bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Argument, Essence and Identity
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

English theology is notoriously ‘lop-sided’. In the historical disciplines, it has an excellent record of intelligent and discriminating scholarship. But, when attention shifts from what was once said and done in the name of Christianity to what might be said or done today, matters are either handed over to the philosopher (whose admirable and indispensable preoccupation with formal and linguistic considerations is no guarantee of competence to perform this task) or else are tackled at a level which, according to the standards operative in cognate ‘secular’ disciplines—from aesthetics and literary criticism to social and political theory—is so strikingly amateurish as to render it hardly surprising that theology plays little part in the conversation of the culture. In this naughty world, Professor Sykes has performed an excellent deed. The Identity of Christianity is a learned, vigorous and original reconstruction of some perennial problems: problems which found particular focus, in the nineteenth century, in discussion of the ‘essence’ of Christianity.

Sykes has shifted the theme from ‘essence’ to ‘identity’ partly to counter the widespread but unwarranted suspicion that an ‘enquiry into what makes Christianity Christianity’ (p.3) is likely to be reductionist in character, and partly because his discovery of the importance of Newman’s work for the ‘elucidation of what was at stake’ helped him to see how mistaken was the equally widespread view that the issues under consideration are of central moment only to Protestant Christians.
Brazil's “Dominican Affair”
Authors: Alison James
Published: July 2007

In late 1969 and early 1970 the Brazilian press carried a story which it called the “Dominican Affair”. It told of how an important urban guerilla had been shot dead by the police owing to his betrayal by two student-brothers of the Dominican Order. The story had the widest implications for Church-State relations at a national and international level, and it got world coverage. Recently more information has come to light, which makes possible an hypothesis (but not yet a definitive statement) of what really happened. It is fascinating, whether or not one is a Brazilian or a Dominican. It reveals very dramatically the complexity of the ways in which the apparatus of government and the media may distort—and continue to distort—even the most localized of events. And it shows how, in spite of these distortions, a seemingly modest man, Frei Tito de Alencar, whose sufferings and ideals have been written about several times in New Blackfriars, can emerge eventually with the stature of a martyr.
Liberation Theology and the Holy See: A Question of Method
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

I The Holy See’s critique of liberation theology

In its document Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’ the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith not only accepts but welcomes the advent of a ‘theology of liberation’, seen as a theological exploration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a ‘message of liberty’ and as ‘liberating power’. The CDF finds fault, therefore, not with the project but with its execution, not with liberation theology as such but with the structure and content of a significant proportion of the liberation theology currently being written. Just how much a significant proportion might be is impossible to determine. On the one hand, some writings of the more extreme members of the school offer the most complete textual confirmation of the portrait by the CDF. Thus in a work put into English in 1977 we read that a theology which accepts the truth of historical materialism (i.e. classical Marxism) will ‘assume his (Marx’s) theory completely in order to see what sort of faith , if any, is possible on that basis’. A moderate liberationist, Gustavo Gutierrez, admits in the preface to a work by a more radicalised colleague thast it would be ‘disingenuous’ to deny the danger of reductionism of just the kind now identified by the CDF. On the other hand, the genre of the document is not textual description so much as logical or conceptual projection. That is, it appears to be concerned with the end-state to which a consistent application of the principles involved in current liberation theology would lead, rather than with a description of a representative mean in the present state of liberation theology.
Kerr on Cartesianism in Catholic Thought: Right or Wrong?
Authors: Trethowan Illtyd
Published: July 2007

In June we published the paper which Fergus Kerr had given at the Upholland Theological Consultation in April, ‘‘The Need for Philosophy in Theology Today” (p. 248—260). In it Father Kerr set out to establish his case by assembling examples of the neo-Cartesian presuppositions which he believes still pervade a lot of Western thinking, and Catholic theology especially, but are largely undiscerned. The paper has evoked many and varied reactions, ranging from enthusiastic praise to severe criticism. One of its critics, Father Illtyd Trethowan, discusses it here, and Father Kerr replies.

