bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Idea of Christian Poetry
Authors: Boyle Nicholas
Published: July 2007

In the autumn of 1958 the columns of Blackfriars, normally reserved, as we know for polite murmurings of theological disagreement, resounded with literary controversy. In the September issue, in an article on ‘Morals and the Novel’, Bernard Bergonzi published some interesting, if inconclusive, reflections on the relation between a Catholic view of certain (principally sexual) moral matters and the presentation of those matters in works of literature, particularly novels. Unwisely, perhaps, he supplied the want of a conclusion with a quotation from Newman’s Idea of a University: ‘from the nature of the case if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.’ Unwisely, certainly, Bergonzi decided to begin his reflections with the case of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, Canto 5), whom he was persuaded ‘Dante would surely have liked to forgive... were they not already damned’. These opening and closing tropes attracted the characteristically circumspect but uncomfortably firm analytical attention of Kenelm Foster in a letter to the Editor. Bergonzi was convicted of failing to distinguish between Dante-as-poet and Dante-as-protagonist-of-the-poem, and Newman was shown either not to have said what he meant, or to have begged the question. The question, Kenelm then believed, was this: ‘can the subject-matter of literature—which, concedo, is sinful man—ever be treated, in-formed, in a way that may appropriately be called Christian?’
The bumpy road back into Europe
Authors: J.O.M.
Published: July 2007

Membership of the mainstream denominations in the UK has gone down since 1980 by half-a-million to seven million, and is likely to drop by another half-a-million before 1990. And membership of sects and non- Christian religions in the UK is going up and up.

We would be fools if we ignored the message being given to us by those now well-publicised figures from the latest edition of MARC Europe's UK Christian Handbook. On 20 September Cardinal Hume, lecturing in Dublin, spoke of the Pope's call to the European Bishops’ Conferences to re-evangelise Europe. The Cardinal thinks that times are more auspicious for evangelising the old continent, for now in Europe there is a ‘dawning of a realisation that we are entering a new phase of history’. Europeans are discovering the limits of human reason: ‘the age of Enlightenment has evidently run its course’.
Transubstantiation for Beginners
Authors: Moore Gareth
Published: July 2007

It is a Catholic teaching that when bread is consecrated in the eucharist it becomes the body of Christ, and that when wine is consecrated it becomes the blood of Christ. People have always had difficulty with this. The difficulty is basically a very simple one: what we call and share as the body of Christ bears no resemblance to what we should ordinarily call a body, and what we drink as the blood of Christ has at best a very superficial resemblance to blood.

This difficulty, of matching our words with what lies plainly before our eyes, has led some Christians, before, during, and after the Reformation, to deny that the consecrated bread is the body of Christ and the consecrated wine his blood. Rather, they are to be seen as symbols of his body and blood: they are not the body and blood of Christ, but signify them. This mainstream Christianity has always rejected. Though much of our activity in the eucharist is symbolic, and though the consecrated bread and wine are clearly signs and symbols in some sense, they are not to be understood as mere symbols, symbolically the body and blood of Christ as opposed to the reality. To quote Theodore of Mopsuestia as representative of early tradition:

Christ did not say: ‘This is the symbolum of my blood,’ but:

‘This is my blood.’ A change of the wine takes place.
History, Homosexuality and God
Authors: Bray Alan
Published: July 2007

An adapted version of a paper given in Oxford at the 1986 conference of Friend. Friend is a national organisation dedicated to the counselling and befriending of homosexuals.

Historians are accustomed to listening to the debates of theologians, but the theologians they listen to are usually those of the past; and they do not normally join such debates. I do not propose to alter that. But one of the workmanlike tasks of historians (as it is of philosophers) is sometimes to put aside their own books and see to the task of making tools others use in their work, and if they are to be taken seriously in a wider college of learning they need sometimes to fulfil this obligation. Sometimes they need to pay the rent.

In a small way that is what I would like to do in this paper, and the audience I have primarily in mind is composed of those moral theologians and practical pastors who are troubled by the tension that exists between homosexuals and the Christian Church. Inevitably, though, what I have to say is not equally relevant to all Christian churches. I have less to say to those who are ready to construct their moral theology afresh, from the beginning. For good or bad they are free of the past. But for many Christians, in varying degrees, this is not a possible option, and it is fundamentally not a possible option for Catholics, for whom an appeal to scripture and tradition—a willingness to listen to the past—is unavoidable.
Arms and the Man
Authors: Humphrey Nicholas
Published: July 2007

An address given at the festival ‘A World in Peril’, organized by Professions for World Disarmament and held in London, at Southwark Cathedral, on 25 October 1986.
India of the Heart
Authors: Lefébure Marcus
Published: July 2007

‘I let the crystals resolve into their mother liquid’

