The Vocation of Theology Today

A Festschrift for David Ford

Greggs, Muers

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895404
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is the task of theology in a complex religious and secular world? What are theologians called to contribute to society, the churches, and the academy? Can theology be both fully faithful to Christian tradition and Scripture, and fully open to the challenges of the twenty-first century? In this book, an international team of contributors, including some of the best-known names in the field, respond to these questions in programmatic essays that set the direction for future debates about the vocation of theology. David Ford, in whose honor the collection is produced, has been for many years a key figure in articulating and shaping the role of contemporary theology. The contributors are his colleagues, collaborators, and former students, and their essays engage in dialogue with his work. The main unifying feature of this exciting collection is not Ford's work per se, however, but a shared engagement with the pressing question of theology's vocation today.

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Introduction

Tom Greggs, Rachel Muers, Simeon Zahl

Living a Theological Vocation

David Ford’s illustrious academic career is, by his own publicly stated account, an indefinitely extended interruption of his path toward a career in business management. This might mark him out as an unusual theologian. Yet for many professional and amateur theologians throughout the world, as well as for the wider audience that engages with his work on public issues, he is in important respects a definitive theologian; in person or through his writings, he shows them what theology is about. Perhaps the serendipitous nature of David’s move into theology has something to say about the vocation of theology itself—called in unpredictable ways out of, and into, the complexities of everyday life. It probably also has something to say about the particular gifts he has brought to theological communities and institutions.

Several of the chapters in this collection, particularly in the final section, focus on aspects of David Ford’s life within and beyond the academy that have been particularly significant for his theological work and vocation. He has also, in recent years, given interviews and written short pieces reflecting on his theological journey and identifying formative experiences and encounters,1 and in this introduction we simply offer a sketch of his theological voyage.

David Ford was born in Dublin in 1948. His undergraduate degree at Trinity College Dublin was in Classics; following graduation, and as a prelude to taking up a management position in industry, he accepted a scholarship to study theology at St. John’s College, Cambridge. From there he went to Yale for a master’s degree, and returned to Cambridge to study for his doctorate (later published as Barth and God’s Story) under the supervision of Donald MacKinnon and Stephen Sykes. In 1976 he was appointed as a lecturer in theology at Birmingham, where he stayed until he became, in 1991, the first lay theologian to hold the Regius Chair of Divinity at Cambridge. He is the director of the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme, which was established under his leadership in 2002. Other academic institutions with which he has been closely associated include the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton, the Cambridge Theological Federation, the Society for Scriptural Reasoning (of which he was a co-founder), and the Society for the Study of Theology. From 2003 to 2008 he was an academic member of the “Davos” World Economic Forum Council of 100 Leaders. He has been a consultant to the international L’Arche movement since 1993. His theological work with the Church of England and the Anglican Communion includes many years’ service on the Doctrine Commission, and serving as a consultant to the global Anglican Primates’ Meeting.

This outline biography already reflects many of the themes that recur in this book and that are judged by its authors to be key to Ford’s distinctive contributions to theology—the interrelations of church, academy, and public life; the importance of building sustainable institutions, and the creativity and energy that is required for such institution-building; and global and local conversations with and around Scripture and tradition.

One long-running conversation that had a decisive influence on Ford’s theological vocation requires particular attention here. Ford’s friendship and collaboration with Daniel W. Hardy began when Ford was appointed as lecturer in theology at the University of Birmingham. The chapter in this volume by Deborah Hardy Ford includes her recollections of her father’s excitement at David Ford’s arrival as a new dialogue partner and colleague. For the younger theologian, the connection with Hardy was to be central to his network of theological friendships and conversations for over thirty years. Their collaboration was far more than a sharing of occasional tasks; it was a sustained co-labouring in the service of a shared, though differentiated, theological vocation, of which their co-authored work—Jubilate: Theology in Praise—tells only a small part of the story.

Another part of that story emerges in the work edited and written by David Ford, Deborah Hardy Ford, and Peter Ochs after Hardy’s death, Wording a Radiance. Here both the intensity and the profound hospitality of the theological friendship between Ford and Hardy becomes apparent, as reflections on and from Hardy’s final months emerge in Ford’s voice, alongside the voices of the other authors and the voices of numerous friends and colleagues whom they drew into their conversations. Still another part of the story of this collaboration could, perhaps, be told through the work of numerous graduate students. Without starting a “school” or a unified movement, Ford and Hardy created the space for continuing and growing networks of theological dialogue, sustained by a shared sense of the joy and the importance of theology.

