there was a gap. But that would apply to almost everything. So that’s one thing they’ve got in common.
Um, I, I honestly don’t think that I’m often the most brilliant person in the room intellectually, but I can try to combine a sort of, you know demi-brilliance with a clarity of expression. That probably to some extent comes with being a preacher. I think that people who are used to preaching I mean, this is just a facile thing to say, but are used to trying to put things clearly.
Anyway, that maybe, maybe I can make up for my, um demi-brilliance by, you know, clarity of expression. That really matters to me because I believe the stuff and I think it’s important and transformatory, and I want to get it across. So I do, I do revise things a great deal in the writing. I, I can be doing a, you know, the eighth rewrite of a, of something and it, and the question that I am asking myself from the third rewrite on is, will someone misunderstand this? So I think putting yourself in the shoes of the reader is a crucial thing there.
Um, then I would say the very simple idea that all things come from God and that as, you know, St. Paul asks, “What do you have that you did not receive?” Um, and that God is the, you know, the Giver of all, of every good and perfect gift which is this idea of, of participation or partaking or receiving or the idea of, of gift. And that applies in right across life. So I do think that to know something is to receive the gift of the, of the truth of the thing that it communicates to you. And it’s called participation.
Um, and I eventually tried to write a whole book that looks at that from lots of different angles But it’s the, it’s the like the beat in the background of, of other things that I write. And I’ve, there’ve been a mixture of, of more theological academic books and then some that have been popular audience. Occasionally some of them somewhat practical. So I wrote a book with a palliative care physician about care of the dying. I’ve waded in a little bit into, well, so the, the book about the Sacraments, why Sacraments, or a book about what we’re doing when we bless things or people or places or endeavors.
I try to combine a conceptual analysis, sort of, well, what is this, you know, what is this thing, blessing? What’s the Bible got to say about it? How does it feature in the, in the history of, of Christian thought and so on? With a a pastoral and perhaps sometimes somewhat evangelistic angle of how can these material enacted, the, the things blessing or the sacraments, whatever, how can they speak of the Christian faith in a, in a enacted physical kind of way.
Um, since I was at Cambridge, I probably didn’t write that many practical things. I’ve written quite a lot of journalism, but the university, or maybe the government assessment system in the UK doesn’t really incentivize people to write popular things, because we get assessed every seven years and it’s they’re, they’re portioned a, a certain amount of money. Unless what you do really helps people, like, build different kinds of bridges or something like that. Um, there’s, there’s this thing called impact. So if you, if you do, your work’s mediated to the general public in such a way that it changes something and you can show it, then, then that gets incentivized.
But they tend to be kind of spectacular cases. If all you’re wanting to do is help, help the people of God, you know, live and, and pray in a, a, marginally more informed or whatever way, then maybe the government prizes don’t follow so much for that. Although I do think, I’ve, I’ve always thought that theology faculties can be really quite on the front foot about the fact that we are speaking to a huge community of faith.
And my PhD supervisor worked on philosophy and liturgy, Catherine Pickstock, and she influenced the Pope, Pope Benedict when he, when he brought back the ancient Western rite. That was, that was like a impact case study from heaven, because I think he even wrote a testimony and so the government could say, “Ah, yes, right. So the, the worshiping life of the largest religious community in the whole world was influenced by this, this book that she’d written.” So now we’re not all going to punch on that, you know, at that level, but I do think that actually we, we probably could be a bit more, on the front foot and, and what we do and the influence that we have actually does matter, and the university can, can celebrate that.
That was a bit of a tangent there, but get me back, bring me back to the question, which was about the book that I’ve written.
Todd Ream: Yeah, of all of the books that you have written then, is there one in which you felt that the argument that you made was most complete and you felt sort of at peace with that you’d brought it to a definitive conclusion? Whereas is there perhaps a book that you thought the conclusion to which you brought this book only opens invitations or opportunities or demands for further reflection?
