A Companion to the Theology of John Webster

By Michael Allen, R. David Nelson and Kevin J. Vanhoozer

An overview and analysis of John Webster’s seminal contributions to Christian theology 

At the time of his death, John Webster was widely hailed as one of the leading Christian theologians in the world. Over the course of three decades, he produced groundbreaking studies on the theologies of Eberhard Jüngel and Karl Barth and, especially since the turn of the millennium, numerous books and essays on various themes in Christian dogmatics. He then intended to write an encyclopedic systematic theology—a project he was unable to complete.

No substitute is possible for that lost opus, but the contributors offer this volume as an homage to Webster and an aid to those who want to learn from him. A Companion to the Theology of John Webster begins with an introductory section on Webster’s theological development, then continues into an extensive overview of Webster’s contributions to contemporary discussions of particular doctrines. An epilogue suggests how Webster’s theology might have unfolded had he lived longer and imagines the continuing influence of his work on the enterprise of Christian dogmatics. Readers hoping to understand the legacy of this great theologian, and also those eager for fresh insights into the present state and future trajectories of contemporary Protestantism, will find much to offer here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467462297

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Kevin J. Vanhoozer (PhD, Cambridge University) is research professor of systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

Book preview

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CHAPTER 1

John Webster (1955–2016)

Ivor J. Davidson

The matter to which Christian theology is commanded to attend, and by which it is directed in all its operations, is the presence of the perfect God as it is announced in the gospel and confessed in the praises and testimonies of the communion of saints.¹ Most scholarly prose doesn’t sound like that. In John Webster’s, the idiom was standard issue, and deeply felt. If his work dazzles in its intellectual depth and style, its motivations were different from those that typically hold sway in the realms of academic culture.

To anyone who knew him, Webster was likely the most unassuming scholar ever met: firm in his convictions, crystal clear in presenting them; devoid of personal grandeur, suspicious of quests for scholarly prestige that jeopardized the uniqueness of theology’s vocation. As he saw it, all theological work occurs in the history of grace, its mandate and possibilities determined by the miracle of divine generosity. As such, theology can only go about its tasks in gratitude and humility, confessing with joy and wonder the God whose immensity meets us as unfathomable love. To those tasks it brings no gifts other than the ones this God gives, redeems, appoints, enables. Only in recognition of the divine abundance, enacted in freedom for our blessing, do we begin to think and speak and act aright.

EDUCATION AND CAREER

John Bainbridge Webster was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, on June 20, 1955, and brought up in West Yorkshire. Converted in his teens from watery suburban Methodism into a tough version of Calvinistic Christianity,² he received his education at Bradford Grammar School, nowadays a distinguished independent coeducational institution, at that time still an all-boys’ direct grammar school.³ Specializing in languages and literature, he went up to Clare College, Cambridge as an Open Scholar in 1974. He read English initially but was glad to switch to Theology at the end of his first year. Gifted student as he was, his experience of literature at Cambridge was disappointing; the course seemed preoccupied with criticism in detachment from fundamental questions of moral practice. Theology was suggested as an alternative, and so it was to be—albeit supposedly only because I could not think of anything else I wanted to do.⁴ He would later claim he had been offered yet weirder academic options but had by a kindly providence declined.

While he flourished academically, gaining First Class Honours and the Burney Prize, he found himself a little frustrated by the dominant idioms of his environment. Drawn to systematic theology, especially of the modern period, he was finding his way in a discipline that had in the 1970s acquired a certain style in much English theology. Rather than treating Christian doctrine as a set of essentially positive confessional claims, determined by Scripture, molded by tradition, systematics in England (somewhat less so in Scotland) was heavily concerned with doctrinal criticism, the analysis of what it might be feasible for faith to say under the conditions of modernity. The approach seemed anxious in manner, limited in scope—preoccupied with the problems attaching to belief in general or with the necessary contemporary reformulation of individual loci at the expense of the grandeur and coherence of Christian teaching as a whole. Heavily focused on questions of method, sources, and context, the subject appeared to take its cues as much from other fields of inquiry (philosophy above all, but also history, social theory, and other disciplines) as from its own territory. Dogmatics in particular existed at a discount. There were exceptions, not least the example of Donald MacKinnon, Cambridge’s Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity, whose intense presence remained an intriguing force to persistent young minds. MacKinnon in particular refused to discredit the importance of dogmatics in grappling with philosophy’s toughest questions. On the whole, however, Cambridge offered fairly thin soil on which to cultivate an interest in doctrine.

