bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding Thatcherism
Authors: Boyle Nicholas
Published: July 2007

A year ago, in an editorial, New Blackfriars was complaining that the theological understanding of what Mrs Thatcher had been doing to Britain had ‘hardly even begun’.

The complaint could have been generalized. To judge by the standard of the public debate at the 1987 General Election, any in-depth understanding of Thatcherism, despite the decade of evidence on which it could draw, was non-existent. Even now it is still in its infancy. A government which claims to have wrested intellectual supremacy from the left and to be full of ideas, and which is if anything rather pleased with itself when its opponents accuse it of sacrificing something or other on the altar of ideology, has nonetheless provoked no coherent theoretical critique to speak of from its public opponents, hardly anything other than mesmerized horror.

Is it the indisputable authority of seemingly unending power that has reduced the critical mind to silence? Or is Mrs Thatcher perhaps right? Has a philosopher-queen inaugurated a republic in which all the questions of political economy, having been answered, no longer need to be asked?

Hardly. The massive paradoxes of the Thatcher years—their blatancy must partly account for the opposition’s bewilderment— demand explanation, and, like any explanation of human affairs, that explanation will of course have a theological dimension. I am not, though, a theologian. Surely, however, the launching of a really satisfactory ‘theological critique’ of Thatcherism at least partly depends on the opening up of a rather more general discussion of Thatcherism, and what I am offering here is a contritibution to this.
The Certainty of Change: questioning Brown's answer to Dummett's problem
Authors: Gifford Paul J.
Published: July 2007

The seductions of centrism

Professor Michael Dummett, in the New Blackfriars article last October which opened what is now quite a long debate, questioned the propriety of Catholic theologians espousing views which contradict traditional Catholic beliefs; to contradict such pronouncements in his opinion makes nonsense of belonging to the Catholic Church. It was Thomas Sheehan’s 1984 article, arguing that the ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars is irreconcilable with traditional or official Catholicism, which prompted Dummett to write in the first place, and it has been mentioned several times since then in the debate.

Here I would like to draw attention to the way an eminent scripture scholar, Professor Raymond Brown, responds to Sheehan’s charge. Brown is a particularly good example to consider, firstly because he has frequently addressed himself to precisely this issue, but mainly because among Catholic scholars his standing is unquestioned. Professor Nicholas Lash, in his response to Dummett, wrote—surely correctly—that Brown’s ‘massive erudition, unswerving loyalty to Catholic Christianity, and endless painstaking judiciousness of judgement have made him (in seminaries and elsewhere) the most widely respected Catholic New Testament scholar in the English-speaking world’.

Consider how Brown addresses this problem of the apparent contradiction between traditional Catholicism and what biblical scholars are now saying. First, he repudiates the picture of Catholic scholarship painted by Sheehan. The ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic scholars, says Brown, is a figment of Sheehan’s imagination. As he says again in a March letter quoted by Fr Timothy Radcliffe in ‘Interrogating the Consensus’, the vast majority of Catholic scholars are ‘centrists’, like himself.
Gardens of Delight and Deception
Authors: Märkus Thomas A.
Published: July 2007

In a recent issue of Building Design, a journal which every architect in Britain receives, a review of Glasgow’s Garden Festival comments that one would expect it to be about gardens but that it turns out to be also about architecture.

A few weeks earlier the Tate Gallery organised a one-day symposium on art, architecture and Deconstruction. A piece of architecture which the philosopher Jacques Derrida, inventor of Deconstruction, claims as a rare incarnation of his ideas is the Parc de la Villette in Paris, designed by the architect Bernard Tschumi with Derrida’s, and other architects’, participation. One would expect such an architectural ‘demonstration project’ to be about buildings but in fact it turns out to be also about gardens.

And both are also about science and industry.

I want to ask some questions about this conflation of buildings, gardens and technology. My argument asks whether the technique of Deconstruction is applicable, even meaningful, in the context of architecture; it ‘deconstructs’ Derrida’s writing about La Villette, and finally tries to answer the question about buildings, nature, art and technology in terms of power.

Deconstructing architecture

The best way to start the discussion is to start where Derrida starts—with language, and especially the written text. Much of Derrida’s work questions the logocentric basis of Western philosophy. That is, the idea that speech, one step away from directly perceived truth, is the pure form of argument, and the written text, one further step away, is a dangerous and second-best necessary evil, brought into being by the need to give philosophy a history.
The Difficulty of Making Sense
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

To believe in the ‘infallibility’ of the Church is not to suppose that we are reliable, but that God is. It is to believe in the effectiveness of God’s act, God’s coming as Word and Spirit to the world he makes and, making it, makes his own, his dwelling-place, his temple. It is to believe that this effectiveness is un-failingly exhibited in the truthfulness of witness borne, in word and action, to this fact, this truth, this Word of life. But this is not easy to believe because the evidence surrounds us on every side that we have been given licence to corrupt, to falsify and to destroy—through egotism, carelessness, incompetence and greed—ourselves, each other, and the world.

