The Oxford Dominicans have been enjoying more publishing success as they have cleared out the desk of the great Herbert McCabe O.P. (that’s Order of Preachers, Thomas Aquinas’s Dominican teaching order). Herbert McCabe taught without bothering too much about publication, but a crucial work that he did send to the publishers is 'Law, Love and Language'.

Here Herbert McCabe shows us that ethics is about all human action and interaction, and that we are intrinsically in conversation, all our action is response to others, and this economy of response determines our environment too. There is no split here between nature and culture (between ‘is’ and ‘ought’). There is no particular need to attribute anything here to Aquinas or Wittgenstein, for McCabe is simply saying that we are not disembodied beings isolated from another in an inert or neutral or hostile world. McCabe’s argument is simply good Christian theology, so he shows that we are not only embodied, but social and linguistic beings too. McCabe’s version of ethics as all human action is therefore very much bigger than the usual accounts of morality investigated through a small number of difficult moral problems. Herbert McCabe replaces our modern dualist account of language and life (for every thing, a word timelessly exists, so language is simply the correspondence of word to thing) with a more supple dynamic (‘aristotelian’) account which allows that what we do really alters who we are, what there is and how we relate to it. What we think of things and how we name them is not just the (post-)modern power game of the individual. We inherit and inhabit our social world along with how we think of it, as we live and interact in interlocking sets of language-speakers and communities. This deflates the (post-) modern Cartesian view which makes naming an act of power by the individual who is above all relationship and responsibility. The effect of his book is to show how in hock we are to the disembodying pull of Cartesian thought, for which turns we are essentially a demonic eye that hovers above the world. In other words, McCabe has recovered important aspects of theological anthropology and the doctrine of creation.

I'll post some snippets from Law, Love and Language. You'll thank me.

In such a person the apostolic word is fulfilled. In him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17.28). For whoever does not violate the logos of his own existence that pre-existed in God is in God through diligence; and he moves in God according to the logos of his well-being that pre-existed in God when he lives virtuously; and he lives in God according to the logos of his eternal being that pre-existed in God… In this Way he becomes a ‘portion of God’ insofar as he exists through the logos of his being which is in God and insofar as he is good through the logos of his well-being which is in God; and insofar as he is God through the logos of his eternal being which is in God, he prizes the logoi and acts according to them. Through them he places himself wholly in God alone, wholly imprinting and forming God alone in himself, so that by grace he himself ‘is God and is called God’. By his gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man, and by exchanging his condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of his love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominisation. For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of his embodiment.

Maximus Ambiguum 7

In The Eschatological Economy I wanted to show that there are interesting reasons why modern society wants to believe that the concept of sacrifice is vicious and outmoded. Modernity is not only mistaken about this, it is concealing something about itself. Christians certainly need to rediscover a clearer and more trinitarian account, because the concept of sacrifice is central to the gospel and cannot be removed without loss. Jesus Christ is ‘the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’. My own professor, Colin Gunton, wanted to show that the concept of sacrifice makes sense, but he found it hard to show how. Many other theologians, like the New Testament and patristic scholar Frances Young in her ‘Sacrifice and the Death of Christ’, were saying that ancient people sacrificed, we don’t, so it difficult or even impossible for us to make sense of Christian doctrine, in terms of sacrifice at least. I was amazed to find Karl Barth saying the same thing (Church Dogmatics volume IV.1 p.275). Frances Young and Karl Barth were puzzled because they understood sacrifice as propitiation (placating a fierce judge), which seems to suggest that pain must be experienced, which is very close to saying that God demands the pain. The problem was that the concept of sacrifice had become linked in Augustinian theology to a doctrine of God that was more pagan (Stoic) than Christian.

It is part of the creed of modernity that we have left all our earlier violence and superstition behind. Just as Christianity surpassed paganism, the modern worldview believes that modernity has now surpassed Christianity. The belief that one system and one age gives way to another that is superior, is itself a ‘replacement theology’, or supersessionism. It believes that we used to be religious, but now we are not. It is up to the Christians to pop this balloon, and point out that one religion (Christianity) has been swapped for another (modernity) but it is still an open question which religion is better. Christians have to say that if a society, like ours, gives up Christianity it has not gone beyond Christianity, but simply gone back to the default position and become pagan again.

See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans

The place of Christian leaders â?? chiefly within the Anglican tradition, of bishops â?? as teachers of scripture can hardly be over-emphasised. The â??authorityâ?? of bishops cannot reside solely or primarily in legal structures, but, as in Acts 6.4, in their ministry of â??prayer and the word of Godâ??. If this is ignored, the model of â??the authority of scriptureâ?? which scripture itself offers is failing to function as it should. The authoritative teaching of scripture cannot be left to academic researchers, vital though they are. The accredited leaders of the Church â?? within the diocese, the bishop(s); within the Communion, the primates â?? must be people through whose prayerful teaching ministry the authority of God vested in scripture is brought to bear - in mission within the world and in wise teaching to build up the Church.

Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 58

By understanding theological discourse as a church practice determined by the salvific-economic mission of the Holy Spirit in doctrina and the core practices, we overcome the false alternatives between freedom and being bound, between theology being self-determined or being externally determined. Only in the Holy Spirit and in genuine poeisis of communion does theology as a church practice participate in God's liberum arbitrium [freedom]. Only by remaining bound to God's economy of salvation does it step into the ‘freedom of the children of God’, becoming thus a discipline commensurate with its object. For only within its distinct pathos does it become capable of truth.

The ecclesial koinonia is to be understood as a soteriological work of the Holy Spirit grounded as such in the communion of the triune God, a communion which through its own presence engages its salvific activity in the koinonia and indeed binds itself to the koinonia by beginning to draw the latter into the divine life. The ‘other’ side of the church as the work of the Holy Spirit is also that the triune God has bound his communion to the ecclesiastical koinonia … In its pathos the church is the actualizing agent of the salvific-economic mission of Christ and of the Holy Spirit. In this sense the church needs to be understood precisely as the public of the Holy Spirit.

Reinhard Hütter Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice

You could try Hütter's more accessible Bound to be Free: Evangelical Catholic Engagements in Ecclesiology, Ethicsm and Ecumenism. It is not only state of the art, but it is full of joy.