Webster embarked on graduate studies at Clare, a Beck Exhibitioner. Here he was drawn to a figure whose significance was not yet much appreciated in English-language theology: Eberhard Jüngel. Studying Jüngel pushed Webster to reflect on the distinctiveness of Christian claims about God—the fundamental inability of Christian theology to proceed from any starting point other than divine revelation; the hopelessness of idealism’s assumptions that the knower takes priority over the known; the material integrity of Christian confession as established in the economy of God’s works. The particularity of Christological and Trinitarian teaching was vital—check upon the dangers of speculation, only sure basis for the differentiation of God and creatures for creatures’ good. If Christian faith speaks of God, it does so on its own terms.

In all this, Webster was driven to take with increasing seriousness Jüngel’s chief modern inspiration: the grand old man of Basel. Karl Barth’s theology would ultimately affect Webster far more profoundly than Jüngel’s, but the influence of Jüngel was important in his discovery of Barth, and in the emphases in Barth which most commanded his attention. His PhD, its critical edges softened somewhat as the first monograph in English on Jüngel’s theology, marked him out as a scholar of exceptional promise.⁵

After a year’s research fellowship at the University of Sheffield, he was appointed in 1982 to teach systematics at St John’s College, Durham, where he remained for four years. It was a congenial environment; he was nurtured by kindly colleagues and taught some able students, both at St John’s and in Durham’s Department of Theology. Ordained as deacon in the Church of England in 1983 and as priest the following year, full-time parish ministry seemed a distinct possibility; he served an assistant curacy in County Durham and as chaplain at St John’s.

Looking back on his teaching as it took shape over these years, he considered he was still struggling to break free of the habits of doctrinal criticism—still needing to discover what it might mean to tackle the big themes in overtly confessional fashion and to draw deeply on the church’s historic resources, uninhibited by the restrictive sensibilities of late modernity. It was obvious to anyone experiencing the young Webster’s teaching or reading his work (which included popular as well as scholarly material)⁶ that he was already a gifted communicator, but his determination to think in earnest about the office of the theologian—about what responsible theological instruction ought to be—attested his refusal to be satisfied with the conventional, and his desire for a tighter integration of theology’s scholarly activities with the interests of the church.

Married with a young son, he moved in 1986 to Canada, where he was to teach at Wycliffe College, Toronto, one of the founding schools in the later nineteenth-century federation of church colleges that had evolved into the Toronto School of Theology. No longer restricted to teaching undergraduates, he had opportunity to pursue Christian doctrine at greater depth, offering more advanced text-based courses to students for whom foundations had already been laid. The ecumenical context of the federation to which Wycliffe belonged also meant he encountered a wider range of traditions and intellectual influences than he had known in Cambridge or Durham; in these engagements he found that theological affinities and differences did not map denominational boundaries in straightforward ways.

He was influenced in particular by a Jesuit colleague, George Schner, with whom he came to work closely. Schner, who would die at just 54 in 2000, was professor of religion at Regis College, Toronto, and a stimulating dialogue partner to many from traditions other than his own. A philosophical theologian with interests in Hegel and Schleiermacher, he had been educated at Yale, and had imbibed much from the instincts of his postliberal teachers. Highly suspicious of North American correlationist theologies, especially their Roman Catholic expressions, he challenged the supposition that theology was obliged to meet its modern challengers on their own ground, using the supposedly fancier resources of critical philosophy in preference to the logic of Christian doctrine. For Schner, it was crucial to recognize how profoundly the trajectories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology had been affected by modern intellectual impulses and to ask about the legacies of those influences in the instincts of contemporary theological reasoning.

Sharing a regular graduate seminar, he and Webster would inch their way through texts theological and philosophical, pondering genealogies and discussing their implications for method in their own time.⁷ Webster would continue to treat the concerns of liberal theology with seriousness, but he became increasingly critical of late-modern theology’s prejudices, which—besides the problems which attached to the readings of history and texts—appeared to offer little with which to edify the church. At the same time, he was, like others, dissatisfied with alternatives that seemed more reactionary than constructive—tame accommodations rather than meaningful responses to cultural pressures. As he had already been nudged firmly to do by Jüngel and Barth, he kept on thinking about why it was that the really decisive movements in modern Protestant systematics had unfolded as they had, and pondering the work that doctrine ought to do. Should not the classical resources of Scripture, tradition, and creed—rather than obsession with context and its supposed imperatives—determine the substance of Christian confession?⁸

