BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Trevor A. Hart is a rector at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in St Andrews, Scotland, and a retired scholar of systematic and historical theology who worked at the University of Aberdeen and the University of St Andrews. While working at the latter university, he founded the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA), which he directed from 2000 to 2013. When Hart is not helping out at church, he can often be found chatting theology with students over coffee at We Are Zest off South Street in St Andrews, or a short walk across the street, talking theology with scholars at St. Mary’s Divinity College.

Hart has published various works on systematic theology, including the well-regarded Faith Thinking: The Dynamics of Christian Tradition, as well as works on the intersection of theology and creativity, such as Between the Image and the Word: Theological Engagements with Imagination, Language and Literature, and Making Good: Creation, Creativity and Artistry. He has also contributed as an editor to the books Patterns of Promise: Art, Imagination and Christian Hope (with Gavin Hopps and Jeremy Begbie) and Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature and Theology (with Ivan Khovacs).

He was kind enough to answer a few questions about his work.

Interview Questions

During 2024, you had an excellent conversation with Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson at the George MacDonald Bicentenary Conference hosted at St Andrews. What was your first exposure to MacDonald’s work?

I was introduced to MacDonald in the 1980s by some friends who had discovered his novels and were enthusiastic about them. It was, I think, primarily the novels (rather than MacDonald’s works of fantasy) that they had been reading, and so my own first venture into his writings was one of the Scottish novels, Sir Gibbie, which I found in a secondhand bookstore for just a few pence, and which I found so gripping that I read it more or less at a single sitting over 24 hours! The only thing that prevented me devouring it more quickly was MacDonald’s insistence on including quite a lot of dialogue in old Scots dialect; but having sampled some of the editions from which this has been expurgated supposedly for the reader’s benefit and convenience, I think doing so affects the prose badly and ought not to be undertaken. It doesn’t take very long, if you persist with it, before the sense of the Doric begins to become clear enough, and it gives the stories a ring of authenticity that is very easily lost when “translated” into the English (or, more typically, North American) idiom. The speech incarnates the characters thoroughly in their proper time and place, and makes that time and place known to the reader.

Did you become familiar with the Inklings after discovering MacDonald, or were you one of the scholars who became interested in MacDonald through discovering he influenced the Inklings?

I suspect I would not be alone in admitting that I was already thoroughly familiar with Lewis, and with Tolkien. Both were already very popular in the UK when I was growing up in, say, the mid-1970s, not least in Christian circles (though I had devoured The Lord of the Rings at least twice before my own conversion at the age of 17!). But my interest in MacDonald was sparked quite independently of these by discovering MacDonald’s novels. Among his works these were not, of course, typically the ones that made such an impression on Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien and others. That was mostly the fantasy and fairy stories, and critical writings such as those contained in A Dish of Orts.

Two things are probably worth reminding ourselves of in this context.

First, MacDonald was indeed a prolific author of novels and works of fantasy, and an accomplished poet; but he was first and foremost a Professor of English Literature (an academic discipline he was personally involved in founding within UK universities), and wrote extensively and authoritatively on many of the literary “greats” from earlier centuries and generations (Dante, Shakespeare, Novalis, Wordsworth, Coleridge to name just a handful). That he was also trained in the natural sciences (as a chemist) and in theology and was competent in languages classical, biblical and modern made him a polymath of a sort that are rarely to be found nowadays due to the increasing specialization and compartmentalization of areas of knowledge within universities and elsewhere. This enabled MacDonald to see links and make connections that were known to the ancients, but with which we have largely lost touch or forgotten today. Some of them are being rediscovered in inter- or cross-disciplinary ventures of one sort or another, and folk get very excited about them! MacDonald was a great forerunner in this respect.

