bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Contribution to Christian Materialism
Authors: Allcock John
Published: July 2007

The debate between Christians and Marxists has been under way now for more than a decade. Christians are admitting that they have in the past been too wrapped up in the institutional forms of religion, and that they have perhaps been seduced from the Gospel by the success of the institutional Church. Marxists, in similar vein, admit that they have in turn been too ready to castigate the outward forms of religious organization, and too little prepared to give consideration to the central message of the Gospels and the prophets. Here too the exigencies of party organization have brought about the same displacement of goals found in the Church. Each declares that the other has far more to offer than they had previously either suspected or been prepared to admit. The unhappy feature of the Christian/Marxist dialogue is that in ten years or so it does not seem to have progressed very far beyond ‘programme statements’, or declarations of intent, of this kind. The concrete and substantive advances made in debate appear to have been quite disproportionate to the expectations held of it. In particular, the development of a really coherent ‘Christian materialism’, hoped for by many participants in the debate, has not been realized.

One is compelled to ask why such an initially promising line of philosophical enquiry should have provided such meagre results. Is it that we were mistaken after all in thinking that progress could be made here? Is it that Christianity and Marxism in fact have nothing to say to each other beyond that which has already been said? Are they, in the last analysis, incompatible systems of thought?
Wrestling with the Word‐3
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

Homily for the fifteenth Sunday of the year 1970 (12th July).

Readings: Amos 7, 12-15; Eph. 1, S14; Mark 6, 7-13.

There are many things which one can admire in Jesus, whether one is a Christian or not. But in some things Jesus is rather primitive and does not seem to know what he is doing.

I have no doubt Jesus would be turned down if he were to apply for the job of sales manager. At least, if he dared tell how he is accustomed to ‘sell’ his own message. His method seems entirely wrong.

Of course one can say: ‘Jesus is not selling soap or encyclopaedias; he is bringing a religious message.’ This may well be so, but does that make any difference? A message is a message. There are lots of people who sell religious and political messages. They want to make us their allies and they do it well.

To send one’s disciples away to preach without any material provisions seems rather irresponsible. Jesus’ order not to wear two tunics looks fussy. Much planning is not done, either. You just stay where you are received without even wondering whether there are not more strategic points from which to work. When people refuse to listen to you, you simply leave and do not really try to force on them the idea that they would be much happier if they listened to you.

Sending our preachers in rather poor conditions may be a gimmick, but not planning carefully where you stay and for how long, and refusing to put in too much effort, suggest that Jesus' preaching methods could be improved on. His message may be interesting but he does not know how to sell it.
Scripture, Tradition and the Community
Authors: Rhymer Joseph
Published: July 2007

This is not a time to be digging the old entrenched positions a little deeper and then defending them, so it is worth noting with caution that each of the terms in this title trails with it a long history of old battles and rigid attitudes. In any case, the old certainty about the meanings of the words we use is one of the new uncertainties.

There is even an implicit assumption hidden in the order in which the terms are used traditionally. We take it for granted, perhaps, that tradition is rooted in scripture, and that the community is first formed, and then grows, by a causal combination of these two prior factors. This view holds that the people of the Old. Testament and of the New were ‘People of a Book’, who were formed by the scriptures which they accepted. They had a clear tradition, as well, handed down to them from the very beginning : ‘It was of importance that this tradition should be preserved without deformation; and fidelity to the received tradition was the ultimate assurance that the doctrine proposed was genuine.’ A little later in the same article the function of tradition as a vital factor in the formation of the community is explicitly stated: ‘… the spirit indeed taught the Church, but communicated no new word beyond that which Jesus had incarnated and uttered. The content of the revelation, once Jesus no longer dwelt on earth, was secured only by the faithful preservation and transmission of the word among his followers. Tradition must therefore be included among the constitutive elements of the primitive Christian community.’
The Bible, History and Mythology
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

I am old-fashioned enough (of course I really mean orthodox enough) to hold that every word of the Bible is true, to use a rather loose figure of speech. But I am also rational enough, I hope, and just modern enough to concede that a pretty good case can be made against the Bible being totally true, and it can be made in the name of history, and with the accusation of mythology.

Each of these words has a different bearing on the truth of the Bible. History is a very respectable word, and if I say that the Bible contains history, that it gives an account of salvation history, or that Christianity is a historical religion, the reader will doubless accept the statement as true, if trite. But mythology is still rather a disreputable word, and if I say that the Bible not only contains myth but presents us with a salvation myth, and that Christianity is a mythological religion, some of my readers may be tempted to wish me burned at the stake. Yet I am prepared to say so, with qualification, and still to maintain that the Bible is totally true. In fact, I think the mythology charge against it is easier to meet than the charge of containing bad, or false, history.