Andrew Davison: Well, I hope everything’s more or less in the second camp, but not necessarily in the sense of being incomplete. I think the participation book I worked through pretty much all the topics in Christian theology. I worked through Aristotle’s four causes. I worked through the good, the beautiful, and the true and knowing and praying and ethics and all sorts of things. So I think that has a certain completeness to it.
I probably didn’t take sin and participation in sin quite seriously enough, and the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a whole chapter, although there are sections that certainly belong to the Holy Spirit. And that I got the opportunity to write a huge, long encyclopedia article for the wonderful new St. Andrew’s Encyclopedia of Theology. So if people want to read about participation, it’s there, it’s free it’s pretty comprehensive. So I was able, that was a good opportunity for me to bring or develop a couple of things that I thought were maybe a bit underdeveloped in the book. And the publisher is interested in a second edition at, at some stage. So in that sense, everything’s, nothing’s ever quite complete.
But I did feel that that was a bit like my nunc dimittis book. I could say, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,” because I, I had made a contribution, and it, it kind of, it, it kind of joined up. Then there was a question, was there a parallel question about what I thought was most open?
Todd Ream: Yeah. Yeah. Which book perhaps opened or left open the demand for, or the opportunity for further investigation or pressed forward? That one that may have been from you personally or other scholars who then read it and then took up the charge that maybe you’d offered?
Andrew Davison: So I would say, in a funny way, the participation book also fits in this category in as much as if it’s a study of how the prepositions from and into feature in Christian theology, I always thought there would be a good parallel volume, companion volume, I might call Mediation, which is about the prepositions through and by. So in a sense, and which I hope to write next year when I’ve got a sabbatical. So in that sense, it was complete-ish in its own way, but it had something that could go alongside it.
Another book I would say that’s sort of complete and incomplete at the same time is I wrote a sort of history or study of philosophy for theologians, which came from the fact that, if you’re Roman, Roman Catholic, you do two whole years of studying philosophy. If you’ve been trained in the Church of England, there’s really, it might come in here and there, but there’s no section dedicated to it. And I thought, even just for the sake of apologetics, it’s good to have that.
So both in Cambridge and then in other way around. Oxford first, then in Cambridge, I used to do optional, an optional course on history of philosophy, and that became a book, The Love of Wisdom. And in a way, it’s, it’s sort of finished because it was just such a ridiculous, audacious thing. Um, and I think I could only have done it as a young, as a young man. I wouldn’t, you know, dream of doing it now. Um, it was just my vision of the history of philosophy. And because I just can set it out on those terms, it just does what it does, and in that sense it’s complete.
In another sense, it’s the most incomplete of my books because, you know, my philosophy section and and, and my book’s that, that big. But that, that is a book I really do want to write a second edition of, in part because I ended it, about the turn of the millennium, and things seemed postmodern, and I think the climate, the intellectual climate has either intensified or moved on or something. I think there are, how long is it? 15 years since I wrote it. I think that there needs to be even just a, a new end to it to take things take things forward. So, that would be that.
One other thing I’d say is the first book I ever wrote with Alison Milbank on, on the parish system and what we call over here fresh expressions, so kind of para-parish new forms of, of Church life. It was my first book, and it’s definitely also my angriest one. Um, and that’s partly because I think I’ve, I’ve mellowed, and partly because we weren’t so much even just taking on a, a, a Church practice, but the report that, that launched it or solidified it.
I do just think to this day it was, it has all sorts of holes in it, and it’s not, I just don’t think it’s an impressive Church document. But I think it caused some heartache to people because they were doing these things to the best of their ability, trying to be evangelistic and maybe the tone of the book, which was more you know, set apart in my mind as being about a report. Um, you, you, you can say, “Well, I’m just criticizing a report about something,” but the people are doing the thing that the report’s about, you know, perfectly justly feel that you’re having a go at them.
