Getting to Know Nigel Biggar

This important Christian thinker is well worth reading:

Many of the individuals featured in my “Notable Christians” series are fairly well-known, at least to evangelicals. Figures such as Colson, Schaeffer, Lewis and Tozer and others readily spring to mind. But the Oxford academic and author Nigel Biggar is one Christian who should be better known.

He is a British Anglican priest, theologian, and ethicist who was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford from 2007 to 2022. By way of a somewhat more tantalising description, the opening paragraphs of a recent interview with him are worth including here:

“There was a time when I wanted people to like me, and I would not want to risk losing people’s approval,” says Nigel Biggar. “But I figured out that people who dislike me for bad reasons are people whose approval is not worth having. There are plenty of other people whose judgment I value who support me.

 

“Old age brings a dangerous combination of two things. You finally figure out what you think, and you cease to care what other people think, so you’re more inclined to say what you think.”

 

Over the past eight years, saying — and writing — what he thinks has made Biggar one of Britain’s most controversial historians. For the best part of a decade he has been waging an often lonely battle for a reappraisal of colonialism, arguing that the British Empire was not as evil as contemporary historians have tended to portray it. His views have provoked opprobrium from other academics, hostile reviews and an aborted publishing deal. They have also brought him international book sales and an unusual level of fame for a Christian ethicist.

 

As the icing on the cake, last December, Kemi Badenoch ennobled him; it is Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas who greets me in his new digs at the House of Lords. Five months after his appointment, he is still finding his way around, but settling comfortably onto his new perch. “Apart from the gents outside the chamber being in poor condition, I’m really enjoying it,” he says. A neat, trim 70, in a dark suit and wire-framed glasses, Biggar is a friendly, if slightly guarded, host. He gives the impression he has endured the barrage of online criticism because he believes he is correct, rather than because he enjoys the scrap. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/14/nigel-biggar-reparations-interview/

He has authored over a dozen important works. I only have four of his books, and will limit my remarks to them. I have already discussed all four of these books in various articles, including these two pieces:

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/09/16/colonialism-and-the-voice/

https://billmuehlenberg.com/2025/12/11/nigel-biggar-on-reparations/

Here I will feature each one again simply by way of a few quotes.

In Defence of War (Oxford University Press, 2013)

I am a realist, therefore, about the fact of intractable human vice on the international stage. Of course, as a Christian I do not believe that anyone has a monopoly of vice; but the fact that its spread is wide does not make it even. If all are somewhat culpable, some might still be more culpable than others. And while it is beyond human competence to pronounce any human being to be ultimately irredeemable, it is presently the case that some people cannot be talked out of grave wrongdoing and that they must therefore be forced out of it.

 

As I believe in the fact of gross and intractable wickedness, so I believe that punishment is necessary and that it has a basic, broadly retributive dimension. As I shall explain in Chapters Two and Five, I do not think of retribution as necessarily or properly vengeful. I think of it merely as a hostile response to wrongdoing, which might and should be proportionate. Retribution is important because wrongdoing needs to be contradicted, fended off, and reversed. Not to contradict it and fend it off and try to reverse it is to imply that it does not matter and, therefore, that its victims do not matter. Just war is an extreme form of retributive punishment.

 

If I am a realist, however, I am a Christian realist, not a Hobbesian one. That my anthropology is not optimistic does not make it cynical. I do not believe that human beings are driven only by the fear of pain and death and the desire for security. That is not merely cynical, but empirically false. It seems to me empirically true that human beings can also be powerfully driven at least by a hatred of injustice, and sometimes even by a love for justice. And while I believe in the fact of sin and the need for retributive punishment, for coercion, and sometimes for violent coercion, I also believe that retribution, even when coercive and violent, should be qualified by forgiveness. I say ‘qualified’, not ‘displaced’. How this is possible, logically and practically, I shall explain in Chapter Two. (p. 11)

What’s Wrong with Rights? (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Of all the purported natural rights, that of obtaining happiness is the most absurd in its utopian detachment from practical contingency. As Ritchie puts it, eyebrows arched, ‘The right, not merely of pursuing but of obtaining happiness, which is named as one of the natural rights of man in most American State Constitutions, may seem, in this world of ours, to be a very large order on the bank of Providence.’ In other words, one person’s right implies another person’s obligation; and since ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, another’s obligation implies his capability. So if everyone has a natural right to obtain happiness, someone must be capable of supplying everyone’s happiness, and obliged to do so. But who could that possibly be, short of God Almighty himself?

 

Ritchie shares with Burke and Bentham a suspicion of the abstract and so absolute character of talk about natural rights. He also shares with them a concern about the tendency of such abstract talk to feed revolutionary anarchy…. (p. 21)

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023)

[A]cademic ‘post-colonialism’ is not just of academic importance. It is politically important, too, insofar as its world view is absorbed by student citizens and moves them to repudiate the dominance of the West.

 

Thus, academic post-colonialism is an ally—no doubt, inadvertent—of Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party, which are determined to expand their own (respectively) authoritarian and totalitarian power at the expense of the West. In effect, if not by intent, they are supported by the West’s own hard Left, whose British branch would have the United Kingdom withdraw from NATO, surrender its nuclear weapons, renounce global policing, and retire to free-ride on the moral high ground alongside neutral Switzerland. Thinking along the same utopian lines, some Scottish separatist-nationalists equate Britain with empire, and empire with evil, and see the secession of Scotland from the Anglo-Scottish Union and the consequent break-up of the United Kingdom as an act of national repentance and redemption. Meanwhile, with their eyes glued to more domestic concerns, self-appointed spokespeople for non-white minorities claim that systemic racism continues to be nourished by a persistent colonial mentality, and so clamour for the “decolonisation” of public statuary and university reading lists. (pp. 5-6)

Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Forum Press, 2025)

The pursuit of what is valuable or good is basic to the moral rightness of anything we do, even if it is not sufficient for it. What is good for us is in our genuine interest. Therefore, there is nothing at all wrong with pursuing our own genuine interests -indeed, we have a duty to do so. As with individuals, so with governments. Governments have a responsibility to look after the interests of their people. As the French political philosopher Yves Simon wrote during the Abyssinia crisis of 1935, ‘What should we think, truly, about a government that would leave out of its preoccupations the interests of the nation that it governs?’ This duty is not unlimited, of course. There cannot be a moral obligation to pursue the interests of one’s own people by doing an injustice to others. Still, not every pursuit of national interest does involve injustice; so, the fact that national interests are among the motives for a government’s policy need not make it immoral. For example, the fact that Britain’s humanitarian policy of suppressing the Atlantic slave trade also benefited British producers of sugar who used free, paid labour in their competition with Brazilian producers who used unpaid, slave labour in no way undermines the morality of the policy.

 

Sometimes individuals and governments can be well motivated to achieve an important good, and they can choose their means of getting there conscientiously, and yet, through the bad fortune of relentlessly adverse circumstances, they can still fail. Not all failure to do good or avoid evil is immoral and culpable. Some of it is honest and tragic. Where that is so, the fitting response is not blame, but lament and compassion.

 

History contains an ocean of injustice, most of it unremedied and now lying beyond correction in this world…. (pp. 21-22)

Hopefully these brief quotes might spur you on to pursue his works further. I hope they do.

[1519 words]