Luther Zeigler on David Ford’s Self and Salvation

Luther Zeigler, ‘The Many Faces of the Worshipping Self: David Ford’s Anglican Vision of Christian Transformation’, Anglican Theological Review 89:2 (2007), 267-85.

David Ford’s Self and Salvation: Being Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) was the inaugural volume in the ‘Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine’ series which promised to be – and has turned out to be – excellent, containing some significant works.

I eagerly started Ford’s book when it first came out and quickly struggled in the early discussions of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, and Eberhard Jüngel. Some of the later chapters covered more familiar territory, but overall the book was hard work. (I was gratified to discover, subsequently, that others had found it just as demanding.)

It should be said (as noted here) that Ford’s more recent contribution to the series, Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), is a complete delight – readable and suggestive in all sorts of ways.

So, I was happy to spot an essay devoted to the earlier, less accessible volume in a recent Anglican Theological Review, which does a great job of summarising its contours and contribution.

Luther Zeigler notes what readers of Christian Wisdom will see, that ‘Ford has developed a model of theological discourse that is at once refreshingly interdisciplinary and culturally literate, while at the same time firmly grounded in biblical witness and liturgical life’ (267).

After an introduction, he unfolds the article in three parts (though the headings that follow are mine).

David Ford and the premises that inform theological method

Zeigler notes that Ford does not ‘subscribe to a classical philosophical or theological worldview’; rather, his tests for good theology are whether it ‘(a) is accessible in its elucidation of ordinary life, (b) recovers key images from that life, (c) is sufficiently rich conceptually to do justice to the rich texture of our experience, (d) is fruitful to us in our everyday lives of worship, prayer, learning and acting, and (e) is defensible to others in the world’ (270, referring to Ford, Self and Salvation, 2-7).

Theology, for Ford, is mediated through the senses, texts, music, and other dimensions of religious experience. In this way, theology merely helps us ‘to recover and grasp what is passed over in our experience of the world, God, and others’; it is ‘reflection brought to bear on unreflective, everyday life’ (271).

Ford himself asks: ‘Does this theology have practical promise of fruitfulness in the three main dynamics of Christian living: worship and prayer; living and learning in community; and speech, action and suffering for justice, freedom, peace, goodness and truth?’ (Self and Salvation, 5).

David Ford and the Christian self and salvation

Ford borrows philosophical insights into selfhood from Levinas and Ricoeur, and combines these with the christological perspective of Jüngel.

• The Levinasian self – not the Cartesian self of a ‘detached thinking ego’, but the Levinasian self of the physical embodiment that separates ‘me’ from the ‘other’; where ethics is the ‘first philosophy’, understood ‘as a relation of infinite responsibility to the other person’ (273). Ford’s basic image to express this ethical relation is facing, where I face the other.

• The Ricoeurian self – and ‘the claim that testimony is a constitutive aspect of selfhood’, where ‘testimony – telling stories of who we are and where we have been – is the manner in which we give expression to ourselves, and that allows us to relate to others’ (274).

• Jüngel’s christology – where the starting point is not the ‘fundamentally anthropocentric perspective’ of Levinas and Ricoeur, but a christology that is ‘closely parallel to Levinas’s notion of the radically substitutionary self’, such that ‘Jesus Christ as the incarnation of God is the primordial substitutionary self, the particular one who is there for all others’ (275-76).

Ford synthesises these perspectives ‘by insisting that the very source of our capacity to be there for others resides in what God has already done for us in Christ’ (276), and goes on to describe Christian selfhood – in terms of ‘flourishings’ – in the following ways:

• The singing self – taking a cue from Ephesians 5:18-22, seeing in it ‘the basis for illustrating how a particular call to sing praises was a transformative element of the new Christian self’, where ‘the act of singing in community draws the self out of itself into relationship with others’ (277). As Zeigler notes, Ford demonstrates ‘how the simple injunction “to sing” from Ephesians is in reality an invitation to the individual to be transformed by a community of voices responding to the presence of God’s superabundance in the creativity of song’ (277).

• The eucharistic self – where Christians flourish ‘by participating sacramentally in the narrative of the Last Supper’, orienting us ‘towards both Jesus Christ and others’ (277-78).

• Jesus Christ as worshipping and worshipped self – and the centrality of facing and being faced by Jesus Christ as the theological centre of Ford’s soteriology. The two main themes here are the centrality of the death and resurrection of Jesus at the heart of Christian soteriology, and the centrality of worship for an understanding of Christian selfhood (278).

• Thérèse of Lisieux and Dietrich Bonhoeffer – whose lives illustrate the ways in which ‘selves can be formed and transformed before the face of Christ’, where ‘each life was centered around Bible, prayer, worship, and the abundance and generosity of the grace of God’ (279-80).

David Ford and the Anglican theological tradition

Zeigler’s apparent overriding concern in the article is to place Ford within a classically Anglican tradition of doing theology (267, 268-69, 280-85). Toward the end he summarises:

‘My thesis is that Ford is indeed Anglican both methodologically and substantively. This is expressed most basically in Ford’s “mediating” method of theological discourse; in his primary focus on worship; in his emphasis on religious experience and its transforming power; and in his fundamental incarnational celebration of God’s superabundance’ (281).

Thus:

• Theology as mediation – where the discourse is structured in dialogue with different conversation partners, seeking to discern points of contact with postmodern intellectual culture which might facilitate a Christian understanding of the self.

• The centrality of worship – where the primary focus is on ‘worship as lying at the heart of Christian identity’ (283).

• The phenomenology of religious experience – the place given to religious experience in his soteriology.

• The primacy of ethics – involving an adaptation of Levinas’s notion of ‘infinite responsibility to the other’ combined with Jüngel’s understanding of Jesus as the ultimate substitutionary self.

• Incarnationalism – with God’s goodness and love ‘reflected in the created order and in humanity in myriad ways’ (284).

Zeigler relates each of these features to the Anglican theological tradition, whilst noting that Ford moves beyond it in being ‘much more sensitive… to the realities of suffering and evil in the world and to the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross’ (285).