bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Freedom, Evil and Farrer
Authors: Hebblethwaite Brian
Published: July 2007

A revised version of a paper presented in 1983 at the third Oxford conference on the theology of Austin Farrer.

Freedom has a central place in Christian anthropology. We may begin our consideration of the notion, somewhat idealistically, by focusing attention on the most exalted sense of freedom, which, according to Christian tradition, is that of man’s true freedom in relation to the God who made him. This true freedom may be defined as the spontaneity of unrestricted and undistorted love, as man realises his true nature as a creature made in the image of God. In the end, in the consummation of all things in the life of heaven, the creature will for ever exercise this true freedom, in both thought and action, as the love of God, now unambiguously manifest, elicits the free, the spontaneous response of love in the communion of saints.

Such a conception of man’s true freedom raises many theological and philosophical problems. The most important theological problem is that of the relation between grace and free will. Indeed, the free will spoken of by contrast with grace appears to have little in common with the true freedom which is the fruit of grace. According to the dominant stands of Christian anthropology, man is not free to realise his true freedom. On the contrary, he is in bondage and can only be freed by grace. On this view man’s free will is very limited indeed. The main philosophical problem with this conception of man’s true freedom is whether such freedom of spontaneity presupposes a more basic liberty of indifference whereby man is able to opt for any one of a range of genuine alternatives, not only equally good alternatives,
Demythologising Mathematics: Gödel, Escher, Bach Revisited
Authors: Barker Sean
Published: July 2007

Why should a journal like New Blackfriars be looking retrospectively at books about mathematics? A short answer is that mathematics, or at least the myth of mathematics, affects the way we think. I shall be looking at two books which demythologise mathematics: The Mathematical Experience and Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline. These help examine the myths of proof—the myths about how mathematicians think. Part of the demythologisation process is to look at alternatives to the myths; in particular I shall look at the role of intuition, and will illustrate this with reference to Catastrophe Theory and Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The prompting for this investigation is the emergence of a new genre of books about mathematics following in the wake of Gödel, Escher, Bach, of which The Mathematical Experience is an example. It would be a fascinating aside to trace the rise of this genre from Fourteen Funny Bits of Mathematics in Avuncular Style as found on the shelves of most public libraries, alongside popularisations of pedestrian seriousness. No doubt it would mention the science-as-a-human-activity school as exemplified by Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, or Watson’s The Double Helix, a vein continued by Catastrophe Theory. It would take a venture into catastrophe theory itself to explain the emergence of Gödel, Escher, Bach—a rogue book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general non-fiction, a picaresque which takes in the art of fugue, Zen koans, and the Jabberwocky and leads to questions at the heart of some of the problems in the foundations of mathematics and of artificial intelligence, while remaining accessible to a child of twelve (albeit the one I know is quite bright). The audience the genre aims at seems to be not so much the interested layman, but more the new technical elite whose computer skills and mathematical awareness can be used to outflank the experience of their seniors. In my years in radar design it was interesting to watch the gradual take-over of certain departments by mathematicians in spite of the active opposition of the electronics-trained managers. In my last department over half the people there had copies of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Spanners and Symbols: God's Action as Communicative Action
Authors: West P.L.
Published: July 2007

Within the framework of the “empiricist” philosophy widely assumed in English theology, there is a serious problem about how to represent God’s action in the world. This applies equally to God’s action in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and to God’s action today through the Holy Spirit. Here I will argue that the problem can be eased by a change of philosophical framework. I will do so in dialogue with Maurice Wiles’ The Remaking of Christian Doctrine which reveals with outstanding honesty and clarity the difficulties that the empiricist framework throws up.

By the “empiricist” framework I mean a general set of philosophical presuppositions that are deeply entrenched within our culture in general, and widespread within our university departments of science, philosophy and theology in particular. Of these (often only implicit) presuppositions I am interested in just two: firstly, that the chief function of language is to represent or “picture” reality; secondly, that “action” must take place via some causal mechanism, the model for which is given by the causal mechanisms of the natural sciences. Thus the only relation that language can have to action is to “picture” it.

This pair of assumptions is peculiarly deadly for theology, because it pushes back our possibilities for conceptualizing God’s action to only two. Either we think of God’s action as the communication of knowledge about a state of affairs—a picture of reality—or else we must see it as an intervention in the causal nexus so as to rearrange the course of events in the physical world.
Leonardo Boff: Complicity and Criticism
Authors: Alison James
Published: July 2007

Leonardo Boff, a 47-year old Franciscan from Brazil, has become one of the best known names in Catholic theology owing to the controversy surrounding his book lgreja: Carisma e Poder (Ed Vozes, Petrbpolis, 1981). The close coincidence in time of Boff’s interview with Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome about the book, and the publishing of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s criticisms of some aspects of liberation theology, has caused some misunderstanding about the issues at the core of the controversy. Two widely-held misapprehensions had better be cleared up now, before we venture any further. They have been repeated over and over again in the press—when Boff and Ratzinger met, at the beginning of last September, one of the things they warmly agreed about was the shoddiness of the media coverage of the affair.

