That virtue is important in the ethics of Aquinas is generally acknowledged. So too is the fundamentally theological cast of Aquinas’s virtue ethics. In his reflections on the ethical life, Aquinas is especially concerned with the good willing and doing, made possible by virtue, that brings a person to the God who has established God as the beatifying end of the human person; and, the virtues that are most conducive to that life with God are, radically, the gift of God, due to divine initiative. Although less immediately obvious, Aquinas’s virtue ethics is also thoroughly Christocentric: it is in relation to Christ, who is model and savior, that a human being receives and grows in the virtues, and so moves closer to the beatifying end that is God. This article examines the Christological dimensions of the virtue ethics of Aquinas, suggesting along the way the implications for a modern engagement with that ethics.
Following the thinking of Karl Barth, this article demonstrates how and why reading the Bible in faith is necessary in order to understand the truth which is and remains identical with God himself speaking to us in his Word and Spirit. After developing how faith, grace, revelation and truth are c...
This article attempts to reconcile the holistically understood and embodied philosophical anthropology indicated by Paul Ricoeur's concept of "narrative identity" with Christian personal eschatology, as realized in the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Narrative identity resonates with sp...
This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans's "mourning reli...
Acknowledging the explanation of the parable of the Weeds (Tares, Darnel) as secondary, this article attempts to show that the parable itself could very well be original, though heavily retouched by the author of the First Gospel. After a comparison with the version offered by the Gospel of Thoma...
Christianity and Creation and Jesus of Nazareth are companion volumes that give voice to a veteran scholar’s summing up a lifetime of research and reflection on what he sees as two inseparably related and fundamental issues of Christian theology and biblical witness: a focus on creation and...
Natural theology is enjoying something of a resurgence at present but this article seeks to question its place in Christian philosophy and theology. Antecedent natural theology accepts that it is necessary for Christian beliefs to be rationally warranted. Romans 1:18ff. is often cited in favour o...
While Reinhold Niebuhr's realist political philosophy continues to find advocates in many quarters on account of its explanatory power, his Christian ideals have had difficulty gaining purchase in the material world. The tension between particular political interests and universal moral ideals th...
This article approaches the theology of mission from the point of view of God's mission and diakonia, seeking a missional model of the grace of justification and economic justice in an age of World Christianity. The author engages a hermeneutical-prophetic side of evangelization-viva vox evangeli...
This paper begins with an explanation of the five strata of mental life that Ignacio Matte Blanco described. In the first stratum common sense (Aristotelian) logic is employed, whereas the fifth stratum is dominated by symmetric logic, the logic of the unconscious which, when taken to the extreme...
This paper takes issue with the Slim for Him programmes which suggest that Christianity has no place for the fleshy, indeed that the devil lurks in ample bodies. It investigates the way in which women have suffered a reducing rhetoric which has had its genesis in certain kinds of theology but has...
