We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, that we may walk in them. (Eph. 2:10) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the last theological work he laboured at before his imprisonment and death, the Ethics, wrote, pregnantly and provokingly, “It would seem that the knowledge of good and evil is the goal of all our ethical thinking. The first job of Christian Ethics is to get rid of that knowledge.” I don’t presume to …
I remarked to John Macquarrie, as we ambled up Oxford’s Cornmarket early in 1984, that it seemed we had found him a worthy successor as Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. “Ay, it will be fine,” the ironic Scot replied, “if only he’s out of jail at the time!” For the young professor designate, still Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, had just been newsworthily arrested accompanying his students on a protest sit-in at an American military …
If we refer to it as a slogan, that need not be in a pejorative sense. It means simply that “the right to health” does useful duty as a shorthand reference. A cluster of concerns are summed up compactly; it gestures out towards a whole line of argument remaining to be traced. If we discuss “the right to health” as a slogan, we do not discuss anything we are actually doing or proposing to do. …
I thought that the best point to start off on would be the nature of the purity of the church. I take it that the purity of the Church is something that is an inescapable practical concern to all Christians in obedience to the word of God. We purify ourselves as he is pure. And the question that I think underlies the issues at stake here is how we understand the purity of the Church …
“Freedom” is a term with a range of meanings, and tonight we shall need to notice three of them. First and most formally, it is the power to act, the ownership of one’s behaviour that distinguishes intelligent agents from creatures of instinct. This is a power of individual human nature, and the assertion of freedom in this sense always imports some kind of individualism. We know the freedom-as-defiance of the existentialist philosopher – or of …
The democracies that emerged victorious from the Second World War tried to entrench human rights as a defense against the cruel politics of power. In so doing, however, they created a major problem of self-understanding, a cleft running deep through the heart of democratic theory. Democracy and human rights are not identical things, so it is necessary to ask whether they can coexist. It seems that the answer depends on two contingent factors: how the …
This series of 3 lectures was given in New College, Sydney in September 2007 Lecture One – Waking http://www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/downloads/File/multimedia/pdfs/f7177163c833dff4b38fc8d2872f1ec6.pdf Lecture Two – Admiring http://www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/downloads/File/multimedia/pdfs/6c8349cc7260ae62e3b1396831a8398f.pdf Lecture Three – Resolving http://www.newcollege.unsw.edu.au/downloads/File/multimedia/pdfs/d9d4f495e875a2e075a1a4a6e1b9770f.pdf
Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community “A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.” So Augustine famously challenged the classical definition of a republic articulated by Cicero, replacing an idealist understanding of organized social life with a realist one, which would allow for radical criticism without dissolving the political phenomenon altogether. My purpose in this year’s Stob …
Recent news reports and specific requests have raised the question whether it is possible for a Christian adoption agency to place children for adoption with a homosexual couple. Let us first of all attempt to clarify the precise dimensions of this question.