We know what needs to be said: there is (for example) nothing obscure or unfamiliar about the Apostles’ Creed. But how to say what must be said in such a manner as to enable our contemporaries (and ourselves!) to hear, in our utterance of it, that one word for all seasons, one same surprising Gospel for every creature—and not some alien, strange, purely particular and puzzling tale, some kind of ancient folklore or science fiction—this is no easy matter. The difficulty of making sense, of making Christian sense, is the difficulty of so expressing the content of the Creed, in word and action, as effectively and properly to clarify, to throw some light upon, our various circumstances, responsibilities and predicament: our politics and science, our poetry and plans and hopes and fears, our private pains and public enterprises, our disease, and happiness, and tedium, and death.

This task, of saying simply what needs simply to be said, this teaching task, this ‘magisterium’ that is the Church’s mission, can only properly be executed in the measure that, always and everywhere, we are attentive, listening before we speak, inquiring before we answer, watchful. This is not a recommendation to regress to pre-critical patterns of interpretative practice. There is no going back upon the lessons learnt in the experiment of modernity, the freedoms (in principle) secured. It is, rather, an invitation to move towards post-critical maturity and, in so doing, to find fresh sense in ancient truth.
Christianity and the Limits of Tragedy
Authors: Worthen J.F.
Published: July 2007

I wish to argue for two related theses. Both concern the debate that has been conducted in recent times about the compatibility of Christianity and tragedy; as typical protagonists we might select Steiner from the side of those viewing an unbridgeable chasm, and MacKinnon as a seeker of common ground. The first thesis for which I am arguing is that much Christian defence of the compatibility of the tragic insight with the truth of the gospel too easily accepts the definition of the tragic insight supplied by critics such as Steiner; a brief survey of actual texts, for the purposes of this article the works of the Greek tragedians, uncovers a far more intricate and ambiguous picture. The study of this new picture paves the way for the second thesis: that the core of the good news, the resurrection of the crucified one, only constitutes the negation of tragedy in so far as it remains its perfection, its completion, its limit, and to that extent its affirmation.

At the heart of the argument lies the question of evil, of how, if at all, it is to be understood. In tragic drama, evil appears with three faces apparently alien to Christian faith: the face of incomprehensibility, the face of ineluctability, and the face of irrevocability. We shall take each of them in turn.

As far as the first aspect, the incomprehensibility of evil, is concerned, it would seem that this must be denied by Christianity. Christianity is the religion of a God who is at once transcendent and benevolent, i.e. providential.
Living Stones: A retreat with Palestinian Christians
Authors: Prior Michael
Published: July 2007

We are told in the First Letter of Peter: ‘Come to him, to that living stone rejected by men, but in God’s sight chosen and precious, and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’

In 1984 Christians in the village of Ibillin, in Galilee, said to a British group of pilgrims that visitors to the Holy Land should not confine themselves to visiting the ancient shrines of past ages; they should also visit the ‘living stones’ of the Land. From this originated the setting-up of an ecumenical organization in Britain called ‘Living Stones’.

Last year a group associated with this organization, but predominantly made up of Vincentians (namely, priests of the Congregation of the Mission, founded by St Vincent de Paul), decided to make ‘a retreat through pilgrimage’ in the Holy Land. It was my conviction that the Land, its peoples, and its history combine to provide an extraordinarily powerful context in which to ‘make a retreat’. What would be unique about this one was that it would include meetings with indigenous Christians, living in the throes of the intifada.

Some idea of what that meant both for the group and for the Christians that the group met is best conveyed in the words of some of those Christians.
Bullitio and the God beyond God: Meister Eckhart's Trinitarian Theology
Authors: Reynolds P.L.
Published: July 2007

Two of the most striking and memorable features of Meister Eckhart’s treatment of the Trinity are these. First, in several passages in the Latin works he uses the metaphor of bullitio—literally ‘boiling’ or ‘bubbling’—to explain the inner trinitarian life of the Deity; that is, to explain how and why there is procession within God. Secondly, in several passages in his German sermons he distinguishes between the personal, trinitarian God and a distinctionless, nameless ground or Godhead that transcends this. The latter distinction, apparently, is considered to exist within God: prima facie, at least, the distinction is not merely economic or between ‘God within’ and ‘God without’. My intention in this study is to examine each of these aspects in turn, to suggest how they are related, and to consider what all this can tell us about the general character of Eckhart’s trinitarianism.

