ABSTRACT
The mystery of all lives lies in their contingency: that each of us is born, lives and dies at particular times and places, and these contingencies shape the kind of people that we are. The contingencies extend right to the heart of Christian theology, for there is at least one respect in which the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus are contingent, and yet determine the very essence of the Christian faith. An education in the history of Western theology, by the time-honoured method of teaching it, was the next crucial contingency. A post in the Philosophy of Religion at King's College, London, then doctrinally in the grip of a kind of modernist high Anglicanism, 'happened' to be that which turned up, after two years of doctoral research, in 1969. For theology is a discipline best done in communion, in the image of the triune God.
