Wm Curtis Holtzen, co-editor of By Faith and Reason: The Essential Keith Ward, looks back on a successful and industrious ongoing academic career ...

In 1998, as a former pastor making the transition to a career in academics, I came upon Keith Ward’s God, Chance, & Necessity. While unfamiliar with Ward’s works at the time my life, intellectually and spiritually, would never be the same. In this book I found a Christian philosopher and theologian who was committed to faith and reason, scientific truth and religious trust, in ways I had never encountered before. It is not merely that Keith Ward’s works offer original perspectives that are challenging yet illuminating or that he offers insightful summations of ancient and contemporary thinking that make him so readable, but it is that his works are filled with humorous sagacity.  All this makes Keith Ward an author worth studying and enjoyable to read.

Born on 22 August 1938, in Hexham, Northumberland, John Stephen Keith Ward’s professional academic life began with his graduation from the University of Wales in 1962.  He served as lecturer in Logic at the University of Glasgow while completing his BLitt from LinacreCollege, Oxford. Keith then went on to Trinity Hall, Cambridge for an MA and a DD, and served at the universities of St. Andrews, London, Cambridge, and King’s College London before being appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.  Most may not know that Professor of Divinity at Oxford is a post officially appointed by the Queen; a fact also lost on the Queen herself.  On an occasion in which Keith met Her Majesty he said, ‘Thank you for the job ma’am.’ Upon reflection Keith remembered, ‘I think she had no idea of what I was talking about, and probably thought I had gone mad.’ Keith officially retired from Oxford at age 65, however, he has continued to teach, currently at HeythropCollege, London, still speaks at various conferences and gatherings, and has not slowed down his writing.

Keith Ward published his first book, Fifty Key Words in Philosophy, in 1968.  Now, at age 75, he has published over 30 books and more than 70 articles and essays. While it is not possible to comment on all his writings, I will offer a few perspectival highlights.

His writings fall mainly into the categories of philosophy, religion, and theology, but he may be best known for his comparative theology.  In 1993-94 Keith Ward delivered the Gifford Lectures, an honour reserved for only the most respected and influential in the world of theology, philosophy, and the study of God. These lectures were published in the book Religion and Revelation which became the first in a five-part series in comparative theology.  The series also includes Religion and Creation; Religion and Human Nature; Religion and Community; and Religion and Human Fulfillment.  This is a Christian systematic theology set in the context of the world’s major religions.  These works explore key doctrines of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam all from a Christian perspective. The aim is to show how the world’s major religions can understand one another and positively work together.

On the relationship between religion and science, besides the above mentioned God, Chance, and Necessity, Keith has Pascal’s Fire which critically explores the rapport since the Enlightenment. In DivineAction and The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith answers some of the more problematic issues including miracles, the purpose of the universe, and the nature of scientific exploration.

For me, Keith is at his most fascinating when writing about theology and the nature of God.  Two of his best are Rational Theology and the Creativity of God and God: a Guide for the Perplexed.  The latter is written, in Keith’s words, ‘in an accessible and lightly humorous style’ and details our philosophically evolving understanding of God.  The former has been perhaps his most influential work on this author.  In it Keith challenges classical theism’s depictions of God as timeless, immutable, and impassive.  Instead, he posits a God who is temporal, responsive, creative, and relational (in fact, for weeks I assumed the title of the book was Relational Theology and not Rational Theology).

Keith has written extensively on the Christian faith and the Bible with the common theme that each need to be continually interpreted in the light of contemporary science and critical thought.  A few of his works in this category include What the Bible Really Teaches, The Word of God? The Bible after Modern Scholarship, The Philosopher and the Gospels, God, Faith, and the New Millennium (a text I have used in several courses). 

Never one to back down from a scrap, Keith has taken on both old and ‘New Atheists’ who have dismissed the idea of God and the value of religion.  Keith responds to attacks by his former colleague Richard Dawkins in the book Why There is Almost Certainly a God and investigates the modernist views of Freud, Durkheim, and Jung in the Case for Religion.  In the books Is Religion Dangerous? and Is Religion Irrational? Keith answers those who claim that religion is harmful, violent, immoral, and simply absurd.  The conclusion Keith reaches is not only is religion, at its core, not dangerous or irrational but coherent, plausible, and ‘the heart of an often heartless world.’

When reflecting on his lifelong academic work, Keith has said, ‘I suppose the most important thing has been that for most of my academic life I have also had a pastoral and liturgical role (in the Anglican Church)’.  He credits this for keeping his philosophy and theology grounded in ‘real life’.  Keith and his wife Marian live in Oxford and his academic work shows no signs of coming to an end.  In 2013 he published the book Morality, Autonomy, and God and is currently working on a book on the trinity, although he thinks this may take a while.

Wm Curtis Holtzen is co-editor of By Faith and Reason: The Essential Keith Ward (DLT: 2012), available as paperback and eBook.