23rd May 2025

Some of you may already know that we plan to move to a retirement flat quite soon. Moving from a four-bedroom house (with a study and dining room) to a two-bedroom flat (with just one living room) presents a challenge – what to take and what not to take! Not least how do we choose which of our hundreds of books to take?

On my study shelves are quite a lot of ‘theological’ books – some of them inherited from my father who couldn’t bring himself to lose them when my parents moved from a Manse, first to a small council flat and later to Tyndale Court. There is the 1909 history of the Prayer Book, a selection of Baptist Handbooks (earliest 1914), biblical commentaries of various vintages etc. etc. Of course I shan’t discard any books by present or former members of Tyndale – Morris West, Harry Mowvley, Keith Clements, John Briggs – and certainly I shall keep Open to God, Open to All (the 2018 history of Tyndale).

I don’t consider myself a ‘theologian’ (once when I said this as an aside while introducing a report at a Baptist Union Council meeting I was taken to task by a senior minister who suggested that we were all ‘theologians’!). But looking at all these books in front of me as I write this, I thank God for all those real theologians – theological scholars on whom we all rely to understand the Bible more deeply.

David T Roberts