At the Sunday eucharist at St Mary’s, our discipleship sometimes appears in the intercessions. These tend to be led by a small number of lay members of the congregation who learned their faith in Sunday school in the West Indies forty years ago. Their intercessions are the Word of God and the gift of God to us still. They know how to pray, and their prayers teach how to pray, and in the course of these prayers we learn a little about our Master, and as a result we learn something about who we are. Because the organist has taught the congregation to come in on time, each ‘Lord, hear us’ receives a proper crisp ‘Lord, Graciously hear us’. You can’t drift too far off in intercessions because your response is continually required. Every part of the service is antiphonal, so the whole congregation is at work, and all this repetition brings slow comprehension, very slow in my case.

St Mary’s follows Common Worship and the Revised Common Lectionary. This means that the Word of God we hear week by week provides some of the narrative logic of the gospel. This week’s readings follow on in some respect from last week’s. The great advantage of this is that we are not dependent on choices made by our own clergy. Of course we get their platitudes from the pulpit. Typically sermons begin with a rambling anecdote, come back to one aspect of one of the New Testament readings (ignoring the other NT reading, the Old Testament and psalm – see, four pieces of Scripture altogether), and then wobble towards some trite apercu about the way ‘we’ are today. But I really don't mind sitting through the sermon, with its embarrassed English inconsequential and often contradictory moralizing. I willing sit through twenty minutes of nonsense in order to have the forty-five minutes of liturgy, with the huge amount of the Word of God that Common Worship contains, with all its sentences, licks and riffs – so I can hear it, say it and sing it in full congregation.

Sermons that follow a theme or expound a book of the bible are fine in an evening worship-and-teaching service. If I was vicar I would move Sunday evensong back to Saturday evening. Then we could say that Saturday evensong was the prelude to the through-the-night prayer meeting or liturgy that culminates with full church sung eucharist on Sunday morning. In non-feast (‘ordinary’) times of year I would have the whole preaching-teaching-worship service followed by pizzas, dance, more guitars-and-drums modern worship racket until the young people wore themselves out.

After five years with this basically very middle-class congregation, I know that it is Christ who serves himself up in the sermon and in the cup. He serves us in the strange form of these embarrassing performances. It is not that Christ hides himself in the gabbled and uncomprehending reading of Scripture and embarrassed serving of the cup, but that he makes himself plain in there in these cringe-inducing performances. He makes himself present and available here for us all, not only in the obvious disciples, whom even I can identify, like those who lead intercessions well. He makes present in the – to me – hidden way represented by those who despise an evangelical faith, though they are our leaders, and who prefer to dive down every culture-de-sac of middle-class imported spirituality and activism. Not only are these the ones I have to break bread with, but they are the cup I have to drink in order to drink with him, and share in him.

For scripture to ‘work’ as the vehicle of God’s authority it is vital that it be read at the heart of worship in a way which (through appropriate lectionaries, and the use of scripture in canticles) allows it to be heard, understood and reflected upon as God’s living and active word. The message of scripture, as a whole and in its several parts, must be preached and taught in all possible and appropriate ways. It is the responsibility of the whole Church to engage with the Bible together; within that, each individual Christian, to the fullest extent of which they are capable, must study it and learn from it, thoughtfully and prayerfully. Within this context, the Church’s accredited leaders have a responsibility, through constant teaching and preaching, to enable the Church to grow to maturity, so that when difficult judgments are required they may be made in full knowledge of the texts.

Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 57

In teaching the coherence of all things around the incarnate Word, Irenaeus was safeguarding not only the integrity of Jesus but the integrity of every particular. Whereas the gnostics saw in the redemptive work of the logos ‘the separation of what was unnaturally united,’ Irenaeus saw in Jesus the reunion of what was unnaturally separated.

Irenaeus placed heavy emphasis on the Christ-event as the climactic moment in a long history of God's approach to man. Only after a protracted period of preparation does the Word appear among us - not as a retort to the old covenant or its deity, but as that very deity in person.... It is under their tutelage (the prophets) that we are slowly readied to receive him, for he does not come to us unannounced. When he finally does come of course a great threshold is crossed and a new age begun; under the tutelage of the incarnate one, in the communion of the Spirit, we ourselves may now advance towards God…. But we have missed an important turning if we proceed to operate on the premise that the incarnation takes place at the point where mankind as such is truly ready for God, where sacred history can therefore broaden out at last into universal history. …As Irenaeus sees it, our evolution has actually become our devolution the Son does not appear at the middle of history, then but at the end; not somewhere near the top, but at the bottom. The Son comes to offer his summing up just where it is necessary for history to begin all over again.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia

Everything is changed by the ascension of Christ. The ascent of man is complete, in this man. Jesus Christ has gone to God the Father. But he has not left us and the incarnation is not ended. A human sits with God. Christ is with the Father and with us. We have not returned to the stand-off and enmity between God and man. One of us has at last broken through to heaven. This human being now sits at the right hand of God, and is forever divine and human. He is our man, there, so the incarnation continues now forever. One of us has gained admittance to the palace and throne room of the great King. That Christ is with the Father does not mean that he is not with us. It does mean we do not control how he is visible or available to us.

Jesus is no longer available to us as a single figure we can be alone with. He is no longer in our grasp, but we are in his grasp. We grabbed Christ, but could not hang on to him. He grasped and holds on to us. He is holy, spiritual, with the glory of his whole company. Christ has now attached us to the people of God. They, or rather, we, stand in a line that stretches back through the door of the palace, where he sits with the Father, outside across the courtyard and out into the world. This procession stretches all the way from there to here, where we are. We are part of the procession that stretches from the Son and that loops around, and connects up, all the world. Our leader is at one end, we at the other. We do not see him, but for him this procession is one with him, is part of him. The whole procession, and all the people in it, us included, are made impregnable by his protection. His Spirit holds together the whole long train of the people of the Son and makes them holy so that they are increasingly able to look forward to his coming again in great glory.

The (RCL) readings for Ascension day are

Acts 1:1-11 In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.

Psalm 93 The Lord is king, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed, he is girded with strength. He has established the world; it shall never be moved; your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting

Ephesians 1:15-23 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Luke 24:44-53 Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

But what if the Church which hears (the Ecce Homo) begins to forget the absence?...worse than the world's ignorance of Jesus's absence…is the Church's failure to proclaim the absence clearly, to witness in its every act of worship that it really is ‘looking for his coming again with power and great glory’. Not the ascension itself but the ascension and parousia together, constitute the Ecce Homo! which in the eucharist is heard and repeated. Martyrdom, as the Apocalypse teaches, is the truest manifestation of Jesus's heavenly session. A doctrine of his departure that is not a doctrine of his impending return is a doctrine capable of converting absence into presence without martyrdom.

