Theology has become a substantial field of my mature interdisciplinary scholarship. My principal interests are in Christian anthropology, Pauline theology, patristics, Eastern Orthodox theology, the historical development of Christian doctrine, and the relationship between Christian theology and the philosophical and intellectual traditions within which it developed.
My theological work is particularly concerned with the early and Byzantine Christian traditions and with recovering theological questions from later interpretative frameworks that can obscure their original intellectual setting. This has led me to work extensively with Paul, the Greek Fathers and especially Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, while also engaging with Catholic and Protestant traditions and the historical development of their differences.
Theology also connects closely with my work in history, philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics and law. Questions concerning human nature, conscience, freedom, moral responsibility, sociality, language, authority and the relationship between inherited traditions and later institutions occur repeatedly across these fields.
Formal Theological Education
My principal formal theological qualification is a four-year Master of Divinity undertaken through St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College within the Sydney College of Divinity.
The degree comprised 216 credit points across theology, biblical studies, Church history, Christian spirituality, worship and liturgy, pastoral and practical theology, mission, research methodology and New Testament Greek. The programme included 90 credit points in Theology, 54 in Humanities in the Christian Tradition, 36 in Biblical Studies and 36 in Christian Life and Ministry.
The programme was strongly research-oriented in my case. I completed a substantial research paper in each substantive course, allowing me to investigate particular theological and historical questions considerably beyond the basic requirements of lecture material.
My results were consistently strong. They included High Distinctions in Introducing Theology, Church Fathers, Theology of the Trinity, Early Byzantine Patristic Theology, Early Church History, Studies in Early Byzantine Church History, the Orthodox Church and Research Methodology, together with Distinctions in Pauline Literature and Theology, the Gospel of John, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor and my final research thesis.
This was therefore not simply general ministerial formation. A substantial part of my programme developed into an academically concentrated study of Scripture, patristics, Byzantine theology and theological anthropology.
Patristic Theology
Patristic theology has become the strongest specialised component of my theological work.
My studies began with Church Fathers: An Introduction and developed through dedicated postgraduate work on Byzantine Patristic Theology from the fourth to ninth centuries and from the ninth to fifteenth centuries, together with specialist courses devoted to Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor.
The early Byzantine patristics work examined the development of Greek Christian thought between the fourth and ninth centuries, including Christology, the ecumenical councils and the relationship between historical circumstances, spiritual life and theological formulation. The later work continued this into middle and late Byzantium, including the development of hesychasm and mystical theology and figures such as Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas.
This chronological depth matters to my approach. I do not regard “the Fathers” as a single undifferentiated body of doctrine. I am interested in the development of Christian thought: the intellectual problems particular theologians encountered, the philosophical vocabulary available to them, their historical circumstances, and the ways later Christian traditions appropriated their work.
Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor
Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor have become particularly important to my theological thinking.
My postgraduate work included a dedicated Patristic Profile on Gregory and a specialist postgraduate course on Maximus. This involved approaching these thinkers within theological, spiritual, philosophical, literary and historical contexts rather than treating them simply as sources for later systematic theology.
Gregory interests me particularly for his anthropology, understanding of the human image of God, account of spiritual development and conception of humanity’s movement towards God. Maximus develops many related questions at an extraordinary level of philosophical and theological sophistication: nature and will, freedom, human division, creation, incarnation and the restoration of humanity in Christ.
The intellectual relationship between Gregory and Maximus is itself important to my work, particularly the development of Christian anthropology and accounts of human division, vocation and reconciliation.
Paul and New Testament Theology
Biblical studies formed another substantial part of my theological training. My Master of Divinity included Introduction to the Old Testament, Introduction to the New Testament, The Gospel According to John and the advanced unit Pauline Literature and Theology, as well as two semesters of New Testament Greek.
The Pauline course was particularly important to the eventual direction of my research. It involved studying Pauline literature through its literary forms, theological content and historical, cultural and religious setting.
My engagement with Paul ultimately developed into my Master’s thesis on Romans 7.
The Gospel of John provides another important dimension because Johannine theology intersects with many of my patristic interests: Logos theology, incarnation, participation, divine life and the relationship between creation and God.
I approach biblical theology historically and linguistically as well as doctrinally. My study of New Testament Greek and my broader background in linguistics reinforce an interest in the conceptual range of words within their original linguistic environments rather than assuming that later theological translations exhaust their meaning.
Christian Anthropology
The principal original focus of my advanced theological research has become Christian anthropology.
My Master’s thesis, Wounded, Not Destroyed: Paul’s Anthropology of Conscience and Nous in Romans 7, examines Romans 7:13–25 and challenges interpretations according to which Paul presents fallen humanity as possessing wholly corrupted moral faculties.
