Forty years ago this month, having just graduated in politics and history from Glasgow University, I arrived in Cambridge to study theology in preparation for the ministry of the Church of Scotland, whose educational bureaucracy clearly thought that my not enrolling in one of the four divinity faculties in Scotland was evidence of at best a lack of judgment and at worst an excess of hubris. In fact it was neither. My father was a fairly well-known minister of the kirk and I wanted to study where I would not be known all the time as my father's son.
In fact it was the distinguished occupant of this page at that time, the late Willie Barclay, who suggested I apply to Cambridge, and I put down as my choice of college St John's, for not other reason than that the Master at the time was a Church of England clergyman.
That rather arbitrary decision led to my being given as a supervisor for my studies a young theologian, with a clutch of firsts from Cambridge , Oxford and Harvard, and newly appointed as dean, Stephen Sykes. On a visit to Cambridge my father met Stephen and said immediately after a conversation with him in the street, “He'll be a bishop for sure”. And he was, though not until he had occupied theology chairs at Durham , and Cambridge .
It was a shock, after experiencing the Scottish university tradition based on lectures, to encounter the system of individual supervisions, but I owe to Stephen Sykes not only the choice of supervisors in branches of theology in which he himself could claim no expertise (though what these might have been it was always difficult to discover) but also his introduction to the distant world of patristics, which gave me a fascination for the early fathers which has lasted to this day.
Twice a week, each week for the first two terms I went to hear Dennis Nineham's lectures on St Mark's Gospel. Gently, incisively, and sometimes very wittily, he introduced us to the issues which the gospel raised, , and I look back on these lectures as the most liberating intellectual experience of my life. Dennis Nineham;s rigorously critical approach, far from undermining faith encouraged it, and as a preacher I owed to him the hugely important discovery that there as many sermons to be mined from how and where Mark placed the stories in his gospel than there often were from their content.
One of the other shocks which befell a bemused Scot at Cambridge was attending lectures on a Saturday morning. Basil Hall, a Presbyterian then, but who later became an Anglican and dean of St John's Colleget lectured in a precise voice about the Reformation, and I was also sent to him for supervisions. I can still hear him telling me that he had read all of John Knox's works, and although there were any number of attacks on prelatic bishops there was not a single word against bishops as such. To return to Scotland and discover that the view, which I was convinced was correct, that John Knox was an Edwardine Anglican was virtually heretical was another shock to the system.
In order, I assume, to inoculate me against Anglicanism, I was told by the Church of Scotland that I had to be attached to the then Presbyterian College, Westminster where I met John O'Neill, then teaching New Testament there, later to occupy the New Testament chair in Edinburgh. Even if nothing else in Cambridge had mattered, the friendship established with John, which lasted until his death two and a half years ago, was of huge importance to me. I was in no position to judge his scholars and I still mourn that mind of his, which challenged so many of the axioms of New Testament scholarship. I still remember the first time he rebutted something I said with the gentle comment: “But, Johnston , you are assuming that the Trinity was not a Jewish doctrine”, or hearing him in his Cunningham Lectures in Edinburgh insist that Jesus did appoint disciples to be ministers of Word and Sacrament!
That afternoon of matriculation forty years ago this month, I wandered, for the first time beside the chapel, looking at some gravestones. There I found the graves of John Knox's sons. And I thought that if St John's was good enough for John Knox to send his sons to, it was good enough a place for me to escape from my father's reputation!