Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

72
OBITUARIES
started at Cuddesdon Theological College. It was decided that he should stay
at Cuddesdon for a year only, and then a year in a town parish to gain some
experience of normal clerical life before taking up the Fellowship at King’s.
Christopher became acting curate at St John’s Newcastle, and then war
broke out.
Christopher was due to be ordained priest in December 1939, but found to his
great dismay that he was not prepared for this step; he had serious problems
with the doctrine of the Eucharist that he had been taught. What is more he
found that at King’s his role was to create an emergency aid post in a building
unequipped with running water. In the unnatural quiet that had fallen on the
College he decided to take up a post teaching Classics at Eton. One advantage
was that at Eton he tumbled to the obvious fact that great numbers of fellow
Anglicans could serve happily as priests without binding themselves to
regarding the Eucharist as more than a symbolic action to commemorate
Christ’s sacrifice. He was ordained priest in December 1943. He returned to
King’s towards the end of the war, but his post proved undemanding, with few
pupils as King’s was disinclined to admit theologians.The most important thing
he did was attend enthralling seminars led by C H Dodd, and to begin
philosophical work on relating theology to the logical empiricism that was
gradually emerging in the wake of Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle and others.
A visit to Germany with a party of British theologians to meet and encourage
their opposite numbers, organised by the Foreign Office and the Control
Commission in 1948, was the first of a series of such that brought Christopher
into contact with academic life in Germany, where theology was taken much
more seriously, and where he learnt to speak and write in German.
In 1949 he became Chaplain and Tutor in Theology at Keble College, Oxford
– as he put it, the Warden had appointed the most nearly Protestant Chaplain
in the history of the College. His first published work was an essay in a volume
titled Faith and Logic (1957), but he was becoming dissatisfied with the
textbooks he had to use in teaching the early history of Christian doctrine, and
began to work on the philosophical background to the doctrinal controversies
of the Fathers.