59 mins
Shocking Knox
IT was of course John Knox who coined the phrase ‘the monstrous regiment of women’.
So it’s tempting to wonder what Knox, glowering down from his plinth in the quadrangle of New College, the home of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity, would make of events there this year.
For not only was this the scene of the celebration of half a century of female Church of Scotland ministers back in May, but this autumn women started work in two of the most senior positions in the college.
“I think he’d get a shock,” says the Rev Professor Susan Hardman Moore, new Principal of New College, and therefore responsible for the trainee Church of Scotland ministers at Edinburgh.
“And we don’t mind about that!” adds Professor Helen Bond, Head of the School of Divinity.
Helen is the irst woman to hold her position in the University’s history – “And about time, too,” says Susan.
“It is quite bizarre that it has taken until 2018,” agrees Helen, ”But when we came in 2000 (the two arrived at New College at the same time, although it is Susan’s second spell) there were only two women on the staf, so we doubled the number. Now, in terms of staf numbers we must be up to about 40 per cent and our undergraduate numbers are largely women as well, so I think it’s just taken a while for women to percolate up.”
Helen specialises in the New Testament and very early Christian history. She got what she calls ‘the divinity bug’ at St Andrews University, before doing a PhD at Durham and then working in Manchester and Aberdeen before arriving at New College, and being made professor about three years ago. Of the new job, she says: “I’m still not quite sure what I’ve let myself in for!”
“I suppose you get to that stage where you’ve been somewhere for 18 years, and it’s time to do something a little bit diferent,” she adds.
“It used to be a three-year post and now it’s ive years so it’s more of a commitment. Although at the end of the ive years I go back to being a regular professor here, so I do have to live by any of the changes I implement!”
Having said that, she declares the school to be ‘in pretty good shape generally’.
“We did well in the last Research Excellence Framework (which assesses the quality of research at UK universities). We came top in Scotland and fourth in the country, and we’re also doing very well in terms of the student surveys – we get very high scores for that.
“And generally our numbers are buoyant and we’re doing really well, so to a large extent it’s keeping going with that, maintaining our position and developing certain programmes.
“One of the things I am quite keen to do is work more on our outreach and outwardfacing roles. I would like us to be a place where people come from the whole of Scotland to ind out more about theology and religion. New College could be ofering a lot of courses – CPD (continuing professional development) events for ministers perhaps, courses for lay people in the churches.
“We have already been doing that sort of thing but I’d like to see it on a wider basis, and not just in terms of Christian theology and not just in terms of the churches, but wider as well. We have got expertise over the range of religion, not just Christian and Jewish but almost any religious tradition you can think of.”
I put it to her that it must be hard to ind new things to say in a 2000-year-old subject, and she laughs. “You’d be surprised. There are always diferent fashions in scholarship, diferent interests.
“Just in the 30 years that I’ve been studying the New Testament, there’s been a massive change in the way people read these texts.
“It used to be a question of pulling the texts apart and looking for historical details, but now people tend to read the gospels and other biblical literature as narratives. They’re interested in feminist readings, post-colonial readings.
“Actually a lot of the more modern ways of reading the Bible are far more accessible to people than some of the things that many ministers might have grown up with at certain times, and that’s why it’s good to have CPD events. It’s not just a question of new information, it’s actually fundamental new approaches that are often much better at talking to people than some of those older ways of reading the texts.”
Looking at new ways of doing things is very much part of Susan’s job as well, as the Church of Scotland seeks to recruit more ministers and develop more lexible patterns of ministry. It’s something she feels she has a perspective on, as someone who came to the ministry in the Church of Scotland through an unconventional route.
Susan Hardman Moore and Helen Bond
One of the things I am quite keen to do is work more on our outreach and outward-facing roles. I would like us to be a place where people come from the whole of Scotland to find out more about theology and religion.
“I started out as a Methodist lay preacher when I was in the sixth form at school (in Staff ordshire). It didn’t enter my head to go into ordained ministry because although the Methodist Church ordained women, I’d never seen a woman minister in my life, and at the time the Anglicans didn’t ordain women. And it just didn’t seem like a possibility. Quite a lot of my friends went on to do theology and became ministers, but I thought I’d be a teacher.
“But the Methodist support for lay preaching had really encouraged me, and when I came up here to begin with I was involved in the Methodist Church around Edinburgh.
“But after a while we started to go up to Perthshire and I became a member of the Parish Church in Comrie, really because there is no Methodist Church in that area. And that led me to think of becoming a Reader in the Church of Scotland, and having become a Reader, in the evolution of my spiritual journey, I came to a point where it didn’t make sense to me any longer to separate a ministry of Word and Sacrament. So I applied for OLM (Ordained Local Ministry).
“So I have not come through the traditional route, I have come with this background of engaging in lay ministry, and I think in some ways that gives me some experience to draw on in developing these new things that have to do with lay training.”
Susan’s academic life started with a degree in theology at Cambridge, after which she trained as a secondary school RE and English teacher. However, she got a scholarship to Yale Divinity School in the US – “A really interesting and creative year” – which led her to take a PhD in history, focusing on the Puritans (16/ 17th century religion and the Reformation is her specialty).
After that she taught at Durham University, before coming to New College for the irst time in 1987. At the time Dr Ruth Page was the only other woman on the academic staf, so Susan points out that she has twice helped doubled the female numbers at the college. (Dr Page would go on to be the irst female Principal).
Susan’s irst stint in Edinburgh lasted four years, and then she spent nine years teaching in the theology department at King’s College London, before moving back north at the turn of the Millennium.
She is married to John Moore, a professor of economics (“The family joke is I deal with God and he deals with mammon”) and they have two grown-up children, Rannoch and Helena.
The Principal job came about after the Rev Professor David Fergusson stood down. “I believe David put my name forward. It’s an appointment by the General Assembly of someone who’s ordained in the Church of Scotland, and while in the past a great number of New College staf would be ordained in the Church of Scotland, now there are far fewer of us. So I come from a smaller pool!
“As Principal, I have oversight of the candidates training for ministry, and work with 121 on various committees – most of which I haven’t had a chance to attend yet – shaping the future of ministries training.
“I really want to echo what Helen said about making this place more outward outwardfacing, I’m engaged in discussions about what we can do to be more lexible to the needs the church has, not just for ministers’ CPD but also for lay training, and I can see that would work very well for the more general programme Helen is talking about.
If you equip lay people and equip your candidates to be more lexible with working with people in the parish, then you might help to create a new environment in the diicult climate we’re moving into.
“I think we want to make New College very responsive to what the church needs in terms of training opportunities at various diferent levels, but also if you can pitch them at lay people who are interested in theology, in biblical studies, in leading worship, then you may get more ministers coming in.
“And you also change the model of ministry. If you equip lay people and equip our candidates to be more lexible with working with people in the parish, then you might help to create a new environment in the diicult climate we’re moving into.”
Helen is a member of Falkirk Trinity Church, where her husband Keith Rafan is an elder. They have two children, Katriona, 14, and 12-year-old Scott.
Despite the church connection, she unwittingly found herself in the headlines after her appointment when she was reported to have said that, often, the best people to study theology aren’t religious.
“I was just trying to talk about the kind of person who comes here to New College, which is a much broader range of people than the ones who are ministerial candidates,” she explains. “Lots and lots of people are just fascinated by the study of religion, and some of them have a religious commitment but by no means all – and not necessarily a Christian religious commitment.
“It doesn’t follow that because you’re religious yourself you are going to be the best person to study religion, and quite often it’s the people who are just fascinated by it who make the best scholars.”
In fact, she says, students are expected to disregard their personal religious leanings as far as possible when studying. “Basically, what we are doing here is a scientiic study of religion, so even if you do have a commitment to a religion, the expectation is that you put that to one side. We all realise that’s to some extent an impossible thing, but you’re not seeing it through the eyes of your faith, you’re trying to disengage that and to study this as an academic subject.
“Obviously there are extra things ministerial candidates will be doing that are growing in their own faith tradition, but that’s not specifically something the School of Divinity in our degree courses are off ering.
“People often ask me what it’s like going to church and hearing a sermon when you have a PhD in the New Testament, and it’s almost like two diff erent things. What you do here is a diff erent dimension to what you listen to in church.”
Susan adds: “What you want to know is, are they thinking critically about the issues?
“The way I sometimes think about it is, we’re not confessional here, so I say we don’t educate people into religion, we educate people about religion. We’re not trying to make them academically into anything in our own image.
“There’s a communion service every Thursday lunchtime, which is open to anyone in the community. The ministry candidates – from the Church of Scotland and the Episcopal Church – are at the core of this.”
And she adds that she believes the multi-faith context is a ‘healthy’ one to study in. “I think it’s one of the huge, huge strengths we have here to off er the candidates. They are not in a little bubble where everyone shares the same assumptions. In some ways it’s like the real world, because there are people around you who believe all sorts of things, and it’s really important that you know how to listen and interact with people with diff erent opinions.”
The way I sometimes think about it is, we’re not confessional here, so I say we don’t educate people into religion, we educate people about religion. We’re not trying to make them academically into anything in our own image.
Helen Bond and Susan Hardman Moore
This article appears in the December 2018 Issue of Life and Work
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