The issue of New Blackfriars for June 1984 contains the text of Father Fergus Kerr’s address to ‘the gathering which founded the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain’ in April 1984. A rough summary of his theme might go as follows. Catholic theology is profoundly imbued with ‘a certain Cartesianism’ from which we need to escape (pp. 248—9). Catholic Scholastic philosophy of 25 years ago, based on Aristotle, presents issues which are the subjects of current philosophical debate (although not of current interest to Catholic theologians) and resistance to Cartesianism would have the added advantage of contact with this philosophical debate (pp. 249—52). Catholic theology since Descartes was a struggle to resist Cartesianism, and Aristotelian Thomism was a weapon in the fight; but the battle was lost because the enemy had infiltrated too deeply (pp. 252—3). Examples of Cartesian influence in Catholic theology today are to be found in ‘mentalism in prayer’, ‘interiorist volitionism in moral theology’, a certain approach to human survival after death, Kiing’s presuppositions and Chirico’s epistemology (pp. 253—7).
Prophet and Apostle: Bartolomé de las Casas and the spiritual conquest of America
Authors: Brading David
Published: July 2007

I: Defender of the Indians or Satan’s tool?

In his De procuranda indorum salute (1589) the Spanish Jesuit, José de Acosta, a former provincial of his order in Peru, lamented that nowadays the gospel and war were all too closely associated. He was at pains to reject proposals mooted by a fellow Jesuit that Spain should invade China so as to bring that great empire into the fold of the Catholic Church. Not that Acosta was a pacifist, since he defended the right of a Christian Prince to establish forts in heathen territory for the protection of trade and the preaching of the gospel. Moreover, in regions like Amazonia, inhabited by mere savages without any law, king or fixed abode, there was a positive duty to introduce some form of political order so that the natives could be taught the elements of civility and Christianity. Any resistance to this imposition of a protectorate could be justly quelled by force of arms, albeit applied with paternal firmness. As for the justice of the previous conquest of the relatively advanced kingdoms of the Incas and Aztecs, Acosta simply counselled a closure of debate, arguing that with no chance of restitution or restoration, any further discussion of the question merely served to provoke dissension between the spiritual and temporal authorities.
Descartes and Capitalism
Authors: Hamnett Ian
Published: July 2007

In a pace-setting paper recently published in New Blackfriars, Fergus Kerr argues that Cartesian assumptions and presuppositions have entered so deeply into the thinking of the West that even those who profess to follow other traditions of thought can often be found to be working within the Cartesian paradigm. Here I hope to develop just one of the many lines of inquiry to which Father Kerr has pointed, arguing that there is a convergence between Cartesian anthropology on the one hand and the productive relations of capitalism on the other. Beyond this, I shall try to suggest that this convergence can tentatively be documented so as to form a real part of the “history of ideas” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rather than left as no more than an abstract, analytical congruence or aptness of fit.

The theoretical argument is straightforward and can be concisely stated. Thomist anthropology and psychology propose a unitary conception of man and of the relationship between soul and body. Kerr pertinently reminds us (p. 255) of Aquinas’s commentary on I Corinthians 15, and quotes his memorable reference to the soul as pars corporis humani. This unity is found in all living things, in vegetables, for example, and in “brutes”; the rational soul in man, moreover, is no exception to this unitary principle. A corollary of this is that, as Kenny puts it, “a human being is not something that has a body; it is a body, a living body of a particular kind”.
Looking Back
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

Now in his 77th year, the author was editor of “New Blackfriars” 1940—1950, and founder-editor of “Life of the Spirit” 1946—55, was Warden of Spode House 1952—81, and has written many books and articles on the spiritual life.

The elderly must often be sad when they look back. There is no escape. In those long-gone days they were fresher and more alive. Today energies are failing and powers of perception lack the briskness and sharpness that were theirs when the experiences they remember first occurred. It is possible to catch the excitement of those earlier times—so exciting, compared with the present—but it is a difficult task. As soon as comparison finds its way into present consciousness sadness tends to make its entry. Yet views of the past change as variously as do the views as one climbs up a hill, some thrilling, some depressing, according to light and angle of vision. Now, for example, the picture of the world of 1908 (the year in which I was born) and onwards looks like a picture of increasing physical violence, of death and hideous human slaughter. And yet, on the other side of the page, we can find another picture, in which intellectual violence seems to be decreasing just as much.

In the late 1920s, when studying first philosophy and then theology in preparation for the priesthood, we used to agonize about those passages in the Bible when the Lord seemed to interfere with the workings of the entire material universe in order to procure some victory for a rather unimportant leader of the Israelites.
Ancient History in Chaos—Velikovsky's Chronological Reconstruction
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

The promulgation and reception of the late Dr Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories constitute one of the most fascinating episodes in the history of ideas. He made revolutionary proposals about the recent history of the solar system, celestial mechanics, and palaeontology, from 1950 onwards; the immoral and irrational response by leading members of the scientific establishment (whom David Stove described in this connection as a ‘despotic and irresponsible mafia’) has been well documented. But Velikovsky himself set most store by his historical reconstruction. Three volumes have appeared so far, Ages in Chaos, Ramses II and his Time, and Peoples of the Sea. Further material, on the Assyrian Empire and the so-called ‘Dark Age’ of Greece, is still to be published.

