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233 Growing up in the country in New South Wales, I inherited a love of wide–open spaces. Paradoxically, my career has placed me in large cities. Much of my early life was spent away from the ocean, but I am never happier than when I find myself where the mountains meet the sea. The opening words of Psalm 121 (“I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth”) resonate in my being. The mountains and the ocean are living symbols of the wonders of creation and are a source of my experience of wonder in response to God’s grace in creation. This sense has deepened with years of reflection. As I look back over my life, I am conscious of the role of reflective memory in enriching life and understanding. At the age of twenty, I was “called up” to do military service in the days of National Service training. Although I was able to pursue my sporting interests there, as I had at school, the experience was sobering, causing me to reflect upon more serious matters. At the end of my term of service, I decided to attend university and prepare for ministry. After one year of study, I qualified for entry and was accepted for training for ministry in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, including four years of study at Moore Theological College. There D. W. B. Robinson, a Cambridge graduate who later became Archbishop of Sydney, introduced me to the Chapter 13 THE SIGNS OF THE MESSIAH AND THE QUEST FOR ETERNAL LIFE John Painter 234 JOHN PAINTER academic study of the New Testament. I learned from him the importance of giving priority to the primary sources while seeking to discern the appropriate questions in an attempt to read and understand the texts. All that I have subsequently learned has built on the foundation he helped to lay. Looking back, I see that my concern with the importance of grace in creation and the struggle to affirm the reality of human freedom and responsibility arose at Moore College, an institution that is strongly Calvinistic in a way that minimizes grace, freedom, and responsibility outside of Christian faith. After two years of working in a Sydney city parish, my senior minister encouraged me to pursue further studies in the Northern hemisphere. During the next year, I began to think of where and with whom I would like to work. Having used C. K. Barrett’s commentary on John, I decided to apply to Durham (U.K.) and proposed a thesis on “The Idea of Knowledge in the Johannine Literature.” With this topic, I hoped I would be assigned to Barrett’s supervision. My application was successful, and we arrived in Durham toward the end of January 1965. By this time, I had decided on two limitations for my thesis. First, “the Johannine Literature ” would mean, for my purposes, the Gospel and Epistles of John. Second , I decided to explore the work of Rudolf Bultmann and C. H. Dodd as two alternative views of the knowledge issue while also giving priority to Jewish sources, especially the Qumran texts that had been published recently. These seemed to me to support a more Jewish reading of John than either Dodd or Bultmann had offered. By the end of 1967, my thesis was complete. Working with C. K. Barrett was a life–changing experience in so many ways. I had thought of myself as preparing for ministry, but upon arrival in Durham I found myself in a part–time tutorship at St. John’s College, which very soon developed into a full–time position. This allowed what might have been one year of study to extend to the completion of a Ph.D. In the course of this work, the Johannine writings became a part of my life, and since then they have remained a major influence on my understanding of Christianity. Over the years, I have developed a deep bond of fellowship with other Johannine scholars, in the spirit of a veritable Johannine school. Although my thesis has not been published, I continue to live out of the richness that it still has for me. Because my father was critically ill, we returned to Sydney in 1968, where I was appointed to St. Andrew’s Cathedral as Precentor. Though this allowed for occasional teaching at Moore College, it was a demanding and rewarding...

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