Wittgenstein
Charles Williams and his Imagery
Authors: Haynes Renée
Published: July 2007

Based on a talk given in London in 1986 to mark the centenary of the birth of Charles Williams, the theological writer and poet.
Understanding German Catholics— the work of H.G. Barnes
Authors: Hebblethwaite Peter
Published: July 2007

H. G. Barnes died twenty years ago this month, on 8 April 1967.
The Church and the Trinity I: The Church of the Spirit
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, ‘The Church of the Son’ and ‘The Church of the Father’, we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.
The kove and the karai a lesson from the Paraguayan Chaco
Authors: Wallis Christopher
Published: July 2007

Reflections of an anthropologist who has lived both with Uamah herders in the Andes and with hunting‐and‐gathering people inhabiting the lowland forests of the Paraguayan Chaco.
The Church and the Trinity II: The Church of the Son
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

The second part of the trilogy which we are publishing to mark the tenth anniversary of Geoffrey Preston's death.
Cities and Gods
Authors: Hastings Adrian
Published: July 2007

A lecture given on the 23rd March 1987 at Sion College in the City of London as one of a series related to the Archbishop of Canterbury's Report ‘Faith, in the City’.
The Church and the Trinity III: The Church of the Father
Authors: Preston Geoffrey
Published: July 2007

Terminating the trilogy which we have published to commemorate Geoffrey Preston
East London Pastoral Planning
Authors: Guazzelli Victor
Published: July 2007

In 1971 a Joint Working Party was set up by the Bishops’ Conference, at the request of the National Conference of Priests, to study the question of a Pastoral Strategy for the Catholic Church in England and Wales. It was the result of much heart searching and uneasiness expressed by the priests of the Conference about their own service in the mission of the Church.

In The Church 2000 (the first paper issued by the Working Party) the question was asked: ‘What did Christ establish the Church to do?’ We then went on to ask ourselves what the Church in England and Wales should be doing in the years ahead. We tried to answer both in the light of Vatican II applied to our own situation.
Hoping Against Hope: obstacles to the option
Authors: Keating Denis
Published: July 2007

In his inspiring and moving reflections on the church in Latin America Jon Sobrino can speak of that church as an identifiable and representative community; identifiable in the struggle against poverty and injustice, representative of many different sections of society:

In the Church of the poor the age-old barriers between hierarchy and faithful, priests and workers, peasants and intellectuals, have broken down... In this solidarity there is a sharing of the word ... There is a sharing of the yearning for liberation and of the various struggles that lead to liberation ... There is a sharing of hopes and successes. Above all, there is a sharing of what formerly had been the tragic destiny of the poor alone: martyrdom and persecution.

In England there are obviously Catholics who are living an option for the poor, without necessarily appealing to the example of Latin America. During the last few years I have witnessed the commitment to the homeless at Mary and Joseph House in Central Manchester; kept in touch with efforts to improve race relations in Leicester; seen the diversification of the Saint Vincent de Paul Society’s work for the poor at the east end of Newcastle; and been drawn into what seems to be an unceasing quest on behalf of the third world by Justice and Peace groups in Nantwich and Surrey. But, despite such options for the poor in different parts of the country, I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church as ‘an identifiable and representative community’ will take an option for England’s poor.
Interrogating the Consensus: a response to Michael Dummett
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

Professor Michael Dummett, in the October New Blackfriars, quotes an article by Thomas Sheehan which asserts that there is ‘a liberal consensus’ among Catholic Biblical scholars as to the historical basis of our faith. This consensus includes such views as that Jesus did not think that he was divine, that Mary was not a virgin and that Joseph was the natural father of Jesus, that Jesus did not refer to himself when he talked of the Son of Man but rather to some future apocalyptic figure, and that the remains of his corpse are still in a tomb in Palestine. Professor Dummett maintains that these views are a denial of the solemn teachings of the Church, and in his subsequent article (the one which appeared in December) he argues that if they are accepted then ‘that teaching is reduced to a demand for the acceptance of certain forms of words, which may be taken as expressing anything one chooses’ (566). I would agree with Professor Dummett, but I would question the existence of such a consensus. In fact, in a letter published in The Tablet of 5 March, commenting on Hie Tablet’s report of the debate between Professor Dummett and Professor Lash, Father Raymond Brown (who is Auburn Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary, New York) writes:

... I found no better example of ultra-liberal distortion than the writing of Thomas Sheehan. From personal experience, I know very well the kind of biblical exegesis that is being taught in most Roman Catholic seminaries in the United States and it is a very moderate centrist presentation, almost diametrically opposed to Sheehan’s interpretations of the New Testament.
Acknowledging One's Dependence: the Jethro story of Exodus 18
Authors: Robinson Bernard P.
Published: July 2007

The two narratives in Exodus 18, in which Jethro joins the Israelites in a sacrifice (w. 1—12) and counsels Moses on how to organize the Israelites (w. 13—27), appear to some highly esteemed commentators to have ‘no substantive relation to each other’ (Noth, 1972:136) except for the prominent role played in both by Moses’ Midianite father-in-law. I hope to show, however, that the two episodes go well together. I hope too that the reader will agree that, as so often is the case with OT material, Ex 18 has light to shed, if only obliquely, on an issue that preoccupies us still; in this case, that of authority.

