bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Demythologizing the Soul
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

When Wittgenstein chose St Augustine’s account of how an infant learns to speak, he was surely signalling his intention to interrogate the whole western way of thinking (and feeling) about the relation of body and soul. He was engaging in the Philosophy of Psychology, as they say. The hard thing, as he noted (Culture and Value, p 48), is to get hold of the difficulty deep down: “Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way”. Merely to say that we no longer believe in the story of the soul’s exile in the body doesn’t mean that we have worked ourselves free of all the ramifications of that powerful ancient myth. On the contrary, quickly reached ‘results’ in philosophy, or easily ‘taught’ methods and theses, only leave the student more oblivious than ever to his or her own confusion. “The philosopher treats a question — like an illness” (Investigations, no 254). The sickness must run its natural course: “slow cure is all important” (Zettel, no 382). Wittgenstein held that the ‘solution’ to a problem in philosophy is no good unless it comes to you when you need it. The first step in philosophical work is thus to make us see that we really did need such an answer. In fact Wittgenstein “hoped to show that you had confusions you never thought you could have had”.
A Timeless God?
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

The doctrine of God’s timelessness is now very unpopular. Several major objections have been levelled against it, and these can be summarised thus:

1

If God is timeless, he cannot be a person.

2

If God is timeless, his knowledge entails absurd consequences or is restricted.

3

If God is timeless, he cannot act.

4

If God is timeless, he cannot command our admiration or love.

5

There is Biblical precedent for rejecting the view that God is timeless.

6

There is no good reason for supposing that if there is a God, then he is timeless.

I think these objections are answerable, and here I propose briefly to say why.

What might be meant by the assertion ‘God is timeless’? The most detailed discussion of this question known to me is Nelson Pike’s God and Timelessness (London, 1970). And, as Pike suggests, it seems reasonable to argue as follows:

First, if God is timeless, He has no duration, i.e. He lacks temporal extension ... It is not just that the life of God lacks temporal limits: the point is that it has no temporal spread at all. Secondly, if God is timeless, God also lacks temporal location. God did not exist before Columbus discovered America nor will he exist after the turn of the century ... The point seems to be that God is not to be qualified by temporal predicates (such as, e.g. ‘six years old’) nor time-location predicates (such as, e.g. ‘before Columbus’). (pp 7 f.)

As Pike indicates, these views can be found in writers like Augustine, Anselm, Boethius, and Aquinas.
Bodiliness and the Good News — II
Authors: West Angela
Published: July 2007

In the first part of this article, I described how a small group of Christian feminists, concerned with issues of sexual justice and the role of women in the creation of a just society, found themselves involved in the establishment of a new eucharistic community, where women had the opportunity to preach the good news of our calling — as we were beginning to understand it. I looked at some of the resistance that we encountered in ourselves as we moved into this new sphere, and at the nature of the ideology, which at psychological level, preserves the sexual status quo, and hinders women from taking their full part in Christian ministry, and their full responsibility for proclaiming the Christian gospel. Here I hope to continue reflection on the experience of our community, and show how it has contributed to my understanding of the sacramental body of Christ and its true ministry.

At the time that our community was in the thick of its problems with the organisation of itself and the Mass, I happened to read Schillebeeckx’ essay on Ministry in the book Minister? Pastor? Prophet? and felt that it threw a great deal of light on the problems that we were undergoing. The questions he was asking about the role and nature of priesthood were importantly related to questions which were on our own practical and theological agenda. In taking the Mass into the context of the women’s community, it was rather as if we had removed the string from a set of rosary beads.
William Warburton: An Eighteenth Century Bishop Fallen among Post‐Structuralists
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

It is hard to imagine a professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure, reading, with mounting excitement, the latest work by one of the present episcopal bench of the Church of England. One should of course be less surprised to discover that a book by one of their 18th century forebears has been a stimulus on the recent French philosophical scene. The work in question is The Divine Legation of Moses; written by William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester and literary controversialist in 1738. It was first set upon by Frenchmen in 1744, when the section of the work dealing with the origin of language was removed from its original theological context and translated by Leonard des Malpeines as the Essai sur les Hieroglyphes des Egyptiens. Warburton’s subsequent influence on thought concerning language has been compared to that of Saussure in our own day, it is felt at many places in the Encyclopédie, and in the writings of Condillac and Rousseau. With the revival of interest in the problematic of the origin of language in the climate of Post-Structuralism, Malpeines edition was republished in Paris in 1977, smothered with critical commentary by Patrick Tort and Jacques Derrida. For the latter Warburton has proved a significant influence.

