WHEN I went to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1969, to study theology, my director of studies was Mark Santer, then the Dean of Clare College: a young-ish academic priest, with a ready smile behind his heavy, black-framed glasses. He told me to read six books and come back in a week with an essay on the Bible and the Word of God. After he had read my attempt, he demonstrated to me, gently, that a paraphrase of J. I. Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God would not do.

Over the next two years, Mark introduced me to patristic theology and, in doing so, changed my life. I began to realise why the Prologue to St John’s Gospel has so often been seen as the heart of Christian faith; I wrote a dissertation on Irenaeus of Lyons. Thanks to Mark, I came to see that criticism did not destroy belief, and that faith had hope at its heart, along with a compelling moral vision.

Every time I met him during the past 50 years, I came away feeling encouraged and energised. At his funeral last week, members of his family and others spoke warmly of his delight in people, his fluency in languages, his endless curiosity. He had a generosity of intellect which could cope with anything, except stupidity. And, even then, he could make exceptions. The Rt Revd Christopher Hill’s obituary of him last week spelt out the many public roles that he played (Obituary, 6 September).

Yet it is his incarnational faith that I return to when I despair of the triviality of much of what goes on in today’s Church of England, with its lack of intellectual and moral seriousness.

My guess is that most Anglicans, apart from those who had him as their bishop in London’s Kensington Area and the diocese of Birmingham, will not have heard of him, because Mark was neither self-centred nor self-promoting. He did not patronise or ingratiate: he just got on with the business. When necessary, he could be tough, and he took some hard decisions. As co-chair of ARCIC, he engaged well with Roman Catholics; his fellow co-chair, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, was a friend; but Santer could also think as a Lutheran or a Reformed Protestant, and he promoted good relations with non-Christian faiths.

All came out of the conviction that, when the Word became flesh, the future changed for everyone. Everyone matters; everyone is of interest. There is a kenosis in being a Christian which is not masochistic, but creative and life-giving. It was this that enabled him after retirement to sit content in the pews in his parish church for years, never interfering. Even recently, when infirmity meant that he could hardly stand, he joined in with children to sing “Our God is a great big God”. I am still learning from this hugely capable, enthusiastic, little-known servant of God.