bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
So Who's a Pentecostal Now?
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

In an important article in Gregorianum, now reprinted separately, Fr Francis Sullivan has invited us to take yet another look at the Pentecostal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’, suggesting a new avenue of approach, using St Thomas’s teaching on the mission of the Holy Spirit in la q.43.

At the outset, let me confess to a growing conviction that, in the long run, the Catholic Pentecostal Movement (under whatever name it may wish to be known) will be seen to have contributed most to the Church by goading a surprising number of Christians, and even some theologians, into taking a renewed interest in the various traditions we have in the Church concerning the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Whatever reservations one may (or, perhaps, should) have about Catholic Pentecostalism, this, at least, is surely a good thing.

Sullivan subtitles his essay, ‘A Catholic Interpretation of the Pentecostal Experience’. He begins by offering a working definition of ‘the Pentecostal experience’ as ‘a religious experience which initiates a decisively new sense of the powerful presence and working of God in one’s life, which working usually involves one or more charismatic gifts’. Members of Pentecostal Churches, he reminds us, would add ‘experience marked
A Marxist's Jesus
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Prague was once, and in time no doubt will be again, a crossroads of ideas, a carrefour of cross-fertilisation between Christians and Marxists. The effect upon such theologians as J.B. Metz and Jurgen Moltmann would not be difficult to demonstrate. In many respects now, so pervasive have a certain basic Marxist agenda and vocabulary become, Christians can no longer formulate their ideas or decide their course of action without more or less explicit reference to Marxism. This is particularly true in Latin America. It is noticeable also in Vatican documents on social policy—for example in the paragraphs on liberation in Pope Paul’s lengthy statement “Evangelii nuntiandi”, published some three weeks before the Declaration on Sexual Ethics, but, in contrast with the latter, destined to drop immediately into that oblivion of indifference reserved by conservatives and radicals in the Catholic Church for all utterances from Rome except those on sex. On a wider front, however, through the spread of sociology and allied disciplines as well as in response to urgent political situations, Christianity—and certainly Catholicism—has, willy nilly, absorbed a considerable amount from Marxism in the past twenty years, and sometimes even shown great critical resilience in the process. Doubt has remained, on the other hand as to how much a Marxist loyal to his atheism could learn from dialogue with Christians, or indeed as to how much serious work a Marxist would be ready to put into the study of Christian source-texts, in comparison anyway with the mushrooming industry of Catholic Marxologists.
Marx, Freud and Morality
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

I said in a previous New Blackfriars (October 1975) that Marxism has had on the whole little to say about morality, because one doesn’t engage in moral debate with men who can only grasp morality in moralistic — and so ideological — fashion. It’s in the provisional silence of those who refuse the term ‘morality’ that, perhaps, something of its true meaning may finally emerge. The condition for the emergence of that discourse is Marxism itself — the theory and practice of political revolution. Until that condition is fulfilled, our ‘moral’ discourse is bound to remain imprisoned within the ideological, that’s to say, that when we speak ‘morally’, we won’t, for much of the time, know what we are meaning. We’ll be in the condition of all those imprisoned within the ideological, who, in the very act of speaking, fail to recognise that they themselves are being ‘spoken’, being constituted, by certain discourses quite independent of themselves, quite concealed from their consciousness, discourses which they betray, despite themselves, in the slips, contradictions, inconsistencies which fissure and deform their speaking. It’s of the essence of the ideological that in speaking, in constituting myself as a subject, I must necessarily repress, remain in ignorance, of the very determinants of my discourse — determinants which are visible only to science, to that science of social formation which is historical materialism, or that science which is psychoanalysis. As ‘I’ speak ‘I’ the coherent historical subject Terry Eagleton, it — the unconscious — speaks through me, constantly disturbing and displacing my discourse.
South African Apocalypse
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

“Dear Father — Our Black People here have been quiet lately. I still think they’re doing -wrong by burning down their own schools and townships. Why not do it in the white areas?

“There are so many why’s about our black people, will the

S.A. government be able to answer it?

“1. Why is there apartheid in most churches except the Catholic church?

“2. Why does the black man not have the same education as the white?

“3. Why does the black man have to do a job and the white gets the credit for it?

“4. Why can’t the black man occupy the same position as the white?

“5. Why must the black man sit upstairs in a bus, when the white sits downstairs?

“6. Why in the first place did they bribe the black man and steal his land? South Africa belongs to the black people.

“7. Why is there apartheid in hospitals?

“8. Why, if there’s been a road accident, can’t the black man help the white?

“9. Why, if I take Michael to hospital do they first help the white and let me wait for hours?

“10. Why can’t the Black people work in Cape Town? — They must produce a pass.

“11. There are so many why’s who can answer it?

“I have two African guys working for me, and I love them. They’re well educated, decent and religious. I took Michael to work one Saturday. He played with them, walked about the factory with them and even ate with them — the white was astonished. — Do you know what the black man then said to the white? He said, ‘Sir, this child is just like his mother, his heart is open’. Then I thought to myself: Who’s child on this earth will play with a black man and eat with him.
Poverty, Wealth and the Church in the Developing Countries
Authors: Visocchi Tony
Published: July 2007

We are all very aware of the glaring inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor countries of the world, and of the cries for help (usually in the form of financial aid) that come from every side One thing that is overlooked, either because we feel that we can do nothing about it, because we are too diplomatic, because we do not want to meddle in the internal politics of nation states, because we ourselves are hardly an example, or because we are in fact profiting from the situation, is the growing imbalance of wealth inside many of the countries in Africa today. The fact that we feel we can do nothing, or do not want to do anything has helped to hide the situation, to relegate it to a limbo. Very often we just do not want to talk about it. And yet there can be no hope of development if this very basic problem is not tackled.

That it exists is evident to anyone who has ever worked in Africa. The usual dichotomy is between rural and urban areas, wealth accumulates in the cities and not in the rural areas, although at times up to 95% of the population live in the countryside and provides the nation’s wealth. The cities give the impression of a progressive, intense and thrusting development, the rural areas appear to be stagnant or even regressing.

And yet to portray the problem in these terms is only to tell half the truth; there is a mixture of poverty and wealth in both urban and rural areas. Each African country has at least one showpiece of a city; tall buildings, offices, apartments, or hotels. There are flyovers, underpasses, or freeways; elegant shopping centres dot the town which is no doubt surrounded by affluent suburbs.
Paul's Experience: Sighting or Theophany?
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

What did Paul have to say about the resurrection, Geoffrey Turner asks (New Blackfriars, April 1977), as he goes on to say that I have suggested that “Paul had a simple spiritual experience”. Well, if that is the impression that I have left, I must try to make myself a little clearer.

Geoffrey Turner appeals to I Cor 15 and interprets that reference to the appearance of the risen Christ to Paul in terms of Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles of the Damascus road experience. Is it so obvious that this move is legitimate? Admittedly it has frequently been made, at least since the middle of the second century when readers of the New Testament were first in a position to turn from one text to another and begin the process of harmonising the different accounts which it is one of the major effects of modern New Testament studies to bring into question. We need to remind ourselves, however, that Luke shows no knowledge of any of Paul’s letters. In fact the picture of Paul that Luke gives in Acts is remarkably unlike the picture that emerges from Paul’s own letters. The account that one man gives of another would of course differ a good deal from a self portrait, but the differences between Paul’s own theology and Luke’s account of it in Acts are so obvious and numerous that we must reckon with the possibility, and even the likelihood, that Luke did not have much access to Pauline material. Methodologically, if we are to be cautious, we must leave open the possibility that the Lukan accounts of the Damascus road experience were not derived from Paul himself but were Luke’s reconstruction of what must have happened.
Kingsley Amis: in search of the Simple Life
Authors: McCabe Bernard
Published: July 2007

A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.

But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.
Ariadne and Justification
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G.
Published: July 2007

The revival at Covent Garden this season of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, though it was but indifferently well directed and sung, confirmed me in a supposition that this opera affords the Christian a useful pair of images for his meditation upon the ways in which God is said to justify man. The musical action of Ariadne presents whomsoever would employ them with lively images for the common faith of Christians and for the different doctrinal formulations of this faith by Roman and Lutheran theologians. It suggests, also, how far these formulations may be related to that faith. The theologian’s nice arguments are rendered immediately appreciable in Strauss’ music. Whether he, or Hofmannsthal his librettist, had ever been confronted with the excitements of the sixteenth century disputants, Strauss, in the composition of this delightful opera, was exploring for himself just that relation of seeing to knowing which is structurally so important for doctrines of justification, and he was doing so within a context which most naturally suggested that a man might come to share in the divine life.

‘Seeing’ is commonly taken as a strong metaphor for all kinds of ‘knowing’, not only that which depends on our opening our eyes. This much, at least, is evident. Nodding in comprehension, I say ‘I see’.
Recent Catholic Writing on the Resurrection (1) The Empty Tomb Story
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The foundation of Christianity, as fact and doctrine, is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus who was crucified,

“a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”

(I Cor 1: 23-24).

Great efforts have been made over the centuries to spell out the presuppositions and implications, historical, metaphysical and theological, of this event, and it is unlikely that anything wholly new will be discovered now. In the last ten or fifteen years, on the other hand, study of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament has quickened dramatically, among Catholics, and it is important for us all to recognize that some divergence of interpretation is now established. Without attempting even to summarise the ever increasing Catholic literature on the subject, or to examine the various problems which the divergence creates, and which the new interpretation involves, it seems worthwhile to delineate briefly some features of the approach to the gospel accounts of the Resurrection to be found in some recent Catholic theology from Germany. The same approach may be traced elsewhere, most notably in major works by the Dominican theologians Christian Duquoc and Edward Schillebeeckx, but since neither of these has yet been translated into English, it seems more useful to limit this survey to three more accessible works: Hans Küng’s On being a Christian, Walter Kasper’s Jesus the Christ, and The Common Catechism. It is not a matter of accumulating authorities for the new approach; it is rather a question of registering how widely accepted the new approach already is.
Principalities and Powers in Ephesians
Authors: Yates Roy
Published: July 2007

The plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. (Eph. 3: 10)

One of St. Paul’s contributions to our understanding of the powers of evil is to sum them up in the phrase ‘principalities and powers’. For him they represent the sum-total of evil powers that threaten men both heavenly and earthly. The author of Ephesians takes over the concept in his emphasis of Christ’s exaltation and victory over evil. For him Christ’s victory and redemption is cosmic in scope, yet peculiarly practical in that its effects are to be worked out in the Church and in the lives of believers.

In 1:21 the ascended Christ is described as sitting at the right hand of the Father above, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion’. This list represents the cosmic totality; everything that in any way is in a position of power and influence in the universe. The all-inclusive nature of the phrase is underlined by the addition of, ‘and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’. There is no attempt made to set the powers in any order of preference, or to define any of their individual characteristics. ‘The Writer is concerned not to give us information about the denizens of the unseen world but to help our imagination to picture the exalted glory of Christ.’ Are the powers referred to good or bad? The need for them to be put in subjection under his feet points at least to the inclusion of subversive heavenly powers. By his exaltation Christ is not only supreme over the whole universe, but also head of the Church.
One more Analysis of Britain
Authors: Dummett Ann
Published: July 2007

Just as pornography has almost succeeded in making sex boring, so the great tide of gloomy analysis of Britain’s ills has almost succeeded in making politics a bore. The prospect of sitting down yet another evening with a group of house-and car-owners, eating very good food and drinking wine, and hearing about how poor they all are because the Trade Unions are now running the country is as disenchanting as having to hear for the fourteenth time about someone’s gall-bladder operation. To read in newspapers, not for the fourteenth but for at least the four hundredth time, that the country is being wrecked by socialism, scrounging and threats to freedom from the extreme Left, is no longer funny, or even horrifying, but just unbearable, like the dripping of a leaky tap.

It would be a good deal less exasperating to have to read, and listen to, endless disgruntlement if the complaints were based on reality. Tiresome though it may be to get an exhaustive account of someone’s hospital operation, one can still have genuine sympathy with the teller because, after all, the operation did happen and was no doubt pretty unpleasant. The really desperate feeling comes on when you have to listen to someone’s account of unreal misfortune: the slightly dotty landlady who thinks her tenants knock on the water-pipes every night to annoy her, when in fact they spend their evenings creeping round on stockinged feet so as not to provoke her wrath, and what she needs is not new tenants but a visit from a plumber.

Complaints about plutocratic coal-miners, suggesting that they are the sort of people who go out in Rolls Royces running down the starved and downtrodden middle classes, and about the dangers of Communism, which is actually weaker in the United Kingdom than in any other European country, are far harder to take even than such a landlady’s fears.
Theology and Natural Theology
Authors: Davies Brian A.
Published: July 2007

The general credibility of theology was once widely held by theologians to depend on a successful natural theology. Today things are different. There are certainly some contemporary advocates of natural theology—and a few of these are even theologians; but it is presently fashionable to reject natural theology in the name of theology itself. But are there cogent, theological reasons for dismissing natural theology? I shall suggest that the best known modern defences of an affirmative reply are unacceptable.

According to the natural theologian, ‘God exists’ is a respectable philosophical assertion which can be rationally sustained without recourse to the prior acceptance either of God’s existence or of any special revelation. Typically, he insists that ‘God exists’ is rational, provable, justifiable or demonstrable. Bearing these points in mind, what is the nature of the theological opposition to natural theology?

We can begin to answer this question by noting the view that the nature of theism renders irrelevant the notion of arguing or reasoning or making inferences about God. Some observe that this is the position of the Bible. Biblical writers, it is argued, “did not think of God as an inferred entity, but as an experienced reality”. Others explain that proofs must result in abstraction, “a pale shadow of the living God who is the putative object of biblical faith”. In this connection we might note some remarks of Alasdair MacIntyre. In Metaphysical Beliefs MacIntyre points to the enormous importance of faith where religious belief is concerned. He thus argues that natural theology, considered in its familiar guise as the presentation of supposedly demonstrative argument, is out of place in religion.
The Long Dialectic of Rain and Sunlight
Authors: Tatham M.A.
Published: July 2007

Those of R. S. Thomas’ poems which can be called—if somewhat loosely—religious, are frequently variations of a dichotomy one term of which appears to have the poet’s qualified approval. And our confidence in the integrity of Thomas’ response to the complexity of his experience is sustained because, as we constantly discover, the preferred term in one variation of the dichotomy becomes the less favoured term in another. Sometimes, indeed, the less favoured term may even be identified with the overtly religious position. Nor are we required to share Thomas’ faith; he is neither insistent nor didactic and consequently there is no problem of distinguishing between the poet and the believer. Indeed, R.S.Thomas is not only immune to the virus of apologetic religiosity but he sustains a dialogue in which faith and unfaith are held in unresolved tension. If his world clearly differs from the one we are familiar with in Larkin’s Church Going it does so, not because it is fundamentally different, but because it is approached from a less familiar direction.

Curiously pehaps, since both are Anglicans, R.S.Thomas’ poetry is quite unlike Betjeman’s, and this is not simply a matter of technique, but has to do with attitudes, and especially their very different ideas about the importance of social artefacts. However much Betjeman deplores Slough’s bogus Tudor bars he delights in the bricky beauty of small towns—the area formerly castigated by Hopkins as ‘Oxford’s base and brickish skirt’ and in this—as in a good deal else, R.S.Thomas is closer to Hopkins. The mere physical threat is seen as having important spiritual implications, although for Thomas the pain is less acute, less fraught, and less creatively tuned to transmit the fleeting energy of living movement.
Against Natural Theology
Authors: Grimes Alistair
Published: July 2007

I want to take up the challenge made by Brian Davies in a recent article, in which he argues that natural theology remains unscathed at the hands of contemporary theological criticism. I shall try and show that his optimism is largely unfounded, firstly, by showing the confusions in his own arguments, and then by indicating some grounds for a more widespread dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise of natural theology.

For both Davies and myself, the natural theologian is one who holds that the proposition ‘God exists’ is a respectable assertion that can be rationally sustained without recourse to a priori acceptance of God’s existence, or any kind of special revelation. As Davies notes, such an approach contrasts strongly with Liberal Protestantism, and in particular Barth and Tillich, who insist that there is no justification or foundation for Christianity in the sense understood by natural theology. Barth’s own attitude is well expressed in his masterly summation of ‘Church Dogmatics’, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so”. Davies will have none (or very little) of this and spends some time attacking both Barth and Tillich. His first target is, however, Alasdair MacIntyre, or at least the Alasdair MacIntyre of ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief. MacIntyre suggests that natural theology is incompatible (in the sense of trying to provide a proof) with the idea of freely accepting the love of God and that, paradoxically, the success of such arguments would be as destructive of religion as the sceptic holds their failure to be. For MacIntyre, the justification for religion is not to be discovered in the search for foundations, but by elucidating more fully what is involved in religious belief.
A Christian View of Justice
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

It should be of supreme interest to anyone who is trying to come to a true Christian understanding of justice to discover as far as possible the attitude of Jesus to matters of justice. There are a number of gospel passages which suggest that he was not at all interested in the concept of justice as fairness. In his teaching there are strong indications that, with God, people do not get what they deserve, that one’s recompense does not bear any relation to one’s effort or merit. It is indicated moreover that such a rejection of justice as fairness should be adopted by men in their dealings with one another because that is the way God deals with men. I am not putting it this way merely to shock. I think that a critique of justice as strict fairness is explicit in the teachings of Jesus and that we must pay attention to it if we are to arrive at the notion of justice which his teachings do uphold, in continuity with the rest of Scripture.

Some of the sayings which suggest Jesus’s indifference to strict fairness are these: The parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16a); The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32); the refusal of Jesus to divide the inheritance between two brothers (Luke 12:13-15); the sayings in the sermon on the mount, Matt. 5:44 (par. Luke 6:32-36), about loving your enemies, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Faith and Experience I
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

Several recent publications focus on the question of religious experience; two of them are particularly devoted to wooing the reader to share the experience of the Catholic ‘charismatic movement’, three of them represent the first published results to emerge from the work of the Religious Experience Research Unit founded in Oxford by Sir Alister Hardy. Since the problems raised by them overlap to some extent, it seems worth while to treat all five books together in a series of articles.

