Interview with Gregory A. Thornbury | September 30, 2013
Intro: Dr. Gregory Alan Thornbury (GAT) was recently named the sixth president of The King’s College in New York City. He took some time to chat with me on the phone on September 30th and discuss . . . a little bit of everything, you might say.
David: Thank you for your time, Dr. Thornbury. You mentioned in your Convocation address at The King’s College that you felt a bit like an alien in the city. Are you feeling more at home now?
GAT: Well, I think everybody feels like an alien. That’s the point of New York. Virtually everyone is an alien in New York as it tends to be a gather place for aliens. So . . . I like feeling like an alien, but that makes me feel special—it makes me feel biblical.
David: A number of our folks may not be familiar with you, Dr. Thornbury. So, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about yourself? Were you a student at Southern Seminary at one point?
GAT: Yes. I grew up just outside of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in the shadow of the dreaming spires of Bucknell University. As an interesting side note, Bucknell University was founded in the basement of the First Baptist Church in Louisville in the early 19th century. It has long since drifted from its Christian heritage like most colleges of the type and of the time. But I grew up there, and my father was the perfect picture of a country parson. He was pastor of the Winfield Baptist Church for forty-four years. So, he had a long, faithful, fruitful ministry in that one location.
In terms of my academic background, I went to Messiah College for my undergraduate degree. If you know anything about Messiah, it’s a Mennonite/Anabaptist/Wesleyan college. So I have had the good fortune of going to places that were outside of my own tradition. I grew up in American Baptist Churches, within the Baptist mainline denomination. Thus, I went to Messiah, which was Anabaptist and pietistic, and it was very good. It challenged me in many areas ultimately for the good. I graduated from there in 1993 and about six months before I graduation, I was accepted as a student at Southern Seminary—this would have been pre-Albert Mohler.
A lot of my Evangelical pastor/mentors really did not want me to go to Southern, because it was perceived, and I think rightly so, as having been theologically adrift. As a matter of fact, I had one very saintly Reformed Baptist pastor say to me, “Greg, if you go to Louisville to seminary I will never speak to you again. Because there are two seminaries in Louisville, one right across the street from the other, and one is Sodom and the other is Gomorrah.” But when I heard Al Mohler’s opening convocation address, he was citing Carl Henry and Augustine and I was like, “O my goodness, this guy’s an Evangelical.” So long story short, I had written Dr. Mohler after the convocation address saying, “Hey, I am an Evangelical too!” It was kind of a golly-gee-whiz-bang type letter and several months later, I was called into the President’s Office (I thought I was in trouble for something). I came in, and he apologized for taking so long to respond to my letter. Long story short, I wound up working for him for five and half years; I did both my M.Div. and my Ph.D. at Southern, and Dr. Mohler was my supervisor. I was his first doctoral student.
In the Ph.D. program at Southern, back during those days, you had to do a third of your coursework outside of the seminary. I completed mine at Templeton Green College at Oxford with E. David Cook, doing British empiricism and Scottish Common Sense Realism research. I went from there to Union University fifteen years ago now. That’s my academic background.
David: Wow—fifteen years. I can’t remember who introduced me to your work, but I remember being instantly encouraged and excited about the fact that you were doing conservative theology from a fresh perspective. But—I confess—I didn’t know you had been at Union that long.
GAT: Yeah, I don’t look like it, but I’m an old-timer. I’m kind of Benjamin Button in a way. What’s the Bob Dylan line from My Back Pages . . . “I was so much older then, I am much younger than that now?”
Dave: Maybe it’s the youthful essence you exude with your numerous pop-cultural references that deceives some people into think you’re younger.
GAT: Maybe, maybe.
Dave: You do tend to make more references than most theologians. A friend and I were recently listening to Peter Gentry participate in a panel discussion and during the conversation he made some passing reference to Napoleon Dynamite. Someone else on the panel asked him if he had seen that movie and Dr. Gentry quickly responded, no, that he had not seen the film and in fact had no clue what it was even about.
GAT: Yes, yes. That would be extreme opposites day if Peter Gentry and Greg Thornbury switched bodies for one day.