Douglas Farrow Ascension and Ecclesia.

Farrow's book is in my top ten. I haven’t yet found anything like it, and it informed a great deal of The Eschatological Economy. Andrew Burgess The Ascension in Karl Barth or Gerrit Scott Dawson Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ's Continuing Incarnation are more introductory, and Burgess has a chapter on Farrow.

I have one reader. But what a reader. Solly has clambered into the lumber room of my head and has started picking things up and putting them back in their proper places. Already I am beginning to feel better. I think I see what I was trying to say. What we seem to have in this book The Eschatological Economy is a very simple contrast. On one had we have the economy of modernity (â??the way we are nowâ??) and on the other the economy of God, the eschatological economy. The eschatological economy is simply reality and the arrangements God makes by which we will enter reality, join him there and so become real ourselves at last .

Here is Solly setting out what is going on in The Eschatological Economy 5.5

â??It is the concept of God's time, of God making time for us, and the idea of debit and credit in our relationships, that stands in opposition to this â??economy of modernityâ??. This is the focus that reassembles the fractured understanding Christian theology provides at the moment: Spirit is personal and proactive, not impersonal and reflective; time represents God's longsuffering and hospitable attitude towards us not something we must suffer and finally be ejected from; we have responsibility to one another, humans are holistic and interactive, mutually giving and receiving, not prefabricated and schizophrenic automatons feigning freedom in an unfree world. The world as it is posits ends, ends we are all assumed to have accepted, but the revealed secret of the Emperor's new clothes is that there are no ends, merely the eternal recurrence of the same, for there is no change in this world, only fashion, no growth, only talent acquisition, no people, only personalities. We live in a moebius strip, acclaiming the return of that which was past as new and fresh or secretly ironic.. The important fact of the work of the Spirit in the world is not that it represents the sum of what has happened - the spirit of the age, etc - but that it represents the fact of something new happening from outside the closed system we have made of the world, constantly opening up that which we seek to close off from God, just as the Spirit's work in the resurrection of Christ stopped the foreclosure of that part of history. As the writer says in Ecclesiastes, characterising the secular world, there is nothing new under the sun. But God makes things new.â??

Visit the great Solly himself

See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans

The deep difficulty in Christian ethics, as evidenced in the work of public theologians such as Thiemann, Stackhouse and Garcia, is that Kant’s answers are assumed but his profound question ignored. They do not seek to refute Kant. They do not seek to point to concrete, sensuous forms of life to show that Christian faith is reasonable. Instead they speak in general terms. They speak of a cosmopolitan social ethics, a criterion of publicity, and universal human rights. Their work contributes to the production of a generic theology that makes no particular claims on people of faith or people outside faith. The result is a refusal to challenge Kant’s designation of freedom as more basic than the goodness of God. This Christian social ethics only continues the Kantian quest. We can use the language of faith and continue to speak of God and Judeo-Christian anthropology, but the concrete material reality of Christianity (Jesus’ flesh) is rendered superfluous to the moral life.

Stephen Long The Goodness of God

The Word of God and the Eucharist are not two things, but one. Five years at St Mary's now, and this is as far as my thinking has got. For the eucharist to be the eucharist, Scripture has to be heard and explained. Where the Scripture is not read and opened the cup of eucharist is empty, and this wine brings us no Christ. Scripture has to be opened, and that means read and expounded. First it must be read, well, slowly and loud, not gabbled or murmured, by someone who understands what they are reading. And then it must be explained. The lessons – all three of them – must be so explained, week after week so that we begin to realise who we are and what it means for us to be Christ’s people, and to be Christ's people here, in our case in Hackney, London. If the Scripture is opened in the course of the service, then as the years go by people will be converted and become disciples, and the whole business of our sancification will begin. If Scripture is not heard and opened, this bread and cup will be precisely as eucharistic as our coffee and biscuits. Scripture is not opened by preaching alone, nor by the eucharist alone, but both together, understood as one.

It seems to me that the Christ served up in the cup is the Christ served up in the sermon. The one Lord is served up in what to us are two forms, preaching and sacrament, but of course just the one indivisible Christ. So the preaching is sacramental and eucharistic, and the eucharist is edifying because it reaches our heads as much as our heart, it feeds, teaches and unifies each of us, head and body.

The Word of God means not just the Scripture read but the Scripture preached on – explained – in the sermon. Actually we could widen that to include the congregational responses, which are also sentences from Scripture, and even further to include the hymns, for they are also our responses to the Scripture-and-bread received. In fact I think that in St Mary’s, insofar as Scripture is opened, it is by the hymns and intercessions, rather than by anything that comes from the pulpit. Well, I’ll try to make the case – you see what you think. In St Mary’s the teaching happens principally through the antiphonally sung psalm that follows the Old Testament and then through the choice of hymns. Clearly our selection of hymns follows some well-thought out schema associated with Common Worship. I approve of it. It seems to me that the great teacher in my church is the organist. By his playing he teaches that congregation to sing and so in some measure to worship. He plays with a crispness and a dedication to supporting and driving the singing of the congregation that I have never seen anywhere else. The congregation sing so confidently that some of the theological sense of what we are singing is surely absorbed.

The hymns we sing, particularly in the season of Easter, contain lines of lurid (Protestant) penal substitution and macabre (Catholic) accounts of Christ's wounds bleeding for us. Whoever picks the hymns either cannot tell the difference or is isn’t concerned by it, and that is fine by me. But I don't think I have ever heard the judgment and the anger of God tackled in sermons, let alone any talk of Christ's blood. The atonement is considered too difficult or divisive to preach on, even in the run up to Easter. Though our hymns are full of it, penal substitution and almost any account of the atonement are avoided by our clergy, and when you can get the conversation onto the topic the subject is quickly changed. They avoid the atonement in sermons, except occasionally when say Genesis 22, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, comes up, and then the idea of sacrifice to God is ruled out, hard to say on what grounds - taste, maybe? Still, the atonement is there in the Scripture read, in the sentences, responses and above all in the hymns, so we are always receiving a good part of the evangelical narrative in the Sunday morning eucharist. Much of it is said or sung by the congregation, and this is crucial it seems to me. But the sermon never explains the lessons we have heard, or the responses we have made to those lessons and so never points out to us the unity of the whole, given by the evangelical narrative. None of this unity of Scripture-and-response is explained, so my question is - how eucharistic is this?