The two accounts are doubtless very ancient; are, indeed, in substance probably historical, for the nation would scarcely without historical warrant have credited a foreigner with the important role given to Jethro in Ex 18 (Welch, 1932:192). It looks, however, as though a redactor has made a conscious choice to insert the story at a different point from that at which it was found in the tradition as it came down to him.

The picture of Moses declaring God’s ‘statutes and laws’ (18.16) and using them to resolve judicial disputes implies that the Sinai-revelation has already taken place (cf. Dt 1.9—18), and indeed at 18.5 the location for the episode is specifically stated to be ‘the mountain of God’; yet the redactor has elected to tell the story before the arrival at Sinai (19.2).
Listening to Middle Eastern Christians
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

Through television Western Christians have recently been exposed to vivid images of the violent repression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. With live ammunition, three-foot clubs and cyanide tear gas, courtesy of the United States, the Palestinian protest of the occupation is being hammered into silence. Once it is silenced, it is hard to know whether Western people will continue to wonder about what is happening to those who are suffering under this occupation.

The World Council of Churches, the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians have long since assumed their stances on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. For the World Council and the Vatican, relationships to Judaism and relationship to the state of Israel are separate questions, the one theological, the other political. Generally, both have supported the two-state solution, or the granting of a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fundamentalists, by contrast, are militant supporters of an expanded Israel, based on their reading of Biblical prophecy.

The voices which are largely unheard in western Christian circles are those of Middle Eastern Christians themselves. Unlike Western liberal Christians, they generally understand that, because the state of Israel implicitly makes claims based on Hebrew Scripture, these claims must be confronted theologically.

One such statement was put together as long ago as 1967 by a group of Middle Eastern Christian theologians, headed by George Khodr, present bishop of Mount Lebanon in the Orthodox Church of Antioch. Entitled What is Required of the Christian Faith Concerning the Palestinian Problem, it lay major emphasis on the spiritual and universal meaning of Christian faith.
Mater Dolorosa, Mater Misericordiae
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: July 2007

Here I want to offer an interpretation of one of the most striking but in some ways least congenial aspects of late medieval English (and European) piety. The late Middle Ages was one of the most exuberant and productive periods of Mariological devotion, which manifested itself in devotional treatises and prayers, in poetry, music and the visual arts. The theological content of much of this, however, is now looked on with some suspicion and incomprehension, and the extraordinary centrality of Mary in the religious consciousness of Christians in the period from Anselm to Luther would now be pretty generally attributed to a defective Christology. Thus the apparently almost desperate late medieval reliance on the Virgin Mary as intercesser, friend of sinners, Mother of Mercy, is often taken to have stemmed from a fear of Christ and a sense of his remoteness from sinful, frail humanity. Christ on the rainbow coming in judgement, the Rex Tremendae Majestatis of the Dies lrae, was the Rex Iustitiae who would weigh men and women by their actions, and before such a dreadful scrutiny, who could stand? The suffering, weak and tempted Christ of the Gethsemene narratives and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the course of the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, and in the millennium of missionary expansion that followed, had been divinised out of his humanity. Catholic Christology, while paying lip-service to that humanity, had succumbed to a practical Nestorianism.

Into the vacuum left by this process the longings of the collective Christian heart for an assurance that God was indeed compassionate, tender, understanding, human, forced the figure of Mary, and it was she, not Christ, who came to be addressed as Most Gracious Advocate, the Christian’s Life, Sweetness and Hope.
Theology and Reason
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

I had anticipated learning from the contributions of others to the debate initiated last autumn in New Blackfriars by Professor Nicholas Lash and me (the debate on what has been called ‘the liberal consensus’) without reentering that debate soon, if ever. The scrupulous courtesy of Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s article in the March issue, in which he discusses whether there is such a ‘consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars, makes it easy to do that. However, I have found it impossible to let the remarks of Mr. Joseph Fitzpatrick in his March article, based on the views of Bernard Lonergan, pass without protest.

