The Hewitson Profile: The ‘public theologian’ doing God’s work with a dash of mischief

Detailed summary

Jenny Te Paa Daniel on her pursuit of inclusion and equality within the Anglican church.

When theologian Emeritus Professor Jenny Te Paa Daniel was a little girl she would go to the pictures with her mum and dad. In those days, when the movies were called the pictures, God Save the Queen was played, which was your cue to stand up nice and straight wearing an expression of devoted allegiance to the crown and monarch.

“And so we’d all be sitting there between our parents and my anti-royalist mother would be saying, ‘Just sit down, just sit down,’ and my staunchly royalist Pākehā dad would be saying, ‘Stand up, stand up.’ And I thought to myself, ‘He’s got the money for the ice-creams. I’m on my feet.’”

This is a good story and a funny one. But it is also a story about what making choices for good ends means, really. And a story about being a clear-eyed kid who grew up to be a clear-eyed adult.

She has just been appointed a companion of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, which is pretty much a club for brainy, influential thinkers. She is chuffed. She has always “wanted to restore theology to its original status as ‘queen of the sciences’. That was its medieval standing. So it’s neat.”

This is the latest in a long list of accolades: five honorary degrees; actual degrees in education and a PhD in theology; the first Māori and first lay person to head an Anglican seminary, St Johns Theological College, a job she held for 18 years until 2013. To list them all would run to the length of this page. Easier, and more concise then, to say that she might well be the country’s leading theologian.

Let’s imagine that a kid – or a dumb adult, that dumb adult being me – asks this: What is theology, actually? “Oh my goodness. Okay. Actually, technically, theology is simply the talk of God. Logos is ‘the word’; Theo is to do with God.”

Raised in the ferment of the Māori rights and women’s rights movements in the 1960s and 70s, “I always had this curiosity about the disjunction between the wider Anglican Church and the Māori Anglican Church I grew up in, which I absolutely loved.

Goo…

Opening of the article, excerpted from NZ Herald. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.