First of all, it was not—this time—Rome that made the first move. On the contrary. Boff had appealed to Rome. When his book was attacked by Dom Romer, Assistant Bishop of Rio de Janeiro and President of the Archdiocesan Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith, he turned to the Vatican. His own very detailed account of the affair, “Minha convocaçao à Sagrado Congregaçeo para a Doutrina da Fé: um testemunho pessoal” (which appeared in Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira vol. 44, fasc. 176, Dec. 1984, pp. 845—852) confirms this.

Secondly, and more importantly, the book does not in fact appear to be about liberation theology specifically. Any controversy involving so prominent a writer of liberation theology is bound to have a “political” dimension,
The Cardinal, in summary
Authors: Iglich Elsa , Kerr Fergus , Mills John Orme , Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

As we have already explained, what is printed here is based substantially on the German abridged version of Vittorio Massori’s interview. This first appeared in the Catholic newspaper Deutsche Tagespost on 7/8 and 14/15 December 1984.

At the beginning of June appeared the long-awaited book (in Italian): Rapporto sulla fede, published by Edizioni Paoline, Turin (pp. 216, 14,000 lire). A German edition is appearing, and a French edition has already appeared (Entretien sur la foi, published by Fayard).
“He must increase, but I must decrease”
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

The Ramsden sermon, preached before the University of Oxford at St.Mary’s Church on 19 May 1985; first preached in Bulawayo Cathedral, Zimbabwe, on 28 October 1984.

‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3.30). These words are offered to us in the fourth gospel as a comment by John the Baptist, not only on his relationship with Jesus, but also on the relationship between two groups of people—his own disciples and those of Jesus. Both had been baptizing. While Jesus himself had earlier been baptized by John, he had now developed a separate movement and more and more people, it seems, were transferring from one to the other. While the two movements were thus distinct, there remained a loose communion and much sympathy between them. Yet, as Jesus’ group advanced, so John’s declined. This can hardly not have been painful for John and bewildering for some of his more staunch disciples. But he accepted it.

I would suggest that this relationship, as also the appositeness of John’s comment upon it, provides a model for the interpretation of a number of subsequent crucial turning points within Christian history.

There is, first, that of the late apostolic period. On the one side was the senior church, that of Jerusalem. ‘You see, brother,’ Paul was told on one of his visits to the city, ‘how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous for the law’ (Acts 21.20). Here was a considerable group of Christians, some of whom had undoubtedly known Jesus personally, some of whom were related to him by family ties, and all of whom were immersed in the scriptures.
Balthasar and his Christology
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Hans Urs von Balthasar, the important Swiss theologian, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday on August 12th.

Pope John Paul’s singling out of Hans Urs von Balthasar for the Paul VI award, for his contribution to Catholic theology, almost certainly marks his emergence as the preferred Catholic theologian of the pontificate. Interest in his thought is bound to increase, especially with the English translation of his master-work Herrlichkeit, now proceeding. Our aim here is to present what can only be an introductory picture of the man and his work, still—amazingly—so little known in the English-speaking world in spite of the fact that his eightieth birthday is at hand and he has been writing for fifty years. We are not attempting to summarize everything (that would be an impossibility) but considering the central theme of his writing, his Christology.

Balthasar was born in Lucerne in 1905. It is probably significant that he was born in that particular Swiss city, whose name is virtually synonymous with Catholicism in Swiss history. The centre of resistance to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, in the nineteenth it led the Catholic cantons in what was virtually a civil war of religion, the War of the Sonderbund (which they lost). Even today it is very much a city of churches, of religious frescoes, of bells. Balthasar is a very self-consciously Catholic author. He was educated by both Benedictines and Jesuits, and then in 1923 began a university education divided between four Universities: Munich, Vienna, Berlin—where he heard Romano Guardini, for whom a Chair of Catholic Philosophy had been created in the heartland of Prussian Protestantism—and finally Zurich.
The Liberation of Christology from Patriarchy
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

The doctrine of Christ should be the most comprehensive way that Christians express their belief in redemption from all sin and evil in human life, the doctrine that embraces the authentic humanity and fulfilled hopes of all persons. The theological categories adopted by early Christianity to define the doctrine of Christ—early Christology, in other words—would seem to be inclusive of women. And yet, of all Christian doctrine, it has been the doctrine of Christ that has been most frequently used to exclude women from full participation in the Christian Church. How is this possible?

