ABSTRACT
At the University of Melbourne, strong departments of philosophy and history had their influence on the author. Analytic philosophers, many of them trained at the University of Oxford, dominated the campus. They trained him to 'watch his language' and scrutinize statements for any careless imprecision. Such philosophers, sad to say, find such imprecision all too often in current theological writing. For example, recently reading a work on Christology from a leading theologian, he came across the claim: 'no statements about God are informative'. Teaching courses and running seminars at the Gregorian solidified and clarified previous interests in the larger themes of Christ's resurrection, God's self-revelation and human experience. Three American scholars, in particular, fed the author's thinking and work during the last years of the second millennium and the opening years of the third: William Kelly, Stephen Davis and Daniel Kendall.