Our task presents us with a problem which must always arise in the study of Eckhart: that of bringing together the Latin Eckhart with the German Eckhart and attempting to take a unified view, and this while conserving the peculiarities of each. Bullitio is a Latin word and, as far as I know, the notion is applied to the Trinity only in the Latin works. It may be noted, however, that there is a related family of German words such as ûzbruch and ursprunc which Eckhart uses to denote the idea of the supreme fountain-head or source, or the original outpouring, outspringing or outbreak of being. One of the things I wish to suggest in this study is that the distinction between God as Trinity and as Godhead is not made in the Latin works.
What Kind of Relativism?
Authors: Thompson Ross
Published: July 2007

In his 1976 book New Testament Interpretation in an Historical Age, Denis Nineham advanced the thesis of cultural relativism in theology this way:

While the events of Jesus’ career were such as to demand interpretation in terms of a unique—indeed literally final—divine intervention, given the presuppositions of certain circles in first century Jewish culture, they might not have seemed to demand such an interpretation given different cultural assumptions, for example to a modern western observer if such a one—twentieth century presuppositions and all—could be carried back to first century Palestine on some magic carpet or infernal time machine.

Broadly speaking this is the theory that the relation between facts on the one hand and language and interpretation on the other is perpetually shifting. Facts that will demand one kind of description in one cultural context will require a quite different kind in another and conversely a given term or description will mean different things in different contexts.
A Sermon for Low Sunday
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

You can take the reports of the resurrection of Christ as literally as you like; you can take them as simple accounts of the historical facts. There are some slight difficulties here because there seem to be some inconsistencies between the different stories, but one thing they all have most certainly in common. None of them says or implies or hints that Jesus simply woke up from death, as from a sleep, and got up and strolled out of the tomb back to ordinary life. There have been people who have said that Jesus did wake up in this way but that was because they thought he had not died, so there wasn’t a real resurrection anyway. Nothing whatever in the New Testament suggests this.

If you take the scriptures, the earliest creeds, the writings of the early Fathers, the whole mainstream Christian tradition through the Middle Ages to our own time—you find no one has ever suggested that the resurrection meant the resuscitation of a corpse. For this reason I get a little tired of modern clergymen telling me that this is not what the resurrection is. I never thought it was; my Church never thought it was; nobody has ever thought it was.

What we have believed is that Jesus, because of his loving obedience to his Father’s mission, obedience even unto death on the cross, was raised up by his Father through the work of the Spirit, and became transformed, transfigured and is now with us as the living risen Christ.
Animals—the need for a new Catholicism
Authors: Oderberg David S.
Published: July 2007

On 8 February BBC 1 broadcast a programme on the work of Dr. Robert J. White, the American neurologist based in Cleveland, who is world-renowned for his experiments, which he calls ‘body transplants’, in which the body of one monkey is transplanted onto the head of another, through a joining of the carotid arteries and jugular veins, and a clamping together of the two spinal columns. In his most successful experiment, the creature remained alive for seven days, though it was paralysed from the neck down. A photograph showed it lying down, its face contorted in a grimace.

Hundreds of such experiments, involving primates of all sorts, dogs, cats, and various other animals, have been carried out in many countries, notably the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union. Dr. White has been showered with awards by his peers, both for his research and for his work with brain-damaged human accident victims. At the same time he is vilified by animal rights campaigners.

He says he can ‘understand’ why some people feel outraged at his experiments and his proposals for further research; people also felt outraged at the thought of kidney and heart transplants—but they are now commonplace. True, he admits, the brain is different, as it seems bound up with the very existence of a person in the way that their heart or kidneys do not, but as long as helping human life is the goal, there is no reason why the brain should not also be treated as transplantable, either with its original head, or into another brainless head (though the latter operation has never succeeded and is technically much more difficult).
Continuity Underlying Discontinuity: Schillebeeckx’s Philosophical Background
Authors: Kennedy Philip
Published: July 2007

It is occasionally said of Edward Schillebeeckx that he is a difficult theologian to understand because in the last analysis he does not have a theology! Instead, he is thought to have produced two, three, or more, quite distinct theologies, whose characteristics depend on the kinds of philosophical equipment he has marshalled in order to give conceptual embodiment to his theological convictions.