In any case, it is clear that a defence of its truth will involve us in a consideration of the meaning of these two words ‘history’ and ‘mythology’, not to mention the word ‘truth’, as well as requiring us to examine the facts in the shape of biblical texts. The neatest way to proceed would doubtless be, first to say what I mean by these words, and then to look at the biblical evidence in the ligfit of my clear definitions.
Anthropology and Ethics: The Thomistic Vision
Authors: Bishop Jordon
Published: July 2007

Thomas Aquinas is generally regarded as a pillar of orthodoxy, the cornerstone of an intellectual establishment. He achieved a synthesis that almost became something of this sort, although his impact is often exaggerated. In his own time he challenged accepted tradition on a number of points and was condemned by ecclesiastical authorities.

The principal point at issue in this condemnation is a doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that may sound bizarre to many today : the ‘unicity of the substantial form'. It is central to his anthropology and has serious consequences for his ethics. It was regarded by many of his contemporaries as heretical or at least dangerous. And if one were to attempt to place Aquinas in the Marxist-Leninist division of all thinkers into idealists and materialists, this doctrine would earn him a place among the materialists.

I shall not attempt a textual analysis of the problem involved. This would inevitably demand a highly technical discussion in the peculiar language of thirteenth-century scholasticism. Rather, I should like to attempt a description of what I believe to have been Aquinas’s view of man and ethics in terms of our own popular picture. I believe that this view can be substantiated through serious historical research and that it is, within the limits imposed by the language gap, a faithful picture of the position of Thomas Aquinas.

It is often assumed that the ethic of Thomas Aquinas is otherworldly, based on a spiritualist anthropology, and ultimately, rationalist. The first assertion is a half-truth; the second and third are false. Aquinas’s anthropology is materialistic, and he is no rationalist.
Poverty and the Religious Community
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

The first thing to be clear about when speaking of religious poverty is that we are using a metaphor, an equivocation. Religious poverty, whatever its exact form, is a certain renunciation of material goods voluntarily undertaken. On the moral level, therefore, it has only a superficial resemblance to actual poverty, the indigence of the people who are poor in the social sense. For actual poverty is not voluntary and its result is to reduce the person who suffers it to a kind of powerlessness, a slavery. The poor are by an inevitable social logic in the power of the rich. They have very little control over the course of their own lives. The poor in our industrial cities for instance are reduced to the exercise of that little bit of illusory freedom that is handed out to them by the rich in the form of choice of different brands in the supermarket, choice of programmes on TV, the unpredictability of the bingo game or the betting shop, the promise of something new in the amusement arcade where working-class housewives can be seen any day of the week trying to increase their housekeeping money playing the fruit machines. Economic poverty is one term of a relationship within society and not a mere simplicity of life. It is the foundation of other kinds of poverty: powerlessness to maintain local community in the face of council planners and property developers; educational deprivation; a ruined environment, and so on.

Poverty, then, is something suffered at the hands of other people and therefore worlds apart from a condition of life freely undertaken. The poor are not masters of their own lives. The religious, however, is a master of his own life. It is a matter of free choice from the outset.
A New ‘Breviary’
Authors: Harbert Bruce
Published: July 2007

The second Vatican Council, in its constitution on the Liturgy, initiated a reform of the Divine Office to adapt it to the needs of modern times. The amount of Office that those bound to the Breviary were obliged to recite was to be reduced, and it was stressed that the Office is intended to sanctify the whole day, so that each Hour should be recited at the time appropriate to it, Lauds and Vespers being seen as the most important Hours. The Council also emphasised that the Office is the common prayer of the whole Church, and urged secular clergy and laypeople as well as religious to come together to recite it in common.

The publication in 1970 of the Liturgia Horarum, the Latin version of the revised Divine Office, was a major step towards the fulfillment of the Council’s intentions. It should not be seen as the end of the process, for liturgy as envisaged by the Council is a creative activity, demanding continual adaptation for the needs of particular groups and situations. For this reason, the Liturgia Horarum gives great scope for choice and adaptation : it is nearly always permissible to change the psalms, antiphons or readings to suit the individual or group that is celebrating the Liturgy of the Hours. This is emphasised in the fine ‘General Instruction’ with which the Liturgia Horarum is prefaced, a document that should be read by all for whom the Liturgy of the Hours forms a part of prayer. The published texts are a framework within which much variation is desirable and possible, and so a habit of reciting the Office that paid too much attention to discovering and observing precisely ‘what is laid down in the book’ would be alien to the spirit of the Council and its reformed liturgy.
Why then the Law?
Authors: Ombres Robert
Published: July 2007

It is a mark of realism that any inquiry should start from where one is and an inquiry into law should start from our everyday understanding of it. Such an inquiry would most likely register a variety of reactions, each in its own way instructive. Law may suggest ‘law and order’ of the sort that is usually associated with right-wing or repressive sections of the political spectrum. Law may suggest the police carrying out their duties; think of the colloquial expression, ‘I’ll get the law on you’. Law may suggest a judge or magistrate sentencing. Law may suggest Parliament at work. On the whole each of these spontaneous images builds on a central picture of law as a command to be enforced in case of disobedience. On longer reflection law would seem to exist to keep order, public peace and stability so that civic life can flourish and law does in some general way embody the predominant views of the community as a whole most of the time. Moreover our reflections would show that there is virtually nothing which could not be demanded or forbidden by law and in turn that there is no law which could not be changed. We have very little, except perhaps the fact that a Parliamentary majority, if not always right, can at least be changed to shield us from the possible content of law and the severity of its application.
Maurice Baring's Russian Novel
Authors: Boyd Ian
Published: July 2007

A novel about Russia written by an English novelist is something of a rarity, particularly when it is written by an English novelist who spoke Russian fluently and lived in Russia for many years. Maurice Baring’s reputation as a writer is in fact based largely on a knowledge of Russian life and literature which he exploited with considerable skill and shrewdness for at least the early part of his literary career. He was one of the first English writers to introduce Russian life and literature to the general reading public of Edwardian England. From 1904 until 1914, he spent much of his time in Russia writing the series of articles and books, which began with a review of the original production of The Cherry Orchard and detailed reports on the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution, and culminated years later with the first edition of The Oxford Book of Russian Verse.
On Sophistry and the Definition of Happiness: A Rejoinder to Mr William Frerking
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Mr William Frerking took me to task for some comments which I made on the famous question which Glaucon poses to Socrates in The Republic. He said a number of wise and sensible things. But none of these had any bearing on my argument. I must first assure Mr Frerking that I do not have the strange conception of happiness which he seems to attribute to me; and then try to show that such a view of happiness is by no means implied by what I wrote in my article.

Mr Frerking expresses surprise that nowhere in my article do I offer a definition of happiness. There are two reasons for this: first, that I do not think that the term ‘happiness’ is susceptible of exact definition; and second, that my conception of happiness, unlike that attributable (at least on one interpretation, as we shall see) to Mr Frerking, is just the same as that which is ordinarily current. Still, misunderstanding has evidently arisen; so it may be as well for me to try to spell out roughly what I, and I believe most other people, mean by happiness. Happiness, as Aristotle rightly suggests, is a state one seeks for its own sake, and not as a means to some other state.
Ecology and the Canticle of Brother Sun
Authors: Doyle Eric
Published: July 2007

In an article published in March 1967, Professor Lynn White of the University of California, argued that the historical roots of the ecological crisis can be traced to the traditional Christian view of man’s dominion over nature. Professor White maintained that because the roots of the trouble are largely religious, the remedy must be essentially religious. He suggested that ‘the profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature may point a direction’ and he proposed ‘Francis as a patron saint for ecologists’. The article sparked off a good deal of interest. Richard Means, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kalamazoo College, Michigan, took up the point and expressing fundamental agreement with White on the religious aspect of the crisis, put forward pantheism as the basis of a solution. While there is a superficial attraction in pantheism as a foundation of the unity of reality, ultimately it destroys the diversity of creatures through a fusion in the All and it makes change, finitude and even evil, intrinsic to God Himself. Francis A. Schaeffer, Director of L’Abri Fellowship in Huemoz, Switzerland, submitted the proposals of White and Means to a detailed analysis. In conclusion he rejected both : ‘So pantheism is not going to solve our international ecological problem. St Francis’s concept, as presented by Lynn White, is not going to solve it—the concept that everything is equal and everything is spiritually autonomous. Romanticism is no solution because ‘firstly, nature, as it now is, is not always benevolent; and secondly, to project our feelings and thoughts into a tree would mean that we would have no base upon which to justify cutting down and using the tree as a shelter for man’.
Dhammapada: Words of Wisdom
Authors: Don Peter W.L.A.
Published: July 2007

Of the many works which comprise the Tipitaka, the Buddhist canonical scriptures in Pali, none has had greater appeal to the Buddhist, whether monk or layman, than the Dhammapada. It is the favourite vademecum of the devout Buddhist. The reason for this is mainly the fact that it is a small work which contains in concise, epigrammatic form ‘the concentrated essence of the religion’.

