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[Preached four times from 5/4/71 at Hull University to 11/12/95 at Bishop Auckland]

A year ago through the kindness of my own university, I had a term’s sabbatical leave, most of which I spent in Germany. Thus it was that I came to visit the great doyen of New Testament studies, Rudolph Bultmann, very old, frail, and I think lonely, far too profound and original to command everyone’s consent, far too stimulating to have ended the debate that he initiated, yet the man whom we all recognize as among the very greatest in the trade. And when I met him once more, I recalled how twenty years ago, this great man ended the last lecture he gave before his retirement. He quoted two texts, one from the Old Testament one from the New Testament. Genesis 32.10—“I am not worthy of the least of all thy mercies, and of all the truth which thou has shown unto thy servant.” 1 Corinthians 4.7—“What hast thou that thou did not receive? But if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou had not received it?”

It is particularly this New Testament text that I bring before you this morning. What have you got that you did not receive from someone else? This is, beyond question a text for scholars.

A TEXT FOR SCHOLARS

For academics of any description young or old, this is our text. There is none of us who does not stand on someone else’s shoulders. This is true even in the newest subjects and among the most original thinkers. None of us starts from scratch. We all of us owe a personal debt to our teachers. I believe that our sense of it, at its lowest, perhaps when we are undergraduates, increases with years, increases even as we see the gaps in their equipment, and the tasks the problems which we see and they didn’t. There is a personal debt we owe to them, for were they never patient with you when you deserved to be smashed for impertinence? But also an academic debt, since they gave us the idea of how to study, to read, to think, to write. And the total debt runs back through more generations than the best of historians could easily compute. For in all the ages persons who have sought truth are our creditors, and it is no bad thing that at least once a year we should publicly acknowledge our indebtedness. Not every search for truth has reached its objective. True and sincere persons have sometimes landed in what we can see to be the most appalling error. Nevertheless, they are our ancestors and benefactors. What is our own little contribution in comparison with what we have received from the past?

Nor should we who are academics forget the debt we owe to those who are not and were not academics. Today at least you cannot forget it, for this is your Founder’s Day Service and it commemorates T. R. Ferens, a beneficent founder and a man of great ability, but not a man of scholarship. I do not know how it impresses you, but I find it almost embarrassing that one should rate my activities as a scholar so highly as to endow them on such a princely scale. We may be embarrassed. We certainly ought to be grateful, grateful to all who made possible the privileged life we enjoy in such places as this. All: it is a longer list than I could compile but let me say one concrete thing. it is always a sorrow to me when I see, not very often, young people turning away with scorn or a false shame from the humble homes that nourished them and gave them their start in life. It is no pleasant sight to see a sneer, where gratitude might have been expected. What have you that you did not receive?

There is no room in a university, of all places, for a generation gap, for we are all engaged in a common activity and neither your fellows nor your professor is necessarily a fool because his hair is six inches shorter than yours. It seems to me that a grateful recognition of the gifts we receive ought to lead to something of the spontaneous gaiety, the joie d’vivre, that so often seems lacking in our life today. Our great public benefactors, our parents, the state, have continued to make us free for the world of books and learning, of beauty and ideas, of science and art, a world far more exciting, more intoxicating than the world of drugs and sex. What if some of them have ulterior motives? Can we not enjoy as well as use our privileges?

Enjoy, you say, in a world such as ours? With destruction and death about us? Hemmed in by S. Africa, W. Africa, N. Ireland, S.E. Asia, E. Pakistan? No I am not inciting escapability. Paul’s words are not only, or mainly for academics. They are a text for human beings.

A TEXT FOR HUMAN BEINGS

What I have just said should remind us that as academics we have received much from the outside world. I do not suppose that Ferens knew much about Greek, or differential equations, but where should we be without him? The university is in the world and it receives much from the world, as well as giving much to it. We are all of us human beings before we are academics, and as human beings we are constantly receiving from our fellows. What is there in my daily life that I have received simply by my own efforts? What have I that I have not received?

In this fact lies the ground of a network of mutual service, which could and should bind together the whole human race. Would not the recognition of this fact solve the basic problems of human relationship? I am not foolish enough to suggest that it would solve all of the practical problems. Economic, political, social, psychological problems will go on calling for the best brains we have, and the best brains will not always succeed in solving them. But supposing wealthy and developed countries, and no less the developing ones, took seriously the question—What have we that we did not receive? And supposing every race of every color took seriously the question—and management and unions, and dons and undergraduates, and parents and children? Could anything do so much to engender a sense of natural responsibility, of mutual service? The gifts I have received are no grounds for boasting, they ought to be an incentive for giving.

Five minutes, you may say, of crying for the moon. What chance is there that power-hungry establishments, revolutionary proletariats, will come to think in these terms? Well, not much; apart from the fact that we have not yet finished with the New Testament. Indeed, we have scarcely even begun with it.

For when Paul wrote to the Corinthians, he was certainly not thinking of a crowd of undergraduates and dons in a university service; he was not even thinking (though this comes much closer to his thought) of the universal love which alone can make sense of the world. He was writing specifically a text for Christians.

A TEXT FOR CHRISTIANS

I shall not weary you by trying to piece together the history that lies behind the Corinthian letters. The Corinthians proved to be the most trying kind of people—pupils who were confident they knew more than their teacher, children that were convinced they were better than their parents. Christians certain that they had left their apostle far behind. They had constructed their own religion for themselves, their own wisdom, their own spirituality, had brought them to the Kingdom, while Paul was still stuck fast in the mud. They knew it all, they had it all, they could do it all. It is an attitude that is always threatening to grow up within the Church, where we are all too much inclined to think that our own theological learning, our own warm-hearted piety, our own social activism, have created a Christian faith for whom Almighty God himself ought to be more than grateful.

We meet this, we are guilty of this, in the Church and we do well to be penitent. But you will pardon me if I observe that it is even more common in that half-light relic of Christianity which persists outside the Church. The Christianity that all reasonable persons, or some of them, feel they wish to retain, is a Corinthian Christianity that arises to achieve the kingdom without the old, coarse, apostolic Gospel. And to it, to this phenomenon, whether it occurs inside or outside the Church, we can only address Paul’s question: What have you that you did not receive?

Do not forget your debts, and do not forget your debt to God. You may like or dislike Christianity, but do not be under the illusion that it is about what human beings can do for themselves. It is about what God has given, and we have received, and it is in this fact that all the rest makes sense. The love of the Father is the charter of academic inquiry. The whole of his world is given to me to explore, and it must make sense. The work of the Son is the pledge of our common humanity; it is the focus on which centers, from which radiates, every valid hope of a humanity bound in one by service and responsibility. This is the new humanity, God’s gift to us, awaiting our acceptance and realization. And the gift of the Spirit is the gift of realization, which by making me grateful to God, makes me recognize obligations to all his family. “What have you that you did not receive?” Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift.

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