bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Cambridge Setting
Authors: Stopp Elisabeth
Published: July 2007

The year before Kenelm left Cambridge to enter the Dominican Order, A.E. Housman, in a famous, one might say notorious, lecture on ‘The Name and Nature of Poetry’, on 9 May 1933, deplored the choice made of him as Leslie Stephen lecturer and then said: ‘Whether the faculty of literary criticism is the best gift that Heaven has in its treasuries I cannot say; but Heaven seems to think so, for assuredly it is the gift most charily bestowed. Orators and poets, sages and saints and heroes, if rare in comparison with blackberries, are commoner than returns of Halley’s comet: literary critics are less common’. This lecture by a poet and classical philologist in fact turned out to be an outstandingly original piece of literary criticism and one of the most characteristic utterances of the thirties. In spite of Housman’s gloom it was a time of literary critics of stature, writers who were at home in the borderland between poetry, philosophy and religion, discovering and rediscovering great poets in a rush of intellectual and political excitement. Though Kenelm’s writing work matured later because of his years of religious and theological training, he belonged essentially to the thirties, his seed-bed where, as Bede Bailey said, he remained firmly rooted. This era between two wars had an ‘escape-me-never’ hold on Kenelm and on his contemporaries, particularly those who returned to academic life after the war and all that the war had meant for European life and sensibility.
Morality: between Law and Real‐life Needs
Authors: Häring Bernhard
Published: July 2007

The investigation that culminated last July in a letter from the Vatican to Professor Curran, criticising the distinction made by him and many others between ‘infallible’ and ‘non-infallible’ Church teaching and initiating his removal from his post at the Catholic University of America, has been one of the most hotly discussed events to have happened in the modern American Catholic Church, has been written about throughout the Catholic world, and has troubled many theologians. We are publishing this translation of an article by Bernhard Haring, ‘Moral zwischen gesetz und Lebensnot’ (which appeared in the German Church magazine Christ in der Gegenwart in August), because its author, who taught Curran in Rome and in March accompanied him to the Vatican for ‘informal dialogue’, has such a close knowledge of this theologian’s thinking, which in some places has been misrepresented. The text has been updated where essential.

Who is Charles Curran? And what was the ‘Curran affair’ about? Curran is a diocesan priest from the diocese of Rochester in the State of New York. He gained his Licentiate in Theology in Rome, at the Gregorian University, and took his Doctorate in Moral Theology in Rome, at the Academia Alfonsiana, where I taught for many years. I was one of his teachers but not his moderator. He wrote his doctoral thesis about Conscience and Intelligence according to Saint Alphonsus of Liguori (1696—1787). Like Alphonsus, but paying special attention to the human sciences, Curran set out to study conscience as challenged by the call to discipleship but as also influenced by clearly perceived values.
Reading the Medea
Authors: Kerr Fergus
Published: July 2007

The Medea—in a Japanese version—performed outdoors—after dusk—in the neo-Classical courtyard of the Old College Edinburgh—late in what had been a cold and wet August: was it worth buying a ticket for that—even if Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth had been the sensation of the 1985 Festival? After all, that had been indoors, and the Shakespeare play had been part of my mind for over forty years. You had to choose between Greek and German, in my day, at a Scottish grammar school, and I had opted for German (entirely because I feared the principal Classics master). But then—I understand Japanese as little as I can follow spoken Greek, and would not that be the case for nearly everyone in the audience? We should all be relying on the eloquence of gesture, lighting, tone, and perhaps music. It seemed advisable, for all that, to study the text in advance of the performance. What follows is an attempt to capture my reading of the Medea. For the first time in my life I found myself gripped by the greatness of the play. I used, and am quoting, Philip Vellacott’s translation for Penguin Classics, and my interpretation is wholly dependent on a marvellous essay by Bernard Knox.
Divine Creation and Human Creativity
Authors: West Philip
Published: July 2007

Like the man who gathered from the vicar’s sermon on sin that ‘he were agin it’, one gathers from reading the literature that ‘creativity’ is something to be approved of. Exactly what this creativity consists in, however, and how it relates to the concept of divine creation on the one hand, and the spheres of art and work on the other, is far from clear. It is the purpose of what follows to investigate these relationships.

The terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, as opposed to more mundane alternatives such as ‘making’ and ‘productivity’, seem to be used in many contexts because of the positive feel they carry over from the idea of divine creation. It is much harder, for example, to disagree with an activity called ‘wealth creation’ than to object to the same process labelled ‘making money’. ‘Creation’ and ‘creativity’ are thus not merely neutral, descriptive terms; they alter our attitude to the activities that they designate. To designate an activity ‘creative’ is—for good or ill—to legitimate it, not just to describe it.

In some cases, however, the activity so legitimated is less obviously wholesome than is divine creation itself, and the designation then serves to conceal dubious aspects of human behaviour. In such a case, the use of language acquires ideological overtones. In what follows I shall examine three examples of the use of the idea of creation, or the use of the terms ‘creation’ and ‘creativity’, in recent literature. In the first two I shall detect tendencies towards such a descent into ideology. The examples chosen are deliberately extreme in order to make my point.
Quaestio Disputata‐Sex and Catholicism
Authors: Meynell Hugo
Published: July 2007

TIME: the present.

SCENE: A coffee-shop on the way to Piraeus. Two ladies, Clodia and Augustina, both in their early forties, sitting at adjacent tables. Clodia gets up and tentatively addresses Augustina; she sits down at Augustina’s table once she has introduced herself.

Clodia: Excuse me—I seem to know you, though I can’t for the life of me remember from where and when.

Augustina: My dear Clodia, how lovely to see you again! Let’s see—it’s over twenty years. Don’t you remember, we used to sit together whispering at the back of O.B.’s class on informal logic.

Clodia: Oh yes, Augustina! Have you got a few minutes? I have, and would very much like to find out how life has been treating you. Don’t look pained so directly—surely the last twenty years haven’t been that bad for you!

Augustina: Well, I doubt whether it has been as bad as the siege of Leningrad or the Warsaw ghetto. But if you sincerely ask me whether I have been in general happy during the time since we last met, and you expect an honest answer, that answer must be no... By the way, why was our esteemed lecturer called O.B.?

Clodia: That I can remember. O.B. was short for Old Bedsocks. According to the more charitable, the reference was to the mustiness of his discourse. Those who sat in the front row said the mustiness also pertained to his person.

Augustina: Well, never mind about O.B. What I remember most about the two of us at the time was how proud we were to be Catholics, in those days of obvious moral chaos in the world at large, and exuberant theological absurdity (as it seemed to us) among the non-Catholics, in the early sixties.
The Spanish Civil War 1936‐9: Catholicism's minority voice
Authors: MacKinnon Donald
Published: July 2007

July 18th 1986 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and the event has been widely commemorated both in writing and in exhibitions, both alike often focussing on the heroism of the men of the International Brigade who made the cause of the Spanish Republic their own. Less attention has been paid to the fact summarized by Professor Adrian Hastings in his recent History of English Christianity 1920—1985 that ‘probably at no other moment in 20th-century history has the English Catholic community, as such, taken up so strongly a political position, and to such effect’ (p. 325). The largely uncritical endorsement of the rebels’ claim to be engaged in the defence of the Catholic Church in Spain against a threat vaguely and frighteningly characterized as a ‘Communist-anarchist dictatorship’ was powerfully and passionately sustained, and the nationalists’ atrocities, for instance at Badajoz on August 15th 1936 or (at the hands of their German supporters) at Guernica in April 1937, either brushed aside or denied.