Powerful as their insights into modernity’s character had been, postliberal theologians had not paid enough attention to Barth’s insistence on the primacy of God and God’s acts. They had placed too much emphasis on theology as a practice of creatures, a form of social and religious life whose major features might, it seemed, be delineated as much by ethnography as by dogmatics. The postcritical idiom had learned a good deal from Barth in its suspicions of the general and in its commitment to the plain sense of biblical narrative. It had not learned enough about Barth’s resolute commitment to God’s essential plenitude as necessary starting point for all things—including a due account of the integrity of creatures and their actions. Only with something akin to Barth’s sense of the antecedent freedom and abundance of the triune God in himself—God’s capacity to enact, but not realize, himself in the history of his creating, reconciling, and perfecting works as set forth in Holy Scripture—would theology begin to chart a responsible course. It would refuse modern forms of the illusion that human life might possibly know meaning or freedom as a way of being in merely symbolic relation with God; it would also—crucially—escape a drift into cultural anthropology, where talk of the gospel proceeded largely in the register of social and moral practices.

Only a positive dogmatics of God and his aseity would do. Pace enduring suspicions, that approach would not inhibit, but rather fund, a rich account of moral theology—the life to be lived by created, fallen, and reconciled creatures on the way to eschatological perfection. This was, Webster came to discern, just what had happened in Barth’s own work. It had found its moral and political density neither in the isolation of ethics from doctrine nor in the substitution of ethics for doctrine, but precisely in the recognition that human action is taken seriously when it is located in a substantive account of human moral ontology—created, fallen, restored—and so in terms for which Christian doctrine provides indispensable categories.

Webster advanced rapidly to full professorial status at Wycliffe in 1993 and became Ramsay Armitage Professor of Systematic Theology in 1995. From 1994, he also undertook adjunct teaching at McMaster Divinity College. He edited and introduced two volumes of Jüngel’s essays,⁹ opening up a number of key articles to a much wider readership, and assembled a stimulating Festschrift for Jüngel’s sixtieth birthday.¹⁰ More significantly, he produced a major monograph on Barth’s later ethics.¹¹ A strikingly lucid analysis of the final sections of the Church Dogmatics (IV/4) and The Christian Life, the work presented a robust case that the fabric of Barth’s dogmatics was—contrary to its glib critics—ethical at its core, for its construal of agency, covenant, and reality underwrote a rich account of moral selfhood. Webster showed how this was worked out in Barth’s depictions of baptism, prayer, and creaturely agency as enclosed and governed by the creative, redemptive, and sanctifying work of God in Christ, present by the Holy Spirit’s power. The ethical and sacramental theology of Barth’s last period emerged from some of his most fundamental concerns. Other substantial essays on Barth’s ethics reached back into neglected territory in Barth’s lectures of the later 1920s, and looked additionally at the themes of original sin, hope, and freedom in the Church Dogmatics, exploring examples of Barth’s recurring presentation of grace as restorative of fallen agency to its intended creaturely shape.¹²

And so began to take form many of the enduring building blocks of Webster’s own thinking. While continuing to work on Jüngel and Barth, he increasingly devoted his attention to tracing out major areas of Christian doctrine and their relation to moral questions. The research and writing were wrought amid a busy life. Husband and father of now two sons, in addition to teaching and supervision he undertook various academic administrative roles, including director of advanced degree studies at Wycliffe and, for a two-year period, chair of the Toronto School of Theology’s Department of Theology. He continued to be energetic in service to the church, as an honorary assistant in parishes in Ontario and as a member of national and diocesan committees and working groups, including the Anglican Church of Canada’s Doctrine and Worship Committee and the Canadian Lutheran-Anglican Dialogue group.

In 1996, he returned to the UK as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford. Among the most prestigious of the faculty’s historic chairs, the appointment was an obvious recognition of his abilities and an opportunity to teach and supervise the work of some of the best young minds on the UK theological scene. The chair brought a residentiary canonry of Christ Church; Webster’s gifts as a preacher found regular deployment in Oxford and well beyond. As in Canada, he also engaged in wider ecclesiastical service, serving on the Church of England’s Doctrine Commission and in the Faith and Order Advisory Group,¹³ which offered advice to the House of Bishops and the Council for Christian Unity on matters of ecumenical and theological significance.

At the same time, Oxford posed challenges. Webster faced once again the powerful impulses of theological revisionism in the British context and found himself rubbing shoulders with some who remained distinctly suspicious of what dogmatics in general, and Barth in particular, might have to contribute to the future of the Christian church in an increasingly secular and plural environment. He was working with gifted students and colleagues but ever more consciously engaged in a style of theology that was cross-grained in its setting and thus prone to a measure of isolation.

