A Day in the Life of a PhD Student

Our family has been in Scotland for two and a half months and it's been just over a month since I officially matriculated at the University of St Andrews, moved into my workspace, and began life as an 'official' PhD student.  Life has more or less fallen into a rhythm and with Joseph back in school after the two-week fall holiday break, this morning I thought I would document an average day in the life of a PhD student - or at least this particular PhD student.

With Joseph's primary school on the way to the university, I get to walk him to school each morning.  It's getting darker earlier and earlier - in December the sun will rise around 9 AM and set around 3 PM! - so on our walk we get to see some great early morning color.

A small gate out of our one-street neighborhood opens into this field, which has a trail to Joseph's school.  Along the way, the path narrows as we pass behind the single neighborhood between our house and Canongate Primary School.

We've loved Canongate.  Joseph's class has been a great fit for him, and a number of other families in the divinity school have kids here as well.  I was counting the other day and came up with five other kids in P1 (the Scottish equivalent of kindergarden) who have parents who either are or were in full-time ordained ministry. 

Dropping this guy off is a great start to the day.  The kids line up outside the door to their classroom (each class has a door outside which is then locked for the rest of the day).  He always makes me wait and wave to him through the window before I head off to my school. 

After about a five minute walk to Joseph's school it's another 15 minutes until I reach my final destination.  Parking is at a premium downtown and we only have one car, and the walk is a great start to the day.  With the sun out this morning I decided to take the Lade Braes which has an entry point just behind Canongate.

It's a beautiful walk and the leaves are still turning here.

The Lade Braes runs right beside the Kinness Burn.  The river a little swollen now because we've had a rainy past few days.  Just on the other side you can see a bit of the Botanic Gardens, which are right next to Joseph's school.

I pass by our favorite park, Cockshaugh and then the path crosses over one of the main streets in St Andrews.  To the south the elevation drops and there's a great view of that part of town and farm land just beyond. 

The Lade Braes continues on, even though now I'm almost to the center of town.  At some points it gets pretty narrow:

Before it ends pretty much at the center of town:

Someone told me before we moved here that the actual town of St Andrews was only three streets, and he was right.  This is South Street (the other two are Market St and North St) and I head east on my way to the divinity postgraduate offices.  Along the way I pass by St Mary's College, which is the Divinity School and where the library, professor offices, and seminar rooms are.

The name of the building that holds the postgraduate offices is the Roundel.  It's at the very end of South Street.  The first door on the left is the entrance.

You can just see Rule's Tower in that picture.  But when you walk around the other side of the building you see this:

That's the ruins of St Andrews Cathedral.  On the other side of that is the North Sea.  My office doesn't face that direction, which is probably for the best in terms of my work efficiency!  The divinity postgraduates are truly blessed to have such a great building in such an incredible location.  The Roundel provides a great community where students can engage one another and learn from each other.  

Speaking of my office, I work on the third floor (2nd floor in the UK as the ground floor is 0 over here) in the Black Room.  I share it with three other PhD's and there's a small side room where a visiting scholar has a private office.  Here's my desk:

Not quite as many books as I had in the office in Starkville but still quite a few.  The divinity school library is a great resource but it's nice to have much of what I need on hand and to not have to worry about books that I need being recalled by other folks in the university community.  The mandatory pastor's continuing education budget that I had at FPC was put to good use!

And here's my view for most of the next eight hours:

Getting into a rhythm of reading and writing for that much time a day has taken a little getting used to.  Pastoral life was great but having uninterrupted time to study was often hard to come by, particularly the last year and a half in Starkville when I was serving as the interim senior pastor.  That experience makes me all the more grateful for what I get to do right now.  Today I'm reading a book by Paul Molnar on T.F. Torrance in preparation for a chat that I get to have with him on Tuesday about the direction of my dissertation. 

Every once in a while I'll need to run over to the St Mary's Library, and today is one of those days.  I was looking for a couple of essays and found them easily enough here:

On Wednesdays the theology students get together for a seminar in College Hall just off of the St Mary's quad.  This semester we're reading through one part (IV.2 for those of you keeping up at home) of Karl Barth's multi-volume Church Dogmatics.  I tried to sneak in today to take a picture but it was locked.  But in this picture it's straight ahead.  This semester Professor John Webster leads the conversation and then next semester Professor Alan Torrance, my supervisor, will do the same.  There are some sharp people studying at St Mary's and I'm encouraged and challenged by them. 

