In addition to being a lecturer in Biblical studies at the London School of Theology – where he taught me Greek nearly 10 years ago! – Tim has been a minister in the Baptist church for over three decades.
Taking on both of these roles, and with some views that may not sit comfortably with everyone in the pews, Tim shares his own journey into faith and the ministry, as well as how he navigates the tension between academia and life in the Church.
What was your journey to becoming a Christian?
I was a teenager, and passing my O levels was the be-all and end-all. I got a crop of O Levels and then A Levels were next. After that it would be a degree. I began to think: when I am I going to reach the point when I’ve… arrived? I could see it constantly receding into the distance. About this time my dad, a successful commercial photographer, split up from my mum, and he was ill; from being quite a wealthy man, he went to living in a small flat in London, burning his furniture on the fire to stay warm over Christmas. I had previously thought I was going to be like him, but now I didn’t want to go there, because look at what he had, and he lost it!
I was studying Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence for my A Levels, and there’s a character in it called Gerald. He’s asked, ‘What do you live for?’ and he says, ‘I suppose I live to work, to produce something… apart from that, I live because I am living.’ That was the best answer I could give as well. At the end of the book, Gerald dies – plot spoiler – and I thought: oh my word, I really need to figure out who I am, where I’m going, and what I’m doing.
Around then, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount really resonated with me about not achieving some goal in the future, but considering how you live now: the person that you are is what matters. I was later invited to a church service by the minister, and, after his sermon, I went forward at a service and said that I think I want to become a Christian. That was a major changing point for me; my purpose to live for Jesus made a significant difference to who I was and my self-acceptance. I had never really liked myself very much, but the verse in Galatians – It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me – was liberating. I don’t need to feel ashamed or look down anymore; if Christ is in me, I’m okay.
Were your family also Christian?
My sister, fifteen years older than me, was the first Christian in our family after quite a dramatic conversion. She prayed for the rest of us, and, one after the other, lots of us became Christians. The change in my dad was significant. The first time I saw him after he became a Christian, he said, ‘I want to have a sign on my wall, saying: talk to people, because people are important.’ That was so unlike him; he’d always been a very self-opinionated man.
However, my family was taken aback when I said that I had a call to ministry. Being a Christian is ok, but entering the ministry? That’s going a little bit overboard.
When did you have that calling?
It must have happened fairly soon after I became a Christian; I was still studying for my A Levels. Luis Palau, an Argentinean evangelist, wrote a book called The Moment to Shout, which is an exposition on the book of Joshua. The last three chapters spoke really powerfully to me and I remember praying, ‘God, are you saying anything to me through this?’ It was as vivid as if there were a voice in the room, saying, ‘I don’t want you to go to university.’ That was quite unwelcome. But it was the ultimate test: if God is real, I can’t get away from the idea that he’s just spoken to me, so either I have to act on that, or I might as well pack the whole thing in. I had no rest until I’d written down: I will not go. Okay, God, it’s over to you.
I was having a chat with one of my teachers who said, ‘I expect you’ll be going to university next year?’ I said that I probably wouldn’t, and he asked me why. I came up with every excuse I could think of, but in the end I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to make of this, but I’m a Christian, and I feel that God has told me not to, but I don’t know why.’ He paused and said, ‘You won’t have known this, but I’m a Christian as well, so I will back you up and make sure that no one gives you a hard time over this.’ That was the first step: okay, God’s got this then.
If God is real, I can’t get away from the idea that he’s just spoken to me, so either I have to act on that, or I might as well pack the whole thing in.
Lots of people – and they didn’t know the quandary I was in – started to say to me, ‘Have you thought of going into the ministry? I can just see you wearing a dog collar!’ I got fed up of this in the end, and prayed,‘God, this isn’t something I want to do, but if this is you, I need to know tonight.’ It was a Sunday afternoon, and, as I sat through the evening service: nothing. I thought I’d got away with it. But during coffee afterwards, the youth pastor turned and said, ‘You’ve got a gift as a teacher.’ That was such a coincidence, but my prayer was answered. It’s like everything fell into place, and so that set my course.
In the time since, are there any notable areas that you’ve changed in terms of practice or belief?
When I went to Oxford and started studying at Master’s level, I was conflicted by the whole business of how you read scripture: if it’s the inspired word of God, what do you do if some of the letters are pseudonymous? If Paul didn’t write Timothy and Titus, where does that leave me? Getting my head around the critical side of study was hard to cope with. I worked it through in the end, and one of the reasons I’m a Baptist minister is that we Baptists believe that Christ is the sole and absolute authority as revealed in Scriptures; we believe the Bible because and inasmuch as it points to Christ. You can’t just say, ‘This is authoritative because it’s in the Bible’; we say ‘This is authoritative because it speaks of Christ.’ That was liberating for me, and it makes a big difference.
Do you find that studying the biblical languages gives you extra insight as you read the text?
Any translation you read is necessarily an interpretation; you are reading what someone tells you the text means. There is often more ambiguity in the original, and that opens the door to fresh interpretations. It also gives you an idea of the original cultural context, which can lead to a deeper appreciation of the text. If you’re going to study with integrity, being able to do so with the original languages is important.
For example, in Genesis 2.15: ‘The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.’ In the Hebrew, the first verb is ābad ‘to serve’, so the original meaning is actually ‘to protect and serve,’ like the LAPD! The whole idea you get is that it’s our job to serve creation and to guard it; that’s what we’re called to do in our relationship with the world. Ecology is important, and I only got that from looking beyond the English translation.
With your understanding of scripture, how do you approach parts of the Bible where there are conflicting accounts or manuscript errors?
