that in later years has proved fruitful again and again both with actual buildings and with the architectonics of theology and institutions.
I returned to GTS as a fellow and tutor for two years, accompanied by my wife Perrin, who, together with our growing family, grew to be central to my life. The experience of teaching and a sense of the crying need for theological thinking led to further study in Oxford University. Yet that was in many ways a painful disappointment, finding a theology that was too influenced by positivist philosophy and rarely confident enough to explore the depths and wonders of God and God’s ways with the world.
The 21 years that followed were spent teaching in the University of Birmingham. The ‘golden thread’ of those rich and varied years was the pursuit of a theology that might give dedicated attention both to the intensity of God and to the way the world is, especially as described, interpreted and explained by theologians, philosophers and scientists since the sixteenth century. Exploring and testing their thought was a slow and often lonely task, but for several hours each week there was intensive conversation with the colleague who became my son-in-law, David Ford. They were wonderful hours, exploring through the lens of praise and the superabundance of God’s truth and love.
Moving to the Van Mildert Professorship of Divinity in the University of Durham and a canonry in Durham Cathedral was like spiralling back to a GTS-like combination of daily worship with academic work. If I were to choose just one key element in those years it would be the fresh, multifaceted involvement in ecclesiology that has remained at the forefront of my thinking ever since.
Then I re-crossed the Atlantic to be Director of the Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry for five years. Much of my time there was spent in rethinking the Center (along lines now happily being pursued by the current Director) and in working closely with individual members from many disciplines and many countries. But judged in terms of long-term results it is probably the relationship with one member, the Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia, that has been most fruitful. He, David Ford (of Cambridge University) and I have spent much time over many years since the early 1990s working together with others to develop the practice of Scriptural Reasoning, the shared study of our scriptures by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
I was deeply gratified when GTS invited me to speak about Scriptural Reasoning during the opening conference of the Desmond Tutu Education Center last month, and very disappointed that I could not attend for reasons of health. I am delighted that Peter, David and others, including some Muslim participants in Scriptural Reasoning, led two workshops (I know that a film of this has since been broadcast on PBS [public television]), and also that the practice had such a warm reception in the seminary. Might I take advantage of this occasion to commend Scriptural Reasoning to you as warmly as possible? It is one way of going deeper simultaneously into one’s own faith and into the faith of others through study and mutual mentoring, and in my judgement holds considerable promise for the twenty-first century, not least in building much-needed forms of peaceful sociality between the Abrahamic faiths. Its fruitfulness has most recently been seen in last week’s10 Muslim message, A Common Word, addressed to Christian leaders, and I hope that this seminary might be a place where that message of love for God and neighbour is responded to wholeheartedly. If only the Anglican Communion could learn this too! My involvement in the 1998 Lambeth Conference and participation in some of the Primates’ meetings during the years that followed made me long for a reconciliatory imagination and practice centred on Scripture and nurturing a deeper and richer sociality, touching healingly the depths of each person. May the new Desmond Tutu Center serve this divine purpose well!
This evening’s happy event brings my theological career since its beginnings in this seminary full circle. I end with two thoughts.
The first is on my own vocation. I see it as having been primarily about the seeking of God’s wisdom. It has been prophetic insofar as it has attempted to engage more deeply with life in all its particularity. It has been priestly in tracing that prophetic wisdom to its source in the divine intensity of love and in seeking to mediate that love through the Church for the whole world, concentratedly in the Eucharist: light and love together. The second is a tribute to the thinker who has perhaps more than any other been my teacher and inspiration over many decades, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He engaged deeply with God and most aspects of God’s creation – intellectually, imaginatively, practically, spiritually, emotionally and through much personal suffering. Above all he responded in all those ways to the attraction of the divine. He discerned the Word and the Spirit endlessly present, active and innovative, lifting the world from within, raising it into its future – giving us a huge hope in God and God’s future, and inviting us intensively and unremittingly to participate in that, as we are drawn through divine love into levels of existence of which we can hardly begin to imagine or dare to dream.
In this spirit I conclude with one of the great Christian prayers, in which I invite you to join:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.11
(Daniel W. Hardy, 18 October 2007)
On that same day when we talked about colour and my father said, ‘I think I probably am dying,’ I asked, ‘Are you ready, then?’
He answered peacefully, ‘Yes, I think I am, I think I am ready to just slip away. My main concern is the unfinished business: mostly this book. It’s not the shape I first imagined it would be.’
‘Is there still much to do?’ I asked. ‘It sounds like you’ve already come a long way.’
‘It’s indeterminate,’ was his reply. And of course he was suddenly speaking about the pain of recognizing all he had to let go of, too: particularly his beloved friend, Peter. This was the closest he ever got to acknowledging some of his own pain and loss in his dying. I empathized, but told him that the process of this book had been amazing to me. It seemed even more appropriate, somehow, that it would have to be continued and finished in the presence of his absence. It had a life of its own, which was bigger than him, and, as he handed it over and entrusted it to us, it would draw us and others up into its life and energy even after his death. As we worked on it, he would be right there in our midst (and he has been): and we went on to speak of the dynamic of the Trinity and of the Eucharist – gathering everything up and together in its life and truth.
Peter describes him as
a pastor’s pastor – seeing light in the other, light as attractiveness in and with the other. He is a pastor of others within the Eucharist; within the Anglican Communion, pastor on behalf of Abrahamic communions and to human communities more generally, all of whom he sees lit up by the divine attractiveness itself: the great cosmic and ecclesial and divine communion of lights which draws him to it and to us and draws us to be near him.
The actual genesis of the writing of this book was when the three of us (Peter, David and I) gathered in the room (at home) where he had breathed his last just a few days earlier: gathered to simply be together and to pray and keep watch over his body before his burial the following day.
We had decided to open our scriptures together, ‘Scriptural Reasoning-style’