I would like in what follows to say something about Velikovsky’s historical reconstruction, and why, in my opinion, for all the firmly-established assumptions which it overturns, it ought to be taken seriously.

It was the difficulties about dating the Exodus, which are well-known to Old Testament scholars, which provided Velikovsky with his initial hint. It has been generally agreed that this event occurred at some time during the ‘New Kingdom’ of Egypt, dated from 1573 B.C.; the difficulty is in establishing precisely when. Not only is there no reference to the Exodus in any known Egyptian document, but the very state of Egypt, under strong Pharaohs, and with Palestine under its control, seems to render the course of events described by the Bible impossible. The result of all this is that a range of dates from the sixteenth century right down to the twelfth has been suggested for the Exodus by modern scholars.
Deity and Domination: II
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: July 2007

The concluding part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984. In the first part of this study of the relationship between the religious use of political images and concepts and their use in political rhetoric (published in January) the author focussed on the political and religious language of early seventeenth-century England.

With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 a kind of stability returned to England; conflicts and controversies there, of course, were in the political sphere, and even a ‘glorious revolution’, but compared with the preceding decades a certain peace and order is evident. There was a strong desire for peace among various sections of the population, and the economic and social foundations were being established upon which was to rise the political stability of the following century. By 1688, writes J. Carswell, ‘Englishmen were becoming used to the idea of reading about their domestic politics rather than fighting about them’. Ideas of arbitrary power were assailed and the notion of a law depending not simply on the dictate of a sovereign once more became predominant. This is particularly evident in the deist and rationalist writers of the period. God is not ‘an arbitrary being’, insisted Matthew Tindal, but the reasonable governor of a regulated universe. The order, stability and rationality of ‘the spacious firmament on high’ provided a model for social and political relationships. It would be little less than horrid and dreadful blasphemy, declared the influential archbishop John Tillotson, ‘to say that God out of his sovereign will and pleasure can do anything that contradicts the nature of God, or the essential perfections of his deity’.
A Disappointing Tale: The Dutch Catholic Church 1970–1985
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

On the 12th of May Pope John Paul II will arrive in Holland for his pastoral visit to the Dutch Church. What kind of Church will he meet? It will be a different Church from the Church that drew the attention of almost the whole western Christian world in the sixties. The bishops are very different, and because the Second Vatican Council changed in many ways the theology but not the organisation, the bishops still largely determine the policy. Changing the bishops still means changing the Church, in spite of all the talk about participation of the laity.

We must start with a little chronology. In the seven dioceses in Holland only two bishops may now be considered to be more or less sympathetic with the Church of the sixties, and both of these seem to be afraid to express their sympathy clearly and publicly. Since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1853 the chapter of a diocese where the bishop has died or resigned has had the right to propose, through the nuncio, three names to the Pope. The Pope has never been obliged to appoint any of those proposed, and sometimes he did not. However, since 1979 not one of the names of the appointed bishops has been on any of the lists of the chapters. In December 1970 a young conservative curate, A. Simonis, was made bishop of Rotterdam. Cardinal Alfrink and his colleagues hesitated for some time to ordain him, but after his promise to cooperate with the other bishops they decided to accept him.
The Children of Woot: Inheritance and Legacy
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

To define precisely the boundaries of a book review, a review article, and an article which draws on a book for its themes would seem to propose nice, indeed over-nice, questions; and what is over-nice tends to become nasty. If we seek to contextualize the term “book review” by insisting on the prior causality of an editor who selects both book and reviewer, this is not a book review at all, which is as well, as it would suggest an outrageous delay if a book published in 1978 were reviewed now. Nor is this even a review article, since I am not so much considering Jan Vansina’s The Children of Woot for its own valuable content, namely a discussion of the evidence for the history of the Kuba of Zaire, but rather as a jumping-off ground for reflections on two quite separate topics, the validity of historical knowledge as such, and the possibilities for development available to African societies in the pre-colonial era. The flavour that New Blackfriars has developed over the years comes surely from the recognition by successive editors of the areas of interplay of the sacred, the scholarly, and (in a very wide sense) the political as a primary focus, perhaps the primary focus. This encourages me to claim that Vansina’s suggestion (p. 242) that “the Kuba past consisted of more than events concerning a few people in a corner of the tropical woods” can be given a wider range than even he might intend.
When Belief Fails
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: July 2007