There can be no doubt that the one Word of God is the substance of virtue in each person. For our Lord Jesus Christ himself is the substance of all the virtues, as it is written: This one God made our wisdom, our justice, our sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1.30). These things of course are said about him absolutely, since he is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification itself. They are not, as in our case, simply attributed to him, as for example in the expression, a ‘wise man’ or a ‘just man’. It is evident that every person who participates in virtue as a matter of habit unquestioningly participates in God, the substance of the virtue. Whoever by his choices cultivates the good natural seed shows the end to be the same as the beginning and the beginning to be the same as the end. Indeed the beginning and the end are one. As a result, he is in genuine harmony with God, since the goal of everything is given in its beginning and the end of the everything is given in its ultimate goal. As to the beginning, in addition to receiving being itself, one receives the natural good by participation: as to the end, one zealously traverses one’s course toward the beginning and source without deviation by means of one’s good will and choice. And through this course one becomes God, being made God by God. To the inherent goodness of the image is added the likeness (Genesis 1.26) acquired by the practice of virtue and the exercise of the will. The inclination to ascend and see one’s proper beginning was implanted in man by nature.

Maximus Ambiguum 7

God’s sovereignty transcends and stands in judgment on all worldly sovereignties. Because God is God, Caesar is not God and neither are Caesar’s successors, be they kings, presidents, prime ministers, or party general secretaries. And because Caesar and his successors aren’t God, their power is limited, not absolute; in addition to Caesar’s legitimate power, there are other legitimate powers in the world.

So the state cannot be all there is. Long before Enlightenment political theorists began challenging royal absolutism with ideas like Montesquieu’s "separation of powers," Western civilization learned the idea of "limited government" in the school of Christian reflection. When medieval Catholic thinkers insisted on a sharp distinction between "society" and the "state," they created a vaccine against absolutism in either its royal or modern (totalitarian) form. The vaccine wasn’t completely effective. But its potency may help explain why the age of absolutism was a rather short one, as these things go in history. Medieval Catholicism also helped plant in the Western mind the idea that "consent" is crucial to just governance. Government isn’t simply coercion, medieval Catholic political theory insisted; just governance requires consent. Consent would be forthcoming if governance were just. And who would judge the justice of a particular form or style of governance, or the justice of a particular act of state? The Church’s claim to be able to judge princes, and the Catholic teaching that "the people" have an inherent sense of justice within them, injected a crucial idea into the political-cultural subsoil of the West—the idea that "justice" isn’t simply what those in authority say it is. There are moral standards of justice that are independent of governments; we can know those moral standards, and they ought to be applied in public life. All of these ideas, fundamental to democracy, were nurtured in the civilization of the Middle Ages by the Catholic Church.

George Weigel Divine Sovereignty Letters to a Young Catholic

... and come before his presence with a song (Psalm 100)

In the house of the Lord, slavery is free. It is free because it serves not out of necessity, but out of charity... Charity should make you a servant, just as truth has made you free... you are at once both a servant and free: a servant, because you have become such; free, because you are loved by God your Creator; indeed, you have also been enabled to love your Creator... You are a servant of the Lord and you are a freedman of the Lord. Do not go looking for a liberation which will lead you far from the house of your liberator!

Augustine Enarratio in Psalmum XCIX - Expositions of the Psalms

It is an ancient canonical principle that what touches all should be decided by all. The relational nature of communion requires each church to learn more fully what it means to be part of that communion, so that its members may be fulfilled and strengthened in and through their relations with other churches. Communion obliges each church to foster, respect and maintain all those marks of common identity, and all those instruments of unity and communion, which it shares with fellow churches, seeking a common mind in essential matters of common concern: in short, to act interdependently, not independently.

Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion paragraph 51

Oliver O'Donovan tells us that our leaders have to lead us, form us and allow us to flourish, or even postively to see to it that we flourish. They have to be brave and lead from the front, and make real decisions about what is good for us. They therefore have to have views about what is good, and they have to allow those views to be tested by dialogue with the people they lead. Leaders have to make decisions. They have to exercise practical wisdom, which O'Donovan calls judgment, in order that we are all increasingly able to exercise practical wisdom, and so become mature. Plato represents one major tradition of practical wisdom, but an even more sophisticated tradition of practical wisdom is that of Christian discipleship.

"In Hebrew the most general word for law, torah, meant simply "a decision." It referred to the "ruling" that a priest would give when consulted. In the same way we say that the judge "declares the law" in relation to a case, meaning not that he quotes from law books, but that he announces a decision; "the law of the case" is simply the generic principle applied in the particular judgment. But since each judgment is not separate and discrete but occurs in the context of an institution, the law of each case is discerned in relation to the law of preceding cases; if it is to be justly proportioned, it cannot be wildly out of line with other decisions. No act of judgment, then, simply invents law de novo; that would defeat the purpose of judging, namely, determining what is proportionate to the law of precedent that stands over and behind the present decision and can be appealed to in support or criticism of it. But a law of precedent requires no distinct human legislator. Divine law, natural or revealed, when mediated through traditions of right innate in the society, is sufficient to allow courts to develop a law by way of their own judgments, a conception which our shared English legal tradition names the "common law."

The English parliament began life as a court of common pleas, a means by which the governed spoke to the government about their frustrations, an organic line of communication between the two which served to legitimate government as pursuing the common good. The extension of parliament’s role to a deliberative forum, first for the authorizing of taxation and then for the formation of legislation, recognized the need for government to listen to the vox populi, to respect its deeply held convictions, and to take stock of its anxieties.

By converting parliament into a branch of government, modern constitutional theory lost the sense that the dialogue between government and the governed is at the heart of the legislative process. It became a purely intra-governmental dialogue. The sheer success of parliament in taming the willfulness of the monarchy led to an implosion of government and parliament upon each other, leaving an unhealthy mutual dependence.

When a certain dialogue fails to accompany the formation of law, its enactment simply becomes another form of executive action - it loses its distinctive lawlike character. But what we need is not a dialogue between departments of government, but a dialogue between government and people ."

Oliver O'Donovan Government as Judgment since expanded to become The Ways of Judgment.

