In 1984, he became Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Queen's College, positions he kept until his move to Duke University in 1990. He has also held visiting professorships and lectureships at Trinity College, Dublin, and the University of Cambridge. Sanders identifies himself as a "liberal, modern, secularized Protestant" in his book "Jesus and Judaism"; fellow scholar John P. Meier calls him a postliberal Protestant. In any case, he is cognizant of Albert Schweitzer's indictment of liberal theology's attempt to make Jesus in its own image, and seeks to keep his religious convictions out of his scholarship.