ABSTRACT
It is good in this centenary year of his death to remember that the Chair of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology in the University of Edinburgh is successor to the Chair of Evangelistic Theology first occupied by Alexander Duff. 'Divinity', said Martin Luther, 'consists in use and practice, not in speculation and meditation. Everyone that deals in speculations, either in household affairs or temporal government, without practice, is lost and worth nothing'. It is a comforting parable for the theologian in a pragmatic, activist age; perhaps too much so, for it oversimplifies most dangerously the relation between theology and action. Chesterton is defending theology against charges of irrelevance to practice, and this point is well taken. The Christian theologian nurtures a distinctive unease with this whole duality, and in particular with the denigration of action, especially banausic or menial action, which runs all through it.