"Communion is, in fact, all about mutual relationships. It is expressed by community, equality, common life, sharing, interdependence, and mutual affection and respect. It subsists in visible unity, common confession of the apostolic faith, common belief in scripture and the creeds, common baptism and shared eucharist, and a mutually recognised common ministry. Communion means that each church recognises that the other belongs to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, and shares in the mission of the whole people of God. It involves practising a common liturgical tradition, and intending to listen, speak and act alongside one another in obedience to the gospel. In communion, each church acknowledges and respects the interdependence and autonomy of the other, putting the needs of the global fellowship before its own. Through such communion, each church is enabled to find completeness through its relations to the others, while fulfilling its own particular calling within its own cultural context."

Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that marvellous? It is the The Windsor Report on the Anglican Communion - paragraph 49. I had no idea how exciting the Christian faith is, but this Anglican material states it loud and clear - and there is loads more where this came from. Let's learn this off by heart, let us teach it to our children, let us bind it to our foreheads - 'each church recognises that the other belongs to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ, and shares in the mission of the whole people of God.' Yup.

Jesus Christ is the universal man, the summit and definition of what human being is. He is the properly catholic being. Life with him means communion with all mankind. He is now forming us into catholic beings, people who are defined, by participation in him, by fellowship with every other human being. The Christian life – the apprenticeship we serve – opens us out from our present incurved state to bring us into relationship with every other living thing. This means that the Christian life and faith is intrinsically about catholicity, thus ecumenism, the reconciliation of every household and community with every other, is what the gospel is. In the apprenticeship of this Christian life we learn to reach out to the whole of the rest of the Church, indeed to the future completition of the Church, when Christ shall be all in all.

You are only a catholic as you strain towards reconciliation with all other churches, and treat them not only as wayward and sometimes willfully disobedient, who you must mourn and pray for, and mention in your intercessions that precede every eucharist. But you must also treat them as those who have some part of the gospel, and some ‘portion’ of Christ and so as those you must learn from and submit to. Being catholic certainly means being under the authority and Magisterium of the Roman Church, treating its teaching with respect and being formed by it. But you must also be under the authority of every other part of the church (no matter how abusive that authority sometimes is), and everywhere look for Christ and ask to be renewed and reformed by him.

I am not a Roman Catholic, but an Anglican, a Reformed Anglican (‘catholic evangelical’ for convenience). The term ‘reformed’ can only refer to the catholic church and so to the determination together that the Church must repent and be disciplined, reformed and renewed by Christ its head. But I think it is right always to wonder whether I should be more 'Roman', whether I should convert to 'Roman Catholic'. Of course this is not a comfortable place to be. Of course this means many contradictions. You may change my mind on this. Of course.

Here is the first of a series of posts on why I wrote The Eschatological Economy. I will start with atonement, move on to the doctrine of election and the people of God, and to the issue of time. Later on I will talk a bit about practices, bodies and the distinctive Christian life and then talk a bit about modernity and the non-Christian way of life. Since these are all interrelated there will be some repetition, but I hope you will not mind that.

The Eschatological Economy started because I wanted to know why the concept of sacrifice had become so alien to us, and whether sacrifice really is as wrong or incomprehensible as many believed. My own professor, Colin Gunton, had restated the place of sacrifice in theology of the atonement. In ‘The Actuality of Atonement’ he argued that some very traditional and unfashionable atonement models, such as the Christus Victor model, the concept of sacrifice, and Anselm’s account, still made good sense. But Colin Gunton was able to make only limited sense of sacrifice. He used to quote Hebrews ‘the blood of bulls does not take away sin’ at me and insisted that we moderns no longer practice sacrifice. I tied to convince him that we moderns sacrifice too. We don't sacrifice sheep in the public square, but we do rear and butcher animals, and the way we surround this process with (industrial, commercial) ritual and keep it is as far out of the public eye as possible is equally strange and even (in a non-Christian sense) religious. It is not crazy to say we sacrifice people, or that other people are involuntarily sacrificed – expended – for us. The economic levers and gears that provide us with our standard of living may be doing so by grinding the faces of the poor, and if we deny that this could be the case, that our comfort is at the cost of their sacrifice, we may be living in denial. So I think we are mistaken if we think that sacrifice and ritual took place in the ancient world but don’t any longer – because this makes much ancient Christian teaching – most of Hebrews, for instance – difficult to understand.

See The Eschatological Economy at Amazon.com or at Amazon.co.uk or at Eerdmans

Modernity identifies religion as separate from ethics, the discussion of ends. It supposes that we all know what end has been agreed upon, and have now only to concern ourselves with how to get there, and so with comparing one means with another. The modern concept of religion belongs to this idea that there is one single end and all talk is only about how, not about what. Theology should refuse this definition and identify religion as talk about ends, assume open discourse about what the ends are, and insist that there is no meta-discourse that can settle this for us. Then we can say that religion is a matter of the good performance of talk about ends. It is not to be reduced to reaching agreement so that talk can stop, but it aims at getting better at the give-and-take of converse, so the talk can grow, become a good of its own and open space for other goods to emerge. Our talk is then both preparation for, and already good performance of, life in common.

The International Theological Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family has three aims, four pillars and seven principles. It is not only their numerical neatness that I approve of.

Here are the three aims:

1. To provide studies in Theology as well as specialized theological studies on marriage and the family; 2. To form by such studies those who are preparing themselves for tasks in the various areas of the Churchâ??s life, especially in the area of marriage and the family; 3. To organize seminars, symposia and conferences as an aid to the local Churches and to the Holy See in promoting an authentic vision of marriage and family life.

The four pillars

1. The first pillar is the founding intention of Pope John Paul II. ITI was founded for the study of Catholic theology as a unified whole within which particular attention is devoted to the theme of marriage and the family. A solid theological formation is needed for Catholic leaders, lay and clergy, to achieve critical judgment in our culture and the capacity to contribute to the new evangelization, which is especially needed in the area of marriage and the family.

2. The second pillar of ITI, also part of John Paul IIâ??s founding vision, is its international character, its bridge function between East and West. About 50% of the students come from Central and Eastern Europe (the majority of them are Greek Catholic), others come from Western Europe and the Americas. This international character allows a genuine experience of the universal Church, which must â??breathe with both lungsâ?? (John Paul II) East and West.