In what follows I am going to give a brief outline of Warburton’s thoughts concerning the origin of language in the original context of his concern with biblical exegesis. Then I shall describe what is made of his reflections by the Post-Structuralists. Finally I will call in not one but three Samaritans, intellectually alien for Warburton in his own century, whose insights may yet rescue him from his 20th century predicament.
The Prophetic and the Mystical: Heiler Revisited
Authors: Williams Rowan
Published: July 2007

Friedrich Heiler’s Classic essay on prayer — Das Gebet — first appeared in 1919: several times reprinted and revised, with an abbreviated translation into English published in 1931, this vastly influential work helped to popularize and to fix in the theological mind a sharp distinction between two antithetical styles of spirituality, the ‘mystical’ and the ‘prophetic’. The distinction owed something to William James, something to a group of Lutheran scholars interested in the history and phenomenology of religion, of whom the most significant is probably the great Nathan Söderblom (whose general influence upon Heiler is very considerable). Heiler enumerates a variety of ways in which what he and his teachers thought of as a basic polarity in religion might be characterized — as a tension between the healthy and the diseased, the active and the passive, or (with Söderblom) between a mysticism of the affirmation of personality and a mysticism of the denial of personality. For Söderblom, this ran parallel to the distinction between ‘salvation-religions’, with the notion of escape or release at their centre, and religions of revelation and prophecy. For Seeberg, working in the same tradition, it was the gulf between the ‘contemplative’ and the ‘voluntarist’ approaches. Heiler, understandably, sees no point in speaking of two kinds of mysticism here, and so frames his own version of the confrontation in terms simply of the mystical in general (understood as involving ‘radical denial of the world and the ego’) and the ‘prophetic’; and he proceeds to develop a detailed and intriguing typology of spiritualities, which has remained probably the most influential section of his work.
Ignatian Spirituality Today
Authors: Hebblethwaite Margaret
Published: July 2007

In September of this year the Dominicans are holding their General Chapter in Rome at the same time as the Jesuits are holding their General Congregation. The occasion marks the opportunity for renewed dialogue and friendliness between these two great orders. As someone who has drawn from both spiritual traditions with great profit, I offer this article on Jesuit spirituality for those of a Dominican background, in the hope of contributing to mutual understanding and respect.

The last twenty years have seen a major upsurge in Ignatian spirituality and in the practice of the Spiritual Exercises - the form of retreat devised by St Ignatius and now given by Jesuits and many others all over the world. Inspired by the movement towards le ressourcement (or getting back to the sources) and by the Conciliar drive to rediscover the true spirit of each religious order, Jesuits began to research the early history of the Exercises.

They found that the lgnatian retreat had departed drastically from Ignatius’ original intention and practice in many ways, centring round one absolutely crucial respect: whereas the Exercises had come in modern history to be preached to groups of people, the true Exercises of Ignatius can only be given individually. There was consequently a movement from the ‘preached’ retreat to the ‘directed’ retreat, stressing the point that although a greater or lesser proportion of preaching may be suitable in some other kinds of retreat, the Spiritual Exercises as such can only be made in the process of private prayer under the individual guidance of a retreat-giver.
William Warburton: An 18th Century Anglican Bishop Fallen Among Post‐Structuralists — II
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

Warburton’s theological opponent. Robert Lowth, later Bishop of London, published (in Latin) in 1758 his seminal Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews. It is evidence of the staggering lack of interest of English theology today in historical enquiry that there exists no study of this work, described by Meinecke as one of the prime sources for later historicism, and by E. S. Shaffer as vital for the development of biblical criticism. After its reprinting a few years later at Gottingen it exercised a great influence in Germany, but it is interesting to note that while Herder praised Lowth for attempting to isolate the cultural peculiarities of the Hebrews, he thought that his enquiry was too technical, failing to penetrate the spirit of an age. It is Lowth’s strictly formal attempt to position Hebrew poetry vis-a-vis the categories of classical rhetoric and poetics rather than a romantic trust in empathy or pure subjectivity which leads him to a new depth of cultural analysis. The Lectures thus represent a moment in the history of ideas that was quickly forgotten.

