The Rev Canon Prof Michael Hull delivered the Principal’s Charge on Monday 1 September 2025 at St Mary’s Monastery, Kinnoull, Perth, whilst the Initial Ministerial Education students in Phase 1 (IME1) were gathered for their Orientation Week. The 2025–26 IME1 cohort is currently 17 candidates (15 for the Scottish Episcopal Church and 2 for the United Reformed Church). The Principal’s Charge is delivered at the start of the new academic year on a theme for the year. The Charge is as follows:–
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Last year, as we began Orientation Week in 2024, my Principal’s Charge was based on a strapline – on the Scottish Episcopal Institute’s strapline, ‘forming people for ministry’ – wherein I stressed your responsibility, not mine, to be the primary agents of your formation. In doing so, I left a good deal of room for the Holy Spirit, who is, of course, the Person in charge of this whole operation of formation for ministry, if only we would give him the liberty to lead. I also said last year, because I was speaking about a strapline rather than Holy Scripture per se, that I would speak more from the lecturer’s desk, as it were, than from the church’s pulpit. But as you will know, for a Christian that is a distinction without a difference. God’s truth, either in natural or supernatural revelation, is the foundation of desk and pulpit, for as St Paul reminds us on the Areopagus, quoting loosely Epimenides, ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17.8).
This year, if you will allow me, I shall speak again about a strapline, namely, the one we find on the seal or badge of the Scottish Episcopal Church: ‘evangelical truth, apostolic order’. Although each of the words is found in the New Testament, the phrase as such was coined by a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America called John Henry Hobart in 1807. And some time thereafter the Episcopal Church in Scotland co-opted it.
My Charge to you today focusses on one word of the strapline, ‘truth’, which, like our Lord Jesus Christ himself, ‘is the same yesterday and today and forever’ (Heb. 13.8). My Charge to you in this academic year is to seek the Truth – with a very bold-faced and underscored capital ‘T’ – as revealed by God naturally and supernaturally. Now, I suppose you are thinking, ‘Well that’s a no brainer! Dipping my toe into theological waters? What’s not to like? If I’ve studied a little or a lot of theology, especially at university level, surely theology vis-à-vis “formation for ministry” will be a breeze. I’ll learn a couple of catchy ecclesiastical-type phrases and altar-serving parlour tricks to hold my own in clerical gossip circles and churchy trivial pursuit. No sweat!’
Well, then, I Charge you to remember that theology is the study of God, and though it may seem like a puddle of platitudes to some folks, it is no small thing to cast out into the deep waters of theology, of truth, to dive deeply into the profundity of God and God’s revelation to us in the Person of Jesus Christ, Incarnate. It is, to turn a phrase of Søren Kierkegaard, a ‘dive of faith’. The Gospels, specifically in terms of ‘putting out into the deep’ in Luke (5.1–11) and John (21.6–8), show the timidity disciples often have when called not just to an intellectual but to a ministerial response to Jesus. Jesus does not offer an idea to be affirmed to his disciples, particularly to those who would minister in his name, but a call to follow him, that is, to know him and to risk everything to remain faithful to him. Yes, we need to use our God-given intellects to grasp Jesus’ call, and to stretch them as far as they will go, yet in the end – in this life and the life to come – what will truly satisfy us, what can only satisfy us – is God, who is Truth.
We are God’s creatures; we long for him; still, our unaided intellects can never take us to his purpose in crafting the created order and his love in redeeming us. Again, one may ask with some naïveté, ‘How difficult can it be for us twenty-one centuries after the Lord walked with us on earth to find his truth? Surely, we’ve got it right by now. Jesus said, “The truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). We know it all! We’re free and clear!’
If you are thinking that – then, God love you! – you are of the few who have been graced to miss much of the so-called truth wars that rage around us, someone who does not have ‘itching ears’ (2 Tim. 4.3). One pernicious bit of truth-war fallout is the double-barrelled adjectival prefix ‘post-truth’. You have probably heard it in different forms – ‘post-truth politics’, ‘post-truth era’, ‘post-truth age’, ‘post-truth world’ and so on. ‘Post-truth’ was declared Oxford Dictionaries’ ‘Word of the Year’ for 2016, ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals’, according to the BBC.
The term seems to have gained traction in the 1990s as the embers of ‘modern philosophy’ turned to ash in ‘post-modern philosophy’ with the denial of objective reality and the reliability of reason. From a diversity of directions, theorists across a spectrum of academic disciplines, particularly in Europe and North America, promulgate the ‘truth’ that there is no truth – not yesterday and today and forever – all truth is relative. And Christian theology, as an academic discipline, is no exception; nonetheless, Christian theology as an academic discipline per se is not to be identified with Christianity. The niggle, for the Christian (‘theologian’ or not), for the believer in Jesus, is, to be sure, Jesus the Christ! Remember, it is Jesus himself who says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14.16a). Jesus also promises to send us the Paraclete, upon his Ascension, who is the Spirit of truth and will guide us into the truth (John 14–16).
