bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Problem of Evil and Modern Philosophy — II
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

Is God morally good? Is he morally bad? Confronted by the reality of evil his defenders have sometimes said that he is morally good, or, at least, that there is insufficient proof of his moral badness. Why? Because, so they say, the following argument is acceptable:

1

In creating, God brings about or allows various evils.

2

These evils are justified since they go along with some good or goods which depend on them in some way.

3

Evil can therefore be seen as part of God’s justified plan in creating or allowing for certain goods.

But does it make sense to say either that God is morally good or that he is not? This is the question I raised at the end of my previous article on God and Evil.

Many people would find it odd, or even offensive, They would say that since God is good, he is bound by moral requirements in the way that human beings are, that the goodness of God is moral goodness, where that is understood in the same way as it is when ascribed to men and women. Richard Swinburne is a good representative of this view. God, he says, is perfectly good. What does this mean? It means, says Swinburne, that God knows which actions are morally good and which actions are morally bad, and that God always does actions which are morally good and never does actions which are morally bad. According to Swinburne, ‘God’s perfect goodness follows deductively from his omniscience and his perfect freedom’. Since God is omniscient he will ‘know the truth value of all moral judgments whether or not they are true or false’. Since he is perfectly free he ‘will always do any action which he recognizes to be over all better to do than not to do, and so one which he judges to be morally obligatory’.
Why are most Christians on the defensive with respect to Marxism?
Authors: Roy Louis
Published: July 2007

The quality of Christian life partly depends on how those who believe in Jesus understand what religion is about. As a theologian I am not directly concerned with the pros and cons of Marxist theory and of Communist practice. My preoccupation is rather firstly to pay attention to Marx’s denying any permanent value to Christian ethics and religion; secondly to ask whether Marx’s assessment of Christian practice is compatible or not with the way most of the faithful have interpreted Christianity in the last few centuries; and thirdly to offer a few considerations on the possibility of partially overcoming religious idealism with the help of both psychology and Marxism.

I hope that it will become evident in due course that a certain number of Christians have been, are and will be on the defensive with respect to Marxism inasmuch as they are a very definite brand of believers, whom we may call ‘idealist’ believers. I shall argue that so far as we are idealist believers, we cannot but forthrightly reject Marxism en bloc, because to our idealist eyes, it necessarily looks like pure materialism. Being two extremes, sheer idealism and sheer materialism cannot but repudiate each other. And in contrast to this main reason for banning Marx from being a partner in fruitful dialogue, I consider as secondary all the other — often legitimate — reasons that we may have to criticize many aspects of both Marxist theory and Communist practice.
Prophecy and the Poor: Fr Vincent McNabb and Distributism
Authors: Cunningham Angela
Published: July 2007

Fr Vincent McNabb (1868-1943) was one of the most widely- known Dominicans of the English Province from the years prior to the First World War up to his death in the Second. Apart from his work internally within the Order he was well-known to Londoners for his appearances for the Catholic Evidence Guild at Speakers’ Comer in Hyde Park and for his involvement in social action, which sometimes made the tabloid headlines. He was involved in the ecumenical movement, in speaking and writing prolifically on all kinds of topics on all sorts of platforms and in all kinds of publications, sometimes far beyond Catholic or even Christian circles. He was a spiritual director and retreat giver of distinction, and he gave lectures on Aquinas under the auspices of the University of London Extension Lectures scheme — an unforgettable teacher according to many students. Clearly an apostolate of remarkable range.

He was a man who aroused strong feelings, and some within the Order were critical of him. One of the grounds for criticism concerned his involvement with Distributism, the social and philosophical movement most commonly associated with Belloc and Chesterton, and it is this area of his life which provides the focus of this article.

McNabb was unique in the influence he wielded in this most lay of movements, although in a private letter of 1932 Fr Vincent denied being a Distributist. His rejection of the label can perhaps provide a point of departure for trying to understand the place of Distributism in McNabb’s thinking.

Fr Vincent was quite clear that he was, first, a Dominican priest and, secondly, a theologian. From an early age he had held firmly that priests should not be involved in politics — in 1914 he wrote in The Tablet that ‘Tragic events during my school life in the North of Ireland have given me a deep-seated distaste for the priest-politician’.
Bodiliness and the Good News — I
Authors: West Angela
Published: July 2007

This paper was originally written for the Glencar Summer School, the theme of which for that year was Liberation. The space for this contribution was entitled ‘Liberation in the Family’. As a Christian feminist, my own concern in the area of family is how women can serve in the family of God; this latter I take to be as different from The Family (of popular and sociological imagination) as the Kingdom of God is different from say, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the two parts of this article, I hope to explore the experience of a group of women so as to demonstrate the meaning that is fully entailed by ‘Liberation in the Family’. That is, I believe, that it necessarily involves us in a reappraisal of our whole theological understanding of the Body and the Spirit.

