Douglas Knight

Solly at Solly Gratia is reading a really tough book at the moment. He is riffing on its opening lines, just saying what occurs to him as he goes along and thereby asking all the hard questions about the context and audience, not only of this theology book, but of theology. Who is it for, [...]

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Dear Bishop Tom,
I have enjoyed the Maurice lectures immensely. In your first lecture you told us about postmodernity, apocalyptic and time, and talked about the tension between the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’, and about true and false expectation. Your second lecture, about art, suggested that good art tells us about this tension between present [...]

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Over at Confessing Reader, Peter Brown’s article on the future of Anglicanism, in the United States in particular, starts by thinking through the institutional possibilities but quickly gets down to the theological motives and principles.
Here are three of the points he makes:
1 The bond of communion is a sacramental witness to the love of God [...]

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Here is more provoked by O’Donovan’s move (see post below).
In every university in the UK administrators are making it difficult to do any academic theological work. But administrators don’t start out as administrators, but as academics, people excited by ideas. But those academics who do not care to explore the wonderful world of the [...]

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Over at the ever-excellent Pontifications Al Kimel is examining the Logos Asarkos, the question of the status of the Son ‘before’ taking flesh (sarx) in the incarnation. Al says that the idea of the ‘pre-existence’ of the Son seemed obvious until Robert Jenson put it in question. So far Al has given us excerpts from [...]

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I am very grateful to Ben Myers of Faith and Theology for an extraordinarily energetic and creative blog, full of competitive but informative lists, links, news and bits from Barth and Jüngel – the perfect blog really. It is only hard to see why he has made my much duller effort his ‘blog [...]

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The lucky few in London next week could pop along to the F.D. Maurice lectures. Maurice was one of the great teachers of the Victorian Anglican Church, who was punished by being sacked by the college which now hosts these lectures in Christian theology. The subject this year is The Bible in the Postmodern World, [...]

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All the Glitterati were out at the reception given by the Brethertons last night to launch Luke’s new book Hospitality as Holiness – Christian Witness among Moral diversity.

Synopsis
We live amid increasing ethical plurality and fragmentation while at the same time more and more questions of moral gravity confront us. Some of these questions are [...]

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Oliver O’Donovan’s departure from Oxford is an omninous event. I wondered whether John Webster (on the right) was over-reacting when he decamped north, but it is now clear that he was not. If you want to see what is at issue, compare Webster with the man who was put in to replace him. [...]

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Demetrios said he received a great reception when he went back to Hagia Sophia. His old parishioners stood in a line to greet him one by one, with a kiss on the hand.
- What does the congregation make of the new priest?
– Well, he doesn’t speak any English (Oops. Three quarters of this particular [...]

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Some scholarship identifies the trinity as the concept that separates Christians from Jews. It assumes that the way to Jewish-Christian dialogue is to emphasise monotheism and play down the doctrine of the trinity. James Dunn tells us that ‘Christianity is only Christianity when it is monotheistic. Only so can Christians remain true to their roots, [...]

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Chris asked: Who/what is the Holy Spirit? That is the kind of question I like.
The Holy Spirit is our Lord. He is God, the real, the holy, the only God. There are many masters and authorities that have power over us (the Christian tradition calls them ‘gods’), but they all want something from us [...]

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Last week’s Church of England Synod discussed the issue of how to look after those who will not accept a woman as their bishop. It didn’t deal with the issue of woman bishops, but merely this lesser issue of how to look after those who, after the decision to ordain woman as bishops has been [...]

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You are wondering where this blog is going. You are not alone. The thing is that I have been tinkering with all three books, with the result that none of them has moved forward very fast. The Eschatological Economy proofs arrived last weeks, with the instruction that I had to get them back within three [...]

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That is the thing about the blooming obvious. You have to keep saying it over and over again. So…
Being and doing are one and the same thing. The work of each creature is the being of all other creatures. Their work is not only the well-being of all other creatures, but their very being. But [...]

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Protestant identity is defined by opposition to Rome. Protestants may disagree vehemently on various doctrinal and ecclesiological issues, but they are firmly united in their rejection of the Pope and other Catholic distinctives. The Protestant Churches will never ever ever, not in a million zillion years, give up their freedom from papal authority; they will [...]

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Three reigning misconceptions, based upon faulty scriptural and church historical premises, with incalculable fallout
1. There is no scripture until the church creates such
* the flaw here is not the usual one entailing a Reformation debate over sola scriptura or disputes over the relationship between church/tradition and scripture (these are important topics [...]

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Adolph Schlatter lived at the turn of the 20th century and taught New Testament and Theology, Church History and Metaphysics; he was a keen churchman, and much loved pastor. The shadow cast by Harnack was long enough to keep him on his mettle and the young Bultmann had not yet made his mark, though his [...]

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Christian doctrine comes in the form of summaries. But summaries are always summaries of something, an experience, like a journey. It is the many little intangible things, and the order in which they came, that make your journey what it is, each event only interesting because it was unforeseen and surprising given the previous event. [...]

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