The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford
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Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item. Vocation of theology today: English View all editions and formats Summary: What are theologians called to contribute to society, the churches, and the academy?
The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford [Tom Greggs, Rachel Muers, Simeon Zahl] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Buy The Vocation of Theology Today: A Festschrift for David Ford by Tom Greggs , Rachel Muers, Simeon Zahl (ISBN: ) from Amazon's Book.
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. How are these unsettling interrogatives, adventurous subjunctives and longing, self-transcending optatives to be balanced with cut and dried indicatives and imperatives?
A fine line indeed — and obviously there can be no general answer. The poem suggests that in matters of such depth and complexity any specific answer is likely to be more an art than a science, and, indeed, more like the disciplined, collaborative improvisation of a jazz group than the playing of a classical symphony. Jazz is a wonderful example of the non-competitiveness of precision and innovation, discipline and daring.
I think of those departments that are reluctant to specialize in certain traditions and disciplines and become over-extended, incoherent or fragmented; and of the ongoing debate among Scriptural Reasoners about relating to texts other than the Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. One thinks of Nietzsche or Marx - nearly everything in a religion can be construed as being about power relations; or of the many other analogously reductive explanations of religion in terms of superstition, projection, sexuality, gender relations, evolution and genetics, psychological needs, social dynamics, or the longing for comforting answers.
All these are factors to be taken into account, and some academics — even some whole departments - will find one or more of them satisfying; but the field of theology and religious studies should not exclude those who do not subscribe to such reductions.
Thomas William Greggs
I met such a daring few in the Textual Reasoning group meetings in the early s on the fringe of the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting. They had extraordinarily intensive, lively sessions around texts, packed with learning, vigorous argument and humour. They were daring not only in relation to usual American Academy of Religion academic procedures and to the academic establishment in Jewish studies and Jewish philosophy but also in the way they brought religion, academy, society and culture into deep engagement with each other. They were fundamentally concerned about how to think through and live their Judaism in the aftermath of the Holocaust, while staying rooted in the classic Rabbinic tradition and also responding critically and constructively to Western modernity and contemporary society.
That was where a few Christians on the edge of the meetings came in. They, including myself, joined with several of the Textual Reasoners to form a new group, and soon afterwards Muslims joined too. Much inter-faith engagement assumes one has to find common ground, consensus, or at least some agreed framework.
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The quality of our listening, both face to face and through our reading and rereading, is vital. As one studies alongside each other certain texts from the three scriptures one realises that it is quite possible that these particular texts are being read together for the first time ever. That picture of intense group concentration and improvisation in response to each other recalls many moments during the past two decades of Scriptural Reasoning.
Note the mutual hospitality in the final stanza —. It is, I think, essential that a university have a commitment to understanding, knowledge and truth as valuable in themselves and not just as instrumental towards some practical end. The most important thing is for each to be able to perform with integrity, and for new groups to be able to improvise so that the huge potential of this field in the twenty-first century might be realised.
Within this multi-faceted potential I am suggesting that the most important single element is the quality of the engagement across and between religions. This is why Scriptural Reasoning can act as one key focus of reflection on how the field is institutionalised. Its form is jazz-like, both disciplined and daring, with regularities and unevennesses.
Each stanza has the same form, but with very unequal line length. The second line rhymes with the last line , combine ; shut, cut and the third with the fourth womb, whom ; horns, mourns. There are surprise bonds between stanzas: So the rhyme scheme is a constant a b c c b b d e e d d… and there are also some lovely half-rhymes and internal assonances and alliterations.
The form is an icon of the musical meaning, as suggested explicitly at the end of stanza I now take a more prosaic approach to the field by reflecting on some developments in China. I had done a lecture and seminar tour of China in , but on a return visit in October I found a very changed situation. I do not want to generalise from a short visit, but the changes were at least signs of hope.
In your handout you have the web address for my full report on the time there, http: First, there was the supportive official attitude towards religious studies in universities. Partly this was expressed by the Vice Minister of the State Administration for Religious Affairs SARA , Jiang Jianyong, in his ministry a former palace, exquisitely restored , during an audience in which he strongly affirmed the importance both of university academic study of the religions and also of high quality seminary education one of his staff who was present was about to spend two months in Fuller Theological Seminary in California.
