Douglas Knight

Dear Dr Knight:
Last night a group of us (the others are Protestant pastors and I am an Orthodox priest) here in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to read your book – The Eschatological Economy – as a group. It fits with some other things we have been reading, and they are as interested as I [...]

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At the top of my list is Duke. Richard Hays and Ellen Davis are leading a strong cohort of biblical scholars toward the recovery of a theological voice in biblical interpretation. Add to that the creative mind of Stanley Hauerwas, the rigorous mind of Reinhard Huetter, the learned mind of Geoffrey Wainwright, and the outspoken [...]

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It is a rule of this blog that stating the blooming obvious is a valuable public service. It is a very useful thing to put the basics in writing. And this is just what Theological Education for the Anglican Communion (TEAC) has been doing. It has just published a set of outlines of what [...]

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It is into that ongoing life and history that we were baptized, and into its preservation, transmission, and communication that you, as priests of the Church, are to be sent. Your priestly ministry will be the daily re-enactment of the story of salvation, the daily
repossession of the heritage. It will become a truly creative re-enactment [...]

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Your correspondent is just back just back from the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics annual conference in Oxford. This is usually a sleepy English affair, but this year the SSCE held a joint conference with the Europe-wide Societas Ethica on ‘Political Ethics and International Order’.
But, oh dear, what happened to [...]

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Theological Education for the Anglican Communion (TEAC) has just published a set of outlines of training in Christian life. Each outline lists the Christian competencies we can hope to learn and the teaching in discipleship that will promote these competencies.
The outline for the ‘laity’ distinguishes four categories of Christian:
candidates in baptismal catechesis [...]

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According to Maximus it was not, properly speaking, Christ who was transfigured when he was seen in glory; it was the disciples, who were momentarily enabled to see him as he truly is. “They passed over from flesh to spirit before they had put aside this fleshly life, by the change in their powers of [...]

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For what we have received as a heritage from our Fathers, we must earn if we are really to possess it. Each generation of the Church has had to learn this lesson anew. Continuity is not the same as archaism, and over and over the Church has reacted to the challenges of heresy and unbelief [...]

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The doctrine of the life shared in Christ is brought into relation to the doctrine of the Body of Christ. The life shared is embodied. The Church is related to Christ as his mystical complement in the one organism of the new creation.
Today men desire the integration of life upon a new basis. But [...]

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You can’t make sense of Christian ethics apart from Christian life. You can’t make sense of Christian ‘principles’ apart from the Christian community or apart from the practicalities that are the outworking of the love that holds that community together and makes it a public body that witnesses to God.
The discipline laid on Christians is [...]

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In The Eschatological Economy I argued that the community of Israel brings animals to the temple for their God to inspect and pronounce good (or not), and thus publicly to assess and agree on the progress of this sanctification. It is not that animals are made holy, but that the whole people is being made [...]

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1144 ‘In the celebration of the sacraments it is thus the whole assembly that is leitourgos, each according to his function, but in the ‘unity of the Spirit’ who acts in all.
1154 The liturgy of the Word is an integral part of the sacramental celebrations.
1155 The liturgical word and action are [...]

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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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Alan Brown (right) and I met Metropolitan John Zizioulas in London at Heythrop last Friday. It was wonderful to see the Metropolitan again. We have both got older, but I was more polite about this than he was. We talked about Rome and Constantinople, and then relieved to get off these vexed questions, we talked [...]

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I have found these three dicta from our Archbishop in from a speech on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They are not trite.
1. Christ equips us to say no to those falsehoods which allow us to ignore the places where he is to be found.
2. The Bible is not interested in resolving personal dramas of choice. [...]

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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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In the Oxford University Press Economics catalogue I found Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence. His opening sentence: ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-being.’ Offer ‘critiques’ the ‘assumption that freedom of choice necessarily maximizes individual and social well-being.’ Here is OUP’s blurb for the book:
Since the 1940s [...]

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Alban Books are Erdmanns’ UK and European distributors. We have made friends already – our first date is to be the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics (SSCE) conference in Oxford 23-27th of August. See you at the book stall.

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The Anglican Communion Institute has done a detailed compare-and-contrast job to analyse whether the resolutions of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church of the United States (ECUSA-TEC) meet the demands of the Windsor Report. Here is the ACI’s conclusion:
‘It cannot be disputed that many people, especially those on the Special [...]

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George Weigel on Michael Burleigh

Christianity gave the West cosmopolitanism and egalitarianism, for it recognized “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free” as relevant social categories — and thus blazed a path beyond tribalism and toward the end of slavery, that ubiquitous human institution. Modern feminism notwithstanding, Christianity also gave the world … feminism, for [...]

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