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In the fifteenth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Oliver O’Donovan, Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. O’Donovan opens by discussing his involvement with the recently formed Global Faculty Initiative—an effort seeking to “integrate faith and scholarship for academics already heavily burdened with the demands of work and the whole of life.” While O’Donovan participates in a number of the group’s efforts, he took the lead on contributing the theology brief, “Sovereignty of Love,” to the project related to the applicability of a proper theological understanding of love across a wide array of disciplines. O’Donovan then shifts to discussing his own formation as a theologian and the impact of a myriad of teachers as different in temperament as Oxford’s Henry Chadwick and Princeton’s Paul Ramsey. O’Donovan began his career at the University of Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall, crossed the Atlantic to serve at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, and then re-crossed the Atlantic when appointed Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and Canon of Christ Church at Oxford. After a long return tenure at Oxford, O’Donovan explains why he believed he needed a change that led him to serve on the faculty at the University of Edinburgh for the final formal years of his career. O’Donovan then offers insights concerning the theological logic that arcs across his numerous books including his three-volume Ethics as Theology project as well as his recently published Gifford Lectures. He then concludes by discussing how the spirit of distrust that has driven a wedge between theologians and the clergy needs to be rectified and that doing so would be of great benefit to both the university and the Church.
- Oliver O’Donovan’s “The Sovereignty of Love” (Global Faculty Initiative)
- Oliver O’Donovan’s The Disappearance of Ethics (Eerdmans, 2024)
- Oliver O’Donovan’s Entering into Rest: Ethics as Theology, Volume III (Eerdmans, 2017)
- Oliver O’Donovan’s Finding and Seeking: Ethics as Theology, Volume II (Eerdmans, 2014)
- Oliver O’Donovan’s Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology, Volume I (Eerdmans, 2013)
- Oliver O’Donovan’s The Desire of Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
- Oliver O’Donovan’s Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (InterVarsity Press, 1986 / Eerdmans, 1994)
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 Oliver O’ Donovan, Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. Thank you for joining us.
Oliver O’Donovan: Glad to be here.
Todd Ream: I’d like to open our conversation by asking you about an article you recently contributed to the Global Faculty Initiative titled “The Sovereignty of Love.” In the introduction, you argue that “Loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and in turn, loving your neighbor as yourself is the means of making the 613 distinct commands found in the Torah a coherent moral law.” Would you please begin by unpacking the ways that contribution by Christ met the need of the rabbis of Christ’s day and that with which they were struggling?
Oliver O’Donovan: As you say this was a rabbinic discussion which Jesus joined in and we understand a great deal more about what He was trying to do in that famous statement I think if we see the various ways in which they tackled it. What we mean when we speak of morality or ethics is some kind of coherence between what we do with ourselves and what we think. Mere unthought motion is not morality, but neither is mere speculative thinking morality.
Thinking relates our here and now in which we have to live and act to other things, past presence, and as far as we can anticipate, future. Thought seeks coherence in reality—to see the world as a whole. And moral thought is seeking coherence between action and reality, including the reality of ourselves, what we are and the lines we have to live.
And so the rabbis .Whose task was to teach the Torah, often to non-Jewish proselytes, sought out a see this very diverse set of commands we find in those five books of the Old Testament as a coherence of life, that they saw their task as a hermeneutic task. And Jesus was very much identified, I think with that task.
Todd Ream: Would you then please unpack the ways that contribution by Christ meets a need that we’re struggling with to this day, and thus why you put this article into circulation?
Oliver O’Donovan: We are looking for coherence, not only coherence in what we do, but coherence in how we can live a life through what we do. This is fundamental to the task it seems to me of living a moral life as we undertake it. And if as Christians or indeed as Jews, we believe that this spoken word, these various spoken words, this tradition of teaching has a meaning to us, we have to engage with it and its coherence and discern it.
Now, what we are being given in the love command is a way of seeing the whole with all the variety of things we have to decide, all the variety of obligations we have to meet.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You then go on to argue in this article that love is an affective and directive attention to a good. In what ways is love affective, but in what ways is love also directive?
Oliver O’Donovan: Moral reasoning is a journey. It begins in one place. It ends in another place with an action or a series of actions. And too often, our thinking about ethics has been confused by the assumption that moral thinking is like a kind of instantaneous flash of light, light we actually have to make a journey to travel. And we travel very often from a reaction we have to the way a state of affairs is unfolded to a set of feelings we have about it, to unpack those feelings, analyze them, interpret them, seek guidance on them, relate them and the circumstance to everything else that is important around us. And then to deliberate on an action.
