bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Delusive Radicalism in Modern Theology
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

We are familiar enough now with the distinction between doctrine and theology, between the doctrinal content of the Christian faith as a form of life (an ‘experience’) and the variety of theological formulations in which this form of life is recognized and registered in the continuing self-awareness of the Christian community. The distinction is not absolute: there are cases in which, for instance, it is extremely difficult to imagine how a particular doctrine could be presented in any but the terms of some particular theology; but in principle at least it is always possible to express the truth of the faith in theological systems which, while of course never actually conflicting, nevertheless diverge considerably from one another in standpoint and procedure. This pluralism of approach has not developed so richly as it might have done because Christian thinking has always been conducted in predominantly European categories and modes of understanding. It may even be that the rapid unification of world culture which we are witnessing today decreases the likelihood that any theology will ever emerge that displays a serious indebtedness to distinctively African or Asiatic approaches to experience. Even if the faith is to survive in these continents at all, it may be bound to do so now in basically European, or post-European, ways of experience and reflexion; but it is clear enough that, at least in principle, there could be some encounter with God in Christ which would take a form sufficiently expressive of originally African or Asiatic approaches to reality to produce a ‘spirituality’ and a ‘theology’ radically different from anything hitherto (though words like ‘spirituality’, ‘experience’, and ‘reflexion’ are themselves so profoundly interwoven with European approaches to reality that one wonders how appropriate they may be here at all). God, even God in Christ (perhaps God in Christ above all, because thus God incarnate), requires to be encountered, that is loved and worshipped, by man – and man is always man in some particular culture, in some particular tradition, in some particular epoch.
Contraception–Tradition Revisited
Authors: Egner G.
Published: July 2007

In giving the fullest account ever of attitudes to contraception throughout the history of the Church, Professor Noonan has done us all a service and written an important and valuable book. His perception and industry are admirable; so, I would add, is the intellectual and physical stamina which has brought him across so vast a Sahara of human folly. He does not disguise his opinion that the tradition is open to change, but his account contains a wealth of texts and references that provide matter for the reader’s verdict without dictating it. I should like to pick out some of the themes in his story – some only, by no means all – and reflect on them.

Two extreme conclusions about sex were drawn in the early Church. One denied that it was a matter for legislation among the redeemed; the other obliged the redeemed to abstain from it under pain of sin. The outrageous consequences of the former opinion made it less dangerous than the latter, in favour of which there were texts enough in the New Testament which, taken out of context, could be cited. The curiously lame replies of the orthodox Alexandrian theologians to this encratism appealed less to Scripture than to the contemporary philosophy of Stoicism, which conceived legitimate sexual activity in purely procreative terms, and drew strict analogies with agriculture and stock-breeding. For Christians to use sex in such a way was, theologians contended, legitimate; its use inspired by passion was sinful; and any use of it where procreation was impossible (as in pregnancy) or prevented (by drugs) removed the one bulwark against the rigorist objections, and so was also wrong.
Essenes or Zealots?
Authors: de Vaux Roland
Published: July 2007

We have all been aware, indeed for some years now, that Prof. G. R. Driver was preparing a work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we knew that it would be a major work, and that it would certainly tell us something new. It was a long wait, but now it is ended, and here is the book, of more than 600 pages, which is throwing to the ground certain positions which had come to be regarded as established. It is the work of a scholar, who is considered one of the finest Hebraists of our time, and of a courteous man, who has many friends, among whom I have the honour to include myself. I cannot forget his charm and humour as chairman at one of my Schweich Lectures on these very same manuscripts in 1959, nor his kind words in the preface which he graciously agreed to write to these lectures when they appeared in print, nor the long talks we had and the meals at Magdalen College and at his home at Oxford, nor the visit we made together to Qumran. All this makes it the more painful to me to be compelled to disagree with what he has written. After I have shared bread and salt with him (and a little more too), he might well say with the psalmist (he would say it in Hebrew): ‘He who did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me’. But this book is without question one of the most important which has been written about the scrolls, and judgement about it must be made with complete honesty and frankness.
Secular Christianity
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