The Tipitaka is a collection of the traditionally accepted canonical texts of the Theravada (also called Hinayana), the form of Buddhism which with local variations is dominant in South-East Asian countries—Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia—and is therefore known as the Southern School of Buddhism, which is one of the two main branches of the religion, the other being the Northern School, the Mahayana, which once flourished in India, whence it spread into Tibet, Nepal, China, Korea and Japan, in which countries it counts large numbers of adherents.
Capitalism or Socialism: The Rational Choice
Authors: Nyerere
Published: July 2007

My subject is an examination of the alternative economic and social systems which are open to Third World countries. In order to keep this discussion within reasonable bounds I must make certain assumptions. It is important that these should be clear before I begin : for if the assumptions are not shared, then much of what I say will be irrelevant. Fortunately, my assumptions are not very controversial— at least within Africa.

The Assumptions:

My first assumption is that any discussion about the appropriate economic and social organisation must, for the time being at least, be conducted within each nation state, and the decision must be made exclusively by the people of that nation.

Secondly, I take it to be axiomatic that all the peoples of the Third World desire to govern themselves, and want their countries to be completely independent of external control. This does not rule out the possibility of political or economic links between two or more countries; nor does it exclude a possible voluntary merger of sovereignties, provided that these things are agreed upon after discussions based on the equality of all participants.

Thirdly, I shall assume that, to everyone in the Third World, the present degree of poverty, and the general lack of economic development, is completely unacceptable. We have to increase our production of wealth so that we may increase the level of our collective and individual consumption.

My fourth and final assumption is that our struggles for independence were national struggles, involving the rights of all the inhabitants. We were not aiming to replace our alien rulers by local privileged elites, but to create societies which ensure human dignity and selfrespect for all.
The Form of His Fiction
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

In 1966, Ian Gregor contributed to Essays in Criticism an essay entitled ‘What Kind of Fiction did Hardy Write?’ The simple yet arresting quality of the question posed in that title was significant on at least two grounds. First, Thomas Hardy had been for some years the subject of a good deal of critical writing, but much of it had dragged an aimless trail through the marshy terrain of Schopenhauer and the Immanent Will, fixated on peasants and pessimism. Hardy had been patronised, Freudianised, mythologised; his fiction was the lumbering vehicle of a home-spun cosmic gloom appropriate in its simplistic earnesty to a half-educated son of the soil. There had, of course, been some excellent Hardy criticism; but Professor Gregor’s enquiry about the form of his fiction opened a new, now frequently-acknowledged perspective. The question was significant, however, not only because it had been insufficiently raised before but because it seemed precisely the right question to pose about that particular author. We don’t commonly ask ourselves what kind of fiction Scott, Jane Austen or George Eliot wrote—not because those novelists don’t confront us with considerably complex issues of form and genre, but because we shape our questions about their artistic techniques within a fairly established sense of what sort of formal enterprise we are dealing with. But with Hardy the position is different. Pastoral, melodrama, social realism, scientific naturalism, myth, fable, tragedy, ideology: it isn’t only that various of these categories fit various of his novels, but that several of them can fit the same work. Maybe all developed literary forms are complex amalgams of other forms; but with Hardy the issue is at once unusually visible and troublingly elusive.
Out of the Ghetto
Authors: Archer Antony
Published: July 2007

It is clear that the early Christians expected the coming of the Kingdom almost at once, and equally clear that it has not come. This long period of waiting has caused a number of problems for the Christian church and it is intended here to consider some of these and the way they were solved until recently in the Catholic church.

A number of them are those which are inevitable in an organisation that goes on a long time. The original spirit of the movement is replaced by routine. Rules and regulations are drawn up. Early practices lose their meaning—this is particularly true of liturgy—but, since they continue, new meanings are invented for them. A clear example of this is the old rule of eating fish on Fridays. When the original connection with fasting was lost people began to argue that it was about establishing one’s identity in an alien environment. The history of the Mass and the complicated meanings attributed to the most trivial and accidental details are another obvious example.

In the same way a form of organisation develops which, as time goes on, becomes increasingly complicated and unwieldly. A special class of people, the clergy, grows up for running it, all with a career structure and rewards of their own and their established place in wider society—and so a gap forms between the clergy and the other members of the church.
On Not Quite Agreeing With Marx
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

Marx denied that he was a moralist. But it can hardly be disputed that anyone who thinks seriously about certain matters which have to do with morals—the nature and causes of wrongdoing and suffering in human society, and how they may be remedied—must come to grips with his arguments. To put the matter bluntly, any responsible intellectual who is not a Marxist must at times ask himself just why he is not; and in what follows, I shall try to explain why I am not. To cope with the whole range of Marx’s writings, one needs to be a specialist; those who are not so may well be, as I am, deeply indebted to David MacLellan for his admirable summary, supported with copious quotations, of the main features of Marx’s thought. For better or for worse, anyway, my Marx will be largely Marx as McLellan presents him.