Affective and directive is trying to get the two poles that are involved in any piece of moral reasoning. I sometimes call them the reflective poll the deliberative poll, but you can find other names. There is the moment at which the thing hits us, and that’s morality too, being affected and the moment at which we have to exert ourselves.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In what ways then, if any, is love dependent upon a good and is a good dependent upon love? What kind of relationship then do they share, and how do we interpret that along this journey that you just referenced?
Oliver O’Donovan: We speak of the good in this very, very general way, as the most general term for the object of our love. We can’t love something without seeing some good in it. And it is the good in it, whatever that may be, that is drawing love out of us, that is giving us, drawing this affective attention from that we call love.
We conceive the good is distinct from ourselves. It in some sense, the good is always something we don’t have. In the sense of not possessing it, it’s not just an aspect of ourselves that we’re working out. It’s present in the world in some form and something to be discovered. We come upon something, a good new book, a good piece of music a good student, whatever it may be, we find it.
If the good were wholly imminent to us, wholly within us, then all our thoughts about action would be merely projections. This is what I am. Some people think that way, but in fact, that’s not doing justice to what we do when we think about what we should do and how we can live, which is meant to bring us in some sense, into connection with what is real, what is there, what is worthy of being responded to.
And that inability to believe in the good—the real good—is the source of moral cynicism. The good is there, we may say for us. Sometimes directly as an object of love, sometimes indirectly through its reverse image, as an evil that arouses horror or causes us to fear danger or something like that.
Todd Ream: What then, in your estimation, is the relationship that love and the law share?
Oliver O’Donovan: When we ask about our moral thinking and acting, if we are not going to be simply complacently accepting that whatever we think is right, we are asking about its truth. Truth of moral thinking is truth in a slightly different sense say than from the truth of a mathematical proposition or a fact of history. But it is truth. It is all the same. It is a correspondence of thought to reality. We might take that old weary and yet still at its own level, valid way of understanding truth, that there is some kind of a correspondence in it.
Love has to find its way. It has to explore its object. It has to discover a truth. Otherwise it’s going to remain at the level of feeling. It’s never going to feed our action. And it’s in love’s search for truth, that the law is so important to it because the law focuses realities in practical terms. It tells us not to get between a mother tiger and her young, for example. It tells us parenterally in a practical way that we can obey certain rather complex truths about the animal kingdom and certain species within the animal kingdom.
Law needs interpretation. Law is a proposition. All propositions need interpretation. It doesn’t communicate in a way that bypasses our interpretative intelligence, but it requires that. But whatever its authority, and there are different authorities attaching to different kinds of law, law offers us a window on how our action can engage with the real world. And hence, it’s a servant of love and essential way in which love can structure its reactions.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to now step back and ask a little bit about this article and your placement of it with the Global Faculty Initiative. And for audience members who are not familiar with it, it’s an initiative comprised of approximately 160 faculty members seeking to promote the integration of Christian faith and academic disciplines by bringing theologians into conversations with scholars across a wide spectrum of faculties in research universities worldwide.
Would you please share how you became interested in serving with this initiative, and what are your hopes for this article and for the initiative?
Oliver O’Donovan: That’s a broad question. The Global Faculty Initiative, as you say, is concerned to help us integrate our various academic disciplines with Christian faith and Christian understanding. And this is the project as it’s been conceived by Terry Halliday and Donald Hay. And this is something of course, to which a moralist is naturally very drawn. Other moral theologians and philosophers have played a useful part in the work of the GFI and I was simply glad at the opportunity to chip in and do a little bit with it as well because it’s a project as a whole, which it seems to me has to be encouraged.
And in your work you are reminded constantly in work for the GFI, of the importance of a wide interdisciplinary conversation, perhaps that’s what’s so interesting about it around topics which are often broadly theological or ethical. But on which there can be many complimentary angles from different branches of scholarship and research.
In the GFI and writing for it you can’t just sing solo. That’s in a sense why it’s so useful to theologians and philosophers who are used to sitting in their room and going off on their own thoughts and developing them for anyone interested here you are in conversation, and you have to listen to the course, to the responses. It’s a matter of fitting more carefully to the context of discussion in the Christian world, not just giving something to it, but all the time, taking from it at the same time, so that’s an exceedingly good discipline for moralists like me.
