Rate My Professor Simeon Zahl

Professor Simeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion at Jesus College. He received his first degree in German History and Literature from Harvard University and his PhD in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge. Following his doctorate, he held a postdoctoral position at Cambridge, a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, and was Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Nottingham before returning to Cambridge in 2018.

An historical and constructive theologian, Simeon Zahl's research interests cover the period from 1500 to the present, focusing on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the place of experience and emotion in Christian religious life, the theological legacy of the Protestant Reformation, Augustine, nineteenth-century theology, and the contributions of affect theory and cognitive science to theology. He is currently working on a book exploring the theology of sin and its contemporary relevance. From 2018 to 2022, he was Principal Investigator on the project Affect and Knowledge-Production in Theology and Religious Studies, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation in collaboration with Professor Donovan Schaefer at the University of Pennsylvania. Zahl co-edits, with Rachel Muers and Ashley Cocksworth, the Cambridge Elements in Christian Doctrine series for Cambridge University Press. His teaching includes undergraduate papers on Christ, Salvation, and the Trinity (B8) and The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (C16), and the MPhil course The Christian God. He supervises PhD research in pneumatology, salvation, affect and emotion, Protestant intellectual history, Martin Luther, sin, and embodiment in theological knowledge-production.

Key publications include monographs The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford University Press, 2020), proposing a new account of the Spirit's work in salvation through affect and embodiment, and Pneumatology and Theology of the Cross in the Preaching of Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (T&T Clark/Continuum, 2010). Selected articles are 'Play and Freedom: Patterns of Life in the Spirit' (International Journal of Systematic Theology, 2024), 'Agency Experience and the Limitations of Non-Contrastive Transcendence' (Modern Theology, 2025), 'Sin and Bodily Illness in the Psalms' (Horizons in Biblical Theology, 2020), 'Beyond the Critique of Soteriological Individualism: Relationality and Social Cognition' (Modern Theology, 2021), 'Non-Competitive Agency and Luther’s Experiential Argument Against Virtue' (Modern Theology, 2019), and 'On the Affective Salience of Doctrines' (Modern Theology, 2015).