And I, and I would criticize some of that movement and I think that there was, with hindsight, I, I still stand by of what we said. But that, there’s a book that feels incomplete I’m not, and I’m not talking about Alison’s chapters there, but about my own in, in tone. And now what I, what I’m happy about there is that over the years I’ve got to know people maybe from the more evangelical wing of the Church of England that had been my own who were trying these things out and they often find that I’m, you know, I’m less aggressive and ferocious and grumpy in person than they thought I would be from the book.
Todd Ream: Which you mellowed too, as you said, with age.
Andrew Davison: Oh, maybe or just become you know, pastorally aware of the implications of, of what you write.
Todd Ream: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. As we think about the complex arrangement of the callings that comprise your sense of vocation, I want to ask you to draw lines potentially between two books, one of which we’ve talked about at length already, and that is your book on “Participation in God.” But then the other is one of your more recent books, “Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine,” which was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.
In what ways do the questions that you’re seeking to ask, you know, relate to themselves in these books and are perhaps, you know, that there’s a, one can look at them on the shelf and think they may not have much in common with each other, but then when one opens their pages and the words rise up, that there is something that they share in terms of this larger argument that you’re seeking to make?
Andrew Davison: Well, they share in common that I’m a relatively unusual thing, that I’m just an old-fashioned systematic theologian. I do doctrine. I mean, I’m quite scientific and I have philosophical interests, but I think the last few decades, philosophy of religion and philosophical theology have almost been there’ve been more people working in those fields.
And now I’d say in political theology, all, all theology’s kind of goes in that direction and and, and many great things are done. But just being interested in God and sin and salvation and Christology and creation and the Church and the life of the world to come and things could look old-fashioned or something, you know, or maybe it’s just not, you know, where, where all the energy is.
So that’s what I do and I think it’s having a bit of a revival. And it characterizes quite a lot of the things that I write, that I’ll take a theme and I’ll look at it in the round as a systematic theologian. So the participation book and the blessing book and the astrobiology, which is to say life beyond earth book I quite often just work my way through Christian doctrines and take that as a different vantage point.
The book that I’m finishing at the moment, which is on the relation of doctrines, in a way does exactly that but in a kind of meta way, that it takes every doctrine and looks at that from the perspective of every other doctrine.
Um, so if you’ve got the dots in place, what do the lines between the dots look like? And how can taking the, how can thinking about each part of the creed in light of each of the other parts help us to understand it? So, I find that’s a tried and tested method. I’m sure I’ll use it again, and that would both the participation book and the astrobiology book have got that perspective.
Um, I am a, I hope, creative disciple of Thomas Aquinas in the sense that I’m not, not one of these people who thinks that he answers all the questions. Um, the great Anglican writer about Thomas from the last century, Eric Mascall, who’s buried in the churchyard of the cathedral just beyond my window he said, “I do not say Thomas has spoken, the matter is finished,” I say, or settled. I say, “Thomas has spoken, let the chase begin,” or, you know, let the, let the case begin. Except Mascall said it all in Latin. Um, and that’s my attitude too. So I don’t think that Thomas gives us a kind of magic book of answers, but I do think that both his method and just the breadth of the things that he writes about give us lots of jumping off places. And that will be, that will be obvious in both of those books and, and also pretty much everything else that I write.
But in other ways they’re, they’re somewhat different because one is more philosophical and the other is more at least, yeah, provoked by scientific questions.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. As our time unfortunately begins to become short, I want to turn our attention to thinking about how you then have come to perhaps even define the contours of the academic vocation as it’s exercised by theologians. What practices, if any, are necessary to nurture it, and what opportunities perhaps advance it? But then also in the age in which we live, what forces, if any, may threaten that sense of vocation?
Andrew Davison: Well, I think it’s somewhat country and church specific. And the Church of England has many weaknesses and problems, but it has known what it means for somebody to have a vocation as a priest and a scholar, and it still does. And that’s I, I helped set up a not-for-profit in the States ages ago now, a scholar-priest initiative, and it was about sort of advocacy within the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada to say, “These things do go together or they can do.” And to help the bishops think that, but also just to be a bit of a support network for people who were trying to hold those things together. So that’s just opened my eyes to the fact that the context matters.