Professor Gregor Smith has done us all a service by writing an important, interesting and honest book. If I want to disagree with him, it is because he has made clearer to me than before what the issues are between secular Christianity and that kind of Christianity – which I shall call radical or revolutionary – which I think is the only alternative. We now know more precisely why there will soon have to be a frank showdown between two quite different kinds of leftwing Christianity. Pace Christopher Driver, we are not ‘all brother radicals under the skin’ (The Guardian, January 13th 1966) and my main debt to Professor Gregor Smith, and the point at which I part company with him most decisively, is that he shows me why his position is not nearly radical enough. Or perhaps it would be better to say he is radical only in a direction which is irrelevant to the real issues of our time, and offers a way of letting off steam through a kind of intellectual safety-valve which, like all safety-valves, works in fact to the preservation of the equilibrium of the present state of things. The trouble with his kind of ‘secular’ Christianity is that, like philosophers, ‘secular’ Christians have only ‘interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx, eleventh thesis on Feuerbach). Despite his protests to the contrary, Professor Gregor Smith is, in this respect, a philosopher, and his secular Christianity is, as I hope to show, a philosophical scheme rather than a living faith.
Contraception and Eve
Authors: Cahill Jane Furlong
Published: July 2007

‘ ... and one of them, a lawyer, put a question to try him: Master, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the commandments and the first. And the second, its like, is this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments, all the law and the prophets depend.’ (Matt. 22, 35-41)

With these words Jesus pointed out the Way for man to come to God and the essence of that Way is a continuing love affair between each man and God, each man with himself for the love of God, and each with his neighbour whom he is commanded to love as he loves himself. Christianity is not only an intensely personal religion, binding each human person man and woman, directly to God in the love of friendship which we call charity, it is also an intensely social religion, because it commands that we love all of our neighbours as we love ourselves. As Christ clearly states, all of the commandments of the Law may be reduced to these two, because all of the commandments pertain to the ordering of self-love and love of neighbour to the love of God.

The love of God is both the means to the end and the end itself of human life, insofar as we must continually be in love with God in this life, and ultimately be personally united with Him in life eternal.
The Pursuit of Peace
Authors: Drinkwater F. H.
Published: July 2007

A fact to begin with (from the Birmingham Post of 31 May 1966) about the new British Polaris submarine, due to be launched in September: ‘Each submarine, with its 16 missiles, can unleash more destructive power, 2,800 miles from the target, than all the bombs dropped by all the air-forces of the last war. It is the most powerful weapon yet devised by man.’’ The crews know (adds the newspaper) that if ever they have to use this power ‘they will have failed in their task – the maintenance of world peace’. Voices of criticism and protest seem to fade away in weariness, as the shadow of world-suicide creeps nearer. Of the statesmen and prelates who favour peace by nuclear deterrence, a few do stir uneasily as one fresh country after another ‘proliferates’ nuclear weapons of its own, or gets them from America. As for mere ‘conventional’ armaments, our own Government announces with pride its arrangements for selling them to pretty well all comers and nobody lifts an eyebrow. It is difficult not to agree with Fr Thomas Merton’s sombre summing-up of our situation as a turning of man’s creativity away from God to make a temple to man’s own powers of destruction. ‘The ultimate extreme of this process of degeneration is reached when all man’s powers are directed to spoilage, rapine and destruction, and when his society is geared not only against God, but against the most fundamental natural interests of man himself.’ (The New Man, p. 42.)
God's Frenchman: Recent Autobiographies from France
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

Apud barbaros. With this acid phrase Julien Green began his diary when a student at an American university some forty years ago. Feeling himself to be an embittered exile from Europe, a cultured man among philistines, his alienation was completed by the onset of sexual torments which, in a world of evasive hints and implications, gradually led him to realize he was much more radically different from his society than he had suspected. He was a homosexual. Riding on a country buggy to one of the splendid Southern homes owned by members of the American branch of his family, he turned towards the young driver and found his heart gripped as if in a vice: ‘Why do we suffer so when we look upon a human face? We can look and look, suffer and suffer more, but there is in that suffering a cruel happiness which ravages the heart. I did not know what to think, I almost wanted to die. No doubt that will seem exaggerated, but you must have gone through what I went through to understand what I mean.’ The ‘jeunesse merveilleuse’ of the American South of those days captivated him, and inevitably made him think of the Greek statuary the college authorities had disturbingly and unwittingly placed at frequent intervals along the corridors. All the more aware of this misery and unhappiness because he was, as his sister stormily told him, in a society where you had to do as everyone else did, he could not resist the revelation of himself that came through Greek poetry and Virgil.
Revaluating Corpus Christi
Authors: Atkins Anselm
Published: July 2007