My argument is instead that Paul depicts a divided human being. The nous continues to recognise and desire the good while the sarx remains subject to sin. Conscience therefore survives as a natural moral witness: wounded and frustrated but not annihilated.
This distinction has considerable theological consequences. Salvation can then be understood not as God’s destruction and replacement of human nature but as its liberation, healing and fulfilment.
That conception connects Pauline anthropology with an important trajectory in Greek patristic theology and particularly with the therapeutic understanding of salvation found in Eastern Christianity.
Paul in His Ancient Intellectual World
An important feature of my theological work is methodological.
Rather than beginning with later denominational debates and reading them backwards into Paul, I employ historical-critical analysis to locate Romans within the Greco-Roman philosophical and Second Temple Jewish worlds in which it was written.
This involves taking seriously the relationship between Paul’s vocabulary and ancient moral psychology.
Greek philosophical traditions had already developed sophisticated accounts of internal human division. Plato distinguished rational, spirited and appetitive dimensions of the soul; Stoic thought examined reason, passion and rational conformity to the good; Hellenistic Jewish thinkers, particularly Philo of Alexandria, brought Greek philosophical categories into conversation with Jewish understandings of divine law.
My thesis argues that Paul’s language of nous, sarx, hamartia and syneidēsis needs to be heard within this intellectual environment.
This is characteristic of my wider theological method. Theology is historically situated intellectual activity. Understanding a theological text requires attention not only to what later traditions made of it, but to the conceptual world in which its author was actually thinking.
Conscience, Reason and Moral Agency
Conscience provides an important point of intersection between my theology and my wider scholarship.
My thesis connects Romans 7 with Paul’s discussion of the law written upon the heart in Romans 2. The central problem is how a person can know and desire what is good while nevertheless failing to do it.
I argue against collapsing moral knowledge, moral desire and moral performance into a single faculty. Paul’s divided person can recognise the good without possessing an unimpeded ability to realise it. The persistence of conscience therefore remains compatible with the seriousness of sin.
This creates important connections with my work in psychology and law. Questions of conscience involve cognition, moral awareness, agency and responsibility; legal systems likewise depend upon assumptions about human responsibility and the capacity to recognise and choose among competing courses of action.
Theological anthropology consequently becomes part of a much wider interdisciplinary inquiry into what sort of beings human beings are.
Trinity and the Nature of God
My theological work is not confined to anthropology. I completed advanced postgraduate study in the Theology of the Trinity, receiving a High Distinction.
This work examined the Church’s teaching concerning the Trinity systematically and its soteriological and existential consequences rather than treating Trinitarian doctrine as a purely abstract metaphysical problem.
It also provided necessary foundations for my work in patristics. Much of the conceptual vocabulary of later Christian theology emerged from the fourth-century controversies concerning God, Christ and the Trinity. Understanding Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus and later Byzantine theology requires understanding the theological achievements and conceptual disputes of this earlier period.
I am particularly interested in the historical development of theological language: how Christians employed and transformed Greek philosophical terminology to express claims that they did not believe could simply be reduced to the philosophical systems from which that terminology originated.
Byzantine Theology
My theological formation is unusually concentrated in Byzantine Christianity.
Alongside the patristic sequence, I studied Early Byzantine Church History, Byzantium: Resplendence and Twilight, and The Orthodox Church: Yesterday and Today. My formal studies therefore involved a continuous engagement with Byzantine Christianity from the early Church through late Byzantium and into modern Orthodoxy.
This matters because Byzantine theology cannot adequately be separated into modern categories of “systematic theology”, “Church history” and “spirituality”. The theological controversies, political history, councils, liturgical life, ascetic traditions and intellectual development of Byzantium continually interacted.
The later patristic tradition makes this particularly clear: developments such as hesychasm, mystical theology and the work of Gregory Palamas need to be understood in their literary and historical as well as theological contexts.
My approach to Orthodox theology has consequently become historical and patristic rather than primarily confessional or polemical.
Church History and the Development of Doctrine
Church history forms a substantial component of my theological scholarship and overlaps strongly with my work as a historian.
My formal theological studies included the Early Church, Early Byzantine Church History, Byzantine history and the history of the Orthodox Church. My research beyond individual courses has extended to the Great Schism, the Council of Florence, Christianity under Ottoman government and the interaction between ecclesiastical institutions and imperial power.
I am particularly interested in the danger of treating later divisions within Christianity as though they had always existed.
Categories such as “Eastern” and “Western”, “Catholic” and “Orthodox”, or later “Protestant” and “Catholic” positions can become anachronistic when imposed upon earlier thinkers. The Fathers belonged to a Christian intellectual world before many subsequent confessional boundaries had formed.
This is one reason I am interested in recovering early Christian theology on its own terms.
Western and Eastern Christian Traditions
Although my formal theological education has been undertaken in an Orthodox institution, my research is deliberately comparative.
