Professor Oliver O'Donovan mentored me in Toronto and Oxford. I am indebted to him and his wife, Dr. Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, for all I am able to do in my ministry. Professor O'Donovan taught me three courses at Wycliffe, Toronto: Introduction to Theolog

Recovering a Sense of Place

By Michael Nai-Chiu Poon

First published in The Living Church (livingchurch.org)

Issue of April 22, 2012

Professor Oliver O’Donovan mentored me in Toronto and Oxford. I am indebted to him and his wife, Dr. Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, for all I am able to do in my ministry. Professor O’Donovan taught me three courses at Wycliffe, Toronto: “Introduction to Theology,” Autumn 1977; “Philosophical Issues in Christian Ethics,” Spring 1979; and “The Church,” Spring 1980. Lecture notes and course essays, with O’Donovan’s page-long handwritten comments, are among my precious belongings after 30 years and many moves to the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore. Sentimentality is not my reason for keeping them. Instead, I have revisited them on many occasions, each time with deepening understanding, for discerning present tasks, in lands and in situations with which O’Donovan had little personal contact.

O’Donovan arrived in Toronto in 1977, the year that Wycliffe College celebrated its centenary, from his previous work at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. This step across the Atlantic to the rising land, “true North strong and free,” as the Canadian national anthem describes it, was imbued with wider significance. The end of the 1970s was a time of profound global changes within North American societies and the worldwide Anglican family of churches.

The Anglican Communion, too, moved “out into the open sea,” as the Anglican Consultative Council said in its report from London, Ontario, in 1978. The Communion was shifting from scattered extra-provincial churches centred on England and America into a family of autonomous churches worldwide. The Primates’ Meeting, the fourth and final Instrument of Communion, came into being in 1978.

The social and political ramifications of these global changes are still unfolding around us. They were not clear, at least to me, then. I was a young naturalised ethnic Chinese Canadian who became Anglican in my adopted country and was about to return to Asia after my studies in Wycliffe. Looking back, what was of lasting worth in the theological education I received? My introduction to theology in the first semester, in a course on modern theology and ethics, was a rude awakening.

As a science graduate, I could not make sense of the philosophical concepts and debates in Western theology. O’Donovan’s “Introduction to Theology” became my lifeline. The class text-study on Origen, Athanasius, Augustine and Anselm was especially memorable. It was the route through which I was led to rise beyond present theological debates, to discover the roots of Christianity, and to reconnect what were previously disjointed ideas. There was no turning back. I wound up replacing most history and modern theology courses with those on the Church fathers, which the dean of studies generously allowed, albeit with a resigned sigh!

I recall this first encounter with O’Donovan at some length to show the ways he formed young theological students. In 2007, he kindly agreed to help the Global South Anglican Formation and Education Task Force draft a “Catechism in Outline.” These words on the purposes and methodology of theological education were his:

The clergy must be ready to think theologically for themselves. ... All of them have to be able to go on thinking and preaching, faithfully to the Gospel, for perhaps forty years after they leave college. Some of them will have to take the lead in criticizing and interpreting movements of thought that have not yet even come on the horizon. And they have to be able to resource the theological needs of tomorrow’s church.

To equip students to face deep changes “that have not yet even come on the horizon,” O’Donovan himself underwent significant intellectual development; and with that, he matured from an Oxford don to a teacher of the Church universal. He recalled these changes in his book On the Thirty-Nine Articles, based on lectures at Wycliffe that he published in 1986, four years after returning to Oxford:

In England we were all Anglicans without trying to be. When I moved to Toronto and began to teach Canadians from a minority Anglican church in an overtly ecumenical context, I discovered to my dismay that I could not communicate what seemed to me self-evident universal priorities to students who were searching for a sense of denominational identity. It became clear to me that if nobody offered them a theological understanding of what it was to be an Anglican, they would look for their Anglican identity in the most foolish and untheological places, never discovering, perhaps, that being an Anglican was nothing other than a mode of being a Christian.

Students sitting in O’Donovan’s lectures in the Toronto years would have felt how their professor was making this adjustment — though most of us often came out of his class in awe, not knowing how to respond, as Jesus’ disciples at the Transfiguration. During the Wycliffe years, O’Donovan was reshaping his thought and presentation. He moved from teaching Christianity and its Anglican expressions in a Church of England context, still steeped in the Christendom legacy, to explaining Christianity in situations where the intelligibility of ecclesiastical traditions and institutions are under question.

On many occasions, O’Donovan would tell his class in somewhat apologetic ways that he had to rewrite his lecture notes on ethics and on ecclesiology from scratch. Looking back, he was developing a new apologetic, to help students lay a firmer and more confident theological foundation for interpreting life that could survive the dissolution of conventions and traditions in vastly changed global situations. Authority, clearly, is a central consideration.

O’Donovan’s marriage, one year after he arrived in Canada, was therefore God-sent! Joan Lockwood O’Donovan is a theologian and philosopher, with a deep interest in law and authority. With Joan at his side, O’Donovan embarked on a lifelong study of the relation between theology and politics. The search for “true political concepts” that are authorised from Holy Scripture, as he would elaborate in The Desire of the Nations and The Ways of Judgment, would become a main engagement upon his return to Oxford in 1982. But the ideas took shape in Toronto — for instance, in the central place that the fourfold Christ event assumed in his lectures on Christian ethics and ecclesiology at Wycliffe.

Turning to the present divisions in the Anglican Communion, it is sobering to note that most of the leaders from different sides of the disputes were in my same generation. Some have become conservative defenders of the status quo. Others have turned activist and schismatic. We were young theological students 30 years ago. I look back with deep gratitude to those formative years at Wycliffe. Through his teaching and preaching, O’Donovan trained us to approach, with attentive devotion to the Christian heritage, the challenges of living in a world that is still in the midst of seismic shifts. As a wise teacher, he showed us there is a more excellent way than being a conservative or a rebel. He taught us to think sensitively about how to live and to share: to know what to defend and what to reorder in civic life, and in life together in the Anglican Communion.

In April 2002, O’Donovan kindly accepted an invitation to give a series of lectures in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Nanjing. It was one of his rare trips to eastern Asia. He even visited my home in Macao. The beautiful harbour that he saw from the peak of Hong Kong Island must have impressed him. That experience perhaps found its way into his essay “The Loss of a Sense of Place”:

What would Hong Kong be without its mountains, its harbors, and its islands? With these features the citizen feels a stake of propriety, which is far more fundamental a datum of political reality than the administrative notion of ownership that assigns the hillside to a hundred thousand different proprietors and the harbor to a government agency. When we are unable to convert this sense of propriety into any form of shared authority, then our natural political aspirations are frustrated; and out of such frustrations grow legal, political and sometimes military battles. (Bonds of Imperfection, p. 305)

The Anglican Communion, too, is like Hong Kong. May we scale the heights to rise above the presenting issues, and rediscover a sense of propriety in our common life.

The Rev. Canon Michael Poon is director and Asian Christianity coordinator of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in Asia, Trinity Theological College, Singapore, and a member of the Living Church Foundation.