The formula ‘lex orandi, lex credendi’ expresses the long-acknowledged belief that the liturgy is didactic. One major concern of the present liturgical renewal is to make the liturgy more expressive of the gospel message which it proclaims. This problem is one of communication, authenticity, and meaningfulness. But another fundamental problem also warrants serious attention. What should the expressed message be? What truths ought the liturgy to communicate? The effectiveness of liturgical teaching is one problem; the propriety and value of the content of that teaching is another. It is precisely at this point that theology reverently and respectfully asks permission to judge the liturgy. Theology urges the need of an inverted formula, ‘lex credendi, lex orandi.’
Liturgy, as rite, is a pattern of sacred behaviour, and as such evolves more slowly than theology. The latter is constantly pushed onward by man’s desire to know, while liturgy is sedentary, conservative. Not that liturgy never reflects the changes in theological thinking. Just as theology has developed, so liturgy has gradually evolved. The really primitive residues in the mass, for instance, are few and short. In fact, liturgy can at times even seem to outrun theology. The unpreparedness on the part of a few professional theologians and bookish bishops at Vatican II for changes demanded by missionaries and pastors is ample proof of it. Nevertheless, liturgy ordinarily prefers calm repetitiveness, while theology at its best continually longs for new discovery and readjustment.
Setting Europe Ablaze
Authors: Allen Louis
Published: July 2007

The most surprising thing about Mr Foot’s book is that it is there. When one considers the scale of the official war histories, one volume for the momentous events of El Alamein and Tunisia, one volume for Normandy, one volume for Singapore, one for Mandalay, military operations involving the deployment of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of men over wide areas of the globe, with final strategic issues in the balance, it comes as rather a shock to find that the compass of one volume is also required for a branch of operations directly involving a force of British and French agents numbered merely in hundreds. The reason is quite simply that these operations have become the focus of at least as much interest and concern as any other single aspect of the war in Europe. There can have been few supposedly clandestine operations bathed in a brighter glow of publicity. The organisers and agents of Special Operations Executive have written about its activities in many countries, and it was high time someone dredged through the archives and at any rate attempted a balanced and neutral account of what happened after Winston Churchill set Hugh Dalton at the head of the organisation with the dramatic order: ‘Set Europe ablaze!’

Mr Foot has worked under severe limitations. SOE controlled a good many activities in France, not all of which are fully covered by this book. He deliberately excludes the running of escape routes, and of the two sections which ran saboteurs into France, RF Section and F (French) Section, the latter is his real concern.
Education in East Africa
Authors: Smith Iain R.
Published: July 2007

Education is a subject which should engage our keenest interest, our most careful provision, our deepest thoughts. Yet one of the most depressing aspects of education in Britain at the present time is that it is not doing so.

Professor Castle writes about education in East Africa. As he is concerned with education in its widest sense – clearly formulated in ancient Greece as that which makes a man – his enquiry is not only into existing educational institutions but also into the whole nature of the societies in which African children are growing up in East Africa today.

He is uniquely well-qualified for his task. After spending most of his life in education in Britain – as teacher, headmaster, and Professor – he went in 1961 to Makerere in Uganda, as Visiting Professor of Education. From 1961-65 he was in East Africa travelling widely, visiting all types of schools and colleges. In 1963 he was chairman of the Uganda Education Commission, whose Report is likely to form the basis for educational planning in Uganda for the foreseeable future. Here is no fly-by-night ‘expert’, but a man whose knowledge about educational institutions in East Africa is probably unparalleled at the present time. To these highly professional qualifications one must add that extra quality of an author who has a deep personal sympathy and concern for his subject.

The result, in this book, is a picture of education as it is in East Africa today, clearly presented, acutely observed.

Such a wide and general subject is fraught with obvious complications.
Black Nuns in Africa
Authors: Power Elizabeth
Published: July 2007

I was teaching in a secondary school in ex-British Africa for fifteen months. The following article is written from notes I made while in Africa. The situation may have changed in the two years which have elapsed since I left. I would imagine that if anything, relations between white and black nuns will have deteriorated still further with the growing African sensitivity to racial undertones in white endeavour among black people.

When I arrived at the Mission, on the first evening, one of the teachers said as he showed me around, ‘There is the convent for the white sisters and that other building is for the black sisters’. My immediate reaction was to be shocked that there should be two separate establishments, one white, one black. But there were several reasons for this separation. The African sisters formed a diocesan community under the local bishop. The Missionary sisters were directed from Europe, and theoretically were working for their own replacement by converting the Africans. Also there was the argument that the African sisters would never develop responsibility and independence if they joined an established European community. And it would be detrimental to the growth of the African church to have Africans in missionary orders, ready to move on to new fields, instead of staying after the Missionaries had left to consolidate the Church among their own people. I was also told that Africans were bashful and inhibited in front of Europeans. So the ‘separate development’ made good theoretical sense.
Sterilisation and Human Reason
Authors: de la Bedoyere Quentin
Published: July 2007

In view of the Church’s divine mission it is not surprising that some of her moral teachings are not self-evident to secular man. However she has usually offered supporting reasons for her position and no disloyalty is involved in questioning whether these are really valid. In the case of direct sterilisation Pius XI, in Casti Connubii, presents the classical argument for prohibition (frequently to be repeated by Pius XII) and specifically states that his conclusion is one that ‘the light of human reason makes most clear’. In this article I want to suggest that there are many good men, even within the Christian tradition, to whose reason the prohibition of sterilisation is far from clear and, furthermore, that even the classical arguments may need to be reviewed in the light of new developments. I am not going to discuss the various medical, psychological and economic factors involved, since their bearing on the central moral problem is indirect.

