James M. Houston
Professor Emeritus, Regent College
James M. Houston is the one of the “founding fathers” of Regent College. In 1966, while he was University Lecturer at Oxford (where he taught from 1947 to 1971, specializing in cultural and historical geography), he was invited by a committee of Granville Chapel to become the first Principal of Regent College. Regent received its charter in 1968, and Dr. Houston was appointed Principal in 1970. Along with Vice-Principal W. J. Martin, he sought official UBC affiliation for the College, and it was granted in 1974.
Following his term as Principal of the College from 1970 to 1978, Dr. Houston was appointed Chancellor (1978-1980) as well as Professor of Spiritual Theology until his appointment was endowed in 1991 as the Board of Governors’ Professor of Spiritual Theology.
He is co-founder of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Washington, DC, where he still acts as a Senior Fellow. He is a prolific author, editor, and Christian scholar, and is respected worldwide as a leader in educating and equipping laypersons. His major areas of interest include the Christian classics, historical theology, and the traditions of Christian spirituality. Some of his most recent research is on the role of the penitential psalms in the history of the church.
Dr. Houston has published numerous books and articles. His recent books include The Mentored Life (NavPress, 2002), Joyful Exiles (InterVarsity Press, 2006), and two volumes of Letters of Faith through the Seasons (David C. Cook, 2006, 2007). A number of his previous books have been re-published, including five volumes in the Soul’s Longing series: The Desire, The Fulfillment, The Prayer, The Creator, and The Disciple (David C. Cook, 2007). The Prayer was previously published as The Transforming Power of Prayer (NavPress, 1996) and as The Transforming Friendship (Lion, 1989). He has also recently published The Psalms as Christian Worship: A Historical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2010) with Bruce Waltke, as well as A Vision for the Aging Church: Renewing Ministry for and by Seniors (IVP, 2011) with Dr. Michael Parker.
TRIBUTES TO DR. HOUSTON
As part of his scholarly career, Dr. Houston has profoundly influenced countless students, many of whom have gone on to make substantial contributions to their own fields. Below are tributes from two of his former pupils, both of whom are also Fellows of the Houston Centre: Dr. Janet Soskice and Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh.
Dr. Janet Soskice
In the fall of 1973 I arrived in Vancouver newly ablaze with Christian faith and my life plans in disarray.
Apart from newly and obsessively reading the Bible, I was entirely unformed as a Christian. It was possibly the unhappiest time of my adult life. Like Dante in the dark wood, I could not see the way forward. Jim Houston did.
I was working full-time in the snack bar of a downtown hotel. Without my asking, Dr. Houston found the funds to enable me to study full-time and work as a waitress part-time during the second semester. Jim saw, as I could not, that someone new to Christian life, having come from studying philosophy at a profoundly secular university, would find Regent hard to navigate. He quietly let me know there were many ways of being a Christian and encouraged me in ways both direct and indirect: through the team of sensitive and imaginative teachers he had gathered (I remember especially fondly Carl Amerding and Ward and Laurel Gasque); the Regent bookshop stocked with Thomas a Kempis and the Metaphysical poets; the visit of Malcolm Muggeridge who had recently published his book on Mother Teresa of Calcutta; and, a visiting professor in philosophy of religion who encouraged my work on Wittgenstein, pointing me to the wondrous Anthony Thiselton at Sheffield who, in turn, directed me to a doctorate in Oxford because ‘that was where the Wittgensteinians were’.
My Regent year was a phoenix year. Much dross needed to be stripped away for new life to break in. My debt to Jim Houston is immense, and it was a delight to me that in recent years he took such pleasure in my book Sisters of Sinai, the story of Bible-hunting twin sisters born in Scotland in the 1840s—fearless Presbyterians and pioneers of Biblical study.
