This error of mine reflected a widespread...

This error of mine reflected a widespread, even if far from universal, practice in the then English-speaking world-which still unfortunately persists in numerous colleges and universities-of ignoring the place both of the earlier Christian eras and of the high middle ages in the history of philosophy.

So, for example, in the then Oxford undergraduate curriculum there had been for a very long time a large place assigned to the study of ancient philosophy, and also to that of modern philosophy, but almost no place at all to medieval philosophy. What is needed to repair my own errors and omissions is of two different kinds. First the account of Christianity which I then gave needs not only to be expanded, but to be radically revised.

The core of that account imputes to distinctively Christian ethics an, as I then thought, unresolvable paradox, that it “tried to devise a code for society as a whole from pronouncements” originally addressed to individuals or small communities who were to separate themselves off from the rest of society in expectation of a Second Coming of Christ, which did not in fact occur (pp. 115-116).

What I failed to recognize was that this paradox had already been resolved within the New Testament itself through the Pauline doctrines of the church and of the mission of the church to the world.

Those doctrines successfully define a life for Christians informed both by the hope of the Second Coming and by a commitment to this-worldly activity in and through which human beings rediscover the true nature of their natural ends and of those natural virtues required to achieve those ends, as a result of coming to understand them in the light of the theological virtues identified in the New Testament.

Those virtues are, on a Christian view, the qualities necessary for obedience to God’s law, that obedience which constitutes community, whether it is that obedience to God’s law apprehended by reason which constitutes natural community or that obedience to revelation which constitutes the church. (My earlier failure to recognize this was due to my having been overimpressed by biblical critics who falsely thought that they had discovered a large and incoherent eclecticism in the New Testament.

What corrected my earlier view was in part a larger knowledge of that same criticism.