Early Christianity used the word ‘logos’ to define that presence of God which has become incarnate in Jesus Christ. This term drew on a long tradition of religious philosophy. In Greek and Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, the divine Logos was the means by which the transcendent God came forth in the beginning to create the world. The Logos was simultaneously the immanence of God and the ground of creation. Through the Logos God created the world, guided it, was revealed to it and reconciled the world to God.

The Logos was particularly related to the rational principle in each human soul. By linking the term Christ, the Messiah, through which God redeemed the world, to the Logos, early Christianity prevented a split between creation and redemption threatened by early gnosticism. The God revealed in Christ was the same God who created the world in the beginning, the authentic ground of creation manifest in fulfilled form over against the alienation of creation from its true being.
Prayer and Righteous Action: exploring Bonhoeffer's suggestion
Authors: Ford David F.
Published: July 2007

Today you will be baptized a Christian. All those great ancient words of the Christian proclamation will be spoken over you, and the command of Jesus to baptize will be carried out on you, without your knowing anything about it. But we are once again being driven right back to the beginnings of our understanding. Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Spirit, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship—all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture any more to speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it. That is our own fault. Our Church, which has been fighting in these years only for self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to man and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and sense, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among men. All Christian thinking, speaking, and organising, must be born anew out of this prayer and action.

That was written by Bonhoeffer during that period of his imprisonment in Tegel between April and August 1944 when, having faced up to the prospect of a long time in prison due to the delay of his trial, he settled down to critical and creative theological work.
Sanders' Jesus
Authors: Rowland Christopher
Published: July 2007

If anyone needed any convincing that study of the New Testament at Oxford and in the United Kingdom has been given a considerable boost by the appointment of Ed Sanders to the chair of New Testament at Oxford University Jesus and Judaism will surely provide it. After two important contributions to the debate about Paul’s theology Sanders has turned his attention to the thorny question of the message and mission of Jesus and his relationship to Second Temple Judaism. As well as demonstrating that he is one of the world’s leading New Testament exegetes, he has used his wide-ranging knowledge and clarity of mind to provide a book of great historical conviction. Some will find his presentation of Jesus as a ‘reasonable visionary’ of the first century very disturbing. Others will find it strangely conservative: not only does it use the gospels to say more about Jesus than many contemporary exegetes would allow, but its main thesis is reminiscent of another great contribution to the debate about Jesus, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God by Johannes Weiss. Whatever one’s point of view, evident throughout this book is the great ability to cut through muddled thinking in a provocative and stimulating way, to disentangle complicated issues and rigorously to pursue the truth wherever it may lead.
Practical Reasoning, Human Goods and the End of Man
Authors: Finnis John
Published: July 2007

Our practical reasoning goes well and attains its truth when we identify ways of adequately getting or realising really desirable objectives. And our objectives are really desirable (good) when they either are really desirable in themselves, or are steps on the way to getting or realising some such intrinsically desirable objective or objectives. If there is but one such intrinsically desirable objective, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know what it is. If, as seems much more plausible, there are a number of intrinsically desirable objectives, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know whether there is some further objective to be attained or realised by or in the pursuit of some or all of these intrinsically desirable objectives, i.e. whether there is some further point to pursuing them; and if so, what that further point or objective (‘last end’) actually is.

Some say that the true last end is some one of the intrinsically desirable human goods, say, the highest instantiation of the highest good attainable in this life, thus contemplation of God to the extent that God is knowable through His creatures. Others agree that it is some one human good, but place it beyond this life, and beyond merely human capacities, in the beatific vision and contemplation of God.
The Involvement of God
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

I have called this paper ‘The involvement of God’ because I want to take part in a discussion about such questions as whether God suffers with the sufferings of his creatures, in order to ask how far God is involved in his world. I shall first try to defend what I take to be the classical doctrine of God derived from Augustine and Aquinas: that it is not in the nature of God to be involved in the suffering of the world as spectator, sympathiser or victim, but that it is in God’s nature nonetheless to be involved with his creatures more intimately than any creature could be involved with any other. Secondly I shall argue that the Christology of Chalcedon does make sense of the notion that God suffers and indeed was tortured to death; indeed, in large part it just is this notion. Thirdly, and a bit more tentatively, I shall suggest that a sacramental interpretation of Chalcedonian christology yields the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The subject of God’s suffering is so popular amongst theologians today that I am quite incapable of even beginning to give a survey of recent literature—this is partly because I haven’t read enough and partly because I don’t want to misrepresent authors by isolated quotation. I shall quote very little; I am concerned with certain ideas, how they hang together and how they fall apart.
Dante and Two Friars: Paradiso XI—XII
Authors: Foster Kenelm
Published: July 2007

