I thank the editor for the opportunity to respond to two forceful conservative critics of my position. As everyone knows, this is a controversy that threatens to split churches and divide society. Yet there is also hope for a way forward.

I was hoping that this book might end one of my most enduring classroom group research activities. At the beginning of my introductory module in black theology, I send the class to the library to search for all the books written by British theologians on ‘race’, since the First World War. Students return an hour later and acknowledge that there are none. Then I send the group back again but this time to search for books on the subject of ‘animal theology’ (by the same intellectual demographic). On their return each group announces, sometimes in triumph, that there were at least a dozen! I then respond by asking them to reflect on what we are to make of a theological community that appears to be more interested in the souls of animals than British Christianity's sojourn with racialised oppression?

Though rarely addressed in a direct way, the theology of God's perfection is a central point at issue in contemporary Christian dogmatics. A good many debates of the moment turn on how the perfection of God's life is to be conceived: debates about the relation of the so-called immanent and economic Trinity; about the propriety of explicating the person and work of Christ through the metaphysics of divine and human natures; about the applicability of kenosis to account for the relation of the divine Word to the human career of Jesus; about the constitutive significance of temporality for the being of God; and much else besides. Recent disagreements amongst Barth scholars about the issue of the relation of the doctrine of divine election and the doctrine of the Trinity are in some measure animated by differing conceptions of the perfection of God, and one of the many ways of profiting from Dr Pitstick's book is to read it as, in part at least, an essay in defence of a certain construal of divine perfection. Indeed, one of my hopes for the book is that, once the noise of battle has subsided and the wounded have been dressed and taken to shelter, we may be able to engage peaceably and constructively with some of the material dogmatic issues to which it has drawn our attention. I do not propose to comment in detail on Dr Pitstick's evaluation of Balthasar; any judgements I might reach would be those of a mere amateur, one of those Protestants who in the 1970s discovered in Balthasar something which kept us reading Roman Catholic theology after Lonergan had wearied us and before we had been pointed to the treasures of ressourcement theology. Instead, I want to draw out from the book three doctrinal topics of capital importance: the ‘finished’ character of the redemptive work of Christ on the cross; the relation between theology and economy in the doctrine of the Trinity; and the doctrine of the hypostatic union – in all of which topics, of course, we are pressed to attend to the perfection of God and the acts of God.

I am grateful to Robert Beckford for the care he has taken to present the argument of my book and for his incisive comments and criticisms. My book has been reviewed by other black theologians, in the UK and the USA, who have avoided the argument of the book, preferring to play the race card: any criticism of black theology can only be an expression of white racism. I am grateful to the editors of SJT in affording me the opportunity to respond. It would be tedious to become involved in a detailed exchange of he-said–I-said. I have chosen to respond to two issues raised in Beckford's review.

Given the extent of agreement between Dr Webster and myself, his article suggests how this topic may promote ecumenical reappropriation of our common Christian heritage. Now if we can only get the Catholics to agree among themselves. . . Seriously, however, he has identified the fundamental questions of my book: what are our doctrinal commitments as Christians, and do we take them seriously enough to accept that not all positions are compatible with them? Are we consequently willing to set aside some propositions, or even adopt others?