With my retirement, I thought it might be helpful to provide a short summary of who I am, my life in the church, how I became theologian, and my teaching career. If you find it interesting, enjoy! If not, that’s fine too.

I cannot remember a time when I did not have faith in Jesus Christ. Evangelical (or fundamentalist) Christianity goes back several generations on both sides of my family, although the name we preferred was “born-again” Christian, or, simply, “Christian.” When I was five years old, I “asked Jesus to come into my heart” and forgive my sins. I was baptized at the age of seven. Luther used to say, “Remember your baptism!” I am glad that I can remember mine.

My family went to church Sunday mornings and evenings and to Wednesday night prayer meetings. There were occasional week-long revival meetings, and Vacation Bible School in the summers. I used to set up my toy box as a pulpit, and preach sermons to my younger sister and her dolls. I read the Bible constantly. I used to worry that my school-mates were not “saved,” and felt guilty that I did not “witness” to them, i.e., tell them about Jesus.

Aside from a certain amount of guilt, my Baptist upbringing gave me a spirituality focused on a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, a sense that Christians had to be different from other folks, a knowledge and love of the Scriptures, a regular practice of daily prayer, and a way of responding to certain types of worship. Hymns like “Amazing Grace” can still give me goose bumps.

At the age of sixteen, I attended a church camp retreat where I “came under conviction” (to use the revivalist terminology) that God was calling me to be a pastor. From this point on, I assumed as a matter of course (as did my family, friends, and pastor) that I was going to be a “preacher-boy.” This decision marked a definite transition in my Christian experience. I think it was the time at which I first affirmed an adult Christian faith.

Throughout my high school years, I was constantly involved in church activities. I was president of my church youth group. I shared tracts with people in the city park. I earned a reputation in high school for being a “Jesus Freak.” (This was at the height of the “Jesus Movement.”) I attended a Campus Crusade for Christ evangelism conference with 100,000 other teenagers in Dallas, TX called “Explo’ 72,” where I heard Billy Graham preach.

But I also began a gradual intellectual and spiritual awakening. I discovered the writings of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, and their literary circle – George MacDonald, Charles Williams, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton. During my senior year in high school, I somehow found time to read through Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and the central writings of Lewis’s literary corpus, both fiction and non-fiction.

During my college years, I attended a small evangelical liberal arts college. My sophomore year in college, I took a required introductory philosophy course, and discovered that I loved philosophy. I majored in philosophy, which led me to discover not only the classical pagan philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Plato), but also the western Catholic philosophical and theological tradition, especially Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. I read modern Thomists like Etienne Gilson, and Eric L. Mascall. I also discovered the twentieth century theological tradition, especially the critical orthodoxy of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Niebuhr brothers, but also Wolfhart Pannenberg (whom I especially liked at that time), and the “biblical theology” of figures like Walther Eichrodt, John Bright, Oscar Cullmann, and Joachim Jeremias. A small group of like-minded friends and I used to spend hours discussing philosophy and theology (along with a couple of influential faculty members), both inside and outside regular classroom hours.

Unfortunately, the enthusiasm with which my companions and I embraced the broadening of our intellectual horizons met with an equally strong distrust from many of the students and faculty at the college. Aristotle and Plato were pagans. Catholics were heretics! All Protestants to the theological left of free church evangelical orthodoxy were lumped together as liberal apostates. No distinctions were made between the Nicene orthodoxy of a Barth or a Pannenberg and the liberal Protestantism of a Rudolf Bultmann or a Paul Tillich. One faculty member complained that some students at the college used to be good “Bible-believing” Christians, but now carried Aristotle under their arms rather than the Bible. Some of our fellow students began to pray for our salvation.

At the same time, I was becoming frustrated with the pietism and revivalism of my home church. The focus on the moment of conversion (the “born again” experience) left little concern for subsequent spiritual development. Supposedly I had reached the peak of my Christian experience at the age of five when I asked Jesus to come into my heart. Occasional “revivals” offered no more than an invitation to return to the excitement of this moment. The Lord’s Supper was not considered a sacrament but a mere symbol, was practiced infrequently, and, even then, was primarily a time to reflect on one’s own sinfulness, never a time of joy. The sacrament was not a sacrament, and couldn’t do anything good for you. However, if you took it unworthily, it could kill you. There was also a fascination with the book of Revelation as providing a detailed blueprint for the imminent end of the world. Many of my fellow evangelicals believed that Jesus would return and take all true Christians away with him in the “rapture” during our life-time (certainly before the end of the twentieth century), leaving false Christians (Catholics and main-line Protestants) and unbelievers to suffer through the horrors of the Great Tribulation under the Antichrist. I no longer believed that this was what the book of Revelation was about.

I finally left the Baptists, but I was not sure where I would end up. I did not view myself as having abandoned my evangelical heritage, but was fed up with “cultural” evangelicalism. During my last few years at college, I had decided to pursue a PhD in theology, with the intent of becoming a college professor. I wanted to share with other students the same joy I had met in discovering the classic Christian intellectual tradition. I did not (and do not) perceive this as an abandonment of the “vocation” I first had as a teenager, but as a change of focus. I believed that serving God in the classroom was as much a fulfillment of my vocation as serving God in the pulpit.

After graduation, I decided to study for an MA in theology at St. Thomas Seminary (Roman Catholic) in Denver. While there, I tried to sort out what I believed, and where I belonged. I wrestled with the issues that separated me from my Catholic colleagues – the relation between scripture and tradition, justification by faith, grace and the sacraments. I discovered the importance of balancing the soteriologically oriented, and individualistic faith of my evangelical upbringing with a more incarnational and sacramental yet still Christocentric approach. I was introduced to the works of contemporary Catholic theologians, e.g., Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner, and discovered a more historical approach to theology. I continued to read Aquinas and Barth. I took courses on church fathers and medieval mystics. I began to discover the Catholic roots of the Protestant Reformation in the late medieval period. Reading Catholic mystics helped me develop more of a respect for the Pietist forerunners of my own evangelical upbringing as I read people like Johann Arndt and Philipp Spener and John Wesley, and saw them in continuity with medieval piety.

I visited several Protestant churches, but found the evangelical churches to be like what I’d left, while the mainline churches I visited were lacking in theological substance and confessional commitment. (I might have discovered something different if I’d visited more confessional denominations, but for some reason I waded in the shallow end of the free church tradition – American Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists.) I thought seriously about becoming a Roman Catholic. I weighed an offer to live for awhile in a Franciscan friary. For a short time, I attended a Bible study led by an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal priest, who led us through the Book of Wisdom (my first encounter with the “Apocrypha”), and who liked C. S. Lewis.

At the end of my time in seminary, I became an Anglican on theological grounds. Several factors helped form this decision:

First was the book The Orthodox Evangelicals, edited by Robert Webber and Donald Bloesch, consisting of essays in response to The Chicago Call of 1977. The Chicago Call was a statement by forty-three evangelical leaders calling for evangelicals to rediscover their historic roots, not only in the Protestant Reformation, but in the pre-Reformation Catholic church. This book paralleled my own concerns about the historical shallowness of modern American evangelicalism, but also showed me that there were other evangelicals who thought like I did. A few years later, Webber published Common Roots and Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail, books that I also read. Webber would go on to become a leading figure in a “catholic evangelical” ressourcement movement, and when I later taught at Trinity School for Ministry, it would become the location of the Robert Webber Center.

I had developed a theological interest in the relation between the medieval and Reformation church. The Anglican Church seemed to me to have gotten the Reformation more or less right. I wanted to belong to a church that was “Catholic,” that was in continuity with the church to which the fathers, Augustine and Aquinas, and the medieval mystics belonged, yet still recognized the need for reform and renewal – semper reformanda. My Reformation studies had convinced me that both the Council of Trent and the continental Protestants (especially Reformed and Free Church) had been lopsided in their attempts at reform because both were reactionary, each side wrongly overemphasizing points denied by the other, while neglecting other sides of catholic and biblical orthodoxy maintained by the other. I could see no biblical or theological grounds for papal infallibility or many of the other Roman Catholic “extras” not found in scripture or the tradition of the early church. Yet too much of Protestantism had simply cut itself off entirely from the Pre-Reformation heritage. Anglicanism seemed to be a theological tradition that allowed one to learn from both Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth.

