Knowledge, Meaning and the World’s Great Challenges: Reinventing Cambridge University in the Twenty-first Century (Ford, 2003)
Our long term history therefore should encourage us to be sensitive to transformations in knowledge and in society and to be willing to respond to them by further reinvention. What about our present situation? I see a strong case for fresh reinvention. The core factors are intrinsic to the dynamism of knowledge and its use, and especially its relation to the people who discover it, teach it, learn it, interpret it, and apply it. I would suggest that this university, along with others, is being asked to meet four interconnected challenges simultaneously.
The Practical Theology of David Ford: Interview with David Cunningham (Ford, 2003)
Scripture has been very important in your theological work, but your approach is different from those who treat the Bible as a rule book or a guidepost. You encourage people to enter its world and allow their imaginations to be fired by its structures, as they would in reading a novel. Is that a fair description?
I think that’s a partly adequate parallel. I wrote my dissertation on Karl Barth and biblical narrative, and I was very much influenced by Hans Frei and the Yale tradition of understanding scripture in terms of narrative. My own engagement with scripture began when I was a teenager. I read the New English Bible translation, and found there a freshness and a gripping power. If the church is to remain true to its calling and to respond to new situations adequately, it has to be fed with scripture and to inhabit scripture. If the whole imagination of the church is to be able to resist the very powerful forces that try to co-opt it or subvert it, then it has to have a scriptural imagination.
Response to “A Common Word Between Us and You” (Ford, 2007)
This historic statement gives the right keynote for relations between Muslims and Christians in the 21st century. It is what we have been missing since 9/11/2001. The most impressive list of signatories from all the main Muslim traditions and countries have made a clear and powerful proclamation of love for God and for all neighbours. The message is rich and deep, and it goes to the heart of Muslim faith as expressed in the Quran. It also goes to the heart of the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament.
Learning from Lambeth Conference 1998 and Primates’ Meetings 2002/2003, Submission to Lambeth Commission on Communion (Ford, 2004)
Submission to Lambeth Commission on Communion
Theological Wisdom, British Style (Ford, 2000)
Some years ago when I encountered theologian George Lindbeck of Yale Divinity School, he asked me about the Gifford Lectures which had been written by my doctoral supervisor, Donald MacKinnon. At the time, Lindbeck was planning a course on MacKinnon. Within a year or so theologian David Tracy of Chicago gave a paper in which MacKinnon was one of the featured theologians. When asked what current theology he found most interesting, Tracy replied, “British.”
British Theology After a Trauma: Divisions & Conversations (Ford, 2000)
If there was one intellectual development in living memory that separates the “grandparent” from the “parent” generation of British theology, it was the rise of logical positivism and analytical philosophy. A fairly homogeneous educated class, largely shaped through a few major universities, received a massive assault from within those universities not just on its philosophy but on its beliefs, ethics and worldview. “But how can you prove . . . ?” “But what do you really mean by. . .” were the reigning questions, and the conclusion of the inquiry was usually that your meaning had no empirical basis and did not make sense. The assault was made by a confident army of elite intellectuals, who appropriated the prestige of modern science and offered a rational rigor that might provide a place (however confined) to stand amidst world wars and huge changes in every area of life. The story is far more complicated than that, yet it is vital to understand how, in the middle two quarters of the 20th century, a drastically reductionist way of thinking became the bottom line against which everything was measured.
British Theology, Movements & Churches (Ford, 2000)
Having surveyed in previous articles the variety of theological conversations in Britain — ranging across patristics, history, philosophy, biblical interpretation, literature and the arts, the natural and social sciences, ethics and politics, and other religions — it probably occurred to some readers to ask: But what about the classic topics of Christian theology? What about the doctrines of God, creation, human being, providence, sin, Jesus Christ, salvation, Christian living, church, Holy Spirit and eschatology?
Remarks at Final Plenary Session of Lambeth Conference (Ford, 2008)
Asking people the question: Where has the Conference been most at home together? the same answer has been given time and again: we have been most at home in worship and in the small Bible study groups. The worship has never been without the Bible at its
centre, and the Bible studies have been embraced by worship. And at the heart of both Bible and worship is what perhaps unites us
most strongly: the desire for God, that hunger and thirst for God which is itself a gift of God.