bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Authority and Ministry in the New Testament
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

In a previous article (New Blackfriars, September 1980) I launched an attack on the ultramontane party and policy which appears to dominate the Vatican at the moment, and to be attempting a return to the high centralisation in the Holy See of all authority, all decisive control over the Church that marked the epoch between the first and second Vatican Councils, 1870 — 1962. I said this looks to many people like an attempt to dismantle the work of Vatican II, or at least to quench the spirit of that council.

Many Catholics assume, wrongly, that this concentration of authority and controlling power in the hands of the Holy See, i.e. of the pope as an institution, is how the Church was instituted by Jesus Christ. They assume that in essentials the Church has always been like that from St Peter onwards. This is an assumption that the pervasive ultramontane theology — or rather ideology — does nothing at all to discourage. A trivial illustration may be had from the new English breviary. The old Latin breviary (and the new Latin one also, I presume) used to give saints their ecclesiastical rank in naming their feasts or in heading selections from their writings; so we would have “St Elizabeth, widow”, “St Edward, king”, “St Bede the venerable, priest”, “St Thomas, martyr and bishop”, “St Augustine, bishop”, “St Gregory the Great, pope”, and so on. The new English breviary has dropped this old-fashioned formality — whether rightly or wrongly is a matter of taste. But it has made one exception. Holy popes remain popes first and saints second; so we have, for example, “A reading from the letter of Pope St Clement I to the Corinthians”, or “From a sermon of Pope St Leo the Great”, but not “A reading from the first letter of Apostle St Paul to the Corinthians”, and certainly not “From a sermon of Bishop St Augustine”.
God: III ‐ Evil
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

At least in the western tradition nothing so affects our attitude to God as our recognition of evil and suffering. An important factor in the modern bourgeois indifference to God has been a cultivated exclusion of evil from our consciousness. It is not long since English moral philosophers searching for an example of moral evil could only come up with promise breaking; the liberal imagination shied away from real sin, just as commercial advertising shies away from suffering. It is a commonplace that prisons and hospitals are not only institutions for dealing with crime and sickness but also for hiding them.
A Note on Mr Pinter's Book of Ruth: The Homecoming
Authors: Doherty Francis
Published: July 2007

The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.

The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:

What do you think of the room? Big, isn’t it? It’s a big house. I mean, it’s a fine room, don’t you think? Actually there was a wall, across there ... with a door. We knocked it down ... years ago ... to make an open living area. The structure wasn’t affected, you see. My mother was dead.

(Act I, Methuen, 1967. p 21).

As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.
Unity: Present and Future
Authors: Goodridge Sehon
Published: July 2007

The true Church is a believed Church; in a real sense we have to ‘believe’ the Church, for the Church can only be recognised in its essential nature through faith. Yet the Church as the ‘called out’ community of the faithful is not simply invisible; it is both visible and invisible. As the people of God, the Church is essentially a ‘people’, and thus is visible. As the body of Christ, the Church is a ‘body’, and thus is visible. In the concrete visible Church there is a mixture of wheat and tares.’ Because the Church consists of human beings, and sinful human beings, renewal and reform of the Church is always necessary. In every age and generation she is faced with the task of presenting herself anew. It is with this understanding of the constant renewal of the Church — ecclesia semper reformanda — that we approach our subject.

The Unity of the Church is not primarily a unity of members among themselves, but is essentially a given unity which has its origin in God himself in his triune being of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This unity was actualized in Jesus Christ himself and made efficacious in the Holy Spirit. The whole New Testament message bears witness to this unity of origin. The classic texts are well known: 1 Cor 1: 10-30; 1 Cor 12; Gal 3: 27f; Rom 12: 3-8; Acts 2:42; 4: 32; John 10: 16; 17; 20-26; Eph 4: 1-6. There was indeed a consciousness of unity everywhere, and it was this consciousness of unity which was one of the factors which constituted the Church. This consciousness of unity became an essential element in the Church’s self-definition, as one of the four characteristics of the Church set out in the Nicene Creed: ‘We believe one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’.
Political Theology 3: Injustice
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

Ideas of justice held by those who are continuously in possession of wealth are bound to be different from the ideas of those who are continuously out of it. The basic anxiety of the former is to ensure the stability of the profitable order by which they are enabled continuously to take possession; that of the latter is to escape from the disorder by which they are continuously dispossessed. There is no common moral order, no community of interest between rich and poor by which it might be said that justice consists in its preservation. In a society as unequal as that of Britain, the moral order is already something broken.

Theories of justice generated by possessors are concerned with stability, even if — as with liberal reformists — this can only be achieved by a wider spread of benefits. In other words, they are concerned to define and defend a partial community of interest in which the access to wealth of those who already have it is preserved while the poverty of those who don’t is explained and justified in general, if not in particular. So they always imply the presence of a moral order behind the existing social and economic one. Furthermore, possessors are likely to hold the restricted concept of justice (see previous article), favouring commutative and criminal justice and then such distributive justice as will fit with these. The dispossessed however, when they find the voice to talk about these things — which is rare — take naturally to the comprehensive view of justice which looks for a different order altogether. The “greater justice” of the gospels is the justice of the dispossessed.
Shall Work Set Us Free?
Authors: Cunningham Angela
Published: July 2007

Much of the recent interest taken in work springs from our present plight of high unemployment, united with fears that the microchip technological revolution will increase unemployment such that we shall have to move to a leisure society, where to work is a privilege.

This presentation (in the medical sense) of the problem affects the diagnosis and affects, too, the way we think of work. For instance, very few commentators seriously challenge the equation of work with paid employment. This shoft-term focus excludes areas of work which should be included both because they are definitely work, and also because taking cognizance of longer-range matters might help us see the present position more clearly, although at a greater distance from the plight of the depressed ex-steel workers of Consett. Incidentally, here it is worth remembering that if we look at the world as a whole, the vast majority of its inhabitants are not in paid employment — they are either outside the market economy altogether, living in subsistence societies, or, as in Britain, supporting those in paid employment by the hidden subsidy of home work, the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing necessary for the maintenance of society, and the consuming necessary for the maintenance of our kind of capitalist society. Thus out of a British population of some 55 million, only about 18 million are in paid employment. On the old model of society these 18 million were seen as supporting the rest; a shift in the phantasm, partly brought about by reflecting on the possible consequences of the micro-chip, has enabled us to see things a little differently — the old,
Priestly Ministry Or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

In the previous article of this series, Authority and Ministry in the New Testament, I set out to show how two planks of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism not only have no basis in the New Testament, but are actually at odds with the whole spirit of these foundational documents of the New People of God. The major plank is, of course, the concentration of all authority in the papacy, with the inevitable stress on uniformity that will accompany such a policy; the second or supporting plank is hierarchical clericalism, the promotion of the clergy, in particular of bishops, as a ruling priestly class in the Church. In this article I will confine myself to this second plank, and investigate how this particular distortion and obscuration of true gospel values arose in the Church. We shall try to discern as far as we can what is sound in the developing tradition of the Church’s doctrine and practice of ministry from what is sick and in urgent need of reformatory healing.

We discovered two things from an examination of the New Testament evidence on the Christian ministry. First, that in the New Testament Churches there was no distinction between bishops and presbyters, these being simply two names for the same persons, one (‘bishop’) denoting the office or function of ‘overseeing’ the community, or being ‘in charge’, the other (‘presbyter’) denoting rank or status, that of elder or senior member. Secondly, that nowhere in the New Testament are these bishops/presbyters talked of in sacerdotal language as priests.
The Ecclesiological Significance of Bad Popes
Authors: Hill Edmund
Published: July 2007

In my last article, “Priestly Ministry or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order”, I surveyed the history of the second plank of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism; namely hierarchical clericalism. Now we must examine the roots of the chief item of this distorted ecclesial ideology, the concentration of all authority in the papal institution. For this purpose Church history divides fairly neatly into two halves, the first millennium and the second millennium of our era.

