We live in a time of repeated scandals in which prominent church leaders turn out to be hiding egregious sinful behaviour.

I joined the faculty at Wycliffe in 2019 only a few months before the start of the pandemic. I was in Toronto first, and visited a number of churches in-person, but by the time my wife joined me the city was in lockdown.

I’ll be retiring next summer.  People ask me “why now?”.  Lots of reasons, probably: let someone younger have a place at the faculty table; family responsibilities; health; fatigue; out of synch with the culture; “work is done,” “new things to do,” generational stage of life; and so on.

The struggle for justice seems never to be won, and it is easy for those who fight for it to become weary.  

It’s Valentine’s Day and as the saying goes, “love is in the air,” but what is love anyway? Ask a few different people what love is, and you will quickly discover that love, like ice cream, comes in different flavors that can be enjoyed on their own or mixed together for an extraordinary treat.

The following comments were transcribed from opening remarks by Professor Ephraim Radner delivered at Morning Prayer in the Wycliffe College Founder’s Chapel, on Thursday, Dece

“One must not argue about opinions.

This blog post is the first in a series, in which Wycliffe theology professors consider the COVID vaccination debate. In the following, Ephraim Radner, Professor of Historical Theology asks, “How did the issue of vaccination so divide the church?”

My first degree was in history. I was educated at the University of York in England by professors who were by and large resolutely unimpressed by notions of human progress.

My wife Annette and I own several charcoal and wash drawings by a wonderful artist, Churchill Davenport. We acquired them when we were married in the late 1980’s.

To say that COVID-19 has brought many unwanted challenges into our lives is a blindingly obvious statement. We are weary of the isolation and loneliness.

The ventilator may well come to be one of the sorrowful symbols of the time of the Virus. We will associate it, as even now we do, with intense suffering, loss, and even death.

In the last few weeks, the coronavirus pandemic has introduced a new and deep anxiety and uncertainty into our lives. All kind of features of our daily lives that we formerly could rely upon have been radically altered and we have no idea about what the future holds.

Who should you listen to?  Who do you trust to learn something from?  These are important questions for students, obviously.

A basic failing in much Christian preaching and teaching about the New Testament is not explaining to congregations the rich relationships between what the New Testament authors say and Old Testament texts.

I often tell my doctoral students that if they have an outside job of more than 10 to 15 hours per week, the chances are that their dissertation will be the worse for it, or that it might not get done at all. Experience seems to confirm this advice. But not always.

We are a people who have been made right in our relationship with God through the sacrificial life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The path we’ve travelled in being made right is the path of forgiveness and reconciliation; it’s what it means to be Christians.

Life is hard for most people. Not just for a moment, or in moments—an illness, a lost job, a death of someone we love. Rather, life is hard in a continuous way, as a kind of passage over time. To get from birth to death is difficult.