And often, gives a certain concreteness to ideas which may otherwise be abstract. When somebody comes back from what archeology says, oh, that just works out here. This is what it looks like on the archeological dig. That sort of thing is terribly helpful, enables a theologian and speakers, a theologian engaging in these conversations just to communicate much more focused and well.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. I would encourage all audience members to not only click on the link to your article, but also take time to look at the mission and purpose of the Global Faculty Initiative and consider other resources that are provided there. And I do hope and wish and pray for the best for their work in months and years to come.
I want to transition now to asking you about your own discernment of your vocation. You were a student at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College and at Princeton University, respectively studying with Henry Chadwick and Paul Ramsey. At what point did you discern the study of theology and in particular, moral theology would prove critical to how you understood your vocation?
Oliver O’Donovan: As I remember, I had the thought of being a moral theologian, at the same time as I had the thought of being a theologian as I was coming towards graduation in the classical curriculum, which I’d been taught. As a classical student, I came away from studies in Aristotle’s ethics with a sort of naive, but in the end, quite fruitful question in my mind.
So much intelligence, scholarly effort goes into clarifying this moral teaching of this ancient Greek. Should we not be able to do something similar with the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth?
Todd Ream: At what point in time then did you discern serving as an Anglican priest would also prove critical to how you understood vocation?
Oliver O’Donovan: That proved more difficult. I was always very attracted to the idea of the ministry, but I had to wrestle for a long time with Kierkegaard’s question about the difference between the Apostle and the genius. Was the scholar merely the genius who sat in his study and speculated while others believed, acted, and preached? That was, I think, a really difficult question for me.
At a certain point, could I seriously ask the Church to ordain me to read books clarify arguments and do things like that? Or was this simply unhelpfully confusing different genres of Christian existence.
And it took me some time to get through that question and to realize that to be a minister of the Word of God was essentially one calling. Whatever form it might take and whatever types of work it might lead to in whatever situation that the key element in the theological scholar, as in the preacher, has to be the service of the Word.
Todd Ream: What impact then did Henry Chadwick and Paul Ramsey have on your discernment process as a theologian and then perhaps also as a clergy person?
Oliver O’Donovan: Well, I was extremely fortunate with all my teachers. And before I came to know either Paul or Henry, I was stimulatingly taught. I was taught philosophy by Sir Anthony Kenny. I was taught New Testament by Leslie Houlden, and I owed a lot to Basil Mitchell to who introduced me, helped me begin to realize this idea I had of Christian ethics and what work in Christian ethics might be, and in the end, encouraged me to come on to work with Paul briefly in Princeton. So those had all helped to sort of shape my direction.
The experience of knowing Paul Ramsey was a very striking one. One was aware that one was in the presence of a very passionate man, a passionate campaigner, who never spared himself the risk of injury and suffered in the cause of the truth and thought more intensely as part of this great, passionate mission for the truth of the Gospel in action.
Here there was a completely committed scholar, well, one might say, use the term, committed with capital C. And working then going to work on Saint Augustine with Henry Chadwick was almost as great contrast as it could possibly be. Henry was the precise historian, very concerned about reading situations, reading details, making judicious judgements.
It was sometimes said of Henry Chadwick that he could never make up his mind about anything. He could always find more interesting arguments on both sides if he looked longer. And that was exactly I think the style. It just, just, just to be with him. He had a very hands off approach to supervision. If he thought you were doing all right, he believed his job was to let you do it. And then regaled you with comments about scholarship, how scholars proceeded, mistakes scholars made, where scholarship was to be found. And so all of which was like a kind of treasures trove of experience.
He was a, he was a teacher who shared his experience and his presence in the scholarly world to immense effect. So they were very different. I would like to think that in my own work and life, I’ve, I’ve taken something from both of them. It would be a pity because in their own ways, they were so remarkable.
Todd Ream: That’s wonderful. Thank you. You’ve mentioned also a couple of authors who had a significant impact on you, Kierkegaard, Aristotle, Augustine, others who have had an impact on your discernment process and how you came to understand yourself as a theologian and as a clergy person?
Oliver O’Donovan: I don’t know whether I want to and the particular question of discernment, I don’t know whether I want to add to those. The biggest single influence I think, intellectually on me was Augustine on whom I did my doctoral work. And one of those very important pieces of guidance that Henry Chadwick threw out without, as if we’re drawing attention to it. We’re just expecting you to pick it up.
