Early Life and Education
Kirk was born in Sheffield and was the son of Frank Herbert Kirk who, in turn, was the son of the Reverend John Kirk (d. 1875), a Methodist minister. He was educated at Sheffield Royal Grammar School and St. John's College, Oxford, obtaining a double first in classics. He was accepted for graduate study at Keble College, but moved to London instead to work with the Student Christian Movement (SCM). The group was beginning a ministry to the large numbers of Indian students that were coming to England to study. During his time in London he also opened a residential hall for students of University College, London known as Ealing Hall, served as an assistant to the Department of Philosophy there and held a number of executive positions with SCM. He began the process to become ordained as an Anglican priest and was ordained a deacon on 21 December 1912 and moved to a church near Sheffield to begin a curacy, intending to go back to Keble College to finish his graduate study. When World War I broke out, however, that proved impossible. Instead, he spent 1915–1919 with the British Army as a chaplain in France and Flanders.
Kirk was able to return to Oxford in 1919, as a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College and tutor at Keble College. He began working on his first book of moral theology, Some Principles of Moral Theology, published in 1920. He adopted the method of casuistry, where general ethical principles are applied to the practical situations in which moral decisions are made. He revived the study of Christian ethics using casuistry, drawing on the work of Caroline divine Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667). In 1922 he was appointed Fellow and Chaplain of Trinity College and awarded a Bachelor of Divinity defree followed by a Doctor of Divinity degree in 1926. In 1927 he was named Reader in Moral Theology and in 1933 was made the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology. His scholarly reputation rests on the books of moral theology that he wrote during the 1920s and 1930s, especially Conscience and its Problems and The Vision of God: the Christian doctrine of the Summum Bonum. In many ways he revived the study of moral theology in the Church of England and is considered one of the leading moral theologians of the 20th century.
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