For all its deceptively quiet style, This Promise is for You brings to light the tensions inherent in what we may call the ‘benign’ wing of Catholic Pentecostalism. There are those who are prepared to state fairly bluntly that Catholic Pentecostalism is something quite new, and that it shows up traditional piety as being, basically, ineffective, and this no doubt corresponds to the experience of the pioneers of Catholic, as of other brands of, Pentecostalism. There are occasional hints of this in Abbot Parry’s book, especially on p. 100, where he warns the reader (who is invited to use the book as a course of preparation for ‘baptism in the Spirit’) that “we are on the brink of changing a tangible, familiar, realistic, ‘normal’ life style, for an act of faith in an unseen God”. This is the kind of language we should associate with those who treat a conversion to the ‘charismatic movement’ as being, for practical purposes, a man’s first serious conversion to Christ (which of course it may be in some cases).

But on the whole Parry is concerned to re-assure the reader that the ‘charismatic movement’ is very much in line with traditional piety, that there are no distinctively ‘charismatic’ virtues, that it is not particularly about ‘odd’ manifestations, that ‘baptism in the Spirit’ may be a gradual process, not a sudden experience, that none of it depends on going to any special kind of prayer meeting, and so on. The continuity with ordinary Christian life is stressed rather than the discontinuity.
The Open Letter: Evangelical Anglicans and Ecumenism
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

In July 1977 a group of Evangelical Anglicans addressed an Open Letter to the bishops of the Anglican communion. The Letter has recently been published together with a lengthy commentary, somewhat in the style of the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) Agreements, in the general reception of which this is intended as a significant intervention. This document invites attention from Catholics, not merely on tactical grounds, because of the large number of Anglicans with a Protestant cast of mind who must be respected and accommodated in any reconciliation between Canterbury and Rome, but also because of the intrinsic importance of the theological questions that the authors raise.

The tenor of the Open Letter may be judged by the Preface: “Some speak as if with the appearance of the three ARCIC Agreements the main theological discussions are already over, and we can all now move on to arranging the nuts and bolts of intercommunion with Roman Catholics and union eventually. This shows how intoxicating is the strong wine of ecumenical bonhomie, and how churchmen, like motorists, can have their heads grow muzzy while feeling that their judgment was never better. Let it be said here, with emphasis, that the signatories think that the discussions which history will see as the main ones have hardly yet begun” (my italics). Evangelicals find themselves badly under-represented in ARCIC, and they consider that the Agreements so far reached on the eucharist, the ministry, and authority, do little to show that Catholics have yet “fully assimilated the doctrinal clarifications which came out of the Reformation conflict”. That the Reformation made Christian doctrine clearer, and that the Anglican communion ‘stands in the Reformation tradition”, are affirmations that are certainly often neutralised by ecumenists.
Ernst Troeltsch and the Study of Religion
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Ernst Troeltsch is not one of the more accessible of twentieth century theologians as can be seen from a bibliography of his works translated into English which appears at the end of Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, translated and edited by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye, Duckworth, London, 1977, £12.50. Whether the translation of the four papers presented in this volume will make him more popular is rather doubtful as he here shows himself at his most heavy and turgid mainly because he writes in abstractions about methodologies. When Troeltsch does discuss issues and authors he is usually concerned with Protestant theology in the Nineteenth Century and it sometimes seems very dated (as in ‘Half a Century of Theology: a Review’ [1908]). This book, however, aims to introduce Troeltsch to a wider public particularly in Germany where he has never had much impact and this volume, curiously, is a translation of the original German including introductory articles by the English editors. These three articles by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye are tremendously helpful in giving an overall view of Troeltsch and his place in modern theology.

Troeltsch is important, it would seem, mainly as a philosopher of religion rather than as a systematic theologian. He is at his best when discussing theological methodology, but when he tried to do straight theology, as in the article ‘The Significance of the Historical Jesus for Faith’ (1911), the effect could be disastrous. In this article Troeltsch assumes at the outset that traditional orthodox dogmatics had crumbled by the beginning of this century and that no one who was at all sensitive to modern intellectual sensibilities could accept the doctrine of the incarnation and that Christ had done anything concrete to redeem or save mankind. Salvation, whatever that might mean for Troeltsch, comes directly to the individual from God and, he says, is a matter of personal experience.
Jesus and the Leaven of Salvation
Authors: McCombie Frank
Published: July 2007

