Spreading Rumours of Wisdom: Essays in honour of
David Ford
Introduction
As the contributors to this special edition of the
Journal of Scriptural Reasoning know, David Ford can
throw a good party. He has a tremendous gift for
gathering people — around texts, around questions,
around concerns, or simply for each other's company.
David's written contributions to theology are well
known, but equally well known and significant are his
contributions in the shape of institutions built or
strengthened, working relationships formed, and
people apprenticed to modes of theological thought.
The collection of essays presented here is conceived
as a modest surprise party — of a kind only academics
can appreciate — in honour of his sixtieth
birthday.
One of the areas in which David Ford has made a
particularly significant and obvious contribution is
the development of scriptural reasoning, so it seemed
appropriate to hold this birthday gathering in the
Journal of Scriptural Reasoning. David's former
graduate students are now teaching and researching in
a wide range of contexts across the academy and
around the world, and have responded with enthusiasm
to the invitation to celebrate his work. The
resulting collection reflects both the breadth of
David's interests and the persistence of his core
concerns — above all, for the development of
theological wisdom that is both deeply informed by
scripture and tradition and ceaselessly attentive to
the multiple cries of the world.
For David Ford, as Ben Quash and other
contributors to this journal point out, scripture is
to be inhabited; it is to be attended to over time in
such a way as to form ones attitudes and convictions
at a deep level. Scripture thus inhabited is found to
be inexhaustibly rich — as with the abundance of
names for Christ and lived ways of relating to Christ
discussed in Tom Greggs's paper. It is capacious,
able to give rise to a genuine catholicity as
portrayed in Chad Pecknold's paper; and it is a space
within which hospitality is possible, as for example
towards the Chinese traditions of wisdom explored by
Jason Lam. Most of all, scripture thus inhabited
calls forth and gives rise to the love that in turn
grounds wisdom — love of God for God's sake, as Paul
Janz discusses in his paper.
This does not, of course, mean that to inhabit
scripture is to retreat from conflict or pain. David
Fords work has led him into intense engagement with
the suffering arising from, and linked to,
anti-Jewish and otherwise violent readings of
Christian scripture. In this collection, Mike Higton
and Susannah Ticciati both engage with particular
contentious scriptural texts, in search of readings
that neither deny the real difficulties for
Christians reading their scriptures in the presence
of Jews, nor regard these difficulties as insuperable
barriers. At the same time, as Mike Higton and Rachel
Muers both suggest, David's way of doing theology —
in person in much as in writing — is characterised by
playfulness as well as seriousness, the genuine joy
that accompanies an activity undertaken first and
foremost for God's sake.
We hope that this special edition of the Journal
of Scriptural Reasoning will be a fitting, if
inadequate, birthday celebration. As at any party,
there are numerous apologies from those who were
unable to be here, and numerous recollections of
absent friends. In particular, all the contributors
to this volume were able during their time as David's
students to benefit from the wisdom and care of his
father-in-law and close colleague, Daniel W. Hardy.
We think Dan would have enjoyed this party, joining
in with comment and criticism and counter-suggestion.
His death in November 2007 was a great loss for all
of us: for the authors of these pieces, for
Scriptural Reasoning, and for Christian Theology. In
offering this birthday tribute to David Ford we also
remember, with much thankfulness, all we learned from
Dan Hardy.
Rachel Muers, Mike Higton and Ben Quash
January 2008
Title Page |
Archive
© 2008, Society for Scriptural
Reasoning
|
