Douglas Knight

“Rocket fuel”
Read more hype here

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The spiritual sons of Abraham are the ones who can tell the story of Abraham. Their narration of the action of God is witness to their paternity. God, the first actor of Scripture, creates a community, composed of patriarchs, prophets and saints, into which are to be integrated. He makes this cloud of witnesses and [...]

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I have found a new hero – he is Gavin D’Costa. I heard him give an impressive paper last summer on the origins of the university in the medieval Catholic Church. He introduced it by saying that after twenty years of teaching theology in Religious Studies departments he has just come out – as a [...]

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Scripture is the learner’s articulation of the lesson she receives from her instructor. This lesson can only be read in partnership with Israel, by the baptised community given the Spirit by the obedient Son. Thus the Christian can learn only within the Christian community, and only as this community itself learns from Israel, properly recapitulated [...]

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Surely it cannot be all that difficult to understand what Norman Kember is about. The man is a witness. ‘Witness’ is a Christian technical term of very long standing (Greek: martyr). The witness simply goes, watches and speaks out about what he sees. He is a witness when he observes the brutal grind of [...]

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There can be no ghetto mentality within Orthodox theology. Theology which contents itself with speaking to a closed group, or which happily ignores intellectual trends outside its own ambit, or, still worse, which adopts an abusive attitude to those ‘outside’ its group (especially if they are ‘western’) to that extent adopts an anti-Trinitarian mode of [...]

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And what is the ideal of theology in the spiritual tradition of which St. Maximos is such a leading light? In that tradition, the patristic Orthodox tradition, the word ‘theology’, as Orthodox theologian Alexander Golitsin points out in another context, is used in at least five different levels of meaning—not five different meanings, but hierarchically, [...]

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Christianity is an apprenticeship. All professions – law, medicine, football – require apprenticeships, which involve their own craft skills and vocabulary. The logic of the practices peculiar to each of these cannot be seen immediately seen by the public. Nevertheless we do not demand that each specialism speaks only some neutral language in which [...]

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Solly is reading Chapter Three of The Eschatological Economy. Here is a snippet of his commentary:
‘It needs a reminder here that for Knight the idea that sacrifice means ‘making holy’ comes in part from the Latin roots of the English word ’sacrifice’. It is necessary to see that this is also how the practice appears [...]

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I have put my Introduction to John Zizioulas over on the Resources website, since it is too long to post here. It is my best shot at saying what we may learn from the Eastern Church, what makes Zizioulas a great exponent of the Eastern tradition, and why he has not been particularly well understood [...]

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I have just discovered Katherine Sonderegger That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew: Karl Barth’s ‘Doctrine of Israel’ (Penn State 1992). I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get my hands on this book, since I was dimly aware of the title. It might save Solly and me [...]

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Robert Jenson has been talking about the atonement at the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton. Over at Generous Orthodoxy Kevin Hector has been taking notes.
Jenson insists … ‘that the crucifixion is a sacrifice …an enacted prayer for the forgiveness of sins; in the crucifixion, Christ prays that the Father would forgive our [...]

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This is actually quite a Christologically focussed chapter, despite the title, and brings together the idea of what it means to be a son of Israel, as well as God’s Son, not only as Israel, but also as Christ. Knight also brings in an Adam Christology, a theme found in scripture but, he believes, not [...]

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[I have shortened Alan Brown’s response to Vincent Rossi. You can see Alan’s whole reply in the comments to Vincent Rossi’s piece ‘Participation’]
‘For Maximus, communion means precisely mystagogy, and mystagogy means initiation into and participation in the Great Mystery, and the Great Mystery is the Incarnation of the Logos, One of the Holy Trinity, through [...]

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It dares the thought that, if Barth is right, the Bible understood the Enlightenment better than it understood the Bible, and, indeed, better than the Enlightenment understood itself: according to its own canons of inquiry it ought not to have lost faith with the Bible in the way that it did.
This is the blurb for [...]

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My own vicar (rector, actually) does not like to lead. He does not see his ministry in terms of leadership, but in terms of enabling. But being an enabler or facilitator does not mean not leading: leading is exactly what facilitating is. Is it really such a great paradox, that some ministry (that is some [...]

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Today we have to take into account that there is a variety of views and differences among Christians as to how reception operates. It is also peculiar to our actual situation that the divided Churches are called to receive from one another or indeed to receive one another, which raises all sorts of fundamental ecclesiological [...]

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Solly is right: ‘When YHWH said to Israel ‘I am your redeemer’ this is not a past tense statement.’ The relationship is live and ongoing (for God is faithful) and Israel is not Israel apart from God’s faithfulness. Israel is always re-supplied with her identity by God. Here is how I introduced the subject: [...]

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To show that persons come from God, we have to link a number of Christian doctrines. We have to show that persons come into being through other persons, and that they therefore come into being as they come into relationship with other people, making their appearance in the great assembly of all persons. We come [...]

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