The argument that secular man might put forward to support direct sterilisation could take the following form: There are many instances in which a married couple would have reasons of conscience to refrain from further conceptions; such possible reasons are in fact suggested by Pius XI in his encyclical. They could be of such gravity that the only way in which the risk could be responsibly avoided would be by permanent abstention from sexual intercourse or by sterilisation. The first solution, it would be readily admitted, carries certain dangers such as the straining or even breakdown of the marital home with consequent damage both to the existing family and to society at large.
Indirect Communication,
Authors: Poole Roger C.
Published: July 2007

The problems involved in human communication in the complex and complexifying modern world, stretching as they do from the cybernetical sciences of ‘communication theory’ on the one hand across to the re-iteration of the modern cinema, theatre and novel that communication is well-nigh impossible on the other, are so complicated and so apparently insoluble, that one might be inclined either to pretend that they do not exist, or to deny their importance, or even to make derogatory reference to the ‘fashionableness’ of the theme of non-communication. To do all of these three things, but especially the last, is to ignore the human moral duty to comprehend and to extend our communicational relations. In considering the subject of indirect communication in these articles, those forms of communication that is to say which are fundamental to any adequate understanding of human intercourse, we have not to pretend that immense problems do not exist, nor simply to decry the popularity of the modern stress upon non-communication, but bravely to make a few inroads. The problems we sketch here are like those mirrors to which Kierkegaard compared his own works; if an ape looks in, no saint can be seen looking out.

In the present articles I want to consider indirect communication from five different points of view. They come from thinkers as different from each other as it is possible to imagine. We shall consider communication in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Claude Levi-Strauss. It will at once be noticed that we have to deal with an idealist, two ‘existentialists’, a phenomenologist and a ‘structural’ anthropologist.
The Eucharist: Sacrament of Christ's Presence in the World
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

I want to take one aspect of the theology of the eucharist and try to show how a shift in our understanding of this leads to a corresponding shift in our understanding of the society in which we live. The aspect I have chosen concerns the presence of Christ in the world.

THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST

We must begin by being quite clear about one thing. If Christ is simply absent from human history since Easter Day, then there is no such thing as Christianity. There are people for whom Jesus of Nazareth is simply an historical memory. Such people may acknowledge his nobility of character, respect the force of his ethical teaching: but they are not Christians. It is clear from the New Testament that what constituted the primitive Church was the consciousness of this community that it only existed, as a community, in the presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ. To put the point another way: to tell people, on the basis of the New Testament, how they ought to live, does not constitute the preaching of the gospel, the good news, of Jesus Christ. To announce to a society that its attitudes and structures are negative and inhuman, and to tell it that things ought to be otherwise, is hardly good news. It is a depressing statement of what most people are dimly aware of anyway. The witness of Christianity is only the announcement of good .news if its primary statement concerns the here-and-now availability of the resources with which to revolutionize human society in the love of God.
Humanism and Tragic Redemption
Authors: Stein Walter
Published: July 2007

When George Steiner announced The Death of Tragedy, in 1961, it was already somewhat unclear whether tragedy was said to be dead or dying, or in fact on the way to being reborn. Since then, Leo Aylen’s Greek Tragedy and the Modern World has challengingly affirmed the possibility of actual equivalents to Greek tragedy in our time. And now Raymond Williams flatly entitles his own critical diagnosis: Modern Tragedy.

These questions of course extend far beyond the theatre. Ultimately they concern the entire substance of our culture, and especially our age’s increasing estrangement from religion. For Tragedy — whether Greek, mediaeval, Elizabethan or neo-classical – has, typically, sprung from societies rooted in religion; although the greatest moments of tragic art were precisely those moments when received beliefs stood under radical historical challenge. To ask why traditional tragic forms have increasingly been abandoned in the theatre of our time is thus, to raise questions we might otherwise not even be able to formulate about our epoch’s relations to religion – and about the resources of humanist faith.