Through liturgical and historical texts I was reading at the time, I became convinced that weekly celebration of the Eucharist was at the heart of early Christian worship – understood as the means by which the risen Jesus Christ became truly present to the gathered community, sharing with them his body and blood, and transforming the church into his body. I needed to belong to a church that celebrated the Eucharist every Sunday, and affirmed the real presence.

Anglicanism was also the church of C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, and E. L. Mascall, whom I admired greatly. There were at this time a number of evangelicals who were making the pilgrimage to Canterbury (Robert Webber), but some who became Episcopalians (Tom Howard, Sheldon Vanauken, Peter Gilchrist, the New Oxford Review) later went on to Rome or Constantinople.

I also admired the local Episcopal bishop, William Frey, who had taken a courageous stance against a repressive regime when he had been bishop in Guatemala, and had been forced out of the country at gun point. I had seen Frey exercise good judgment and charity toward a couple of local Episcopal churches when they had broken away to form an Anglo-Catholic schism over opposition to the 1979 BCP and the ordination of women. I started attending a local Episcopal church, and was confirmed by Bishop Frey on May 16, 1982. A few years later (1990), Bishop Frey became the Dean President of what was then called Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry.

The year after my confirmation, I set off for the University of Notre Dame with the intention of becoming a lay theologian. While at Notre Dame, I complemented my previous largely Protestant and Roman Catholic education by introducing myself to the English and Anglican tradition of theology and spirituality. I read the English Mystics: Julian of Norwich, The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton; post-Reformation Anglican writers: Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel, Richard Hooker, John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Joseph Butler, and modern Anglican theologians: Charles Gore, Frank Weston, Edward Hoskyns, Michael Ramsey, C. F. D. Moule, more Mascall, Stephen Neill, Stephen Sykes. I studied theology in an ecumenical context, not only with the Roman Catholic faculty, but also with Protestants like Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder, and occasional visiting Anglicans like Paul Bradshaw and Kenneth Stevenson.

Although I focused on Systematic and Historical Theology, I was also a Liturgy Minor and Notre Dame was at the center of what was then called the Liturgical Renewal Movement. I took courses on Patristic Liturgy, Reformation Liturgies, and ecumenical sacramental theology. (I have since taught a seminar course at Trinity on the writings of authors in the Liturgical Renewal movement.) While at Notre Dame, I was especially influenced by my dissertation director David Burrell, who taught me to read Thomas Aquinas not as a philosopher but as a theologian for whom the doctrine of creation was central. The Jesuit Edward Kilmartin taught me how to think about liturgical theology from an ecumenical perspective. My interest in ecumenism led me to discover the writings of Thomas F. Torrance, who now joined Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth as one of my key theological interlocutors. Stanley Hauerwas introduced me to the notion of a the church as an alternative community of character in contrast to the surrounding modernist and post-modernist culture. Burrell and Hauerwas had both studied at Yale, and through them, I was introduced to the approach of what was then called the “Yale School” of theology. Finally, while at Notre Dame, I was introduced to additional Roman Catholic theologians associated with what was called the Ressourcement movement: Yves Congar, Avery Dulles, Jean Danielou, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar.

In 1988, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where I researched and wrote my dissertation on Jacob Arminius (a process that took several years), while I worked full-time as an administrator at Harvard University. (Another good thing that happened during this period was that I married my wife Jennie.) My dissertation was the first work ever to look at Arminius’s theology as a whole, and I argued not only that Arminius had been influenced by Thomas Aquinas, but that the doctrines of creation, redemption, and grace were at the heart of his theology – not a concern about free will.

