bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Responsibility of Theology for Spiritual Growth and Pastoral Care
Authors: Endean Philip
Published: July 2007

‘It seems that theology has no significant responsibility for spiritual development and pastoral care: at best, theology is a harmless distraction which entertains some Christians endowed with certain kinds of temperament; at worst, theology is a positive impediment to proper Christian formation and growth’. So a Thomist videtur quod non might begin, and the documentation would be easy to find. We might, for example, quote the famous adage, ‘by love he may be caught and held, but by thinking never”. We could reflect on how pastoral supervisors often try to get trainee ministers to respond to ‘what is really going on’, and not to think too quickly in terms of articulated theology. Again, many of us will know good priests who will tell us that seminary training in theology was something they survived. They began real learning on the job, on the basis of simple goodness and common sense. Theology is something of which they are in awe, or nervous, or suspicious; it remains remote from their awareness.
Not the Whole Story: Another Response to John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Part I
Authors: Daniels John
Published: July 2007

It is the province of knowledge to narrate and the privilege of wisdom to listen. With apologies to Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is already ten years since John Milbank published Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Its impact was immediately apparent, the journals Modern Theology and New Blackfriars dedicating entire numbers to discussing some of the many issues arising from it. For it is unquestionably a daunting achievement: a relatively simple thesis elaborated at considerable length and taking on in the process a whole range of authors from a variety of disciplines and across history. To do the book justice in a few words is almost impossible; but it surely remains the case that whatever one’s views of Milbank’s conclusions, it is difficult not to respect both the scholarship and ambition which it represents.

A number of the many issues raised in the course of the book have already been addressed by subsequent reviewers and authors. It might seem curious that there is still something left to be said fully a decade later; and yet there is so much meat contained in the book that it remains a banquet of inspiration and controversy in many ways. In this paper I wish to focus my engagement with Milbank’s ideas by considering his account of the work of Paul Ricoeur. Although he discusses Ricoeur only very briefly—a few pages (pp. 263-8) out of more than four hundred—I hope to show how dealing with this small part leads us to engage with a central element of Milbank’s thesis. Before embarking in earnest on this task, there are two points which need to be declared.
What does love know? St Thomas on the Trinity
Authors: Williams Rowan
Published: July 2007

Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.

What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.
Confessions of an Existentialist: Reading Augustine After Heidegger: Part I
Authors: Smith James K.A.
Published: July 2007

Our task is to read Augustine after Heidegger, in a double sense: first, chronologically, returning to read Augustine after having passed through Heidegger, re-reading the Confessions after reading Being and Time. But in a second hermeneutical sense, we are reading Augustine after Heidegger; that is, we are reading Augustine after/as Heidegger read him in the period of his earliest development. By doing so, we mean to let Heidegger’s sketch of factical life (Existenz) function as a “hermeneutical situation” of our reading of Augustine as well indicate the way in which Augustine’s Confessions functions as a horizon for Being and Time.

The impetus for returning to Augustine is found in Heidegger’s turn to the doctor gratiae in his early work on the phenomenology of religion. In the young Heidegger’s work in the phenomenology of religion, it is as much phenomenology as religion which is at stake; that is, the rigorous questions of phenomenological method find a limit case in the consideration of religious experience. Thus, a phenomenology of religion functions as something of a ‘testing ground’ for phenomenology understood as a hermeneutics of facticity. As Jean Greisch has noted, these “questions of method, which have an effect on the philosophy of religion, primarily take up the question of the status of phenomenology itself, and even the status of philosophy itself in the sense of an appropriate conceptuality.”
The Lutheran‐Catholic Agreement on Justification: Botch or Breakthrough?
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Asked to name a German city associated with the Lutheran Reformation, most people with any knowledge of the period would, I suppose, cite Wittenberg — the Saxon university town from which that Reformation was launched. But an equally serious candidate would be Augsburg in what is now northern Bavaria where the single most authoritative document of Lutheranism, the Confessio Augustana or ‘Augsburg Confession’ was promulgated in 1530. It was to Augsburg, where the Reichstag, the imperial Diet, was meeting, that the former Master of the Dominicans, Thomist theologian and Catholic church reformer, Thomas de Vio was sent in 1518 as papal legate with a mandate to bring Dr Luther, member of the Order of Augustinian Hermits and professor of biblical studies, to his senses. De Vio — better known from his birthplace, Gaeta in the kingdom of Naples, as il Gaetano or Cajetan, was at first viewed by Luther with comparative favour. Although Luther shared the anti-Italian feelings common in Germany in this period, disliked what he knew of Thomism, and numbered several Dominicans among his harshest critics, he found Cardinal Cajetan learned and humane. There was, however, no real meeting of minds. So far as Luther was concerned, the encounter was to be a debate, like the Heidelberg Disputation from which he had just emerged with flying colours.
Wittgenstein and the Majesty of Death
Authors: Moore Gareth
Published: July 2007

Frazer begins his work The Golden Bough with a brief treatment of the priesthood at the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi in classical times, concentrating on the rule of succession: ‘A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he himself was slain by a stronger or a craftier.” Frazer is apparently troubled by this rite, finding it so bizarre and difficult to understand that it calls for clarification at a deep level. This is surely an understandable reaction. The rite is bizarre and repugnant, and provokes the questions: How could such a practice have arisen? How could people have lived like this and done these things? Though he does not say so explicitly, it seems to be such questions that send Frazer off in search of an explanation, a search that will take him several volumes and hundreds of pages. When he sets out to find an explanation of the rite of Nemi, Frazer thinks above all in terms of constructing a hypothesis as to the historical origins of the rite. An important stage in this process is to link the rite with other practices, particularly ones which depend on magical beliefs. These magical beliefs are in turn explained as primitive scientific hypotheses. Since we are familiar with the idea of a scientific hypothesis, understanding magical beliefs as primitive scientific hypotheses makes it readily intelligible to us why people in less advanced societies should have held such beliefs.
Renewed, Dissolved, Remembered: MacKinnon and Metaphysics
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

‘I have some longstanding debts: to Donald MacKinnon, who introduced me to philosophy at Aberdeen between 1950 and 1952; to Cornelius Ernst, who got me to read Wittgenstein, together with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, at Hawkesyard in 1957-60; and to Adolf Darlap, who helped me to understand Heidegger (much easier than understanding Wittgenstein), in Munich between 1964 and 1965’.

Serendipitously, a few days before being invited to contribute to these celebrations some remarks on that ‘longstanding debt’ to Donald MacKinnon, while sorting out some papers I came across three yellowing pages of typescript. On the top of the final page was written, in that inimitably energetic and near-illegible hand: ‘Done for Theology in July 1977, but rejected by the editors as unsuitable on the inflexible recommendation of Dr James Mark (reviews editor). DMM’. (This was by by no means the only occasion on which Donald had noted the inflexibility of one to whom he usually referred as ‘the brother of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police’.) The spurned offering was a review of Christopher Stead’s Divine Substance, which had been published earlier that year.
Demons
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

The demonic is mysterious because it appears to be without cause. It is an apparently unmotivated malignancy, which delights in destruction for its own sake. Or, as the saying goes, just for the hell of it. It is hard to know quite why Iago feels so resentful of Othello. The witches of Macbeth reap no obvious profit from driving the protagonist to his doom. This kind of wickedness seems to be autotelic, having its grounds, ends and causes in itself. It thus joins a privileged, somewhat underpopulated class of objects, which includes God and art. It is enigmatic because it is brutely itself, not because it has the inscrutability of something too deep to fathom. As St. Augustine remarks in the Confessions of his youthful debauchery, I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it’.

For many commentators, the Holocaust would be the prime example of this phenomenon. Part of its horror lies in its apparent pointlessness. Even if you had wanted to rid the world of Jews, you could have found some less unspeakable way of doing it. As Stangl, the ex-commandant of Treblinka, was asked later: ‘Considering that you were going to kill them all... what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?’ Or as Primo Levi inquires:

‘Why go to the trouble of dragging them on to their trains, take them to die far away, after a senseless journey, die in Poland on the threshold of the gas chambers? In my convoy there were two dying ninety-year-old women, taken out of the Fossoli infirmary; one of them died en route, nursed in vain by her daughters. Would it not have been simpler, more “economical”, to let them die, or perhaps kill them in their beds, instead of adding their agony to the collective agony of the transport? One is truly led to think that, in the Third Reich, the best choice, the choice imposed from above, was the one that entailed the greatest amount of affliction, the greatest amount of waste, of physical and moral suffering. The "enemy" must not only die, but must die in torment.
Religion and Violence: Plea for a ‘weak’ theology in tempore belli
Authors: Engel Ulrich
Published: July 2007

Only a few minutes after the events of September 11, 2001, the perfidious terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were being linked with the religious sphere. It made no difference whether it was the slogan of “battle of the cultures” (S.P. Huntington) which made the rounds of the mass media or whether the public took a look at the simplistic Islamic thoughts of Mohammed Atta, which the pilot of death had left behind in his will, or whether it was in the context of the political war rhetoric which accompanied the allied attack on Osama bin Laden and the whole of Afghanistan, or whether it was in the statements made by church officials at the innumerable memorial services for the victims of the attacks: religion was or, rather, is, always involved.

The questions are obvious: What is this link between violence and religion about? Is there a potential for violence which is structurally inherent in the religious - outside or particularly also within the concrete religions of revelation: Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Does the terrorist attack on the twin towers of Manhattan - symbols of globalized capitalism - demonstrate the reawakening of “religious mania” (as the German news magazine Der Spiegel put it)? These and similar questions challenge (Dominican) theologians to give their opinions about this, since each religion determines its relationship to violence through its particular theology (cf. H.-J. Sander).
Broken on the Wheel of History: A Pentecostal Perspective on Summa Theologiae 3a, 48
Authors: Armitage Mark
Published: July 2007

In Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 Thomas Aquinas proposes five ways or models of atonement. These are, in order, the ways of merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption and efficient causality. In line with the patristic and mediaeval tradition, Aquinas presents these five models very much in terms of what Hans Urs von Balthasar might call a theodramatic ‘action’ between God and humanity—a drama centred on the person of the incarnate Son who in some sense or other offers recompense to his Father for our sins. This theodramatic approach to soteriology dominates Catholic thought from Anselm to Balthasar and Protestant thought from Luther to Barth and beyond, but it takes little account of the latest thinking in historical Jesus studies or of current interpretations of Paul and other New Testament writers, and in this article I would like to suggest a way of rereading Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 in the light of what might be termed the Schweitzer/Sanders/Wright understanding of Jesus and Paul.

For Albert Schweitzer, Jesus was an eschatological prophet who saw himself as heralding the end of the age and who, when his preaching did not result in the anticipated apocalypse, effectively ‘broke himself on the wheel of history’ in order to bump human history over into the next phase. Paul picked up on this, and (according to Schweitzer) his ‘Christ-mysticism’ explored the various ways (being ‘in Christ’, dying and rising with Christ, mystical body, Holy Spirit) in which Christians become bound up with the Messiah whose death has inaugurated the eschatological kingdom.
“Monstrous Propositions” of a Dominican
Authors: Cross Tony
Published: July 2007

When, as a student at Oxford, Johnson “took up Law’s Serious Call. . . expecting to find it a dull book”, he found it “quite an overmatch” for him. Taking up David Urquhart’s Effect on the World of the Restoration of Canon Law ... a Vindication of the Catholic Church against a Priest, I found myself in somewhat similar case—struck by the moral passion and remorseless logic. Urquhart’s luckless opponent was the Dominican friar, Fr. Rodolph Suffield—celebrated English Dominican preacher of the 1860s. Urquhart (1805-77) was an eccentric Scottish aristocrat, a Protestant papalist, who succeeded in pushing his concern over the morality of war on to the preparatory documentation of the first Vatican Council. Suffield (1821-91), by the late 1860s profoundly antagonistic to ultramontanism, left the Church to become a Unitarian minister shortly after the promulgation of the Infallibility Decree. It is perhaps timely to recall their contestation as contemporary British foreign policy impales itself upon the horns of its current moral dilemmas.
When Time Is of the Essence: Aquinas and the Imago Dei
Authors: McFarland Ian A.
Published: July 2007

There are probably few theological categories more contested than the image of God. The reasons why are not hard to fathom. Though the priestly writer to whom we owe the phrase nowhere specifies in what this image consists, theologians since Irenaeus have seen in it the key to understanding human distinctiveness. Though Irenaeus’ own interpretation of the imago Dei is remarkably holistic, the phrase has more often been understood in narrowly cognitive terms. And while the faculties cited as the seat of the divine image have generally been viewed as widely inclusive of all human beings, those in power have proved all too willing to question the humanity of those whose cognitive abilities they have judged somehow deficient.

Partly as a protest against narrowly cognitive interpretations of human distinctiveness, the last century has seen an increasing emphasis on the capacity for relationships with others as the defining feature of the divine image in human beings. Insofar as such capacity is also subject to variation among individuals, however, relational criteria seem as open to exclusive interpretation as those pertaining to the use of reason or will. In both cases, an essentialist interpretation of the imago Dei threatens to result in the boundaries of the human being drawn too narrowly.
Not the Whole Story: Another Response to John Milbank's Theology and Social Theory: Part II
Authors: Daniels John
Published: July 2007

This paper is an attempt to respond to John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory from a perspective informed by hermeneutical phenomenology. In the first part, the ‘classical’ distinction of explanation and understanding was defended against Milbank’s critique by reference to Paul Ricoeur’s account of the distanciation/appropriation polarity. It was argued that Milbank’s account does not sufficiently grasp identity as a hierarchical synthesis of ‘ironic’ identities which reflect different degrees and kinds of distanciation from the paramount reality of everyday life (see Schutz 1962a, 1975). The explanation/understanding binary therefore retains a validity insofar as it draws attention to the way in which different readings variously manifest the moments of distanciation and appropriation.