3. The third pillar of ITI is its pedagogy, which consists in studying the original writings of the great Masters of Theology, in addition to Sacred Scripture, esp. the Fathers and the Doctors of the Church. Contact with original texts develops an eye for quality, especially in theology. The great masters lead faculty and students most directly to the realities discussed in theology, above all God himself. This pedagogy also develops the virtues of active reading, attentive discussion and penetrating understanding.

4. The fourth pillar of ITI is a rich Catholic community that lives and prays together in the same place and its close vicinity. The example of the Christian family life lived by many among the faculty and students offers the most persuasive and practically helpful evidence of the beauty and practicability of that life. It also encourages the formation of religious and priestly vocations and their blossoming.

But the Seven Principles are the knock-out.

The Word of God as Center As the inspired Word of God, Scripture, as the Church receives it, stands at the center of the curriculum. All other courses are ordered to unfolding its meaning.

Ad Fontes, East and West The Curriculum has its point of departure in the primary sources written by the great masters of the theological tradition, from the Fathers of the Church to the present age. It draws on the theological tradition of the East as well as of the West, seeking in this way to â??breathe with both lungs of the Church.â?? The Greek Fathers and St. Thomas Aquinas are particularly important points of reference.

Pedagogy Teachers and students actively collaborate in pursuing the understanding of the Churchâ??s faith through the reading and guided discussion of the masters. Care is taken that students truly prepare the texts and that sufficient room is given to student participation to develop the virtues of active and responsible reading and thinking.

Theology in its Unity Foregoing premature specialization, the Curriculum seeks to unfold theology out of its inner unity, in conformity with its essence as a scientific reflection of the faith of the Church. The Curriculum is ordered around the central mysteries of the faith: the Trinity, the Incarnation, grace, justification, the Church, etc. All particular questions are addressed in the light of these central mysteries.

Theological Rationale The rationale of studies at ITI is theological throughout. Both the sequence of semesters and the composition of courses in each semester are shaped in accord with the above mentioned unity to allow for a systematic building up of the parts of theology. When questions usually classified with other fields (philosophy, psychology, sociology) are discussed, they are discussed for the sake of theology and in an order required by theology.

Primacy of the Theological Question Historical-critical investigations are a necessary aspect of the study of sources. Such investigations, however, find their inner completion only in the properly theological question, "What is the truth of the matter?â??

Above All, Charity Theology stands under the rule of the new commandment and exists for the sake of union with the One whose love for us we come more deeply to understand. It is therefore studied and taught at the heart of his Church.

I will be plagiarizing these principles in their entirety from now on.

Theological commissions within provinces need to be made more conscious of, and conversant with, Communion-wide dimensions of theological discourse. In particular, we need to develop the habit, and thence the virtue, of that charity which listens intensely and with good will to widely different expressions of sincerely held Christian theology, at the levels both of method and of content. As a Communion, we need a common forum for debate, a common table to which we can bring our questions for a proper family discussion.

It is because we have not always fully articulated how authority works within Anglicanism, and because recent decisions have not taken into account, and/or worked through and explained, such authority as we all in theory acknowledge, that we have reached the point where urgent fresh thought and action have become necessary.

The Windsor Report paragraph 41

Here is another excerpt from 'The Critics of 'Being as Communion'', Alan Brown chapter's in Personhod and the Church: The Theology of John Zizoulas, due to appear at the end of this year:

"Baptism is a new birth in which the human being is newly hypostasised in the mode of being of Jesus Christ. This ontological re-constitution and in-corporation is not, however, a re-constitution and in-corporation into a separated and individualized hypostasis, but rather one into the hypostasis of the one who is the only-begotten of the Father, existing in and only in an absolute perichoretic reciprocity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. As such, the communion of the Church is a participation (an already eschatological participation) in the mode of divine being itself, the mode of catholic, koinonetic love. Consequently, for Zizioulas, it is not possible to ‘project’ the mode of being of the Church onto the divine being, since the mode of being of the Church already is the mode of being of divine being;

For Zizioulas, there are not ‘two communions’, one divine and one human – rather there is one divine communion, in which humans participate, this participation being the ecclesial mode of being that is the Church."

The most articulate discussion of the struggle for discipleship in the Anglican Communion has been going on over at Titusonenine. Here are excerpts from comments by Ephraim Radner and IRNS -

"Windsor itself is not just about practical actions, taken within some vacuum of public affirmation and meaning. There is an entire theology about the church, however broad, that upholds its recommendations, and this theology includes the character of teaching, witnessed life, and the place of Scripture as informing and even directing thisâ?¦ there is every reason to believe that â??bare actionsâ?? are and will be considered inadequate if they are not tied to clear and clearly-interpreted commitments. The matter of trust for the Communionâ??s future life is at stake in this.

No one can underestimate the destructive degree to which ECUSA has thrown a poisoned apple into the everyoneâ??s midst. There is every sign that Rowan Williams knows this, and may well realize that the poison has already been ingested by everyone. There is little cause for optimism here, and every cause for pleading with the Almighty." Ephraim Radner

"In my own diocese, a reappraiser and I asked the bishop the same question on the same day and received answers to suit our own particular reappraiser/reasserter positionsâ??in other words opposite responses from the same mouth. That is not leadership and is precisely why we are in the mess we are in." SD

"By remaining neutral as regards Lambeth 1.10, TWR [The Windsor Report] implicitly OKâ??d the idea that one could remain neutral, or even opposed. There is no question that Lambeth 1.10 is the present teaching of the Anglican Communionâ??thank God!â??but there is equally no question that TWR leaves the question of changing that teaching open. Until it is clear that changing that teaching is NOT openâ??that some doctrines are not open to â??developmentâ?? or â??evolutionâ?? from one species of doctrine to anotherâ??then we will remain in a never-ending doctrinal guerilla war, a war that TWR has failed to mediate. Broadly speaking, TWR addresses two interrelated questions, â??developmentâ?? and authority in matters of doctrine within the Anglican Communion (or â??receptionâ??). I believe that it solves neither of them, and in fact at best confuses the issues. The main reason why parties can continue to either disagree or even simply talk past each other while claiming to adhere to the Windsor Report is not because one side or the other is disingenuous (although there is certainly plenty of that to go around), but because the Windsor Report failed so spectacularly." Iâ??d Rather Not Say

Read some more of this discussion at Titusonenine. For a longer statement on the decisions the Anglican Communion has to take, read Ephraim Radner's If there is a future for ECUSA and the Anglican Communion...

