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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
It is good in this centenary year of his death to remember that the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh is successor to the Chair of Evangelistic Theology first occupied by Alexander Duff. Duff was a missionary strategist and statesman who saw the Christian mission in world-wide terms, yet found in his Scottish Reformed heritage treasures of immense value and relevance to the India of his day. Within a few short months of his arrival in Calcutta in 1830, Duff produced an assessment of the situation in Bengal of quite extraordinary shrewdness and insight, discerning the signs of the times and pinpointing the opportunities and dangers to the Christian witness. He looked, as any good practical theologian must, for the working of God in the context in which he found himself; he embraced not just the immediate opportunity but the long-term process, imbuing his converts—remarkable men that they were—with a vision of India as she might be, and of their own role as reformers, renewers and leaders of Indian society and culture in their ministerial and educational work. Duff saw himself not as handing on a closed and unexamined package of accumulated wisdom and orthodoxy, but as equipping a new generation to think for themselves and live creatively always looking, like the heroes of faith of Hebrews xi, to the future, to the city whose builder and maker is God.
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