The vision of theological theology articulated in his inaugural professorial lecture in 1997 was not to everyone’s taste.¹⁴ Unstinting in its critique of modern university theology’s alienation from its proper habits of thought on account of its captivation by wissenschaftlich ideals, it proposed a renewed confidence in the articulation of Christian difference—in theology’s own distinctive culture of faith and practice. That prospect necessarily entailed the parsing of dogmatic claims and the identification of their consequences for moral and intellectual activity. The substance stood as contrast to the fragmented worlds of the late-modern academy, with its false disciplinary absolutisms, its mixed-up anthropologies of inquiry, its bondages to special interests, its incapacity to render an integrated account of what human learning might, at the last, be for. But the quest for a theological theology also involved radical challenge for contemporary theology itself: the need to reconnect with classical roots; to cherish once more theology’s necessarily spiritual culture of reading, worship, and discipline; to resist the temptation to turn the discipline into something it could not legitimately become.

Webster later came to feel the position outlined in that lecture—and in some of his other work in the period—represented an unsatisfactory combination of the reactionary and the defensive, in its own way still wanting in a thoroughly positive account of theology’s core concerns. Still overly invested in a critical discourse of cultural activities, he was even yet not saying enough about Trinity, creation, and redemption, still failing to set out sharply enough what it is that creaturely intelligence is doing—anywhere, anytime—when it thinks and speaks about God. He would come to place yet more emphasis on the work that doctrine (and a Trinitarian doctrine of creation and creatures in particular) must do, and give larger place to scriptural exegesis in describing the church’s practices.

These practices were not to be reduced to the visible patterns or habits of a social polity, somehow charged with the burden of mediating divine presence to the world. They were the witness of an assembly called into being to attest the matchless adequacy of the acts by which God makes himself known in the Word his gospel announces. To be ecclesial in the right way, and in turn moral in the right way, theology needed to recognize it was defined centrally not by its own practices and contexts but by the perfection of the God who has elected creatures to fellowship with himself—and so to holiness, and so to discipleship, and so to testimony. Creaturely testimony did not effect God’s presence or make it real; it pointed to the adequacy in which God has chosen to draw near to us, agent of his own self-authenticating splendor.

These emphases would evolve through further studies of Barth, and through closer and more critical engagements with postliberal ecclesiology and ethics. Firmly established as a leading interpreter of Barth, Webster gathered a strong cast of contributors for a Cambridge Companion, published in 2000.¹⁵ In the same year, he issued a short introduction to Barth’s thought, a splendidly accessible little book that encouraged students to read Barth for themselves and find real nurture in so doing.¹⁶ Three lectures delivered in Australia yielded a critical conversation between Barth and postmodernism that managed to be far sharper than some forays into related territory, showing the distinctiveness and centrality of Barth’s incarnational Christology for his version of an ontological grand récit.¹⁷ Webster also continued to be intrigued by Jüngel, not least as interpreter of Barth, translating and introducing Jüngel’s magisterial paraphrase of Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity, God’s Being Is in Becoming.¹⁸

More important in the end would be the production of Webster’s own serious exercises in constructive dogmatics, which continued to emerge in a steady stream, mainly in essay form.¹⁹ One of the increasing preoccupations of this work—his contributions to the delightful activity in which the church praises God by ordering its thinking towards the gospel of Christ²⁰—would be the theology of Holy Scripture, its nature and interpretation. While welcoming contemporary endeavors to move beyond a ruinous bifurcation of systematics and biblical studies, he remained critical of the degree to which scholars had yet thought about the need for a doctrinal treatment of Scripture and the tasks of scriptural interpretation. Hermeneutical and literary theory, the sociology of texts, the practices of textual reception—these were still the dominant notes. Postcritical biblical exegesis, for all its concern to leave behind historicist reductionism, remained in thrall to the instinct to naturalize Scripture and its interpretation, or at any rate preoccupied with the situations of its human recipients. The antidote was a far more explicit focus on divine perfection and presence: on Scripture and its properties as instruments of the self-communication of the triune God in all the sufficiency of his being.