About five o'clock is quitting time for me.  On the advice of many others I'm treating my academic work much like a job and working on basically a 9 - 5 schedule.  It started raining this afternoon and I got a text message from my wonderful wife with an offer to pick me up.  That was good to hear, since I'd forgotten my raincoat.  And here she is, navigating the Scottish roads in our manual Citroen C4 like a pro!

T.F. Torrance: Pastor

I initially encountered T.F. Torrance's writings while I was in my second year of seminary, as I've recounted elsewhere.  One of the reasons that I settled upon studying T.F. when I applied to doctoral programs was because his theology continued to capture my imagination while I served as a pastor.  More often than not, when I picked up one of T.F.'s books during my six years in Starkville, I found something that related to the work in which I found myself.  Part of this has to do with the nature of what T.F. believed and who he thought God was.  But it also comes from his experience as a pastor.  It's one part of his life and ministry that impressed me and I've devoted this post to some details about T.F.'s pastoral ministry.

As I said before in my last post, Torrance initially believed his vocation was to follow in his father's footsteps as a foreign missionary.  It was only while studying at New College at the University of Edinburgh that he began to believe that his ministry might fall within the real of theological education. 

In 1939 Torrance returned from a brief stint of teaching at Auburn seminary in New York (the content of those lectures can be found in The Doctrine of Jesus Christ) to a country on the verge of war.  He initially attempted to enlist with the British Army Chaplains but was told that the waiting list was currently two years long.  After a brief season studying at Oriel College in Oxford while finishing his doctoral dissertation begun in Basel, Torrance accepted a call to be pastor of a Church of Scotland parish in Alyth.  He would serve there until 1947, though the time was interrupted by his service with the Allied Forces in Europe.  After that he served for three years at the Beechgrove Church in Aberdeen before accepting a post at New College.  Torrance's memoirs of that time in Alyth have recently been published, and are full of many reflections that give insight into his pastoral heart, such as what follows:

"I made a point of reading a passage of the Holy Scripture and praying in each home, relating the intercession as far as I could to their family life and circumstances of which I learned from their elder.... During those pastoral visits I used to recall the statement of John Calvin that the gospel should be preached privatim et domatim, privately and from house to house, and made that a major part of my ministry.  I found that after I had visited people two or three times and read the Bible to them and prayed with them, they often opened their hearts to me.  I learned more of the needs of peoples lives and souls in that way than I could have done otherwise, and it helped to make my preaching of the gospel and exposition of the Bible as personally relevant as possible.  I recall on one occasion, for example, a lady member of the congregation hesitatingly told me that she had a vision of angels, but had never dared to tell any minister about it in case it was dismissed.  When I told her that I believed her, and spoke a little of the ministry of angels, she was overjoyed in a way that deepened her faith and her own reading of the Holy Scriptures" (Gospel, Church, and Ministry 34).

T.F.'s time as a pastor serves as the background for his ministry at New College teaching divinity students and his writings as well.  It wouldn't be correct to say that he was driven by 'practical' concerns - it's clear that the motivating force of his theology is the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures.  But that was always done with an eye to the church and its ministry in the world.  Nowhere is this more clear than in T.F.'s continued concern with making clear that it is through Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone that we come face to face with God.  At key points in his pastoral ministry he encountered people who questioned whether or not God was really like Jesus, and the lasting impact of his work has been to answer that question with a resounding "Yes!"  Here Torrance recounts an incident that took place in his service to the Allied troops during the invasion of Italy:

"When daylight filtered through, I came across a young soldier (Private Philips), scarcely twenty years old, lying mortally wounded on the ground, who clearly had not long to live.  As I knelt down and bent over him, he said: 'Padre, is God really like Jesus?'  I assured him that he was - the only God there is, the God who has come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Savior.... The incident left an indelible impression on me.  I kept wondering afterwards what modern theology and the Churches had done to drive some kind of wege between God and Jesus.... There is no hidden God, no Deus Absconditus, no God behind the back of the Lord Jesus, but only the one Lord God who became incarnate in him" (from T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography). 

Torrance's work clearly has academic implications for any number of fields:  the dialogue between theology and natural science, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity, or the interpretation of the Scottish Presbyterianism being just a few.  But even within the most challenging of his works there is a clear pastoral trajectory which is in all true theological work in its service to the Church in its ministry in the world.  I close with a passage I recently stumbled across about the importance of prayer in the T.F.'s work of training ministers while at New College:

"During my own years of teaching theology in New College... I used to ask myself two questions about students as they completed their training: whether they had tuned into knowledge of God in their studies so finely that they had attained a theological instinct for divine truth, and whether their conduct of public worship reflected the habit of private prayer.  They were much more important for the holy ministry, I felt, than clever essays, profound learning, or brilliance in examinations.  Fine-tuning of the human mind in the knowing of God and direct personal communing of the human spirit with God lie at the very heart of theological understanding, and bear decisively not only on the vocation of the pastor but on the vocation of the theological professor" (from "John Baillie at Prayer").