Mr. Fitzpatrick’s article appears to me to encourage hostility to reason itself. He does not openly declare himself an enemy to reason, and I have no doubt would sincerely repudiate such a charge: but, all the same, what he wrote will surely reinforce hostility to it on the part of others. A large part of his contention is that, in theology, and, by implication, in other disciplines as well, deductive reasoning should be demoted. Anyone who puts forward such a thesis needs to spell out with great care exactly what he means by it if he is not to be taken, or mistaken, for an enemy of reason; and Mr. Fitzpatrick exercises very little care. He objects to ‘the habit among Catholic theologians of arriving at conclusions by often dubious deductive reasoning’ (p. 134). We have here, at the outset of his attack on the use of deductive reasoning in theology, a vital ambiguity.
Thomas Aquinas and the Real Distinction: a re‐evaluation
Authors: Brown Montague
Published: July 2007

Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in all beings other than God has been the focus of much debate among Thomists. And this is how it should be, for all agree to its central importance in Aquinas’s metaphysics. Is the distinction a deduction we make from our knowledge of God’s essence, or an insight drawn from our experience? And if it is the latter, is this insight from multiplicity to unity based on the inevitable mental distinction we draw between the concept of essence and that of existence, or is it the fruit of a metaphysical penetration of the material things we meet within our world? Let us look first at the argument based on an intuition into God’s simplicity and a deduction from that intuition, and then turn to an examination of the arguments which move from the diversity of our experience to the simplicity of the source of that experience.

In the first argument, the claim is that we have a direct insight into being as being, into existence itself, that is, God. ‘Being (esse), insofar as it is being, cannot be diverse.’ If it differs, it must be by something other than it, that is, by particular essences. Is this the main-line argument for the real distinction? Many commentators (among them O’Brien and Fabro) have thought that it is. However, I believe they are mistaken. For the proof as it stands is incomplete, not in failing to offer a conclusion, but in failing to ground its major premise.
New Arms, Old Modes of Thinking
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: July 2007

An address (slightly shortened here) given on 19 April, during Coventry

Peace Week.

Einstein long ago said, ‘With the splitting of the atom everything has changed except our modes of thinking and thus we drift to unparalleled disaster.’ Our modes of thinking—that is the key, yet we change them with the greatest difficulty to meet a new, entirely new, situation. We now have got the power to destroy our world. We can do it slowly by exploitation, tearing up the forests, polluting the seas, piling up nuclear waste and filling even outer space with the dustbins of our technology. Or we can do it quickly. A war no-one expects suddenly starts—confusion reigns, troops panic, a nuclear weapon is fired and the gate to Armageddon opens. This is not a panic scenario. With 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world today it is a perfectly realistic one. We have, in our mad arsenals, something like 6,000 times the fire power of the whole of the Second World War. A cruise missile, made to sound so nice and small and tactical, has a warhead about ten times that of the Hiroshima Bomb—itself over a thousand times more powerful than the largest bomb of the Second World War. Yet our MoD talks about using them ‘to stop the Russians at the eleventh hour’.

Years ago the United Nations, in several serious reports, made it clear that this nuclear deterrence on which we put such reliance cannot be a stable system of security.
Eternal Loss
Authors: MacKinnon Donald M.
Published: July 2007

The most interesting article to come to my notice recently from the religious press appeared in the August 1988 issue of Life and Work, the monthly record of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This issue was largely devoted to the jubilee of the Iona Community, and the Editor had the excellent idea of inviting an assessment of the Community’s achievement from Donald MacLeod, the professor of systematic theology at the (dissenting) Free Church College in Edinburgh. Perceptive, astringent, humorous, always controversial, sometimes (as has been remarked in subsequent correspondence) a little unfair, this article had the supreme merit of puncturing complacency and, at the same time, making important constructive suggestions.

Writing of what he sees to be the Community theology, Professor MacLeod says that ‘it has room for the Incarnation but not for the Atonement, and simply cannot bring itself to summon individuals (including the poor) to repentance. Terrified of proselytising, it refuses to evangelise.’ While such a tendency may characterize those who have been touched by the emphases of the Iona Community, it may be said that in the Christian world at large we have to reckon with a passionate renewal of traditional, even fundamentalist, Evangelical teaching. But what gives Professor MacLeod’s remark its peculiar point is the fact that it is addressed sympathetically to those whose theological sophistication may have immunised them against serious engagement with the themes of, for instance, A.M. Toplady’s classic hymn Rock of Ages:
Thinking on the Last Things
Authors: McLean Teresa
Published: July 2007

The four last things are death, judgement, heaven and hell, of which only one is certain: the first. Death is the key to the four last things, and thinking about death is the key to the devotion based on the four last things which flourished in a small way at various times and places during the middle ages, and in a changed form in counter-reformation Europe.