To give doctrine its proper weight in this matter was, once again, to reorient theology to its location in the sphere of God’s grace, the place where God’s voice is heard in his word by his Spirit as God wills it to be so, and where he thus rules in mercy and judgment over his church. When it recognized things to be so ordered, theology would be delivered from burdens it was not called upon to bear—the impossible work of trying to hear the word better by means of hermeneutical sophistication—and also from complacency, the reduction of the word to so much cultural capital. Interpretative actions were, of course, vital, but over against their hyperinflation as human endeavors stood the living authority of divine speech. The chief realm where God’s speech was to be heard was indeed the church, the creature of the word, but over against the church’s tendencies to domesticate that word stood the reality that the textual instrument of God’s speech, the canon of Holy Scripture—inspired, sanctified, perspicuous, sufficient for all that God intends—is, or ought to be, a knife at the church’s heart.²¹

Webster’s Oxford years saw him make many substantial contributions to the leadership of his discipline in the UK and much further afield. In 1999, together with Colin Gunton at King’s College, London, he launched the International Journal of Systematic Theology. It came to establish itself—remarkably quickly, in hindsight—as one of the leading English-language outlets for academic work in Christian doctrine, and to its flourishing Webster devoted great care throughout the rest of his life. He also gave major lectures, conference papers, and lecture series in the UK, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and elsewhere. His Thomas Burns Memorial Lectures at the University of Otago, New Zealand, in 1998, on the culture of theology, stand as a magisterial statement of the theologian’s calling.²² His Scottish Journal of Theology lectures on Holy Scripture at Aberdeen in 2001 formed the basis of the remarkable monograph, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch.²³ The Day-Higginbotham Lectures at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Texas, in 2002 were published as Holiness, a lovely short account of its theme, striking not least for its opening celebration of the beauty of theology as an exercise of holy reason.²⁴

In 2003, Webster was enticed to leave Oxford for a divinity chair in Scotland. Becoming professor of systematic theology at the University of Aberdeen, he continued to work at an outstanding pace. There was Barth still, of course, but hardly just that: Scripture and its interpretation, moral theology, the doctrine of God, Christology, reconciliation, creation, anthropology, ecclesiology, eschatology, and much else. The writing was pervasively marked by deep convictions concerning the nature, sources, and ends of theology as a discipline, and about the implications of such a vision for the theologian’s personal practices and the architecture of his studies.²⁵ Firm themes would develop a good deal in nuance and extension: theology first, economy second; no relations of God and creatures real on God’s side as they are for creatures (God is already relationally replete in his essential triune life, his movements ad extra the magnificent, free overflow of his sheer goodness); no rendering of divine presence somehow subject to the possibilities of creaturely mediation. Over time these boundaries became clearer: None of it need imply—as some feared—any denigration of creatures or their history, but just the opposite; duly inflected, here lay better account of their dignity, moral enactment, and ends. Speaking well of divine perfection meant also speaking well of the presence of God with us, the temporal missions of Christ and the Spirit and their comprehensive consequences. Still: First the perfect God who has life in himself, then the creatures whose life is given, purposed, and redemptively secured by the free and majestic movement of this God’s fullness—in that wonder lying all the integrity, freedom, and fulfillment they could ever conceivably know. The order and proportions of major doctrines had to go on being re-expounded and reconfigured accordingly.

During his early Aberdeen years, Webster undertook the demanding task of lead-editing The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology.²⁶ In 2007, he established with Ian McFarland and myself a new monograph series, T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology, which would help issue new constructive and historical doctrinal work. He also continued to give substantial disciplinary service in an array of other ventures—as an editor of Ashgate’s Great Theologians and Barth Studies series, on the editorial boards of the Scottish Journal of Theology and its monograph series, and in advisory work for the Journal of Reformed Theology, Ecclesiology, and other journals. He became an editorial advisor for Baker Academic’s Studies in Theological Interpretation series and for Zondervan Academic’s monograph series, launched in 2012, New Studies in Dogmatics. He also provided peer review and advisory services for a wide range of publishers, for the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and other bodies internationally.

Several of the publishing developments in which Webster busied himself provided important opportunities for the dissemination of the work of emergent scholars. He attracted more graduate students than he could readily take and distinguished himself as an exceptional mentor. He also played an important guiding role in appointments to his school. At Aberdeen in particular he was able to contribute a great deal to the nurturing of a vibrant community of scholarship and faith.

Early in 2013, after some pondering, he was persuaded to consider the possibility of a short move down the east coast of Scotland, to the School of Divinity at St Andrews. He was appointed professor of divinity that summer. His coming held huge promise; his contributions were again, just as expected, entirely positive, gracious, and collegial. He continued to supervise a sizable cohort of doctoral students and ran an inspiring graduate seminar; he also taught at undergraduate level, contributed to conferences, and played generous part in other aspects of academic life. Things otherwise did not go exactly as planned on several fronts, but there were those for whom his company and his wisdom were a gift to be treasured, and lasting impressions were made. Larger aspirations, alas, were not to be fulfilled. Webster died suddenly at his home in Aberdeenshire on May 25, 2016.

