In the received view, God is perfect, meaning that He is complete, lacking in nothing, without undeveloped potentialities; He is always full. Contemporary English tends to use the term “perfect” differently, in the sense of what is entirely good. Though one might anticipate that if God is perfect, then He is entirely good, the question of His goodness per se is not explored until Question 6. Here we are asking only about His fullness or complete actuality.

The introduction looks at the different ways that the unique, but troublesome, injunction at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount for the followers of Jesus to ‘Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt. 5.48) has been interpreted within Christian history. It looks specifically at the interpretations of John and Charles Wesley, John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa and Tertullian and argues that Aquinas’ is the most sophisticated. It suggests how each reflects the influence of their particular social contexts and their radically different theological takes on humanity, while holding in common a clear distinction between human and divine perfection.

Chapter 5 turns, at last, to the more conventional resource for Christian ethics, namely the Bible. It looks specifically at the way that teleios and teleioö (adjective and verb) are used thrice each in Matthew, in Paul and in Pauline letters, but most frequently in Hebrews where Jesus is seen as being perfect and without sin and in the Septuagint variously depicting human, and more occasionally divine, perfection.

A succinct account of the author’s mature constructive theological investment in a metaphysics of the Infinite. The opening section of this essay indicates a determination to weave metaphysical and soteriological concerns together without any implied separation of these from each other, or, alternatively, any premature collapse of one into the other. Latter parts of the essay then focus on how ‘Infinite Perfection’ came to prominence in Duns Scotus as the principal Christian thought-name for God, to ‘help theologians understand the positive (cataphatic) possibilities for naming God in the Bible and in philosophy as well as the negative (apophatic) limits of our knowledge’. Scotus’s confidence in abstract conceptual analysis and in ‘the power and ability of our finite minds’ helped to lead the Franciscan to crown ‘Infinity’ (above ‘Being’) as the highest name of the divine perfection. In this Scotus is also an ancestor of Descartes’s later modern discovery of the excessive idea of the Infinite within the human mind.