No, that’s TYNdale.
It’s eighty years since the Evangelical study centre, Tyndale House, was founded in Cambridge, and if you’ve any interest in the intellectual integrity of biblical Christianity, or even in the output of this blog, you have reason to be grateful for that. The reasons are laid out in an interview there with Peter Williams, the current Principal.
At the start of World War 2, British, and world, Evangelicalism had very little in the way of academic rigor, the universities and even Bible Colleges being dominated by liberal theology of one kind or another. The reasons for that are quite complex, involving the capture of the denominations by nineteenth century critical scholarship, and the consequent retreat into a suspicion of intellectualism by many Evangelicals. To that must be added the historic hangover of prejudice against the Non-conformists who kept biblical teaching alive, who were not even allowed to study in British universities until 1871, despite Cambridge in particular having been the seed-bed of the English Reformation. Blame Charles II for that.
Here I just want to add my own insignificant personal testimony to the benefits Tyndale House has brought. I was converted as a teenager through a vibrant Crusader Bible Class, whose ethos could best be described as devotional and practical (no bad thing) more than it was academic (also no bad thing). The main leaders tended to be local businessmen, bankers, accountants, and other non-university types. I have to add, though, that since it was formed in 1910, the class primarily served boys from the local grammar school, of whom a fair number, by my day, ended up at prestigious universities.
So it was no surprise to me that, on going up to Cambridge in 1970, I found a Christian Union 400 strong – not far off 10% of the student population. Knowing very little, I had no idea that the likes of John Stott and Martyn Lloyd-Jones had had to bring serious thinking into Evangelicalism more or less from a standing start after World War 2. I had, though, certainly been aware, from the liberal outlook of a succession of RI teachers at school, that Biblical Christianity was rather looked down upon.
The first IVP commentary I bought from Heffers bookshop was Derek Kidner’s excellent Genesis, which actually formed the starting point of my own book The Generations of Heaven and Earth half a century later. It did come as a slight surprise to find he was the warden of a place called Tyndale House in Selwyn Gardens, at which the leader of my college CU, Steve Motyer, was studying, and that Derek’s kids, Faith and Jim, were loosely connected to the CU scene. A guy called Mike Wenham was also in my college CU, whom I only found out much later to be the son of one of Tyndale House’s founders, who wrote the definitive Greek grammar for British Evangelicals. At some stage, Steve showed me around the place, which had even then an impressive, if compact, library.
Having lived in a grotty attic in my second year, I splashed out on the best of the college hostels for the last, and it turned out to be right opposite Tyndale House. The picture in the header was taken of Tyndale from my window that year, though Spiny Norman is not visible in the original.
One day I answered a knock at my door to find the great theologian himself, Derek Kidner, standing there. It seems that an American PhD student had turned up unannounced, owing to same miscommunication, for a short study stay. Tyndale had only eight small student rooms, and someone (Steve Motyer I suppose) had mentioned my Christian faith and the fact that I had a larger than average pad. Consequently, I ended up accommodating the student on my floor for a fortnight. I still have the book he published through IVP eight years later.
Peter Williams’s interview names some of the host of serious Tyndale House scholars whose books helped form my Christian mind in the ensuing years. My next direct encounter with Tyndale House, though, was in the mid 1990s. One of my fellow-elders (a banker, and providentially one of my old Crusader leaders halfway across the country) had befriended an Australian guy called Bruce Winter whilst living in Singapore. Bruce was now the warden of Tyndale House, just an hour’s drive away, and he used to come and preach from time to time. At that stage I was beginning to do some theological study through the Open Theological College, and Bruce invited me to use the library at Tyndale House, which as a Cambridge graduate I was apparently entitled to do.
Not only was it something of a buzz to find that the last user of a book I was consulting was the author of another on my list, but as Bruce’s friend I got to look round and to meet some excellent people, such as their then librarian David Instone-Brewer, who wrote what I consider to be the best biblical treatment of marriage and divorce around. I was also introduced to an American missionary in the Philippines, who was also a scholar of Oliver Cromwell’s Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, the theologian John Owen. I was able to reduce him to inarticulate exclamations of “Wow!” by driving him to Owen’s parish church in Coggeshall, where the vicar showed us a pewter offering plate that dated from Owen’s incumbency.
Fast-forward to a few years ago, and I was invited by a (now-deceased) friend to an Intelligent Design conference at Tyndale House. It’s a long drive to Cambridge from Devon, and unbeknown to me the event was cancelled at the last minute (probably because my friend became ill). Although I was just as unannounced as the American was back in 1973, Bruce Winter’s replacement, Peter Williams, (now termed “Principal” rather than “Warden”) gave me an hour of his valuable time discussing science and faith matters, including my first book, which was then approaching publication (and a copy of which is in Tyndale House library).
That conversation was more valuable than the original conference would have been, because it gave me the entrée, a year or two later, to take Josh Swamidass with me to meet Williams and pitch the Genealogical Adam and Eve idea to him, both of our books on that subject being imminent. Although predominantly concerned with the Bible itself, Tyndale House has had some association with the question of origins since Steve Meyer, Doug Axe and Paul Nelson were studying in Cambridge and wrestling with the question of design in nature.
And so I certainly can’t say that I’ve had any significant impression on the work of Tyndale House. But I can say that, not least through knowing three of its wardens, that it has had a profound effect on me over the last fifty-five years. And as I said at the outset, it has probably had a profound effect on you if you value an intellectually rigorous Evangelical faith.
