He completed his doctoral work in the area of Religion and Literature, with a study of the German Jewish poet Paul Celan, at Wolfson College, Oxford (1979–86).
Following the untimely death of Colin Gunton, Davies was appointed in 2004 to the Chair of Christian Doctrine at King's College London.
Davies' work combines an interest in language and communication, whether textual or oral, with questions of metaphysics, ethics and doctrine.
[3] In recent work Davies has also taken up the theme of the possibility of grounding global or 'ecumenical' accounts of the self in the proto-ethical structure of the self as identified in the contemporary neurobiology of human social cognition.
He is currently writing a series of articles, published in English and Chinese, on the possibilities of new contemporary 'global' accounts of the self and on 'ecumenical' theologies, working together with colleagues from China, Europe and the UK.