Douglas Knight

The Oxford Dominicans have been enjoying more publishing success as they have cleared out the desk of the great Herbert McCabe O.P. (that’s Order of Preachers, Thomas Aquinas’s Dominican teaching order). Herbert McCabe taught without bothering too much about publication, but a crucial work that he did send to the publishers is ‘Law, Love and [...]

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In such a person the apostolic word is fulfilled. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17.28). For whoever does not violate the logos of his own existence that pre-existed in God is in God through diligence; and he moves in God according to the logos of his well-being that pre-existed [...]

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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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The place of Christian leaders – chiefly within the Anglican tradition, of bishops – as teachers of scripture can hardly be over-emphasised. The ‘authority’ of bishops cannot reside solely or primarily in legal structures, but, as in Acts 6.4, in their ministry of “prayer and the word of God”. If this is ignored, the model [...]

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By understanding theological discourse as a church practice determined by the salvific-economic mission of the Holy Spirit in doctrina and the core practices, we overcome the false alternatives between freedom and being bound, between theology being self-determined or being externally determined. Only in the Holy Spirit and in genuine poeisis of communion does theology as [...]

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At the Sunday eucharist at St Mary’s, our discipleship sometimes appears in the intercessions. These tend to be led by a small number of lay members of the congregation who learned their faith in Sunday school in the West Indies forty years ago. Their intercessions are the Word of God and the gift of God [...]

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For scripture to ‘work’ as the vehicle of God’s authority it is vital that it be read at the heart of worship in a way which (through appropriate lectionaries, and the use of scripture in canticles) allows it to be heard, understood and reflected upon as God’s living and active word. The message of scripture, [...]

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In teaching the coherence of all things around the incarnate Word, Irenaeus was safeguarding not only the integrity of Jesus but the integrity of every particular. Whereas the gnostics saw in the redemptive work of the logos ‘the separation of what was unnaturally united,’ Irenaeus saw in Jesus the reunion of what was unnaturally [...]

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Everything is changed by the ascension of Christ. The ascent of man is complete, in this man. Jesus Christ has gone to God the Father. But he has not left us and the incarnation is not ended. A human sits with God. Christ is with the Father and with us. We have not returned to [...]

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But what if the Church which hears (the Ecce Homo) begins to forget the absence?…worse than the world’s ignorance of Jesus’s absence…is the Church’s failure to proclaim the absence clearly, to witness in its every act of worship that it really is ‘looking for his coming again with power and great glory’. Not the ascension [...]

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I have one reader. But what a reader. Solly has clambered into the lumber room of my head and has started picking things up and putting them back in their proper places. Already I am beginning to feel better. I think I see what I was trying to say. What we seem to have in [...]

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The deep difficulty in Christian ethics, as evidenced in the work of public theologians such as Thiemann, Stackhouse and Garcia, is that Kant’s answers are assumed but his profound question ignored. They do not seek to refute Kant. They do not seek to point to concrete, sensuous forms of life to show that Christian faith [...]

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The Word of God and the Eucharist are not two things, but one. Five years at St Mary’s now, and this is as far as my thinking has got. For the eucharist to be the eucharist, Scripture has to be heard and explained. Where the Scripture is not read and opened the cup of [...]

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There can be no doubt that the one Word of God is the substance of virtue in each person. For our Lord Jesus Christ himself is the substance of all the virtues, as it is written: This one God made our wisdom, our justice, our sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1.30). These things of [...]

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God’s sovereignty transcends and stands in judgment on all worldly sovereignties. Because God is God, Caesar is not God and neither are Caesar’s successors, be they kings, presidents, prime ministers, or party general secretaries. And because Caesar and his successors aren’t God, their power is limited, not absolute; in addition to Caesar’s legitimate power, there [...]

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… and come before his presence with a song (Psalm 100)
In the house of the Lord, slavery is free. It is free because it serves not out of necessity, but out of charity… Charity should make you a servant, just as truth has made you free… you are at once both a servant and free: [...]

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It is an ancient canonical principle that what touches all should be decided by all. The relational nature of communion requires each church to learn more fully what it means to be part of that communion, so that its members may be fulfilled and strengthened in and through their relations with other churches. Communion obliges [...]

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Oliver O’Donovan tells us that our leaders have to lead us, form us and allow us to flourish, or even postively to see to it that we flourish. They have to be brave and lead from the front, and make real decisions about what is good for us. They therefore have to have views about [...]

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“Communion is, in fact, all about mutual relationships. It is expressed by community, equality, common life, sharing, interdependence, and mutual affection and respect. It subsists in visible unity, common confession of the apostolic faith, common belief in scripture and the creeds, common baptism and shared eucharist, and a mutually recognised common ministry. Communion means that [...]

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