There is no such thing as uninterpreted history. With my students, we compare what Matthew, Luke, Mark and Paul say about Jesus’ word over the cup at the last supper: ‘This is my blood of the covenant’ in one, ‘This is my blood of the covenant,which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins,’ in another, or ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood…’; he only said it once, so which is right? Actually, they are all interpretations.
That’s my take on the command to wipe out the Canaanites: Moses said it, but God didn’t.
History for me is always inaccessible; we have no direct access to what actually happened at all. We can’t be sure what Jesus said, but each of the gospel writers has interpreted and drawn out the significance of whatever he did say. It’s not a word-for-word verbatim account, rather, the way that they tell the story draws out the meaning of his words. I would say we trust the people’s interpretation because they’re guided by the Spirit of God; they are doing what God laid on their hearts.
However, I have issues with Deuteronomy, because essentially it’s Moses saying to the people: this is what God told me on the mountain. It’s in Deuteronomy principally that you get the command to wipe out the Canaanites: you are to destroy them, every mother, child, and animal. God doesn’t actually say that to Moses in Exodus; Moses is going beyond what God said. That’s my take on the command to wipe out the Canaanites: Moses said it, but God didn’t.
Do you think there are any areas in the New Testament where there is a genuine tension or contradiction?
Reconciling Acts and Paul’s letters. I’m fairly sure that Luke is working with traditions in Acts and drawing them all together into a sequence, so there are clear tensions between the order of events in what we read and what actually happened. It all unravels from the letter in Acts 15 which was sent to Antioch, Syria and Cilicia, because if that letter’s genuine, then it is addressed to those regions where Paul worked before his first missionary journey (Galatians 1:21; Acts 11:25-26). I’m still working this through to some extent, but it leads me to think that I have to totally readdress the whole sequence of Acts, and it drastically affects how I relate Acts to Paul's letters and the chronology of his life.
There are tensions between John and the synoptics: did the Last Supper happen on the night of Passover or the day before? (Again, it’s a minor thing, does it really matter?) I think John’s probably right that Jesus was crucified on the day that the Passover lambs were slaughtered, which means it wasn’t a Passover meal. However, there’s attraction there: because it happened near Passover, it’s been interpreted as a Passover meal in the synoptic accounts. So there are always historical tensions in bits and pieces like that.
In terms of textual criticism, there’s nothing there that really rocks the boat. Lots of people in my church get upset if I say that Mark’s gospel ends at chapter 16 verse 8, as the following verses weren’t in the original. But what do you lose if they’re not there? Nothing essential.
On the other hand, Gordon Fee argues that the bit about women keeping silent in church in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is actually an interpolation, because some manuscripts include these verses in a different place, and that’s one of the tell-tale signs that they could have been a gloss written in the margin which found its way into the main text. If that’s so, and if Paul did not write the Pastoral letters, that has huge implications for our understanding of how he viewed women.
Do you find that there are many similar tensions between your academic approach and your pastoral role? Do you have to be careful how you preach on certain topics?
If I’m being controversial, I tend to be cautious. I’ll say: Some people think this; there are a range of options here; you can read it this way; you can understand it that way. I’m not pushing a certain line, I’m just saying that there are a variety of things on the table and give people the opportunity to decide what they think.
One time I talked about the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, saying that you can’t take it as a picture of the afterlife – it’s clearly poetic. Lazarus dies and angels carry him to Abraham’s bosom? That doesn’t happen when people die. But someone came up to me afterwards, pointed to Jude 9, and said, ‘Yes, it does!’ But I think you have to look for signs for whether something is meant to be historical and literal, or not. Rob Bell has talked about reading the Bible literately rather than literally, reading the text as it is intended to be read, and not imposing a rigid, historical, conservative evangelical framework on it.
I said, ‘She’s a woman, she’s a Canaanite, he’s not going to help her; that looks pretty racist to me!’ People didn’t like that at all.
The difficulty is that if you’re doing a sermon, there’s not the time to appropriately address some issues. I upset a number of people last year when I looked at Jesus refusing to heal the Canaanite woman’s daughter, where he says about not giving the children’s bread to the dogs. I said, ‘She’s a woman, she’s a Canaanite, he’s not going to help her; that looks pretty racist to me!’ People didn’t like that at all. I like to stick my neck out and be a little provocative sometimes, but normally I’d be far more cautious and hide behind the options available.
I’ve seen people give that interpretation of Jesus and the Canaanite woman before and get a fairly hostile response!
Jesus is sinless and racism is sinful, that’s why people get a hang up on it. It’s big. But historically, did Jesus never do a single thing wrong? If you read John’s gospel, he lied to his brothers about not going up to the feast! In the whole business of innocence and righteousness, he died an innocent man. He was falsely accused and died on the cross for a crime he didn’t commit. You can extrapolate from that to the fact that as the sinless son of God he does take away the sin of the world. So, as a theologian, I am convinced that, unlike any of us, Jesus was completely and utterly devoted to doing God's will. But historically, I don’t think you can get much beyond the fact that he died as an innocent victim of injustice. History and theology are in tension there a little bit.
If you were to give a sermon to the Church in the west, is there anything you’d want to address?
I am deeply grieved by our inability to talk sensitively and understandingly to each other about issues around sexuality. My own views have shifted; I’m not convinced that all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage is inherently sinful. But I think the big sin is the vitriol and the antagonism, and the way in which the church is tearing itself apart over this. That does far more damage. So my sermon would be to call people to find ways of talking about this, to welcome each other, to listen to and understand each other, and to accept one another. To recognise: yes, my faith is different to yours, but that doesn’t mean that yours is invalid. That’s the big challenge for the Church today.