My thesis required substantial engagement with Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and Calvin as well as Catholic, Protestant and modern biblical scholarship. It contrasts different understandings of human nature, sin, conscience and grace rather than simply reproducing an Orthodox account.
One of my broader interests is precisely the extent to which the conventional division between “Eastern” and “Western” Christianity can obscure a more complicated intellectual history.
Early Christianity did not develop inside the later denominational map. Greek and Latin Christianity interacted extensively; theological positions changed over time; and thinkers subsequently appropriated by particular traditions often resist neat retrospective classification.
I am therefore interested in Christianity as a shared historical and theological tradition whose subsequent divisions need to be explained rather than assumed.
Theology, Philosophy and Psychology
My theological anthropology also intersects substantially with philosophy and psychology.
Romans 7 is itself an example. My thesis treats Paul’s account of moral conflict in relation to Greek moral psychology, including Platonic and Stoic accounts of reason and passion. It also considers Philo’s synthesis of Greek philosophy and Jewish Scripture.
These ancient questions remain recognisably human questions: why do people knowingly act against what they judge to be good? What is the relationship between reason, desire and action? What constitutes freedom?
What does moral responsibility require?
My previous formal study of cognitive, biological and social psychology gives me another perspective on these questions. I do not collapse theology into psychology, or psychology into theology, but I am interested in where their accounts of the human person encounter one another.
This is especially relevant to my work on conscience, human sociality, cognition, creativity and moral agency.
Theology, Society and Political Thought
Theology also intersects with my sociology, history and political economy.
Religious ideas do not exist only as private beliefs. They generate institutions, communities, moral vocabularies and understandings of authority. Christianity has consequently contributed to the historical formation of European societies and their conceptions of the individual, community, political authority and moral obligation.
My comparative research into societies historically shaped by Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy draws partly upon this theological knowledge. It enables me to distinguish theological traditions themselves from simplified cultural labels subsequently attached to them.
My historical research into Byzantium, the Holy Roman Empire, Muscovy and Russia likewise examines the use of Christian theology and ecclesiastical authority in legitimating political power.
Theology therefore contributes to my wider attempt to understand how systems of thought become social and political institutions.
Languages and Theological Scholarship
Language is another important component of my theological work.
I completed two semesters of New Testament Greek as part of the Master of Divinity and have undertaken additional study of Greek outside the degree. I have also studied Latin, while my broader academic work in linguistics has made me particularly attentive to semantic change, translation and the historical development of concepts.
This matters greatly in theology.
Terms such as nous, logos, sarx and syneidēsis possess histories and semantic ranges that cannot always be reproduced by a single English equivalent. The same is true of the increasingly specialised vocabulary developed during the patristic controversies.
My theological work therefore shares with my linguistic scholarship a concern with the danger of assuming that apparently equivalent words necessarily encode identical concepts across languages, cultures and historical periods.
Research Method and Independent Theological Work
My theological education culminated not merely in course completion but in an independent research programme.
I received a High Distinction in formal Research Methodology before undertaking the substantial research essay that became my Master’s thesis. Each of my substantive courses also involved an independent research paper, allowing me progressively to investigate questions in patristics, biblical interpretation, Church history, Byzantine theology and Christian anthropology.
The thesis itself integrates biblical exegesis, historical-critical methodology, philosophical anthropology and patristic theology. Its structure moves from the history of interpretation, through methodology and detailed exegesis, to a constructive account of Pauline anthropology and natural conscience.
Its purpose is consequently both historical and constructive: to recover Paul’s conceptual world accurately and then ask what that recovery contributes to contemporary theological understanding.
My Work in Theology
I regard theology as a substantial area of my mature interdisciplinary scholarship rather than simply an additional qualification.
My formal preparation includes a 216-credit-point Master of Divinity with concentrated postgraduate study in systematic theology, biblical studies, patristics, Church history and New Testament Greek. Within that programme I developed particular expertise in Pauline theology, Greek patristic thought, Byzantine theology, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, theological anthropology, conscience and the historical development of Christian doctrine.
My Master’s thesis brought these interests together through an original study of Paul’s anthropology in Romans 7, locating Paul within Greco-Roman philosophy, Hellenistic Judaism and the subsequent patristic tradition rather than beginning with later confessional categories.
The distinctive feature of my theological work is perhaps its location within a much wider intellectual project. I approach theology simultaneously as scriptural interpretation, historical inquiry, philosophical reflection and the study of a living intellectual tradition.
A question running through much of this work is therefore:
How can Christian theological ideas be understood within the intellectual worlds in which they arose, traced through their subsequent historical development, and brought into conversation with what other disciplines tell us about human nature, society and the search for the good?
That question connects my work on Paul, Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor with my wider scholarship in history, psychology, sociology, linguistics and philosophy, while allowing theology to retain its own distinctive subject matter and methods.
