Campion Lecture for Trinity Term with Professor Graham Ward - recording now available
Professor Graham Ward, formerly the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at the University of Stellenbosch and also a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall, offered our Trinity Term Campion Lecture on Thursday 5 June 2025.
Professor Graham Ward, Biographical note
Professor Graham Ward was formerly the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology at the University of Stellenbosch. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Campion Hall. Among his books are Cities of God (Routledge), Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (CUP), True Religion (Blackwell), Christ and Culture (Blackwell), The Politics of Discipleship (Baker Academic), Unbelievable (I.B.Tauris) and Unimaginable (I.B.Tauris).
For the last fifteen years Graham Ward has been working on a four volume engaged systematic theology, Ethical Life. The first two volumes have been published as How The Light Gets In (OUP) and Another Kind of Normal (OUP). The third volume, Salvation, will be published next year.
'What is a Spiritual Education?' lecture details and recording link:
This lecture, held at Campion Hall and online, on Thursday 5 June 2025, examined the work of the Holy Spirit in the operation of salvation.
You can view the lecture at this livestream link here.
Lecture details: The talks treats the formation and salvation of persons, and how the Latin persona becomes important. It treats the difference, though not in a derogatory way, between spiritual formation and well-being, building upon the Pauline distinctions between the body (soma), the mind (psychê) and the spirit (pneuma). Drawing upon Scripture and evolutionary biology, Professor Graham Ward describes the educational process involved in being formed, showing that form is an emergent property as it is in evolutionary biology. It is not something that can either be predicted or prescribed. The Spirit works upon us at profound emotional and dispositional levels, beneath cognition and language so we have to come to terms with all that is hidden (mystêrion). Suffering plays an important pedagogical role in that. Biographies play a role in that. They are the means by which we are “sounded through”, and in being “sounded through” we come into our distinctive personhood in Christ.