A contemporary of Dante’s, opening the Divine Comedy for the first time, would probably have expected to find St. Francis among le beate genti, or at least to hear his praises sung by them, and that independently of any particular interest in the Franciscan Order, such was the esteem in which ‘il santo d‘Assisi’ was held. St. Dominic, on the other hand, an incomparably less popular figure, is unlikely even to have crossed the mind of such a reader except, perhaps, in connection with the well-known confraternity he founded. For the average Catholic of those times, Dominic had already become what he has remained, one of those holy ‘founders’ about whom one knows or cares little, well-nigh obscured as they are by the universally accepted and venerated institutes which they founded. Even the Dominicans themselves seem, on the whole, not to have fully appreciated the extraordinary character of the man to whom they owed so much. Apart from the biographical sketch in the Libellus of Jordan of Saxony (d. 1237), Dominic’s immediate successor in the government of the Order—a sketch which was historical rather than hagiographical, written that is to describe ‘the origin of the Order of Preachers’—and from the depositions by the witnesses at the two Processes, at Bologna and Toulouse, prior to his canonization in 1234, biographical material concerning Dominic is sparse, or, rather, scattered piecemeal among conventional legendary accretions.
Seeking the Glory of Him who sent us
Authors: Horn Romuald
Published: July 2007

The English Dominican Father Romuald Horn, who here, on the fiftieth anniversary of his ordination, reflects on what the priesthood means for him, spent many years of his life as a priest in the once famous parish of St Dominic’s, Newcastle upon Tyne (which in his early days contained some of the most deprived parts of Tyneside.) He is now a confessor at the Basilica of St Mary Major, Rome.

A golden jubilee is not an occasion for argument. If fifty years are not reason enough, it would seem useless to look further. For one can speak with the tongue, and one can say a word with one’s whole life. Even to change one’s mind after so long a time, impressive as it may be, doesn’t get rid of fifty years easily. In particular the golden jubilee of a priest contains a whole life, and a long one, because ordination comes at the beginning of maturity. Argument is still more out of place, because the priest is a minister, a servant. It is for his Lord to judge, not for himself. This is the true judgment, which the Lord will deliver at his own chosen time, a judgement which may not be anticipated. It remains for the minister to pass judgment on his ministry from his own point of view, as servants may compare one master with another, and one condition of service with alternative employment. This is what I am endeavouring to do now in this year of my golden jubilee, 1985.
Cupitt's Context
Authors: Matthews Melvyn
Published: July 2007

One of the characteristics of western middle class men and women in the latter half of the twentieth century is a form of quiet cynicism. We do not wish to give credence to anyone else any longer. We have shut the door to those who would give us dreams of a better world, and are usually quite happy, even at times quite determined, to dig our own back gardens. We have, in fact, seen the rise and fall of too many heavenly cities for us to wish to build any more. Fanaticism of any kind is definitely a non-starter. One might have thought that this insularity was a particularly English disease brought about by loss of empire and the apparent failure of post-war social optimism, but it is also a disease of each western nation. It is often codified into political form by the new right or into religious form by the moral majority, but it derives, essentially, from a form of quiet, despairing selfprotectionism, resignation; a belief, if it can be adorned with that word, that nothing very much more can be done. All that can be done now, it is felt, is that people should cultivate their own situation. Religion is therefore understood as that which reinforces the sense of the individual’s importance in the face of social and cosmic collapse. The church is the last refuge for those suffering from anomie, and faith gives the individual hope in the face of darkness. Church study groups, when asked what signs of hope there are in the world, answer that there are none, apart, perhaps, from the odd place like Iona or Taize which the middle classes treat like tourist attractions rather than a places for renewal.
Theologies of Repression
Authors: Márkus Gilbert
Published: July 2007

At the end of their National Conference this summer, the bishops of the Philippines spoke out strongly against human rights abuses in their country. They recited a long list of the names of people killed in the past year, including priests, journalists, trade unionists and other community leaders. Such denunciations of violence and repression are now fairly standard parts of the conclusions of many bishops’ conferences, but the Philippine bishops’ statement is interesting because it singles out the use of ‘religious fanatics’ in the government agencies’ counter-insurgency campaigns. The bishops condemned this as an ‘unholy strategy’, and claim that it is only ‘conducive to the worst forms of terrorism’. The arming and training of fanatical religious groups to fight the New People’s Army had led the civilian Home Defence Force to become ‘instruments of terror rather than peace’.