The first millennium, we could say, saw the gradual development of the doctrine of the universal primacy of the Roman Church and its bishop in the Catholica, such as it was eventually defined, together with the doctrine of papal infallibility, in 1870. The dogmatic constitution Pastor Aetemus of Vatican I, could have been promulgated (with some modifications to language and style which would chiefly have been improvements) by any pope from Leo the Great (ob. 461) to Gregory the Great (ob. 603), without anyone in Rome or the West thinking it very unusual, though there would no doubt have been demurrers from the East. But the practice of Eastern bishops, throughout the Arian and then the christological controversies that raged in the 4th and 5th centuries, shows that in fact they accepted the unique position of the Roman Church as the touchstone of orthodox faith. Rome was never heretical.
The Theology of Ernst Käsemann – II
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Although Ernst Käsemann’s magisterial commentary on the Epistle to the Romans proved to be open to review and patient of analysis without much explicit reference to the doctrine of justification (of New Blackfriars March 1981), the author himself undoubtedly regards this famous Lutheran insight as the key to his reading of Paul. What is not so clear, however, is whether Käsemann’s understanding of justification in Paul has much to do with what Catholics have usually supposed that Lutherans mean. In fact Käsemann may well have offered a reading of Paul which cuts the ground from underneath the central point of contention at the Reformation. His version of the doctrine of justification in his reading of the Epistle to the Romans may therefore have greater ecumenical effects in the long run than many agreed statements. And this is not the only way in which his work is likely to prove increasingly productive, as the young Swiss Calvinist scholar Pierre Gisel brings out in the first major systematic account of Käsemann’s writings. 1 The doctrine of justification is not one with which Catholics are generally at ease. The word is seldom mentioned in Catholic sermons. Salvation, grace, sanctification, yes — that is a chain of notions with familiar Catholic resonances, and clearly they pinpoint the area at issue. But talk of justification, as of predestination, sounds like Protestant jargon. Many Catholics are surprised to hear that the Council of Trent did not (as they suppose) merely condemn Luther’s teaching but actually worked out, with considerable thoroughness, and sanctioned with great solemnity in 1547, a Catholic doctrine of justification which has formed part of the official teaching of the Catholic Church ever since.
Theology and Sociology: Two Approaches To Religious Conversion
Authors: Archer Antony
Published: July 2007

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.
Political Theology 4: Property
Authors: Ruston Roger
Published: July 2007

In the course of an unusually angry article on poverty in Northern Ireland which appeared in the Times of 18 March this year, it was pointed out that in a region already suffering the highest cost of living, the highest unemployment rate (17.3 per cent) and the worst housing shortage (32,000 families homeless) in the United Kingdom, the social security system is passive and waits for people to find out what benefits they might be entitled to and to claim them. Moreover, the claim forms are “impenetrable to all but the well-educated and practised claimant, a contradiction in terms”. And the fear of scrounging has seriously interfered with the system’s ability to meet the crying need. In the UK as a whole £500 million welfare benefits remained unclaimed in 1978. Ulster was well represented. Meanwhile, the Government is pouring the balance of £70 million into a factory making luxury sports cars for the American market in the middle of a world energy crisis, for the sake of 1000 jobs.

On 6 April, the Guardian reported that more than 1000 new investigators have been appointed to save an estimated £50 million in social security frauds, while at the same time it has reduced the staff of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise dealing with tax frauds, which cost about £5,500 million. As the number of security fraud officers is increased so less and less time is given by benefit officers to ensuring that claimants receive their full entitlement. And more and more people are frightened to seek their legal rights. Moreover, “home visits have been reduced and officers have been told not to help claimants to work out the intricacies of various benefits in order to decide which was the most advantageous”. Meanwhile, it is not known what arrangements the Inland Revenue have to reclaim the vast tax arrears of the Vestey business empire, which paid no tax for decades on its highly profitable chain of butcher’s shops.
Metaphor, The Self, And The Language of Religion
Authors: Cunningham Adrian
Published: July 2007

In this paper, I am concerned with some of the ways in which religious language resonates with our sense of being a self, and especially a bodily self. At present we often tend to counterpoise language to the biological and we stress the conventional even arbitrary aspects of language. Religion, however, tends to give language a force that is comparable to that of biology. It is not only that words are creative in that flat which makes the world, or the word which Mary hears as the conception of her son. The whole pattern of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a pattern only because similarities of meaning have historical force, as the sacrifice of Isaac is linked to the sacrifice of Christ for instance. Things of similar meaning tend to be taken as linked in actuality, either by historical causality, or by being seen as different manifestations of a basic underlying pattern. In general, religious language tends to give a real dimension to linguistic usage that we would tend to say is ‘only metaphorical’: T was in the seventh heaven’, ‘Christ is present in the Eucharist’. Those religious traditions in which the issue of such language being ‘only metaphorical’ has arisen, have rejected it as a sufficient account of what they mean. There is no question of our being able to translate religious usage into metaphorical or poetic usage in any easy fashion. But attention to meta even if we cannot always take it as comprehensible. Thus consideration of what it means to be ‘lost in thought’ may help us to understand a little more what someone may mean when they say ‘whether I was in the body or out of the body, I know not’.
Thoughts on Hunger Strikes
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

