David Bennett
About David Bennett
David Bennett is a budding theologian, author and speaker with OCCA The Oxford Centre For Christian Apologetics. He wrote his first book A War of Loves (2018: Zondervan, foreword N T Wright) and has appeared on television and radio programmes such as BBC One, BBC National Radio, and VICE News. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford in theology, exploring ethics and contemporary Anglican theology of desire.
Country of Residence: United Kingdom
Graduating year of C3 College: 2013
In my current doctoral work at the University of Oxford, I discovered a rich source of theology for helping us through our current time. Exploring the question of human desire has led me to the theology of St. Augustine. His works are probably the greatest in the Christian canon outside of the scriptures. They help us to deal with the in-between spaces that scripture doesn’t always fill in for us, and also to apologetically re-approach Christian faith in a time where power is under pressure and culture is turning against it. Our time is much like the 4th century context of a collapsing Rome in which Augustine penned the greatest apologia for the Christian faith outside of Jesus’ life, The City of God.
Central to Augustine’s whole thought-world is the notion of being a perigrinus which roughly translates as a pilgrim. However, the word has a fascinatingly rich significance related to the city-state of Rome. A peregrinus was an illegal alien, an unknown entity, a refugee from another land, a queer figure who didn’t quite belong in the City’s citizenry and the power play of socio-political norms in the State. They couldn’t be easily identified. In this rich context Augustine constructs this magisterial metaphor for the state of being a disciple of Christ in the world. From the youngest of ages we are born restless. Our lives are but pilgrimages where we can fully make Earth our home, even if we try. Rather, in Christ, we recognise Earth, and these bodies as our future home, affected and disturbed by the effects of sin and death, and yet gloriously en route to being perfected by Jesus. We love this world not because it’s our home yet but because within it lies the seed of the future promise of home when desire will finally come to its full rest, and our restlessness will rest with God in Christ.
What C3 College equipped me to do is to live as this kind of pilgrim. To embrace our human restlessness as a gift to take us deeper into the love of Jesus.