Given at Great. St Mary’s Cambridge on 19 February 1985

We are supposed to live in an age in which belief is harder than ever before. In fact the Dean of Emmanuel thinks that belief in any traditional form is just not possible for modern men and women. According to him, humanity in the late twentieth century finds itself alone in a disenchanted universe, the age-old props and comforts of religion have fallen away, and we are left with an austere, demanding, individual task of imposing meaning on the inane, of making ourselves and our ideals the heart of a heartless world. If we choose to call these ideals God, well and good; but when we say we ‘believe’ in God we don’t mean, the argument goes, what people in the past have meant by that. Their God was a sort of super-hero, a Dr Who figure, who made the lightning flash and the sun rise and who could be invoked to fend off the horrors of existence. This is superstition, says Don Cupitt, and so is any account of God which does not acknowledge that God is simply the sum of our human values, representing “their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power”. In other words; penetrate to the heart of religion, look closely at the image in the shrine, and what you will find is not the unseen God, but a mirror. The true name of YAHWEH is Narcissus. And we have heard this before.
Documents and Human Hearts: formal and experiential sexual morality
Authors: Stacpoole Alberic
Published: July 2007

For the true Christian it is axiomatic that the fundamental form of interpretation of the Scriptures is not search for meaning or valid patterns of thought for today, but discipleship: in other words, the enactment of Christian life, the establishment and building up of the Christian community, the singular and corporate worship of God, the completion of Christ’s Church by sharing in his afflictions (cf Col 1.24). The Christian interpretation of the Word of God occurs not in any private ‘religious’ place, but out where the human race speaks and suffers, endeavours and achieves. What Christian theology executes reflectively, Christian discipleship executes practically—mediating that memory and hope which we call the handing-on of the Gospel.

Where an opposite view prevails, responsibility for present interpretative mediation of the Gospel experience no longer devolves upon the community of Christian disciples, but far too much upon Church leaders and their theologians (commissioned as if only to explain the utterances of Authority). Christian living, which should always be responsively and responsibly interpretative—my affirmation of Christ’s call—in daily life, consequently tends merely to become the obedient practising of the explained ideas of others. Those ideas are received not in the context of our own mundane experience, cultural and psychological but before it, as the utterance of an ideology from an exterior citadei. Such utterances may appear standard to all societies, tunelessly valid, unaffected by particularity of place or people—in a word, universal and unchangeable (and so undebatable); they may satisfy the minds of those who construct pervasive patterns of thought. But above all what they can do is stifle the spirit of creative participation and joyful assent. The letter is made to prevail and the document rule; but the spirit then becomes joyless.
To the Archbishops and Bishops of England and Wales
Authors: Mills John Orme , Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

Next November the Extraordinary Synod assembles to evaluate how far the Church has succeeded in faithfully implementing the decisions of the Second Vatican Council. It is for this reason that we are here presenting, for the consideration of you, the bishops of England and Wales, a response written by a group of British Catholic theologians to what the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had to say about contemporary Catholicism in his famous Jesus interview. This is an unusual thing to do. Isn’t it rather an impertinence? A possible affront to the Cardinal Prefect? A possible embarrassment to the bishops?

We are convinced it is not. With his wonderful sense of ‘Catholic wholeness’, Cardinal Newman believed that an essential feature of authentic Church life is internal dialogue—in other words, continuous interrelating between three facets of the life of the Christian community: theology, worship and government. (Professor Lash says a little more about this in these pages). The Church only remains properly Catholic, in the truth, in so far as the dialogue continues. Catholics still often often feel that it is disloyal in any way to question what comes from ‘on high’. The Catholic who in any way dissents is identified as not properly ‘orthodox’. But orthodoxy requires us to believe that the Holy Spirit is poured upon the whole Church. And that Church remains Catholic because the conversation between the theologians and the bishops and the laity carries on.
Them Dry Bones
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: July 2007

One of the Brothers at the Irish De La Salle school where I began my education had a brisk warm-up routine for frosty mornings. It consisted of a rapid-fire set of catechism questions round the class. If you faltered or made a mistake you got a ferocious slap on either hand with a whippy three-foot cane, and went to the back of the line to be questioned again. The remembered tingle of swollen finger-ends as the second inquisition drew near is still capable of bringing me out in a sweat. It is some testimony to the effectiveness of this pedagogic technique, however, that while I have now wholly forgotten the Brother’s name, I have almost total recall of any question in the catechism, even at a distance of thirty years, and coasted through the first year of doctrine tutorials in my undergraduate theology degree- course on the strength of it—“I see that Duffy is the only member of the class who has actually read the Chalcedonian decrees”.