I found being an Episcopalian difficult in the diocese of Massachusetts. Almost everywhere I went, I encountered a kind of liturgical unitarianism, accompanied by a theology that reduced the gospel to social activism. I attended a historic church in Harvard Square for a year only finally to leave when I heard the priest announce from the pulpit on Easter Sunday that the good news of Christianity was that we did not have to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. For awhile, I attended a small local parish where I became Jr. Warden, but the parish split when Bishop Tom Shaw worked with the search committee to install a lesbian rector who moved into the rectory with her lover. The following spring, she invited Dominic Crossan (of the Jesus Seminar, and who claimed that the bones of Jesus were eaten by dogs) as a Lenten speaker. Toward the end of my time in Massachusetts, I attended Church of the Advent, a historic Anglo-Catholic parish in downtown Boston.

After finishing my dissertation, my job search yielded no results. Every fall I would send out resumes, and every spring the rejection letters would arrive in the mailbox. In the mid-1990s, I met Al Kimel, an Episcopal priest and editor of The Baltimore Declaration, through email. Al introduced me via email to Peter Moore, Dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, and Dean Moore asked me to write a chapter for an upcoming book he was editing as a correction to the theology of Bishop John Spong. In response to The Baltimore Declaration, several orthodox Episcopal theologians had produced a book on the future of orthodoxy in the Episcopal Church, and several of these same scholars also wrote chapters for Peter Moore’s book.

Contributors to both books belonged to an organization called SEAD (Scholarly Engagement with Anglican Doctrine), and at a conference sponsored by the (theologically liberal) Conference of Anglican Theologians, I met David Scott, President of SEAD, who invited me to attend SEAD’s annual conference in Charleston, SC. At that first conference I attended, I met Bishop Fitzsimmons Allison and SEAD stalwarts Ephraim Radner, George Sumner, Rusty Reno, Christopher Seitz, Philip Turner (then Dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale), and, finally, in person, Al Kimel and Kendall Harmon, creator of the popular blog TitusOneNine. There were still Episcopalians in the world who believed the gospel, and many of these folks became my friends.

I continued to attend SEAD Conferences, and wrote an essay that appeared in a SEAD book on the Nicene Creed. (I later expanded this essay in the book I would write on atonement theology.) I taught adjunct courses in Religion and Theology at Harvard University and Assumption College in Worcester, MA.

Shortly afterwards, my wife Jennie and I moved to Connecticut where Jennie took courses at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. I was Visiting Professor for a semester in the Religion Department at Trinity College, Hartford. While at SEAD Conferences, I met several priests who lived in CT and NY state, and we formed a local Northeastern branch of SEAD, where we met on a monthly basis to present papers, to pray, and to encourage one another in our faith and scholarship. I found in the clergy and laity of SEAD the theological and spiritual encouragement that had been lacking during my years in Massachusetts.

Through these monthly SEAD meetings, I became friends with the Rev. Dr. Leander Harding, then rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church, Stamford, CT. Shortly afterwards, Leander was hired to teach Pastoral Theology at Trinity School for Ministry, and Leander encouraged me to apply to teach theology at Trinity. I interviewed unsuccessfully twice for positions at Trinity, but after Dean President Paul Zahl resigned unexpectedly at the end of the spring semester of 2007, I was offered a one year position of Visiting Professor to teach courses in theology, ethics, and church history. The following year, I was hired as Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Ethics at Trinity, and, after eighteen years, I have decided that it is time to retire.

Rather than provide a chronological account of all that happened during almost two decades, the following is a topical summary of some of the more important things.

Faculty

While I had felt isolated in both the diocese of Massachusetts and Connecticut, I discovered in the faculty at Trinity colleagues who shared a vision of Anglicanism similar to my own. Leander Harding (whom I already knew) taught Pastoral Theology, and had received his PhD from Boston College. The Rev. Martha Giltinan co-taught Pastoral Theology, and had been a parish priest in Massachusetts. Grant LeMarquand, New Testament and Missions Professor, had studied under N.T. Wright, had been a missionary in Africa, and would later become Anglican Bishop of the Horn of Africa. Rod Whitacre, who taught NT, had been on Trinity’s faculty almost since the beginnings of the school. Don Collett and Phil Harold were (like myself) newer members of the faculty. Don had studied OT under Chris Seitz at St. Andrew’s, Scotland, and Phil had studied Church History with Martin Marty at the University of Chicago. Wes Hill, who was hired a little later, taught NT, and became a close friend.