The second thing to recognize about him, though, is that while he was undoubtedly an accomplished artist and an intellectual powerhouse in his own right, MacDonald saw himself as standing in a tradition and handing on its insights to the next generation. Some of the “big ideas” in his writings can be found in the authors whom he himself loved and respected, not least Wordsworth and Coleridge in England’s recent literary past, though he was no mere conduit; he was selective, willing to correct or adjust where he felt it to be necessary, and added the distinctive contribution of his own multi-disciplinary insights as he conveyed the ideas to others. While various Inklings were no doubt thoroughly familiar with Shakespeare, Wordsworth and others before they encountered MacDonald, what he drew from these authors and, in his critical writings, made of their work will have been influential in its own right, and no doubt commended him and his own thought to them all the more fully.

What are some ways that MacDonald or the Inklings have influenced your approach to theology and the imagination?

In my undergraduate studies (in theology at the University of Durham), I took two courses on theology and literature taught by a Professor of English Literature. This helped me to see the importance of breaking out of academic silos, and to appreciate more fully the natural links between the concerns of the theologian and those of the artist, especially novelists and poets.

Eventually, when I arrived in St Andrews and had to chance to do so, I decided to teach a similar course myself. This was the starting point for what quickly broadened out into a wider consideration of the products of human imagining, and in due course the nature and functions of imagination as such. At the time there was very little serious theological attention given to this hugely important aspect of what it is to be a human being in the world, but early on in my trawl for studies of the theme I came across MacDonald’s handful of essays addressing the theme in ways that continue to be “cutting edge” in what they have to say. In their own ways, of course, others among the later “Inklings” realized how important and influential the power of the imaginative is and used imaginative forms to engage religious and theological questions about the world. Charles Williams novels are a good example of this, as are some of Chesterton’s works, and Lewis’s Ransom trilogy. To my mind, though, the best instance is one of Lewis’s latest works, the novel Till We Have Faces.

Since you’ve written about Scottish theologians like Peter Taylor Forsyth, I’m curious: do you see MacDonald responding to particular Scottish concerns in his theology—things that were going on in Scottish Presbyterianism at the time, things like that?

Yes. Even though MacDonald spent the larger part of his adult life in England, his theological sensibilities were shaped positively and negatively by the nurture he received growing up in the Highlands, and this comes out clearly in the novels and elsewhere. As in so many other ways, MacDonald is judicious in his assessment of the religious currents of his childhood and youth.

We are talking about a culture in which the dominant force was a stark version of Presbyterianism underpinned by the theology of scholastic Calvinism, and the pastoral and spiritual virtues and vices of all this are explored in the characters and plots of MacDonald’s stories. Most fundamentally, he reacted against any theology that called into question God’s fatherly love for all made concrete in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. So, doctrines such as that of a double-predestination and a “limited atonement” were anathema to him, familiar as he was with the pastoral impact of their being taught from the pulpit—leading some people (the minority) to a self-satisfied, self-righteous and self-serving presumption, and driving others into anxiety or even despair.

But, as I said, MacDonald is judicious in his assessment, and while he spares no ire or comic irony on these official teachings or those who propagate and live by them he knows very well that most devout Christians in congregations subscribe to them only in the letter rather than the spirit, and carry on reading their Bibles, loving Jesus and praying to their heavenly Father in a manner relatively unscathed by officialdom. The character of Robert Falconer’s grandmother (in the novel of that name) is often singled out as a representative product of the “high” Calvinism of the day, and in many ways this is accurate. But even she transcends her theology of choice: convinced that her wayward son must surely be among those predestined to “reprobation” and, believing that he has recently died, she anguishes in her heart over his presumed fate in God’s hands and prays that, if it were possible, she might be damned in his place. That’s a form of “cognitive dissonance” that crops up in many of MacDonald’s more complex characters.

You start your chapter in Tree of Tales talking about how J.R.R. Tolkien’s work seems to show him developing ideas—things that start in his poem “Mythopoeia” being clarified in “On Fairy-Stories,” and so on. Given that point, do you find it’s important to look at a thinker’s work systematically—what they said over time, not just the most famous snippets?