Over the past five decades, Schillebeeckx has published about four hundred and seventy theological studies. A perusal of these divulges that at different stages his writings have freely borrowed philosophical ideas from such diverse contexts as phenomenology, existentialism, Anglo-American-Scandinavian analytical philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, neo-Marxist critical theories of society, and twentieth-century revivals of Thomism—a list by no means exhaustive.

A survey of his publications further uncovers that for a period of about nine years, from 1963 to 1974, he did not write a single book. These years, particularly from 1966 onwards, were devoted to a determined study of hermeneutics and biblical exegesis as a preparation for interpreting Christian faith in a new way. In 1974, at the end of this incubatory period, he published Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, the monograph in which he effectively gave notice that he had radically changed his theological method. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, he had employed a method which took classical theological theories and texts as its point of departure. With the book Jesus, however, references to patristic, medieval, and papal documents have to a large extent been put aside in favour of an avowedly hermeneutical method, which is dependent on a bountiful array of exegetical data and which seeks to set past and contemporary human experiences in a mutually critical and interpretative relationship with each other.
Speaking of Death
Authors: Mortimer Iain
Published: July 2007

A talk given in a retreat for eucharistic ministers in November 1988.

Sooner or later, in Christian ministry, we find we are having to talk to somebody about death, their death or the death of a loved-one, and we are not going to do this very well if we have avoided thinking about death ourselves, avoided asking ourselves what death means—or should mean—for the Christian.

In St Peter’s, Rome, there is a statue by Michelangelo. We have all at least seen photographs of it at some time or other. It is a pieta. That’s to say, a statue of the dead Christ with his mother. We see the broken bloody corpse of Christ lying gently in the arms and lap of his grief-stricken mother, his head facing upwards, his torn limbs drooping down. The statue tells even the most casual tourist a simple story: this is a mother holding the dead body of her son.

But Michelangelo’s Pieta does far more as well. It shows the deep trusting relationship that existed between the mother and the son. How many of us who have seen it cannot be moved by the face of Mary? She is truly beautiful and in a strange way serene. Her skin soft, gentle and warm. And in her beauty she shows her grief. In her tenderness is shown her pain. In the motherly embrace of her dead son is shown her great grief. The agony and joy of being a mother cry out at us from the stone.

Michelangelo uses other images to heighten our understanding and our empathy. We see, hidden under her garment, the gentle curve of her breasts—breasts which sustained life in the early months of her baby son. But above all there is the gaze of Mary into the face of her son—that gaze of total pity, total loss, total love.
Gabriel Marcel, Philosopher of Mystery: A Centenary Appraisal
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Gabriel Marcel was born one hundred years ago this year. It seems fitting, then, to attempt a re-evaluation of a philosopher who was one of the seminal minds of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century. For it follows from the nature of Catholic tradition, as an organically developing communion in Christ and his Spirit, that no such mind ever becomes ‘irrelevant’: that is, out of relation to other spirits that follow it in history. The difficulty with introducing Marcel’s religious philosophy, however, lies not so much in any seeming obsolescence, but in the character of that centre to which, again and again, Marcel returned. He was a ‘philosopher of mystery’.

Notoriously, he disliked philosophical systems, which he regarded as an affront to the Socratic spirit of continuous questioning in the search for truth. As a result, Marcel nowhere offers a systematic exposition of his own philosophy of religion. He preferred to present many of his reflections in the deliberately unsystematic form of a journal, a diary or an occasional article. At times, his meditations sprang from crucial events of his own life-time. But undergirding everything he wrote lies a constant concern to highlight the unchanging and ultimate issues of existence. He wanted to restore to words a power of signifying of which, he felt, they had been denuded. In so doing, he would help give back to language its power to reveal le poids ontologique, the ‘ontological weight’, of human experience. This ‘weight’ produces a bias—pondus meus, amor metis, inverting Augustine’s adage about how love carries one away—and this bias, if we follow where it tends, directs us towards the reality of God. In this essay I shall try to retrace the Marcellian path to transcendence whose crucial steps are three: the mystery of human personhood, the mystery of inter-subjectivity, and the mystery of hope. But let us begin with a word about the man and his setting.
Jewish and Christian Understandings of Sin
Authors: Rhymer Joseph
Published: July 2007

Such a topic as this raises problems. Both Judaism and Christianity consist of a spectrum of organisations loosely associated with each other within a broad tradition, rather than neat, consistent, homogeneous religions. There is also the problem of understanding the thinking of people living in past eras and other cultures, especially as religions tend to behave as if events and experiences from the distant past—complete with detailed laws—still apply with all the force of divine authority. It will be an achievement just to identify a credible method for handling a topic such as this.