My Charge to you in this academic year is to seek the Truth who is a Person and who is our God as well and to rely on his Holy Spirit of Truth.
When Jesus finds himself before Pontius Pilate, a creature of the twenty-first century as much as of the first century, who dismisses truth, who refuses to engage with truth even when its Personification stands before him because of his fear of a murderous mob, the scene is not unlike the cancel-culture mobs of our own day. Jesus’ crime is, indeed, to speak the truth. What does Jesus say? What does he claim? Jesus claims that he is ‘the Son of God’ (Jn 19.6). And it is because he says this that he is condemned to death. The mob and its leaders, when they cannot bear the truth, refuse to engage with it. Instead, they seek to annihilate truth. There is no quarter given to one who dares to speak against the ideology of the day vis-à-vis the mob, and the leaders who should have been the first to seek the truth, dismiss it in favour of the cacophonous voices of violence. Jesus is composed: ‘for this I was born and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth’ (Jn 18.37b). So he does. So he dies. And so he rises.
In my Charge to you today to seek the Truth, I wish to emphasise its necessity, not only for a life well lived on the natural level, but for a life well lived in God. As St Paul would have it, ‘speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ’ (Eph. 4.15). To speak the truth is perforce to grow into Truth, and this Truth is an Incarnate Person, whom we only know intimately by studying his natural revelation in the created order and his supernatural revelation in Holy Scripture.
Again, some may think, ‘A no brainer! We’ve cracked the books, even the “Good Book”, already! Again, no sweat! Common Awards provides us with a well-thought-out palette of biblical studies, Christian tradition, mission and ministry, and theological reflection and reflective practice – all at the appropriate level and balance. We have qualified tutors. Like any divinity school or theological college or theological-education institution, we’ll have the truth presented to us in the fitting dosage and package, along with suitable assessments and learning outcomes and feedback…. Again, no sweat!’ Nevertheless, I ask you, what if that is as good as it gets? A programme of study? Even a great programme of study? Would you leave everything to follow that? Would you lay down your life for that? I wouldn’t.
To encounter the Truth I am talking about today, to engage in theology of great profundity and depth is to wade through the essential but shallow waters of purely academic study and to cast out into the deep (Lk. 5.4; Jn 21.6). Desk and pulpit, if you will, the study of nature and the study of supernature, the study of the things we can discover with unaided reason and the study of things we only know by God’s grace, all of this collapses, ultimately, or should I say coalesces, into an encounter with the Divine: the Divine Person, the Word, the Revelation of God, Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end (Rev. 22.13). At the heart of a theology of any depth and profundity is an encounter with him. If we do not know him, we do not know God, even if we know volumes and volumes of things of only secondary or tertiary importance (cf. Matt. 11.27; Jn 14.6–7). Sure. We can learn a lot about nature by observation and the scientific method, and it is well worth knowing. Sure. We can learn a lot about revelation by reading the masters of the Christian tradition and the lives of the saints, and they are well worth knowing. But the pearl of great price is the Truth (Matt. 13.45–46) because everything pales in comparison to knowing Jesus as he is revealed to us in Holy Scripture, who is the uncreated image of God (Col. 1.15–20), who comes to us in the flesh in space and time.
To know what it means to bear the image of God, as we surely do as his redeemed creatures, is to know the Christ, not merely to know about him. Think of the Psalms which speak of us as little less than gods (see Ps. 8.6; 82.6). Think of the Epistle to the Hebrews which speaks eloquently of the sanctification that is ours in Christ (Heb. 2.5–18).
My Charge, then, is to study in such wise as to put out into the depths of theological study to encounter the Truth in the Person of Jesus Christ.
Christianity is not an encounter with a concept or a theory or an idea or programme of study or a school of divinity or the Common Awards or the Scottish Episcopal Institute. As St Peter, full of the Holy Spirit immediately after Pentecost declares, ‘Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to humankind by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4.12). Trust in the Holy Spirit now, the Paraclete, to guide you as you put out into the deep. At the same time, try not to be distracted by so-called truth wars and their fallout, by neologisms like ‘post-truth this’ or ‘post-truth that’ by philosophies that do not acknowledge Jesus’ Lordship – be they ancient or mediaeval or modern, post-modern, or, even ‘post-Christian’, as we often hear these days – that fail to appreciate God’s revelation in Christ, by those who would deny objective reality and the reliability of reason, by all those voices that seem to clamour for truth – but truth apart from God – where, to be sure, there is no Truth. Only Jesus sets us free (Jn 8.31–32) and to minister faithfully in his name we need to spend a lifetime plunging the depths of his Truth.
Let me conclude with the example of a priest who spent his life in the Truth. The Anglican parish priest, theologian and author W. H. Vanstone, who died in 1999, leaving a few beautifully written and much-loved books, once compared the Church (meaning the Church of England, I think, nonetheless applicable across denominations) to a ‘swimming pool in which all the noise comes from the shallow end’.
My Charge? Stay in the deep end! It is there you will find the Lord, the Truth, who sets us free to be his faithful disciples.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