For another reason also, it is hard to categorize Lowth. His formal, aesthetic treatment of the Old Testament opened up the possibility of accounting for it (without recourse to the wilder absurdities of deist slander) in purely human terms. However Hans W. Frei is, I think, wrong to conclude that because Lowth is not concerned to expound the truth of the scriptures, nor to establish their factual veracity, the work is theologically neutral.
Mackie on the Argument From Design
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

Reviewing J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982), Galen Strawson says that ‘philosophical resistance to the theologians’ argument has dropped to a low ebb in recent years’ because ‘most philosophers think the topic is simply not worth discussing any more’ (The Sunday Times, 16 January 1983). This is fair comment, though its truth entails no conclusion to the credit of ‘most philosophers’. But Mackie, at any rate did think theology worth discussing. Hence The Miracle of Theism (written shortly before Mackie’s death in 1981), which is a sustained discussion of arguments for and against God’s existence. The book is a rich one deserving of serious study. Here I am concerned only with a small part of it: its critique of the design argument offered by Richard Swinburne in The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979). Swinburne thinks well of an argument which belongs to the family of arguments commonly lumped together under the (dubious) title ‘the argument from design’. Mackie thinks otherwise of the argument. Here I wish to defend Swinburne, though I shall also be disagreeing with him at one point.

Swinburne offers what he calls a ‘teleological argument from the temporal order of the world’. That there is temporal order in the universe is, says, Swinburne, very evident. This is explained as follows:

Regularities of succession are all-pervasive. For simple laws govern almost all successions of events. In books of physics, chemistry and biology we can learn how almost everything in the world behaves. The laws of their behaviour can be set out by relatively simple formulae which men can understand and by means of which they can successfully predict the future. The orderliness of nature to which I draw attention here is its conformity to formula, to simple, formulable, scientific laws. The orderliness of the universe in this respect is a very striking fact about it. The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not - it is very orderly. (P 136)
Adversus Haereses?
Authors: Chantler Paul , Pottage John , Tombs David
Published: July 2007

The early Church engaged in a trenchant, philosophical debate over the nature of scriptural interpretation. Some writers on hermeneutical method showed great insight and perspicacity; others seemed to make less of the problem it raised than they ought. Although most held some general view of inspiration of the scriptures, it was more often over the question of interpretation that they disagreed. We shall examine one or two of the philosophical difficulties of hermeneutics which were raised by early Christians and which are debated still.

There were, of course, many areas of disagreement about how scripture ought to be interpreted but we can distinguish two major schools of thought, both of which cover a broad spectrum of ideas: the literalists and the allegorists.

a) The literalists: these were the people who believed that scripture could, somehow or other, be taken “at face value”; that there is an obvious and evident meaning of the text or, alternatively, that there is no hidden meaning.

A great literalist was Porphyry (c. 230 - c. 305), one of Christianity’s detractors. He attacked the allegorising tendency in the Church when he wrote of those “who boast that the things said plainly by Moses are riddles, treating them as divine oracles, full of hidden mysteries, and bewitching the mental judgment by then-own pretentious obscurity, and so they put forward their own interpretations” (Against the Christians, III).
Hope and Optimism
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

What hope does ‘the hope that is in us’ (I Peter 3:15) offer to the world in which we live today? That is the question to which I will address myself.

Jesus said ‘when it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times’ (Mt 16:2-4).

The Pharisees and Sadducees had just asked Jesus for some extra ‘sign from heaven’, and with these words he refused it to them: sufficient signs are already there, if they choose to see them: the signs of the times. Good Pope John frequently made use of this phrase, appealing to the modem church to read correctly to day’s ‘signs of the times’. Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus is reported as prophesying extensively about ‘signs’ in the future — nearly all of them very fearful signs: earthquakes, wars, famines, and ‘all this is but the beginning of the sufferings’ (Mt 24:8). We have certainly no proof that we are now in the age when ‘the end will come’ (Mt 24:14), and it would be foolish to leap to that conclusion: Christians have tended to do so time and again in times of human disaster and have, afterwards, often been left looking a little silly. Nor can we begin to surmise what the last age, described uneschatologically, will be like when it arrives.
Incarnation And Image Of God
Authors: Moore Gareth
Published: July 2007

One of the high points of St John’s Gospel comes near the end, in chapter 20, in the confrontation between Jesus and the disciple Thomas. Jesus, crucified but now risen from the dead, has already appeared to his disciples as a group, sending them out as the Father had sent him, and breathing out the Holy Spirit upon them (20: 19 — 23). But on that occasion Thomas was not there. When the others tell him: ‘We have seen the Lord’, he will not believe them. ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe’ (v 25). Now, eight days later, Jesus appears to them all again, and this time Thomas is with them. Jesus takes up the challenge made by Thomas to the other disciples: ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing’. Thomas answers: ‘My Lord and my God’, and Jesus finishes the encounter with the words: ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ (vv 26-29).