As I write this a number of Catholic nationalists are on hunger-strike in protest against the operation of the courts and prisons by what they see as a repressive regime which discriminates against Catholics, which was set up by and is now supported by the armed might of another country. There are twenty six of these hunger-strikers and all of them are Polish. Very understandably, the British media which have been giving a good deal of space and time to Polish anti-government protest have not had much to say about this. Nor, indeed, have those clerical super-patriots who have felt impelled to comment on the smaller hunger-strike taking place in Ireland. For the most part these comments have shown a triumph of class-solidarity and national feeling over the free play of reason that must be most gratifying to any marxist. St Thomas says that the eye can see and distinguish any colour because it is itself colourless: if we have rose-tinted spectacles the rose-tints of the world are indistinguishable from white. Some of these clergymen seem equipped with mental spectacles through which the operations of the security forces, the interrogation centres, the courts and prisons of Northern Ireland become indistinguishable from pure white; they are indignant to find that the rest of the world sees in them more of the colour of blood.

These remarks should suffice to alert the reader to the tints he must look out for in my own mental spectacles. It is a great function of debate and argument to clean each other’s glasses, that is why hard thinking has to be a communal affair and why argument, even apart from the courtesies of debate, is itself an act of fraternal charity.
Victor White and C. G. Jung the fateful encounter of the White Raven and the Gnostic
Authors: Cunningham Adrian
Published: July 2007

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.
Theology and Rhetoric
Authors: Edmondson Ricca , Wörner Markus
Published: July 2007

In this paper we should like to examine some rhetorical aspects of theological language. Before doing so, it is necessary to argue for the view that there is a special mode of discourse appropriate to theology, as opposed to the view that theological language is composed of statements which differ from others only in terms of their subject-matter. There is a distinguished history of opposition to the view we propose; in a very ancient debate it has repeatedly been maintained that theology should be concerned only with discovering and promulgating true statements about God and our knowledge of God, and that any concern with developing sorts and styles of language can only distract and distort. This position is connected with another, which has received support from natural-scientific quarters since the mid-19th century especially: it presents a contrast between academic and non-academic language, founded on the contention that academic discourse occurs in the course of researches where the truth of a statement matters, but virtually nothing else about it does. According to this position, as long as a statement is true it should not matter to the researcher whether anyone finds it important or believable, or whether it impinges on anyone’s interests or needs. (Hence the expressions, presumably used chiefly in non-academic circles, ‘an academic point’, or ‘of merely academic interest’.) The concept of rhetoric can be used to point to misguided features in this type of position, whether it is taken up in relation to theology or in relation to research in general. But theology, more obviously than most subjects, highlights the dubiousness of trying to erect a linguistic ideal without attending to the effects on language of its most communicative aspects.
Bonhoeffer's Footnote and the Moral Absolute
Authors: Bishop Jordan
Published: July 2007

In much contemporary discussion of ethics, the Roman Catholic tradition — particularly in questions of sexual morality — has been characterized as the last refuge of the absolute. On questions such as the morality of contraception, the Church has been remarkably out of phase with other churches and other ethical traditions, insisting on a particular approach to natural law theory which has, by now, become identified with the Roman Catholic tradition.

It is interesting then, to find the following footnote in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as edited from Bonhoeffer’s papers by Eberhard Bethge:

Marriage is not founded upon the purpose of reproduction but on the union of man and woman. Woman is given to man as ‘an help rheet for him’ (Gen.2:18). The two shall be ‘one flesh’ (Gen.2:23). But the fruitfulness of this union is not something that is commanded. For biblical thought this would have been impossible; it was only in the age of rationalism and technology that it could come to be understood in this way.

Writing at a time when the Roman Catholic tradition maintained a strong consensus on the question, Bonhoeffer notes that this tradition “does not indeed, as is often asserted, maintain that reproduction is the only purpose of marriage. No one did that before Kant”.
Reflections on being a Theologian
Authors: Congar Yves
Published: July 2007

‘What is my licence to say what I say?’ You ask and prompt me to answer a question which, I must admit, I’ve never put to myself. I’m not given to self-reflection. I live. Life is its own certainty and justification. But now that you have asked me, I've put the question to myself and so I’ll tell you why I practise theology, what theology I practise, and how.