Right at the beginning he said you know, nobody should ever do any work on any of the Church Fathers until he has read every single word of one of them. Well, that was my instruction to go away for six months and leave nothing unread in Saint Augustine. Now, when you expose yourself to a major thinker intensively like that, over a long period, you are shaped by it. And of course, it wasn’t just the questions I was bringing to Augustine then, but all the other things he had to offer that began to shape my thinking and develop my ideas. So he, I regard as purely foundational in, in giving my work its shape and its mandate.
But the work of Ramsey was particularly important to a certain stage in answering some important philosophical questions about action. I learned things from him that I think I’ve always been grateful for and gone on believing right through. So that has also been highly significant. Later on in life, one read other people who also gave one other directions.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For students then who are discerning a call to study theology and then perhaps also as a clergy person, what advice would you offer them?
Oliver O’Donovan: I would say this, that you need to grasp the unity of theology and ministry. If you are in a parish study, if you are in a college preach, find ways of taking what’s helpful and good in the pulpit, back into the classroom, back into the study, back to the desk, and working at those in another mode. Find ways of taking what has really been illuminating in study, recasting them so that they may be shared in the pulpit. The disciplines are complimentary the whole time, and to be able to unify one’s theological thought, one has to have both modes of operation or part of one’s own oneself.
I have known theologians who have made a point of saying, well, when I’m in the pulpit I say this, that and the other. When I’m in the lecture hall, I say the opposite. I can’t come to terms with the sort of divided mind that implies. That frightens me. I think both from the light it sheds on what could happen to the ministry and the light it sheds on what could happen to scholarship. It seems to me it’s not going to be good for either in the end. All the time one thinks of ministry, one thinks of scholarship, but what you have to think of is the scholar, minister, the person, the person God is appointed to do these things, is that person, I might put it like this, is that person going to be saved?
Todd Ream: Thank you. After serving at the University of Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall and the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, you were appointed the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and Canon of Christ Church at the University of Oxford. Would you describe the discernment process that led you back to Oxford then and to service in such capacity?
Oliver O’Donovan: Oh my generation had a very different experience of employment from the experiences that our successors have today. And I’ve often been ashamed at how easy certain kinds of decisions were made for me. It very simple. The main struggle I experienced in discerning my course early on was the struggle of principle about the ministry and scholarship that I just tried to describe to you. And after that, it was a matter of receiving instruction.
One, a letter came and said, there is this position. We think you are going to be in it. End of story. Not quite the end of story because of course you have to go away and pray. You have to know that this isn’t Satan at the other end of the letter, even if the letter comes from a very respected, very much admired principle of a college when the letter came from. The Prime Minister saying she would like to give my name forward to the Queen to appoint me as Regius Professor, naturally I have to spend more time in prayer because prime ministers are more ambiguous characters and you never know what’s been going on there.
But anyway, for me, there were the opportunities just open. And the question was, all the time for me, are these opportunities to take for the Gospel’s sake? And those key moves seem to be I don’t know that I can describe it any differently than that.
Todd Ream: In what ways did the discernment of serving as a Regius Professor at the University of Oxford come with certain responsibilities in your mind to the past, but also certain responsibilities to the future?
Oliver O’Donovan: Yes, I was given this chair in Oxford, though I was on the whole a bit young for it, because it was a very strong feeling in certain circles just at that time that Britain, especially England, needed a tradition of teaching Christian ethics, which was well-established in America, but had no exact equivalent over here, unless perhaps in the Scottish universities.
And though nobody ever said so, I was in effect charged with trying to build up the subject in a chair which had been in recent years pretty marginal to the life of the theology faculty and had even once or twice been slated for abolition. There were those who said it would be a shame to get rid of an opportunity really to do something in Christian ethics. Can we find someone who could simply put his back into it, I think is what they had in mind. And I think that what I did there was governed always by a sense of obligation, that sign of trust in the invitation imposed on me.
On the one hand, I was delightfully free because there were no established patterns and no established colleagues in my field. So what I said was taught as Christian ethics was taught as Christian ethics. And I answered one might say to nobody. And I only sort of later on realized what an exceptional privilege that was. On the other, I knew I had to provide an approach that would mesh well with the character of theology as it was taught in Oxford at that time that would fit in with the faculty, have synergy, and so on.
