he thought I was misguided in my desire to study a bunch of “religious
extremists.” So, both of my supervisors were hostile to my interests for
different reasons: one thought I was a “heretic,” believing in some kind
of revelation that undermined the full and fi nal revelation contained in
Scripture, and the other thought I was just plain weird. The validating
body for my degree decided my life was not complicated enough, so they
thought they should appoint a sociologist to supervise my empirical work.
The resident College sociologist did not get on with the resident syste-
matician (i.e., the Calvinist), because the sociologist’s wife was a feminist
and the staunch Calvinist had a few problems with feminists as well. So,
the College appointed a sociologist from a local university who was an
Anglo-Catholic priest in the Church of England, but who kept saying he
knew nothing about theology—and I just kept on thinking, “wake up and
smell the incense!”
In the middle of it all I was rather confused, which is not surprising
really, so I decided to go and talk to one of the most famous Anglican
Charismatic theologians at the time. I explained what I wanted to do for
my project and he shook his head and said. Theologians do not “do”
empirical studies, we leave it up to the sociologists and the anthropologists.
“Theologians,” he stated, “don’t read people directly; they read ‘texts’
written by people.” At the time, I thought, “so let me get this right: theo-
logians don’t ‘read’ people?” I wondered why they appeared so dysfunc-
tional! I just thought my lecturers were all eccentric or something. “Go
away,” he advised, “select a period of history or a person (e.g., Karl Barth)
and read a text and write about that text (even if it is multi- volume).” I
left this meeting feeling slightly humiliated, but also illuminated as to the
way some theologians actually thought about the contemporary world
and the role of theology in it. Overall, I was extremely disappointed with
the conversation. I did what I have done a number of times over the years.
After much refl ection, soul searching and prayer, I ignored an expert in
the fi eld because I felt he did not understand what I was doing. This event
played a signifi cant role in my early academic journey and infl uenced the
trajectory of my research. Despite what felt like derision, something inside
of me cried out:
It is an oral theology.
It is an enacted theology.
It is a theology of the heart.
It is a theology of the guts.252 M.J. CARTLEDGE