To start at all we must have a working definition of sin, whatever the difficulties, so the working definition is: ‘Sin is whatever is thought to ignore or defy God’s revealed will’. Some of the consequent questions are: How is God’s will revealed? What does it reveal? What constitutes defiance of it? Most of what follows looks at some of the answers given by Christians and Jews at various times. Finally, a conclusion is reached about common elements in what Jews and Christians understand by ‘sin’, and how to talk about it. Like all true mysteries, sin cannot be described comprehensively, but this does not mean that we have to retreat into silence. There is a way of talking theology which preserves integrity.

Both Jews and Christians share common ground in their belief that what Christians call the Old Testament contains the revealed will of God, even though Christians then modify their attitude towards the Old Testament in the light of what is contained in the New Testament.
Augustine and the Legacy of Guilt
Authors: Grey Mary
Published: July 2007

The task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought—in particular, his views on community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.
Sin in the Cinema
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2007

To begin, we need to say something in general about the cinema as a medium. To do this, let’s throw away the packaging, the ice cream, the popcorn, the advertisements. We are not dealing with television, so there are to be no advertising breaks within the film, no welcome or unwelcome intrusions from other people; we pay our money, settle in our place, the lights are lowered. We can’t escape, it is us and the film. We are in the dark or semi-dark, but around us there are others, an anonymous collectivity drawn together in the watching of a film. Film makes its appeal to a mass audience, so we laugh, we weep, we are scared, or we are just bored, with others. Afterwards we can talk about the experience, agree or disagree with the critics. Yet besides all this shared experience, those images on the screen can stir personal memories, stimulates desires, bring up from the subconscious dreams and fantasies, we can identify with the characters and with the situations. It is a way to escape from our everyday life. Like Wittgenstein, we can sit in the front row of the stalls and let the film take over, cleanse and purify us like a shower bath. It is a way in which we can indulge ourselves, let our imagination have free scope. Pope Pius XII in two allocutions in 1955, to the Italian Film Industry (June 21) and to the Congress of the International Union of Theatre Owners and Film Distributors (October 28) was eloquent about this power of the cinema to transfer the spectator to an imaginary world and so produce an effect of emancipation and liberation. Another Italian put it rather differently. Federico Fellini in his film The City of Women, recalling his visits to the cinema in his youth, shows us a row of schoolboys in the stalls who become a host of individuals in one vast bed, each fantasizing and masturbating.
Refusing to Bless the State: Prophetic Church and Secular State
Authors: Markus R.A.
Published: July 2007

‘Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came’. The remark (made by Alfred Loisy) locates, with pin-point accuracy, the place of the Church on the map of salvation-history. Its existence here and now, in the time-span between the Lord’s first and second Comings, is to be a sign of that Kingdom where there will be no more need for Church. By its very being the Church proclaims the comings of that Kingdom and is committed to being a question-mark set against all earthly societies and against any particular form of social organisation, institution or project. Among Christian thinkers few can have rivalled Augustine in constructing their thought within such an eschatological perspective. A sense of the huge distance that divides ‘here’ and ‘now’ from ‘there’ and ‘then’ runs like an axis through his mature thought. The first part of this article attempts a brief summary of his view of the nature of human society ; the second part is a reflection within such a perspective on the political tasks of a prophetic Church in a modern secular society.

Christian thought in the first three centuries was dominated, as it was bound to be, by the Pauline and, for that matter, the rabbinic tradition of thinking about social existence: the Christian, like the Jew, was necessarily an alien in his society, a traveller with no permanent home in it, The one and only just society was that which God would bring about in His Kingdom. In relation to earthly societies, Christians were aliens; in relation to God’s Kingdom they were subjects, awaiting God’s act to establish the society in which they would be gathered, rather than active participants in its creation, still less, its rulers.
Church and State: The Case of Ireland
Authors: McDonagh Enda
Published: July 2007

—The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken, said Dante, and they must be obeyed.

—Let them leave politics alone, said Mr Casey, or the people may leave their church alone.

(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man).

The spectacle of Mr Casey waving the pope’s nose over the Christmas dinner table towards the irate Mrs Riordan seems a good place from which to approach the issues of Church and State, not least for its exposition of the prejudices, half-truths and common assumptions that will crown round and must be thought through: the Church is really the hierarchy; the bishops’ word is final in a Catholic country; religion should be kept out of politics. But it indicates also the way Church-State relations in Ireland are the product of a complex history, just as they are in most countries. Without proper attention to that history, it is impossible to analyse the present situation adequately. The description and analysis on offer here are bound to be sketchy and incomplete, yet it is possible and timely to pick out some of the key features of the historically moulded present and then reflect on the potential opportunities and challenges in the immediate future.