With this groundwork in view, the second part of the paper sets out to examine Milbank’s understanding of the role of Christian theology vis-á-vis other accounts of being and the adequacy of the category of narration.
Wounding and Healing: Reciprocity in Divine and Human Narratives: the Cases of Christina Mirabilis, Hadewijch, and Mechthild
Authors: Neal Diana
Published: July 2007

Elaine Scarry’s text The Body in Pain offers an analysis of the human experiences of suffering and pain as effects of divine and human making and remaking. Assuming a Feuerbachian analysis of the human projection of the divine, she maintains that God is the primal human Artefact who, once made, remakes the human subject in his own image through wounding and healing. That which distinguishes the human from the divine is embodiment. Embodied as they are, human beings can be wounded. God, being bodiless, cannot be wounded.

Scarry’s thesis relies overwhelmingly on a Western notion of human work that she believes has been passed into our culture through two dominant sets of religious and politico-economic discourses, for her those of Judeo-Christianity and of Marxism. These discourses have been so influential in the formation of western subjectivity that they reveal much, she holds, about the way Western subjects are constructed by discourses of pain and illness. It is this aspect of Scarry’s monumental work that interests me, and which I will initially use to read the text of the 13th century Flemish mystic Christina Mirabilis, before moving on to a consideration of her medieval contemporaries Hadewijch of Antwerp and Mechthild of Magdeburg. In reading Christina’s text, the problem I will pose is how her performance of wounding and healing assist in constructing/reconstructing herself as a mystical subject. Secondly I will ask the question, what theological and literary purpose does the language of wounding and healing serve in the medieval texts of the Beguines Hadewijch and Mechthild? In other words, what does the text produce?
Foot's Natural Goodness and the Good of Nature
Authors: McCarthy David Matzko
Published: July 2007

Philippa Foot is a good philosopher. She is a good person too, insofar as her manner of thinking, conversing, and asking questions are evidence of who she is ‘as a human being’. I begin with reference to Foot as good philosopher and human being for a few reasons. For one, I do so in order to introduce particular uses of the word ‘good’. The guiding question in Foot’s recent Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) is whether my ‘she is good’ is simply equivalent to T like it’ or ‘it strikes me in a favorable way’. Do I have some objective basis to make my claim, in reference not only to ‘good philosopher’ but also to ‘good human being’ ? Foot argues that I can be objective in both descriptions, that a non-subjective account of ‘good’ is necessary to make sense of how practical reason is both practical and reasonable. By staking out the non-subjective constraints of practical reason, she suggests that the modern ‘turn to the subject’ has come to its dead end. This dead end is a leading concern of my remarks on Foot’s Natural Goodness, and my principal aim is to advance her arguments for a teleological conception of nature, particularly human nature. But first, there is more to say about what is good.
How to be an Atheist
Authors: Turner Denys
Published: July 2007

Might I begin with the personal remark that in the course of preparing this lecture for Blackfriars in Oxford, I was quite unable to prevent thoughts of Herbert McCabe’s absence here today from occupying my mind. You must forgive me if, though he is absent physically, you are able to identify his presence intellectually within the few thoughts I offer you today; for the inclination to give some expression to the conjunction of influences which some thirty years of debate with Herbert have visited upon me personally became, in the circumstances, irresistible. Back in the early nineteen-eighties Nicholas Lash and I published in quick succession monographs on the subject of Marxism and its relation to Christian theology. We agreed on much of a theological nature, disagreed sharply on how to read Marx, so Herbert, then in his second stint as editor of New Blackfriars, invited us each to review the work of the other, Nicholas first, me to follow. With characteristically wicked wit, Herbert entitled my reply to Nicholas’ review ‘Turner Responds to Lash’. Well, today I mark my indebtedness to Herbert by means of a lecture which I am happy to concede is, in a manner, a response to Herbert’s ‘lash’, and in some spirit of emulation, could I achieve it, of that fierce clarity and energy of thought which so characterised what Eamon Duffy called ‘his mighty soul’.
Finnis and Aquinas on the Good of Life
Authors: Lamont John
Published: July 2007

In his Natural Law and Natural Rights, Fundamentals of Ethics, and other works, the Oxford professor of jurisprudence and moral theologian John Finnis has elaborated a theory of ethics and natural law that he presents as being based on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Finnis has been influenced in this project by the moral theologian Germain Grisez, and has worked in cooperation with Grisez and Joseph Boyle on these issues, but I will confine myself to a discussion of Finnis’s thought, while noting that my conclusions will have implications for the views of Grisez and Boyle as well.) His account of natural law incorporates a particular account of human life as a good for practical reasoning, from which he concludes — in disagreement with Aquinas — that capital punishment is immoral. This conclusion has gained wide acceptance among Catholics, partly because of the influence of Finnis and Grisez’s moral theories. I want to examine his understanding of the good of life, contrasting it with the actual views of St. Thomas, and argue that it is mistaken. I will then explain why I think his mistake is an important one that needs to be avoided.