In what name, in virtue of what? I myself see two decisive elements: on the one hand, my vocation as a friar preacher, which shapes and fills my life; on the other hand, circumstances and appeals. I’ll start with this second element, because it’s easier to explain.

I never had a plan. I’ve tried to respond to appeals, requests, circumstances. Most appeals came from outside, in the shape of requests. I receive them every day, often two or three times a day ... If anything, I’ve accepted too many. That accounts for the quite ridiculous list of my articles, whether long and learned, or brief and popular. They amount to date to some 1630 or 1640 titles! But there are also the interior appeals, inspirations. These can range from the humble enough idea to read this, follow up that reference - yes, that’s how I operate, I think that our lives are shaped even in these tiny ways - right up to the first great appeal, in the years 1928 - 1929, to dedicate myself particularly to the Church and ecumenism. Two things intimately inter-twined. Here I very soon saw what I had to do. It got more complicated as time went on, of course, but the through-line always remained the same. And I have to admit that I was filled to overflowing. I wanted to change something and I saw very clearly what it was. My brethren and friends, my comrades in arms.
One is never able to overcome it completely …
Authors: Bórquez Adriana
Published: July 2007

Dear Sir,

I would like to apologise for my behaviour yesterday. Maybe if I try to explain . . .Would you be able to understand the real meaning of what lies behind these words? Will you . ..? I am not asking for pity or sorry; I am not even asking for sympathy for myself. I ask you only to know, to be aware, and to respond before it is too late.

Why YOU? I do not know with certitude; it is a mixture of elements: that’s you, Sir, as you have emerged from nothingness into my soul: somebody I do not know, and somebody I know so well, so well . . . Somebody I feel I want to cling to, somebody I have to run away from.

The other day . . . that stupid tooth of mine once again came loose and I was quite disappointed to have to go back to the surgery: I do not like dentists, you know. Anyway, anticipating a big row with the surgeon who had made that botched job, I felt encouraged to hurry there. However, it wasn’t the blond one in the clinic, it was you: a big guy, somewhat fat, young, with lots of selfconfidence, but, at least, approachable; in some way aggressive, but then ... willing to be friendly. Tall, powerful, steady; a young professional with a whole life ahead to be enjoyed ... you reminded me of “the other one”, long ago. So similar you and he . . .! Even your hands! Even that polite aggressiveness! That smile of yours . . . of his . . . the way you looked at me ... he looked at me . . . and said: “Sh! do not worry little one, do not be afraid. Sh! Little one, little one . . . Sh!” He was leaning on his side on the upper deck of the bunk.
Tragedy and the Soul's Conquest of Evil
Authors: Surin Kenneth
Published: July 2007

In an interesting and important essay entitled ‘The Soul’s Conquest of Evil’. Professor W. W. Bartley III argues that it is virtually impossible for man to overcome or subdue his own evil will. Bartley claims that it is a conditio sine qua non of man’s conquest of evil that he possess self-knowledge, but he is pessimistic about man’s capacity to gain the self-knowledge needed to triumph over his evil will. Bartley quotes with approval the words of C. G. Jung:

The individual who wishes to have an answer to the problem of evil, as it is posed today, has need, first and foremost, of self-knowledge, that is, the utmost possible knowledge of his own wholeness. He must know relentlessly how much good he can do, and what crimes he is capable of, and must beware of regarding the one as real and the other as illusion. Both are elements within his nature, and both are bound to come to light in him, should he wish — as he ought — to live without self-deception or self-delusion.

It is Bartley’s contention that the search for self-knowledge is a costly and perilous venture, undertaken successfully by only a few exceptional individuals. Prima facie, what Bartley and Jung say seems to be not without plausibility; most of us find it hard to be good precisely because we fail to acquire that clarity of vision which is so important if we are to struggle successfully to be moral beings. Nevertheless, Bartley’s position cannot be accepted without substantial reservations, and in this essay I propose to examine his position more closely, and attempt to show why I am inclined to reject his arguments.
John Coulson: Religion and Imagination ‘in aid of a grammar of assent’
Authors: Swanston Hamish
Published: July 2007

An image of the emperor is set up to be venerated in his absence, (Summa Theologiae 3a, 73, 5 responsio)