One of the reasons, and perhaps the most obvious one, why St John tells this story is to provide some help for Christians who, living years after the events of Easter, and never having seen the risen Lord, have difficulty in believing that Jesus really did rise from the dead.
Ritual and Agnosticism
Authors: Grainger Roger
Published: July 2007

In my work as a hospital chaplain I listen to many people whose daily life has been drastically interrupted by some kind of unexpected event—not always an illness— so that they have been obliged to stand back and try to take stock of all the things that have happened to them over the years. These people often say things which reveal the important part played by ritual in their lives, things like “I was married at St. So-and-So’s”, or “I remember being confirmed at St. Somewhere-else’s”. They may never have been to these churches again—most probably they have not in fact, or at least only rarely—but they remember what took place on these occasions, what it meant to them and how they felt about it. Now, when they look back, these things at least make sense. Sometimes, perhaps they are the only things that do make sense. All the meaning and purpose of a life has become attached to a particular occasion associated with a church service that they probably have not thought about for years. You could say that for them at this juncture in their lives the possibility of meaning only really exists at all because of that morning at St. So-and- So’s. You could also say that nowadays with some of our strong-minded theologically rigorous clergy they probably wouldn’t even have had that!

Christian ritual has suffered attack from several directions, notably theology, psychopathology and anthropology. Protestant theologians in particular have regarded ritual as an idolatrous attempt on the part of men and women to reach God by means of human techniques and on human initiative.
Marx, Matter and Christianity: Turner responds to Lash
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

When he reviewed my book Marxism and Christianity (Oxford 1983) in New Blackfriars last December, Professor Nicholas Lash said he would be grateful for comments on his own very different attempt to confront some of the same issues as I had dealt with. He was referring to his book A Matter of Hope, published in 1981 by Darton, Longman and Todd. Here I am complying with his request. After Lash on Turner, readers of New Blackfriars can now try Turner on Lash!

Lash “aims to take Marxism seriously” (p.5) from the standpoint of Christian theology. He certainly does take Marxism seriously, at least in the sense that he gives Marx’s ideas a fair crack of the whip. The substance of his work consists in detailed, patient, lucid and by and large at least plausible reconstructions of some central themes in Marx’s thought. These include epistemological and/or ontological themes concerning “appearance and reality”, “ideology”, “truth”, “science and theory”, themes in social and anthropological theory such as “revolution”, “utopianism” and “alienation”, and above all the controverted question of the nature of Marx’s ‘historical materialism’ which,rightly, in my view, Lash sees as being the foundation of all that is distinctively Marxian about the rest. The strength of Lash’s book is, first, that he sees this distinctiveness and pervasiveness of Marx’s materialism and,secondly, that the intellectual and scholarly weight of the book is dedicated to its exploration. Indeed, as an essay by a theologian in the exploration of this and other central Marxist themes, I do not think Professor Lash’s book is seriously rivalled by anything much in the English language.
Church and Family II: Church and Family in the Medieval and Reformation Periods
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

In our first article (published in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars) we discussed the tensions between the Christian Church as a model of a new kind of family and the traditional family in Greco-Roman society, and trends toward the resolution of this tension both by separating out the vision of the new community into an eschatological ascetic religious order, on the one hand, and the repatriarchalisation of the Church and the resacralization of the patriarchal family, on the other hand. It would be useful at this point to summarize the major features of the patriarchal family as that existed in Jewish and Greco-Roman society.

Patriarchy refers to a legal, social and ecomomic system of society that validates and enforces the domination of male heads of families over the dependent persons in the household. In classical patriarchal systems, such as are found in Hebrew law, this included wives, dependent children and slaves. In this sense, various groups of males are also dependent persons in patriarchal systems. However, women are subjugated persons in patriarchal societies in a different sense than either male children or male slaves. The former could grow up and become themselves householders; the latter might become emancipated and become householders. Women, first as daughters, then as wives, and sometimes even as widows dependent on the eldest son, were defined generically as persons dependent on the patriarch or male head of the household in which they lived.
The Prince of Peace: prophecy for our times
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

(A sermon given at an ecumenical peace service in Brighton on 17 February 1984)

Sometime in October last year, President Reagan gave the following little homily on the scriptures to a Jewish acquaintance: “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if—if we’re the generation that is going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of these prophecies lately, but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.” You know, I think he’s right—that is, apart from confusing the Book of Revelation with the Hebrew prophets.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined... For every boot of the tramping warrior in battle tumult and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder and his name will be called, ‘Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’. Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore.” (Isaiah 9. 2—7).