That there has recently been an eruption of opinion on the nature of myth in the New Testament is scarcely a matter of surprise. For too long we have been content to use words in one context as if they had no significance in any other. The significations of “myth” are legion, and current debate about myth in the New Testment must remain quite pallid until definitions are agreed: which is not something anyone familiar with the history of myth could possibly think imminent. But if “myth” is certainly the most notorious of lightly-used and little-comprehended terms, “symbol” and “metaphor” are no more respectable. Both are related to myth, which speaks typically through received symbols of one kind or another, and which rests upon the imagery of metaphor. Giambattista Vico defined metaphor long ago as “a fable in brief’, and certainly the notion that myth grows out of metaphor, and the related notion that metaphor summarises myth, are both familiar enough to students of literature. And the notion that the literal reading of metaphor in the Bible is the source of much of the mythologising that some now wish to see reversed is familiar enough to students of the New Testament. The difficulties that might be involved in that reversal, however, must give us pause. It is in illumination of some of these difficulties, rather than in any attempt to solve them, that this paper is offered.
In Filial Disobedience
Authors: Griffiths Bede
Published: July 2007

Readers of New Blackfriars will remember that last March Fr Adrian Hastings contributed an article on Celibacy, in which he declared that he had come to the decision that as a Catholic priest he was free to marry. He has now followed this up with a book, containing the original article published in New Blackfriars and some other articles on kindred subjects together with an account of his life, showing the background of experience which has led to this decision. This little book is, in fact, an Apologia pro Vita Sua, and as such it seems to me extremely impressive. When a person comes to such a decision, it is natural to ask, what are the motives behind it, conscious or unconscious, and to what extent he can be called a balanced personality. In this book the answer comes through with extraordinary clarity. It is written with transparent sincerity, with humour, intelligence and a profound sense of Catholicity. I do not think that any unprejudiced reader could question that this decision has been reached after mature reflection by one whose life has given him a singularly close connection through his experience in Africa with the issues involved, who has seen their implications for the whole Church and has had the courage to challenge the present system of the Church, which imposes celibacy on the clergy, by the witness of his personal life.
Faith and Experience III: Experience and its Interpretation
Authors: Tugwell Simon
Published: July 2007

In some, perhaps most, cultures metaphysics and mysticism belong together. Even in our own society organizations which bear the name ‘metaphysical’ are likely, an examination, to be found to be concerned primarily with more or less mystical and esoteric doctrines and practices. But it is still typical of the Anglo-Saxon academic world that philosophers have, on the whole, not been frightfully eager to; tangle with mystics, nor mystics with philosophers. As a result of this it has been lamentably easy for philosophers to assume that they know what mystics are saying, without bothering to verify their allegations, and for a whole trend of spirituality to thrive off a naive rejection of the ‘God of philosophers’ in favour of the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and God knows who else’.

Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis is an important symptom that this situation is changing.

Most of the contributions are not concerned directly with the philosophical issues posed for philosophers as such by mysticism. Intuition and the Inexpressible by Renford Bambrough tackles the logical problem of ineffability; Nelson Pike and George Mavrodes discuss the epistemological status of mystical experiences. But otherwise most of the essays are concerned with clarifying the methodology of investigation of mysticism, and with developing and studying the concepts needed for such investigation.

The ten contributors were left entirely free to choose their own topic and tactic; it is all the more impressive that a certain coherence definitely emerges from their various essays. Almost all the essays contain some kind of attack on two much loved doctrines: first, the belief that, underlying the diversity of expression to be found in mystical writings, there is either a single or at most a few varieties of essential mystical experience; and secondly, the belief that it is, in principle, fairly straightforward to disengage the essential experience or experiences from their interpretative garments.
Never Forgetful Witnesses: David Holbrook on Sylvia Plath
Authors: Smith Stan
Published: July 2007

I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.I bed in a fish puddle.Down here the sky is always falling....I housekeep in Time’s gut-end Among emmets and molluscs,Duchess of Nothing,Hairtusk’s bride.

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poem for a Birthday’ (The Colossus) is a complex dramatic monologue, a seven-part narrative in which a psyche struggles towards birth, in ‘the city of spare parts’ which is the world. It draws for its imagery on that teenage suicide attempt fictionalised in The Bell Jar and on the experience of actual childbirth, so that at times the speaker is mother, at times child, and frequently both. Its main literary sources are the Brothers Grimm and Theodore Roethke’s early poetry, particularly Praise to the End (1951). Its heroine is a Cinderella or Snow-White princess in nightmare exile among incomprehensible and uncomprehending powers. The second chapter of David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence offers an extended commentary on this poem, ‘trying to foster the reader’s possession of poetic meaning, while endeavouring to discuss universal truths about the dynamics of human personality as seen by “philosophical anthropology”.’ For this enterprise he asks the reader’s patience, ‘ignoring for the moment certain problems of the concepts and theories I shall be using’.