And that was the reason I think for or one reason for the emphasis on both on historical work that makes, I think Christian ethics has taught in Oxford distinctive even to this day compared with many American schools. But another concern, which was also very important at the time, was to build a real relationship between Christian ethics and Biblical studies, which had been the core backbone of everything Oxford did.
Anyway, trying to create the shape was my major concern over the time I was there. And I, I think the shape has obviously been improved on by my successes. It would be sad if it hadn’t been. Nevertheless, I think it is held as a basis for them to work with satisfactorily and to make something out of.
Todd Ream: Thank you. After serving in Oxford for 24 years, you were appointed Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at the University of Edinburgh, a role which you then filled for six years. In what ways did you discern that the opportunities serving at Edinburgh in such a capacity may have differed from the opportunities of serving in Oxford?
Oliver O’Donovan: It was obviously very different. I mean, the chief difference, you might say, was my age. I was now six years from retirement. And you, American viewers will never understand that in Britain at that time, the university convention was that the date of your retirement was fixed. On the day of your appointment, you were, you were appointed to such and such a date and that that was it. And I was at an end of career phase. I’d been in Oxford for 25 years, more or less. I had certainly done something.
The burdens of being a senior figure, a repository of institutional memory in a place like that, the, the, the old guy to whom people turn to say, can you just sort this out, and so on, well, I think beginning to weigh on me and I, I was aware of the attractiveness and perhaps importance of just trying something new before I retired, getting a fresh injection of new demands, new energies, and it turned out various things had to be looked at at that time. Possibilities, things I might have been asked to do. But it just turned out that the chair in Edinburgh came up and needed someone.
So for six years I went there. And I’ve never regretted it. It was, you know, I meant, I think it was a very, people, people looked ascar at the time and they said, why is he leaving Oxford? What’s wrong with Oxford? There is a certain sort of mythic imagination about the universities, their statuses, all this kind of thing. No one walks away from a place like that without a reason. No, the reason was 25 years. That was it, you know? And the need, the need for some fresh imagination, which Edinburgh gave me. I mean, so I got what I wanted.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to ask you now about some of your books that you produced and prepared over the course of your career. You’re the author and editor of approximately 20 books with some of the most widely noted titles being, for example, your three volume ethics as theology series, Self, World, and Time, Finding and Seeking, and Entering into Rest, and then there’s Resurrection and Moral Order and The Desire of Nations. When you look at the arc of your work as a whole, what questions, if any, would you contend to find it?
Oliver O’Donovan: I am an ethical realist. That is something, it’s easier, much easier to be today than it was I think when I wrote Resurrection and Moral Order. But I want to describe something called evangelical ethics, which is a moral realism that responds to the Gospel about Jesus Christ. The reality is it tends to, therefore, it is not simply the quasi metaphysical reality of recurrent relations and forms and an ordered universe, but the narrative reality of what God has done for mankind in history.
So the themes of creation and redemption have been prominent right through, handled in different ways and sometimes under different names. But it’s one of the junction points at which I’ve constantly come back to try and think some more. Methodologically, I’ve sought to understand as ethics as a hermeneutic discipline, a discipline that thinks with its texts, scriptural exposition has always been very important to my work. It’s not just a matter of framing a moral question.
We have to decide first, let’s say, whether AI in schools is a good idea and then finding arguments, and perhaps being very ingenious and finding arguments even out of the distant Christian tradition or even out of Scripture. Here is an argument from Jeff Bezos. Here is an argument from Martin Luther. Here is an argument from Saint Paul. That kind of thing. It’s not just like that. It’s a question of learning how to tell the story of created human reason and redemption from chaos as it has been told us in Scripture explored by commentators on Scripture to intelligent in ways that can shed a light that falls on our particular practical situation with its challenges.
And then thirdly, my work is about what we are doing when we engage in moral reasoning. The point from which, which I made a little earlier, that moral reasoning is a journey. It’s always got a beginning and an end. We are in time, what we do is in time and has to be begun and brought to completion. And understanding the better understanding, better the shape that a good moral argument or a good moral reason may have in our minds in that light. So those, I think, are three things that I’ve constantly come back.
No doubt could mention others. I think I’m held responsible for one or two notorious political propositions, but those three as foundational to my thought about moral ment ethics.
