At the end of every class at the Anglican seminary where I teach, my students fill out a course evaluation. Each semester, without fail, I find myself wondering how they will answer one of the pre-written questions: “Did the course help you articulate an Anglican understanding of biblical, historical, systematic, and pastoral theology?” Sometimes I joke with my students, telling them that that question will be waiting for them at the end of the semester and admitting that I live in fear of reading their responses. I wonder what their answers will be mainly because I myself haven’t been able to give a satisfactory answer to the related, underlying question: How will I, as their instructor, teach an Anglican understanding of biblical, historical, systematic, and pastoral theology?
Because I’m a biblical studies professor, I am chiefly interested in what an Anglican approach to a course on, say, the four canonical Gospels would look like. Certainly there is a range of perfectly adequate answers to that question. One could, for instance, assign readings on the Gospels from historical Anglican luminaries such as B. F. Westcott or William Temple. I could imagine a fruitful course on the Fourth Gospel assigning a paper on Temple’s pastoral Readings in St. John’s Gospel and on the theological commentary of the great Anglo-Catholic scholar Edwyn Hoskyns. Or one might devise an assignment in which students were asked to match the movements of the Eucharistic rite with the Synoptists’ Last Supper narratives. Or, turning to Paul, I could conceive of a course on the epistles that asked students to reflect on whether or not Thomas Cranmer’s theology of justification sola fide counts as a good reading of Galatians and Romans, as my friend Jono Linebaugh has recently done. And so on.
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