Today marks the one-year anniversary of John Webster’s death. At the time he was, in my opinion and others’, the greatest living theologian writing in English, and perhaps in any language. This is the tenth installment of a series of tributes to the man and his theological project, a work in progress that was tragically…

I am not the first to observe that the loss of John Webster in May of 2016 was not only the loss of a leading theologian, mentor, and friend. It was also a loss for the discipline of systematic theology. Friends and I spoke of John’s yet to be published systematic theology in the way…

John Webster’s Holy Scripture is arguably the most academically significant book in English to deal with the Bible from a theological point of view since the publication four decades ago of David Kelsey’s Proving Doctrine: The Uses of Scripture in Modern Theology. Webster’s little book is widely cited and has been assessed by a variety…

John Webster’s Oxford inaugural begins with praise for his predecessor in the chair, Rowan Williams. If the fact of praise is routine in such a lecture, the content may have raised eyebrows. Williams’s intellectual work is praised above all for being ‘prayerful’ (italics original), which is not a standard part of the Oxford lexicon of…

John Webster devoted a good portion of the first fifteen years of his career wrestling with the theology of Eberhard Jüngel. Research for his Cambridge dissertation, “Distinguishing between God and Man: Aspects of the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel” (1982), anticipated the magisterial Eberhard Jüngel: An Introduction to His Theology, which not only served as the first…

Whenever John Webster published one of his essays, it seemed you could hear from certain sectors of the theological academy the sound of theologians dropping everything. They wanted—we wanted—to make sure our hands were free so we could take up and read. For about two decades these essays arrived as something less authoritative and less…

If he is known for anything, John Webster’s name stands for “theological theology” and a fastidious, full-throated commitment to doing theology as if God mattered and as God continues to act. His much-discussed Oxford inaugural lecture heralded a reorienting of the theological task away from conversations or earlier correlations and back toward what could be…

I was a doctoral student at the University of Aberdeen in 2008 when John Webster was composing his essay “Trinity and Creation.” It was initially delivered as a plenary session at the 2009 meeting of the Society for the Study of Theology eventually published in IJST (the version from which I will be quoting), and…

If there was an unmistakable constant in John Webster’s thought, it was his resolve to see all things in light of God’s perfection. It was this resolve that in turn gave his thought its particular intensity. As he saw it, theology is truly theological to the extent that its rational movements find their resting place…

I came to know John Webster partly because I moved in the wide orbit of Barth studies, where he was an acknowledged master, and partly because I was his successor teaching theology at Wycliffe College. Even after his departure for Oxford John would return to Toronto from time to time to connect with friends, including…

May 25, 2016 was a day to be forgotten by most historical books and hardly recognized by its contemporary chroniclers. Were it not for digital publication, hardly a record of the tremor would have even been felt. Yet, that day marks the death of one whom Kevin Vanhoozer has called the “greatest living theologian,” John…

I write this on what would have been John Webster’s 61st birthday, 20 June 2016—if he had not gone directly to glory last month. I write to pay tribute to a person I described, long before his untimely death, as the greatest living theologian—the best theologian on earth. Such judgments of course say as much…