He also emphasized the number of inter-religious initiatives China had begun or taken part in, nationally and internationally, and he explained that Chinese religious organizations are trying to learn from the West how better to be involved in charitable and social service work of many sorts there is, for example, an arrangement with Georgetown University for training Chinese religious leaders in this. He clearly understood that in the twenty-first century a world-class university needs to engage well academically with the religions, and his government has set about achieving this - and, as the academics told me, they have also, predictably, met some resistance from those who are anti-religious or do not see the point of taking religions so seriously.
But the most illuminating official comments came from Professor Zhuo Xinping. He is a scholar of Christianity not himself a Christian , educated in Germany, who since has been Director of the Institute of World Religions, belonging to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Since he has also been Chair of the Chinese Association of Religious Studies, covering all the university departments that study religions. He and some others including Professors Yang Huilin and Youzhuang Geng in Renmin University have been key architects of the remarkable development of religious studies in Chinese universities in recent years — I was especially struck by this, since it has largely been achieved since my visit in In a lecture Professor Zhuo summed up the transformation: So the study of religion was mainly from an ideological perspective.
Nobody paid special attention to the academic study of religion. But now, the academic study of religions in China plays a leading role. But what sort of study is it?
Vocation of theology today : a festschrift for David Ford
That leads into the second point. It is, in fact, a Chinese improvisation on Scriptural Reasoning, innovating by combining it with Comparative Theology which deals mainly with Christian and Hindu or Buddhist texts , expanding Scriptural Reasoning beyond Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures to include those of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, and introducing it to new disciplinary settings, especially that of comparative literature.
That was not the case before. It is now possible both to be fully academic and, with integrity and openness, to be religiously what one actually is. This is because it requires the scholarly disciplines related to texts and contexts and yet also allows for discussion of contemporary issues of interpretation, truth and application. It has two further features that seem to suit at least some Chinese departments well: Overall, in terms of the five advantages of the UK paradigm of theology and religious studies that I mentioned at the beginning of my lecture, Scriptural Reasoning exemplifies.
I would like to comment on other situations where I see signs of the DNA of theology and religious studies being introduced into very different institutional settings and societies. From my own experience I would especially note: But time forbids, and in conclusion I want briefly to make three comments each of which deserves a lecture to itself on previous lectures in this series. Theology and religious studies departments are, at their best, examples of such a niche in our intellectual, cultural and religious ecosystem.
Again, I am not convinced by his narrative of the genealogy of universities and their relationship to modernity. But he makes clear that, in the West at least, there should be an hegemony of Christian theology in those departments. I can conceive of many negotiated settlements in diverse departments and universities, some of which might be Milbankian; but, at least in the present situation in this country, and also in some others I have mentioned, I think there is a great deal to be said for spaces where there is an ethos in which there is not just one host, but rather a mutuality of everyone being both host and guest.
Simeon Zahl | University of Cambridge - www.farmersmarketmusic.com
What is unexpected is that, in this particular text, his passion is for the former aspect. In the Lectures on Galatians introduction, Luther identifies again and again the non- contribution of human agency as the crucial defining feature to be communicated about christian righteousness. That is, this approach is the opposite of what human beings by nature believe about themselves and about their relationship with God: So deeply is this evil rooted in us, and so completely have 15 Luther, LW 26, The pastoral implications of this as Luther sees them, to which he returns repeatedly, are a feeling of abiding peace, joy, and rest,20 and a certain kind of divinely-grounded freedom in relation to the world.
The zero point of human effective power is the place where God does his work. Importantly, the dominant metaphor for christian life in the Galatians introduction is the deeply organic one of dry earth awaiting divine rain That is, I come forth into another kingdom, and I perform good works whenever the opportunity arises.
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In each of these cases, along with connotations of stability, of deeply involved intimacy, of home, and of a kind of living faithfulness, there is always an implied or explicit contrast with more active alternatives. That is, menein is about staying in some sense the same as opposed to being subject to a change in circumstances.
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It is about resting as opposed to working, about the wisdom in letting things remain as they are rather than always seeking to change or improve them. Abide [meinate] in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides [mene] in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.
I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me [o menwn en eimi] and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit On Johannine abiding, see also Barrett, John, 84, 87, Plants do not have agency the way that human beings do. In John 15 this organic imagery of dependence is further built upon to create a double- dependence: Our dependence is so deep that we are dependent on one who is himself radically dependent, just as a branch is doubly dependent on the vine, which in turn is dependent on soil, water, and so on.
Overall, John here is painting a picture of christian existence as utterly intertwined with the divine life: