A couple of weeks ago I briefly noted the death of Rev. Prof. Dr. Francis Nigel Lee and mentioned with hope that a longer form memorial of his life would appear online.
Ian Hodge has produced and published a fitting piece, A Friend To Remember, which appears at Biblical Landmarks.
Here’s a couple of paragraphs to which I can personally attest as being very accurate.
Nigel was a gifted preacher, an orator. At conferences, you could expect him to eventually loosen his tie, undo his top shirt button to give him breathing room, and remove his jacket, if he felt it was getting in the way. In his preaching he wanted you to hear the Christ in the Scriptures, not Dr. Lee, so he explained the text verse by verse.
I also had the pleasure of being a guest in his home, and attended one of his classes on the Westminster Confession of Faith at the Presbyterian Theological Hall where he was professor of Systematic Theology. His teaching style was dogmatic in the classroom. After the class, I asked him why he did not entertain discussion and interaction with the students. He replied that students were there to learn, he was there to teach, there was no need for discussion. Students needed to pay attention and make sure in the exams they regurgitated what they had been taught.
To this day in the rare instance I take off a coat when preaching I always am tempted to loosen my tie, undo my collar button and roll up my sleeves in Nigel Lee fashion. The pulpit of my home church in Wynnum, Qld, is situated on an elevated platform which Dr Lee would seemingly skate from one side of to the other in animated gesture, not being locked to notes on the lectern. I could only wonder what the recordings may have sounded like as his voice went one way and then the other across the microphone.
There were rare instances when he submitted to interaction with students in lectures. Pretty much never in systematics, perhaps chances were better during one of the post-lunch lectures on a warm Friday afternoon. The beginning of a semester saw him bring in a box of books to commend for our further reading, most in the foreign languages he knew, while most of us struggled with English. He’d announce a particular volume of use, mentioning that it would be helpful if someone would translate it from the Dutch. There were never any takers.
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