In fostering our possession of poetic meaning he glosses the above lines (from section 4, ‘The Beast’) as follows: ‘For “marry” here, I believe, we may read “identify”. Her concept of marrying belongs to the infant’s primitive belief that Mummy and Daddy virtually eat one another in marriage’; ‘a cupboard full of fragments of impingement—memories of her father and fragments of the mother’s “male element”;’ ‘Hairtusk is maleness, again, her father’s penis.’
De‐Institutionalising, African Style
Authors: Visocchi Tony
Published: July 2007

Some time ago, a television programme dealt with the state of affairs in Uganda—a country that has gripped the news media for a long time. It gave the impression that the army and police were instrumental in the horrors perpetrated against the population. The police and army were set up in Uganda, as in other countries, by the colonial powers to defend the population from violence and crime at home, and aggression from outside the country’s boundaries. In so doing, the colonial powers transplanted their own institution of social control.

What was intended to help the local population has become in fact in Uganda, for example, an institution of violence, aggression, crime and exploitation of the very people it was supposed to protect. Hopefully, Uganda is an extreme case but it is not the only country in Africa where governments act in a like manner. Thus one of our western institutions, established for the good of the community has become quite the opposite of what was really intended.

The army and police are not in fact the only ones to have gone this way. Throughout the years that I spent living and working in the rural areas of East Africa, I constantly came into contact with doctors, nurses and other members of the medical profession working in hospitals and clinics run by the Government or the missions. One constantly heard the same story from doctor or nurse, man or woman, black or white, government or mission employed that they were frustrated. Desperately sick patients would be brought to them only to die after a short period in hospital.
Kenelm Foster on Dante
Authors: Ryan Christopher
Published: July 2007

Kenelm Foster’s new book is a collection of essays written between 1959 and 1977. With one exception, all these studies have aspects of Dante’s work as their subject. The book falls readily into three parts. Chapters 1-5 deal with general topics: “An Introduction to the Inferno”, “Courtly Love and Christianity” (the only non-Dantean topic, but, obviously, very relevant to the main subject), “Dante and Eros”, “St Thomas and Dante”, and “Dante’s Vision of God”. Chapters 6-9 are readings of various cantos of the Comedy(and one of the pleasing features of the book is the successful retention in these and other essays of the semi-informality of the lecture style): Inferno XIX, Purgatorio XVII, Paradiso X and XIX. Chapters 10-12 consist of one long essay (over a third of the work) from which the book gets its title, on the presence of morally good pagans in Limbo, and on the philosophical and theological assumptions which lie behind this unusual idea.

I cannot summarise here the main themes of this rich and varied book. But since I want to recommend it warmly to specialists and non-specialists alike, let me try to specify some features which lead me to do so. Specialists particularly will gain from Father Fsoter’s interpretation of certain passages which run counter to commonly received opinion: lucid expositions combined with detailed accounts of where and why he finds other critics’ views unsatisfactory, as for instance on Par. XIX 64-66 (“Lume non è ...” pp. 149-152). Of particular value to the non-specialist are the apparently casual but in fact careful and judicious outlines of political, literary and theological developments (e.g. pp. 34-36, 87-88, 152-54).
Literature and Theology: A Note on some Suggestions of F. D. Maurice
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G.
Published: July 2007

Like the Cambridge ladies of e.e. cummings’ poem, who ‘believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead’, we most of us indulge in the interdisciplinary performance of literary and theological study. Walking home from the Sunday morning service we appraise both the englishing of the liturgy and the structure of the homily without much thought of whether we are right to mix literary and theological judgments. In this we ought to be encouraged. And we ought to encourage others.

It is, perhaps, for such encouragement that an undergraduate asks when he puts his name down for a course advertised in ‘Literature and Theology’ like that proffered at the University of Kent. My acquaintance with such young men and women suggests to me that for them literature and theology are not at first differentiated as autonomous disciplines, for they are experienced as modes and moments of one conversation. Their centre is in the undergraduate talking.

