Douglas Knight

For the first time in recent memory, Anglican conservatives have something to cheer about. Ever since the Episcopal Church’s general convention in June, things have been moving rapidly in the Anglican world, and this past week was no exception. There were not one but two events sure to shape the future of Anglican polity and [...]

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The Christian people is a vast assembly made up of all the members of Christ, both those who for us are in the past and the future. All the members of that assembly, the whole Christ, intend that we join them. Our full identity is there with them. They intend to make us present there [...]

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We asked ourselves two questions: if rationalist (positivist) philosophy is strictly rational and, consequently, if it is universally valid, and if it is complete. Is it self-sufficient? Can it, or more directly must it, relegate its historical roots to the realm of the pure past and, therefore, to the realm of what can only be [...]

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If your college allows you to pay your academic fees in instalments, bring each payment with you to the theology seminar, lay it on the table in a big envelop.
But before you do this, go to the cathedral, stand inside the door and as people emerge from the morning eucharist ask them for a [...]

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Giants can still be found in Britain. Well, just the one giant really. He is our theologian, and he is an evangelical theologian.
His name?
Oliver O’Donovan

Author of The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Politcal Theology and most recently The Ways of Judgment, O’Donovan is now Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology [...]

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The ministries are known by their effects; when we see the effects we may discern that the Spirit is giving the church its authentic shape. What impact, then, will these effects have on the politics society in which the church lives? If a political society has in its midst a church that is taught by [...]

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So far I have said that in the eucharist we receive our place in the one loaf of Christ glorified together with his people. In the eucharist all are called and gathered together in Christ, and through him we will be connected to, and so become alive to, all other people. When we are at [...]

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Months ago I promised that I would post pieces from The Apprenticeship. I haven’t told you anything about the purpose or structure of the book, and without any context, passages may not make all that much sense, but let’s try anyway.
This first piece comes from a section asking ‘Which comes first – the [...]

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The Muslims, who in this respect are often and willingly brought in, do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations, but by the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own foundations. … The same is true for the reference to God: It is not the mention of God that offends those who [...]

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It may sound strange, but the pope’s main point is that the most pressing problem we face in the world is not the nature of faith, but the nature of reason. How could he say this? Isn’t the problem today simply religious fanaticism and the intolerance associated with it? The pope certainly thinks these things [...]

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I have to say I am stunned by the way some sectors of the European left appear to be reacting. I had heard they were rallying to Benedict’s defense, which may be true generally, but not in two stories from The Guardian. Both are bitter, bitter attacks on Benedict, who they say is the bigot [...]

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The Person of Christ is a product of King’s College London – before the glory departed. Here is what T & T Clark says about it:
Understanding the Person of Christ affects our understanding of all Christian theology. All ten contributors to this volume share a commitment to the orthodox theological tradition in Christology as [...]

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Richard Neuhaus at First Things (On the Square 18th September) offers a variety of views on what Pope Benedict said last week at Regensburg. Neuhaus himself says this:
“Pope Benedict … is a man of great gentleness and deliberation and extremely careful to say what he means. What he said at Regensburg [...]

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Jesus does not come to the individual believer alone, but to his whole community. And he is not merely present to us, but brings us into this community and incorporates us in this body. It is Jesus Christ who comes to me, anointed (christed) with his whole people. As members of that people, we are [...]

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There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a “dies academicus” (open debate/general studies day?) when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of “universitas”: The reality that despite our specializations which [...]

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Genesis 1 is a polemic, in fact, against the polytheistic creation-accounts of other cultures in Canaan, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Where the Babylonians and Assyrians celebrated the gods’ creation of the universe through the slaying of the sea monster Tiamat, Genesis sets ‘the great sea monsters’ in the fifth day of creation (1.21). They are God’s [...]

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…Pluralism is difficult to argue for successfully.
To assert the right of plural moral judgment requires a careful account of the systemic social differences that make that right intelligible. So explanation of difference is the essence of a policy of mutual forbearance. It risks adding insult to injury to demand forbearance while at the [...]

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In the disintegration of Western thought the Church has been treated as sociological entity; its human, visible aspects have become separated in idea from its mystical and divine aspects. This dichotomy lies at the root of all our Western divisions, and this appears to be reproduced in them all. Thus the conception of a single [...]

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My caricature continues:
Catholic and Protestant deliberations on the eucharist tend to focus on the encounter of two individuals, Jesus Christ and the believer. In this encounter Christ makes himself present in the form of the wafer consecrated before us. In the eucharist Jesus comes to me in an event of transformation in which ordinary bread [...]

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John Paul II decoded the new threats to the “mystery of the human person” in the post–Cold War world, and he spent much of the decade of the 1990s trying to explain that freedom detached from moral truth—the “freedom of indifference” that dominated the high culture of the triumphant West—was, inevitably, self–cannibalizing.
Freedom untethered from [...]

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