It is fundamental to Marx’s thought that human relationships, and consequently the whole web of institutions which make up society, are determined by the material circumstances in which men live and work; and consequently that if you change these material circumstances, you will change human ideas and behaviour at large. This thesis is generally labelled ‘historical materialism. Now the word ‘determined’ may be understood here in a relatively strong or a relatively weak sense. If it is taken in a strong sense, the thesis is that, given the material circumstances and the means of production prevalent in a society, its members cannot but behave very much as they do. (It would appear to be incorrect to ascribe to Mans a rigid determinism applying to the details of every individual action.)
Justification and Verification
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

In this article I want to draw attention to one particular argument used by some modern Protestant theologians, an argument concerning the verifiability and falsifiability of Christian belief. This argument consists of an appeal to the Pauline idea of justification, but the difficulty which the argument raises concerns the meaning which is given to ‘justification’. The concept of ‘justification’ can acquire rather different meanings from the contexts in which it is used; that is to say, the meaning which ‘justification’ has on any particular occasion depends on the character of the position which it is being used to attack. Let us look at some of these positions in order to see what differences of meaning ‘justification’ may have.

Paul gave the first peculiarly Christian exposition of the idea of ‘justification’ in his letter to the Romans, though he had previously used the idea in a more rudimentary fashion in his letter to the Galatians. Paul used the idea to distinguish Christianity from any other form of religion, particularly that of Judaism. He says that justification, i.e. the state of being righteous which allows us to stand before God without fear of condemnation even though we are technically still sinners, comes through faith and not through works of the Law (the Jewish Torah). In so far as we try to justify ourselves before God by performing pious practices and carrying out morally good behaviour, we will not succeed either in performing these works successfully or in being judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.20). But in so far as we abandon any attempt to make ourselves righteous before God, in so far as we accept that God makes us stand uncondemned, we will be judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.21-6).
Meaningful Dialogue
Authors: Marinoff Irene
Published: July 2007

To indicate the subject of this essay two popular expressions, which everybody uses and professes to understand, have been deliberately chosen. Through this constant use the significance of the words has evaporated, and one is left with little more than a vague indication of goodwill and low-level understanding. Yet a closer study of both terms is rewarding since it leads straight into the mystery of human— and Divine—communication.

For all time the word ‘dialogue’ is linked to the name of Plato, who used this literary form to demonstrate his master’s method of enquiry and develop his own philosophy. For both philosophers the aim is the apprehension of truth. However, this is not handed over to the pupil in a packet to be passively accepted and absorbed. Socrates is conscious that he knows nothing. If he leads his disciples into making contradictory statements, he does not do so in order to overwhelm them at the end with a ready-made solution in the maimer of a deus ex machina. He shares his own thought processes with them, teaching them to examine their preconceived ideas. If the disciple takes this seriously he will learn to think for himself and acquire a sensible approach to philosophical problems. It is fascinating to follow the argument in a dialogue as superficially simple as Euthyphro. Twice the disciple is forced to admit that ‘piety’ is ‘piety’ because it is beloved by the gods, though he has previously agreed to the opposite statement and granted that ‘piety’ had a special excellence which makes it ‘pious’ and consequently beloved by the gods.
Worker's Control in Chile
Authors: Obrero Jose
Published: July 2007

The last assembly we held before the coup was impressive. It was a sequel to an assembly which the administration had called several days before to inform us that our stock of raw material was down to zero; that with the truck owners’ strike there was no way of bringing the stock of ingots reserved for us in Concepcion; that we’d have to consider seriously the prospect of a halt in production. The news was badly received.

The Production Committees met immediately, and obtained unanimity quickly: except for workers of this plant, nobody was going to stop production. We’d get the raw material to Santiago—cost what it may—and that was that.

The determination was made and it was firm; we communicated it to the administration who gave us the green light, though it took a while to put together the means to realise it. . . .