Well, I think that depends on the thinker and on the particular body of work. Famous snippets can sometimes be famous for good reason! And some authors undoubtedly change their minds about things or choose to veil their own views behind unreliable narrators and the like, which makes trying to trace threads of continuity or overall unity a bit of a waste of time.

I certainly think it’s important to attend carefully to a text in its context, including its place within the presumed flow of development of a writer’s way of seeing and doing things, but there’s a hermeneutical circularity about that. And it may well be that difference and development are more apparent across the decades of many writers’ output than identifiable consonance or consistency. So, it’s risky to generalize on these things.

I do think, though, that Tolkien is an example of someone who seems already to have known from the outset the things that mattered to him and the overall direction in which his writing would travel, given the chance. The literary evidence (of which there is plenty) demonstrates this. As well as an overall vision which would change only in the detail and unpacking, I think he was also fairly patient, willing to sit with an idea or a theme and let it marinade until such time as the opportunity to work with it further arose. So, things that clearly have their roots quite early in his career were only worked out and “written up” later. It’s also true, of course, that he drafted and redrafted things over the decades which only reached their final published form late in his life, having been written originally not for the reading public at all, but for Tolkien’s own gratification and the entertainment of his friends. So, in his case in particular I think it is legitimate to presume a basic continuity of outlook, unless evidence to the contrary is fairly unequivocal.  

How do you feel when you get a chance to revisit some of your ideas and see how your thinking has clarified?

For the most part, I find myself reassured that what I wrote “then” has borne the test of time and, other than wanting to say much more (including by way of clarification), I don’t think I would wish to recant, or to set any basic ideas and convictions aside. I’m sure there are some clumsily written bits and pieces out there if one goes far enough back, but I think I’m one of those writers whose output over the years manifests an overall continuity. That doesn’t mean that I don’t constantly have lots of new things to say (or, put differently, that I just keep on regurgitating the same old things), but with hindsight—which is the only perspective to adopt on this—I think that the development from early interests and writings is precisely that, an organic development where things have emerged and come together naturally enough from earlier stages of my work. Knowing much “more” than one did forty years ago, of course, sometimes presents as “knowing now just how little you actually know about anything, given how much you now realize there is to be known about everything,” and weighing the importance of one’s ideas accordingly!

Can you share a little about how the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts (ITIA) was started?

I mentioned already that I had started to teach courses on theology and literature soon after I arrived in St Andrews, and that broadened out to an interest in imagination more widely. Around that time I was supervising a handful of PhD projects linked directly to this research interest, so we had a small group who met together to discuss things on a regular basis. Jeremy Begbie (now at Duke, then based in Cambridge in the UK) had a well-established project working on “Theology Through the Arts” and through a variety of common interests and links, we decided to bring this together with what was happening in St Andrews in order to consolidate it all. Jeremy’s work on the arts and mine on the imagination both got worked into the title of the endeavor.

We began to pick up students very quickly, and a weekly research seminar gave us both an institutional core and a shop window for some really interesting projects. We ran our first conference, drawing speakers from the US and elsewhere on the theme “Transfiguring Flesh” and over the next decade the conference became more or less an annual event. We also started a master’s program which became a great way to attract good students many of whom then stayed on to study for a PhD.

When we began all this, there was as yet relatively little interest in an academic conversation between theology and the arts or theology and the phenomenon of human imagining. We were one of only a small handful of places providing an opportunity to engage in those conversations. On the one hand, this meant that ITIA quickly established itself (and remains) a world leader in this field. On the other hand, it meant that those graduating with ITIA PhDs couldn’t expect to find lots of ITIA-shaped job opportunities waiting for them. What is particularly gratifying, therefore, is to see what a large percentage of those who came and studied with us have been successful in securing teaching position across the world, many of them, having established themselves, developing ITIA-type programs and initiatives wherever they happen to be.

You mention in the introduction to Between the Image and the Word how your research had become “bound up” with your experiences at ITIA. How has living in a community of students and fellow scholars informed your work?