Historically a predominantly Catholic country, Ireland has known only one established church, the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. Since its disestablishment in 1869 no attempt has been made to substitute any other in law or constitution. This is one simple but important fact of Irish history which immediately sets it off from its nearest neighbours in England and Scotland. Its implications are manifold, something not always appreciated by the churches in Ireland themselves, who have sometimes behaved as if they did enjoy some kind of established status as churches of majority populations, Catholic in the South and Protestant in the North.
Charles Davis versus René Girard
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

In the course of the past twenty years René Girard has offered us a theory of the structure of human desire. Because desire is something very fundamental, his hypothesis is far-reaching and it gives us many original and, I believe, plausible results. However, not everything is explained and put into a new light because of a new insight into the structure of human desire. Thanks to Girard’s hypothesis, I think we can see how many apparently very varied things may have much more in common than we thought, and sometimes we can even perceive much better why there are differences and what they are. But even I, who have restricted myself in the three articles on Girard which I have published in New Blackfriars’ mainly to expounding his hypothesis, consider that hypothesis to be less embracing than Girard himself sometimes seems to think.

Nevertheless, although any debate on Girard’s hypothesis is welcome, precisely because it helps us to see what is valuable and what is not, and although it is a pleasure to see Charles Davis in the July/August issue of New Blackfriars contributing to this debate, the attitudes which Davis brings to the debate make constructive discussion difficult. It seems to me that Davis feels akin to the postmodern position which assumes that a universal and unifying vision of reality is impossible and that it is doubtful whether reality is a unity; that perhaps there are more realities than one at the same time. Holders of this view can thus only be suspicious: ‘Suspicion, critique, uncovering: all can be turned upon oneself’ (p. 327) in a never-ending process. I myself feel closer to those attempts which, like Girard’s, try to dismantle the boundary fences between the various disciplines, constituting a parallel movement to postmodernism.
A Vision to Regain? Reconsidering Christopher Dawson (1889—1970)
Authors: Cervantes Fernando
Published: July 2007

When, in the mid-1930s, T.S. Eliot was asked whom he considered the most influential English writer, he replied: ‘Christopher Dawson’. Such a statement may cause surprise, if not disbelief. For Christopher Dawson, whose centenary is celebrated this month, is today a largely forgotten figure and his once influential books seem everywhere to be gathering dust. The reasons for this will be better understood by considering Dawson’s work in the wider context of his intellectual development. Only then will it be possible to reassess the strength of his scholarship and to highlight the relevance that his vision might still hold today.

Dawson is frequently associated with that group of writers and intellectuals who continued the tradition of Chesterton and Belloc to mark the English Catholic ‘revival’ of the 1930s. To some extent this tendency is understandable, since much of Dawson’s work was in fact aimed at making Catholicism intellectually accessible to a largely Protestant or secularized audience. But his association with Chesterton and Belloc can also be highly misleading, for, unlike the latter’s militant and prolific writings, there was nothing apologetic or polemic about Dawson’s work. Indeed, its fairness and serenity came as a breath of fresh air to the Catholic scholarship of the twenties and thirties, even inviting the respect and praise of non-Catholic contemporaries like Dean Inge, Sir James Marriott and H.A.L. Fisher.
Why create Hitler?
Authors: Sadowsky James
Published: July 2007

‘If God knows how people like Hitler are going to behave, why does he create them?’ One reply to this objection goes as follows. It is impossible both for God to know what Hitler is going to do and for God to decide not to create him. If He is not going to create Hitler, there will be no Hitler to do anything and no future act for God to know. God’s knowing what Hitler will do presupposes the decision to create. God does not first know how Hitler will act and then decide to create him. It is the other way around. It is as if God is ‘surprised’ by the results of his decision to create—not that he learns something he did not previously know, but that he knows from all eternity something he would not otherwise have known. The decision to create is, in a sense, taken blindly.

While it is true that God does not know what people are freely going to do unless He decides to create them, it is also the case according to many that without having to know whom he shall choose to create he knows what people will freely do in case they are created. He is able, therefore, to take into account these hypothetical choices when deciding to create. If this is true, then the problem of evil becomes more acute. God creates with the prior knowledge of moral evil. One then has to show that the good which comes from creation outweighs the evil byproduct.
Justification and the Constitution of Consciousness: a new look at Romans and Galatians
Authors: Alison James
Published: July 2007

One of the difficulties in understanding St Paul’s treatment of Justification is that the theme appears in two ‘second order’ documents: the epistles to the Galatians and to the Romans. These are obviously not secondary in terms of their importance, but they are second-order reflections, interpreting something that the recipients already knew. It is clear that, from time to time in his letters, St Paul makes explicit references to the initial Kerygma, the first annunciation of the salvation brought by Christ, but treats it as something already known. The frequency with which the formula ‘Do you not know?’ occurs points to this. When Paul berates the Galatians (Gal 1:9; 3:1—5) it is in terms of their infidelity towards that which they had received, or their bad interpretation of it. Famously, Paul on occasion (as in 1 Cor 11:23—26) repeats part of the original Kerygma—in that case what he himself had given in Corinth.