LOOKING BACK

Webster’s published reflections on theology’s place in the modern research university remain astute not least because they were born of his own experiences in both church college and secular academy. He saw the benefits and dangers of both, and well knew there was no utopia. Theological education of an intellectually serious kind was vital for the church’s flourishing and its service to the world; theology had so much to offer the university, and things to gain from being there, but it could never settle down. The fundamental culture of the gospel—eschatological, established and overwhelmed at once by the judgment of divine self-presence—forbade it. The principled isolation of theology from the university might well be perilous, a questionable pursuit of perfection through an intellectual fuga mundi; at the same time, theology faced inevitable challenges as well as opportunities in inhabiting a sphere where the operative metaphysics and morals of knowledge and its purposes were in general radically different. Webster was a dedicated servant and genial colleague in each of his academic institutions, and his professional path knew relatively few transitions, but a certain pragmatism, by turns restless as well as calm, tended to mark his approach.²⁷ Like most of us, looking back, he knew more of a belonging in some places than in others.

Webster discerned academic vanity projects at some distance; he had his own words to say about failure of vision or fickleness of commitment. Wherever he was, he also evinced great forbearance, a capacity to press on quietly and cheerfully with what mattered whatever was happening around him. Assiduous in his own patterns, he could be remarkably long-suffering with the irresolute and the disorderly; ever courteous and professional in his interactions, he maintained good humor and compassion when provoked. Strategic ineptitude was, of course, vexing; malice wounded; injustice angered; cowardice was matter for legitimate grief. But: divine wisdom and loving purpose, not the folly or gall of creatures, was ultimate. The steady-mindedness with which Webster could recognize pointless intrigue or personal insecurities for what they were, and rise above them in pursuit of what counted, bore its own testimony. Theologians went on learning their calling—in continuing personal repentance and faith, and by prayer—amid the frustrations of broken systems. Whatever their circumstances, they were first and foremost—as one of Webster’s last essays would say—in the order of love²⁸—in the divine economy of the regeneration of creatures, in the communion of those appointed to sanctification. Invited to devote themselves to the contemplation of the one in whom all true happiness is found, assured that their entire being and destiny lie in his hands, they should, in his Spirit’s power, give their minds chiefly to gratitude, generosity, and hope rather than lament.

To reckon with the Christian gospel was, for Webster, to be interested in all kinds of things, for there was no sphere of reality not encompassed by that gospel’s address. But, crucially, obedience to the gospel meant that our God-given studiousness as creatures was rendered quite different from mere curiosity—that disorder of intellectual appetite in which we seek to know created realities in detachment from their creator.²⁹ Baptism spelled the demise of curiosity’s reign, the commencement of a new intellectual life in which reason is regenerated and consecrated to its proper deployment in the pursuit of all true knowledge as centered on God. Theology needed to practice vigilance all the same: to keep submitting to divine instruction, to keep on hearing how creaturely science is as nothing unless it directs us to the Creator from whose bountiful goodness we have so received. This in turn meant resistance to mental indolence and restlessness alike, a refusal of the idols of putative intellectual fulfillment in something less than God himself. Theology could attain these ends only in confessed dependence and prayer, and by the sanctifying work of the Spirit.³⁰ But, caught up in the great work of the divine refashioning of rational creaturely life, no small part of theology’s potential contribution to the realm of the academy was its vocation to model, on its own terms, intellectual patience.³¹

If people thought him too Barthian, or too Thomist, or too interested in strange characters like the Reformed orthodox, or too evangelical, or too whatever—it seemed not to bother him too much. In some, such an attitude might easily reflect conceit, a refusal to hear counterargument; in Webster, it was quite the opposite. He did not pursue independence for its own sake, and came to be increasingly conscious that theology must resist cultural isolations of the wrong sorts, commending its positum to the world by all the constructive means it can. Within church as well as academy, he was a gracious contributor, committed to charity and peace as well as truth. He listened attentively, respected his interlocutors, confessed when he did not know, changed his mind when others persuaded. He undoubtedly had his strong dislikes and was not afraid to adduce them, but fierce polemic in his writing was fairly rare. Even the sharper exchanges focused on issues, not personalities. He was no retreatist scholastic, and remained alert to the dangers of being cast, as he once put it, as a theological Ishmael (Gen 16:12).³² He was just not interested in being popular or clever, or in gathering a party around him.

He was ever wary of trendy movements and of claims that his discipline’s future lay in the adoption of simple prescriptions, especially of a correlationist sort. Conversations as such were not the be-all and end-all, he would insist, and cultural prestige might be purchased at a heavy price; fidelity to the evangel was what mattered. This would inevitably mean a refusal of any proposed strategy in which the tasks of exegesis and dogmatics were less than central, and skepticism toward any diagnosis of contemporary disciplinary vigor where the signs of such life might be limited.

