Douglas Knight

Unfortunately, I feel compelled to scorn here…
Arius was from ALEXANDRIA, not Antioch!
This guy doesn’t know his Church history.
The Antiochenes stressed the full reality of divinity and the full reality of humanity in Jesus Christ. The Alexandrians stressed that the one active and passive subject in Jesus Christ was the Logos.
At its extreme, Alexandrian theology tended [...]

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The first dimension is that the celebratio is prayer and a conversation with God: God with us and us with God. Thus, the first requirement for a good celebration is that the priest truly enter this conversation. In proclaiming the Word, he feels himself in conversation with God. He is a listener to the Word [...]

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Even casual observers of American Christianity, in all its ecclesial manifestations, cannot help but notice these days a common and deep division in all the old-line churches — Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, and Presbyterian, to name the most prominent of them. What divides them all in nearly identical fashion is most visibly and audibly profound disagreement [...]

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A simple postmodernist assumption that diversity is just a fact of life that needs no exploring and exchange would be a recipe for a depressingly tribal and static intellectual life.
The university, then, sustains a culture of its own, a culture of conversation and mutual criticism and appreciation, in the context of which people may [...]

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Marriage isn’t the creation of the state or even of “religion” (as construed as a syncretistic sectarian entity). Rather, marriage is a pre-political institution with its own nature and contours; people are free to enter into a marital relationship, but people are not free to redefine and reconfigure marriage (for that is simply impossible). That [...]

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Responses to A Call to an Ancient Evangelical Future
Good observations all. What, one might ask, is there not to like?
Well, in the first place, there is a word that is never used in this document. It is conspicuous in its absence. I kept waiting for it to appear, and it never did. That [...]

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In every age the Holy Spirit calls the Church to examine its faithfulness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, authoritatively recorded in Scripture and handed down through the Church. Thus, while we affirm the global strength and vitality of worldwide Evangelicalism in our day, we believe the North American expression of Evangelicalism needs to be [...]

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This is proper to the Pastor, that he should be a man of prayer, that he should come before the Lord praying for others, even replacing others who perhaps do not know how to pray, do not want to pray or do not make the time to pray. Thus, it is obvious that this dialogue [...]

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Between Evangelicals and Catholics there have been long-standing differences on the capacities of human reason. To put it too briefly, Evangelicals (and the Protestant traditions more generally) have accented that human reason has been deeply corrupted by sin. Catholics, on the other hand, while recognizing that human reason has been severely wounded by sin and [...]

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First – and perhaps surprisingly – there is a profoundly political element in the university. It is taken for granted that those who exercise power in a society need to be formed in a particular culture. They need to learn how to reflect on the social interactions around them; they need to learn how to [...]

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I was scooting through 1 Corinthians for a group of students last week, and assumed that I knew what I want to say about chapter 15 on the resurrection of the body, but somehow I made rather a mess of it. What I wanted to say was that the resurrection of each Christian and the [...]

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So the most important thing of all is the desire to be one, and to prove that desire, not only by praying – because we pray for unity at every single liturgy – but prayer without activity, without work, is just blasphemous. To be praying all these things and not to be working, not be [...]

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The liberal hermeneutic paradigm, fashioned by the controversy over historical biblical criticism, failed precisely because it thought it could count on there being a concrete moral truth immediately and categorically known to all, a peremptory and unchallengeable moral certainty. In this it failed to allow for danger. Action is always exposed to danger: we may [...]

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First the DK blog slowed to a crawl. Then it disappeared entirely.
The beginning of term always means a pile of work. I am teaching a couple of courses on Scripture, which means becoming rapidly re-acquainted with the bible. At the same time various friends arrived with dissertations. It is a joy to read a [...]

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The Church is whole when all parts of the church are in communion with all others. For this reason each church must insist on the centrality of ecumenism and be disciplined by it. Notionally, all the leaders of the church meet together in councils in which the whole church is present. This council or assembly [...]

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We are made for excellence. Developed through the four cardinal virtues prudence (practical wisdom), justice, courage, and temperance (perhaps better styled today, “self-command”) freedom is the method by which we become the kind of people our noblest instincts incline us to be: the kind of people who can, among other possibilities, build free and [...]

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The Scripture tells us not to bear false witness against our neighbour. Whether this particular ambiguous statement we have it in mind to make will be false, or merely discreet, is something that the Scripture will not tell us; we must judge that for ourselves with the aid of the Holy Spirit. Yet everything the [...]

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When people ask me, for example, why the Orthodox jurisdictions in America are not united, the answer is very clear: because our leaders don’t want it. If they wanted it, we would have had it yesterday. There is nothing stopping them… you may have to suffer a lot. You may have to give up some [...]

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The bishop represents the whole history of the Church, all its apostles and doctors, to his congregation. He is the catholicity of the Church, in one person. In him the worldwide church makes itself present to each local congregation. A bishop is a member of the assembly of the whole church, drawn from every corner [...]

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Dear Dr Knight
I am on my second reading of “EE”. As a Lutheran layman I am a reader of First Things and Touchstone. My pastor and good friend has just left our Lutheran church and communion for the Church of Rome. About the time he announced his decision to leave, I ordered “EE” on a [...]

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