Yet the self spinning at the centre is not enough. Those works of literature and theology about which the young people talk witness to the experiences of others and thus become encouragements for them to think of those others. The ‘blessed rage for order’ proclaimed by the poet and the theologian communicates to the undergraduate a sense of their strivings and of his own unordered existence. And, though I intend to indicate here only that ordering of experience which may be suggested to those who attend to literature and theology, I am aware that something of the same discontent affects men in many disciplines and that these have all an interest in the new order.
Fundamentalism versus Tradition
Authors: Smith Lewis
Published: July 2007

Fundamentalism clearly is some kind of literalism, especially in biblical interpretation, a literalism sustained (for what are taken to be religious reasons) in the face of liberal amd critical reconstructions and reinterpretations of the text. In fact, of course, the critical reconstructions are often undertaken for equally religious motives. Fundamentalism expresses and exploits the worries of believers; the residually Christian popular audience takes the passion-play literalism of Zefirelli’s television film with the same uncommitted tolerance as the modernist musicals “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Fundamentalism is widely influential among some theologians too. From the time of the Modernist crisis to the run-up to Vatican II, the Biblical Commission and the Holy Office imposed something very like fundamentalism on Catholic biblical studies. Professor Barr’s book does not study such phenomena in detail, he is concerned with a Protestant fundamentalism of a more systematic kind, self-designated as conservative evangelicalism. But there is enough of a family likeness between the fundamentalisms for Barr’s critique to be serviceable in coming to terms with the recent past of Catholic biblical work, dead but not yet entirely prone.

There are three marks of the fundamentalism Barr has between his sights: the inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith and necessary test of the orthodoxy of otherwise acceptable Protestantisms; sharp hostility to modern theology and biblical criticism; and exclusion of those who fail the inerrancy test from the ranks of true Christians, (p 1) Rightly, one begins to suspect that Barr has little sympathy for his subject, regarding it as a mistake in theology and a resistance to known critical truths. Barr has no hope of persuading fundamentalists to change their minds, though he does hope to help students make theirs up in more intelligent and deliberate fashion.
Edmund of Abingdon
Authors: Fitzgerald E. V. K.
Published: July 2007

Master, Fellows, Scholars and Friends of St Edmund’s House:

It is customary on this annual occasion to delve into the scantily recorded life of St Edmund of Abingdon—in order to discover anachronistic references to the work of Newman or Newton upon which the speaker may hang his threadbare argument. In my own case the exploration did not, at first sight, augur well at all: I was indeed christened Edmund, but after the East Anglian Edmund, the patron saint of failed governors rather than of successful scholars; and perhaps even more ominously, one of Edmund of Abingdon’s great quarrels was with my ancestor Maurice Fitzgerald, Justiciar of Ireland. However, as is so often so in such cases, my good wife came to my aid, for St Edmund’s great academic contribution to Oxford, or so Roger Bacon assures us—was the introduction of the New Logic based on the Toledo Translation: in other words, the rendering into Latin of the Arabic versions of the Greek masters made in Cordoba by scholars such as Averroes, while in Europe only the dim Hibernian candle flickered fitfully in the night.

However, although I shall return to St Edmund’s tenuous connexion with Islam at the end of this Address—for having hung one’s garment on a somewhat insecure peg one must presumably take it off before it brings the whole wall down with it—I think it would be more useful to pursue the main practical concern of St Edmund’s life: the relationship between Church, State and University. Specifically, I would like to draw some parallels between the role of Church and University in society in order to derive some implications for the future role of this College.
St Thomas Aquinas as a Dominican
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

St Simeon the New Theologian, telling the story of a young man called George writes: “For love for what he sought separated him from the world, and creaturely things and all affairs, and made him entirely of the Spirit and light. Yet all the while he lived in the middle of a city and was responsible for a house and occupied with slaves and free men, doing and achieving all the things that pertain to the present life.”

With only a little modification, this description applies equally well to Aquinas, at least if we accept the accounts of him handed down to us by his early biographers. Given to rapture and religious ecstasy, supposedly “bound with a bond of chastity that shall never be loosened” (Gui, Chapter 7) he spent his active life in an entirely urban context as writer, teacher, administrator and advisor. He wined and dined with kings; he had the ear of the papacy and highest nobility as well as the offer of the loftiest ecclesiastical preferment. The Lives of the Brethren says that : “One day somebody asked Master Jordan ‘What Rule do you follow’? He replied, ‘The Rule of the Friars Preachers. And this is their Rule: to live an upright life, to learn and to teach’.” We need to see Aquinas as a man whose rule shows itself in his life and its handling of study and teaching. In this respect, although he doubtless represents ideals common to more than one religious order, common to many Christians indeed, Aquinas is typically Dominican. The Prologue to the Primitive Constitutions observes that: “Our Order was established particularly for the sake of preaching and the salvation of souls, and that our whole study should be principally and earnestly devdted to our being useful to the souls of others.