Once we had obtained the transport to fetch the raw material, we convoked an assembly to inform all the workers of our success and ask for volunteers to accompany the trucks. Everyone knew what was involved—a long journey and a perilous one, most of it on our own time, with no bonus. The truck owners and right-wing terrorist groups were sniping at anything that moved along the roads, dynamiting bridges and railway tracks. The response was tremendous —just about everyone volunteered; the selection proved difficult.
On Re‐reading Goldman
Authors: Grainger Roger
Published: July 2007

I’m sitting next to Evelyn, in the choir stalls of the hospital chapel. Evelyn, who has been a patient in this hospital for at least twenty-five of her fifty years, is singing away lustily with the rest of us. But the words she is singing are quite different from the ones I’m singing. So different in fact that I can’t make them out at all. But, no matter; ‘God is his own interpreter, and He will make it plain’, the rest of us sing.

In Religious thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, Ronald Goldman says that ‘some religious experiences are so profound and personal and mysterious that it is doubtful if they are communicable at all, except through the emotional language of the arts’. In Evelyn’s case, it is simple enough. She can’t read. She is simply feeling religious emotions and singing religious words in a religious way; the result is, she sounds just like the six-year-old child quoted by Goldman:

‘Thy deliberately Faith I full,

Faith against almighty worship God,

And Faith all unto you,

Faith against thy holy prayer’.

In fact, Evelyn is perfectly capable of what Goldman would consider to be ‘adult’ religious thinking, and I know this because I’m preparing her for Confirmation in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, not understanding the words of Cowper’s hymn is certainly not stopping her from undergoing a genuinely religious experience. In fact, she is worshipping more completely and wholeheartedly than we are. She is more totally involved in an experience of Divinity. Although they are opaque to us, the words she is using fit her experience exactly. The parallel with glossolalia is obvious.
Varieties of Resurrection
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

During the last decade a large number of books on the resurrection have appeared, which reflect a wide range of theological perspectives. What is puzzling is not that there should have been such an interest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that the interpretations should have been so various. Why is there no unanimity of understanding concerning the resurrection? After all it is an event that is described in only a few short texts; why do exegetes find it so difficult to interpret these texts? The previous sentence, however, has already introduced us to some of the problems involved in this extremely complex hermeneutical situation. Is the resurrection an event? and is it (can it be) described in the New Testament? Exegetes and dogmatic theologians differ over these problems as much as over their understanding of the texts, and yet what is the relation of such questions as these to the linguistic content of the texts?

These reflections are prompted by the publication of an English translation of an interpretation of the texts concerning the resurrection by the distinguished French exegete Xavier Léon-Dufour. The bulk of Léon-Dufour’s book is presented as a straightforward interpretation of the texts, from the christological hymn of Philippians 2.6-11 and other Pauline and pseudo-Pauline literature to the major texts of Corinthians 15 and the closing chapters of each of the Gospels. Léon-Dufour offers an interpretation of the meaning of the texts not only in the limited literal sense but also in the wider context of the whole gospel message of each of the evangelists. One has the impression of an exegete with a distinguished past moving towards the end of a career and wanting to make a final statement on that most important of ‘events’.
The Sacrament Machine: Rumbles from the Production Line
Authors: Harbert Bruce
Published: July 2007

Antony Archer rightly suggests (‘Dismantling the Sacrament Machine’, NB January 1975) that present Church structures impede the preaching of the Gospel, and that the laity must begin to do tasks from which they have hitherto been cut off, in particular that ‘it is urgent that the laity take preaching into their hands’. He points to the inadequacy of much present-day priestly preaching, and discusses the possibility of such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, but concludes : ‘However, such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, superficially attractive though it is, would only compound the present distortion. After all the priest is ordained to preach the Gospel and attempts to change the Church should be in accordance with its theology’. It is this last point that I wish to develop.

Nobody would deny that there are many lay people who have the gift and vocation of preaching the Gospel, and are able to do it better than most priests. But preaching remains an inalienable part of Christian priesthood. You can be a preacher without being a priest, but not a priest without being a preacher. If we stress the sacramental functions of the priest at the expense of his preaching role, or vice versa, we distort our picture of his office. Though individuals may be more suited to one task than to the other, priests must be trained for both, and both must be expected of them. To train a man to administer the sacraments without training him to preach is like teaching a violinist to stop the strings with his left hand, without showing him how to wield the bow in his right. The reason for the interdependence of the two roles lies deep in the nature of the Gospel itself. Christ came both to speak and to act: he both utters, and is, the Word of God. Indeed, it is hard to conceive what is meant by administering the sacraments without preaching, since all human gestures reveal something about those who make them, and so every sacramental act communicates, proclaims, preaches, though it may do so very badly. Bro. Antony has fallen into a trap when he says ‘By preaching is meant here verbal communication’, since the verbal is inseparable from other forms of communication.
The New Bestiary
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

In the early days of anthropology, it was not quite clear whether the new arrival was an infant prodigy, or simply a know-all adolescent. If the claims of the first generations of anthropologists were correct, marvellous keys had been discovered for tracing the prehistory of the family and the origins of religion; but the development of the subject brought about their rejection, though Morgan’s scheme of the evolution of the family was absorbed into the ossified dogmas of Soviet Communism (from which it has by now been quietly dislodged), while Sir James Frazer’s mythology of corn spirits and dying gods not only impressed Freud but gave English-speaking intellectuals their abiding image of traditional religion.