Oswald Bayer's Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification is very short, 88 pages, but nonetheless quite remarkable. You can see the contents page here.

Oswald Bayer, until recently professor of theology at Tübingen, is as big as Eberhard Jüngel, and his interests are much broader than justification, and much bigger than Miroslav Volf, though in the same area of Church and discipleship. This is magisterial philosophically- and hermenutically-literate theology. You can get some idea of the scale of his thought from his titles – Gott als Auctor (God as Author), Schöpfung als Anrede (Creation as Address), Freiheit als Antwort (Freedom as Answer), Leibliches Wort (Embodied Word: Reformation and Modernity in Conflict). 'Embodied Word' - with the sophisticated ontology of Luther's theology of the Word of God who speaks all things into existence. Bayer's hermeneutics are theological to a degree not yet reached by the discussion in the UK and States.

It is a scandal that this book is the only piece of the work of this colossal theologian published in English, other than the (not very well translated) articles in Lutheran Quarterly. Read Bayer’s piece on Luther in Blackwell’s The Reformation Theologians (ed. Carter Lindberg) and you will be lifted by its sheer evangelical force and intelligence, its very brevity telling you more about the Reformation as evangelical movement – and merciful act of God – than all the rest of the book.

There are other other scandalously untranslated Germans, chiefly Ingolf Dalferth (Gedeutete Gegenwart: Zur Wahrnehmung Gottes in den Erfahrungen der Zeit - 'Meaningful Present: The perception of God in the experience of time') but I'll tell you about them another day, and anyway, none are as important as Bayer.

The Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission asks for your comments on the following issues:

1. Anglicanism has always given a high place to the reading of Scripture as the ground of its worship and teaching. How is it possible for Anglicans in different parts of the world to listen to the Bible together?

2. The Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission (ATDC) and the Windsor Report are both emphasising the notion of ‘covenant’ as a basis and expression of communion. If a covenant is more than a constitution, what implications does this have for decision-making by churches that are in a covenantal relationship with each other?

3. How do you think the genuine and meaningful expressions of communion that your church experiences with Anglican Christians in other parts of the world will be able to survive current disagreements in the Anglican Communion?

4. What sort of language (theological and otherwise) is appropriate for speaking about Christian people with whom you disagree?

We also welcome contributions from individuals, and especially lay people, so we will be pleased if you feel able to spread the contents of this letter as widely as possible.

Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission These are very reasonable questions. Wouldn't any list of Christian characteristics, such as 'godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness...' (1 Timothy 6.11) be the way to reply? The Anglicans are God-marked people, distinuished by all the spiritual gifts that make up Christian discipleship.

The defining role of secular government is to exercise judgment. The court is the central paradigm of government – all government, in all its branches. In Ancient Israel, the simplest model, such as we find in the narratives of David and Solomon and in the Psalms, is that the monarch is a judge who sits in court. "Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land," he declares according to the psalm, in what is probably a kind of oath of office; thus, daily assizes are the proof of a just king. Ancient Israel also knew, however, that the task of judgment required not only that the monarch sit in court but that he also found courts. To provide a court in which a judge sits is no less an act of judgment than to sit in court himself. He considers the situation obtaining, in which those who are wronged lack access to public interest and vindication; he finds it wanting; he redresses it by inaugurating courts. He does not found the judiciary from outside, as it were, like a businessman founding a University chair without himself being a man of learning. The founding of the judiciary is precisely the founding judicial act. It gives judgment in favor of the oppressed.

Oliver O'Donovan Government as Judgment

Given the diverse spiritual needs of people, focusing on but one aspect of saving power really amounts to confusion regarding atonement. By contrast, if there is no confidence regarding the proclamation of saving power in Jesus Christ at all, then ministry and mission live under a cloud of gloom. The heart may yearn for the proclamation of the power of the cross, but the will to do so is absent. Much of the lack of clarity and loss of nerve stems from the fear that atonement is the weak point in the Christian message because there is but one theory (namely, penal substitution) and it is flawed. Whether one openly subscribes to such a view, or quietly fears that it is true, in either case the drive to proclaim the cross is undercut. This paralysis regarding the cross, however, leads to a general shutdown of all systems: If one cannot find a way to confess the saving power of the cross, then Jesus becomes irrelevant and the church has no good news. The situation is not improved, as we shall see, by substituting the threefold outline of Gustaf Aulén. While he appears to recognize three theories rather than one, in the end the three are reduced to only one acceptable theory, i.e., Christus Victor. Against the imperialism of those who argue that atonement is but one general theory or that everything can be squeezed into three theories, this study shall present ten distinct theories, thereby demonstrating the breadth of Christian witness to the fullness of Christ.

The ten theories gathered under these four headings are:

I. Christ Died for Us: Sacrifice II. Christ Died for Us: Justification by Grace III. Christ Died for Us: Penal Substitution IV. Liberation from Sin, Death, and Demonic Powers V. The Purposes of God: The Renewal of the Creation VI. The Purposes of God: The Restoration of the Creation VII. The Purposes of God: Christ the Goal of the Creation VIII. Reconciliation: Christ the Way to the Knowledge of God IX. Reconciliation: Christ the Reconciler X. Reconciliation: The Wondrous Love of God

Peter Schmiechen Saving Power: Theories of Atonement and Forms of the Church. Read Peter Schmiechen's Introduction

Amazon offers a bewildering range of ways of plugging a book. You can write reviews, compile lists and run blogs pushing your friends and their books. Now you only have to post a review of a book, or make a list of favourite books and you are rewarded with your own Amazon homepage. It is a formidable way of taking people who are looking at one book by the elbow and conducting them towards another one.

Most academics have better things to do than thinking out book lists for Amazon, but I don't, and I found Al Kimel (Pontifications) and David Yeago (Pro Ecclesia luminary) offering very useful lists of recommendations for students there. Al Kimel is a Jenson and Torrance fan, though he keeps Pontifications readers on a diet of J H Newman. David Yeago offers Readings in the Christian Theological Tradition and Personal Enthusiasms in 20 Century Theology.

Telford Work is also very good at book lists. His site is a model of what can be done to help students find the right titles and learn what is expected of them. His pep talks to students about reading, learning, writing essays and plagiarism are so good I would copy them without qualm, were it not that I know he would catch me.