Well, so in terms of you know, you asked about book recommendations. I’m going to do what I suspect many people do on your show, which is to say read Sertillanges’ book The Intellectual Life. Does that come up all the time?
Todd Ream: You’re the first to mention it formally in terms of conversations, but it does run through conversations I’ve had in other places. One of the probably three or four, you know, leading, you know, texts that get referenced.
Andrew Davison: He’s a Dominican, member of the Order of Preachers from the early 20th century. I think it was written in the ’20s. Um, it’s called The Intellectual Life. It was written in French. Um, it’s been translated and published by Catholic University of America. It was translated into English by the first woman ever to be professor at the University of Cork in Ireland. And it’s short, and it’s an absolute masterpiece, I think. And it’s 100, 100 years old almost.
I mean, obviously some things are dated. He talks about card indexes. He talks about the intellectual’s wife, which could seem, you know, tremendously backward, but actually it’s, it’s rather beautiful that he realizes that of vocations are often a shared shared thing, and that we have to support one another, and there’ll be someone else in your life, and they bear some of the burden. So we might want to change things around and talk about the intellectual’s husband as well. But in terms of the spousal thing, I think he’s, he’s really onto something. So I’ve, I’ve, I can happily say that Sertillanges will do a better job than I will.
Um, practices, he says you should try and get two, at least two-hour blocks. And he’d just say it’s about getting things into your calendar. I have a sort disordered calendar in as much as during the vacations I get quite a lot of time and during term time it can be very difficult to get blocks. But we have morning prayer pretty early here, and in that period between the end of morning prayer in the cathedral and the beginning of the day, that is a a good, good block. So the care and the curation of one’s calendar is really important.
So this is like a tip, I suppose. I like to have a good sense of all the things that I might be working on in the many years into the future. And everything that I read, I read with an eye to all the things that I might write on. And I have a little sort of code system that I just write letters or a few little brief words I could write or something in the margin with a circle around it. And then when I’ve finished a book, I might even compile my own index at the back of all the pages where I talk about each of the things that I’m interested in. And then doing a lot, you’re doing several research projects of, of, of reading all at the same time. So I heard that first here. That’s my recommendation.
I’d also say, for me, and I say this to my doctoral students, the plan stage is really important. Maybe we’re getting too much into the weeds here. But I think the plan is really important. Uh, and you save yourself a lot of time by working at it like at a skeletal level. So I, I like the kind of plans where you, you have your, your big things maybe, like, with capital Roman letters beforehand, and then you, you subdivide with numbers, and you subdivide those with A, B, and C. But like, like basically a skeleton.
And one of the good things about that is, if you then don’t have actually that much time to write on any particular occasion, you’ve planned it down to the paragraph. If all you’ve got time to do is write a couple of paragraphs, you know what you’re going to say. That might be more detail than you were after, but they’re my little tips.
Todd Ream: Yeah. No, that’s very helpful. Thank you. The virtues then that animate such a vocation what intellectual or moral virtues do you believe theologians need to cultivate in order to flourish in their vocation? And then perhaps what theological virtues do you believe they need to pray to receive also to flourish?
Andrew Davison: Well, I think something like humility or not feeling like you need to do everything, knowing what the one thing needful is. I suppose I come back to that thing that my books, as it happens, have almost always addressed what I thought was a gap or a need. So I, I mean, this is so much about temperament and personality, so I don’t sort of say that other people need to be like me or that it will come, some things come naturally to other, to people, and people, we have different skills and different vocations.
But I think knowing that you just have to plow a furrow and working out what that one furrow is and, and it’s enough to do that thing. And I suppose in, what I’m saying um, is approaching it as an act of service. Um, and in a, and in a maybe, I say it a funny kind of way, but it maybe is not that surprising, working out how you can do some good and trying to do it probably also as it brings in its train a like a recognition and, you know, honor and, and it being held up. Whereas, if people are trying to write for the sake of making a name or being noticed or what, then that almost always falls flat. So you kind of, um I don’t know whether that’s a very helpful thing to say, but just, just work out what good you can do um, and, and try and do it.