Todd Ream: Thank you. If I may ask then, about one of the other hallmarks of your work, it’s your commitment to ecumenical dialogue and relations, particularly dialogue between Anglicans, Catholics, and the Orthodox. Would you describe the process that led you to believe that those relations were part of your calling and why they became important in terms of how you committed your time and energy as a scholar and clergy person?
Oliver O’Donovan: Yes, I came to maturity to adulthood at what I suppose was the high watermark of the ecumenical movement in the 20th century when it was moving fast and effectively and, was one had to make up one’s mind about it, I think as a Christian. And whether this was part of God’s work for us in our generation, and my mind was fairly easily made up that it was I can see, I could see no great divine hand creating a multitude of churches that can’t get on together. That seems to me, does not praise God.
The churches God has brought into existence have got a terrific way to go before they really can sing praises together. That’s obvious. But that direction had to be the one one looked. Then when I was in Canada I was appointed to the National Anglican Catholic Dialogue. This was a simply an opportunity and one, I think not, you know, I was very glad to have and to seize, particularly I think because this work had attracted some very excellent colleagues in Canada. It was one of the things that Canada was actually very good at at that point. It had an outward looking Roman Catholic community, very diverse far from sort of hide bound in any way. They had a great deal of self-confidence and as it were, prepared to take on all comers. And that was a good thing.
And then there were at that time one or two devoted and extremely intelligent Anglican leaders theological leaders who could always in dialogue give us good as they got. So this was a very constructive exercise and highly educational for me. From that, I got transferred to the International Anglican, Roman Catholic Dialogue for about seven years because they needed a moral theologian. And that was interesting and in some ways a more challenging task. Canadians can get on together once they’ve made up their mind that they need to.
I think international dialogues are more difficult. There are so many angles coming in of a, of a different kind, but it was still very constructive and to my mind, very important. I spent a little time also on the Orthodox dialogue. I never got to understand it or know it as well as I would’ve liked. I think I needed longer but in the end had to make a choice as to whether I was going to stick with the work with Catholics, which I had known and got a certain way with or was to start from the beginning again, trying to master a great deal about Orthodox theology that I didn’t know. And took the former route.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You’ve been invited to deliver a number of lectures over the course of your career, but in 2021, you delivered the Gifford Lectures, the six-part series of lectures that were eventually published as The Disappearance of Ethics. Drawing from that work then, in what ways do you believe moral theology is in crisis today and to where you would point individuals, especially members of younger generations, where would you point them to look for hope?
Oliver O’Donovan: That’s a very sort of interesting and searching question. The Disappearance of Ethics begins with a little reflection on the situation John Henry Newman found himself in in Dublin when it was intended to have the National University of Ireland, founded as a university with no theology, and the theologian in charge of it was troubled. And he wrote, as we know, this very eloquent series of lectures on the idea of the university, which raises the question of what happens in a university when the range of knowledge and learning is not comprehensively addressed. It’s left out. And that was the way he faced the question.
Now, starting from there, I began to ask myself, what were the factors that led ethics to be left out of theology factors? Not infrequently. In different ways left out of philosophy factors too often by processes of manipulation and transformation and posed in this book a rather different account of what the source of the reason, the source of the problem was, which had to do with difficulties in conceiving ethics and its task. That meant that important aspects of the task and the, and the questions were allowed to drop out of sight by ethicists themselves.
I was reflecting, I suppose after 30 years, trying to represent the subject in a theological faculty on the very curious position it occupied in the academic spectrum divided between philosophy and theology on the one hand. While the academic spectrum itself was constructed mainly out of descriptive sciences, and you are expected, as it were, to have a little slice of objective reality in which you are the specialist, you come back with all the information and, and interpret the information, which is something ethics has no information of that kind.
It can’t define itself in that way, and that’s why it’s a puzzle to those who work closest to it, especially in a theological tradition that had come to be dominated by biblical studies that construed themselves in remarkable obedience to Heidegger as historical and cultural studies about the past, that was of course what Heidegger thought theology in the university should be strictly a historical discipline. It shouldn’t do anything that was left to a philosophy to do. Now such a biblical studies can, of course, not really comprehend ethics except as ancient sociology. This is the way the communities behaved. This is what they thought and so on.
But there are other problems, not only one’s colleagues. One student who approached the study of ethics from every conceivable angle and with every conceivable aim, often without any direct preparation in the discipline. Some looking to it to offer some definite compensation for what they regard as a deficit in their educational experience. It’s going to provide something relevant, by which they mean all these descriptive sciences that just cull, go over them.
