When Dan Hardy died in 2007, just six months after being diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour, he had recently engaged in a series of conversations which, now published, offer a unique form of theological legacy. Wording a Radiance records the discussions he held with three of the people closest to him as death approached: his daughter, the Anglican priest Deborah Hardy Ford; her husband, Cambridge theology professor David Ford; and the Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs.
The conversations are described by David Ford in these terms: ‘I think the best way to begin to say what was distinctive . . . is that while he [Dan Hardy] was having them he was simultaneously living out their content, and that content was the culmination of a lifetime combining Christian living and theological thinking’ (p. 112).
It is this unashamed fusion of faith and theology which makes Hardy's parting words so compelling – and challenging to those of us who work in contexts where we might be reluctant to divulge personal commitments in an apparently objective intellectual context. For Hardy, as he reaches the end of his own earthly theological journey, there is a key concern that theological endeavour remains rooted in religious life: ‘Dedicated attention to the intensity of God; that's the source of theology; it's not about academic contrivances’ (p. 2).
Hardy's words point to his deep conviction that the practice of theology is inseparable from the spiritual quest at the heart of Christian faith. So theology ‘has a doubling role: to explain but also to invite deeper into the mystery. It's a form of prayer done deeply within the Spirit and it requires sustained inquiry in many directions, by testing the major theologies, philosophies and sciences of modernity’ (p. 2).
This is not, of course, an argument against sustained intellectual examination of Christian claims – but it does caution against theology being an academic discipline indistinguishable from any other humanities subject. Hardy insists that our context is ‘dedicated attention to the intensity of God’ – and that has implications, particularly concerning how we relate to the institutions within which we work.
In the light of Hardy's claims, I might ask, for example, how many SJT readers operate within departments which feel they have to try and justify their continued existence within their university in terms that would make equal sense if the subject under consideration were history or geography. Is there an often unspoken nervousness about theology's relationship to faith and spirituality? Is it conceivable that your department would happily describe the practice of theology as, even in part, using Hardy's definition: ‘a form of prayer done deeply within the Spirit’?
The questions may be provocative, but they follow inescapably from the picture of academic theological study which Hardy sketches. In response, we might well be tempted to say that such remarks are more easily made at the end of a successful career when there are not so many people left around to impress. But such an observation should not distract us from Hardy's key concerns – and it is also worth noting that he does reflect candidly on the challenging and difficult times of his early career.
Of his years as a postgraduate student in Oxford, where his D.Phil. thesis was rejected, he writes: ‘At the time, Oxford philosophy – and such was its influence, much else besides – was largely in the grip of logical positivism, a movement that reduced Christian belief either to nonsense or simple moral guidance . . . the options open to theologians like me were very limited, and it was a deeply frustrating time’ (p. 16).
In her introductory portrait of her father in the book, Deborah Hardy Ford follows this discussion of testing times in Oxford, and later in Princeton, with an underlining of the importance of the worshipping context within which her father undertook his theological work. His professorship at Durham, which combined academic and liturgical responsibilities, is recalled with fondness. And it was in the context of liturgy, during a pilgrimage to the Holy Land just weeks before his terminal diagnosis, that Dan Hardy experienced a seemingly unprecedented moment of spiritual transformation, with substantial implications for his understanding of theology, expressed in this telling phrase: ‘my thought about God was transformed into desire for God’ (p. 45).
For Dan Hardy, the study of theology was about exactly this sense of vocational and spiritual discovery. Writing about the process of supervising graduate students, he describes it as ‘gently edging forward the things that are being prompted in them’ (p. 36). And that observation is made in the context of his disclosure in Wording a Radiance of the way in which he had ‘for years experienced light suffused around other people, especially in a pastoral context . . . now I also experience the light separated from others, in itself and then suffusing and illuminating virtually everything. I believe this frees my pastoral activity . . . this includes graduate students, with whom I find that our pastoral discussions move further away from academic topics and allow students to make vocational discoveries of their own’ (p. 101).
These visions of light intensified on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, with a particularly significant moment at the front of St George's Cathedral shortly after the consecration of a new Anglican bishop of Jerusalem. Hardy notes, ‘I have been deeply interested in the question of the infinitely intense identity of the Lord. I have tended to articulate my findings through words and ideas, but, in Jerusalem, the reality of this intense identity was embedded in a visual experience of a pillar of light, making graphic what was otherwise only conceptual. The light magnified the meaning of God's infinite identity for me hugely’ (p. 74).
So the light Dan Hardy saw – as a pillar in St George's Cathedral, or emanating from a graduate student making vocational discoveries – was light reflective of God. A light which prompts and energises what he later refers to as ‘an ongoing process of envisioning and re-envisioning’. A glimpse of God; a vision of the energy of the Spirit.