Raymond Williams’ confrontation of these questions seems to me crucial, in several ways. Unmistakably at the growing-point of humanist consciousness, his work is at once a critique of tragic theory, a socio-critical map of modern tragic literature, and a reassertion in depth of revolutionary imperatives in the face of objections to revolution truly wrestled with. Significantly, the book concludes not with any theoretical summing up but with an actual drama of revolution.
South African Impressions: (I) The Social and Political Scene
Authors: Hill Russell
Published: July 2007

The Afrikaans daily Die Burger for Saturday, 26th August, 1967, reports the Prime Minister, Mr Vorster, as saying the following to a Nationalist Party gathering in the Transvaal: ‘We have developed a way of life in South Africa. We have learned from experience, so that we have been able to find a solution (to the problem of race relations) which the world can learn from. South Africa has never expected the world to subscribe to its policy or accept it; our standpoint has always been that we should be given credit for being honest. I think more and more people are giving us credit for our honesty. They are asking whether we haven’t perhaps got something. South Africa is being looked at with new eyes.’ Mr Vorster asked the United States and Britain whether they had found the solution to the colour question. ‘We have reached the stage when we can tell the world that we have the solution. We have reached the stage when we can invite the world, and say: “Come and see what it looks like where people can live in a country according to the policy of separate development.” In South Africa there is peace and calm, and this is not because of pressure from the government. South Africa has no need to call out an army, in order to let people live together like this. Everywhere in the world there are problems and strife. This is not the case in South Africa, because we have been dealing with the question for generations. We can discuss these matters, because the evidence is there for any unprejudiced person to see.’
The Age of the Spirit
Authors: Davies Mervyn
Published: July 2007

It has traditionally been one of the central tasks of theology to determine man’s relationship to God in his state of redeemed sinfulness. The various solutions put forward in answer to this question contributed greatly to the divisions of Western Christendom as we now know it. The controversy has nearly always turned on the question of what role man can play in his own redemption. For Luther man could only be said to be righteous on account of the merits of Christ imputed to him while he in himself always remained a sinner. Trent gives an somewhat milder form of the doctrine of Simul Justus et Peccator in attributing to man an actual righteousness by which he can make redemption his own through works. Much of the discussion is a matter of terminology, as Hans Kung has shown in his book on Barth’s doctrine of justification. Such discussions seem at their liveliest when a need is felt to return to a more theocentric theology. Luther felt that the Roman Church was turning man away from God with her doctrine of merit and so glorifying man. He felt called to remind the Church that nothing is possible without the grace of Christ and that man can never claim any righteousness of his own. The tendencies to which Luther objected can be said to have been repeated in the ‘reductionist’ theologies of Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher. The present interest of Catholics in the teaching of Marx and the theology of ‘Secular Christianity’ would certainly have seemed to him as it does now to Barth, as further examples of the reprehensible tendency to anthropocentric religion.
Modern Theology: An Exchange
Authors: Meynell Hugo , Jenson Robert
Published: July 2007

Dr Jenson rightly noted at the beginning of his review that the book was not a survey of contemporary theology in general. But I do not think he should have gone on assuming, against all the evidence provided by the book itself, that it was intended to be such. Perhaps the original title I suggested to the publisher, Problems in Modern Theology, would have been less misleading to him. He observed that I had hardly said anything about contemporary Roman Catholic theologians, and that I had left out a great many important Protestants; he might further have observed that a large part of the book (Chapters 2, 3 and 9), deal very little with ‘theologians’ in the usual sense of the world.

He might also have adverted to my own clear statement on page 9 as to what the book was about. I recognized that the chapters did not represent a single sustained argument; but I claimed that they were united by a single purpose: ‘to point out a number of fundamental and mutually related mistakes—philosophical, historical and practical—by which it seems to me that much contemporary theology is vitiated’ (italics restricted to the present context). Two claims are involved in this: (a) that there is a cluster of related propositions and arguments propounded by some influential modern theologians; (b) that these are erroneous. The first claim laid on me the task of accurate exposition of some of the work of some of the theologians influential at the present time.
Is England ‘Racialist?
Authors: Baldock Peter
Published: July 2007

The statement by Enoch Powell last May had all the inevitability, if none of the elegance, of the climax to a Greek tragedy. It was inevitable that a man who had already made frequent use of the rather tawdry rhetoric of largely fictitious statistics about the ‘flood’ of immigrants and who fancies himself as a poet should begin to talk about rivers of blood. Just as bad a parody of Greek tragedy was represented by the chorus from the respectable press. From pompous phrases about ‘dangerous nonsense’ in the Economist to the somewhat more tart strictures of The Times leader, the respectable press offered no insight into the significance of Mr Powell’s speech, but merely demonstrated its own moral rectitude and an incredible belief in the power of pure liberal reason. Many commentators appeared to believe that the fact that some of the dockers had mis-spelled their slogans proved their impotence. But many of the saints and many of the S.S. were near-illiterate. If intellectuals wish to contribute to the fight against racialism they must do so not by proving that racist myths are myths (that is old hat) but by analysing the nature of English racialism to see more clearly how it can be fought. In particular we must decide whether racialism in England is an aberration of individuals and groups or whether it is something essential to our society, whether England is or is not ‘racialist’.
The Liturgical Movement: Right and Wrong Directions—I
Authors: Cloud Duncan
Published: July 2007