Professional social anthropology meanwhile followed the path of academic respectability, the elaboration of its own methodology and, more particularly, its own academic language, which admirably fulfilled the related functions of revealing its mysteries by successive degrees to the initiated while concealing them from outsiders. Respectability once attained, however, has a way of losing its charm, and we now seem to be on the verge of a new wave of anthropologists as prophets. Dr Roy Willis presents himself as one of the first of the band, with his revelations contained in Man and Beast, the first of a new series, entitled Approaches to Anthropology, under the general editorship of Professor Mary Douglas.

Let it be said at once that Dr Willis is a singularly urbane prophet and his kerygma contains little that menaces doom, though much that stirs up thought.
‘Slant’ and the Language of Revolution
Authors: Wall Alan
Published: July 2007

‘The distinctive character of Western European Marxism since 1918 has been its co-emergence and colloquy with various currents of idealism—Dilthey, Croce, Husserl, etc. The same pattern is likely to be repeated in Britain, should an ‘Anglo-Marxism’ ever finally emerge. The precondition for a transcendence of this dialectic is the reunification of theory and practice in a mass socialist movement. This has not yet been achieved anywhere in Europe’ (Perry Anderson, New Left Review, 35).

Slant, the journal of the Catholic left in Britain in the 1960s, began publication in 1964 and ended in 1970. Its formation and development were the result of factors both within and outside the Catholic Church. The development of the ‘New Left’ in Britain seemed to open up an area of potential middle-class radicalisation. After Hungary and Suez in 1956 what appeared to be required was a de-Stalinised, socialist humanism, responsive to the specific conditions of welfare-state capitalism whilst being at the same time internationalist in its perspectives. In the early 1960s the New Left was a political tendency—with all the vagueness which that term implies. It represented a hesitant, exploratory analysis, which was only later to refine its insights into a more rigorous critique of contemporary capitalism.
What is Fascism ?
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

Only a few years ago, an article with a title such as this would have seemed of merely historical interest—akin, perhaps, to a paper on the Second International or Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism. But fascism is no longer of merely antiquarian interest, if indeed it ever was. As the crisis of world monopoly capitalism intensifies, fascism is once more a real political issue in the advanced capitalist societies; and some historical analysis of its constitutive structures is absolutely indispensable to the political task of rooting it out. This isn’t easy, for a number of reasons. For one thing, fascism is a phenomenon of considerable complexity, and for that reason among others lends itself temptingly to vulgarly reductive explanations whose theoretical bankruptcy leads straight to political impotence. For another thing, there isn’t always enough time to plough one’s way through the history and theory of fascism when the National Front are gathering at the local town hall. And so Front-hunting can become a seductive displacement of the real task of examining what fascism actually signifies. There is, too, the problem of knowing how seriously at the moment to take fascism in our society—of steering a line between that bland dismissal of it on which it historically thrives, and diverting one’s political energies from the major tasks which confront us—the destruction of the bourgeois state through the building of revolutionary proletarian leadership—to a more immediate but (at present) structurally less determinant issue. In this, the issue of fascism is rather like that of sexuality: it’s never easy to draw the line between pathological obsession and ascetic underplaying.

To risk a reductive formulation: fascism is essentially the attempt to ensure the rule of monopoly capitalism in its purest, most untrammelled, most invulnerable form. But of course monopoly capitalism is extremely reluctant to do any such thing.
‘Decentring’ God
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

In the good old days of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, it was comforting to think that, whatever the divergences between the two camps, they were at least united by their profoundly humanistic dimension. It is a wry historical irony that the humanistic plank which once bridged the Christian-Marxist gap has now become the blunt instrument with which Marxism belabours Christianity about the head. For the most important developments in European Marxism centre on a decisive rejection of the ‘Marxist-humanist’ interpretation of historical materialism. ‘Marxism’, announces Louis Althusser in a polemical, programmatic chapter-heading, ‘is not a Humanism’; and Michel Foucault takes comfort in the thought that ‘man is but a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge, and will disappear when the latter has found a new form’. Man-centred Marxism—that heretical deviation from historical materialism which pivots all on the ‘collective subject’ and its ‘praxis’—is merely a displacement of the inherently bourgeois ideology of ‘humanism’. History as the expression of the generic subject Man, en route to reappropriating his alienated being: we cannot escape this Hegelian form of Marxism merely by substituting ‘men’ for Man. For the subjects of history are not ‘men’, not even ‘social classes’, but, as Althusser comments, social formations; Marxism is the science of the laws of these social formations, of these structures of which individual men are merely the bearers. It is ‘humanism’, with its corrosive insistence on rooting all in the ‘living concrete individuals’ of history, which forestalls us from thinking through society as structure—a structure which, like the unconscious, has its reasons of which ‘living individuals’ know nothing.