Finnis presents his account of natural law as being modelled on St. Thomas’s account of the first principles of natural law, which is given chiefly in the Summa Theologiae, la2ae q.94 a.2. It may be helpful to sketch St. Thomas’s understanding of practical as opposed to theoretical reason. Theoretical reason aims at knowledge of how things are, and its activity terminates in belief about how things are.
Thinking About Good—Thomas Aquinas on Nicomachean Ethics I, Divine Names IV‐V and de Ebdomadibus
Authors: Boland Vivian
Published: July 2007

Herbert McCabe taught in many ways, not least per viam provocationis. One day in the mid 1970s he provoked something far beyond his intentions with a throwaway remark about Summa theologiae I, q. 15, the question on ‘ideas’. ‘It must have been written by Saint Thomas on a platonic off day’, he declared, a comment that remained with the present writer to stimulate research in directions that might not have overly pleased Herbert. ‘Platonic’ and ‘platonist’ were not usually good words in his vocabulary, profoundly impressed as he was by Thomas’s achievement in developing Christian theology in radically new ways using the works of Aristotle, Plato’s brightest student and critic.

Thomas Aquinas himself, though, at the midpoint of his career, was convinced that the Platonists, in what they had to say about the first principle of things, were exactly right (verissima) and completely in harmony with Christian faith ‘. In fact, in a brief but potent contribution to the 1974 Thomistic Congress for the seventh centenary of Saint Thomas’s death, Andre von Ivanka asserted that as regards ‘good’, and because of the ontology supporting his understanding of it, Thomas not only ‘platonises’ but formally contradicts Aristotle. Where Aristotle argues that ‘good is not a general term corresponding to a single idea’ (.Nicomachean Ethics 1.6, 1096b25) Thomas says that ‘all things, in seeking their proper perfections, seek God himself, insofar as the perfections of all things are reflections (similitudines) of the divine being’ (Summa Theologiae I 6, 1 ad 2). Elsewhere Thomas says that ‘all things seek, as their ultimate end, to be united with God’ (Summa Contra Gentiles III. 19).
Zizioulas: The Trinity and Ecumenism
Authors: Weinandy Thomas
Published: July 2007

‘Being as communion’ is a phrase that evokes the name of only one person, that of Bishop John D. Zizioulas. It is first and foremost within the context of the Trinity that Zizioulas elaborates his understanding of this concept. Moreover, from his trinitarian understanding of ‘being as communion’ Zizioulas has also elucidated a distinctive understanding of creation, Christology, Christian anthropology, ecclesiology, the Eucharist and eschatology. In so doing Zizioulas has made significant and insightful contributions to Christian theology. I cannot comment on the whole of Zizioulas’ thought in so short an essay, but I would like to examine briefly the topic that interests me the most — the Trinity. I want to highlight the strengths of Zizioulas’ conception of the Trinity as well as to note those aspects that I believe demand greater clarity. In attempting to clarify the ambiguities I will also offer a few suggestions as to how Zizioulas’ trinitarian thought might be further enriched. In the light of all of the above I will conclude by offering some thoughts on advancing ecumenical relations among Eastern and Western theologians.
Irony and the Eucharist
Authors: Eagleton Terry
Published: July 2007

In one region of our lives, we have no problem in understanding how a thing can change its substance while apparently remaining itself. The process is known as metaphor. ‘Fire’ can mean anger or amorousness rather than literal flame, but the word ‘fire’ remains unaltered in this exchange, rather as the bread and wine of the eucharist still look and behave like bread and wine. Since the meaning of a word is its being, we can say that the being or ‘substance’ of the word has changed with this metaphorical transaction. Flame has transubstantiated into fury.

Moreover, ‘fire’ can act as a metaphor of passion only because there are real resemblances between the two. The relation between the two signs is not iconic (they don’t look much like each other), but it is not arbitrary either. Maybe Seamus Heaney could get ‘carburetter’ to mean erotic passion, but for most of us ‘fire’ is a less laborious way of doing it. In a similar way, the bread and wine of the eucharist, as signs of our human solidarity which need to be destroyed (consumed) if they are to yield life, have natural affinities with the body of Christ. As Herbert McCabe once remarked, you couldn’t consecrate Coke and burgers because they aren’t food and drink.