Of course, the cause of this enthusiasm lay in the appalling actions that accompanied the revolutionary situation of July 1936. The lapse into chaos defined for the nationalists by the murder of the right-wing deputy Calvo Sotelo on July 13th inevitably increased the readiness to welcome the military pronunciamento long in preparation, by social groups feeling their future threatened by the quickening pace of social change. The moderate socialism of Prieto was rapidly being taken over by the radicalism of Largo Caballero, and the fundamental, seemingly intractable issue of agrarian reform tackled no longer by legislation but by spontaneous occupation of land long denied to the landless.
Aids and All Saints
Authors: Mason Stuart
Published: July 2007

A sermon given by a London senior social worker on All Saints’ Day 1986, during the Spode House conference ‘The Catholic Church and Aids’.

It is a happy chance for me to preach the sermon at Mass on All Saints’ Day, because twenty years ago today I became a Catholic. It is a doubly happy chance that I should do this at a conference on the Catholic Church and Aids, for when we think about the saints and sanctity we will arrive at a clearer idea of what, Aids being in our midst, we can do about it.

For twenty years, each All Saints’ Day, I have heard homilies which have all had one theme in common—that today is the feast primarily of the unsung heroes of the Church—those countless men and women not singled out for special mention, through canonisation and special feast days, who are in heaven. As an antidote to the plaster statue school of piety which manages for me to make the whole idea of sanctity at once impossibly remote and unattractive, I can only applaud the general trend of All Saints’ homilies. (Who is really inspired by knowing that St. Aloysius, as a baby, refused his mother’s milk on Fridays?) Also it does us no harm to be reminded that we are all called to be saints, that our hallowing—so far from being some horrid obstacle course comprised solely of self-denial and martyrdom—is the great gift of life that God has in mind for all of us.
George Tyrrell and the Development of Doctrine
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Early last summer, when he was in Peru, Cardinal Ratzinger disclosed that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was preparing a document on the ‘central issues of the Modernist crisis’. He enumerated these as the nature of doctrine, principles in the interpreting of the Bible, and the role of philosophy in theology.

If we want to get those thorny ‘central issues’ into historical perspective, how should we go about it? If one belongs to the Englishspeaking world, there is, arguably, no better way than to explore the thought of the Modernist George Tyrrell, who was born 125 years ago this year. However severe may be our final assessment of him, it is a fact that the questions Tyrrell raised were those of a theological genius, and we cannot ignore them or brush them away. To understand his thought we must trace its history—his ideas of what theology should be developed dramatically in the course of his life. And if we want to get to grips with what was really distinctive about his thought—where he was addressing himself to the ‘central issues’ which Cardinal Ratzinger has recently listed—then we must consider especially what he had to say about the notion of doctrinal development. His ideas of what theology should be formed, so to speak, a series of photographic lenses through which he peered at his favourite subject: the continuity and discontinuity of Christian tradition.
‘Forgive us our trespasses’
Authors: McCabe Herbert
Published: July 2007

On the four Sundays of Advent the Family Mass at Blackfriars, Oxford, was televised live on BBC 1 with Herbert McCabe preaching on the theme of hope. The Catholic Truth Society of London will shortly be publishing all four of his sermons as a pamphlet. The first focused on prayer, the expression of hope in our personal lives, the second on hope for the whole world, the third on contrition as an expression of hope, and the last on mourning as an expression of hope. Here we are publishing the third, broadcast on Gaudete Sunday.
Is there a place for Feminists in a Christian Church?
Authors: Hampson Daphne , Ruether Rosemary Radford
Published: July 2007

Based on a dialogue held on 16 May 1986 in London at Westminster Cathedral Hall, and organised by Catholic Women's Network and Women in Theology. Dr Daphne Hampson presents her own position at length, Dr Rosemary Ruether responds to it at length, and a discussion between the two of them follows.
Peace, War, and the Christian Conscience
Authors: Zahn Gordon C.
Published: July 2007

A slightly shortened version of a paper given in London on 8 November 1986, at the commemoration (sponsored by PAX CHRISTI) of the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the PAX Society.
‘Surrounded by so great a crowd of witnesses …’*
Authors: Lewry Osmund
Published: July 2007

