Douglas Knight

The Reading Church: Scriptural Authority in Practice – Fulcrum Lecture by the Revd Professor Oliver O’Donovan at the launch of his book
A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy
Monday 27 April 2009, 6.00pm St Mary Islington, Upper Street, London N1 2TX
Rumour has it that there is a group [...]

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More from the world’s greatest living evangelical. If he wasn’t so good I wouldn’t keep quoting him.
The first action, therefore, is to gather together in the Lord’s presence. This is what in former times was called “statio”. Let us imagine for a moment that in the whole of Rome there were only this one [...]

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The question is how we understand the purity of the Church for which we are bound to strive in prayer, in self-criticism and self-examination, first, before we venture onto critique of actions and structures. I understand the purity of the Church to be a prophetic notion, first of all concerned with the purity of the [...]

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Candour is of the greatest importance for the public realm itself. Candour is a simple public duty, often unperformed, or performed badly, out of simple reluctance to take responsibility for the truth on which the community depends. Behind many a story of tyranny lies collusion between oppressor and oppressed, a community that prefers to accept [...]

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Oliver O’Donovan has given three lectures at New College, University of New South Wales
Morally awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith

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For O’Donovan, the extraordinary events of that Pentecost day changed the world forever. God’s people became open to mutual address.
• It eventually led to the ‘conciliar movement’ in Christendom—a call upon the Pope to take seriously the Christian wisdom of others.
• In turn, there blossomed parliamentary movement in civil society—a call upon the King [...]

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If churches do not really need each other or owe each other anything, the Church is a voluntary association, and each congregation just a club of individuals. But this is not how it is. The Church is created by God – baptism is the act of God – and the baptism of each Christian is [...]

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Many months ago I promised you a series on Oliver O’Donovan. At last, here it is. This piece discusses O’Donovan’s Fulcrum sermons and offers a little theological context. It starts below, and is linked to the rest of the paper on ‘Resources for Christian theology’, with links to the sermons themselves. Next is a piece [...]

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If the first good news for the gay Christian, then, is that the “great question” – the question of the self, with all its pain and its hope, can be opened illuminatingly in the light of the righteousness of Jesus Christ, there is also a second good news. There is a neighbour with whom to [...]

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There is an elementary point about Christian ethics that I have sought to emphasise ever since the opening pages of my Resurrection and Moral Order published twenty years ago: there is no Christian ethics that is not “evangelical”, ie good news. There can be no change of voice, no shift of mood, between God’s [...]

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It is, of course, right that philosophers should speak as believing Christians. It is right that they should do their philosophising in a conscious openness to theology… But it is not good that they should confuse the philosophical task of understanding the world as it presents itself with elements randomly introduced from Christian proclamation. The [...]

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The liberal hermeneutic paradigm, fashioned by the controversy over historical biblical criticism, failed precisely because it thought it could count on there being a concrete moral truth immediately and categorically known to all, a peremptory and unchallengeable moral certainty. In this it failed to allow for danger. Action is always exposed to danger: we may [...]

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The Scripture tells us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. Whether this particular ambiguous statement we have it in mind to make will be false, or merely discreet, is something that the Scripture will not tell us; we must judge that for ourselves with the aid of the Holy Spirit. Yet everything the [...]

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Giants can still be found in Britain. Well, just the one giant really. He is our theologian, and he is an evangelical theologian.
His name?
Oliver O’Donovan

Author of The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Politcal Theology and most recently The Ways of Judgment, O’Donovan is now Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology [...]

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The ministries are known by their effects; when we see the effects we may discern that the Spirit is giving the church its authentic shape. What impact, then, will these effects have on the politics society in which the church lives? If a political society has in its midst a church that is taught by [...]

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…Pluralism is difficult to argue for successfully.
To assert the right of plural moral judgment requires a careful account of the systemic social differences that make that right intelligible. So explanation of difference is the essence of a policy of mutual forbearance. It risks adding insult to injury to demand forbearance while at the [...]

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Fulcrum has published two papers by Oliver O’Donovan. The first shows that contemporary theological liberalism is bankrupt: ‘The Failure of the Liberal Paradigm’ is its obituary. But O’Donovan does so the more effectively because he shows that liberalism wasn’t always bankrupt, and is not bankrupt by necessity.
Contemporary liberalism shows a violent disdain [...]

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A series of conflicts over sectional emancipations and inclusions [meant that] there were some very good stories of emancipation to be told, testimonies to the liberating implications of the Gospel and the pastoral involvement of the church, the enormously influential struggle for civil rights in the USA, for instance, and the Latin American base ecclesial [...]

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Liberalism fails to bring a critical practical reason to bear on the present world. In its pursuit of doctrinal reconstruction it treats the moral questions of the age as moral certainties, it views the indeterminate shapes of the present as sharp outlines. It may even imagine that in the present it can find some kind [...]

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Fulcrum is running the first of a seven-part series by Oliver O’Donovan, which promises to be a substantial diagnosis of the present environment in which the Church must offer its witness.
In this excerpt, O’Donovan describes the stance that theological liberalism takes towards the witness represented by the teaching of the Church: [...]

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