Dear Paul
Your Luther chapter is wonderful. It is particularly wonderful when you get out of the secondary lit and into John and the Catechism. What a star Luther is. I think there is more you could quickly pick up from Jenson on Luther speech-act approach to the theology of the Word – Jenson ST2 295 ‘According to Luther the soul becomes what it hearkens to. Luther : ‘Do not be surprised that I said we must become the Word.’ The old notion was that the mind is formed by what it sees. Luther makes the mind to be formed instead by what it hears.’
But there is something much more important to say at this juncture. You are nearly out of time. If you do not submit in time those years you spent with us in London and in Germany, and the hope and effort of Colin will have been for nothing. You may not feel this as a act of judgment – and of self-harm – now, but in the long term you will. You cant help anybody outside the immediate parish without this doctorate, so if you don’t make a great lunge for it right now, you will be confining yourself to the parish for the next thirty years, unable to help the rest of us.
You have no time for anything new. So don’t bother with a final Gunton chapter. Gunton is probably everywhere in this thesis. You must now very speedily and drastically hack everything down into a smooth product. It is great to have a sense of your authorial voice, but not your talking voice – don’t be chatty, get more terse. You must understand that you now have to produce a thesis-lite. You are writing for just two people who will give it a rushed reading on the train to your viva, have a bad conscience about it, and who only want to be confident that you are competent (not be troubled by having to judge whether you are brilliant or wayward). Safety first. Throw away everything that you cannot instantly clarify. None of it will be lost and whatever you throw away now can be re-included and developed later. You must finish this by kissing your summer goodbye, closing the door on the church and the family and accelerating away to the end of this thesis. You are good at winging it. Do so now. You should email every chapter at the end of every week between now and September – to Lincoln or Chris or me or anyone – just to give yourself the sense of urgency and progress you need. Don’t feel detached from the rest of us – we all feel this urgency in a much more hostile environment, and not having you around doesn’t make it any easier. I hope you will send me frequent new instalments, starting with conclusion and introduction.
Your server has bounced this mail back six times now, so I’ll post it here and hope you find it.
Good luck
DK
