Rev. Fergus King

My interests have been shaped by time spent as student teacher and priest in Scotland, Tanzania, England and Australia, as well as contacts elsewhere in Southern and Central Africa. African colleagues have imbued me with an sense of urgency: the study of mission and New Testament must have some purpose and matter-seriously. The Bible engages with issues of salvation and liberation, and its handling must earth those matters in the stuff of everyday life. On the plus side this gives a great enthusiasm for the subject: I try to research with some fire in my belly. The downside is an impatience with some of the fustiness of New Testament Studies as a northern academic tradition. Above all, it raises issues of justice, and a great concern that the power of reading Scripture must not rest solely with those whom geography and circumstance sets in the privileged places of scholarship in the global north: there needs to be leveling of the playing field so that insights of all readers be respected, and not pushed to the margins by those who would limit valid scholarship to those well-versed in the rules of a guild.

Research Expertise
The New Testament in its context (with an emphasis on socio-historical and rhetorical criticism), Contextual Biblical Interpretation, Bible in Africa, Hermeneutics- particularly the significance of Barr, Bahktin, Gadamer, Jonathan Z. Smith and Wittgenstein for reading the Scriptures, Missiology with particular reference to the NT. My more recent work has seen me developing these thinkers' various insights into  a methodology which explores the family resemblances between literary, philosophical and theological themes  in the nexus of Judaism, Graeco-Romanitas and emerging Christianity, particularly in relation to the Johannine literature. This means that I have been  returning to  my roots a s a classicist particularly in regard to  Graeco-Roman religion, Epicureanism and Stoicism. I am currently supervising a PhD at University of Newcastle.

Teaching Expertise
I have taught  courses in both English and Kiswahili at diploma and undergraduate levels on a variety of subjects: New Testament, Church History (esp  early Church History), hermeneutics, homiletics, missiology and African theology. I have also taught Greek, and developed my own course for teaching Greek to students for whom English was a second (or later) language. Given that  theology and its related disciplines are prone to  "churchspeak" (apologies to George Orwell) and jargon, I have a particular interst in  exploring in class how  technical discourse can be rendered in  everyday language. In 2017, I was appointed to  a professorship  (NT Mission: sociocultural interpretation) at the Missional University, an on-line institution which is   being launched from a  centre in the USA (http://missional.university/theologicalstudies/index.php?cID=303).

Administrative Expertise


Collaborations

I have worked with Bishop Maimbo Mndolwa on  an article about  the Universities Mission to Central Africa in pre- and post-independence Tanganyika (Tanzania).