The notion of metaphor will only get us so far in understanding the eucharist, since a change of being which leaves a thing apparently intact is more mysterious than a change of meaning which does so. But a semiotics of the eucharist can be pressed further.
Eden and Beyond: Images of Paradise in Biblical and extra‐Biblical Literature
Authors: Gooder Paula
Published: July 2007

The word paradise is one which is so familiar to most of us that its utterance evokes an immediate mental image of a beautiful garden where the righteous dwell for eternity. This image, while finding its roots in the biblical tradition, is influenced as much by Dante, Milton and many Christian paintings as it is by biblical traditions. In fact, it is hard to see the word paradise without bringing to mind those famous medieval and renaissance paintings of the Garden of Eden, Heaven and Hell. The problem of this Christian heritage is that it encourages a rather monochrome image of the nature of Paradise which runs contrary to the variety of images contained in texts from the biblical era.

The purpose of this study is to examine the references to Paradise in texts from the biblical era and to explore the images evoked by them. The paper will begin and end with a consideration of the texts about Paradise in the New Testament. From there we shall move on to explore the background to these texts first in the Hebrew bible and the Septuagint and then in non-canonical texts from the second temple period. We shall note where ideas shift and develop and note how this affects the image of Paradise. We will end by returning to the texts from the New Testament and noting how this background affects our understanding of the relevant passages.
The Symbolism of Marriage and of the Parent‐child Relationship:
Authors: Sutton Agneta
Published: July 2007

Both Karl Barth and John Paul II have written extensively on marriage and procreation. Coming from different traditions, they have of course different things to say. The aim of this paper is to show that the differences between them highlight theologically important questions relating to the symbolism of marriage, the value of procreation and the parental mission. Both theologians share the view that as Christians we must see the world and human relationships in the light of the Gospel News, and so from an eschatological perspective. Both of them, therefore, hold that under the New Covenant in Christ the relationship between mankind and God and also between man and woman in marriage take on a new meaning. But, nevertheless, they differ on the importance of procreation and also on the question of the God-given parental mission. The exploration of these differences will bring to the fore the question of what moral obligations are entailed by the concept of the child as a gift, a concept espoused by both theologians. It will also bring to the fore the question of the basis of the fourth commandment.

The paper starts with a comparison between the two theologians’ views on marriage and procreation. Here it is shown why Barth considers procreation relativised under the New Covenant in Christ and so why he attaches less importance to procreation than John Paul II does. In the second part of the paper the two theologians’ views on the main role and mission of parents are discussed and it is shown why John Paul II puts the emphasis on the evangelising role of parents as Christian educators, whereas Barth stresses the symbolical role of parents as representatives of God.
In Support of Felix Wilfred: Some Implications of Wittgenstein's World‐Pictures for Interreligious Dialogue
Authors: Steinkerchner Scott
Published: July 2007

Felix Wilfred, a Catholic theologian working in an Indian context, provides a trenchant critique of traditional Western theology’s ability to find relevance in India’s multi-religious context. This article explores how Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of world-pictures provides a philosophical support for Wilfred’s critique and indicates a different, more productive model of interreligious dialogue.

There is a large amount of interreligious dialogue that is interested in ascertaining what is indeed true about the world. When different religious traditions make different and sometimes conflicting assertions about the world, the question arises about the relationship between these various claims. As these claims are part and parcel of the traditions themselves, springing from the core of the various religions, the question becomes how the religious systems themselves are related and what is the relationship between the truth claims of various religions? Various approaches to this can be categorized in three broad categories, exclusivist, inclusivist and relativist.

In his last book, On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed the problem of making truth-claims, how anyone can validly say they were “certain” that something was indeed the case. He noticed that truth- claims were intrinsically connected to world-pictures with which they mutually arise, and that no truth-claim can therefore claim a status that transcends all world-pictures. This critique casts suspicion on the usefulness of the exclusivist-inclusivist-relativist categorization of theories of religious pluralism and points to a more productive model of interreligious dialogue that respects and utilizes the differences in different religions. Rather than comparing statements made by various faiths and determining which in fact are correct, I propose a model of dialogue that allows each side to attain a better perspective on their own position as they come to see a different way of understanding the world.
Recent Thomistica: II
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

No one in the English-speaking academy would even try to write an exposition of ‘Thomism’, inhibited as we are by fifty years of the (no doubt salutarily) deflationary effects of analytic philosophy. More positively, the current wave of scholarly works suggests that a systematic exposition of Thomas Aquinas’s thought, if possible at all, would be premature. (We have noted some of the studies of his use of the Bible: New Blackfriars 83 (2002): 245-251).

Thomism is a tradition, long tracts of which remain unresearched. Two conferences have recently mapped some of the territory. Saint Thomas au XXe siècle (Paris: Saint-Paul 1994) contains more than twenty excellent papers tracing the history of Thomism since the foundation of Revue thomiste, the quarterly journal of the Dominican friars at Toulouse. The focus is on France, indeed on the Toulouse ‘school’; yet, as well as a fascinating picture of that particular tradition, we get a great deal of insight into the principal conflicts in Catholic theology during the twentieth century (how deep these were is not widely appreciated in the English-speaking world, where even Catholics themselves tend to believe that we all agreed, prior to the Second Vatican Council).