Recently there have been several attempts to introduce Latin American liberation theology into this country. These attempts can usually be recognized by their chief catchphrase — ‘doing theology’. ‘Doing theology’ is represented as being a practical and political affair which everyone can take part in, and which is the opposite and alternative to academic theology, which is believed to be remote, abstract and oriented to the elite. But the problem with this approach to ‘doing theology’ is that it tends to leave us with another abstraction. What in Latin America was the result of a historical and political process, and the naming a new reality as a result of this process, becomes in translation to our historical reality simply a new abstraction.
Radical Alternatives: Conceptual Schemes and Expressive Behaviour
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Professor Mary Hesse wrote as follows:

“The thought forms of alien cultures may be so foreign to our own that it might make sense to say that I understand my dog, or even my chrysanthemums, better than I understand those people”.

No doubt that is a provocative formulation of the problem of understanding other people. In fact, as the context shows, what she means by understanding her dog is that she can teach him tricks and predict his visible behaviour. What she is suggesting, then, is that, confronted with people of a radically different culture from our own, we might find it impossible to teach them anything because their behaviour was unpredictable — so unpredictable as to make communication between us impossible. With the nearing prospect of inter-planetary, and eventually of inter-galactic, travel, of course, the question of communication with deeply alien beings is no longer entirely academic. But for a long time now, certainly, since the expansion of ethnography and social anthropology in the wake of the European colonisation of the rest of the world, we have been increasingly troubled by the thought that, even on Earth, human beings may already be, or may always have been, hopelessly unintelligible out of their own culture. It might even be something of a relief, in view of the appalling atrocities that have occurred this century, to accept that some people may simply see everything in a completely different conceptual framework from others. It would explain the horrifying breakdowns of consensus about moral and political values.
Dismantling the Monolith? A Retrospective View of the Papal Visit
Authors: White Allan
Published: July 2007

In February of 1982 Cardinal Hume addressed a press conference on his hopes for the forthcoming papal visit to Britain. At that time the full horrors of the Falklands war were still lodged in the dim recesses of the Argentine military mind and the seemingly endless resources of British colonial nostalgia were still untapped. The Cardinal was able to speak of the renewal that the pope’s presence and message would bring as well as the challenge he would present to pastors and people calling them to “a fundamental change of ourselves”. In the euphoria that accompanied and immediately followed the Pope in Britain many people spoke of “things never being the same again”. In a few short days of glorious summer weather he was said to have given the Church here a sense of renewed confidence, hope and pride in its own history and traditions. He proved sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the various national communities that form the United Kingdom. He was openly committed to ecumenical dialogue and the tone of his speeches was so eirenic and positive that Peter Nichols in The Times wondered “if we cannot start thinking about the weekend that produced John Paul III”. Paradoxically this seems to point not so much to a renewal of the Church in Britain as to the personal conversion of the Pope to a new interpretation of the Petrine office. This interpretation has particular implications for the development of the theology of the Church as well as revealing not only the virtues of the Pope but the weaknesses of the Church in Britain. Until these implications are examined the renewal hoped for by the Archbishop of Westminster and his brother bishops in England, Wales and Scotland will be delayed if not altogether blighted.
A Note on Cosmological Arguments
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

I am very grateful indeed to Fr Brian Davies for treating my work with such sympathy and thoroughness. He has put forward objections to some of my arguments and conclusions which richly deserve some attempt on my part at an answer.

Fr Davies approves of a recent suggestion by Anthony Flew, derived from Kant, that one should distinguish sharply between those types of argument for God’s existence which try to establish it from the mere fact of the world, and those which do so on the basis of some particular characteristic of the world. They propose that the term ‘cosmological argument’ should be kept for arguments of the former class. With great respect and suitable trepidation, I would wish to dissent from this formidable team of authorities, preferring as I do a threefold division. For I believe it is very important in this context to distinguish between two sorts of properties which things or the world may have; one sort, by virtue of the fact that they can be objects of our knowledge at all; the other which they just happen to have as a matter of fact, independently of their knowability by us. Let us distinguish these as respectively A properties and B properties. Now the effect of the proposal of Kant, Flew and Davies is to reduce theistic arguments which are not versions of the ontological arguments to two types — those from the mere existence of things or the world, and those from the B properties of things and the world.
Atonement and Moral Apocalypticism: William Styron's Sophie's Choice
Authors: Surin Kenneth
Published: July 2007

In this essay I shall be discussing William Styron’s depiction of a theologically significant incident in his recent novel Sophie's Choice (London: Corgi Books, 1979). Since our discussion will approach this novel from a theological, as opposed to a purely literary, standpoint, it behoves us to begin by specifying the theological context of the argument that we hope to develop in this essay. This essay is concerned with the doctrine of the Atonement. More specifically: we shall argue that Styron’s narration of the episode which gives his book its title provides a basis for a criticism of all purely ‘subjective’ interpretations of the Atonement. The adherent of a purely ‘subjective’ conception of the Atonement emphasizes the manner in which the believer makes the work of Christ his own — the saving significance of Christ’s work is reckoned by the ‘subjectivist’ to lie in the ways in which individuals appropriate that work. That is to say, Christ’s saving work takes the form of a ‘subjective’ process; it is, in the words of Donald Baillie (a notable modem proponent of the ‘subjective’ conception), a “reconciling of us to God through a persuasion in our hearts that is ... a realizing of His eternal love”.

‘Subjective’ understandings of the Atonement have come to prevail in recent years. This is mainly because ‘objective’ conceptions are invariably bound up with incarnational christologies, and incarnational christologies no longer totally dominate the theological consensus. Instead, so-called ‘functional’ christologies tend increasingly to be in vogue, and since a ‘subjective’ understanding of the Atonement accords better with a ‘functional’ christology than it does with a fully incarnational (or ‘ontological’) christology, there has been a recognizable drift away from ‘objective’ conceptions of the Atonement.
The Language of Ritual
Authors: Grainger Roger
Published: July 2007

In this article I shall be making some attempt to look at Christian ritual from the particular angle of its nature as a medium for the communication of theological ideas. Ritual, and particularly sacramental ritual, is itself a specific kind of human discourse, one particularly suited to the description of religious experiences and the codification of religious thought. Ritual is a language. The structural principle according to which all language operates is the identical principle underlying any kind of human understanding: the neurological function of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate between percepts. Just as the formation of ideas depends on the ability to discriminate ‘this’ from ‘that’ - whatever ‘this’ and ‘that’ may actually be — so the communication of ideas both to oneself and to other people has discrimination and differentiation as its main purpose, for the action of distinguishing is also the action of relating, and once we are able to hold the objects of perception in tension we can organise our experience into articulated statements about the world: we can relate our own experience to that of other people.

A language, then, is a way of distinguishing between experiences in order to relate them to one another. By relating one thing to another, we are able to alter the meaning we ascribe to similarity and division, so that we now see connections when we were once only aware of oppositions, and logic where there used to be nonsense.
Hegemony and the Talking Cross
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

That useful and interesting publication, African Arts, regularly sends out a questionnaire to its readers asking them for details of financial details, range of interests, and criticisms of editorial policy. The picture of the average reader which emerges, a prosperous art collector, or prospering would-be collector, seems to reflect the advertisements rather than the articles. Were New Blackfriars to launch such a questionnaire, one would be little surprised to find that the average reader is an under-wealthy book addict who through the articles enjoys her/his fantasies of endless and fascinating reading in well-stocked and up-to-date libraries. For such people a worthwhile, or, at least interesting, questionnaire could be constructed to test their control of semantic variations by seeing how they defined various “in” words. One problem, of course, is that “in” words must shift in meaning if they are to stay “in” indefinitely. One “in” word is “hegemony” which received from Gramsci a neat specification as the situation in which a group dominates society by means other than force, fraud, or consent. Unfortunately, the word has also become a resource for translating Chinese foreign policy statements in which “hegemony” refers to the domination of the super-powers over their allies. I want in this article to use “hegemony” in discussing Spanish colonial, and Ladino post-colonial domination of the Maya Indians of Yucatan Chiapas, and Guatemala, and the way in which Maya resistance developed new forms of authority, based on the “assumption” of some of the symbols used by their conquerors.
Turner on ‘Operative Rituals’: A Sociological Response
Authors: Flanagan Kieran
Published: July 2007

In a rather bleak essay, Charles Davis observed in 1970 that ‘the general verdict upon liturgical reform is that it has failed to solve the problem of worship in a secular age’ and ‘that the chief effect of the reforms has been to uncover an insoluble problem’. Any sociological response to liturgical renewal came after the late sixties as a critical reaction to changes implemented as a result of Vatican II. There was certainly no sociological participation in the demands for liturgical change prior to 1963. As a result the Conciliar reforms did not so much answer a sociological scepticism as generate one that has developed increasingly since. The attempt to relate the shape of rite, to what were perceived as the cultural and social needs of a secular modem society, merged with a wish to maximise the active participation of the laity in the liturgy, whose simplicity and clarity of form, would enable a worshipping community to develop as a witness to an increasingly sceptical society.

Pre-Conciliar forms of rite were rigid in shape, objectively secured in complex rubrics, but were considered as implausible and irrelevant to contemporary needs. The tenor of the new rites was a mixture of looser simplified rubrics, in the General Instruction ol the Roman Missal, 1969, matched to a sensitivity to pastoral and cultural needs. But this wish for some degree of adaptability (that satisfied neither radicals nor conservatives) pre-supposed some criteria of assessing changes in form as affecting local situations. If indigenization was to occur some form of systematic evaluation seemed desirable. Initially, the changes were met with indifference by sociologists of religion, who have displayed little interest in the social nature of liturgy since.
Reconciliation in the Middle East
Authors: Gross Selwyn
Published: July 2007

In everyday parlance, the term “reconciliation” is used in at least two distinct senses. Think of someone saying: “They were reconciled with each other after all those years”. The picture which comes to mind is the establishment of some kind of peace or harmony after years of disagreement. “Reconciliation” in this sense is seen as eminently good and well worth striving for by active means. In religious terms, when one talks of reconciliation, one tends to think of an almost eschatological situation, when all human beings are consciously reconciled in Christ, and God is “all-in-all”. There is, however, another, more ambiguous sense of the term, although it is not as common, and does not spring as readily to mind as the unambiguously positive usage of the term. Consider hearing someone say: “They have reconciled themselves to the probability of being made redundant next week”, or something of the sort. Here, the term “reconciliation” is used in a manner not unlike “resignation”. “They are now resigned to their situation.” It is not necessarily positive, and implies a passive and perhaps grudging acceptance. It is worth bearing both of these senses of the term in mind, since different models of the tensions created in the Middle East by the existence and behaviour of the State of Israel use different senses of “reconciliation” in positing ways in which the conflict could be brought to a resolution.

My brief is to talk about “reconciliation in the Middle East”. It is my intention not to talk about the Middle East in general, but rather to focus upon Israel, to examine those things which demand reconciliation, the actors in the Israeli situation, and factors making for reconciliation.
The Emmaus Story: Necessity and Freedom
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

The Emmaus story, Luke 24:13-35, is a bifocal narrative. It pivots on two moments of disclosure and the puzzle is how they relate. The first is on the road, when Jesus interprets the Scriptures: ‘“Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and so enter his glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (v 26). The second is in Emmaus, when they recognise him in the breaking of bread, but Luke cleverly links it with the first by having the disciples immediately remember what happened on the road: “And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts bum within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures’” (v 3 If). Finally, the two climaxes of the story are brought together in the last line of the pericope, when they report back to the disciples in Jerusalem: “Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v 35). The first moment of insight is in the perception of the necessity of Christ’s death; the second is in the repetition of the gesture of the Last Supper, Jesus’ free appropriation of that death in the breaking of bread.
No to the Nuclear Warriors: The US Bishops' Pastoral
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

The final version of the US bishops’ pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response, although it is not without its disappointments, is still an extraordinary document which is going to have an irreversible effect on the way the Catholic Church thinks about nuclear war. It is not out of the blue however, having spent a long time in gestation — at least since the bishops’ 1976 statement on deterrence, “To Live in Christ Jesus”. And it is the fruit of at least two major developments of thinking about modem war: on the one hand Papal and Conciliar teaching on total war, which began with Pius XII’s broadcasts during World War II; on the other hand modern American scholarship in the Just War tradition, which has been stimulated by the sense of responsibility for Hiroshima and Vietnam. If the main moral thrust — their “No to nuclear war” — comes from the former, it is the latter which set up the possibility for intelligent open debate in the United States on the morality of modern weapons and strategy. But one must give due recognition to a third influence: the profound effect which a handful of Catholic pacifists such as Dorothy Day, Gordon Zahn and James Douglass have had on some of the American bishops.

The remarkable thing is the confidence with which the bishops have intervened in the debate in their own country: not merely with well-meaning generalities such as normally afflicts church documents, but with tough arguments on particular policies, many of which are clearly opposed to those of the US Administration.
Peace Education
Authors: Moonan Lawrence
Published: July 2007

In this discussion-paper I look at certain general kinds of peace which certain general kinds of “education” are calculated to bring about, if they succeed; in order first to see which if any of them is ultimately worth having. I find at least one, and at present only one general kind of peace to be worth having; and then examine two broad “realistic” ways — the only “realistic” ways I yet see — in which we might think to achieve that peace. I find neither of those ways to be ultimately capable of delivering that peace, and nearly all the more sensible forms of “peace education” which I have yet heard canvassed, to be tacitly or expressly geared to one or other of those ways. (The present paper came in response to a review of literature on peace education which I was called upon to make, some time ago.) I then consider an “unrealistic” possible way to achieving the same sort of supposedly worthwhile peace, finding that the chances of ever achieving it by that way are slender in the extreme, and that the forms of “education” which I see to be needed in order to achieve it by that general route are themselves so dangerous that the “unrealistic” route too may well find no sensible takers.

After a discursive opening I present an argument with “small holes” in it. By that I mean that assumptions would have to be supplied, at various stages, to make the argument even formally valid; and that many of the steps I do express would have to be rewritten for a similar purpose.
Barry Barnes, The Sociology of Relevance, and the Relevance of Sociology
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

I thought of putting something in the title about theology. Better not. Juxtaposing theology and any single social science might recall the sermon in The Way of All Flesh in which geology was shown first to be totally without significance for theology and then to be positive evidence for the literal truth of Genesis. If theology is to be explained away by sociology, that shows insufferable presumption. If theology could be helped by sociology, which would mean that theologians could or should learn something of it, then this would seem to burden yet further theological curricula. If sociology has no special relevance, but yet is an honourable way of earning a living, both sociologists and theologians should continue to cultivate their separate gardens; but is this not the old idea that something could be true in theology and false in philosophy, and vice-versa, which so annoyed Aquinas?

Fundamentally, the objection to the involvement of sociology in theology seems to be that sociology developed to study things going wrong. There can be a sociology of error; can there be a sociology of truth? The best way of answering this seems to be to look at the work of the American historian of science, T S Kuhn, as presented by the Edinburgh sociologist, Barry Barnes.
Church and Family 1: Church and Family in the Scriptures and Early Christianity
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

We hear much today, particularly from conservative American Christians, about the need to restore the Biblical view of the family. It is assumed by these spokespersons that the “Biblical family” is a male-dominated nuclear family consisting of a working husband, a non-working wife, who is full-time “mother”, and several dependent children. What is really being assumed here is that the Bible endorses a conservative version of the late Victorian, Anglo-Saxon patriarchal family. Such rhetoric about the “Biblical view of the family” lacks a sense of the socio-economic history of the family over the last three to four thousand years. It is taken for granted that this Victorian ideal of the patriarchal nuclear family was created in the Garden of Eden and has remained static ever since, until a recent period in the twentieth century when, for some inexplicable reason, it began to be “undermined” by feminism, gay rights and delinquent children. It is not necessary, then, to reflect upon the norm itself the forces that are challenging it, but simply to restore what is presumed to have always been, as the expression of God’s will.
The Sense of an Ending
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

Life stories have a beginning, a middle and an ending. Our sense of the ending depends on our basic faith concerning the ultimate meaning and value of our life story. The entire life story of Jesus Christ and its particular ending in the resurrection equips Christian faith with its sense of the ending of both our individual life stories and of the universal story that is history. The resurrection expresses the belief that the Storyteller’s Creator Spiritus of life-giving love, which enabled Jesus Christ to find his true story, also enables us to find our true stories with the same love that survives death in the resurrection of the just.

The story of the Last Judgment, which also expresses faith’s sense of an ending, implies that the love which survives death is a responsible love. We are responsible for the incipient life stories that we have gratuitously received; and we are responsible for finding our true stories in virtue of the life-giving love that we have received. Our freedom is such that we are not necessarily predetermined by the gift of the life-giving love to the finding of our true story. What has been freely received may be freely rejected.
Judaism and the Universe of Faiths
Authors: Cohn‐Sherbok Rabbi Dan
Published: July 2007

Recently there has been considerable discussion in Christian circles about the relationship between Christianity and the world religions. Traditionally Christians have insisted that anyone outside the Church cannot be saved. To quote a classic instance of this view, the Council of Florence in 1483-45 declared that: ‘no one remaining outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans but also Jews or heretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life: but they will go to everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels. Unless before the end of life they are joined to the Church’.

Increasingly, however, for many this view has seemed highly improbable in the light of contact with other faiths. An important document issued by the Catholic Church in 1965 (Nostra Aetate) for example declared that the truth which enlightens every man is reflected also in non-Christian religions. Nevertheless while recognising the value of other religions, this declaration maintains that the Christian is at the same time under the obligation to preach that Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Liberation Ethics and Idealism
Authors: Fourez Gerard
Published: July 2007

Liberation theologies provide a framework for serious reflection about systemic issues. But some liberation theologians, while urging social change, foster a guilt-inducing process which actually prevents both personal and social change. The tendency to moralize individual life is thus simply transposed into moralizing and collective issues. Absolute search for justice can even sometimes become offensive. The content of normative ethics is changed but the same guilt-inducing attitudes remain.

This article is concerned with the construction of a “liberation ethics” which goes beyond the mere transposition of idealistic moral philosophy to a new set of issues. It deals with the meaning of ethical principles and of sin, while constructing an ethics based on historical accounts of liberation. Interestingly, this approach is consonant with the “different voice” of women in ethics, as it has been analysed by scholars like Carol Gilligan.

The Shortcomings of Idealistic Ethics
“My Lord and my God”: The locus of confession
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

Most New Testament scholars would agree with Raymond Brown when he claims that there are only three passages in Scripture which indisputably call Jesus God, and that two of these are in John’s gospel, in the first verse and at the very end, in Thomas’ confession (20:28). And theologians are divided in their reaction to this “high” johannine christology between those who welcome it as an unambiguous declaration of the divinity of Christ, the first step towards Nicea, and those who find it very odd, perhaps intolerably odd, to address any man, even this man, as God and so can only accept it as an eccentric way of claiming that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God, or that, at worst, this is the beginning of a dogmatic tradition that betrays the man Jesus. I would like to suggest that the way forward is to recognise that something very curious is indeed happening in the Prologue and in Thomas’ confession but rather than cope with these odd statements by pretending that they are actually saying something much less scandalous (“Jesus is the man who definitively reveals God”), we must admit that they only have meaning within a particular context.

It should be possible to write a sociology of the early church which would show that particular sorts of christological claims only came to be made at a certain point in the history of the church because it was only then that the ecclesial context existed in which such claims could make sense.
Strikes: Reformulating Catholic Thinking in Britain
Authors: Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

If it is to be of real value, Catholic discussion in Britain on the right to strike must take into account the main strands of reflection so far on the subject. My object here is simply to draw attention to these, not to describe them in detail, much less to make here a theoretical contribution to the discussion myself.

It may be of interest to begin with three contrasting examples of clerical reflection born out of social realities. Cardinal Manning’s social thinking had an important influence on trade unionists even in his own lifetime. He seems to have developed personal friendships with some union leaders, described rather ambiguously as ‘some of their most famous agitators’ by the anonymous writer of the 1934 Preface to a collection of Manning’s works on social questions. Manning was deeply and personally involved in the celebrated London dock strike of 1889. Writing a couple of years after that strike, the Cardinal took it as ‘evident’ that between a capitalist and a working man there can be no true freedom of contract. The capitalist is invulnerable in his wealth. Concerning the nature of strikes he reflected, ‘A strike is like war. If for a just cause, a strike is right and inevitable, it is a healthful restraint imposed upon the despotism of capital’. John Lopes was Catholic chaplain at Cambridge from 1922 to 1928. During the General Strike of 1926 he was dismayed to hear of undergraduates volunteering as strike breakers and he warned, ‘If there is ever a class war in this country the universities of Oxford and Cambridge began it in 1926’. The Cardinal, preaching at Westminster, condemned the strike; dons were divided.
Rahner's Score
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

With the appearance of its eighteenth and nineteenth volumes, the English translation of Karl Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie now stands complete in a score of volumes (I reviewed the twentieth, which appeared in 1981, in February last year). Completion was timed for Rahner’s eightieth birthday, which was on 5 March.

Some of the essays refer in footnotes to subsequent papers, so a supplementary collection will eventually (even soon) be necessary. The publishers are to be congratulated on staying the course. The translators have sometimes nodded, and some have occasionally been defeated by Rahner’s tortuous sentences and idiosyncratic jargon (it has never been kept uniform). It is pleasant to record that the last three in the series (two volumes of the German edition) have been undertaken by Edward Quinn: needless to say, they reach the standard set by Cornelius Ernst in his pioneering version of the first volume (1961).
Priests, People and Parishes in Change: Reflections of a Sociologist
Authors: Hornsby‐Smith Michael P.
Published: July 2007

During the past twenty years a massive literature has grown up on the implications for the life of the Roman Catholic Church of modern social changes and shifts in theological emphasis legitimated by the Second Vatican Council. Nevertheless, it would be useful to try to summarize from a sociological standpoint the overall effect of those changes and shifts in the role of the parochial clergy of England and Wales and on their relationship with the laity.

The Roman Catholic community in these countries broadly can be said to comprise six distinct strands in terms of social origins and cultural heritage. First of all there is the largely aristocratic and upper middle class strand, derived from the recusant gentry, in decline since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850. The second strand consists of a significant infusion of converts. The third, by far the most important numerically, is the mass of Irish immigrants over the past century and a half. About the size and significance of the last three strands we know remarkably little in any detail: Catholic refugees arriving in the 1930s and 1940s from Eastern Europe (especially Poland), and Catholic migrant workers and their families from the Mediterranean countries and from the Caribbean.

Of these various strands, the most significant from the point of view of the emergence of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales as a significant religious and political force is undoubtedly the Irish strand.
Religious Belief and the Shadow of Uncertainty
Authors: Corner Mark
Published: July 2007

A paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984

In his Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, John Wesley spoke of faith as follows:

...as you cannot reason concerning colours if you have no natural sight—because all the ideas received by your senses are of a different kind... so you cannot reason concerning spiritual things if you have no spiritual sight, because all your ideas received by your outward senses are of a different kind; yea, far more different from those received by faith or internal sensation than the idea of colour from that of sound.

In Wesley’s mind faith is a ‘spiritual sense’ which enables the believer to perceive a reality beyond the scope of the non-believer restricted to the ‘natural’ senses. Faith, Wesley emphasises, is not a human choice but a gift of God. Those lacking this gift may no more understand what it means to have faith, than those lacking the gift of sight may understand what it means to see. (Note, incidentally, that in this article I am using ‘faith in’ God and ‘belief in’ God as interchangeable terms, and talk of ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ as if there was no such thing as ‘half-belief’.)

The model of perception, when used in this way to explain the nature of religious belief, tends to make of believers a privileged group who may have only a limited dialogue with the ‘blind’. Indeed, it is difficult to see what sort of discussion would be possible between believer and unbeliever as to why one should believe.
Küng's Case for God
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

People would like to have reasons for believing that God exists. With its appearance in attractive paperback format Hans Küng’s Does God Exist? certainly looks like the most thorough and scholarly treatment of the subject. For one thing, at seventeen ounces, clearly printed on decent paper, and sturdily enough bound to survive several readings, it is a fine example of modern book-production. The translation by Edward Quinn, is, needless to say, almost faultless. Some of the reviews which the hardback version received were very destructive—Alasdair MacIntyre’s page-long diatribe in The London Review of Books (5—18 February, 1981) comes to mind: “Whenever in future I try to imagine what Purgatory will be like, the thought of having to read Dr. Küng’s book will recur”. Judgements in some of the theological periodicals were rather more respectful. To give only two examples: in Theology (September 1981), after some gently expressed but actually quite devastating criticisms, Brian Hebblethwaite concludes as follows: “So it can hardly be said that this is a great book. But as an attempt to set the scene for a serious engagement with atheism, it serves a very useful purpose”. In The Month (March 1981), while describing Hans Küng as “a sort of Dale Carnegie of modern theology, building confidence, edifying in the best sense of the word”, Paul Lakeland’s judgment of the book runs thus: “He has two ostensible purposes, to present the history of thinking about the problem of God since the time of Descartes, and to define a new concept of God.
Etienne Gilson 1884 — 1984
Authors: Harding John
Published: July 2007

When Etienne Gilson died on 19 September 1978 at the age of 94, medieval studies suffered the loss of one of its most celebrated historians of philosophy. This year witnesses the centenary of his birth. It is perhaps appropriate briefly to recall the memory of this truly great scholar of our age. He was a cultured man in the best traditions of western scholarship, a fact to which his literary output amply attests

Born on 13th June 1884 in Paris, and after a notable rise through the French educational labyrinth, Gilson emerged as a scholar and teacher of considerable dimensions in terms of the breadth and depth of his learning. Though a dedicated family man, he was never afraid to meet the countless calls to lecture, write and also to attend and contribute to the numerous conferences to which he was invited. Such was his stature to become that on more than one occasion, he was called to represent his country on the international stage in various capacities.

His travels in the service of his scientia amabilis were fruitful not only in the sense that they gave him the opportunity to share and enrich his scholarship through the contact he made with so many others on both sides of the Atlantic, but also because it was on one such journey to Canada in 1927 that the idea of establishing a programme of Medieval Studies in St. Michael’s College, Toronto, was seriously discussed. Two years later the new Institute of Medieval Studies was born, receiving Pontifical approbation in 1939.
God as Mother: a necessary debate
Authors: Middleton Deborah F.
Published: July 2007

The report recently published by a study group for the Church of Scotland on the Motherhood of God for discussion at the Church’s General Assembly caused quite a stir in the popular press, and this reaction, no doubt, had a part to play in setting the atmosphere for the reception of the report at the Assembly itself. However, that there should be such a reaction would seem to reflect the patriarchal nature of the society we live in rather than a resurgence of religious fervour, since I would doubt that the feelings of horror and ridicule expressed came in each case from a devout church-goer.

Despite the trivialisation of the report by the popular press and its subsequent dismissal by the General Assembly, this reaction as a whole should be welcomed by theologians and believers alike, and those who produced the report should not be upset by it, because confrontation and controversy are at the heart of the Christian gospel and the tradition of the Church. From the beginning the preaching of the gospel encountered intransigence and resistance to change. St. Paul himself expressed anguish at the seemingly impossible task of preaching the concept of a crucified God, ‘the scandal of the cross’, which he describes as, ‘a stumbling block to Jews and folly to gentiles’ (I Cor. 1:23). But without that leap into new territory the Christian message would have died with the first apostles. This does not mean that the Church must change for change’s sake, but only that it is through confrontation with new concepts that we are forced to study and reflect on our present position.
Doing Theology in English
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

The text of a brief report presented to the Upholland Theological Consultation of April 1984, at which Fergus Kerr OP gave the paper which we published in June.

Introduction

Nine years ago, the editor of The Month invited me to reflect on the state of English Catholic theology. In preparation for this Consultation, therefore, I turned back to the article I produced on that occasion and asked myself: how much has changed?

By and large, I think, very little. Others of you are better placed than I am to comment on the state of theology in seminaries, colleges of education, and houses of study of religious orders. In the universities, the Catholic contribution has continued to grow quite impressively (at least so far as numbers of both staff and students are concerned). But these resources of largely lay theological competence continue, I think, to be insufficiently appreciated by the Church in this country. (I have the impression that the theological preparation for the Liverpool Pastoral Congress illustrates this neglect.)

Where the publication of original, scholarly, creative work is concerned, we are still nowhere near making a contribution proportionate to our resources. To be blunt, I have especially in mind here a problem which I call ‘the reticence of the religious’—who have not, for the most part, even the excuse of vows of silence! On the other hand, in the very important area of high level popularisation, we owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael Richards for his series Introducing Catholic Theology.
Half Slave, Half Free: Patrick Macgill and the Catholic Church
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: July 2007

I do not sing

Of angel fair or damosel That leans athwart a painted sky;

My little verses only tell

How human beings live and die And labour as the years go by.

I do not sing

Of plaster saints or jealous gods,

But of little ones I know,

Who paint their cheeks or bear their hods Because they live in doing so Their hapless life on earth below.

Patrick Macgill Songs of the Dead End

Patrick Macgill (1889—1962), the Donegal poet and novelist, was an articulate spokesman for a suppressed, inarticulate migrant workforce. He is also effectively an important voice of the sensitive layman in a clericalised church around the turn of the century. To give rather than to acquire is his message; to give freely and to become truly liberated is his ideal of the Church which he loved to hate: ‘If a man is born to the ould ancient faith he’ll never lose it’, it will always be there, (1918 : 200). That tension between the authoritarian clergy and the layman runs through his work. The preoccupation with sexual morality and the only moral issue runs through his scorn for that lace-curtain respectability of his time. His class-consciousness is remarkable in early twentieth-century Catholic writing, when many churches seemed to have lost their sense of personal involvement with the poor as people rather than objects of charity. That, for Macgill was the ultimate pornography. Himself a navvy in Scotland, he knew the bitter experience of the emigrant Irish far removed from the organisational church, from the main stream of secular life and effective personal relationships, and so from God.