Until recently these words did nothing more for me than bring back nostalgic memories of Handel’s Messiah from my childhood.
Church and Family III: Religion and the Making of the Victorian Family
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

The model of the bourgeois or Victorian family that received its idealized expression in the 19th century has its roots in complex processes of socioeconomic and cultural changes going back to the late medieval period. It was a long time before this type of family really became standard or normative for most people in Western societies, and it has remained more an ideal than an actuality for many people. For well into the 18th century, and even later in rural and frontier areas, other types of family patterns still predominated. For peasant and farming families in Europe and America, the home continued to be a workshop where a variety of goods used by the family were produced. The family members had little private space, for most of the house was taken up by the workshop where goods were created. Farm animals might live in sheds under the rooms where the family lived, a practice that still continues in peasant families today. Grandparents, unmarried aunts and uncles, apprentices and other dependents quite often swelled the ranks of persons living in a household.

Aristocratic families also did not correspond to the modern nuclear family type. In 18th century palaces a large court of retainers dwelt in attendance. Still sometimes legitimate and illigitimate children of a great noble, as well as the children of servants, lived together. Servants often slept in the same rooms as their masters or outside in the halls. Functions that we think of as intimate and private, such as a great magnate’s eating or going to bed, were public events.
Mark's Story of the Death of Jesus
Authors: Navone John
Published: July 2007

The four Gospel accounts of the death of Jesus might be compared to four portraits of him. Rembrandt or Velazquez would present a rather traditional and historical likeness. El Greco presents almost translucent features and elongated limbs, a more mystical likeness. Roualt, who gives perhaps no more than a torso in bold striking colors, brings out the human suffering. Dali presents a cosmic view, the cross hovering over the world. Each presents the same story but with differing emphases; the crucifixion is, at the same time, historical, traditional, mystical, full of human suffering and cosmic.

Similarly, each Evangelist has created a portrait of the death of Jesus. We must ask why. The Evangelists were not just writing biography, nor were they concerned with the purely historical. They were writing from the resurrection faith, from which stems all the theology of the New Testament. They narrate the death of Jesus from this perspective; consequently, the meaning of his death, rather than physical detail, is their central concern.
Remembering Father Bede Jarrett 50 Years After
Authors: Pepler Conrad
Published: July 2007

This year the English Dominicans are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Father Bede Jarrett (1881—1934). As we noted in last month’s editorial, he was—and still is—revered as administrator, author, preacher, friend; above all, as a man who gave a distinct stamp to the English Dominican Province. During his sixteen years as Provincial (1916—32) he founded this magazine, but probably his most important single achievement was to bring the Dominicans back to Oxford after an absence of nearly 400 years. He initiated the building of the new Oxford house of studies, Blackfriars, in 1921—the 700th anniversary of its original founding on the instructions of St. Dominic. On 17 March (exactly fifty years after Father Bede’s death) Dominicans from many parts of the English Province met there for a commemorative Mass. Father Conrad Pepler spoke at this, and we print his text here. Born in 1908, from boyhood Father Conrad knew Bede Jarrett; he came to the Order in 1927, when Father Bede was Provincial, and was a student at Blackfriars, Oxford, when he was its Prior (1932—4). Later he was Editor of both “Blackfriars” and “The Life of the Spirit” (now merged in “New Blackfriars”), and then, from 1952 to 1981, Warden of the Dominican conference centre in Staffordshire, Spode House.

“Wisdom has built her house, she has set up her seven pillars.”

(Prov. 9: v.1)
Church and Family V: Feminism, Church and Family in the 1980s
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

In the late 1960s, American women and women throughout the world began to awaken to the fact that the victories of women’s rights to work, to vote and to be educated had not solved the problem of women’s inequality. A silent problem was gnawing away at women of the middle classes in industrialized nations, a problem “without a name” as Betty Friedan put it in her pioneering book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1962. In the 1950s all the media of culture and socialization had been directed toward convincing women that their place was in the home, that full-time child-raising and domesticity was their highest vocation. The women who had accepted the “feminine mystique” felt increasingly entrapped and stifled.

At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement were raising American consciousness about the structures of social oppression. Many young women responded enthusiastically to the call to win equality for Black Americans and to end the war in southeast Asia, only to find themselves treated as second-class citizens by their male colleagues, expected to be sexually available, to do the rote labor of the movement, but not to make the real decision. Out of these various forms of discontent, an explosion was gradually building, the explosion of a new movement for women’s liberation.