On the face of it, the liturgical movement is one of the big religious success stories of the twentieth century, a paradigm case of the movement of the Holy Spirit in the Churches. From small beginnings, Pius X’s encouragement of frequent communion, his reform of the breviary and his interest in Church music on the one hand and the renewed scholarly concern with ancient liturgical texts, manifested by men like Edmund Bishop, on the other, sprang up in Benedictine monasteries like Mont-César and Maria Laach a movement to rediscover and revive the principles embodied in the great liturgies of the patristic period. These principles have gained wider and wider acceptance and the official seal of approval was placed on them, first of all in a rather grudging manner by Pius XII in his encyclical Mediator Dei (1947) and then wholeheartedly in the Liturgical Constitution of the Second Vatican Council promulgated in 1963. Parallel movements in the Church of England and among the Lutherans only confirm the authentic character of liturgical developments.

Yet, despite the evident signs of the movement of the Spirit, there are some disquieting features in the present situation. A substantial minority on the right remains stubbornly unreconciled to any change, while on the left there are some who are preoccupied with ‘underground’ or domestic liturgies and others who question any special concern with liturgical forms as, in effect, a gigantic irrelevance and a distraction from the Christian’s primarily political role. Consequently, it is worth the effort to distance ourselves from the liturgical movement and its principles and enquire if, among the many sound intuitions into the nature of worship which it has promoted, there are some attitudes and approaches which are of more doubtful value.
The School of Conscience
Authors: Deman Thomas
Published: July 2007

In the course of his article ‘The Encyclical Abstraction’ last month, Fr Thomas Gilby, O.P., touched on the distinction between the notions of conscience and ‘prudence’. He suggested that we should conduct our discussions of the moral issues raised by Humanae Vitae with greater precision and usefulness if we resorted to the suppler and ampler notion of ‘prudence’ rather than to that of conscience. ‘Prudence’ is something of a misnomer, carrying with it unfortunate associations for us today. Yet in much of our present discussion we seem to want to make ‘conscience’ do a great deal of the work that was formerly done by the finely analysed and thereby quasi-technical notion of ‘prudence’. It seems sensible, therefore, to take another look at this classical conception, and we do so by publishing here a translation of an extract from the extended Appendix to the French edition of the Summa of St Thomas Aquinas, dealing with Prudence. This piece thus takes its place as one of a series of contributions to a deeper consideration of the encyclical. We intend to publish further reflections in coming months from Mr Michael Dummett, Fellow of All Souls, and from Frs Timothy McDermott and Cornelius Ernst, O.P.

The important place occupied by ‘prudence’, in doctrine as in moral life, in the teaching of Aquinas can be seen clearly enough in his treatise on ‘Prudence’ in the Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae, 47-56. It is only too evident, however, that it has not subsequently kept pride of place in theology, for reasons which are not far to seek.
Priest and Anthropologist
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

The points of growth and strain in our personal lives are usually those situations in which we have to fuse together our insights and our duties, or to put it differently to reconcile obligations and calls. These are the points where every Christian has to become in some sense his own theologian, within the terms of the New Testament promise that the children of God are led by the Spirit of God. While most priests are very conscious of not being professional theologians, yet they do develop by pastoral experience a rule of thumb theology in which the insights of grace, mother wit, what the Bishop said, and scraps from the textbooks mingle. Now it is surely regrettable that so little has been done to close the gap between academic theology and this kind of empirical wisdom which often enough needs rethinking and reshaping but which has qualities which are not always flourishing in an academic atmosphere. My own personal tension is not one of pastoral insight grappling with theological analysis but rather of another double focus—for as priest I must strive to see the people among whom I live as so many persons each besieged by grace, yet as an anthropologist I must see them at the level of the masks of culture and the bonds of society.