Here I am not writing about the last things themselves, but about the devotion, and, even then, not about the counter-reformation devotion, which was part of a different world from the one in which the mediaeval devotion flourished, and had a completely different significance. I want to look at the four last things in the middle ages, as one devotional subject with the emphasis changing from one to another of its constituent parts so that it acted as a barometer for the mood and atmosphere in the Church.

In the last twenty years or so thinking on the four last things has had something of a revival and has, I believe, again been reflecting the Church’s current moods, though in traditional style.

Possibly the most noticeable feature of this devotion, or subject for contemplation, is that it has only been really popular when the religious atmosphere has been restless and when there has been criticism of the established Church to the point of disillusionment. Its popularity has also been related to concern for the individual soul. It has only been in the last few years that theologians have tried to combine communal and personal salvation in a devotion on the four last things.
What Chance for Ecumenism?
Authors: Dummett Michael
Published: July 2007

Editor: It was Professor Michael Dummett who, fourteen months ago, with his controversial article ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, started the sharpest debate that has run in our pages for many years, and we are here affording Professor Dummett the final word. However, although we are now closing this debate, many of the same issues will be touched on again (if from rather a different angle) in the special issue which we will be publishing in February, ‘What Counts as Catholic Teaching?’. Rowan Williams, Nicholas Lash, Edmund Hill OP, Timothy Radcliffe OP and Paul Parvis OP will be contributing to this. Later in the year Dominican Conferences will be mounting a conference based on it.

From the discussion in the pages of New Blackfriars that has followed on my article of October 1987, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, I have learned much. Half of my article was devoted to the prospects of reunion with the Orthodox; and from the fact that none of the commentators has so much as mentioned that half, I conclude that anxiety for such reunion is not acute among the British Catholic intellegentsia. I think this attitude to it is mistaken: it is among our most urgent needs. Since the schism, the Catholic Church has been, intellectually and spiritually, a crippled body, paralysed, as it were, down the whole of one side: we need once more to become one with Eastern Christians for the sake of our own health, at least as much as for their advantage.
Aquinas's Quodlibet XII, qu. 14
Authors: Moonan Lawrence
Published: July 2007

Among the authentic writings of St Thomas Aquinas is one, addressed to the question: Utrum veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem? (‘Is the truth is stronger, when you compare it with wine, with the king, and with a woman?’) Slight as it is, it reveals both an attitude and a sophisticated approach to university education, which it would do us no harm to reflect on.

The piece is quite literally a quodlibet, which in modern usage sounds as though it ought to be a trifling thing anyway, an intellectual bagatelle. The question considered here, you may think, confirms as much. In fact the Disputatio de quolibet was something of a high-point in the intellectual life of the faculty in which it was held. And we find there, much more typically, the mature thought of the faculty’s most eminent teachers. But we do find bagatelles too, and perhaps even that, or the reasons behind it, can be instructive.

In medieval universities, the teaching was directed by a double aim: to impart coherent and substantiated bodies of knowledge, scientias; and to instruct in crafts in which those sciences could not only be developed, but could be put to use. To instruct, as the statutes sometimes put it, in the usus scientiarum. In accordance with this aim, there were two main types of teaching-vehicle. One was the lecture (lectio), in which coherent bodies of knowledge could be transmitted economically and in a context minimising distortion in transmission.
Reading, Writing, and Aquinas
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G.
Published: July 2007

Those whose enthusiasm for exploring the interweaving of religion and literature has encouraged them to reconstruct the history of theology so that the great tradition runs from Jesus’ parables and the Gospels through, say, Justin’s tale of the old man on the beach and Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the ‘Dream of the Rood’ and the Grail Cycle, the novels of George Eliot and of Cardinal Wiseman, up to some manageable modern poet, have usually not found a place for the Schoolmen. Even those who content themselves with considerations of theologians as readers, and whose topics are illustrated by references to Paul’s reorganization of Menenius’ fable of the talking stomach, to Luther’s likening of the theologian to the literary critic who elucidates the Georgies, and to that most interesting and attractive of modern popes, John Paul I, writing fan letters to Mark Twain and Dickens as well as to Jesus, rarely bring even Aquinas into their conversation. The rest of us may pause at this. Willing enough, it may be, to get along without Albert and Biel, not feeling called to defend even Duns Scotus usque ad effusionem sanguinis, we would not think it respectable to surrender Aquinas.