This collaboration also became the site for a seminal three-way dialogue and friendship between Ford, Hardy, and Peter Ochs. Their dialogue and friendship, across faith traditions (later drawing in Muslim scholars), was central to the development of the distinctive modes of practising and thinking about interfaith engagement found in and around Scriptural Reasoning. Ochs and Ford have continued to accompany, nourish, and shape each other’s academic and institutional work over two decades.

Ford’s own evolving understanding of the theologian’s vocation is reflected in a sequence of programmatic statements about theology’s place in the university, in the churches, and in the contemporary world. His inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, A Long Rumour of Wisdom, on the form and public vocation of theology and religious studies, was followed by numerous articles and occasional pieces on the task of theology,2 and the major collection of essays, Shaping Theology. Most recently, he wrote The Future of Christian Theology, setting out a manifesto for a practice rooted deeply in Scripture, tradition, and communities of faith, but also formed by and attentive to a rapidly changing contemporary context.

A more wide-reaching contribution to the future of the discipline is seen in Ford’s ongoing commitment to inviting others into the space of theology and making it possible for them to join in the theological task. As mentioned earlier, his name is probably familiar to most undergraduate students of theology, in the English-speaking world and beyond, as one of the people from whom they have learned about what theology is, how it has been done in the past, and how to start thinking about their own place within it. Publications throughout his career have made significant contributions to the teaching of theology. The Very Short Introduction to theology, three editions of The Modern Theologians, and the Jesus and Modern Theologians readers, all embody the wish, not to encompass or define the field in a restricting way, but to offer a realistic and attractive picture of an activity in which readers can learn to participate.

David Ford is widely recognised for his contribution to the creation and sustaining of academic institutions, and not only for the study of theology. The account he gives in a number of his published works of the mutual benefit to be gained from the genuine integration of theology and religious studies in research and teaching of the highest quality, has been carried through in his work with colleagues to extend, strengthen—and rehouse—the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity. He has also served, over many years, several institutions that seek to embody the fruitful relationship between academic theology and faith communities. His commitment to institution-building is reflected not least in his extraordinary efforts—and extraordinary successes—in raising funds to support academic theology and to secure its future in numerous contexts.

Most recently, he became the founding director of the Cambridge Inter-faith Programme. The early work of the Programme includes a major project on the place of religion in the research university—that is, the place of religion beyond the academic discipline of theology and religious studies. The message, which is echoed strongly in many of Ford’s writings, is that the university matters not only as a place where theology (and religious studies) can be pursued, but for its own sake—and ultimately, to pre-empt a discussion in Mike Higton’s contribution to this book, for God’s sake. Ford’s developing theological preoccupation with the nature and reality of wisdom is played out in his commitment to the university as a place where wisdom can be sought and found in the service of the common good. The title of one of his widely distributed lectures suggests the magnitude of what he takes to be at stake in the future of the university: “Knowledge, Meaning and the World’s Great Challenges.”

Characteristics of a Theological Oeuvre

David Ford has been highly prolific over the course of his academic career. At the time of writing, he is the author or co-author of ten books, and the editor or co-editor of a further eight—and that is not to mention the extensive list of articles and book chapters to be found in the bibliography at the end of this volume, or indeed the many hundreds of papers, addresses, and sermons, in academic, ecclesial, and other public contexts, that do not appear in print. Sheer volume alone does not, however, explain why it is difficult to produce a brief summary and introduction to key themes in Ford’s theological work and development over the past four decades. Rather, as Alistair McFadyen’s essay in this volume explores in more detail, Ford’s work reflects a degree of scepticism about grand narratives and neat package summaries in theology. He generally prefers to enter...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Part 1: Conversing with Theologians
• Part 2: Attending to Scripture
• Part 3: In and For the Church
• Part 4: Reasoning between Faiths
• Part 5: Speaking and Listening in Public
• Part 6: Theology and the University
• Part 7: Theology and the Face
• Publications by David F. Ford