Before becoming a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers I studied social anthropology, and did field work in Angola. At the present time I am in the Diocese of Makurdi, Northern Nigeria, and after experience as a bush curate, I have been given the work of making a study of the Tiv people on whom there already exists an extensive but in several ways incomplete documentation. Here, I am trying not so much to discuss missionary work in the Diocese or Tiv religion and social structure, as work out on paper my own theologizing of my work.
The Encyclical Abstraction
Authors: Gilby Thomas
Published: July 2007

The flock will safely pick its way across the stony hills to patches of fresh pasture, for the shepherd is there and, it is hoped, his trusty dogs, yet the hyaenas can be heard, alike from the Osservatore Romano and the Guardian, calling from one side that we should greet Humanae Vitae with joyful submissiveness and from the other that we are damned if we do: it is hard to tell which howls are the more remote. (Hyaenas, of course, have their merits; they are the ancestors of animals we domesticate and grow fond of, terriers, spaniels, and so forth.) These interim notes, written in mid-September when the pastoral instruction of the English Bishops is still to come, offer nothing fresh; they follow the marks in the old ordnance maps published ever since moral theology was established as a scientific discipline about seven centuries ago. They will indicate, first, the place of abstraction in moral teaching; second, the intervention there of ecclesiastical authority; third, the argumentation offered to support a decision; fourth, its consequent appeal to natural law; fifth, the varieties of assent. For convenience these five headings are expanded into five sections.
Louis‐Joseph Lebret, O.P. 1897‐1966
Authors: Cosmao Vincent
Published: July 2007

The Pope’s encyclical on Development, Populorum Progressio, has drawn attention to a man, Père Lebret, who is better known in many parts of the Third World than in Europe and particularly in the English-speaking world, but whose life is, nevertheless, expressive of one of the main trends that have marked the development of humanity and of the Church during the last decades.

In marking him out as one of the principal instigators of this encyclical, Paul VI knew better than anyone that he had not intervened in its detailed preparation simply as an expert, but that it was his experience and his life which had given him the essential inspiration for it. And those who knew him realize that his work and thought are one with his life; so much so, that if his writings were to pass away, in the way writings do, there would still remain the mark he has left on the history of his time and the direction which, largely thanks to him, some men and some commissions have given to their life and work.

In our present preoccupation with the problem of our relations with the Third World, it would, therefore, seem to be useful to recount the main stages of his life, in order to understand better some of the forces which determine the direction of history in the sense of an ever closer interdependence of nations.
Private Investment in Developing Countries
Authors: Pargeter Mark
Published: July 2007

The debate on aid to less-developed countries has recently been concentrated in the fields of private charity and government contribution. In the field of private charity there has been an extension of the 1 per cent idea, and schemes have proliferated—Third World First, 1 per cent Group, Good Friday appeal, St Andrewstide appeal. These are all designed to overcome one of the main disadvantages of appealing for money from the individual—the enormous cost of collection. In the field of government contribution the debate has settled in the field of multilateral v. bilateral aiding. The important point at issue here is to ensure that the aid does not become a political football.

The debate as it has been conducted, chiefly by men of good will of left-wing persuasions, has left aside the question of how private investment could be integrated or used for the development of the less-developed countries. The words that go round are those of moral obligation and what is right rather than the efficiency and profitability of the products of the development process. There is a lack of trust in the products of the capitalist system, a feeling that it cannot work fast enough or fairly enough to be able to augment the direct efforts that can be undertaken by direct transfer without receiving anything back.
Nyerere of Tanzania
Authors: Tanner Ralph
Published: July 2007

Any understanding of this statesman’s contribution to a new African ideology of reality and humanity in their political, economic and social doctrines has to be combined with an examination of the background from which he emerged.

Nyerere has been fortunate in inheriting problems which have not been as serious or restrictive of new policies as those experienced by the new presidents of Uganda and Kenya, even though there was the shared inheritance of colonialism, underdeveloped economies overwhelmingly agricultural and the shadows of a British style of administration too expensive for newly independent African states to maintain.

Tanzania’s historical background is remarkably free of the problems which continue to bedevil the politics of its neighbours. Tribal differences are minimal and mostly within the Bantu group so that the state has no inherited splits in its structure. There is the national language of kiSwahili, dating from before the colonial period and structured into the administration first by the Germans and then by the British; it is a real medium of communication centred on the towns and as such has associations with politics and progress which have increased its utility.

The capital at Dar-es-salaam on the coast is not dominated by one tribal group and the state had no semi-independent federated kingdoms to cope with; the progressive Haya and Chagga are too small in numbers and too far from the capital to be in any position to dominate national policies. The numerically superior Sukuma and Nyamwezi had neither the economy nor natural leaders to achieve the Kikuyu and Ganda ascendencies in their respective countries.
Coleridge: Friend or Partizan?‐I
Authors: Sharratt Bernard
Published: July 2007

‘Unfortunately, in the great theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers: for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge of calumny if I add, that they have lost all credit with wise men, by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive an honest man’s money (that is, his argument) because they anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and most unseemly appearance, are suffered to pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to known partizans.’ (I, 227).

