Journal: Southeastern Theological Review
Volume: STR 14:2 (Fall 2023)
Article: Interview With Timothy George
Author: Anonymous

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Interview With Timothy George

Editor’s note: Timothy George originally gave this interview as a presentation to the 2022 Baptist Dogmatics Roundtable participants. Through the interview, he shares formative impact of his upbringing, pastoral ministry experience, and academic pedigree to tell the story of how he became a theologian. He was a Baptist boy from the backwoods who grew up to pastor a church in inner city Boston while being shaped by the most significant movers and shakers of mid-20th century American theology. He has practiced convictional ecumenism in contentious contexts and tutored a generation in theological retrieval before many of us knew dogmatics existed. At the end of the interview, he provides a critical engagement of the Baptist Dogmatics Manifesto. We have taken his feedback with great sincerity and made changes to the Manifesto. The revised version of the Manifesto will be published in Confessing Christ.1

Tell Us About How You Became A Theologian.

Well, I never intended to be. Karl Barth tells us that when he was 10 years old, he went into dinner one night with a complete plan of his, all of his “collected works” to present to the family. Jaroslav Pelikan was a mere 14 years old when he went to see Wilhelm Pauck at the University of Chicago and said, “I want to do a PhD with you” and on the spot outlined The Christian Tradition, in its entirety.

There are some people like that, but I’m not one of them. Luther said, “I became a theologian not by reading or writing or speculating, but by living, dying and being damned—this is what makes one a theologian.” So how did that happen to me? It did not happen easily and not by any predictable line of progression.

How Do You Think Your Early Life Impacted Your Development As A Theologian?

Growing up in the American South, I was nurtured in a community

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of faith that was part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, but had no idea that this was so. I never heard those words used to describe the church. We were separatist Baptists. We were also dogmatic, but in a very bad sense of that word—being quarrelsome, self-assertive, guilty of the two major diseases that afflict the church today: amnesia and myopia. That was the background I brought to the study of theology as a young student. It began very early for me, even though I came from a family that was, in every sense of the word, on the margins of respectable society.

We lived in a neighborhood that was actually racially integrated in the 1950s. It was integrated, not because we were uppity liberals trying to make a social statement, but simpl...