Saint Thomas au XIVe siècle, a special issue of Revue Thomiste (Janvier-Mars 1997), offers another set of fine essays on one generation of theologians, the first after Aquinas’s death, some of whom were devotedly Thomist, others (including Dominicans) much more critical and some even ferociously anti-Thomist. Largely unknown to any but specialists in medieval studies, these controversies show how contested Aquinas’s thought has been all along.
War on Ash Wednesday: A Brief Christological reflection
Authors: Hanby Michael
Published: July 2007

At perhaps no time in recent memory has the temptation to hopelessness been so great or the relative powerlessness of most of the world’s humanity so obvious. As I sit to write this essay, safely complicit in the “protection” afforded by the world’s richest and most powerful nation and yet strangely imprisoned by it, we appear to be careening ineluctably toward war—or escalating an ongoing war largely invisible to the public eye—against a country half of whose population is under the age of fifteen. Vast opposition in the United Nations is greeted with incredulity and incomprehension by President Bush on our half-willing behalf, and massive protests worldwide are countered simultaneously with piety about the blessings of free expression and an indifference which shows that such liberty is countenanced, such displays encouraged even, because sovereign power and a bland pluralism of purely private opinion have drained these expressions of any weight. This impotence is what we have learned to call freedom. In Washington, war protesters dutifully apply for permits to register their dissatisfaction. Could there be a clearer example of modern democracy’s ingenious capacity to domesticate dissent simply by permitting and embracing it?

It is particularly appropriate, as we are plunged helplessly and headlong into war, that we are also invited by the Ash Wednesday liturgy and the season which it announces to contemplate this powerlessness, to offer sacrifices of repentance worthy of it, by dwelling on the fact and meaning—or perhaps the meaninglessness— of our deaths. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
‘To Live and Die Upon a Dogma’: Newman and Post/Modern Faith
Authors: Loughlin Gerard
Published: July 2007

Today, as in his own day, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) is a contested site, the name for different ways of being Catholic. Competing views of Catholicity still seek for legitimacy by appealing to the authority of Newman’s thought, of his intellect, and, not least, his Cardinal’s red hat, conferred on him by Pope Leo XIII in 1879. At the beginning of the last century, those known as Liberal Catholics or Catholic Modernists appealed to Newman as their patron saint. George Tyrrell (1861-1909) declared himself a ‘devout disciple of Newman’, and confessed to having been ‘brought into, and kept in, the Church by the influence of Cardinal Newman and of the mystical theology of the Fathers and of the Saints’. Today, however, it is not Catholic Modernism, but religious postmodernism that might be in want of Newman’s imprimatur.

Professor Terry Wright, for example, has recently suggested that Newman’s reading of the Bible offers a via media to postmodemity. For Newman recognised the ‘multiplicity of meanings’ to which a critical, open and historical reading of the Bible gives rise. ‘The All-wise, Allknowing God cannot speak without meaning many things at once’, Newman declared.
The Claim of Judaism Correctly to Interpret Scripture in accord with Scripture's own Imperatives and Narrative
Authors: Neusner Jacob
Published: July 2007

The claim of Judaism to own the Bible rests on four facts, and one further claim. No reasonable person can deny the facticity of the facts I shall adduce in evidence of the Judaic claim of possession. The claim is a matter of interpretation of Scripture: who is right about its main point, as I shall explain.

The first fact is, Judaism takes seriously and keeps the laws set forth in Scripture. In contemporary Judaic life there are disagreements on details, but no one who affirms the authority of the Torah denies the commandments. Take the Sabbath for example. It is the seventh day of the week, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. We keep that law. Christians do not. Take the matter of the covenant of circumcision, beginning with Abraham. We keep that law, Christians do not. Christians focus on their liberation from the law of the Torah; they do not keep the Sabbath as God commanded it; they eat forbidden food; they do not observe the laws of the Torah. Why should they even want to claim to own Scripture at all, if they do not keep important commandments that Scripture sets forth?