Dr Coulson proffers a thesis which relates belief to imagination by referring both to assent. If he is to make a real assent to the objects of faith, the theologian must “use his imagination”, which means undertaking the intolerable wrestle with meaning, since what he seeks to renew “lies hid in language”, (p 168). Dr Coulson’s thesis is evidently to be substantiated by reference to the languages of T S Eliot and J H Newman. Dr Coulson argues that ‘Eliot’s method as a poet, and its theological implications’, (p 169), are anticipated by Newman in the Grammar of Assent. ‘Eliot’s poetry exemplifies what Newman’s theology explains’ (pp 5 and 169). Newman is presented to us as a guide in the uses of imagination for our present situation.

Dr Coulson has a gift for civilised conversation. Here he deals familiarly with the great matters, with religion and art, if not with sexuality; he deploys the hint, the echo, the overlap, catching at connections that do not have to be fully expressed; he is not all that anxious to avoid repetitions, and more than content to return some several times to a favourite quotation. He would have us share his enthusiasm for some favourite author, not for Newman and Eliot only, but for Coleridge and several Coleridgeans. He is himself at least like Coleridge in his method which is, as he says of that of the great man, ‘the very reverse of the system-building required for a magnum opus’, (p 13). And Dr Coulson’s beginning is the common one of conversation.
Criticism or Construction? The Task of the Theologian
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

When I settled down to prepare this lecture, I looked at the title I had offered to the Regent of Studies and began to have doubts: was it really appropriate, on so prestigious an occasion, to discuss what seemed, the more I looked at it, a rather naive or childish question?

Not that I have anything against childish questions. Small children are neither experts nor are they wise. They are not experts, because they lack the opportunity to amass specialist stocks of information and skill. And they have neither experienced enough nor suffered enough to be wise.

Nevertheless, small children do often ask fundamental questions as a matter of personal concern.

Theologians are usually elderly, or at least middle-aged. The theologian’s audience therefore have a right to expect of him a measure of scholarly expertise: they are entitled to assume that he knows a number of things that other people either do not know or have forgotten. Moreover, the theologian’s audience also have a right to expect of him a measure of that wisdom which is the fruit of experience and suffering. (The fact that, on both counts, the audience will often be disappointed does not render their expectations the less legitimate.)
Vestimenta Imperatoris
Authors: Fitz Patrick P J
Published: July 2007

There is no question of my declining your kind invitation; rather, the talk I would give is not the talk you would want. I think that the Papal Visit is lamentable. I could do nothing but deplore it. And I ask you to hear my reasons.

It is not the sensationalism and vulgarity against which I complain — the souvenirs, the “logo”, the Popemobile, the hiring of a publicity-agent, the whole unlovely apparatus of a whistle-stop tour. After all, if the thing is going to take place at all, it will have to be financed from somewhere, and the cost seems crippling enough to call for every money-making scheme that ingenuity can devise or gullibility fall for. There is, I suppose, something vaguely comic about it all, but then there always is something vaguely comic in the travels of the very great. No, if there were no more to it all than a chance for crowds to see the Pope, my reaction would be very much what it is to cup-ties, or Butlin’s, or pilgrimages to Lourdes: carry on, God bless you, don’t expect me to join in, have a good time. Unfortunately, much more is involved, and if I had to state in a phrase what that something more is, I would say that the Visit is profoundly and damagingly misleading. Let me say why.

You will know that recent events and changes in our own Church - the concept of Oecumenism, the recovery of the Bible, the Second Vatican Council — are examples of how Christians of all denominations are trying to come to terms with their past and to understand it.
Psalm Singing as Eucharistic Act
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

What is the significance of singing the psalms? It is the one form of prayer shared by every major Christian denomination. Whatever the disagreements about the Eucharist, charismatic prayer, the rosary or whatever, the singing of psalms has gone unchallenged as the typical form of Christian prayer. And yet it is not immediately obvious in what sense the psalms are either Christian or, for that matter, prayer. How can it be an act of Christian prayer to long to dash out your neighbour’s children’s brains on a rock, to celebrate a law by which we are no longer bound, and to proclaim God’s mysterious intention to use Moab as his washbowl? The question is not what this or that psalm, might have meant originally in the Temple. It is not even of what Christian theological sense we might discover or construct for any or all of the psalms. That is an important question but its answer will not make sense of our practice of singing the psalms, in which there is no time to carry out complex theological hermeneutics and during which our minds are often enough dull, vacant or distracted. The question is not of the meaning of the psalms but of the meaning of singing them, though, as we shall see, the relationship between the two is complex.