Indeed, it was as an elaborate mnemonic device that I think I chiefly valued it. Not just the riveting stacatto crispness of the question and answer form, and not just the lapidary elegance and compression of many of the answers, which seemed then, and seem still, admirable—‘What is prayer? Prayer is the raising up of the mind and heart to God’. Best of everything were all those wonderful lists: the three theological virtues and the four cardinal virtues, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost and the two great precepts of charity, the seven corporal works of mercy and the eight beatitudes, the seven deadly sins and the six sins against the Holy Ghost, the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance, the three eminent good works and the four last things.
The Church of Rome and Reunion
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

No one will deny that in the last twenty years since the Second Vatican Council there has been a wonderful growth in the ecumenical movement among Christians. Not only has the whole climate changed in the relation of the Christian churches to one another, but formal agreement has been reached with Anglicans, Lutherans and reformed churches on such formerly controversial subjects as the Eucharist and the Ministry. But there still remains one insuperable obstacle to Christian unity, which no amount of discussion has so far been able to overcome, and that is the claim of the Roman Church to the ‘universal jurisdiction’ and the ‘infallibility’ of the Pope. Is there no way out of this dilemma or is the Ecumenical movement doomed finally to break down at this point?

An answer to this problem has been offered in a recent book published in India, which proposes a solution from the Roman point of view on strictly orthodox lines. Its author is a Spanish Jesuit, Luis Bermejo, who is a professor of theology, formerly dean of the faculty of theology, at the Papal Seminary at Poona. His book consists of a series of articles contributed to theological reviews, which make a careful, scholarly survey of the historical grounds for these doctrines. His contention is that only a strictly historical method can answer the question of the validity of these doctrines. In the past it has been only too easy to read into the evidence of the New Testament and the Fathers the developed doctrine of a later age.
The Vatican and the Sisters of Mercy: differing views of the Church
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

Recent confrontations between the Vatican and the Sisters of Mercy, as well as with other groups of women religious, particularly with Americans, reveal a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship of Church and State, the sacred and the secular, held by the nuns, on the one hand, and the Vatican, on the other. Current Vatican policy assumes a rigid line between Church and State which makes any office-holding, either elected or appointed, in government, by either a priest or a nun, incompatible with the religious vocation. Although the first conflict between the Vatican and Sister Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy appeared to be primarily over differing interpretations of the relationship between personal morality and public policy in the specific case of payments for abortion, subsequent conflicts with the Sisters of Mercy over other nun office-holders went beyond specific differences over Church teachings on moral issues. The holding of any public office was defined as out of bounds for priests or religious: in other words, the Vatican pressed (and continues to press) for a very harsh interpretation of the restriction in the new Code of Canon Law (canon 285, 3) and for its world-wide observation.

A similar line has been taken in the case of the four priests who hold public office in the Nicaraguan revolutionary government and, most recently, the Italian priest who has been elected as a socialist to the European Parliament. In each case the resolution of the conflict is to force the person involved either to resign the public office or else be removed from their religious order (or, in the case of a diocesan priest, be suspended from priestly duties).
Which Book of Daniel?
Authors: Robinson Bernard P.
Published: July 2007

As every schoolboy once knew, the Church of Rome accepts the Longer Old Testament Canon rather than the shorter one read by Protestants and Jews. This means that she can invoke OT authority for the immortality of the soul (Wisd. 3. 1—9) and for the propriety and efficacy of prayers for the dead (2 Macc 12. 43—45). Apart, however, from a few proof texts of this sort, it is doubtful whether the so-called Deuterocanonical books and passages have much influence on Catholics. Take the case of the Book of Daniel. When they set out to expound Daniel Catholic writers tend either to give scant attention to the passages peculiar to the Longer Canon (so, e.g. Delcor, 1971 and Collins, 1981) or, as the present writer did in his brief commentary on Daniel (Robinson, 1971), to ignore them altogether. Should we not, perhaps, take our Canon more seriously?