The second fact fundamental to the Judaic claim to own the Bible turns from law to theology, specifically, Scripture’s theology of Israel, defined as the people called by God to his service in the Torah. The Jewish people today as for all the centuries from the beginning of Scripture to the present finds in Scripture its story of itself.
Radical Celibacy: Towards a Christian Postmodern Sexual Ethic
Authors: Lloyd Vincent W.
Published: July 2007

As part of the broad project of reconceptualizing the world in theological as opposed to secular terms, some “radical orthodoxy” theologians have begun to address the issues surrounding gender, sexuality, and marriage. These include, most notably, Graham Ward, Eugene Rogers, and (perhaps better classified in the post-liberal “Yale School”) Miroslav Volf. These theologians, however, have made only limited (or poor) use of the extensive conceptual apparatus that has been built up over the last two decades by postmodern feminists and queer theorists. By using these tools in a Christian, orthodox manner in accord with the radical orthodoxy project, I will show that we are led to drastically different conclusions, to a sexual ethic that is no longer “sexual,” but rather refocuses on friendship and celibacy.
Joshua and the Pilgrim People of God in the New Testament
Authors: Ounsworth Richard J
Published: July 2007

It is possible, as I know from recent experience, to spend three years studying theology in a secular university, and even with a majority of that time devoted to the New Testament barely touch on anything that might credibly be called ‘New Testament Theology’. The texts of the New Testament are studied in considerable detail, with careful attention paid to the theological positions of each individual writer—or at least, for the most part, of Mark, John and Paul—but with no attempt to create a synthesis, to trace theological themes that link disparate books, or to allow a reading that goes beyond narrow exegesis to inform the exercise of speculative systematic theology. There are honourable exceptions to this general trend: Gerd Theissen’s A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion attempts something in the way of a synthesis, but explicitly goes beyond the texts of the New Testament in a way that makes his programme more a historical study of early Christian theology than New Testament theology properly speaking. Arguably one has to look back to the likes of Barth and Bultmann for authentic New Testament theology, theology based on the scriptural texts themselves rather than on a historical reconstruction of the theological milieu that produced them, and addressing modem theological concerns.

This article proposes one route towards developing this sort of theology, beginning with the significance of Jesus’s name. Though the Holy Name was once an important Catholic devotion, it receives little attention today, either spiritual or scholarly: yet when properly explored through readings of, in particular, the Letter to the Hebrews and Matthew’s Gospel, the fact that Jesus’s name is identical to that of Joshua (in Greek lesous, in Hebrew Yeshua) proves to be far from trivial, opening the way to a theologically powerful and spiritually refreshing approach to Christology and ecclesiology.
The Place of authority in our Judgments of Truth, goodness and Beauty
Authors: O'Neill J.C.
Published: July 2007

Kant thinks that our judgments in all three parts of Critical Philosophy: metaphysics, practical judgment, and aesthetics, entail antinomies, antinomies that were to be resolved in analogous ways. For example, in aesthetics, the dictum de gustibus non disputandum is antithetical to the claim that if we could not dispute questions of taste, we could contend for them and expect others to agree (Kritik der Urteilskraft paras. 56, 57, B232-240; A229-237). He putatively resolves the antinomy by claiming that the judgment of taste in the thesis does not presuppose ‘distinct’ concepts, but the judgment of taste in the antithesis presupposes an ‘indistinct’ concept, a super-sensed substratum of appearances.

I agree that our judgments in questions of metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics face philosophical problems. There seem to be two ways in which we engage with others in discussing these judgments, the mode by which we say, “Don’t argue! Hutton’s Hams are the best”, and the mode by which we submit to the invitation, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1.18). I argue that our judgments in questions of fact and of morals and of beauty are made with authority. I argue, further, that our expressed judgments in all three spheres are required to be submitted to the authority of others. This is not an antinomy, since each proposition is consistent with, and even entails, the other.

But, you may say, I rarely, if ever, have any authority, since I am compelled by the facts to think what is the case, what is true.
‘“Go and make disciples of all nations” Preaching the Kingdom or Religious imperialism?’
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy
Published: July 2007

When Gareth did his degree in Theology at Oxford, he chose as an optional paper ‘Comparative Religion’. Typically it never occurred to him that he might study the texts in translation, and so over the summer he acquired a working knowledge of Chinese and Japanese. This was very disconcerting for his tutor who did not know a word of either language! So I had to find a tutor in the School of Oriental Languages who told me that he could not imagine how anyone could have so rapidly learned so much. So it is in honour of Gareth’s interest in this area that I wish to offer a few thoughts on the relationship of Christianity and other religions. Having been for nine years a Jack of all trades and Master of the Dominican Order, I have no special expertise, except about airports and exotic foods. But this never inhibited the vigorous arguments that Gareth and I had about everything, usually with copious whisky, and which I miss more than I can say.

At the end of Matthew’s gospel the risen Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Go and make disciples of all the nations’. Christianity was from the beginning a missionary religion. That is why it was transformed in the first few years from a Jewish sect into a faith that includes us. From the middle of the last century onwards we can see a growing doubt about this mission. What right have we to export our faith? And especially after September 11th, we may wonder if we are not adding to tensions around the world, as Christians and Muslims compete with claims for the truth?