The exegetical problem remains: what we have is an interpretation of the original kerygmatic package, an interpretation of what was evidently a very powerful, exciting message, frequently accompanied (so it would seem) by signs and wonders of one sort or another. Yet our faithful interpretation of this interpretation demands that we supply a good deal inductively. There was clearly a message of salvation centred in Christ crucified (1 Cor 2:2); it was from this that the ecclesial life was to flow; and it was from this that the signs and wonders abounded. It was clearly from this also that interpretations or misinterpretations arose which led Paul to formulate his doctrine of Justification.
Being a Muslim in Britain
Authors: El‐Essawy Hesham
Published: July 2007

‘How does it feel to be a Muslim in Britain?’ asked a young student during one of my lectures in a British school.

Having been brought up in Egypt, where freedom of worship is a matter of course, the question was something of a surprise to me. It just did not occur to me that, in the Britain of today, a young student would wonder about a question like that.

‘It is easy,’ I answered. ‘I can pray any time and anywhere, I can fast any day of any month, I can give alms to the poor, I can go on pilgrimage, and I can freely declare my faith. And as for the moral values of Islam, I can see no contradiction there. On the contrary, I see respect for the Islamic moral code.’

The question did, however, reverberate in my mind, and, I have to admit, I am one of the privileged few who can do what they want when they want to, simply because I am my own boss. I know of fellow Muslims who are not permitted by their employers to pray on time, or to fast the month of Ramadan. On the major Muslim feast days, many Muslims cannot take time off to celebrate without putting their jobs at risk or losing an important school day. Many Muslims cannot take time off work to go for the mandatory Friday prayer, even though it takes place during their lunch hour.
Harmony in a Multi‐religious Society: an Islamic view
Authors: Engineer Asghar Ali
Published: July 2007

Historically speaking, human beings have now lived for centuries in multi-religious or multi-ethnic societies. It is very difficult to ensure uniformity of faith or ethnicity in a human society, much less so in a modern industrial one with its own migratory inducements and shifting patterns. Faith as an identity, not as an ideology, has been one of the most powerful factors responsible for much bloodshed in modern history, particularly in the third world countries. Most of the third world countries are multi-religious and multi-ethnic, and these cleavages have often caused grave situations of violence and bloodshed.

India saw a great bloodbath in 1947 when it got divided apparently on religious lines. More than a million people were slaughtered then and thousands continue to be killed even now manifestly on account of religious differences. Similarly, the ethnic conflict in far-away Southern Africa and next-door neighbour Sri Lanka is rocking our conscience. Hundreds of innocent persons are getting killed in these ethnic conflicts. It is, therefore, necessary to understand not only the political and socioeconomic causes of this conflict but also its religious and ideological dimensions. If communal violence is to be successfully combated it is necessary to grapple with the religious aspect of the problem too.
Human Beings as the Story of God: Schillebeeckx's Third Christology
Authors: Kennedy Philip
Published: July 2007

During the month of his seventy-fifth birthday, November, 1989, Edward Schillebeeckx published the final part of what now stands as a three- volumed Christology. His new book, Mensen als verhaal van God (‘Human Beings as the Story of God’), has taken twelve years to appear. It completes a trilogy begun in 1974 with Jezus, het verhaal van een levende (‘Jesus: The Story of a Living One’), and continued in 1977 with Gerechtigheiden liefde: Genade en bevrijding (‘Justice and Love: Grace and Liberation’). These three ‘opera magna’ combine approximately eighteen hundred pages of reflection on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the specificity of Christian faith. What follows is a description of the third part of Schillebeeckx’s Jesus-Quest with an overview of its structure and contents in the light of its two companion volumes, and comments on its governing preoccupation. The description is intended more as an interpretative commentary than a critique.