Dr. Bruce Hindmarsh
I am grateful to have known Jim for about thirty-five of his one hundred years, and what a blessing his friendship has been to Carolyn and me over this time. He has been our much loved teacher, mentor, and friend as we have gone through various seasons in our lives: as Regent students, starting a family, entering into doctoral and post-doctoral work in Oxford, and establishing my own work of scholarship and teaching first in Saskatchewan and then at Regent in Vancouver. He has been a friend to us in good times and bad. He rejoiced with every academic milestone in my life and celebrated my scholarship as a friend and a kind of unofficial Doktorvater. Our conversations and our common intellectual life in Christ has meant more and more to me as the years go by. It was a particular joy to travel with him some years ago to Edmonton for a conference on Christian Higher Education, to share the platform with him, and to be present as he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award in Christian higher education in Canada. As I think back now, I appreciate deeply the fellowship we have shared as Christian scholars, and the fellowship with both him and Rita in times of friendship and hospitality (all those great meals!), but most of all the shared fellowship in Christ’s suffering as life has brought its sorrows as well as its joys.
As always with Jim, the personal and the intellectual have never been separated. It has been one of the greatest honours of my life to hold the James M. Houston Chair of Spiritual Theology at Regent College, and this means more to me—to be thus associated with Jim in my scholarly life—than any other grants or fellowships or academic appointments I have had. Jim gave me the real gift of wanting me to be myself in this role and he has never made me feel a weight of expectations to live up to. But I do feel, nevertheless, that what I have learned from him, what has become now a part of my life, I want to pass on to others, namely that thoughtful Christian scholarship and prayer belong together as a form of personal integrity.
As I think back over Jim’s life, it is remarkable to think of what he has achieved. In addition to his work as an institutional founder and and educational leader, Jim showed remarkable prescience in his intellectual career, alert to widespread changes in the culture and the need to be ahead of these trends as a Christian thinker. Early in his career at Regent College, he focused on Christian epistemology and the Christian mind at a time when this emphasis was sorely needed among evangelicals. He also worked widely in environmental ethics and a theology of creation, long before this became fashionable. At the University of British Columbia, his students included some of the young activists who went on to found the first serious environmental advocacy organizations. In 1978, he moved into teaching and writing about spiritual theology—again, long before this was fashionable. He established the first program in spiritual theology in the evangelical world at Regent College, which very much addressed the needs of the hour for students.
Before anyone was using the word “postmodernism,” Jim was aware that the rising generation needed to see the Christian mind as part of the response of the whole Christian person to God and his grace. His whole career was founded on this basic Christian personalism. This focus on persons stimulated not only a basic Christian humanism concerned with all of life under God, but also a personal approach to students and to everyone he met. Informally and formally, he became a spiritual director and mentor to a whole generation of students, and to hundreds of men and women around the world, through conversation and letter writing. This was in many ways a blossoming of the skills he had developed at Oxford as a tutor. His mentoring has included working personally with key educational and political leaders across North America and the Pacific Rim and around the world. Again, his focus on spiritual direction emerged at a time when this was a growing concern among many Jesuits, but long before evangelicals became interested.
Jim's fluency in French meant that he was reading the nouvelle theologians about a generation before other evangelicals were, and he was therefore alert to the need to put students in touch with the early church fathers as a living tradition and source of renewal, long before the patristic revival became popular among evangelical theologians and publishers. His close relationship with the Torrance family in Scotland helped him be alert to the importance of Trinitarian theology for Christian life and witness before the wider revival of Trinitarian theology broke like a wave on these shores. Even late in life, he continued as a pioneer, thinking and writing about aging and the implications for the church of the demographic changes that are coming and about the imperative of a new Christian culture of care.
The Christian mind, environmental ethics, spiritual theology, the patristic revival, spiritual direction, Trinitarian theology—in all these fields and more, Jim was ahead of the curve, leading the way, rather than following. As a Christian intellectual and educator, Jim has meaningfully integrated an unusual breadth of inter-disciplinary reading and insight and has spoken prophetically to the secularization and depersonalization of human life in Western culture and the church, and he has awakened a whole generation of evangelicals to the much neglected, larger heritage of Christian spirituality. He has a generosity of spirit matched with a prophetic boldness to always speak honestly to the truth as he sees it. He is a provocateur in conversation who rarely goes along with the consensus, but by his friends and colleagues he is known mostly for his empathy, charity, and his gift of discernment. There are countless Christian men and women today whose lives have been changed by a single, never-to-be-forgotten conversation with Jim. And he is still going strong, as he approaches his hundredth birthday. He is an outstanding exemplar of Christian humanism for us all.