Betty Friedan had called women to seize their discontent by leaving their exclusive homemaking roles, returning to school for further education and seeking interesting jobs. Entrance into the public world of work was to be the panacea. But many women already suspected that this was not enough; that the world of work was also a place where women were marginalized and exploited.
In the Cave of the Heart: Silence and Realization
Authors: Bruteau Beatrice
Published: July 2007

A paper presented at a symposium on East-West monasticism held in Kansas City in August 1983, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Abhishiktānanda (Henri Le Saux OSB).

Hidden in the depth of the heart and in the highest heaven Is that mystery of glory and immortality which only those can find Who have renounced all things and themselves.

This verse is freely translated from the Mahānārayana Upanishad and was apparently a favourite of Swami Abhishiktānanda’s, for he quotes it, in differing guises, several times. I think it fairly epitomizes his insight and his realization.

I have only recently made the acquaintance of Swami Abhishiktānanda and am not really entitled to speak of him. There are those who can, foremost among whom would be Dom Bede Griffiths. But I am so attracted to Swami Abhishiktānanda, so moved by his inspired writings on the life of renunciation and the non-dual experience, that I would like to offer the little I have to say to his memory.

Swami Abhishiktānanda was a French Benedictine monk, Dom Henri Le Saux, who, after thirteen years in a Benedictine monastery, received permission to go to India in 1948. There he and Fr. Jules Monchanin founded the ashram of Shantivanam (Forest of Peace) as “an attempt to integrate into Christianity the monastic tradition of India”.

In 1949 he met Śri Ramana, called the Maharishi or great seer, in the south of India, at the foot of the sacred mountain Arunāchala.
Religious Art and Religious Belief
Authors: Howes Graham
Published: July 2007

Few sociologists of religion have been tempted to explore the visual dimension of religious change. The problems—both theoretical and methodological—are formidable.

In the first place, when scrutinizing religious art in any culture we have to be very careful about our assumptions concerning the iconicity of religious symbols and the so-called creative character of visual images. Richard Wollheim, for one, has argued persuasively that when we discuss iconicity in any cultural setting we have to take account of the relation of the sign to the sign-user as well as what is represented by the sign, i.e. the referent. It is, he says, “when signs become for us ... ‘fuller’ objects, that we may also come to feel that they have greater appropriateness to their referents”. The problem for sociologists of religion is just how to tease this kind of sense data from respondents.

Secondly: as Hugh Duncan has noted, “the problem is not that of asserting that there is a reciprocal relation between art and society, but rather of showing how this relationship exists” ‘Proof’ might be arrived at by establishing either valuative congruence, social structural influence or interpersonal influence within the artistic vocation itself. But here we also need to postulate a psychological mechanism through which the individual artist transmutes social, cultural and credal themes into tangible artistic statements, as well as a theory of perception and symbolic process to account for art’s effect on the disposition and behaviour of the audience.
Finding God in Motherhood: Release or Trap?
Authors: Pepper Mary , Hebblethwaite Margaret
Published: July 2007

It was easy to anticipate that there would be some criticisms of Margaret Hebblethwaite’s widely praised book “Motherhood and God” from conservative quarters, and what the criticism would be. And our publishing, in our last issue, of Deborah F. Middleton’s article “God as Mother—a necessary debate” has brought us letters from readers arguing that all who discern “motherhood” in God must be mistaken. But questions about Margaret Hebblethwaite’s book have not come solely from the right. Here Mary Pepper, one of the organizers of Christian Women’s Information and Resources (CWIRES), criticizes the book from a feminist perspective and the author replies. We shall be publishing a review which looks at the book from yet another perspective later.

Editor.

The publication of Motherhood and God by Margaret Hebblethwaite happened just as the Church of Scotland Study Group presented its controversial report on The Motherhood of God. So the book was launched amid the turbulence of dispute within the Scottish Church, evidence that the questions around gender and theology can no longer be ignored. The report, cautiously and reasonably, gives scriptural justification for describing God as Mother, but a minority of the group felt unable to agree that God might be properly addressed as Mother. (It was the outcry over a woman praying ‘Dear Mother God’ that caused the setting up of the Study Group.)