In what follows, I shall first consider some general problems involved in taking one’s Canon, whether the Shorter or the Longer, seriously, without however getting entangled in the ‘canonical criticism’ debate.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the early Christian Church did not simply inherit an OT Canon from the Jewish people. The Jews, in fact, did not possess a fixed Canon for the OT as a whole until the late first or early second century of our era: the contents of the Pentateuch and of the Prophets had certainly been settled by the time of the beginning of Christianity, but the extent of the third division, the Writings, remained unclear.
The Likely Price of Peace: René Girard's hypothesis
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

Little Tom is trying to watch the TV, but his even smaller sister Naomi, will not stop walking between him and the screen. Here is a conflict. How is it to be solved? Tom can slap Naomi, but it is very likely that a row will develop that will end up with both of them being packed off to bed. Or he may call in the strong arm of one of his parents, but—though Tom may not realize it—this could be a dangerous course too: his parents may disagree with each other and the conflict could spread. Even end in divorce! Or Tom could find himself having to accept a compromise for which he will have to pay either now or later. In fact he does not hesitate a moment: he knows what to do. He gets up and starts playing with his sister’s doll. Naomi, seeing this, runs to her doll, and Tom can go back to the TV to watch his favourite programme in peace.

All of us, children and adults, often make use of the same strategem, especially in our love affairs. We all know how hard it can be to resist desiring what somebody else, or some other group, much desires, and to resist wanting what others have. The Falklands became important for the British people immediately the Argentinians commandeered them; and, because they were British-occupied, the Argentinians had for many decades desired them. In that case the conflict got out of hand and exploded into violence.
By Rather Dim Lights
Authors: Tatham Michael , Hebblethwaite Peter
Published: July 2007

I don’t see how the rather obnoxious Tory voters can be excommunicated. They are acting according to their rather dim lights (something that most ‘progressive’ Catholics applaud when it is a matter of Humanae Vitae).

Peter Hebblethwaite New Blackfriars December 1984 p. 499

Perhaps one of the most rewarding things to remember when one is playing with ideas is that nothing remains as it is for very long, and, what is rather more awkward, just as ideas are soon outmoded and superseded, so too the nature of the problems with which we are engaged changes before our very eyes. It is as if the entire process is taking place on a cinema screen where the credits continuously merge into new lines.

Even the apparently successful outcome of some process of study or legislation can be seen in the long run to have produced not so much a final answer as a formidable tariff of new problems. Medical science’s ability to reduce infant mortality and prolong the average expectation of life has created a situation in which—were it to be taken seriously—the Church’s traditional pastoral and moral teaching, with its primitive emphasis on fertility, would be a serious threat to the future. Recent matrimonial legislation to improve the position of women has been so successful that further legislation is now urgently required to protect not only husbands, but the unfortunate wives of second alliances. In the early years of this century it would have been impossible for pioneers in the Labour Movement to foresee that within a man’s lifetime the power of the unions mobilised for sectional self-interest under the laissez-faire banner of ‘free collective bargaining’ would play a decisive role in destroying a Labour government.
The option for the poor in South Africa
Authors: Nolan Albert
Published: July 2007

‘This phrase (the option for the poor) burst upon the ecclesiastical scene only a few years ago. Since then it has become the most controversial religious term since the Reformers’ cry, “salvation by faith alone’’.’

These are the opening words of Donal Dorr’s recent book on the option for the poor and Vatican social teaching. He is not exaggerating. I should say that the challenge to the church, to almost all our churches, represented by this term ‘option for the poor’ goes far beyond anything envisaged by the Reformers. It challenges both Catholic and Protestant, and it challenges us in a very fundamental way.

Here, I should like to do little more than open up the debate about the option for the poor in South Africa. The question has been raised here and there in a variety of forms, mostly without the term ‘option for the poor’; but in South Africa there has been no systematic Christian practice based upon it and not much research and reflection around this controversial phrase. My intention, then, is to open up the specific approach implied in this new theological term for further research, reflection, debate and practice.