They may be frustrated then when we ask them to read texts, particularly ancient texts. Think about what they meant, is that relevant? Is it more relevant than reading Thucydides? Some look on ethics to solve some quite specific questions that they’ve come—with a moral question that’s troubled them for a long time. Let’s say the treatment of animals or the nuclear bomb. And they are going to be frustrated that instead of us sitting down and giving them concrete information that will support their view of the treatment of animals, or perhaps make them revise it. We are being asked to think about arguments about something completely different and much more abstract.
So in the course of teaching ethics, I’ve always been conscious of the puzzles and sometimes the disappointments that students have formed in their exercise. Fortunately, not all students are disappointed. In the end, we find the others who see, get through the problems, make the thing really positive. Our culture, however, tells us that ethical judgments ought to be quick and immediate, and they’re not. They never. Not even if you have a Damascus road experience and a converge, that’s just the beginning of what you’ve got to think about then. It just reorients your thoughts and you’ve got a big task still ahead.
Ethical judgments are as long as life and the disappointments people have in studying ethics are rather like some of the disappointments that life presents to with things don’t turn out to be as straight and clear as they set out thinking they’re going to be. So students starting on this mighty enterprise, I would say remember the parable of the treasure in the field. The treasure’s there, all right. But you’ve got to purchase the field and that is pricey in today’s costs and then you have to dig.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation today, I want to ask you as a theologian, how you came to understand the academic vocation. You’ve talked about certain qualities, commitments, characteristics, and practices that have defined it for you, but sort of in the big picture sense, what would you point to as sort of the animating features of the academic vocation as you sought to understand it and exercise it?
Oliver O’Donovan: I sum it up, I think to myself in terms of the relation between inquiry and communication, asking the question, sharing the processes and the answers. In theology, we are called both to search and to communicate the Word of God.
I was once at one of those events which universities invent in order to teach their teachers how to teach. So suddenly at a certain point in my career, our university became very anxious about the fact that all its famous teachers were unable to teach and needed to be taught, to taught, taught to teach. So we were all sent off to sit and be taught to teach.
And of that session, I retain only just one illuminating moment. And that was when the instructor said to us, could you just imagine to yourself for a moment, what is your picture of yourself in teaching? What do you picture yourself as doing? And the most bizarre picture came jumping into my mind of something I had been watching down the river Thames, which was a mother duck with newborn fledglings all around her, standing on the edge of the river, plunging into the river, turning around and facing them, and quacking very angrily at them until they tumbled down off the back and were in the water with her and started paddling like that.
It seemed to me an excellent communication of what teaching might be. Namely, you are going to do some swimming. You take the little ones with you and they swim with you. That’s what it amounts to. You take them with you and you share with them the interests, the questions and the methods as they come. It is really a sort of, I suppose, an apprenticeship model.
Now, I know, I’m sure not all teaching can be done like that. There’s so much information has to be shared, et cetera, et cetera. But in the long run, what my teachers did for me and what I’ve sort of tried to do for students and I think not nearly as well as they did, but it sort of let me near them, while they ask questions about Saint Augustine or try to work out reasonings about the existence of God or whatever it might be. They let me near them, they let me share this enterprise, to join in with stupid questions and take that into the process as it were.
So the task of asking, searching, the lonely task of the scholar with the book, finding things out is all the time being brought into a kind of dynamic relation with a sharing operation. You are sharing what you are doing, with those who can do it, perhaps in the end much better than you can initially, perhaps not quite so well. But that’s part of the exercise.
When these time and motion studies came in at university, suddenly became fanatical about a bit later on, you had to fill in on these bureaucratic forms. I expect it’s the same in America. How many hours per week you are giving to teaching. How many hours per week you are giving to research. In other words, your life is divided down the middle into these two insulated compartments. That seems to me to be the destruction of the academic vocation. Complete destruction of it. That’s not what it’s like. It’s not what it should be, though.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For theologians then, what intellectual and moral virtues do you believe are most important to cultivate? And then also too, what vices you believe are most important to confront and about which to be vigilant?
Oliver O’Donovan: Well, a theologian is a human being. The theologian is a believer, and perhaps the most important virtues to cultivate are those which are set before. All human beings and all believers—begin with faith, hope, and love. And then when you’ve finished with them, you can go on to some special ones for theologians.
