Representation is an essential element of political authority, together with power and judgment, the latest to be acknowledged in the Christian West, coming to recognition in the Middle Ages with the expectation of a plurality of national identities. Its initial points of reference were theological, to Israel and to the dual office of Christ as priest and king, but in modern developments it has been understood especially in terms of legal forms. Government represents an existing political identity, bound up with (...) a tradition of continuing practice and constituted by a ‘common good’ which brings together the various interests within a society. ‘Recognition’ of government involves knowing it in relation to ourselves, by affective cognition, an emphasis lost in modern theories. Success and failure in representation are on a relative scale of more or less. It depends on realistic and truthful popular self-understanding. (shrink)

Ethics is distinguished as a field of study within the realm of organised knowledge which interprets moral experience. Christian ethics assumes this interpretation into the hermeneutic framework of Christian theology in relation to a hope for the renewal and recovery of human agency. Its theme is moral thinking in general, which it understands within the framework of faith. It is dependent on philosophical ethics, but presumes and aims at more. The concepts handled by theological ethics include analytic categories coined to (...) describe the operations of moral thought itself, concepts that name qualities and performances of universal importance, and concepts belonging both to dogmatics and ethics, e.g. ‘sin’. It is concerned to describe the ‘architecture’ of life in the Spirit: World, the framework of meaning, Self, the agent, Time, the immediate future open to action. It resists pressure for theoretical economy in favour of unipolar theories. Its tasks include critical engagement with issues of policy or practice in wider discussion, engagement with particular moral dilemmas, the exploration of special fields, such as bioethics, marriage, economics, critical conceptual interaction with philosophy, interaction with biblical exegesis, exposition of texts from the tradition of theological ethics, and comparative intertraditional enquiry. (shrink)

An ancient Hebrew poem of uncertain background and fastidiously subtle formal technique is made the subject of a commentary by a fifth-century Latin bishop with no Hebrew, working with a poor Latin translation, who, moreover, dismisses the formal complexities of the composition as irrelevant to interpretation. Claiming to detect hidden depths beneath the Great Psalm’s limpid surface, Augustine uses it as an opportunity to revisit some of the favorite themes of his own later writing. Has he read the text with (...) sufficient sympathy to discover anything in it that might correspond to the poet’s intentions? Comparing his approach with Ambrose’s earlier and very different one, we notice some unexpected interpretative strengths in the earlier work. But Augustine’s attentiveness to connections between lines and stanzas and to the repetition of key vocabulary reveals a close attunement to the emotional movements of the poem. His contention that the Psalmist’s “law” is to be understood as Saint Paul’s “law of faith” is not imposed on the text, but allowed to emerge from its sequential development, and especially from its opening and closing lines. (shrink)

An ancient Hebrew poem of uncertain background and fastidiously subtle formal technique is made the subject of a commentary by a fifth-century Latin bishop with no Hebrew, working with a poor Latin translation, who, moreover, dismisses the formal complexities of the composition as irrelevant to interpretation. Claiming to detect hidden depths beneath the Great Psalm’s limpid surface, Augustine uses it as an opportunity to revisit some of the favorite themes of his own later writing. Has he read the text with (...) sufficient sympathy to discover anything in it that might correspond to the poet’s intentions? Comparing his approach with Ambrose’s earlier and very different one, we notice some unexpected interpretative strengths in the earlier work. But Augustine’s attentiveness to connections between lines and stanzas and to the repetition of key vocabulary reveals a close attunement to the emotional movements of the poem. His contention that the Psalmist’s “law” is to be understood as Saint Paul’s “law of faith” is not imposed on the text, but allowed to emerge from its sequential development, and especially from its opening and closing lines. (shrink)

Sin has infinite variety, but is also a unified phenomenon. As a way of displaying both these aspects, the vice-lists of the New Testament explore patterns by which sin unfolds in a sequence of diverse but connected forms. The eschatological vice-list of 2 Timothy 3 treats this as an unfolding of the sin of pride from an immanent form to a socially concrete one. Exploring this train of thought in further detail, we find room within the progress of pride for (...) the love of money and the love of war. (shrink)

Luke Bretherton wishes to encourage informal political activity, and asserts a contrast between two complementary and alternative ways of doing politics, formal and informal. But the tendency in his descriptions is to replace formal with informal politics, which is then in danger of being left without responsibility to the structures of political society.