It would be improper, certainly, to rummage in the Summa Theologiae for immediately modern answers to particular questions, but it must be in order to expect a theologian as methodically sensitive as Aquinas to have meditated on the general topic of the relation of the forms of a theological science to the literary forms he encountered in Scripture.
Are Homosexuals Sick?
Authors: Moore Gareth
Published: July 2007

Recently in the Church a particular way of talking about homosexuals has become popular. Talk of perversion, sins against nature, and so on, has been less to the fore, giving way to a quasi-medical vocabulary, and a way of talking about gay people has developed which is more consonant with modern thinking. Now they are not so much wicked as sick; they suffer from something called ‘the homosexual condition’. It is not so much that they commit horrible and disgusting sins as that, unfortunately and through no fault of their own, they have a tendency or disposition to perform such acts. It is still a morally bad thing if they actually give way to this tendency, but it is not sinful that they have it; it is like a tumour in their moral insides. Thus homosexuality was described as a ‘condition’ in the 1975 Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics:

A distinction is drawn ... between homosexuals whose tendency is ... transitory or at least not incurable: and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable.

There are many kinds of condition; we speak of social conditions, economic conditions, conditions of hygiene, and so on. But here it is the medical condition that is being taken as a model for homosexuality. That is clear from the reference to possibilities of cure and to ‘pathological constitution’.
Civil Disobedience: A Sign for Jonah
Authors: Eggleston Barbara , Finn Richard
Published: July 2007

We cannot escape the fact that at USAF Upper Heyford people are ready to kill the innocent. That readiness is at the heart of our deterrent policy. And if we support that policy, acquiesce in these plans, then that readiness to kill the innocent, however reluctantly, is in our hearts also. We harden our hearts. I think we can best explain why we did the limited and public damage that we did by telling a short Bible story, about that reluctant prophet Jonah. He too is hard-hearted. He wants to see Nineveh destroyed, even when the people have repented. He is cross with the God who has mercy on them. So God causes a gourd, a castor-oil plant, to grow up and shelter Jonah. And then God destroys it. And Jonah is furious.

Then God says:

‘You had pity on the plant for which you did not labour, which you did not make grow, which sprouted in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left...?’

(4—10f.)
On Deconstruction and the Proof of Platonism
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

On a superficial overview, the upshot of the work of the French thinker Jacques Derrida seems to be to make nonsense of all human discourse and communication. When one looks at it more carefully, this impression is abundantly confirmed. Still, there are lessons of great importance to be learned from it; and I shall try in what follows to show what they are.
Tradition and Creativity: The Paradigm of the New Testament
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

What must I believe to be a Catholic? Catholicism is a highly variegated phenomenon, with an extraordinary diversity of beliefs, practices and traditions. Is this Tradition an inheritance to be cherished, or a stifling burden?

This question becomes especially acute when the Church tries to discover its identity in a new culture or society, as when Paul brought Christianity to the world of the Greek city, or, in our own day, when we ask what it might mean to be a Catholic in monetarist Britain. One way to answer this question would be to scrutinise the Tradition, to see if one can discern an essence that must be preserved, while leaving one some freedom to be creative. Clifford Longley recently described a liberal conservative theologian, such as Karl Rahner, as one who ‘sits under obedience to Tradition, and applies his intellectual ingenuity to the negotiation of as much freedom as can be justified within those limits.’ Many Catholics can identify with that picture. But I would suggest that if one looks at the genesis of the New Testament one can discover a different paradigm of the relationship between tradition and creativity, fidelity and freedom.

There were several moments between the time of Jesus and the canonisation of the New Testament when the Church was faced sharply with the question: What must we believe? What in the inherited tradition must be preserved? This was so with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, with the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century, and with the emergence of the Great Church in the second to fourth centuries.
Who does the Teaching in the Church?
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

The semi-official answer to this question, ‘Who does the teaching in the Church?’, the answer that would be given by the average official of the Roman Curia, or the average Catholic bishop, would probably be that it done by a rather mysterious entity called ‘the Magisterium’ (or, with more formal emphasis, ‘the sacred Magisterium’). By this is meant, in theory/practice, ‘the pope and the bishops’, and in practice/practice, the Holy See.

The notion that the teaching of doctrine is the exclusive preserve, privilege and duty of the pope and bishops is bizarre, surely. I mean, I doubt if the pope or any of the bishops were themselves taught their catechism, before they reached their present exalted office, by popes or bishops in illo tempore—or that the catechisms they were taught from were actually compiled by any pope or bishop.

This distortion of reality arises from the application of the word ‘magisterium’ (which means ‘mastery’ or ‘the status and function of a master’) to the traditional and authentic Catholic doctrine that final authority in matters of doctrine, the final judgment where there is controversy, is the responsibility and right of the pope and the bishops. The use, or rather misuse, of the word ‘magisterium’ in this sense is very recent in the history of theology. Its first and comparatively innocuous employment in an official document is to be found in Gregory XVI’s brief Dum acerbissimas, of 1835, condemning the errors of George Hermes. Its far from innocuous apogee was attained in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis of 1950, in which it appears at least eleven times.
The Unity of Christian Truth
Authors: Williams Rowan
Published: July 2007

