Union

I became Professor of New Testament Studies at Union in 2007. I have been a teacher most of my life, starting out by teaching modern languages in a local post–primary school. I still use them, but these days within theology.

Outside of responsibilities at Union, I am an elder in a Belfast church, where I participate on the rota of pianists and preach occasionally. My wife, Sandra, is a retired nursery–school teacher who remains active in supply teaching and involved in children’s ministry. We live in Bangor and are parents to four young adults (Aimée, Myriam, Stuart and Marc), none of whom now lives in N. Ireland, as well as grandparents to Anna and Caleb. We like meeting new people and exploring new places.

After studying theology at Union, training for ministry and serving as an assistant minister in Belfast, I worked in France for sixteen years. First, I was a minister in the Reformed Church of France (now the United Protestant Church of France), in parish ministry in Cognac and Segonzac and later Marseilles South–East and Aubagne. Then I taught New Testament in John Calvin Seminary, in Aix–en–Provence, where I was also vice principal and then principal for a time: ever since, I have continued to help deliver the New Testament curriculum in Aix on an annual basis. I am also a visiting Professor of New Testament at Baltic Reformed Theological Seminary in Riga, Latvia. 

Having especially enjoyed working with undergraduate students under previous collaboration arrangements with Queen’s University, I am especially enthusiastic about Union’s new BA in Theology, awarded by St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and excited to see this develop. The BA has an important component of biblical studies, where students can expect to engage with our whole biblical studies team comprising experts in both Old and New Testament or the Bible’s original languages (Hebrew and Greek). 

Graduates of Union are equipped to go on to further study, ministry, teaching, work in the caring professions or the charitable sector, and many other roles. In my engagement with ministerial students – and my teaching or supervision at bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral levels – I aim to help students become skilled and thoughtful readers of New Testament texts and confident and creative interpreters of their complex and diverse impacts on faith, culture and life in society. Having recently completed my tenure as College Principal, I can now give over more time to teaching, research and writing.

My teaching draws on my research and publications. I approach Scripture with respect for the integrity and coherence of texts, while taking account of the responsibility of the reader in engaging with them. I also attach priority to the way each New Testament text makes its particular contribution, both to larger corpora – like the collection of Gospels or of Paul’s Letters – and to the biblical Canon as a whole. Finally, I am interested in how communities of faith read Scripture and in how the Bible has impacted, and still influences, culture or society.

For several decades, my special interest and area of expertise has been the Book of Revelation. My PhD dissertation in French, on Parody in the Apocalypse (2002), was reworked and published as a unique thematic study of Revelation (2007), then in English as Reading Revelation: A Thematic Approach (Cambridge, James Clarke, 2012). For its tenth anniversary, in 2022, this was republished in the Foundations of New Testament Criticism series, incorporating a new postscript in which I respond to scholars’ reception of my research. I have also published many shorter studies on aspects of the book and its interpretation.

Union College commemorated Luther’s September Testament and explored some of its ramifications at its International Conference in September 2022. For me, that was an opportunity to complete a research project, underway since 2016, that focussed on the unusually crucial role played by the Book of Revelation in Martin Luther’s Bible publishing endeavours. In the wake of several academic papers and published contributions (2017 – 2020), it was appropriate to assess Luther’s achievement overall, as well as to evaluate the continuing prominence given to Revelation in the Geneva Bible in English. Both studies feature in Martin Luther’s Bible: Perspectives on a Rich Legacy, published in February 2024.