Tag: <span>04 interview transcript</span>

Tag: 04 interview transcript

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The Practical Theology of David Ford: Interview with David Cunningham (Ford, 2003)

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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.

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A GodSpy Interview with William T. Cavanaugh (Cavanaugh, 2008)

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What do you think best characterizes the essence of your thought? Cavanaugh: What I’m trying to do is make connections between Sunday on the one hand and Monday through Friday on the other. In other words, to make connections between Church life—especially the Eucharist—and everyday life. I want to bridge the gap that shouldn’t be there but is.

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Liturgy as Politics: An Interview with William Cavanaugh (Cavanaugh, 2005)

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This is often our approach to liturgy and social life: we try to “read” the liturgy for symbols and meanings that we take out and apply in the “real world” — the offering means we should give of our wealth, the kiss of peace means we should seek peace in international relations, and so on. This is fine, but it doesn’t address the liturgy as an action that forms a body, the body of Christ.

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Cardinal Pell and the Theology of the Nation State (Cavanaugh, 2005)

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How might a Christian envision the way the world ought to be and how humans ought to live in community. I guess if you take the biblical story, which I do with my very beginning students, and you look at the biblical story as a whole, it can be told as the story of primordial unity and then scattering and gathering again, salvation as a kind of gathering again into a harmony amongst humans and between humans and God. And so the way the story of the Fall in Genesis is told it encapsulates the whole thing: that there is this Creation that begins good and then through sin kind of falls apart and so on and then we are to be gathered back together.

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The Gospel vs Scripture? Biblical theology & The Debate About Rites of Blessing [interview] (Brueggemann, 2002)

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I incline to think that most people, including the movable moderates, probably make up their minds on other grounds than the Bible, but then they are uneasy if it collides with the Bible or at least they have an eagerness to be shown how it is that the Bible coheres. I don’t think, on most of these contested questions, that anybody – liberal or conservative – really reads right out of the Bible. I think we basically bring hunches to the Bible that arrive in all sorts of ways and then we seek confirmation. And I think that I’m articulate in helping people make those connections with the hunches they already have.

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An Interview with John Webster (Webster, 2008)

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Why should ordinary Christians care about such seemingly recondite matters as how to articulate the immanent being of the Trinity? There aren’t any “ordinary” Christians; there are saints, a few of whom are appointed to the task of thinking hard about and trying to articulate the common faith of the church. We don’t usually need to use formal theological language and concepts in the everyday life of the church in prayer, preaching and service. But like any other important human activity, faith has to achieve a measure of conceptual clarity if it is to understand and express itself, and part of that process is the development of abstract concepts like Trinity, incarnation and substance. What’s important is that we don’t treat such concepts as if they were improvements on the ordinary ways in which the saints express the faith; they are simply shorthand terms, a tool kit which helps us keep certain crucial aspects of the gospel alive in the mind and worship of the church. Theology and theological abstractions matter because the gospel matters, because the gospel concerns truth, and because living in and from the truth involves the discipleship of reason.

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Interview with Richard Hays by John E. Anderson (Hays, 2010)

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You have written prolifically on Paul, including your seminal dissertation The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11. What first drew your attention to Paul, and how do you see your work on Paul fitting in to the larger context of Pauline scholarship?

My fascination with Paul took shape during my years in the doctoral program at Emory, as a result of seminars with Lee Keck and Hendrikus Boers. I was taking those courses in the immediate wake of the publication of Ed Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism and J. Christiaan Beker’s Paul the Apostle. These works were raising in different ways questions about Paul’s “pattern of religion” and about the problem of “contingency and coherence” in Paul’s thought. It seemed to me that the way most Pauline scholars approached these issues was driven too much by the quest for an ideationally/systematically formulated “center” of Paul’s thought, with too little attention to the narrative underpinnings of Paul’s teaching. So I began to mull over the ways in which Paul’s letters might be understood to contain allusive references to an underlying story. At the same time, in the seminar with Keck, I wrote a paper on Romans 3, which later became my first published article, a piece in JBL called “Psalm 143 and the Logic of Romans 3.” The germinal insight of the essay was that Ps 143:2, which Paul loosely cites in Rom 3:20, contains in its wider context references to the righteousness of God that help to elucidate the logic of Paul’s argument in Rom 3:21-26. You can see how this led on to further developments as I followed this thread.

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Interview with Oliver O’Donovan (O’Donovan, 2001)

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What did you find when you went looking for the roots of political theology for your book “The Desire of the Nations,” and were you surprised at what you found?

Yes I was, though it was quite a moment of discovery, I think. I came at it from a series of moral questions about the just war, having been well taught by my ethics teacher Paul Ramsey at Princeton. In the early 80s I decided I had to get into this much more thoroughly, so I went back then to the founding texts of the just war tradition from the 17th century and found, to my amazement and delight, not just a sort of just war theory but a whole political theory, a whole elaboration of political concepts that covered a huge range of things and was deeply theological in inspiration. That helped me understand what Hobbes was doing, and when, coming out of this tradition and using this tradition, himself having a great theological interest, he set apart the political thought from the theological thought, creating, as it were, a sort of autonomous structure of political thought that lived on its own, and so I said to myself at that point, “What I’ve got to do is actually get back behind that great division and see finally what was going on.”