Theological pluralism has been pressed upon us with increasing enthusiasm over the past twenty years. It has been seen as the only appropriate response to the cultural fragmentation of our world, and also as the continuation of what has in fact been the nature of theological discourse from the first. We had been too easily misled, by a harmonizing biblical exegesis on the one hand, and a Denzinger-based version of doctrinal history on the other, into supposing that the articulation of what is believed by Christians to be true about God and the world naturally falls into a pattern of tidily unified correlations. The pendulum has now swung a fair way towards the opposite pole from this.
On the Function of Heresy
Authors: Parvis Paul
Published: July 2007

One of the things which must count as Catholic doctrine is the affirmation that it is possible to get it seriously wrong. In this article I hope to offer some remarks on the function of heresy in the articulation of the Church’s faith. I would like to begin with a question, the possible answers to which have implications: how much do heretics sleep?

By 1843, John Henry Newman had come to believe that heretics were by nature sluggish creatures. In his fourteenth University Sermon, on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, Newman spoke of the ‘ordinary torpor’ of heretics from which they ‘never wake up … but to exchange courtesies and meditate coalitions’.

That was in its own way a radical answer, a radical break with the age-old view that heretics were ever-active, ever-vigilant. This view had, in particular, been the answer of virtually the whole of that patristic tradition in which Newman’s thought had been so largely formed.
The Value of Literature: III—Tennyson's Doubts
Authors: Finn Richard
Published: July 2007

In words that tried, but failed, to temper growing contempt with resignation, John Henry Newman in Tract XC wrote this of the Thirty Nine Articles: ‘let the Church sit still; let her be content to be in bondage; let her work in chains; let her submit to her imperfections as a punishment; let her go on teaching with the stammering lips of ambiguous formularies...’. In Newman’s ears the language of the Via Media had come to seem deceitful. It took pride in plain speech, yet its words were so framed to include heresy with orthodoxy, false with true. The assured tones of the Articles and Prayer Book, cadences in which generations of Englishmen had come to find comfort and devotion, now seemed in 1841 to belong to a Church that would not listen to the sterner, clear, voices of Church Fathers. Such tones seemed instead to lull their hearers into complaisance. The lips of the Church could be said with irony to stammer, for assurance was only the proud veneer that smoothed over, as it smooth-talked, doctrinal confusion and hesitation. Newman’s words were those of Isaiah, who prophesied that the ‘stammering lips’ of foreign conquerors would command the sinful Israelites, as a result of their desertion of the Law’s clear precepts. Such words hit home: those who complained that the allusion to Isaiah fell wide of the mark could not do so except by excluding broad interpretations of Scripture and Creed of this kind, Newman’s very targets. But if not thus, how are we to proclaim our faith?
Two Christianities
Authors: Corner Mark
Published: July 2007

It sometimes seems as though everyone loves a Christian, and everyone wants more of them. From a dangerous, persecuted sect of the first century, whose strange practices of consuming their god and indulging in a communal agape produced the sort of ignorant criticism in the Roman Empire that Moslems and Hindus receive in much of the West today, Christianity has become most popular religion, chief determinant of public morals and compulsory faith of any budding British monarch. It is now commonplace to challenge the progress of the Christian faith from a subversive branch of Judaism to a world religion. The highpoint of that progress, the success of Christianity in becoming official faith of the Roman Empire, looks very different today. Did Constantine convert to Christianity, or did Christianity convert to Constantine? The degree of self-criticism implied in that question represents a profound challenge to the churches.

I would like to suggest that there are two Christianities. The first is the faith that this government, in the form of the Bishop of London, the Prime Minister and Baroness Cox, is anxious to put onto every school curriculum. This Christianity encourages what seems to have become a vogue phrase in politics today, ‘good citizenship’. It supports pride in one’s national identity, respect for the institutions of state, and a type of concern for others harnessed to the sort of individual conscientiousness that volunteers for school governorships and neighbourhood watch schemes.
Women and the Human Paradigm: An Exploration of Gender Discrimination
Authors: Hannaford Robert
Published: July 2007

The contemporary debate about the place and role of women in the Church is proving to be a painful and difficult business. Language itself contributes to the problems in the sense that certain tacit assumptions —overwhelmingly negative about women—are embedded deep in our talk about human persons. The answer is not to be found simply in tinkering with non-sexist language. The practical difficulties facing women are compounded by the fact that the language in which the discussion is conducted depends for its meaning on gender images that are implicitly discriminatory. The clue to this problem is to be found in certain key assumptions about the nature of human persons.

