Leading scholar joins Divinity and Religious Studies at Aberdeen

The University of Aberdeen’s highly regarded department of Divinity and Religious Studies has appointed a leading professor to strengthen its position as a premier centre for world class research in Christian Theology.

Dr. Paul T. Nimmo will take up a chair in Systematic Theology in September. He joins the department from Edinburgh University having previously been an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. His own studies were undertaken in Cambridge, Edinburgh, Princeton, and Tübingen. Widely published in the fields of systematic and historical theology, his book Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision earned him the Templeton Award for Theological Promise. He is widely acknowledged to be amongst the front-rank of researchers in the theology of Karl Barth, and his major study of Barth’s theology of the sacraments, Thinking the Eurcharist After Barth, is forthcoming. He is an Editor of the International Journal of Systematic Theology. Together with David Fergusson, Dr. Nimmo is currently editing of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology.  

Dr Nimmo has a broad range of research interests in systematic theology generally and in the Reformed tradition in particular. His work incorporates both historical and contemporary Christian doctrine, and he is centrally involved with a number of church projects in theology. He is a member of the Church of Scotland – Roman Catholic Joint Doctrine Commission, the Church of Scotland Working Group on Issues in Human Sexuality, and the inter-denominational ‘Why Believe?’ Group. He is a Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Theology and is a Fellow of the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. In high demand as a public speaker and lecturer, Dr. Nimmo has delivered the Kerr Lectures in Glasgow and a Block-Seminar on the Theology of Karl Barth at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen.

The University’s Pro-Chancellor, former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and former President of Princeton Theological Seminary, The Very Reverend Professor Iain Torrance, said:  “I am truly delighted by Paul Nimmo’s appointment. He is one of the most brilliant and most promising younger scholars in his field from anywhere in the world. At the University of Edinburgh he has been acclaimed by the student body as being also a great teacher. Aberdeen has a long tradition of outstanding theology in the Reformed tradition. In the case of Paul Nimmo, the Department could not have made a better appointment, and this is good news for Reformed scholars not only in Scotland but also in the US, Korea, Japan and Africa.”

Divinity and Religious Studies is a leading research department within the University and home to one of its largest communities of international postgraduate research students. The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) confirmed its status, rating 80 percent of its assessed research at 4* (world-leading) or 3* (internationally excellent). The department ranks first in Scotland and second in a field of thirty-eight departments in the UK in the Times Higher Education tables.