More important, I found myself in the midst of a group of people who enjoyed each others’ company, and we became fast friends. Martha Giltinan, who was single, had a gift for hospitality, and often invited groups of us to her large old house to eat (she called herself a “foodie”) and enjoy one another’s company. Rod connected with students through teaching ukelele during lunch times, led a monthly “roots jam” at the church I attended, and led a contemplative prayer group.

Music was a way of forming community. In addition to Rod’s ukelele, Phil played piano and accordion, Don played flatpick guitar, Grant played drums, Leander played “blues” harmonica. Some of the faculty formed a jazz band. Not to be left out, I bought a mandolin, which I still play almost every day, if not all that well. When we would gather at the annual faculty retreat in Western Virginia, we would sit around the porch and sing and play music together for hours. I would consider the faculty friendships I formed at that time to have been the occasion of some of the happiest times of my life.

With the exception of Don Collett, all of the faculty with whom I formed such close friendships during my first years at Trinity are no longer here. Sadly, Martha Giltinan died of cancer ten years ago, and Rod Whitacre also died of complications from kidney disease a couple of years ago. Phil Harold retired early; Grant LeMarquand went on to became Bishop of the Horn of Africa, returned to Trinity for a few years, but recently retired to Canada. Leander Harding returned to the pulpit, and has spent the last few years as the Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral in Albany, New York.

There have been many new friends, of course. Joel Scandrett teaches Systematic Theology and wrote a book with me. David Ney is a former student of Ephraim Radner and teaches Church History/Historical Theology. Amy Schifren was the first Dean President of the North American Lutheran Seminary, taught liturgy and homiletics, and became a close friend (now retired). Our alliance with the Lutheran Seminary brought us David Yeago (now retired), and more recently David Luy and Alex Pierce. Jacob Rodriguez, who knew Grant LeMarquand in Africa, replaced Grant as New Testament professor, and Brad Roderick is now Missions Professor. I love these folks, but I dearly miss the friends who first welcomed me to Trinity.

Students

My early years at Trinity were marked by a “perfect storm” of catastrophes. The financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 led to a huge drop in the number of students, combined with fewer donations. The mid-2000s saw the split in the Episcopal Church that led to the formation of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009, with splits occurring not only in the local diocese of Pittsburgh, but also in dioceses that had provided many of Trinity’s students. Trinity did its best to negotiate the split, providing a resource for the newly founded ACNA while continuing to welcome orthodox Episcopal students. Nonetheless, the school never recovered from the loss of Episcopal students, and the students from the ACNA come with the understanding that they will be serving in a mission setting of church plants, not being able to depend on traditional parishes with large endowments.

The students that I have come to know in my years at Trinity tend not to fit either into the profiles of the historic mainline denominations nor of the historic low church evangelicalism or the charismatic “renewal movement” that characterized Trinity in its early years, but neither are they typical of the “born again” revivalist evangelicalism of my own upbringing. Many of them have backgrounds similar to mine and some of our faculty. Growing up in “free church,” revivalist, or charismatic evangelical homes, they at some point found themselves dissatisfied with the lack of theological and historical depth in American evangelicalism, and have found in Anglicanism a liturgical, sacramental, and historically based church. They have undergraduate degrees from places like Wheaton College or Moody Bible Institute. Others are local and may not be Anglican at all, but come to Trinity because it has a reputation as an orthodox seminary in Western Pennsylvania. They often discover Anglicanism while here. Some had no religious upbringing whatsoever and became Christians as adults. Some (fewer now than when I first arrived) are middle-aged adults who experienced a call to ordination later in life.