The experience of intra-human discrimination has certain common elements. Those discriminated against are in one way or another denied rights accorded to other human beings, their needs are subordinated to those of others, and their behaviour tends to be interpreted in causal rather than psychological terms. What is characteristic about this experience is that it involves a refusal to treat those discriminated against as persons in the full sense of that term, for to recognize someone as a person is precisely to accord them certain rights, to take note of their needs, and to see them as subjects whose experience can only be adequately explained in terms of psychology. In this essay we shall attempt to uncover those features of our talk about persons that give rise to the possibility of discrimination and following this we shall consider the particular difficulties facing women.

It has been customary for philosophers when analysing the concept of a person to begin by listing the kinds of things we say about persons.
Bullitio and the God beyond God: Meister Eckhart's Trinitarian Theology
Authors: Reynolds P.L.
Published: July 2007

Our inquiry is about two aspects of Eckhart’s theology of the Trinity. One aspect (treated in Part I, which appeared in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars pp. 169—181) is his use of the notion of bullitio (‘boiling’) in the Latin treatises to explain personal procession and plurality within God. The other is the distinction in Eckhart’s German sermons between the Trinity and the undifferentiated Godhead beyond the Trinity.

The conclusions drawn from the first part of this study were as follows:

Bullitio is a metaphor depicting the generation of the Son from the Father. It also depicts the procession of the Holy Spirit, but this aspect is less developed in the texts we have considered. The metaphor represents an attempt to explain and to understand not only the nature of this generation but also the reason for it. I have argued that Eckhart, unlike Aquinas, allies himself with the tradition of a priori proofs of the Trinity. Bullitio is a metaphor for the self-diffusiveness of the good, and is related to Bonaventure’s notion of fountain-like fulness (plenitudo fontalis). Bonaventure finds in the latter attribute, which he regards as a property of the Father, the reason for plurality in God. There are no grounds to suppose that the idea of bullitio involves a distinction between God as Trinity and as the hidden Godhead.

Ebullitio, the first moment, as it were, of the creative emanation from God, is rooted in bullitio, and these two ideas are linked by that of formal emanation. The generation of the Son is a formal emanation; it is also the formal cause of creatures, insofar as this cause is considered in abstraction from their efficient and final causes.
Sacrifice and Violence: New Perspectives in the Theory of Religion from René Girard
Authors: Davis Charles
Published: July 2007

We live in a time in which the boundary fences between the various disciplines are being dismantled—at least as far as the social sciences and humanities are concerned. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault. Is it philosophy, history, sociology or political science? Again, where would one place the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida? Under the guise of literary theory it has profoundly changed the enterprise of literary criticism, and some think it is finally bringing to an end the hegemony of historical criticism in the theory and practice of biblical interpretation. With a nod towards Thomas Kuhn we could say that across the social sciences and humanities there is a search for new paradigms.

Students of that questionable discipline, called variously science of religion, history of religions, religiology, religious studies, comparative religion, or simply religion, are well used to a cloud of uncertainty obscuring the legitimacy, function and defining method of their academic project. About the only point of agreement is that the science of religion is not theology—and even that distinction is understood in different ways. Other questions abound. Is there a single science of religion, with a defining method, distinguishing it from such related sciences as anthropology and sociology? Or, is it a collective name for a group of sciences and disciplines with no single methodology? Is there a strictly empirical science of religion or is the study of religion essentially a hermeneutic discipline, demanding a methodology appropriate to one of the Geisteswissenschaften? One could continue along these lines, multiplying questions. Enough has been said to indicate what all its practitioners know, the uncertain status of the academic study of religion. By the ‘academic study’ of religion I mean that study when disengaged from the controlling authority and presuppositions of any particular religious tradition or organization.
Moral Conscience and the Experience of God
Authors: Stinnett Timothy R.
Published: July 2007

I am making a systematic theological point about the relationship between moral conscience and the experience of God. While the same theme may be taken up as a moral theological question, my intention is to explicate in part the meaning of ‘God’ as implied by the Christian witness of faith, and so I am approaching the theme as a systematic theologian and not from the perspective of moral theology. That is, I intend to ask primarily about the significance of moral conscience for understanding our experience of God, and not vice versa.

Clearly the phrase ‘the experience of God’ is systematically ambiguous, and I will argue that the term ‘moral conscience’ or ‘dictates of conscience’ is also systematically ambiguous, and that recognition of this ambiguity helps us resolve a cluster of philosophical and theological problems that accompany any assertion that moral conscience is a mode of the experience of God. (‘The experience of God’ is also grammatically an ambiguous phrase, of course. Here I will be using it as an objective genitive unless otherwise indicated.)

My central hypothesis is that the experience of moral conscience is a primary mode of the experience of God, if not the most important mode. This hypothesis is hardly without controversy: at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when D.F. Schleiermacher argued against any simple identification of moral conscience and religious experience, it has been recognized to be complex and problematic. Schleiermacher wrote in 1799 that religion ‘must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs’ (Schleiermacher, 31).