Professor Schillebeeckx began the exegetical research for the first instalment only a few years after the closure of the Second Vatican Council. His intention in the initial volume was not to provide an apologetical support for official church teaching, but rather to discover what was distinctive about Jesus, not as his individuality is codified dogmatically but as it is found in his practice and preaching, as these are reflected in the early credal formulas of the New Testament. Schillebeeckx sought to examine critically the intelligibility of Christological belief in Jesus of Nazareth for people today (1,33—34). Whereas the first volume addressed the issue of the ultimate identity of Jesus, the second gave more attention to various theologies of grace, especially the New Testament. The most fundamental presuppositions on which the first two books were constructed related to conditions for professing a Christian faith in the modern world. Schillebeeckx maintains that people today will no longer embrace Christianity simply on the basis of authority: conditions for believing must in some way be anchored in contemporary experiences.
The Great Sabbath
Authors: Bruteau Beatrice
Published: July 2007

‘... for that was a Great Sabbath. ‘ —John 19:31

The Sabbath that immediately precedes Pesah (Passover) is called Shabbat ha-Gadol, the Great Sabbath. It is this day that is commemorated in the Christian calendar as Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a day whose mystical significance has not, perhaps, been sufficiently drawn to our attention.

Holy Saturday is in every way a Nothing Day. There is no liturgical celebration. The churches are empty. The altars are stripped. The tabernacles have been vacated and their doors stand ajar. Nothing whatever is happening. What does this mean?

It is the Great Sabbath—the Great Silence, the Great Nothing that precedes the Feast of Redemption, of liberation from slavery, of entry into the New Life of freedom.

To begin to appreciate it, to experience and savour it, we need to study the significance of the Sabbath in general. It is, no doubt, an endless study, for not only have scholars thought about it for thousands of years, but worshippers commit themselves to live it and experience it deeper and deeper throughout their lives.

‘Sabbath’ comes from the Hebrew shavat = ‘to rest’. It recalls the Creation and God’s rest when it was completed. It is characterised by cessation of creative physical activity.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And the seventh day God finished his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation. —Gen. 2: 2—3.
Is Sacra Doctrina Theology?
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with the question de sacra doctrina, qualis sit et ad quae se extendat. Readers of this question often assume that he is here asking about the nature of Christian theology. This assumption is open to question and in what follows I shall briefly explain why that is so and what Aquinas actually does mean by sacra doctrina.

I

The most obvious reason for refusing to equate sacra doctrina in Aquinas with ‘theology’, as that word is commonly used, is that much that would now pass for theology would not be recognised by Aquinas as sacra doctrina. In most modern discsssions, ‘theology’ does not mean ‘teaching we agree with’. It means what people who earn their living as theologians say or write. On that basis, editors and librarians, whether Christian or not, will class as theology the views of people as different as Augustine and Troeltsch, Luther and Cajetan, Schillebeeckx and Ratzinger. These pairs of authors, and others one could mention, have wildly divergent things to say, but all of it counts as theology. For Aquinas, however, not all of it would constitute sacra doctrina. That, for him, is nothing but true teaching. For him, sacra doctrina is indeed ‘teaching we agree with’. Or, more precisely, it is teaching we ought to agree with. As we read in la, 1,1, it is something revealed by God.

In the second place, ‘theology’ does not translate sacra doctrina. The proper translation is ‘holy teaching’ or ‘sacred doctrine’.
Eckhart's Orthodoxy Reconsidered
Authors: Colledge Edmund
Published: July 2007

There probably has never been a generation since the year 1329, when the Holy See in Avignon condemned fifteen propositions extracted from Eckhart’s writings as heretical, when the justice of the condemnation has not been questioned. The object of this paper is to take account of some recent publications which seem to support the decision of the Dominican General Chapter at Walberberg in 1980 to initiate proceedings for a reexamination of Eckhart’s case.

One is by Richard Woods OP, and it may be commended for its concise and factual account of the troubled times in which Eckhart lived and suffered. Sagely he observes that some of the Church’s grievous problems, which she may be thought to have visited upon the German friar, are still afflicting her, so that the Order of Preachers, in seeking to restore to him his good name, is not merely indulging in Dantesque brooding over the parish pump.

The second is by a Dutch Jesuit, Paul Verdeyen, who has with Romana Guarnieri’s permission reprinted, in 1986, as volume 69 of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis her text of the French Mirror of Simple Souls, parallel to his own critical edition of the manuscripts of the Mirror’s Latin translation. Though Verdeyen’s work is flawed (particularly by one strange misapprehension—that the translation was produced by the Inquisition in Paris before the author of the Mirror, Margaret Porette, was tried, condemned and put to death for heresy), nonetheless Verdeyen has made valuable contributions to our further knowledge of Margaret’s perplexing and engrossing case. Very soon I shall attempt to support my belief that it is relevant to that of Eckhart.