Gifford Lecture Series 2026: Professor John Swinton, University of Aberdeen The epistemic chaos of the powers: delusions, narrative resistance and the apocalyptic practice of hospitality
This is the second of a series of six Gifford Lectures, which for 2026 will be on the theme of ‘The symptom's secret: an apocalyptic theology of mental health'. The lectures will be presented by Professor John Swinton from the University of Aberdeen, this one on ‘The epistemic chaos of the powers: delusions, narrative resistance and the apocalyptic practice of hospitality'.
What if mental health symptoms are not simply signs of personal disorder, but indicators that something larger is disordered in the world around us? Symptoms such as hearing voices, compulsions, delusions and memory loss refuse to stay neatly inside individual bodies. They rupture our settled ideas about the world and point us towards unnoticed aspects of creation that challenge our ideas about normality, knowledge, personhood, time and even God.
This lecture series focuses not on diagnoses but on symptoms, those epistemologically rebellious units of human experience that transcend the clinical and lead us into new understandings of the world. The strange new world that they attune us to is the place where Jesus is unveiling the new creation, if we have eyes to see. A focus on mental health symptoms will help us see that the natural world we assume to be the norm must itself be viewed differently: apocalyptically.
The series brings mental health symptoms into conversation with apocalyptic theology, a tradition largely absent from discussions of mental distress. Apocalypse is understood here not as end-times catastrophe but as God's act of unveiling: a Divine invasion of love designed to rescue us from the Lordless Powers that, although defeated on the cross, continue to wreak havoc on the world.
The aim of this series is not to replace clinical frameworks but to supplement them with a theological account of the world's disorder and God's liberating apocalypse. Throughout, the series will develop an approach to mental health care that not only offers compassionate care to suffering individuals but learns to read these experiences in ways that attune us to the work of the Powers and Principalities and to the cruciform, apocalyptic movement of God in, to and for the world.
Theologian, professor and ordained minister, John Swinton, is Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen and the founder of the Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability. He is also a major figure in the development of disability theology.
The other lectures in the series are:
- Tuesday 24 March: An invasion of love: mental health symptoms and apocalyptic attunement
- Tuesday 31 March: Megan's loops: why we are not all ‘a little OCD' and why that matters
- Thursday 2 April: Where is the demon? Hearing voices, possession and the mislocation of evil
- Tuesday 7 April: The end of narrative: why stories are not central to who we are
- Thursday 9 April: After nature, within care: natural theology and mental health symptoms after apocalypse