The first thing to note is that we are not just singing the psalms, we are singing the psalter, and it is the canon of the psalter that gives us a preliminary definition of the significance of psalm singing. It is true that we do not sing all the psalms in the psalter, and even the psalms that we sing are sometimes bowdlerised of the nastier verses. But even if we only ever sung just a few of the psalms it would still be true that the canonical form of the psalter makes a claim about what sort of an activity psalm singing is.
The ARCIC Report
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Thomas More, lately Lord Chancellor of England, was beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 July 1535. Thomas Cranmer, lately Archbishop of Canterbury (who had tried to save More), was burnt to death in Oxford on 21 March 1556. William Allen left England for good in 1565. The ‘Roman Catholic Relief Act’ was passed in 1829. Anglican orders were declared invalid, in 1896, through defect of both form and intention. Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, visited Pope Paul VI in 1966 and they decided to set up a joint theological commission which reported to them two years later (the Malta Report). The first meeting of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) took place at St George’s House, Windsor Castle, in 1970. The concluding meeting was at the same venue in 1981. The Final Report appeared, after mysterious delays, on 31 March 1982. Pope John Paul II is due to arrive in England at the end of May. These dates signpost the four hundred and fifty years during which the majority of the people of England and Wales (not to mention Scotland) have been out of communion with the Apostolic See.

The Final Report is now offered to the churches in communion with Canterbury as well as to the churches in communion with Rome, for us all to decide in due course whether the doctrine here set forth is sufficiently consonant with our conscientious understanding of the faith for us to proceed towards “the restoration of complete communion in faith and sacramental life”, to quote ARCIC’s original statement of intent.
Jesus and Judaism
Authors: Chilton Bruce
Published: July 2007

The desire to consider Jesus from the perspective of Judaism may arise for various reasons. I have recently returned from New York City, where for years a formal and informal “Jewish-Christian dialogue” has been flourishing. Judaism is a major cultural force in New York, and the Church must relate to Jews if she is to engage the society in which she lives. Accordingly, this dialogue is not only historical and theological; its agenda is often determined by practical conflicts between Christians and Jews. A more purely theological root of the desire for such dialogue is, on the other hand, often expressed. The three great forms of biblical monotheism — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have so much in common, it is frequently claimed, that each should be able to learn from the others, and certainly should appreciate enough about the others to avoid the sickening instances of religious oppression which deface the histories of each. Finally, there is a sound historical reason for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Jesus was Jewish, and the New Testament was written during the most crucial period in the development of Judaism. As we will discuss, one cannot be adequately understood without reference to the other. This basic, historical side of Jewish-Christian dialogue is our present concern, although we would by no means deny the importance of its theological and pastoral aspects.

There is no doubt that Jesus was Jewish, not only ethnically, but also socially and theologically. We find him in the Gospels teaching and disputing as a rabbi, discussing questions of how Torah should be applied, using figures of speech and methods of argument also used by other rabbis. A recent volume by Geza Vermes, entitled Jesus the Jew (1973), represents a bold attempt to place Jesus in the context of Judaism. His work is subtitled, A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, and certainly to understand Jesus as a Jew is historically crucial.
Lonergan and Hume IV: Critique of Religion (2)
Authors: Fitzpatrick J
Published: July 2007

The argument adduced for the existence of God arrives by a chain of reasoning at the affirmation of a being that is self-explanatory, an uncaused cause, at what is sometimes also called a ‘necessary being’. The notion of a necessary being is one that Hume, in arguments not so far outlined, finds incoherent, and he has been followed in this by a good many other philosophers. The argument for a necessary being is presented by Demea:

Whatever exists must have a cause or reason for its existence, it being absolutely impossible for anything to produce itself or to be the cause of its own existence.
All Shall Be Well: Christian and Marxist Hope
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

Most people would agree that there are differences between Christian hope and Marxist hope. But where do these differences lie, and how are they to be specified? According to one widely accepted account, Marxists entertain high hopes for the future of the world, convinced that nothing can stand in the way of their realization. Christians, on the other hand, entertain no such hopes. They are prepared to tolerate, or endure, the state of the world as it is, hoping only for a future ‘beyond’ all futures, an eternity that will redress the tragedy of time.
Wittgenstein and Theological Studies
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations appeared posthumously in 1953. The anniversary deserves commemoration. The publication of much more of his late work, not to mention the flood of exposition and commentary, would in any case prompt reflection. But, even after thirty years, with its status as a philosophical classic securely established, the use of the book remains as difficult and controversial as ever. It is appropriate, in these pages, to concentrate on the effect the study of Wittgenstein’s later work might have in the context of theological studies — in fact as an essential therapeutic propaedeutic.