But the special virtues, the ones that serve this vocation are not that vocation are in the end less important. And I think that too is something we always have to wrestle with. An elderly theologian like myself is bound to think, I suppose that being ready for death when it comes is more important than being up to date with the latest literature. That just counts for more. And if one could take a little bit of that point of view earlier on in life too, it’s maybe not a bad idea.
Still, there are practices specific to the specific task of being a theologian, of which the most important is a constant living familiarity with the Scriptures that allow them to feed thought and a loyal involvement in worship and the mission of the Church. These are virtues rather than skills, but there are skills too that we may think are of some importance, things like a basic competence in the language of the texts and appreciation of the broad contours of the Christian tradition of teaching. These things are also naturally skilled that one has to bring rather than virtues.
It wouldn’t be a good idea if all theologians were linguists or historians, that then distorts theology, it prevents it fulfilling itself, but a theologian who is neither a linguist nor a historian, does need to be aware of the value of these contributions and be willing to learn enough just to be able to appreciate what they contribute. The virtue, and I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it, of taking the trouble to learn enough of what you can’t know everything about.
Todd Ream: Wow.
Oliver O’Donovan: That is a theological, a theologian’s virtue.
There’s always a temptation among theologians that come to the vices to defend oneself by drawing the limits of one’s interests as tightly as the limits of one’s competence. So that one has no interest in things one is not very, very good at because the thing one is most afraid of is making a mistake when you get beyond the limits of your perfect competence.
Now a theologian has to be prepared to make that mistake. The theologian needs the, I don’t know whether it’s courage, I don’t know whether it’s humility, to risk a mistake in a good cause when finding out about something he needs to know about that he hasn’t been trained as a specialist. And if that, that is what is it, what creates some of the ethos of theology as opposed, prevents it becoming a kind of mere coalition of precise skills addresses.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As we close our conversation then today, I want to ask you as a theologian and a clergy person, in what ways do you believe that theologians can be of greater service to the Church? And in what ways do you believe the Church may be able to be of greater service to theologians?
Oliver O’Donovan: I think we need to trust one another a little bit more. Being a theologian in Church, you become quite used to being looked slightly askance, particularly by your colleagues in the parish who know that you do not have to carry the burdens they do and probably do not really appreciate what burdens that may well be there that you have to carry. And I think there just needs to be a lot more understanding by the theologians of what it’s like in the parish and by the parish clergy of what it’s like being student. And I say if you, if you are in a parish study. If you are in a college, preach. It’s very simple.
I knew a very, very good moral theologian, and a, and a wonderful man who always used to devote his summer when he might very reasonably have taken on with him, gone to look at the antiquities on Crete or something like that who, who used to go every year simply to take over an island parish, very remote and do the ordinary work for parish priest for six weeks or so. Each year, while the parish priest took a holiday and went or went off to look at the ruins on Crete because the parish priest lived in great remoteness, rarely saw a city, needed to get out of the place, and the theologian reckoned that he could help him.
But what he picked up there about the life of parishes inevitably enriched what he wrote. I mean, it simply made it more weighty, more real, more authentic. It was a proper contribution to his theological labors and not just, not just a kind helping out of a neighbor, which it was also, so we need to think about those things.
Then we need to think about the way church administrations use their theologians. Some churches have this in their DNA when there’s a problem, call on the theologians to sort it out. Some obviously don’t and would call on anybody else rather than their theologians to sort it out. Churches do need theology if they’re to be spared when they speak in public the terrible fate of opening their mouths corporately talking of the absolute nonsense. I mean, there is a terrible risk of what happens when a Church speaks publicly and corporately, if it’s not being properly prepared. Now, theologians know all about speaking nonsense because they speak the whole time. They’re always speaking nonsense. So they have to learn to criticize themselves, to get the nonsense out, to see where they’ve stumbled into saying something stupid and, and, and readjust it.
This is part of theologian skills and church leaders need it and they’ve been very busy doing other things, doing their administration, doing their pastoral work. They need help there and they had better realize they need help. That’s part of what I think I would want to say. Good church leadership is the word of the bishop, is to know when to bring the theologians into the discussion, not on their own, not as a sort of mighty panel pronouncing on things, but in debate with other members of the church from other skills and other concerns to try and sort the province out and to try and bear a witness that sounds coherent and true to the Gospel in the public world.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Oliver O’ Donovan, Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Oliver O’Donovan: Thank you for having me.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at seven Christian Scholars reviews 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.