Student life at my years at Trinity has been characterized by informality and the building of friendships I never knew in either my undergraduate or graduate education. Faculty and students get to know each other and friendships continue well past graduation. I keep in touch with (now middle aged) students who took the very first course I ever taught at Trinity in the fall of 2007. Many of them are priests. Some of them are now bishops. A few have gone on to earn PhDs and become professors themselves.

The last few years have marked the shift to a post-COVID seminary life. Online teaching, which was in its primitive beginnings when I first came to Trinity, now accounts for the majority of students. While we were on the verge of outgrowing our space the year before COVID hit, we took a serious drop following the pandemic, and while the numbers are growing again, residential numbers still fall considerably short of what they were even a decade ago.

Teaching

Although I received my doctorate from the largest Roman Catholic University in the United States and studied under well known “research” faculty, I never had a desire to teach at a “big name” school like Notre Dame, Yale, Princeton, or Duke, or even a large evangelical school like Fuller or Wheaton. My hope was always to teach at a small college or seminary like the places I had done my undergraduate and seminary work, and Trinity has been such a place. Because we are so small, specialization has always been out of the question. I have taught the introductory theology courses for years as well the introductory Christian Ethics (now Moral Theology) course, as well as from time to time a Social Ethics course addressing specific ethical issues: the family, church abuse (only recently), consumerism, politics, the environment. From time to time I teach Christian Apologetics, but I do not teach it in the way in which I studied it as an undergraduate. I teach apologetics with the understanding that my students live in a post-modern and post-Christian setting, and my position is that Systematic Theology is the best apologetics. I focus on the heart of Christian faith – creation, redemption, incarnation, grace, and ecclesiology – and try to help students understand how historic Christian faith addresses contemporary culture. Certainly I look at current historical, moral, and scientific challenges to Christian faith – but I do so within a Trinitarian and Christocentric perspective addressing a contemporary post-Enlightenment context.

From time to time, I have been able to teach seminar courses in which I am able to concentrate on my own specific interests. I have more than once taught a course in which students did a comparative reading of the theologies of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth. A course on readings in liturgical theology echoes my own training at Notre Dame, but also has developed into a new course on Prayer Book Theology. A seminar course on close reading of classic texts in Christology eventually evolved into a text on the Atonement that I wrote and published with Joel Scandrett.

Publications

There are faculty who teach, and there are faculty who do research. It is hard to do both, and at a small seminary like Trinity, just keeping the place going takes a lot of time away from study and research. Still, I have been able to get some writing done. I’ve published a handful of scholarly articles and given some talks, but I am quite proud of the two books I have published in recent years. Neither of the books was my own idea. More than ten years ago, my dear friend Martha Giltinan, who had been first an Episcopal priest and then an Anglican priest in the ACNA, and was from the beginning a member of the ACNA’s new Prayer Book committee, approached me to ask that I write a series of essays defending the ordination of women. I was reluctant at first, but wrote the essays, and eventually Baylor University Press published them as a book. Unfortunately, Martha died before the essays were finished, so she never knew about the book. Despite criticism from those in the ACNA opposed to women’s ordination, the book has been well reviewed and I have received much appreciation not only from women clergy, but even from bishops in the ACNA.

The second is the book Modeling Atonement that I wrote with Joel Scandrett. This book grew out of courses that Joel and I taught independently of one another – he at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and I at Trinity. Although the ordination book has received more attention, I actually consider the Atonement book to be more at the heart of my theological vision. I would actually prefer to be known for that book more than for my views on the ordination of women.

Finally, one of the reasons I intend to retire is that I want to have time to write more. Specifically, I have hundreds of pages of lecture notes from my courses on Systematic Theology, and there is (in my opinion) currently no good text book on Anglican Systematic Theology. Similarly, my favorite course to teach is a history and introduction to The Anglican Way of Theology. Despite its significance as the third largest church outside the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and the largest church springing from the Protestant Reformation, there is no good introduction to the history of Anglican Theology. (Compare this to material concerning Lutheranism or the Reformed tradition). I have even more ideas, but for now, my goal is to get this material written and published.