Dave: Well, one of the reasons for our discussion today is to help promote the healthy study of theology in our church. Our church has just recently launched a program for theological study, and while we don’t have to encourage most of them to study, I readily recognize that there are some within Evangelicalism at large who simply don’t see the value in theological education—they struggle to find it relevant or worthwhile. I know this is a broad question, but what might you say to someone who is struggling with those thoughts?
GAT: I will say two things by way of prolegomena in answering that question. The first one is something that comes from Timothy George—I always cite him when a question like this comes up. Many moons ago, when would teach the boilerplate church history course at Southern Seminary and Beeson Divinity School, he would always say this on the first day of class (they were the first words out of his mouth I believe). He said, “There are a few important Christians between Jesus and your grandmother about whom you might like to know”—which is a very modest way of shaming people regarding our soft narcissism (that naïve belief that everything about the faith that we have we somehow stumbled upon on our own, or got from our church on their own merits).
Which leads to my second preliminary comment, this one from Karl Barth, who said that “radically and basically, all sin is simply ingratitude.” So, I think not to acknowledge the history of the church not only imperils us in many ways that we could talk about, but I think it is fundamentally a “sin of ingratitude.” If you read, for example, the life of Athanasius—which I am very solicitous to see made into a film—you understand that we would not be where we are today without him. There is so much pathos in how we have preserved orthodoxy despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To not receive that deposit, to not learn from others, is a great sin. It is under such circumstances that I will go the way of Hal Lindsey and Tim Lahaye and say, “maybe we are living in the end times.” That’s probably a little too much to answer your question.
Dave: You’re certainly a student of church history. Who have you studied or read over the years that has really influenced you, what works have been formative in your theological development?
GAT: You’re essentially asking who’s in my pantheon. A person’s pantheon is cultivated over time and develops over time, but if I were forced to keep into greatest hits or top five, I would say definitely, starting with the early church, some of the texts that have most inspired me would be:
Athenagoras’ A Plea on the Behalf of Christians
All of Athanasius’ writings, chief among them A Life of St. Anthony
Augustine’s City of God and Enchiridion were deeply formative for me, and The Confessions for philosophical reasons mostly.
In terms of the Reformation:
I can vividly remember discovering Luther as a very young man. The exhilaration—the kind of messy gritty feel of theology lived in life and then recorded on paper—there was an exhilaration to Luther’s prose that I still think is unparalleled in the church, because you know this is being written on the run, written in a season of danger. So, I am very much a Lutheran in that sense.
Then as I come forward onto the threshold of the modern era, perhaps some theologians who were touch points to the modern era, I would say:
Pascal’s Pensées, and likewise to Luther, on the opposite end, within the Counterreformation. For a long time I had a very roughed-up piece of paper, which eventually just disintegrated, with all of my favorite quotes from the Pensées on it. These were deeply influential.
My second great discovery in college was finding Kierkegaard; this was akin to my discovery of Luther. I am always interested in spoke-in-the-wheel theologians, so Kierkegaard was definitely one of those. Resolutely orthodox, I think he was unfairly characterized and portrayed by some mid-twentieth century Evangelicals.
Dave: That’s interesting. I would not have guessed that. Though I am not overly familiar with his work I have long heard Kierkegaard’s name associated with heterodoxy.
GAT: Now, don’t get me wrong. Do not go wandering into Kierkegaardian wonderland without a reliable guide. I mean—you don’t want to get lost down there, because you can have a tough time finding your way out, but he’s been an immense blessing to me.
Now I am leaving out my philosophical pantheon here, but moving up into the contemporary period: Bonheoffer. Certain key texts of his revitalized my faith in ways that I can’t imagine would have happened otherwise.
And then maybe, if I am forced to keep it to five or six, I would say Carl F.H. Henry. I do credit, by the grace of God, him with saving my faith when I was very close to going over to the dark side.
Dave: I have heard other folks say similar things about his work God, Revelation, and Authority. One pastor I served under earned his masters at a neo-orthodox school and he said that volume one of that set saved his faith.
GAT: Oh wow. I would love to get to know him.
*special thanks to Liz Lockwood for editorial assistance
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