The Trajectory of Faith, Love, and Hope

At its core, Oliver O’Donovan’s Self, World, and Time (SWT) is a reflection on God’s life as faith, love, and hope intended to illuminate the shape and direction of our life together.1 O’Donovan provides us with an occasion to see how moral and doctrinal claims interlock, for theology cannot properly be theology if it does not attend to doctrine’s inclination to stretch its legs into the actual life of the Christian believer. As a historian of Christian thought and practice, my response will resist a certain inclination to press immediately towards action and will delay for the moment the question ‘what’s at stake?’