UPDATE (29 June): Here is Professor Hart's laureation address:
Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, The Rt Rev Dr Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham.
Tom Wright was born on the 1st December 1948 in Morpeth, Northumberland, the second of four children, and heir to the long-established timber business run by his father. His early education was at Sedbergh school (then in the wilds of Yorkshire) where academically he excelled in classics and learned to love and to play cricket and rugby – cricket because Yorkshire were rather good at it in those days; rugby because, as he told me, one had rather little option! In between school and University came a gap year, and a chance to try his hand at the family trade – working as a lumberjack in British Columbia!
Undergraduate studies were at Oxford, first in ‘Greats’, and then in Theology as part of training for Anglican Ministry, graduating with first class Honours in both subjects. It was during this period that Tom met and married Maggie (who it is our great pleasure to welcome here today) and from then on studies were combined with the busyness of family life, with the eventual appearance of four children – Julian, Rosamund, Hattie and Oliver – and (much more recently – and the arithmetic is Tom’s, not mine!) two and a half grandchildren: Joseph, Ella, and one due in October.
A DPhil in Oxford under the supervision of George Caird led to a Fellowship and Chaplaincy at Merton, a five year spell in Canada as Assistant Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at McGill University in Montreal, and, in 1986, a Lectureship in New Testament Studies back in Oxford where Tom also held the posts of Chaplain and Fellow of Worcester College. In fulfilling these various appointments he quickly established a model of working that has been the hallmark of his career ever since; a mutually enriching counterpoint between the pastoral ‘cure of souls’ and top-flight, internationally renowned scholarship.
In the mid-1980s a prodigious publishing career began which was from the outset directed again quite self-consciously both to the academy and to the wider reading public. This has continued largely uninterrupted ever since, producing a stream of more than 60 books from popular works, through ‘mid-level’ texts for students and the theologically literate public (I confess to having several of these readily to hand on my own bookcase!), to the sort of substantial academic monograph which rather than just adding to the log-jam of scholarly works in print takes its chainsaw to the state of the discipline, reshaping it altogether. Scholars are generally deemed eminent if they manage to do this in one field of specialized concern. Tom Wright has done it both in his work on the historical Jesus, and in his contributions to Pauline studies. The core of this contribution lies in a massive six-part work Christian Origins and the Question of God of which three substantial volumes have already been published and a fourth is eagerly anticipated in the next year or so. On top of all this, Tom has published innumerable scholarly articles, and delivered prestigious named lectures in Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, London, Yale and many other universities besides. In 2007 he added St Andrews to that list, delivering one of the current series of James Gregory Lectures on Science and Religion on the theme ‘Can a Scientist Believe in the Resurrection?’ Tom is one of the foremost living New Testament scholars, and we are not the first university to have honoured his scholarship in this way.
But Tom’s scholarship cannot properly be disentangled, let alone isolated, from the other vital side of his calling, as a pastor and (latterly) a senior churchman: First as Dean of Lichfield from 1994, then as Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey, and since 2003 as Bishop of Durham, one of the most senior Episcopal appointments in the land. Here, both in his role as diocesan bishop and as a figure with a significant profile within the public life of the nation, he has put into practice commitments arising directly out of his theological learning. Resurrection, he urges in his writings, means that God is concerned with and for the whole of human life and not just some supposed ‘spiritual’ bit of it; from his seat in the House of Lords and in regular appearances on national TV, radio and in the press, Tom’s has been a powerful and a distinctive Christian voice on global debt, the Iraq war, constitutional reform and many other issues of the day. His particular commitment to the economic and social challenges facing the Northeast of England, and his enthusiasm for meeting the people of his diocese both in- and outside churches have made him a much-loved pastor in the region as well as a distinguished representative of an ancient tradition the riches of which, he insists, need to be recaptured and re-imagined so as to speak to our shared present and future.
Amidst all these other achievements, Tom admits to playing the piano, the guitar, the Dixieland jazz trombone and pretty much anything else musical he can get his hands on. His CV lists his ‘clubs’ as the Athenaeum and the Bishop Auckland Golf Club (of which, as Bishop of Durham, he is actually President). Golf, he says, is a great source of relaxation and solace, because it’s the one thing which, as a bishop, he can do really badly, and absolutely no one complains! So there we have it: from the chainsaw to the five-iron via the jazz trombone. A man of many and diverse hidden talents! But for all the world to see, a ground-breaking scholar, whose career-long commitment to holding the life of the academy and the Church together has had a remarkable positive impact on each.
Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to New Testament scholarship and to the life of the Church I invite you now to confer on Tom Wright the degree of Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa.