But in her very readable book, ‘about finding God in motherhood and motherhood in God’, Margaret Hebblethwaite has no difficulty at all.
Is There a Catholic Social Ethic?
Authors: Knowles Michael
Published: July 2007

In the May local council elections in the borough of Congleton, Cheshire, I stood as a Labour Party candidate in one of the wards. It consisted of rich Cheshire farmland and the result was quite predictable. I received 106 votes to the Tory 432. If Labour had won in the ward of Brereton, it would have signalled “the end of civilization as we know it”, and, to employ the phrase of Caspar Weinburger, U.S. defence spokesman, when interviewed on BBC World Service, the capitulation of the west to “Soviet hordes”. That, however, is not the point of this article. I am a “practising Catholic”, by which is meant a Catholic holding to the teaching of the Church and attending the sacraments. Now, a little down the road on which I live there happen to be a number of Catholic families, also “practising”, indeed pillars of the local Church. But in contrast to me two of these families supplied the bulk of the ten signatures the local Tory candidate required for his nomination. That is quite a public commitment because their names went up in print on the town hall and local parish notice boards, where I spotted them. As a political commitment it is second only to standing as a candidate. It was this which set me thinking if in fact we can talk about a Catholic social ethic.
Biblical Inspiration and the Paraclete
Authors: Turner Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,

The ancient doctrine of the inspiration and the inerrancy of the Bible not only is impossible for intelligent people today, but represents a deviation in Christian doctrine, whatever salutary uses may have been made of it in the past by the Holy Spirit, who often turns human errors to good ends.

This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.
Deity and Domination: I
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: July 2007

The first part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984.

From very early times men have spoken of and to their gods in political images, just as they have ascribed divine characteristics to their earthly rulers. This has been the case no less in the judaeo- christian tradition than in pagan cultures. Some of the most persistent images used of God in this tradition are taken from political discourse: king, lord, judge, to mention but three. Again, abstract concepts applied to God such as sovereignty, power, majesty and dominion have a strongly political connotation. Yet remarkably little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by theologians and historians of doctrine.

In the first part of this paper (published here) I wish to consider the way in which analogies between divine and civil domination were employed among some groups in seventeenth-century England, and set this in the context of a more general thesis about the use of such analogies. I shall conclude, in the second part of this paper (which will be published in the next issue), by suggesting certain significant implications which may be said to follow from this manner of thinking and talking about God and the state.
Biography as Theology: Hebblethwaite's Pope
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The time is right for a good biography of Pope John XXIII. It is, of course, ridiculous that the Catholic Church—all 780 million of us, as I recently read—should be so decisively affected by the personality of a single man. It is only with the invention of railways, telephones, aeroplanes, and now television, that the solitary in the Vatican has acquired such power. The ‘modern world’, which Pius IX sought to keep at arm’s length from the Papal States, soon provided the media for an unprecedentedly intense personal veneration of the ‘Holy Father’. The successor of Peter now enjoys a supremacy in the Church that Peter himself evidently never had (see Acts 8:14 and 11:2, and Galatians 2:11). With the triumph of Ultramontanism, the whole body has been surrealistically distorted by a grotesquely inflated ear (I Corinthians 12:17). The traditional ecclesiology of the Catholic Church as the communion of local churches has been re-established in theory—but, for the most part, we remain captured, and captivated, by media-promoted adulation of the individual. The power of the ‘world’ over the Catholic Church is as insidious as ever.

One of the worst effects of media domination is instant oblivion for yesterday’s men. In longer historical perspective, of course, the tolerance and the initiatives of Paul VI will seem obvious. At present, with men in control who cannot see the other side of a question, he is remembered only as a rather sad and dithering figure.
Abortion and the Christian Feminist: I — A Dilemma?
Authors: Smith Carol
Published: July 2007

It might seem that to be a Christian and at the same time a feminist involves few conflicts for the individual. In John 10:10 Christ said: “I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly”. Surely this is what feminism is about too — enabling women to live their lives “more abundantly”, by utilising all the potential which lies within them. One of the major achievements of the women’s movement has been to give women a growing consciousness of how great that potential is and the realisation that the peculiar gifts of women are not necessarily worthless because a male-orientated world sees little value in them. Women have discovered in themselves a capacity for assessing their own value and utilising their various potentialities as fully as possible. Christians, too, male and female, have a duty to be fully human and to realise their own worth. Offering ourselves unreservedly to God involves of necessity a developing awareness of what it is we are offering. It would seem, then, that the feminist Christian should see her feminism as enriching her Christianity and her Christianity as reinforcing her feminism.

Nevertheless, in practice, areas of conflict do arise. One such is the issue of abortion. Feminists have consistently campaigned for abortion on demand and the slogan “a woman’s right to choose” has become one of the most familiar of the women’s movement. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that one cannot be a true feminist while not supporting the notion that abortions should be freely available to all women who ask for them.
II — Prolifers for Survival
Authors: Dowell Susan
Published: July 2007

Abortion was a hot election issue in the US of 1984. The pro-family rhetoric of the Born-again Right predictably incurred the correspondingly doctrinaire derision of the women's movement and the Left. The National Organisation for Women (NOW) banned from its platform women who in any way opposed abortion. Both sides agree, it seems, that abortion is a primary and integral component of women's liberation and a crucial test of ‘reliability’ for or against.

