Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.1998, Page 43

Duncan B Forrester
Practice and Passion
in Theology
I am delighted by your invitation to take part in the celebrations marking the one
hundred and fiftieth anniversary of your distinguished Faculty of Theology,
which is the origin of the University of Iceland. And I am deeply honoured by
your conferring on me the degree of Doctor Theologiae honoris causa, a distinc-
tion which I know I have not earned but which comes to me, appropriately in a
Lutheran context, as pure grace!
You are, I think, quite brave to bring another Scottish theologian to Iceland.
When my revered colleague, Professor Norman Porteous, was here many years
ago, the occasion was marked by a volcanic explosion and the emergence from
the depth of the Icelandic tohu wbohu of an entirely new island, called Surtsey.
When another senior Old Testament scholar, Professor George Anderson, came
to lecture he arrived to the accompaniment of widespread flooding and when I
came a number of years back in the month of February, there was a hurricane
accompanied by a sudden thaw; the electricity failed throughout the city of
Reykjavik, and the windows were blown out of the hotel in which I was staying!
I hope my visit this time will not be accompanied by such disturbing portents.
And I, for my part, am perhaps just a little brave to come again to the island
which was first settled by a handful of Celtic monks from Scotland and Ireland,
seeking in loneliness and austerity to commune with God amidst your magnifi-
cent scenery, and venturing by fragile coracle to Greenland and perhaps beyond
even to the coast of America, which it appears they found (as others have found
since!) too hospitable and comfortable to provide an apt setting for their discip-
lined devotions. These Celtic hermits might indeed on their voyages to Iceland
and their austere sojourns here before their liquidation by the Norse incomers
have sung St Columba’s great hymn:
Alone with none but thee, my God
I journey on my way;
What need Ifear, when thou art near,
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