In hearing the word, there was, as Barth himself had insisted, no past in the church.³³ As Webster worked his way steadily from modern to classical authorities, his deep sense of the riches of the tradition, and of their enduring potency as instruments of divine instruction in the understanding of Holy Scripture, became of course all the more acute. The great Thomas Aquinas and Augustine were but a fraction of it; John Calvin never stopped fascinating; John Owen, an early attraction, became a favorite in later years. Barth—contrary to some bizarre rumors—scarcely went away; one of Webster’s very last submitted pieces was on Barth’s Ephesians lectures at Göttingen in 1921–22.³⁴ There were just so many giants from whom to learn, and contemporary fads generally had little to do with it. What are you reading just now? asked a visitor, possibly expecting (very naively) some fashionable monograph on ecclesial ethics or something trending on Amazon. Wollebius, came the reply, quite casually, as if all might (at least should) be doing so. Stunning! But ressourcement or retrieval also needed care: no idealizing—or demonizing—of epochs and their legacies; no drift of tradition into stasis or self-satisfaction; no conflation of the revelatory authority of the Living One with the church’s proprietary stock.

Personal intellectual interests were wide-ranging: literature, history, philosophy, critical theory, political ethics. He would, when the mood took him, chat away about knowledge or art or virtue in various registers, and he thought a fair bit about moral characterization in literatures new and old. I’ve been enjoying Plutarch recently, he would comment without notice as you drove along the main street. Great fun! None of it was meant to impress in the slightest, far less to be in or out of fashion, or (forfend) to subsume theology’s interests under some other rubric; much of it would register limited visible presence in his writing.³⁵ It was just Webster being Webster, furnishing his mind as he did. He was invariably happy to ask for tips, prone to admit he wasn’t sure where to look for something; equally ready to dispense, low-key as ever, generous suggestions from the considerable fund of his own reading, while probably suggesting he was a bit out of touch with half of it.

His writing—produced in longhand, in multiple, highly self-critical, drafts—was invariably characterized by great precision and elegance. The essay remained his favorite form, and he was quite relaxed about issuing its fruits in multiple contexts; dissemination, not possession, was pedagogical virtue. Material was often tried and refined in seminars, symposia, or lecture series (larger conferences appealed to him less and less); he would labor hard at revising an already impressive text that was not yet to his taste. The 2007 inaugural Kantzer Lectures at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Illinois, Perfection and Presence: God with Us, According to the Christian Confession, offered a fine summary of several themes in his mature thinking about the order of God and creatures.³⁶ His last collection of papers, the two-volume God without Measure, is rich in polished jewels, yet like its predecessor essay volumes was intended as but a further set of preparatory exercises. A greater endeavor awaited: the vast (but evangelically necessary) attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the major elements of Christian doctrine in their essential interrelations, and to map that theology as an essentially moral and spiritual matter. En route, Webster continued to read and reflect extensively on the nature of theology and the theologian’s office: on the principles, resources, and ends of Christian intellectual activity, and on the relationship of contemplative, ascetic, and moral practices in theological work. The ultimate synthesis was never to be; its loss is immense.

Webster makes demands of his readers—the quality and pace of his arguments, the range of reference, the splendidly unfashionable predilection for a fair bit of Latin (Euge, serve bone et fidelis!). But his work is also marked by directness, its instinctive grace carefully controlled. The textures are chosen not for display but in transparency to Scripture’s contours and furtherance of wonder at the beauty of the realities on which we are being invited to gaze. In that sense the prose typifies the ideals it seeks to commend, avoiding intellectual abstraction and self-adornment, aiming unashamedly at delight in God. It is instructive to compare Webster’s scholarly writing with his preaching, some lovely examples of which have been published,³⁷ or with his briefer expositions of scriptural themes.³⁸ The academic material is self-evidently a more formal affair, intended for peers; yet it too deploys—unashamedly—a great deal of churchly rhetoric, with particular modes of argument and appeal, particular norms of persuasion, and particular ends in Christian doxology.

Academic honors never greatly interested him. They came his way—distinguished chairs, prestigious invitations internationally, a Doctorate of Divinity honoris causa from Aberdeen in 2003, fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2005. Others were under consideration at the time of his death. But to Webster the real rewards were not to be found in those things.

