Douglas Knight

The truth of the God of Jesus Christ is its own reward. Communication of that truth makes for joy and a life well-lived – a second reward. Colin Gunton taught me this.
Colin Gunton showed that the doctrine of God is not only about the truth of God. It also secures our own identity, our [...]

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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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My picture shows the Orthodox are doing all the talking and the Anglicans all the listening.
Let me remind you of the theologians whose work I have been posting (find them in the ‘Contemporaries’ section) –
Christopher Seitz, Ephraim Radner, Oliver O’Donovan, Augustine DiNoia, R.R. Reno, Reinhard Hütter, Douglas Farrow, Oswald Bayer, Gavin [...]

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No member Church can make significant decisions unilaterally and still expect this to make no difference to how it is regarded in the fellowship; this would be uncomfortably like saying that every member could redefine the terms of belonging as and when it suited them. Some actions – and sacramental actions in particular – just [...]

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A well-written and concise covenant would clarify the identity and mission of the Churches of, or in association with, the Anglican Communion. By articulating our ecclesiological identity, a covenant will also help the Anglican Communion in self-understanding and in ecumenical relationships. A covenant could provide, for all provinces and/or national churches, a fundamental basis of [...]

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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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So koinonia / communio is a foundational term which gained fundamental significance for the early church, and which in the eyes of many once more occupies a pre-eminent place in defining the essence of the Church today. The Church is shared participation in the life of God, therefore koinonia with God and with one another [...]

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The action of Israel that we have received in the form of scripture and liturgy topples the alternative constructions of the gentiles, and prevents the world knitting itself together into any form other than the form of Christ. It is the one action that keeps the world open, reminding us that the Messiah is not [...]

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One way of looking at the present conflict within our own churches is to see it as an insistence, on the part of the various players, to heal that sickness and to rewrite the plot of the drama of which they are parts so as to exclude the length and detail of its anguished elaboration. [...]

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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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What is a bishop?
A bishop is the discipline of the whole Church on us – which is nothing other than the Lordship of Christ effective for us – packaged in the form of one person. The bishop represents, and makes available to us, the discipline of all other parts of the Church – geographically, [...]

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There are four areas where recent papal teaching has articulated a variety of propositions that need to be affirmed. Veritatas Splendor teaches that there’s no freedom outside of truth, There is a slim chance that human beings could find happiness outside of some proper understanding of what it is to be human. This does not [...]

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Christopher Wells, writing for the ever-excellent Anglican Communion Institute, is wondering what the Archbishop of Canterbury makes of the debacle of the just-finished General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Wells suggest we read Archbishop Williams’ lecture on a previous great Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey.
‘Williams seized Ramsey’s suggestion—enshrined in his [...]

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This General Convention has now given its response to the recommendations of the work of that Commission, known as the Windsor Report….The responses which the Convention has given to the clear and simple requests of the Lambeth Commission, the clear and simple requests indeed of the Anglican Communion, are clearly and simply inadequate. We reaffirm [...]

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If we Westerners are the ‘strong’, and the South are the ‘weak’, we ought to ‘bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.’ That we bear with them is the only possible sign that we are indeed the mature and the strong.
Even if we sophisticated modern Protestant Westerners are more [...]

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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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The criteria then for thinking about the faith and about the relation of faith to culture are the criteria that come from the classical view of theological inquiry which is to see the intelligibility of what is intrinsically intelligible, naturally using all of the capacities and rigor that human reason supplies. It’s not a question [...]

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Catholicity, sometimes also called ecumenism, is not an extra. It is the centre of the gospel. It is an evangelical imperative. Without reconciliation with the rest of the Church, there is no salvation for us. If the Church of England, and its Synod, does not feel the absolute priority of ecumenical reconciliation with all other [...]

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Catholicity means we do not make our own rules. Our Anglican readiness to make new rules about who may be ordained a bishop shows that we have lost touch with the church in any part of the world. Our lack of concern for the rest of the world is a lack of love. Is it [...]

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We are not talking about revealing arcane truths in talking about the Trinity, we are talking about love, pouring itself out so that love will be returned. That is what the theology of the Trinity is about. Love will be returned in a way that is mutual, that is, it’s not a matter of simply [...]

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