Douglas Knight

The debate triggered by certain decisions in the Episcopal Church is not just about a single matter of sexual ethics. It is about decision making in the Church and it is about the interpretation and authority of Scripture. It has raised, first of all, the painfully difficult question of how far Anglican provinces should feel [...]

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Why is it that we moderns are so confused about the sources of our identity? We cannot decide whether we are essentially bodies, and must obey the dictates of our biology, or whether our bodies are simply vehicles which we can use or abuse, as though nothing our body does really touched us.
The [...]

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Sunday is, so to speak, a fragment of time imbued with eternity, for its dawn saw the Crucified and Risen Christ enter victorious into eternal life.
With the event of the Resurrection, creation and redemption reach their fulfillment. On the “first day after Saturday”, the women and then the Disciples, meeting the Risen One, understood that [...]

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Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology of Oxford

The Queen has been pleased to approve that The Reverend Professor Nigel Biggar MA PhD be appointed a Canon of Christ Church and Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology in the University of Oxford from 1 October 2007,in succession to the Reverend Professor Oliver O’Donovan MA [...]

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68. We are agreed that no local church is self-sufficient. Various structures and practices are needed to maintain and manifest the communion of the local churches and sustain them in fidelity to the Gospel. These include local, provincial, world-wide and ecumenical synods and councils. Anglicans and Roman Catholics agree that from New Testament times (cf. [...]

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Here is a selection of events from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster – events page
Commission for Justice and Social Responsibility – Inaugural Conference
Catholic Social Teaching and its impact on the wider community Saturday 24th February 2007 Brentwood, London
Journey to Freedom – with the Augustinians of the Assumption
Assumption Priory, Victoria [...]

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Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet day after day they seek me
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practised righteousness
and did [...]

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Report of the Anglican Covenant Design Group
6 Unity of the Communion

(Nehemiah 2.17,18, Mt. 18.15-18, 1 Corinthians 12, 2 Corinthians 4.1-18, 13.5-10, Galatians 6.1-10)
Each Church commits itself:
* in essential matters of common concern, to have regard to the common good of the Communion in the exercise of its autonomy, and to support the work of [...]

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The 1996 Oxford Liturgy Conference was ‘a watershed for English Catholicism’, apparently. Here is its Declaration on the Liturgy (I have added some italics):
1. Reflecting on the history of liturgical renewal and reform since the Second Vatican Council, the Liturgy Forum agreed that there have been many positive results. Among these might be mentioned the [...]

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The person of Christ

The Twelfth Edinburgh Conference in Christian Dogmatics
Monday 27th to Thursday 30 August 2007
Speakers include:
John Webster
Richard Bauckham
Henri Blocher
Bruce McCormack
Stephen Holmes

– all the greats
Rutherford House holds these conferences every other year. They are small, which means there is a good chance of some real discussion, and they are [...]

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65. The Gospel is only fully understood in the Church. God’s revelation has been entrusted to a community, which means that the whole people of God has the responsibility for discerning and communicating God’s Word. Within the ‘symphony’ of the whole people of God, everyone has a part to play – those with the ministry [...]

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COMMON DECLARATION OF POPE BENEDICT XVI AND THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY HIS GRACE ROWAN WILLIAMS
Forty years ago, our predecessors, Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Michael Ramsey, met together in this city sanctified by the ministry and the blood of the Apostles Peter and Paul. They began a new journey of reconciliation based on the Gospels [...]

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All Christians have their own circle of those who have requested them to intercede on their behalf, or people for whom for various reasons they know they have been called upon to pray. First of all, this circle will include those with whom they must live every day. With this we have advanced to the [...]

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The first symptom is Europe’s refusal to mention its Judeo-Christian roots in the Preamble to the European Constitutional Treaty, which, following the French and Dutch referendums, has now failed. The title itself is revealing of an ambiguity. A Treaty is not a Constitution and a Constitution cannot be a Treaty. The European Constitutional Treaty is [...]

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We can still, I think, register disquiet that so little is done by collaboration among Catholics themselves in settings where there is taken for granted a Catholic liturgical and spiritual ambience, and a general consensus about the elements which should enter into a Catholic systematics – a suitable philosophical preamble, linked in some way to [...]

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If Anglican evangelicals take the path forged by so many Dissenters before them, not least among them John and Charles Wesley, it will eventually result only in the endless multiplication of denominational factions, just like the Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists—not to mention the Plymouth Brethren and the Independents—of centuries past. The Reformation logic of faction [...]

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The vocation to the Theologian to reflect, to study, to teach, and to write is placed within the mission of the Church, as one of service to it. Examining the British context for theological work, the document discusses Government policy in higher education in relation to the often vulnerable and difficult entrustment of the theologian [...]

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Just seen the bibliography of Oswald Bayer at Wiki.de and remembered what a colossus Bayer is.
He is Professor Emeritus at Tübingen, a Lutheran, but more than that, he is a Luther – really shocking evangelical power, wielded with very great intellectual sophistication and gentleness. His line is that the Reformation is much more modern [...]

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Dear Ealing students
Here are some links to Cardinal Ratzinger – Pope Benedict – on faith and reason, secularity and the public square
On Europe’s Crisis of Culture

At Regensburg Faith, Reason and the University (Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization) and responses
We’ll be covering some of the issues set out in chapters 4 and 6 [...]

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If churches do not really need each other or owe each other anything, the Church is a voluntary association, and each congregation just a club of individuals. But this is not how it is. The Church is created by God – baptism is the act of God – and the baptism of each Christian is [...]

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