There is a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the meaning of the phrase itself, and even a measure of deliberate distortion of its meaning. Hence, in the first place, it will be necessary to state quite clearly what we are talking about and even more importantly what we are not talking about.
Walter Kasper and his theological programme
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Walter Kasper’s name is by now well-known among English-speaking readers of theology: the 1984 translation of Der Gott Jesu Christi following on the translating in 1976 of Jesus der Christus established his reputation as a writer at once conceptually rigorous and historically well-informed. What is less understood, however, is the total context to which these works belong. From Kasper’s background in the Tubingen School his writings so far can be shown to represent a total theological programme of a quite distinctive kind. This programme is not only of considerable intrinsic interest. It also has a wider church-political significance in the light of Kasper’s selection as the official theologian of the Roman Synod Secretariat, encharged with the collation and theological analysis of the ‘submissions’ made to the Holy See by national conferences of bishops in readiness for the 1985 Synod on ‘The Church after Vatican II’. His appointment offers a useful key to the debate about the intentions of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and more generally, of the Roman Curia in its higher echelons) in the middle 1980’s. In particular, it helps to determine whether these intentions are best described as ‘Neo-Ultramontane’, as argued (in effect) by a group of writers in New Blackfriars in June 1985, or rather, as the present author has maintained, as offering a via media or re-accentramento (‘re-centring’) for Church and theology, amid the competing voices of left and right-wing radicalism in post-conciliar Catholicism. This is a debate which has not ended with the ending of the Synod.
God and Freedom: A Discussion
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

‘If there is no logical impossibility in a man’s freely choosing the good on one, or on several occasions, there cannot be a logical impossibility in his freely choosing the good on every occasion. God was not, then, faced with a choice between making innocent automata and making beings who, in acting freely, would sometimes go wrong: there was open to him the obviously better possibility of making beings who would act freely but always go right. Clearly, his failure to avail himself of this possibility is inconsistent with his being both omnipotent and wholly good’.

(J.L. Mackie, ‘Evil and Omnipotence’, Mind, April 1955, p. 209)

A. So we are agreed that since God is the Creator he is responsible for everything that happens in creation.

B. That would seem to be so.

A. But how are we to understand ‘responsible’ here? Could it mean that God does everything that is done?

B. Apparently it does. For what is done is done either by God or by something else. Yet what something other than God does is created and God is therefore responsible for it. So everything that is done must be done by God.

A. That seems to follow. But it is subjects who do things, is it not?

B. If that means that what is done is done by something or other, then, of course, I agree.

A. And does not this mean that what is done is done by an agent?

B. Certainly.
A Long Sermon for Holy Week
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

I am here concerned with the paschal mystery; so, first of all, a few words about mystery.

Mystery is a depth of meaning. There are two things to notice here. Firstly, mystery belongs to what has meaning, to the signs and symbols and gestures through which we understand. (If we see event as mystery it is because we see it as word.) Secondly, mystery always refers to the not-so-obvious, deeper meaning that is perhaps hidden at first. So mystery concerns what shows itself but does not show itself easily. Mysteries are not for concealment but for revelation; it is because the revelation is so important and so profound that we have to work to understand it.

This is not meant to be a very difficult idea. Take, for example, a play like Macbeth. It is quite clear that you can appreciate the meaning of this play at many levels. In the first place it is a good thriller about murder and intrigue at court. At another, slightly deeper, level it is a piece of English political propaganda slandering the memory of a perfectly decent king who was, however, Scottish. At a deeper level still it is a tragedy about a man over-reaching himself; about the relationship of human life with nature and especially with time. It is about how we belong to the cosmos and to the time that is given to us and yet seek to transcend this and to belong to ourselves, and it is about the revenge that time and nature take upon us.
Lonergan and Systematic Spiritual Theology
Authors: Helminiak Daniel A.
Published: July 2007

Popular enthusiasm for spirituality has mushroomed in the past two decades. The analyses of the human sciences and the impact of secular self-help programs have challenged the religious basis of spiritual pursuit. The influence of gurus from the East has transformed the problematic. The need for a systematic spirituality that can sort out the issues and relate them insightfully grows more urgent. In different ways, the thought of Bernard Lonergan, summarized in Method in Theology, speaks to the present need. Here I shall suggest some of those ways.

Introduction: The Need for Theory

Spirituality is a broad field. It entails many practical issues. These include: prayer and how one does it, from vocal prayer and lectio divina to discursive meditation and contemplation and mysticism; the possible physiological correlates of religious experience: postures, breathing, fasting, sensory and sleep deprivation, sexual abstinence, anatomical and neuro-chemical bases, and even drug ingestion; spiritual direction and questions of discernment of spirits; the social dimensions of public prayer and liturgies, group prayer, and group psychic and religious experience; prescriptions for ‘holy’ living; and study of the various traditions, both Western and Eastern, and of modern psychology. These all have to do with practice, and they are not to be minimized. If spirituality has any real significance, it must be in the practice. This field can less tolerate mere thinking and talking about the subject than can other fields of theology as currently conceived.
Apocalyptic and the Peace Movement
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

Based on a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1986.