And that will also give you your topics but well, I mean, there are, there are lists of intellectual virtues. And you’ll find them in Thomas Aquinas amongst other people. I think the vices of our time, I mean, distraction is going to be a big one. And I think I mean, the Church has a real vocation and mission there, I think, to help its own people and the world to think about what it means not to be distracted.
I’d be interested to know, I must listen to some of your back issues about this bit of the, maybe you can do a digest of what people say about intellectual virtues and vices, because I’m not sure that I’m particularly adding very much there.
Todd Ream: Yeah. No, thank you. No, along the lines of much of what people have said, I mean, I, I think if there are two twin themes that often run when it comes to virtue and vice, it’s, you know, people, and I think this is largely driven, I mean, I think there is there’s a rationale here that proves true over time, but the age in which we live, I think, invites greater emphasis on focus on this particular virtue and this particular vice, and that is the virtue of humility, but also the vice of pride. And that we live caught too close to the vice of pride, not oftentimes even recognizing that we may be susceptible to living that out.
But I think, you know, humility is part of the pathway. It’s essential for the academic life to flourish, for us to recognize our finitude and to welcome others around us in relationships of intellectual friendship and what we can learn from them and what we can share with them.
Andrew Davison: Then I would definitely say that friendship is important. And in the world probably more generally, but certainly in theology, little that has happened that has been transformatory that hasn’t come out of the collaboration of a bunch of friends. Whether you think of the Cappadocian Fathers or the Oxford Movement or all sorts of evangelical things friendship I would put absolutely at the, at the heart of it.
And humility, and I think I maybe have used the word humility, but I brought it round to service because just sort of willing yourself to be humble is it may be is difficult enterprise. Whereas saying, “What can I do to be of service?” Which is about the other and not primarily about yourself, I think you get to humility through it and it’s probably more achievable.
Todd Ream: Absolutely.
Andrew Davison: One more thing, which is keep reading. Keep reading. So I find that when my time is pressured, because I love writing so much, it’s more the re-reading that goes than the writing and, and, you know, eventually your wells are going to get dry. And we live in an age wonderfully where the past is back on the table, and it’s going to be just such a provocative, there’s a wonderful essay by, by C.S. Lewis, you probably know it, called “On Reading Old Books” with a preface to a translation of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word.
It’s, it’s, it’s really worth reading. And he says, “Well, of course, they got all sorts of things wrong,” but, but usually it’s pretty obvious, you know, and we probably don’t fall into that. But also, we get lots of things wrong, and if we only read people from our own time, they probably get the same things wrong, and they can’t provoke us.
Whereas the people who writes from a whole different world or time are going to give us a perspective that we can’t get otherwise. So Certalange’s Intellectual Life and C.S. Lewis’ “On the Reading of Old Books.”
Todd Ream: Thank you. To close then again in what ways, if any, do you believe theologians can be of greater service to the Church perhaps in the years to come, but also the Church can be of greater service to theologians?
And perhaps some of this again is regional in terms of where one is on the globe, but also contextual by the Church, the Christian tradition in which one serves. But yeah, what ways do you see those two serving one another in more mutually affirming ways moving forward?
Andrew Davison: Well, one thing I’d like to say about the Church serving the theologian is not about, you know, knocking on the door and saying, “Give me, give me,” you know, “Help, help me out.” Um, what I want to point to a way is in, in which the Church just being the Church can already be a help to the theologian, which is we talked about distraction. Um, the discipline of prayer, I think should be at the heart of every, well, every Christian’s life, but certainly of every Christian theologian, practicing Christian theologian’s life and so I’d say saying morning and evening prayer, that’s a, that’s a resource that’s, that’s there for you and something that the Church offers the theologian.
