Dr Mike Higton
Research Interests
Christian Doctrine
I am interested in Christian doctrine as one of the central ways in which Christian communities have made sense of themselves, and can go on making sense of themselves. I explore the ways in which Christian doctrine emerges from and guides Christian practices of reading, arguing, and learning - and so the ways in which the examination of Christian doctrine is inevitably and messily bound up with detailed, ethnographic attentiveness of the lives of Christian communities and individuals, past and present. Roughly speaking, you could call this a postliberal approach to doctrine.
The doctrine that has most occupied my time is Christology - the doctrine of Jesus Christ. I am interested in the history of Christology, and in contemporary interpretations of classical Christology, particularly when tied to an fairly strongly apophatic Trinitarian account of the nature of God, and to accounts of salvation that stress participation in the life of God, or theosis/divinisation. A sketch of the kind of approach I favour can be found in my SCM Core Text, Christian Doctrine (London, 2008) - but it is a line I plan to pursue much further.
Biblical Hermeneutics
I am interested in the role that the Bible plays in Christian life - particularly Christian life construed using the kind of doctrinal framework I've just mentioned. And that means that I am interested in the role that various forms of Bible reading have been held, and are still held, to play a role in uniting believers to Christ, driving them deeper into participation in God's triune life. And I am interested in accounts of that process that are properly post-critical: i.e., that take seriously historical and ideological criticism of the Bible, without allowing them to set the whole agenda.
Theology and Higher Education
I am interested in Christian theological accounts of learning - particularly adult, lifelong learning. And I am interested in what happens when one brings those accounts of learning into serious conversation with the multiple accounts of learning that are operative in modern Western universities. I find that pursuing this conversation provides an interesting doorway into debates about the nature of reason in a secular society and its relation to religion. After all, reasoning is something that we do together, and universities are one of the key sites in which reasoning is done in our society - and yet universities turn out, on close inspection, to be places where multiple different accounts of reason are in play; they are sustainable not because there is a firm secular consensus about reason, but because of a rough working overlap between many differing understandings. I am interested both in the theological roots (or theological baggage) of various of those understandings of reason, and in the contribution that theology can make to the ongoing negotiation of university life.
Scriptural Reasoning
I have for a few years been involved in Scriptural Reasoning - in a programme of intensive small-group study of scriptural texts by mixed gatherings of Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars. (Scriptural Reasoning has non-academic forms as well, but my involvement has been firmly on the academic side.) I have found Scriptural Reasoning a stimulating environment for textual study, a wonderful environment for discovering more about Judaism and Islam (and Christianity) and building inter-religious friendships, a fascinating laboratory for forms of corporate study that have done much to shape how I understand reasoning more generally, and a powerful way in to fresh ways of thinking about the relationship between religious traditions in a largely secular environment.
Research Supervision
I am happy to supervise in a range of topics in modern Christian theology, systematic theology, and the history of doctrine, especially:
- General systematic theology / Christian doctrine
- Christology (history of the doctrine; contemporary incarnational theology)
- Doctrine of God (history; contemporary articulations)
- Biblical hermeneutics
- Scriptural Reasoning
- Theology and higher education / learning
- Recent Anglican theology (e.g., Rowan Williams)
- Postliberal theology (e.g., Hans Frei, George Lindbeck)