To put it like that is already to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work has had very little effect on the practice of theology in the past thirty years. That is to say, we need not linger long upon the mare’s nest of “Wittgensteinian Fideism”. This nomenclature was introduced, I think, by Kai Nielsen (in Philosophy, July 1967, if not already somewhere else). As an atheist Nielsen wants to go on arguing that religion is nonsense. He therefore objects to the way that certain Christian philosophers, or certain philosophers who are also Christians, try to make out that religion is a practice which can be understood only by the insider. Any outsider, such as a committed atheist, could not even know what he is talking about when he argues against the existence of a god or whatever. Religious language would be intelligible only to those who participate in the “form of life” in which it is at home. Religious discourse would moreover constitute a distinctive and autonomous “language game” which could be understood, let alone criticized only by adepts. This counts as Fideism, in the textbook sense: the propositions and concepts of the Christian faith would simply be unintelligible to people who have not yet been “saved”.
A Shape of Faith
Authors: Mark James
Published: July 2007

The title of this paper indicates an exploration; the indefinite article implies that it is (perhaps necessarily) expressed in personal terms. Putting and responding to questions like this one is very much a custom of our time; a time of questioning, when we are disinclined to accept the forms of tradition and the pronouncements of authority. We assume that it is normal and necessary, for Christians, to ask themselves what they mean when they use the traditional language of Christian doctrine: to ask themselves how these are related, on the one hand, to the experience to which they are intended to give intellectual shape and, on the other, to the intellectual processes which we use when we try to understand more manageable kinds of experience. Do we accept such language and in what sense? Do we want to reinterpret it? I suspect that most of us have asked ourselves the question that Bonhoeffer, in his prison-cell, came to see as the central one: ‘What do we really believe, in the sense that we hang on to it with our lives?’ Notice that he uses the word ‘We’; he thought of faith as something shared, something corporate. But he had to do his own thinking. And if you feel that need you can’t.in good faith, suppress it.

It is in this sense that my paper will be an individual and personal one. I haven’t any distinctive experience to offer you; and what I have to say will, I think, be of general rather than of personal interest. Still, since it does come from an individual I ought to say something about the background of temperament, experience, orientation and interest which lie behind it, and which may help you to place what I have to say, and therefore to assess it for yourselves.
Towards An Urban Theology
Authors: Vincent John J
Published: July 2007

The origin of the Urban Theology Unit resides, I fancy, in a quite fundamental question which has seemed to me to be elemental in any search for Christian discipleship. It was something like: Where do I have to place myself so that Gospel things happen to me?

I had satisfied at least myself that the peculiar and distinctive genius of Christianity lay in its uncovering and empowering certain secular dynamics which were for the wholeness of humanity.

The call to be a disciple, in this light, was therefore the call to place oneself strategically, so that the dynamics of the Christ-events could be recognised and entered into. The evangelical motive, “What must I do to be saved?” was therefore secularised into “Where must I be that salvation happens?” The church therefore had to be discovered around and within those events, people and movements which could be part of the on-going secular dynamic which continued the acts of Jesus. The acts of Jesus, in turn, were the immediate and often microcosmic happenings which embodied and pointed to the Kingdom of God.

It seemed to me, further, that the calling of a theologian always had to be secondary to the calling to be a disciple — or, more pertinently, that a theological vocation was impossible except as a development of a discipleship vocation. This meant that theorising had to issue from commitment, speaking from acting, systematising from experimenting. Indeed, I later learned that the whole life pattern of Jesus reflected this kind of dialogue between engagement and withdrawal, conflict and spirituality, politics and privateness, and that the peculiar group that he called into being likewise existed as alternative communal society (the New Israel) and as his own alternative inner being (the Body of Christ).