Another recurring theme, again developed significantly as a result of the pilgrimage, is that of movement. The church must resist a damaging turn inward; instead, our response to God's attraction should be to go forth into the world, the challenge being to maintain our unity with God as we do so. And this is why, for Hardy, the eucharist must be at the heart of the church's life and the life of the theologian: it is ‘a means of educating the pilgrim's desires in service to the Church. Enacting this education is to walk a path of church formation and scriptural enactment.’
This sense of movement is perhaps best expressed in his statement that ‘ecclesiology is embodied: in Jesus’ walking’. For the church really to be the body of Christ, each individual Christian faces the task of walking as Jesus walked, and engaging with those along the journey as Jesus did, if the Body of Christ is to fulfil its calling in a world where Jesus himself no longer walks. And there is a freedom to be found on this walk – in the sense that ‘engaging with Jesus, we are rationally puzzled and frustrated as well as healed’ (p. 84). It is not that by walking with Jesus we solve all of our own problems or those of the people around us, but it is in this journey of discipleship that we fulfil our own vocation and that of the church, referred to by Hardy as ‘a mobile order . . . measured and guided by Scripture, by the Eucharist and by Jesus’ steps’ (p. 85).
This walking with Jesus may also offer ways forward for interfaith engagement in a pluralist society. Hardy writes of a ‘triple hermeneutic’ as Christians walk with Jesus along a road where they also meet Muslims and Jews: ‘walking with Jesus allows you to walk with other traditions. It provides a wonderful opening because you can imagine Jesus walking with others too . . . Just imagine the Emmaus Road story as a story of Jesus coming and walking among his disciples: Christian, Jew and Muslim’ (p. 36).
His reflections on friendship and interaction with those of other faiths were rooted in his own practice of scriptural reasoning. By articulating his visions of light which marked his encounters with other people, Dan Hardy was, perhaps, just beginning to consider an emerging theology for interfaith engagement, rooted in a conviction that the mystery of God's Spirit was working in the world in ways so extraordinary as to be generally beyond articulation.
As David Ford reflects, ‘If the discernment of “Church” is closely tied to discernment of God's fullness and abundance, and that fullness is found in some inter-faith engagement, what are the boundaries of the Church? It is not that there are no boundaries, no limits to what God is understood to fill; but we have no overview of them, and may be frequently surprised by the movement of the Spirit “welling up in the group”. To change the metaphor from water to air: who can identify the edge of the wind?’ (p. 127).
Ford's unanswerable question could be seen to point in the direction of the task that Hardy suggests underpins theological engagement: that of the description of the apparently indescribable, as meaning is sought in the context of a spiritual journey. For him, theology without that confident sense of context, that sense of purpose, and yet rooted in mystery, would be a neutered theology, failing to live out its calling.
For Dan Hardy, his personal calling was one which combined prophetic teaching with patient pastoral engagement, especially with his graduate students. He was awarded an honorary DD from General Theological Seminary shortly before his death. In an acceptance speech, delivered by his daughter as a result of his declining health, his words paid tribute to Coleridge, his constant influence, and created a moment for reflection on his own vocation: ‘It has been 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.’
In this short, at times deceptively accessible book, Dan Hardy bequeaths a determination to see theology undertaken with uncompromising intellectual rigour and yet in an unrestrained, unambiguous context of Christian faith. His words might well surprise and appal university administrators sceptical about theology's place in the contemporary academy. But if theology is to flourish because of what it is, rather than by pretending to be something else – presumably something safely secular – then Dan Hardy's words offer vital sustenance for a challenging trek.
It would be inappropriate not to mention that this is also a book which contains some of Hardy's trademark complexity which may well leave a reader momentarily baffled. A diagram, ‘The Energetics of Attraction’, attempts to clarify Hardy's concepts of sociopoiesis and abduction in the context of pilgrimage; this reader, at least, struggled to make sense of it all, though Hardy's ultimate concerns and theological direction remained clear.
What shines through the whole of this book – and shining is, surely, an appropriate metaphor given Hardy's luminescent faith – is the infectious enthusiasm for theology, as a discipline which straddles church and university and which enables true seeing. That the volume includes family photographs as well as impenetrable diagrams only adds to its engaging qualities, for this is a rounded theological portrait of an attractive life which points to the attractive qualities of God. It defies many of our seemingly sacred intellectual conventions, and seems all the freer and richer having done so.
Hardy concluded his DD acceptance speech with scriptural words which seem suitably to sum up his encouragement towards theologians who might follow after him: ‘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’ (p. 13).