I find that the exposure to the Bible morning and evening give quite of, I mean, you’ve got to just try and stop it becoming a, instrumentalize it as an intellectual thing, but quite often I come across a reading and I think, oh, that, that’s, that’s really the opening to a, a certain know, theological avenue to, to pursue.
And also preaching, I, I think I develop, I was preaching at Oriel College Chapel on Sunday night. I was preaching on John 3 John the Baptist, and something in a passage jumped out to me that will get into the second edition of the participation book, I think. And so it, it’s a wonderful opportunity to be exposed to the Bible and, and things, think things through.
What can the theologian offer the Church? I think we live in a really interesting period for that, which is whatever you say about the various surveys that have been carried out, and I’m sure there are, you know, there could be more additional empirical work that’s done, I find it difficult to deny that something is happening with a sort of return to the Church, especially amongst younger people. The college chapel I was preaching in on Sunday was full. The university church in Cambridge is full. St. Aldates across the road from us is full four times on a Sunday.
Um, I think, well, I mean, maybe not every single service, but I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be surprised. And I think what’s bringing people back and what they’re interested in is theologically quite dense deep, resourced Christian life. Um, so in that sense, the theologian is not only contributing to the pastoral life of the Church and the, like, the discipleship of the Christian, but it may be more than for a long time also to the missionary or evangelistic life of the Church.
These things kind of blend into one another and people, the Church has porous boundaries, and people start coming, and they might actually be, it might be the sermons as much as sort of evangelistic things that draw them in. I don’t want to divide the teaching life of the Church and the missionary life of the Church, absolutely. Um, but to say that people are reading the Fathers and Aquinas, of course they’re reading the Scriptures and it’s speaking to them, especially young people.
And I mean, if I was being a doomsayer or a naysayer, I might say the Church has got itself into a bit of a paradoxical situation where it’s played down theological education and in certain parts of the Church it’s become enslaved to a culture of the very flimsy paperback. Um, C.S. Lewis used to say that the most devotional reading he ever read was, you know, difficult works of the Greek Fathers and the medievals and, and things.
And I think we have sort of sold our birthright for a mess of pottage when it comes to depth of quite a lot of the material. So that’s just, you know, that’s the, that’s the tragic thing, that we’re maybe not always in a position to be able to give people what they’re being, being attracted to. But it’s there, and it’s, and it’s wonderfully accessible on the internet, and lots of, you know, fantastic editions of everything, and everything’s translated and wonderful footnotes and everything. So it’s, it’s all, it’s all there.
So I would, I would say it should be the beginning of a, of a wonderful age for taking the theology and the, the deep history of, of theology seriously because it’s so attractive to people. And, and, and our wider culture is so intellectually impoverished, that it really can speak, speak into them.
I mean, there was a time maybe when, when politicians and so on, they, they, they knew all the, the pagan Greek and Latin authors and, you know, where they, they kind of had hinterland there that didn’t necessarily need to be a Christian, but it’s not like there’s any, there are very really, there, there are other rival deep intellectual traditions.
I mean, I also happen to think the Christian one has the advantage of being profoundly true. But if you’re, if you’re after a kind of nuanced, putting yourself under judgment, seeing things from different sides tradition, the Church could really offer that and you’re not going to get it unfortunately in very many other places. So I’m, I’m maybe a natural optimist. I think probably a Christian should be, but I do, I do think that theology has a lot to offer the Church.
And maybe I’d, I’d say one of the things is preaching. I think that we haven’t put enough emphasis on preaching. We haven’t valued it enough. It’s been very easy for the very busy pastor to throw something together and that’s a wonderful, the primary way really for the, for the mediation of theology. And like I say, it can be quite evangelistic as well as being discipleship because people will come in and especially now, curious and sit at the back of the Church. So just if we all made incremental changes to the amount of time that we put aside for preaching, I think it really would be noticed and would pay off.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been Andrew Davison, Regius Professor of Divinity and Residentiary Great Canon of Christ Church, University of Oxford. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Andrew Davison: It’s been a pleasure.
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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.