To observe him in his element, you had to watch him in animated seminar discussion with a group of motivated students and colleagues. Webster was very good at recognizing how to introduce students in particular to big issues and currents of thought by choosing important texts, offering clear and balanced orientation to their aims and interests—and then encouraging learners to think for themselves through close and generous reading. The conversation would, at one level, be deadly serious—theology mattered more than anything else. Authors had to be shown respect, whatever they were saying; he had little patience with lazy judgments or cheap dismissals of nuanced arguments. There would be concern, too, that hesitant students were noticed, listened to with courtesy, affirmed as much as possible; insights would be valued whatever their source.

At the same time, a typical seminar with Webster was quite bereft of stuffiness or po-faced sobriety, on the part of its leader, at least. As often as not, it was punctuated with much impromptu humor and irreverence of the best sort, all conveyed in a Yorkshire persona that cheerfully remained its understated self wherever it traveled. With Webster, cant and bluster were liable to be called for what they were, long-winded or daft arguments met with earthy assessment. That is quite a difficult case to sustain, a senior scholar gently commented in response to a particularly odd conference paper where Webster was a sorely tried member of the audience. It’s not difficult at all—it’s blasphemous! opined Webster to those beside him, perhaps not entirely sotto voce—and proposed they adjourn forthwith for a pint.

The assessments of arrant nonsense were unlikely to miss the mark. To those who got things, or were sincerely trying to do so, Webster was a very supportive friend indeed. His consideration for students and colleagues was often exceptional—though never showy. The acts of generosity and pastoral care were carried out unobtrusively, sensitively and without fuss, as though they were nothing much, and just what anyone would do. Typically they reflected great thoughtfulness, an attention to matters and people often overlooked. Webster’s investment in his graduate students in particular was outstanding; its counsel and professional support extended long after any standard obligations of professorial guidance might reasonably have been exceeded. He was delighted to be honored with a Festschrift lovingly conceived by a few of the grateful on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 2015.³⁹

The power of his thought and its expression was inevitably influential, but he relished serious engagement and did not seek to form his students after his image as some affect to do. He had his own views of youthful interpreters who appraised his work in lopsided or eagerly schematic fashion, or those who seemed to hint of themselves as its due conceptual curators. He found comfort and stimulus in authentically shared convictions; he would not have wished to have heirs.

Webster was, without doubt, a very modest and—for all his considerable sense of fun—a genuinely private man. But his approach to his calling was more than a matter of personal style; it reflected his understanding of the theologian’s life. Humility was, for him, an essential spiritual grace. Theology was authorized to be gloriously joyful and bold. It had reason to be frank in rejection of error and exposure of folly. It ought not, however, to be strident, totalizing, or oppressive of legitimate difference. It must resist vanity, the temptation to take itself with the wrong kind of seriousness, to foreclose on the infinity of the mystery set forth in the gospel. If dogmatics involved attentive listening, ongoing ascetic discipline was needed—consecration, repentance, petition, a repudiation of self-importance, an enduring wonder at the inexhaustible goodness of divine self-giving.

Webster drove himself hard and paid a price over the years. Personal challenges were faced with courage, dignity, and faith. He took quiet pride in his family, loved his garden, the arts, antiques, food and drink. Private as he was, he could be great company, and he had a finely developed sense of mischief. He kept up an extensive correspondence, finding time to write to all kinds of folk in all kinds of places. Gentle pastoral wisdom, not least the gift of encouragement, was almost as much a part of his métier as scholarly advice. His death may have passed relatively unnoticed by secular media; the flood of personal tributes from around the world—as well as the attendance at the service of remembrance and thanksgiving conducted by Rowan Williams in St Andrews on August 27, 2016—attested a little of his impact on individual lives.

To me, he was an immensely generous and loyal friend, from whom I learned not enough, though vastly more than he was ever told. He was an astonishingly humble dialogue partner. Many of our conversations (not least in respect of his wit) I expect to remain with me for life. Looking back over a little of our correspondence in what turned out to be his final months, I am struck again by the combination of intellectual acuity and waspish observation, but also by the spiritual candor, the frequency of reference to faith, to prayer, and to Scripture’s counsel. His expression was ever deft, never trite. Our last conversation in person, a few days before he died, was on one of his favorite late themes: the knowledge of providence as gospel consolation, the learning of trust in the God who enacts his promise that his right hand will hold us fast—anywhere. Webster knew his own heart and thus spoke well of the beauties of grace.

Webster’s modesty, his disciplined submission of his exceptional intellectual powers to theology’s calling, and—above all—his sheer delight in the God who thus announces himself in the gospel remain an enduring inspiration. If gratitude is indeed fundamental to faithful existence in the order