But I am encouraging poor habits in you. Get back to your books. Whether late at night or first thing in the morning, it is for reading the bible, not skimming the internet.

I have put in a link to the site of Andrew Goddard, who teaches Christian ethics at Wycliffe, Oxford’s evangelical Anglican ordination college. Andrew’s site is not the prettiest, but it is increasingly full of material on Christian ethicists, and includes some properly theological and ecclesiological thinkers. Christian ethics is no longer done in complete isolation from, and ignorance of, Christian doctrine or the Christian community. Goddard’s list of theological ethicists includes much more than the merely culturally evangelical, not only because it has representatives of every conceivable denomination, but because some of these Christian teachers are producing some real works of discipleship. The Roman Catholics are producing some of the best of them. We are going to have get used to saying that John Paul II and Benedict are among the greatest evangelical theologians of our generation.

Andrew seems to be the only English man involved in the work of the Anglican Communion Institute, which is leading the way in what we could term ‘the church struggle’. He has a couple of gentle, charitable but rigorous articles on the choices for the US Episcopalian Church which you can find on the ACI's site.

We all have conversations in which we have to defend the Church against those who want the Church to merge peacefully into the world until, all distinctiveness gone, it is no longer objectionable to anybody. I have such conversations with the clergy here. I think we should all learn to quote the Windsor Report on the future of the Anglican Communion and other documents published by the Anglican Communion so we are able to quote them as public decisions that the Anglican Communion has taken, by which it remains faithful to the whole Church, that God holds united through time and across the world, and that therefore may be regarded as properly describing who we are. I'll quote you some salient bits from the Windsor Report in future posts - you'll like it.

I had a wonderful day last Wednesday teaching a day-long course on ‘Church, Society and Sociology’ to students at OASIS (a new outfit for me). I inherited some content from whoever gave the course in previous years, but bulked it up a bit with a strong narrative and did the whole thing with pictures via PowerPoint. We started with the sociologists Weber and Durkheim, saw that these gentlemen expressed many of the things that we think are unique to our own contemporary crisis, thereby revealing that the things we think are true only for our own society being said a century and more ago. I said that it is not just a matter of these thinkers' ideas but also of how knowledge and science are divided and arranged, and how they were understood as solutions to what was taken to be the inevitable problem of conflict in society. I said Weber and Durkheim may be better understood through Kant and with Tom Paine, Robespierre, the American Founding Fathers as part of the impulse to found society afresh on new ground – and so, devious as ever, Knight got the conversation around to Plato and the Republic, so we could have straight compare-and-contrast exercise - Plato (noblest of the pagans) on one hand, Christian gospel on the other.

We looked at Augustine’ claim to have found the wisdom Plato was searching for, and that, in the Christian case it comes with means of forming that wisdom in persons by means of a long training that Augustine termed discipleship. Augustine said that there were two ways of life, under two jurisdictions (cities) each with its own account of human being, so we have two competing accounts of who we are and two competing histories. We decided to tell keep these histories distinct but in parallel. One, the Christian version, took us from Augustine to Benedict to Aquinas to Luther and on. The other took us a non-Christian route, from Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Rousseau, Hume, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Marx to the sociologists and positivists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all the way to Benjamin and Adorno.

It was very simple a tour of the great history of ideas, showing two opposing stories, the Christian and the non-Christian. I haven't enjoyed myself so much for ages, and the students didn't seem to suffer too much. I found pictures from Google Images and Wikipedia. It was easy to follow, students made all the right interjections and enjoyed the magic lantern show, so I will do it again. Everybody likes a picture show, but I'm stating the blooming obvious again.

I ended with MacIntyre, pointing out that we need a new Benedict, Milbank and his return to Augustine against the pagans of ‘social theory’, and Benedict XVI who obviously also believes that we need to recover the disciplines of discipleship of Saint Benedict, and thus the Christians out-narrate the sociologists. Obvious, really.

The Eschatological Economy is now in stock at Eerdmanns and can be bought direct from them.

Apparently it will take some weeks to get the book’s details up on Amazon, since this is not done book by book but in large batches. They seem so relaxed about getting anything about their titles onto Amazon it is clear that - bizarrely, worryingly - they do not see Amazon as a crucial means of marketing. So I will delay posting anything about ‘Why I wrote this book’ and some of the other wonderful, mostly Catholic, material I have discovered on Christian formation. We are thinking about a launch in London in September in the hope that some copies will have made it to the UK by that time.

Didaskalex writes reviews of theology titles on Amazon. He has very wide tastes and is a fast worker, born to blog. I have just been admiring his summary of Patristic Teaching on Salvation - not least because I wish I could produce such sound-bites. What do you make of this? -

Patristic Teaching on Salvation:

a. Church Fathers do not limit salvation to Justification. b. Church Fathers include the Trinity in atonement, the salvific work of Christ. c. Church Fathers do not limit salvation to Jesus sacrifice on the cross. d. Church Fathers consider salvation as renewal of human and universe. e. Church Fathers never exclude cooperation of the faithful: Synergy. f. Church Fathers teach that salvation is a continuous dynamic process, starting at spiritual birth, progressing from kenosis to theosis.

Salvation: Augustine to Anselm:

Augustine view of predestination contrasted with Pelagius freedom of choice, got more entangled with the doctrine of original sin. Although Pelagius was condemned in Ephesus, synergism that man has to cooperate with God in his salvation, was the predominant position in the East, termed semi-pelagianism. Anselm pushed the legalistic nature of salvation, into a forensic dogma, while Aquinas maintained that God wills that some, not all men be saved!

Salvation from Anselm to Vatican II:

Catholic scholastics starting with Anselm and Aquinas applied dialectics to theology reducing patristic metaphors to abstract concepts, western theology ended in sterility and provoked derision from humanists. Vatican II recovered the traditional meaning of salvation as restoration of the entire universe. Liberation and feminist theologies pressed the Roman church to admit that salvation should include transforming oppressive social conditions.

Salvation in Evangelical theology:

Protestants and reformed inherited medieval dogmas of the Western Church, even after various revisions, the legal ransom payment on the cross stayed central. Evangelicals teach that individual's legal status must be changed from guilty to not guilty through justification by adoption, to restore favor with God. The positive desire to live righteously is termed regeneration or new birth, while sanctification or making holy comes to completion in the life beyond death, echoing the inherited Roman purgatory.

See Didaskalex