Douglas Knight

In The Eschatological Economy I compared two christologies. One is the Christian christology, in which Christ is the truth of man, and true man is in fellowship with God and with all men and creation. As Christ is the truth of man, so (Christian) christology is the truth of anthropology. I take this from Irenaeus. [...]

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Colin Gunton in his The One, the Three and the Many (Bampton Lectures) sought to offer a theological analysis of modernity while at the same time calling Christian theology back to the heart of its faith, the Triune God. In The Eschatological Eschatology: Time and the Hospitality of God, Douglas Knight has similar goals, though [...]

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The purpose of this blog is to tell you about The Eschatological Economy. Reviews are beginning to appear.
In this ambitious book, Douglas H. Knight sets out to illustrate the way Christian theology can function not as one category of knowledge within a larger secular account of the world but as itself the [...]

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Now and again, there appears in all fields of study a work that offers its readers a radical reconception of the basic subject matter in question. In the case of Douglas Knight’s The Eschatological Economy, the term ‘radical’ is especially apt because, rather than seeking something novel, Knight returns us to the roots of Christian [...]

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In The Eschatological Economy, Douglas Knight avoids the defensiveness of much recent theology and presents the Christian faith as a bold challenge to modernity. He takes Kant and Hegel to task for down-playing the significance of the particular, and urges the Church to proclaim God’s eschatological promises to a world increasingly devoid of hope.
Knight begins [...]

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God’s elect people, Israel, demonstrated in the public drama of sacrifice to the watching world that Israel’s God is the one true God. But when later Christians ceased to read the Old Testament as God’s witness to the world of the Gentiles, Israel came to be understood instead as just an example of primitive society, [...]

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Right from the days of Jesus’ mission between the Jordan, Galilee and Jerusalem, some have been embarrassed by the eschatology articulated in his message of the approach of God’s final reign. Some have not been able to avoid asking whether there is something shamefully mistaken or wrong hereabouts. Such embarrassment has persisted to [...]

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The Holy Spirit is the medium of God for humankind. He makes a real and material place for us and supplies the whole resource of our creaturely life with God. The Father and the Son speak the Spirit. The Spirit is the language they speak. But the Spirit can speak and be many languages, without [...]

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It is time for another in the series of little pieces on the logic of sacrifice and atonement, which I set out in the central chapters of The Eschatological Economy.
The reason we find sacrifice, along with other accounts of salvation, hard to accept is that we tend to overlook the crowd watching the event [...]

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To understand the theological concept of sacrifice we need to learn the connections between all the various parts of the theology of the Old Testament. The election of this people, the covenant, and the whole life of this people in obedience, and disobedience to God, is the key to sacrifice. This is what I wanted [...]

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Dear Dr Knight
I am on my second reading of “EE”. As a Lutheran layman I am a reader of First Things and Touchstone. My pastor and good friend has just left our Lutheran church and communion for the Church of Rome. About the time he announced his decision to leave, I ordered “EE” on a [...]

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In The Eschatological Economy I wanted to show that one unfortunate consequence of reading the Scriptures without the doctrine of election of the people of God – first Israel, then also the Church – is that the Christian tradition has under-played the process of formation and transformation, and has little comprehension that a community is [...]

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Dear Dr Knight:
Last night a group of us (the others are Protestant pastors and I am an Orthodox priest) here in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to read your book – The Eschatological Economy – as a group. It fits with some other things we have been reading, and they are as interested as I [...]

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In The Eschatological Economy I argued that the community of Israel brings animals to the temple for their God to inspect and pronounce good (or not), and thus publicly to assess and agree on the progress of this sanctification. It is not that animals are made holy, but that the whole people is being made [...]

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The variety of information Amazon makes available for each book title grows each month. The Amazon ‘See Inside’ function takes you to the Amazon Online Reader (their equivalent to Google Book Search).
The ‘See Inside’ function now works for The Eschatological Economy : it opens the Amazon Online Reader, which allows you to select ‘Excerpt’ which [...]

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In The Eschatological Economy I wanted to show that when we talk about sacrifice, in the bible or in ancient pagan world, the first question we have to ask is whose sacrifice? Do we mean Israel’s, or the sacrifices of other nations? The difference between sacrifice in Israel, and sacrifice in the rest of the [...]

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Recapitulation – God’s reverse engineering of creation. Eschatology has tended to mean that which is to come. Then it meant that which is to come which has actually come in Christ, the proleptic future. Now it means the bow wave of God’s work of recreation, coursing through the created order, renewing everything in line with [...]

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The Eschatological economy makes daring and provocative claims:
`Christian thought is political. It contradicts other systems of ideas and creates a real encounter and contest of world-views…’
`Modernity is a religion… Modernity and Christianity are both forms of enlightenment, but modernity is the counterfeit version, Christianity the real one…’
`The Word of God identifies Western being as a [...]

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God is judge. This is an idea that has undergone a metamorphosis in my mind. Too often ‘God is judge’ means he is like those guys in red dispensing retributive justice in our British court system. This was Luther’s apprehension of God before he understood things better, but it is an apprehension that seems to [...]

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In The Eschatological Economy I wanted to show that there are interesting reasons why modern society wants to believe that the concept of sacrifice is vicious and outmoded. Modernity is not only mistaken about this, it is concealing something about itself. Christians certainly need to rediscover a clearer and more trinitarian account, because the concept [...]

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