All the more vital, then, is the search for ethical consistency and clarity which is being maintained in some wings of the peace and women's movements. This was given some force by the visit to Britain last autumn of the US Catholic pacifist Juli Loesch, who founded, in 1979, an organisation called Prolifers for Survival. She came to promote a parallel network here. This exploratory visit, (sponsored by Pax Christi, some members of London SPUC and Women for Life) provoked signs of increasing polarisation in UK. One reaction in Peace News-which in 1983 published a reflective consideration of the links between private and public violence-‘was to curl into a ball and puke’.
Aquinas Lecture 1984 Truth: Anselm or Thomas?
Authors: Anscombe G.E.M.
Published: July 2007

Given at Blackfriars, Oxford, on 16 February 1984.

Anselm, called doctor doctorum by those who came after him, died in 1109, 116 years before Thomas Aquinas was born. So the sort of distance in time between them was something like that of Byron, or Napoleon, or even Kant, from us. In the writings of Thomas his name seems only less weighty than that of Augustine. It was not Thomas’ way to express disagreement much with revered authorities; so he does this little or not at all with Anselm. Indeed, it looks as if he had found him very valuable and some things he certainly took from him.

Let me first give a brief sketch of the most significant early parts of Anselm’s dialogue On Truth. He proposes to his pupil that they look through the various things that are said to have truth in them. They will begin with propositions, where, he also tells us, most people stop too; in any case, we rather often call propositions true or false. It is clear that he does not mean ‘abstract propositions’, but vocal utterances; and he remarks that the nature of truth in these can be equally considered in any signs that come about to signify something’s being the case or not being the case, e.g. writings or speech with the fingers. .

The striking things about his discussion are two. First, the identification of truth with rightness of assertion. What is assertion for—i.e. what has it been created for? Answer: to signify as being the case what is the case.
Once in Khartoum
Authors: FitzPatrick P.J.
Published: July 2007

There are concatenations of events that prompt reflexion: such as a television programme on the evidence for Jesus; a hand-out in criticism thereof, composed at Cardinal Hume’s request by some biblical and theological scholars; public expressions of disbelief, some episcopal, preceding the consecration of the new Bishop of Durham; the fulmination of York Minster, if you like; and, again if you like, the remarkable scarcity of public expressions, whether of belief or disbelief, from our own hierarchy. New Blackfriars, where in past years articles have appeared expressing a variety of views upon biblical veracity, seems a suitable place for some prompted reflexions. All references are to the bibliography.

There is one reflexion I get out of the way before offering my own—I found it in the Universe for June 29 of last year. There it was said that one proper reaction of Catholics to the dissent exhibited in the Church of England is a ‘a sense of humble gratitude for the guidance we have in the Church for our Faith, as well as a deepening fidelity’ (Burridge, col. 4). Whatever else the disagreements in New Blackfriars have done, they at least forbid us to lay to our souls any such flattering unction as that nonsense. There is in the Roman Church much dissent in these matters, dissent that goes very deep and shews no sign of going away. Some years ago, two writers in this journal expressed the dissent with force and clarity, and it is from what they wrote that I begin the reflexions I have to offer.
Theology of Liberation and its gift to Exegesis
Authors: Rowland Christopher
Published: July 2007

The future of the theology of liberation is hidden in a cloud of controversy. Nevertheless, I have a shrewd suspicion that, whatever the aspirations of the religious authorities might be, we are dealing with an approach to the Bible and a way of Christian discipleship which is so deep-rooted that it will be difficult to dislodge, at least in some areas of Latin America. This is not to suggest that the way ahead for the liberation theologians is going to be an easy one. But the fact is that in a country like Brazil there is an intimate link between this theological approach and the life of the church. The importance of the basic Christian communities in the lives of ordinary Christians and in the work of the theologians of liberation themselves cannot be overestimated. They have provided the framework and the foundation on which its edifice has been built. There may be moves against practitioners of the theology of liberation, but there will still be the setting for that theological reflection. What is more, there are signs that the theological method has been appropriated in certain quarters of North American and European theology. But what most concerns us here is the fact that the theology of liberation is producing distinctive approaches to biblical interpretation which in my view demand a hearing from us.