to get on with it!” I was left practically speechless by this, and after promising I would bring Mrs. Harpur and the two girls to tea at the college the following week, I mumbled a hasty farewell and walked on into the gathering night.
Brunt’s words came as a numbing shock. I thought about them over and over as I walked around Christ Church Meadow and listened as the melancholy bells of the college clocks and the churches, more per acre than in any other city on earth, counted out the passing time.
During the weeks that followed, the research went on as before, punctuated by breaks when I attended specific lectures to broaden my knowledge of the state of Biblical studies and of the latest thinking about the origins and nature of early Christianity. But the words of my former tutor kept sounding in my mind. As I thought about returning to the rush and pressure of a busy, growing parish, teaching one day a week at Wycliffe, and at the same time trying to pull my research together and begin to write the thesis, it began to sink in that I had really taken on a vastly tougher assignment than I had originally bargained for.
A letter soon afterwards from Rev. Dr. Leslie Hunt, Wycliffe’s principal, informed me that I had been appointed in absentia as Associate Professor of New Testament and Greek. I was to assume part-time duties in the fall of 1964, one year after my return from fulfilling the residence requirement in Oxford. My duties—and, not insignificantly, my salary—would be part-time to permit me to complete the D.Phil. It was expected I would augment my wage with an honorary appointment as assistant on weekends in one of the more well-to-do suburban parishes. Lodging for me and the family would be a large, drafty apartment in the college itself overlooking Hart House. The previous New Testament professor, Dr. Ward, had also lived there for some years during his tenure.
The prospect of the next few years—seemingly endless studies, insufficient funds with more debts already beginning to accrue, a family to provide for and, at the height of my vigour and ability, having to be in effect a sort of second-grade professor alongside the rest of a faculty who were all full professors—began to depress me. I seemed engaged in one of the world’s most solitary tasks, sitting for hours by myself in a chilly library surrounded by voices from the past. Oxford in the deep mid-winter is not, as already hinted, the most jocund spot on earth. The depression grew darker and I began to find it hard to concentrate. Sleep was difficult and troubled. Praying seemed to be in vain. In one way, it was a dark night of the soul. I became aware of a growing, pent-up anger. It was rage, but with an unknown cause or object. I began to blame myself for a lack of faith. But more prayers and attempts at piety—Bible reading and churchgoing—only seemed to make things worse.
Then one Sunday evening I went to a lecture called “A Christian Psychologist Speaks Out” at an Anglican church in the city centre. The speaker was Frank Lake, MD, a former counsellor to Christian missionaries in India (whoever would have thought that missionaries needed clinical counselling?). He impressed me so much and I was feeling caught in such a quandary that I went up to him afterwards and asked if it might be possible to see him sometime about my problem. We agreed on a time and place for a week later, and it proved to be one of the wisest steps I had taken in a very long time.
We met for two very lengthy conversations overall. Gently, but at the same time firmly, he helped me to bring to consciousness my undue anxiety to please my parents, especially my father. He helped me to see the sources of my anger, so long and so carefully concealed under a “nice guy” persona. He helped me to unpack all of my reasons for being back at Oxford and showed how some were noble, some were much less so, and how one stood out above all: “because my father said I should go.” Most helpfully, he said there is a place for right-directed rage. “You will be depressed because you are holding down so much anger,” he said. “That takes great energy. Get out in the country alone somewhere and shout it out. Allow yourself to be angry with God, too. He can take it!” He added that whatever I decided to do about my future, it was very clear that I had some big decisions to make.
I have necessarily condensed this episode, but it was a turning point in my life in so many ways. I felt gradually a great sense of release and of returning energies. It was as though I had been standing with a foot on the hose while at the same time hoping for water. I wrote home to my parents to say that I was going to accept the post at Wycliffe, after fulfilling my promise to the bishop of a full year back in the parish, but that I was reconsidering whether or not to pursue a D.Phil. My father’s dream had been of my being a staff member, a professor, at a leading evangelical place of higher learning. Well, he would have his dream, but no longer on his terms.
Experience has shown me that once you make the right decision, events have a way of coming together so as to confirm it, sometimes again and again. I was about to receive a couple of very clear signs of my need to change tack.
I had been attracted to Chrysostom in the first place because of my deep interest in a theology not of the academy but of the heart. He had the reputation of being the most eloquent preacher ever to grace a pulpit and of garnering packed crowds whenever he spoke. I wanted to discover and lay out for myself and others his power to connect. My thinking had been particularly influenced by a passage from Carl Jung that I had read while in the parish some months earlier. In his marvellous little book of essays already cited, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung speaks of the many hundreds of people from every race whom he had treated over the years. He writes: “Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over age thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life . . . Every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.” My interest was in finding ways of expressing such a “religious outlook” in terms people today could readily understand, in the same way that Chrysostom had touched the people of his own time. The year back at Oxford had helped to deepen my awareness that merely repeating the old evangelical dogmas was not the path to such an end.
Keeping all of this in mind, the reader can imagine my shock and sense of dismay at gradually discovering two things that somehow had been either wholly forgotten or not sufficiently well grasped by the various scholars whom I had consulted both before and after my return to Oxford. The first unpleasant surprise came one day while I was reading more of Chrysostom. I happened across his Discourses Against the Jews. They were given in 386 and 387 during his preaching days in Antioch, capital of Syria and one of the leading centres of Christian learning and teaching in the fourth century and beyond. There are eight sermons, and while much of the anti-Semitism in them is directed against Christians who were observing certain Jewish rituals and festivals, the racism against Jews and their religion is absolutely virulent and shameful. (Note that the term “anti-Semitism” only appeared in 1879, and so is a modern idea; but anti-Judaism and antipathy to Jews as a race predates Christianity itself.) To my shock and dismay, Jews are called pigs by Chrysostom and accused of drunkenness. All Jews are “Cains,” that is, murderers. He denounces Jews as lecherous, rapacious, “perfidious murderers of Christ.” God, he rants, “always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.” In another passage Chrysostom, the leading light of the emerging faith that was to conquer what was left of the Roman Empire and spread around the globe, declares: “The other disease which my tongue is called to cure is the most difficult . . . and what is the disease? The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews which are soon approaching.”
There is more, much more, some of it much worse than this. One is reminded of the disgraceful vituperation against Jews by the renowned Protestant reformer Martin Luther, in his Table Talk. Anyone interested in learning more about all of this can research it on the Internet, looking especially at “The Surprise of Finding Anti-Semitism in the Heart of the Early Church Fathers.”
My mind was reeling from the impact of my discovery. The next day I forsook the libraries and my customary work of translating Chrysostom in search of nuggets of wisdom and instead spent a day walking for miles out along the towpath by the Isis, north of the city. I paid scant