Coleridge’s comment on ‘those, who under the name of Reviewers, volunteer this office’, of the door-keepers of literature, seems to have passed unnoticed by many of his own reviewers. Of the reviews of The Friend I have seen, few have departed from the model drearily and anonymously exemplified in The Times Literary Supplement: a meticulous account, drawn almost entirely from Barbara Rooke’s scholarly introduction, of the immediate circumstances in which The Friend was first published and later revised; a few (very well-deserved) compliments on the superb editing, and a final paragraph asserting the profundity and continuing worth of Coleridge’s thought—and the job is done. Such a response is doubly inappropriate in this case: because on Coleridge’s own grounds the value of scholarship lies in the re-disclosure of the relevant in the dated, and because this particular work is concerned precisely with an attempt to outline underlying, ‘fixed principles in politics, morals and religion’ (title-page). To assert its continuing worth is to acknowledge both points; but—as Coleridge would agree—mere assertion is inadequate.
The Work of Brothers to All Men in Bihar, India
Authors: Thomas Jim
Published: July 2007

During 1965-66, India suffered the worst drought in living memory the monsoon had failed for the third time in four years; food grain production fell by 19 per cent, and there was widespread famine. Mothers spent hours searching the cracked earth for grains of rice or wheat with which they could feed their children; and would walk miles to the nearest good well for a couple of buckets of water. Life was reduced to the absolute basics. Women would cut a sari into two and wear half each. When the Brothers to All Men (B.A.M.) team first drove into the village of Kosila the people tried to take the canvas from the jeep for clothing.

Bihar is the most backward state of India, and the Gaya district is one of the poorest in the State. Thus B.A.M. established a team of volunteers in the town of Gaya in December, 1966. The first two volunteers began a well-digging programme in the worst-affected part of the district. This work was done in conjunction with the international Relief organization AFPRO (Action for Food Production) and was completed by April, 1967.

B.A.M. started its own programme in May, 1967, employing villagers to dig emergency irrigation wells on a ‘Food for Work’ basis. For this project the National Council of Churches provided a jeep, and a supply of food grain with which to pay the villagers.
Wrestling with the Word—2
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Today we are celebrating the feast of Christ the King. It’s the last Sunday in the liturgical year: next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent, when we begin to relive liturgically the whole mystery of the meaning of life as we apprehend it, once again from the beginning, with the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem.

The liturgical year now ends with the feast of Christ the King, This is a feast introduced by Pope Pius XI in 1925. What he was doing then was simply to sanction and ratify a movement which started about 1870 in the town of Paray-le-Monial in France, a movement called La Société du Règne Social de Jésus-Christ, the founders of which seem mostly to have been aristocrats and merchants. The idea behind it seems to have been to suggest that the power of Christ, the sovereignty of God, was not just in our hearts, purely inward and spiritual, but that it made some visible difference to society. After all, 1870 was not a very happy time for the Church; the pope had finally lost control of the city of Rome and withdrawn into the Vatican. The new secular state had just offered him a pension and declared his basilicas and palaces extra-territorial and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the government. Pius IX refused to accept these terms and it was not until 1929 that Pius XI signed a treaty with Mussolini’s government which ran on these lines. In the climate of 1870 it must have seemed natural enough to compensate for the pope’s loss of temporal power by propagating the idea that Christ’s sovereignty is more than merely spiritual and interior— that it is also social and political.
The New English Bible
Authors: Baker Aelred
Published: July 2007

If anyone thinks there have been quite enough translations of the Bible already, he will have to think again, and make room on his bookshelf; for the New English Bible (NEB) has arrived. It was heralded in The Times on 25th February with a fanfare, unusually shrill and orchestrated. And well it might be, for this is news indeed. It completes a project begun in 1946 and undertaken by representatives of all the major Christian bodies in Great Britain and Ireland, except the Roman Catholics. Why not they? A recent national newspaper colour supplement answers that it is because Roman Catholic scholars were engaged on the Jerusalem Bible (JB). What, all of them and all the time? Well, perhaps it is an exaggeration, but there is prudence in the telling. For seeing the august body that sat in judgment on one another’s work in committee stage, Roman Catholics could be nothing but admiring and grateful observers; which in fact, latterly, some of them officially were.

Review is necessary now only of the Old Testament as the New was published separately in 1961, to explode some of the critical booby traps. The Massoretic Hebrew text has been made the basis of the translation and the finest English scholars of a generation are the instrument. The result begins boldly; for the very first words summon up the apparatus of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica and a host of modern scholars to support the reading: ‘In the beginning of creation, when God made heaven and earth. . . .’ And in the next verse, where JB had the first of its more notable misprints, there is ‘a mighty wind’ sweeping over the surface of the waters, instead of ‘the spirit of God hovering’. Thereafter a great deal more of Hebrew scholarship, especially by English scholars, is writ forever in the text.