What relationship, if any, is there between contemporary apocalyptic and the contemporary Peace Movement?

Whatever it was in its original form, in its current form apocalyptic is the belief that God is moving in history to a violent climax in which he will defeat his enemies, both human and supernatural. The appearance of Christ will mark the end of this age and the beginning of a thousand- year reign of peace for the elect. We are now living in the End Times and it is possible to detect the signs of the End in natural disasters and political/military events. These signs are a warning to human beings. For those who have eyes to see, they have been clearly prophesied in the Scriptures. Repentence and belief in Christ is required for a person to be saved from the great tribulation which is about to come.

Such beliefs are shared by a range of contemporary Christian groups, though these differ in important ways amongst themselves, especially over the interpretation of historical events and the nature of the final war: for instance, whether or not it will be a nuclear war. Such beliefs appear to be on the increase in the United States and perhaps also in Britain, even among members of the main-stream churches. It is not difficult to see the increased fear of nuclear holocaust as a major factor in the new popularity of apocalyptic beliefs.
The Return of the Roman Catholics to Oxford
Authors: Stacpoole Alberic
Published: July 2007

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.

The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.

From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.
Gilbert Márkus's ‘Theologies of Repression’
Authors: Searle Peter , Márkus Rev Gilbert
Published: July 2007

In his article of this title, which we published last January, Gilbert Márkus OP wrote about the political and social influences of some of the evangelical groups now in Central America, and he mentioned World Vision, which has its headquarters in California. The Director of World Vision of Britain writes:

The incidents to which your author refers, predominantly in the present tense, occurred approximately five years ago and this in itself is extremely misleading. World Vision, while we have 75 development projects in Honduras, caring for some 10,000 children and their families, together with some other general development work, has no involvement whatever in relief projects or refugee involvement in areas where fighting is going on. This has been the case for approximately four years so, again, your article is misleading.
Aquinas on Good Sense
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

I was asked to contribute something about St Thomas Aquinas to this collection in honour of Kenelm—an activity rather like offering a short paper on Karl Marx in a festschrift for Lenin. Much of whatever understanding I have of Aquinas I owe to the insights and scholarly precision of Kenelm’s writings and I shall not in this paper attempt to play in his league. This will be an elementary introduction to an important part of Aquinas’s thinking which was neglected for some centuries and is only in our own receiving the attention it deserves. I am concerned with the virtue he calls prudentia. I have nothing original to contribute here (except perhaps some mistakes); what I will say will be new only to those to whom Aquinas is new, but there are perhaps, enough of these to justify yet another simple introduction.

As is almost always the case with Aquinas’s technical vocabulary, the nearest English word to the Latin one would be a mistranslation: prudentia does not mean what we call prudence. Prudence suggests to us a certain caution and canniness, whereas prudentia is much nearer to wisdom, practical wisdom.

Fortunately, however, we have a nearly perfect English equivalent in Jane Austen’s phrase ‘good sense’. I take Jane Austen to be centrally concerned not with presenting the ethos of the new respectable middle class but rather with the failure of the new bourgeoisie to live satisfactory lives because of the inability of the older ‘aristocratic’ tradition to transmit to them a certain outlook and way of behaving and education that came down to the author via the remains of a Christian morality.
Manzoni and Leopardi—Kenelm Foster's Interpretation
Authors: Caesar Michael
Published: July 2007

To a former student like myself, to whom Kenelm’s conversation about the Italian Ottocento was as stimulating over the years as his teaching on the subject had been sure and authoritative in undergraduate and postgraduate days, it was always something of a shock to remember how relatively little he had published in this area of Italian literature. Two major essays, both of which started life as lectures, two invaluable translations, a scattering of lesser articles and reviews—these, combined with his presence as teacher and talker, were enough to ensure his status as an indispensable point of reference in any discussion of the early nineteenth century in Italy.

The two lecture-essays—on the idea of truth in Manzoni and Leopardi (1967) and in commemoration of Manzoni on the centenary of his death (1973)—are not so much the report of specific pieces of research as syntheses, dense and sometimes tense, of what Kenelm judged to be the most important things he had to say about the subject. And the subject mattered to him a lot. Manzoni was important because, as he put it in the centenary lecture, he was ‘that uncommon thing, a considerable Christian artist’—adding in pen to his own copy the word ‘very’ before ‘considerable’—and Leopardi was in some sense his antithesis. What Kenelm had in mind when he thought about Christian art is discussed elsewhere in this issue.