All scholarship is an activity in community, whether that looks to be the case or not. After all, most scholars spend their time engaging via print or other media with the thoughts of others who have shared those thoughts in order to contribute to a conversation. A tradition of study, a way of doing things academically, acknowledgment of the accomplishments (and sometimes the failings) of one’s predecessors, one’s own teachers, and others currently working in a given field—all this is a form of community, even though a lot of time is spent in the isolation of a library or at the word-processor, and even though most academics spend a lot of time trying to find something to say that no one else has said before!

But those more individual pursuits can’t be carried on in total isolation, because we need something to think and write about, and we write in the hope that others will take notice and respond. The advantages of having an actual flesh-and-blood community in which scholarly conversations can take place around shared concerns is difficult to overestimate. There are (or should be) plenty of opportunities to share ideas, ask questions, and learn from one another, though this can only really happen if one gets beyond the sort of academic seminar model in which everyone is primarily concerned to prove how much cleverer they are than everyone else (or afraid to join in because it might be discovered that they aren’t!).

A proper community of learning is one in which there is an underlying concern for the common good, a willingness to find and respond to the best in someone else’s viewpoint or project (especially when you disagree with it), and a willingness to take as well as to offer constructive criticism in the assurance that there is always something to be learned. There’s a relationship of trust involved in all this.

As far as the student-supervisor/teacher relation is concerned, I think a good supervisor will always believe that he or she can learn a lot from supervisees, both in the work they produce and in the feedback they give along the way on a supervisor’s own thought and writing. I think when I said my work was “bound up” with the venture that became ITIA that was largely a matter of necessity but also a gift of Providence. No one can do everything, and it is often the demands of supervising and teaching that dictate the way one’s time and attention is allocated. The circumstance works well and to everyone’s benefit when there is a consonance rather than a competition between the things you want to work on as a scholar and the substance of those demands. Supervising PhDs and teaching master’s courses in ITIA gave me a grounding for the work I wanted to do and sometimes reshaped the direction of what I had thought I might do. That’s how it works when it’s working well. And weekly research seminar discussions and endless cups of coffee chatting with students afterwards in Zest are a huge source of encouragement and enjoyment rather than a drain on time when one could be writing. At least, that’s how it was for me.

You’ve worked as a scholar discussing theology and put theology into practice by serving as a rector. Do you find the practical ministry impacts your scholarship?

It works both ways I suppose. When I moved into full-time pastoral ministry in 2013, I told others (and myself) that from now on I was simply going to be doing theology again, but in a different register. And that is how I think about it. Because I have always been involved in some form of associate ministry in a congregation (preaching regularly, leading worship, and involved in pastoral work) this has kept me grounded in the realities of life beyond the ivory tower of academe, and perhaps prevented me from ever becoming more rarefied or abstract in my work than might from time to time actually be necessary. But full-time ministry certainly keeps you “real” in terms of what matters and what might be mere academic indulgence and helps monitor the proportions between the two.

I guess something else that it does is remind you just how theologically uninformed many folk in congregations actually are, and to make you determined to address that in one way or another. For me that has meant placing a certain emphasis on preaching among all my other activities, but also doing some writing directed not to the academy but to thinking Christians in congregations. I think I have published two or three “scholarly” books since moving from one role to the other and two intended for a wider readership.

Ministry, of course, is a 24-7 occupation, and there’s no doubt that making time for scholarship in the midst of it is a challenge: but then, to be honest, making time for scholarship as a full-time academic in a university can be just as much a challenge these days. The challenge of time for me is that while I can do research on a “little and often” basis, I have never been able to write like that. When the writing stage comes it has to be done in longer, more sustained shifts at the laptop, otherwise I lose the thread and/or the creative energy dissipates. So, sticking to pre-ordained deadlines is a bit of a challenge!