Though the Philippine bishops’ conference was addressing itself to its own local situation, they are clearly aware that this use of certain groups of Christians by repressive governments is not peculiar to their own country. Other local Catholic hierarchies have spoken out strongly against various religious groups. In recent months Mexican Church leaders, together with labour leaders and others, have called for the expulsion of various evangelical, fundamentalist sects from Mexico. The enormous financial resources of these sects, together with their political and social impact, has led to accusations that they are an integral part of US foreign policy in the region, and even that they operate as a front for the CIA.
A Long Sermon for Holy Week
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

I think the best way to begin is to ask why Christ died on the cross. That we can give some kind of answer to this question in terms of the meaning and purpose of the life of Jesus is presupposed by the Christian activity of ‘preaching Christ crucified’ two thousand years after the event. For our purposes, then, we can rule out the idea that it was all a tragic misunderstanding which need never have happened ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do’, said Jesus of his executioners; but even if this means that they misunderstood him, the misunderstanding was not fortuitous. It was a misunderstanding that was in some way to be expected. In the gospels Jesus is presented not, indeed, as seeking his death or courting it but as realising that it was unavoidable. It is this unavoidability that we shall be looking at here, in Part Two of this ‘long sermon’.

Scholars dispute about the circumstances of the death of Jesus but two facts seem fairly well established: Jesus was executed by the Romans because they found him a threat to the precarious stability of their colony; and they were encouraged to do this because Jesus was rejected by the leaders of his own people. I think that, in the end, the reason why he was thus rejected was that he claimed to ‘speak with authority’; that is, he regarded attachment to his own person as more significant even than belonging in the ordinary way to the People of God in accordance with the Law.
The Greenham Vigil: a women's theological initiative for peace
Authors: West Angela
Published: July 2007

On August 31st 1984, ten women arrived at Blue Gate, the entrance to the American Cruise missile base at Greenham Common to do the night watch for the peace camp there—and simultaneously to keep the vigil of the Passion based on the gospel of St. Mark. It so happened that that weekend was the anniversary of the women’s peace camp—three years since it had been set up in 1981. The camp had been evicted and destroyed many times. But the women return and remain, gathering around the fire, huddled under sheets of polythene at night and in the rain. Old prams stand at the ready for the women to wheel away their few possessions when the bailiffs come in the morning—as they do most days.

The women of the camp welcomed the night watchers and extended the hospitality of their fire, before going off to sleep under the polythene sheets. The vigil women remained around the fire to keep the watch, gathering each hour on the hour to face the guarded gates of Greenham, to sing a psalm, read from the bible and pray. Towards morning at 6.00 a.m., as dawn came up over the base, and Mark’s gospel told of Jesus being led away and delivered to Pilate, the night watch prepared to depart. Meanwhile, another woman was getting up in London and going to continue the vigil in the church beside her house.

Without the presence of the women’s peace camp at Greenham, this theological initiative for peace on the part of Christian women would not have taken place.
A Long Sermon for Holy Week Part 3 The Easter Vigil: The Mystery of New Life
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

... because it is only Christian men Guard even heathen things.

G.K.C.

At the time of the full moon at the Spring Equinox the people of the Messiani extinguish all their hearth-fires and every lamp and lantern and source of light from amongst them. They gather then on the hillside at midnight and in the darkness a Holy Man strikes the new fire from the rock of flint and with this a great sacred fire is made to blaze. This new fire from darkness represents, for the Messiani, the rebirth of Messia, their dying god, and also the rebirth of the year and the coming of new life out of darkness and winter.

An image of the risen god in the form of a tall candle is then lighted from the fire to symbolise his return to life from the dead, and adorned with certain sacred signs by which past and future and all time is made to centre on this time and this place. Led by the flame of the image the whole throng then moves in procession from the fire to the place of assembly. As they go they take new flame from the image for their own torches and lanterns and they dance and shout the praises of Messia ‘the new light of the world’.

When the crowd is once more assembled Messia is erected amongst green boughs and flowers and other signs of fertility and a Holy Man addresses it in song, bringing this Holy Night to coincide with the mythic nights of creation and of the birth of the Messiani people,
The Destabilising Poverty Crisis
Authors: Evaristo Arns Paulo
Published: July 2007

The opening address at the 18th World Conference of the Society for International Development (S.I.D.), Rome, 1 July 1985

Together with the Catholic Bishops of the United States (in their first draft of the pastoral letter on the economy) I would like to affirm:

‘Every perspective on economic life ... must be shaped by two questions:

— What does it do for people?

— What does it do to people?

The poor have a special claim on our concern because they are particularly vulnerable...’

This World Conference is at the same time an opportunity and a responsibility. It is an opportunity to take up again one of the most difficult of world debates: the relation between the North and the South. And it is a responsibility because even though this Conference is one of analysis and dialogue we must take steps so that its influence goes beyond this level. We have reached a point in history where debate and dialogue without international action have become an offence and an insult to those who are suffering in North and South because of international economic policies. This morning I would like to speak of the meaning and the validity of the topic that was given to me. We all, rich nations and poor, want poverty to be the centre of world concern. But, in my view, the reasons for our concern are fundamentally different. And it is this that I would like to develop in the first part of my presentation.
Most Unholy Alliance: Conservative Attitudes to Christianity in East and West
Authors: Corner Mark
Published: July 2007

It is now nearly a decade since Edward Norman’s controversial Reith lectures, subsequently published as Christianity and World Order, helped to generate a great deal of debate about the appropriate sphere of Christian moral concern.

Dr Norman’s view is clear:

...the teachings of the Saviour clearly describe a personal rather than a social morality.

Any attempt to outline a Christian social morality—to ‘involve the Church in politics’—means compromising the proper concern of Christians with what is transcendent. It entails sanctifying whatever prevailing political world-view is current at the time. Among Western nations, Norman argues, this means supporting what he calls a ‘Human Rights Ideology’. The Human Rights movement ‘has elevated Western liberalism to the apparent authority of eternal truth’. As a consequence, ‘... the Churches now see Human Rights as the essence of the Christian message’. Christians in politics are engaged, then, in a process of absolutising a relative (Human Rights), identifying the essence of Christianity, which must be changeless, with a prevailing political ideology which represents only the view of a liberal twentieth century establishment in the West. In doing so, they obscure the truly changeless essence of Christianity, which lies in eternal values, values which by definition cannot be political.

Criticisms of Norman’s thesis have been numerous, and the arguments on both sides are now well-rehearsed. Any attempt to outline a Christian personal morality, no less than a Christian social morality, involves the apparent compromise of associating with current secular ideologies, it has been pointed out.
Being a Preacher: The Franciscan Way
Authors: Harding John
Published: July 2007

Reading Simon Tugwell’s book The Way of the Preacher led me to consider what St Francis of Assisi had to say about preaching and what is the place of preaching in the life of the Franciscan.

Given that both the Dominicans and the Franciscans are essentially mendicant, it is not surprising that over the centuries they have been heavily involved in both preaching and teaching. As Fr. Tugwell ably demonstrates, the Order of Preachers came into being as the practical response of St Dominic to the most urgent need of the Church in southern France, namely, the need for competent and devout preachers. St Dominic realized that to reverse the serious decline of the Church in southern France (and elsewhere too) there was a need for preachers who could be relied upon to expound and if necessary defend the authentic catholic tradition. Such preachers were not easily to be found and when they were to be found they were not easily retained. St Dominic did the obvious and eminently practical thing, he began what was soon to become the Order of Preachers. Preaching, for Dominicans, is very much a matter of self-definition. For Franciscans it is not quite so straightforward.

Many studies have sought to isolate the distinctive characteristics of the Franciscan charism but few, if any, would list preaching as being among its most noteworthy. Having said this, it would be hard to trace the growth of the Franciscan movement without encountering such notable preachers as would compare with the great preachers of old.
Noncombitant Immunity and St Thomas: carrying the debate further
Authors: Dombrowski Daniel A.
Published: July 2007

In 1983 one of the most powerful nations in the world, the United States, fought one of the weakest, Grenada. Even in this lopsided affair, which lasted only a few days, twenty innocent people were killed when United States fire hit a mental hospital. The American people received this news with equanimity, in that they had become inured to the slaughter of innocent people, say by the Nazis against the Jews or by the Soviets against their own people, but also by their own government’s bombers at the end of World War Two or by its lieutenants at My Lai. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding, the issue of noncombatant immunity poses the greatest threat to the continued efficacy of the just war theory.

At present James Turner Johnson, of Rutgers University, editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, offers perhaps the most sophisticated treatments of just war theory, specifically Christian just war theory, and he astutely claims that a primary task of the Christian ethicist is to reintroduce acquaintance with what has been lost in Christian tradition (HT, 300). But what is the Christian tradition regarding noncombatant immunity? Obviously no answer to this question can afford to ignore St. Thomas Aquinas, but exactly was his position on this issue? The American Catholic Bishops and various Thomistic textbooks, acting as distilling agents for the various drops of Catholic tradition, imply that for St Thomas it is always wrong to intentionally kill noncombatants, which leaves open the possibility of killing some noncombatants if such killing is compatible with the proportionality dimension of the principle of double effect.
Mozart, Amadeus and Barth
Authors: Sherry Patrick
Published: July 2007

In an article in The Times, published to coincide with the premiere of the film Amadeus early in 1985, the playwright Peter Shaffer said that his own apprehension of the divine was very largely aesthetic. What he meant is illustrated by a remark he quoted from his play Amadeus, on which the film was based: ‘The God I acknowledge lives, for example, in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music’, and indeed by the whole of that play. Shaffer’s statement and the view expressed in his work raise some profound theological questions, and provide an interesting point of comparison with a leading 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, for whom Mozart ranked almost as a Father of the Church. I want to use the comparison between them to raise some questions about the role of the Holy Spirit in creation, particularly the Spirit’s connection with beauty, both in nature and in art.

Shaffer and Barth

Shaffer’s theology is simple: for him Mozart was an instrument of the spirit of God. The remark which he quoted in his article is put into the mouth of Antonio Salieri, the Viennese court-composer, who is depicted by Shaffer as recognizing the spirit of God speaking through Mozart, but led by jealousy to attempt to block this spirit. Early on in Amadeus Salieri says ‘Dimly the music sounded from the salon above ... It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child’ (p. 37).
A Covenant to the People
Authors: Phillips Anthony
Published: July 2007

A sermon preached at the Judges Service held at Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral on Candlemas Day 1986, in the presence of the Lord Chancellor and attended by judges, magistrates and members of the legal profession.

Says the prophet:

I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations. (Isaiah 42:6)

How, though, did the man who first summoned Israel to this vocation understand her mission?

Ironically, he was writing at a time when the very future of Israel’s identity as a people was most in jeopardy. Forty years before she had suffered humiliating defeat by the Babylonians. Her temple was destroyed and her leaders, together with the king, exiled in heathen Babylon. The first prophet of the exile, Ezekiel, had assured his fellow captives that if they remained faithful to their God they would be restored to their land. But nothing had happened and, as the generation which had gone into exile died off, it seemed that God had totally abandoned his people.

Then suddenly a second prophet sounded his triumphant message: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that her warfare is ended,

that her iniquity is pardoned. (Is. 40 : 1—2))

But he was not just content to proclaim Israel’s return to her land: he saw her as the agent by whom the whole world would be brought under God’s rule. Her restoration was not just to vindicate God’s people, to allow them fellowship with him irrespective of what went on elsewhere in his world. Rather it was to be a light to the nations.
Peace and the Clergy
Authors: Flessati Valerie
Published: July 2007

Fifty years ago Sheed and Ward published a book called Peace and the Clergy. It was attributed anonymously to ‘a German priest’ because its author, Fr. Francis Stratmann OP, a Dominican, was the persecuted leader of the German Catholic peace movement, Friedensbund Deutscher Katholiken. With about 40,000 members, this was one of the first organisations to suffer the full force of Nazi oppression. It had been dissolved by the Nazis on 1 July, 1933.

Stratmann was born in 1883 and ordained in 1912. After the First World War he had become a university chaplain in Berlin, and it was there that he had begun his struggle against National Socialism and for peace. His book, The Church and War, published in 1924, drew on Scripture, Catholic moral theology and papal pronouncements to challenge the justification of war. When, in 1936, Peace and the Clergy appeared, it was in its English translation. ‘A work of this kind cannot be published in Germany today’, the preface explained. Temporarily arrested by the Gestapo after the Friedensbund was banned, Stratmann survived the war by going into exile, first in Rome, and then to Venlo, in Holland, where he was working as chaplain to Jewish converts in the Sluis refugee camp when the Nazis invaded. Going into hiding, he was sheltered in the Flemish Dominican convent at Lint, in Belgium. In exile he kept a diary, later published, and, in addition to other books, wrote a five-volume work on The Saints and the State.
Theology in its Natural Environment: Issues, Implications and Directions
Authors: Killen David P. , Killen Patricia O'Connell
Published: July 2007

This article was originally presented (in a modified form) to the continuing seminar on Pastoral Theology of the Catholic Theology Society of America at its 1985 annual meeting. There, and here, it is intended to be the starting point for a discussion and reflection on the nature and significance of a theological process which is playing an increasingly important role in the life of the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies. We refer to it as ‘theology in its natural environment’. It is also variously called indigenous theology, contextual theology, local theology, practical pastoral theology, or theological reflection. The variety of names and of methods all point to an essential quality of theology in its natural environment, its specificity or particularity in terms of a concrete community whose essential unit is the small group.

Our experiential base for theology in its natural environment has centered in seven years of work with the Education for Ministry Program of the Bairnwick Center at the School of Theology of the University of the South, U.S.A. Currently enrolling nearly 6000 students in six countries, this is the largest program of theological education by extension in the English-speaking world. At its heart is a model and various methods for theological reflection that enable people to do theology in their daily lives with the ongoing critical support of a small group of six to ten peers.
Christianity and Cultures
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

There is a paradox—one, no doubt, among many—about contemporary Euro-American culture. On the one hand it has developed a capacity for systematic, and critical, ‘self-consciousness’, unequalled by any other, or by its own ancestral cultures. This is exemplified by the development in the last hundred years, practically from zero, of the human sciences, in particular of psychology and sociology. In Academe, at any rate, the intellectual leaders of our culture live in a world of ‘meta’s’—‘metahistory’, ‘meta-science’, ‘meta-psychology’, and meta-sociology too, I shouldn’t wonder. A capacity and techniques for reflexive thinking have been carried much further than ever before. In the Christian dimension of our culture the ecumenical movement and above all the Second Vatican Council illustrate the same trend; the Church ‘self-consciously’ reflecting on what it means to be Church—and whether and how far it is succeeding in being Church. Ecclesiology (the Church reflecting on itself), is now a most important branch of theology. A hundred years ago, when the word ‘ecclesiology’ itself had a different meaning, the Church’s reflecting on itself was rarely more than one weapon in an arsenal of polemical apologetics.

On the other hand Euro-Americans, in their cultural leaders and in the mass, still retain by and large the serene uncriticised assurance that their—or should I say ‘our’?—culture is normative, and that it is the only authentic realisation of human potentialities. It is, to be sure, not the only way of being human or organising human society, but it is certainly the best, and the only one that has a future.
Fidel y la Religión: Preaching before Princes
Authors: Alison James
Published: July 2007

‘...It is absolutely right and just to state that the revolutionary movement must have a correct attitude towards the (religious) question, and avoid, at all costs, a doctrinal rhetoric which offends the religious sentiments of the people, including that of workers, peasants and the middle layers, and which would only serve to help the system of exploitation.’ Thus Fidel Castro, having offered an explanation as to why religion had been seen as the simple ideological ally of the forces of exploitation, answers Frei Betto’s suggestion that ‘one of the gravest errors of the Left in Latin America was to preach atheism in their work with the masses’.

This is just one of many points covered in a book which is the result of twenty-three hours of interview between the Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution and a Brazilian Dominican friar known already to readers of New Blackfriars .

Even had the contents been much less interesting than they are, their publication would already have been an historical occasion. Published in Havana in December 1985, the book sold 1,000,000 copies within four months (in an island of ten million people); it has been on the bestseller list in Brazil for a similar length of time, has gone through several editions in Mexico and other Latin American countries. It has been published in Spain, Italy and Poland. But for a few headlines such as ‘Convert Castro woos Church’ earlier this year, it has received scant attention in the British media. At the time of writing this—July—the only English-language edition is available in Australia and Oceania, but not in the U.S. or Great Britain.
Gender and Sacrifice
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

This is an attempt to see what some of the underlying assumptions in the current debates on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic priesthood are. It seems to me that the debate is not getting anywhere because of the lack of common language of discussion. In such a quandary, the best thing to do would seem to be to look at the implicit assumptions of both sides. Perhaps we are really present at one of those night battles which both Newman and Matthew Arnold saw as characteristic of controversy in their own day, where neither side understands either the explicit arguments or the implicit assumptions of the other. If so, the best service an observer can do would be to see how these implicit assumptions plug into wider world-views.

One of the major arguments for the ordination of women is that the Church is inevitably affected by the social structures and cultural values of the age it is living in. Therefore the supposed argument from tradition lacks weight. There were not women priests for the same reason that there were not women lawyers or engineers. Objection to the ordination of women is just another case of the way in which religion of any sort seems to become a bulwark of extreme conservatism in social ideas, perhaps because of religion’s sociological role in stabilizing society and maintaining identities over time. Another form of this argument is that the Church cannot afford to continue neglecting the very great pool of ministerial talent that undoubtedly exists among women.