The ‘de-centring’ of the human subject: this is the scandalous, pervasive theme of European Marxism and structuralism. ‘Man’ or ‘men’, installed by bourgeois ideology at the heart of history and the universe, the source of all discourse and creation, is impudently dethroned.
The Papacy and the Historian: Romans and Germans
Authors: John Eric
Published: July 2007

As the Roman Empire waned the Church waxed. Inevitably it was a Church deeply affected by Romanitas. When the Empire became Christian, if that is the right way of putting it, under Constantine the political centre moved east to the new capital of the Bosphorous, the Washington or Brasilia of the new era. Byzantium became the royal city, Rome the urbs ecclesiae, the city of the Church. Inevitably the head of the city of the Church, in view of the hierarchical ideology coming into increasing favour, was taken more and more seriously as successor of Peter. The climax of this early papalism is the pontificate of Leo the Great and the reception accorded to his letter or tome at the council of Chalcedon: the tome and the council set the seal on orthodox Christology. However this undoubted display of successful authority must be seen in its context. Behind the council’s Christologi-cal decrees lay more than a century of conciliar activity and the production of what are still the orthodox credal formularies: to all this Rome contributed veiy little. The canon of Scripture had been debated and disputed: the authoritative work of deciding what was to be included and what was to be excluded was done without reference to Rome. It is Leo’s intervention which is unusual. His predecessors had not made much effort to settle doctrinal disputes: one feels by this time Christians felt this sort of thing was the job of gatherings of bishops. Leo is unlikely to have felt very differently but as the events of the last generation had shown, the problems of theology had become vital political issues and if Rome had not intervened it seems unlikely agreement of any kind would have been reached.
Metaphor and Truth in Hebrews
Authors: Smith Lewis
Published: July 2007

The image of the Church was already a complex one in the years leading up to Vatican II, whether one thinks of the picture portrayed in theological writing or of the meaning glimpsed, and perhaps apprehended, in day-to-day living, in personal prayer and in worship. But within the complexity there was in Catholic theology and practice a special stress upon the priesthood in the Church, and therefore upon the Church as a sacral, hierarchical institution, endowed with a fullness of priestly powers : of order (magisterium) and jurisdiction. This sacral-bureaucratic view came to fullest expression in Journet’s The Church of the Word Incarnate, in which order precariously maintained a primacy of honour over jurisdiction. Bishop De Smedt took a fresh and critical look at the same image when he denounced triumphalism, clericalism and juridicism in a speech he made at the Council. Freedom and fraternity were not the only fundamental Christian values to come into their own again; the stress on the living Word of God and his coming into expression in the scriptural word, and the shift towards existential modes of thinking in response to the demand of faith seeking knowledge in us and for us, in and for our time, called into question a static, clerical-priestly and authoritarian Church.

The ten years after the Council have been a testing time for us all, and not least for the priests of the Church. There has been a spate of theological writing about ministry and priesthood, verging indeed, at popular levels, on the narcissistic and obsessional. Too little of it has seen that behind the question of the ministry there stands a more fundamental, christological question about the meaning of Christ’s priesthood. The more welcome, therefore, to Fr Sabourin’s study of Christ’s priesthood and the history that led up to it.
Social Consciousness in the New Testament: Jesus and Paul — A Contrast
Authors: Ford J. Massyngberde
Published: July 2007

Not infrequently one meets scholars and laity who envisage Paul, the apostle, as a revolutionary and Jesus as a non-violent, non-aggressive person (except perhaps for his cleansing of the Temple). Is this view correct ? It will be the plan of this paper to suggest—but by no means to come to a firm conclusion-—that the opposite is true. When I speak of ‘Paul’ I shall be speaking of the Pauline school, not necessarily of the individual apostle, and when I speak of Jesus I shall not always distinguish between the ipsissima vox, the very voice of Jesus, and ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus, as redacted by the evangelists. Further in examining Pauline theology we must remind ourselves continually that in all likelihood the apostle never saw one of our written canonical gospels.