The way of wisdom

Christian Century, May 3, 2003 by David S. Cunningham

IF THE UNITED STATES and Great Britain are "two nations separated by a common language," then perhaps Christian theologians of the two countries are "separated by a common theology." American and British theologians often find themselves in significant agreement--drawing on similar sources and reaching shared conclusions--but geographical distance as well as the very different church-state relations in the two nations have meant that Christians in one region are often unaware of theological developments in the other.

For example, although David Ford's work is much respected among academic theologians, and he is one of the most important public theologians in the UK, his name is probably unknown to most Christians in the U.S. Educated in Ireland, Germany and the U.S. (as well as in the UK), Ford brings a wide range of intellectual resources to bear on his interpretation of the faith. His writings include scholarly reflections, works of spiritual guidance and literary interpretation, scriptural commentary, and a number of texts used in the training of clergy.

Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, Ford is a man of profound learning, quick wit and sparkling humor. He is much sought after as a preacher and lecturer. An adviser to the bishops of the Anglican Communion, he has written and spoken widely on themes as diverse as the role of theology in the university, the spirituality of the L'Arche communities, and contemporary Irish poetry

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.

As for the "novel"-like reading of scripture, I'd add that the issue of genre is important. When I wrote Praising and Knowing God with Dan Hardy, the Psalms and the poetry of the Bible were more primary than the narrative. And now the genre that most fascinates me is wisdom. It's a sort of integrative genre, gathering together the prophetic, the legal and the poetic into a very rich understanding of reality.

The theme of wisdom runs through much of your recent writing--wisdom not only as a genre of biblical literature, but as a theological category.

The wisdom tradition represents the self-critical side of the Hebrew scriptures. It's thus a very good model for what theology should be doing: paying close attention to tradition while thinking through the difficult and dark questions. Wisdom demands an integration of rigorous thought with imagination and also practical concerns--how things actually work out in the living of life. Part of its fruitfulness for me has been that it acts as a check on theology's being too doctrine-centered, and not taking account of the imaginative and the practical.

I would never want to run down the importance of the intellect; I spend a lot of my time reminding people that you need to be at least as intelligent in your faith as in the rest of your life. But given our very pluralistic environment, in which you're likely to come up against five different worldviews in the course of a day's encounters with the media, you need a way of thinking, imagining and acting that makes deep sense, and that allows you to adapt and improvise in relation to these diverse views.

So wisdom is able to integrate theory and practice?

Yes. The opposite of wisdom is foolishness, and very few people are in favor of foolishness.

Did your thoughts turn to theology fairly early in life?

My father died when I was 12, so during my teenage years I was asking a lot of the hard questions. I almost led a double life, playing a very active role in school while pondering deep questions about the meaning of life. The key thing, as I look back, was the reality of God: if God is real, then that affects everything. I had no hint at all, during that period, of becoming a theologian. But accidentally I picked up, for a school prize, a paperback copy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics. Why it should be in a Dublin bookshop still puzzles me; but there it was. I read it with fascination; it was beyond me in many ways, but it was clearly both intellectually very rigorous and highly practical. It sowed the seed of the idea of what good theology might be like.