Finally, there’s little doubt that being immersed more fully in the messiness of people’s lives not least in moments of crisis and extremity forces you hard up against some big questions about God and God’s dealings with us in a way that won’t permit the trotting out of easy or facile doctrinal formulae, whether those were learned via a popular paperback from the local Christian bookstore or a learned tome of systematic theology. The reality of sin and redemption at work in people’s lives has a way of complicating neat theology, and that gives a writer pause before embarking on putting pen to paper.

I would imagine a challenge that comes with writing about the imagination theologically is to make things fit too neatly into a systematic pattern, to dissect until the mystery disappears. Have you found anything that helps you avoid that extreme, helps you get excited about the imagination again?

I think the loss of sense of mystery occurs whenever we mistake our own carefully packaged and organised ideas about reality for the substance of reality itself, no matter what we are talking or writing about. The reality we are all immersed in every day is one thing and our “thinking about” or reflecting on it is something else entirely. Actually, in order to think about at all, it we have to step back temporarily from the flow of reality, becoming momentarily remote from it while we “pause for thought.”

Ideas, words and the rest are in this sense always abstractions from reality, and we need to keep the distinction clearly in view. If our ideas and words are helpful, they will illuminate and help us to “make sense” of things, better able to grasp and deal with the world when we re-immerse ourselves in its complex and constantly changing texture. Reality itself is always bigger, messier, deeper, richer than even the best of our thoughts and statements about it, necessary and beneficial though those thoughts may be, and so the return to reality will always challenge our schematisations of it, holding them to account and demanding their further adjustment so that, as theologian Colin Gunton puts it, there gradually comes to be a better fit between words and the world. That’s a basic premise of any sort of realism, whether it be in theology or anywhere else.

But it’s very easy for us to come to prefer the neatness and regularity of our schemes or systems to the messiness and intractability of reality itself, and to begin to treat them as if they were reality, as if we had captured reality and exhausted its capacity by breaking it down and slotting its bits into our variously shaped boxes and categories. In religious and theological terms, that is called idolatry, and there’s plenty of it around! But it can be found in any area of human understanding, anywhere in which gaining knowledge about something becomes an imperialistic project, colonising reality with our ideas about it rather than allowing it to stand over against our ideas and remain elusively beyond their grasp.

To answer your actual question (!), as I get older I become less and less satisfied by any attempts to systematize that do not recognize this concern and so come to terms with the intrinsic controvertibility, partiality and provisionality of even the best among them, misplacing the true source of authority where knowing is concerned. In theological terms, the more comprehensive and consistent such schemes are, the more suspicious of them I become. Imagination is an essential tool in constructing schemes of that sort (locating particular things within overarching patterns), but it is also vital to helping us to escape from their allure, to think outside the box, and to wonder in the face of what confronts us.

I own a very large number of books, and many of those are works of theology—some “systematic” in the much-vaunted sense, others less so. Increasingly, though, my theological reflection is stimulated not so much by the answers to be found readily to hand in such books as by the undeniably “theological” questions posed by novels, poetry, and other imaginative texts that interrogate the stuff of what it means to be human in the world God has placed us in. As Paul S. Fiddes reminds us in his great book Freedom and Limit, both are approaches to essentially the same territory of concern, but their approaches are quite different and both equally necessary unless we are happy for all the mystery and complexity of things to be squeezed out, leaving us with a set of (no doubt theologically “orthodox” but nonetheless) bloodless abstractions distanced from any reality we know.

Any upcoming books or projects you can share?

I have just finished a short book on the doctrine of God. Its provisional title is Metaphor, Mystery and the Meanings of Monotheism and some of its concerns overlap quite a bit with what we have been talking about. My next project is something rather bigger—a book exploring ways in which artistic works of various sorts (painting, poetry, theatre, music, and others) engage with and transform the materiality of the world in which, as embodied beings, we live, and doing so in conversation with the classic Christian doctrine of the incarnation or “flesh-taking” of God himself in Jesus. It is entitled Taking Flesh: Incarnation, Embodiment and Artistry and it is due to be published by Fortress Press in 2027.

More information about Trevor A. Hart’s books can be found on his website.