T.F. Torrance: Evangelical Theologian

As I begin my work here in St Andrews and as I also start to use this medium to communicate to friends and family what it is I'm up to here, as great place to start is the person is the subject of my study here - T.F. Torrance.  As I've shared elsewhere, a part of what I feel is the Father's call on my life and ministry has to do with this particular person, and as I've been spending time in his biography I've been reminded why that is so.  For the next few posts, what I'll do is draw attention to certain parts of his life and ministry.

 A young T.F. Torrance

In reading Allister McGrath's wonderful biography of Torrance and also in a recent conversation with my supervisor, I've been reminded of the evangelical heritage and thrust of Torrance's ministry.  Torrance was born to missionary parents who worked in the Chengdu region of China (roughly south-central China).  Torrance's father, also named Thomas, was inspired by a visit from David Livingstone to a nearby Scottish parish to consider mission work.  Torrance senior was to spend the greater part of the rest of his life in China.  His work began in 1896 with the China Inland Mission and later he worked with the American Bible Society where he met his wife, Annie.  The work in China was set on the backdrop of a particularly tumultuous period of Chinese history, and among the political struggles that took place Christian missionaries were often persecuted or martyred.  In 1927 the Torrance family fled Chengdu because of threat of persecution in their area and during their escape by ship came under small-arms fire. 

Torrance was profoundly affected by the faith of his parents and it was a gift that oriented his life and ministry.  He writes:

Through my missionary parents I was imbued from my earliest days with a vivid belief in God.  Belief in God was so natural that I could no more doubt the existence of God than the existence of my parents or the world around me.  I cannot remember ever having had any doubts about God.  Moreover, as long as I can recall my religious outlook was essentially biblical and evangelical, and indeed evangelistic.  I used to read three chapters of the Bible every day and five on Sundays which meant reading through the whole Bible each year.  My father who could repeat by heart the Psalms and some of the books of the New Testament (the Epistle to the Romans, for example) encouraged us children to memorise many passages of the Holy Scriptures which I greatly appreciated later in life.  Family prayer sled by my father on his knees and the evangelical he taught us to sing nourished our spiritual understanding and growth in faith.  I can still repeat in Chinese, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.'  I was deeply conscious of the task to which my parents had been called by God to preach the Gospel to heathen people and win them for Christ.  This orientation to mission was built into the fabric of my mind, and has never faded - by its essential nature Christian theology has always had for me an evangelistic thrust. 

It was to that end that Torrance commenced theological studies at New College in Edinburgh.  He hoped to follow in his father's footsteps and return to the mission field in China. 

 H.R. Mackintosh's

The Person of Jesus Christ

Torrance's training at New College deepened his theological convictions.  Under the teaching of a great Scottish theologian named H.R. Mackintosh, Torrance found himself taught by someone who often ended a survey of a particular Christian doctrine with the question, "How would that be received and understood on the mission field?"  Mackintosh's teaching affected Torrance deeply, and the mark he made upon the young TF is visible throughout his life. 

Mackintosh also, however, gave Torrance a different vision for his vocation.  As Torrance excelled in his studies and won awards and fellowships, he began to articulate a new way of understanding his calling: 'theological ministry in the service of the gospel.'  And it was to that end that Torrance left Scotland in 1937 to study with the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth.

As I have been reading through TF's writings in much greater depth, I am reminded of all of the ways that this "evangelical and evangelistic" thrust to his work is present from the beginning to the end of his corpus.  In his writings, in his teaching (which had the effect of leading to the conversions of at least a handful of theology students), and in the witness of his life, Torrance maintained a strong sense of the missional impulse of the Gospel.  In his dialogue with the natural sciences (something I'll blog about later), it's clear that Torrance views his work as serving in the church's ministry to the Western mind and all of the ways in which it had built unnecessary barriers between the physical sciences and theology.  In whatever ways God calls me in ministry forward, I feel some comfort in placing myself at the figurative feet of someone whose writings have at their heart a healthy, evangelical heart. 

*Quotes, dates, and details from Torrance's life all come from Allister McGrath's T.F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography