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

In 1958 he married Elizabeth Odom, whose brother John had gone sailing
with Christopher in 1938. Once they had moved out to a house in
Summertown in 1964, and with a growing family, Christopher felt that he
was less useful to the College as Chaplain. In 1971 he applied, and was
elected, to the Ely Chair of Divinity at Cambridge. In many ways it was a
surprising appointment, since Cambridge already possessed a first-rate
patristic scholar in Geoffrey Lampe, who had moved to become Regius
Professor. Christopher and his family deeply enjoyed his membership of the
Cathedral Chapter at Ely, as well as his Professorial Fellowship at King’s. He
had the use of “the Black Hostelry” at Ely, a dilapidated but splendid house
dating back to 1291, and an endless source of fascination to the children.
On the enormous attic floor, with his son William as partner, he laid out a
really extensive model railway, which became a showpiece for visiting
scholars and Ely choristers alike.
Christopher’s research work since about 1958 had focused on the concept of
substance in the texts of the early Fathers. The first result was an essay, “The
Significance of the Homoousios”, delivered at the Oxford Patristics Conference
of 1959, but many more years of work followed before he was able to publish
Divine Substance in 1977. It was well reviewed, but did not achieve quite the
circulation he had hoped, not least because it appeared in the Oxford
University Press catalogue under theology, without even a cross-reference
to the philosophy section. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy
in 1980.
Christopher very much enjoyed his conferences abroad, particularly the
“Westdeutsche Arbeitsgemeinschaft”, and ultimately became proficient
enough to lecture in German at Berlin, Mainz, Heidelberg and Marburg, all of
these in 1991. His shorter papers, many of them delivered at conferences
abroad, had been collected as Substance and Illusion in the Christian Fathers, published
in 1985. Christopher had also been asked to contribute to a series of
theological textbooks published by Kohlhammer, and Theologie und Philosophie I
(Alte Kirche) appeared in 1990. It did better in a revised and improved
English version, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity, published by Cambridge in
1994. This was translated into Portuguese and Hungarian. For his 80th
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OBITUARIES