Osmund Lewry died, surrounded by his fellow‐Dominicans, on Easter Thursday, 23 April. He was 57. Although he had continued to be a member of the Oxford Dominican house, and died there, since 1979 he had been on the staff of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto. He was becoming an internationally respected authority on mediaeval thought; as The Times obituary notice said, he died ‘at the height of his powers and at the beginning of a richly‐promising scholarly career’. His death is a severe loss, but the remarkably serene way in which he faced that death was an inspiration to many people. In place of a conventional obituary we are publishing here an article which he completed for us only ten days before he died. It traces how his fellow‐Dominicans, in the span of almost a life‐time, contributed to his spiritual development. We believe it has something to say not only to Dominicans.
A Leaky Sort of Thing? The divisiveness of Michael Dummett
Authors: Lash Nicholas
Published: July 2007

A note by the Editor: In the October issue o/New Blackfriars appeared an article by Professor Michael Dummett, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’. In it the author discussed what he saw to be problems arising when Catholic theologians and seminary teachers publicly align themselves with the so‐called ‘liberal consensus’: in other words, adopt opinions which, in the author's view, ‘imply that, from the very earliest times, the Catholic Church, claiming to have a mission from God to safeguard divinely revealed truth, has taught and insisted on the acceptance of falsehoods’. He believed this to have happened on a wide‐spread scale. He concluded that ‘the divergence that now obtains between what the Catholic Church purports to believe and what large or important sections of it in fact believe ought …to be tolerated no longer: not if there is to be a rationale for belonging to that Church; not if there is to be any hope of reunion with the other half of Christendom; not if the Catholic Church is not to be a laughing‐stock in the eyes of the world.’ Here Professor Nicholas Lash reacts to Professor Dummett's article, and particularly to what he had to say about modern theologians and seminary teachers. In the next article Professor Dummett answers him.
On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

In the western world, at least, socialism is in crisis as a political force. But it is also in crisis as an intellectual creed, and it is this crisis that concerns the present article. Nevertheless, the practical and the theoretical crises are very closely allied; the real political problem for contemporary socialism may be that, increasingly, people no longer know, or have forgotten, why one should be a socialist.

One might want to re-express this as ‘people no longer see any reasons to be a socialist’. And the practical response might be to urge us, once again, to convince people that socialism is the truly reasonable path. And yet, I am going to argue that in certain crucial senses there simply are no ‘reasons’ for being socialist in the way that we have tended to imagine in the past. If, I shall suggest, we can overcome the lingering suggestion that socialism is a matter of science, of historical diagnosis, or of universally valid reason, then we shall actually be able to recover the most authentic core of the socialist tradition, and the Christian socialist tradition in particular. In the course of this argument I shall first of all establish a contrast between old-style Christian socialism and new-style Christian Marxism, and then go on to show that Christian socialism is in certain ways more in tune with a ‘post Marxist’ or ‘post modernist’ radicalism. Finally, I shall suggest how Christian socialism nonetheless moves beyond the ambiguity of the post-modern critique of capitalist society.
God Above and God Below
Authors: Edwards Adrian
Published: July 2007

Religious syncretism is a currently fashionable topic, both among anthropologists and theologians. To the anthropologist, syncretism offers not only fascinating field material, but also important theoretical questions. Supposing two or more world religions are present in the same culture, as is the case with the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. Will the internal logic of the world religion oblige its adherents to reinterpret the culture? Or will the common culture eventually obliterate the boundaries between the religions? For theologians the boundary between Christian and merely Christian-influenced is both extremely difficult to draw and extremely necessary. Whom do we admit to the local council of churches? Where does liturgical inculturation end and repaganization begin? What about the survival of pagan attitudes-devotion, for instance, to Mammon or Mars—to be found among the ultra-orthodox? Some contemporary theologians, for instance Robert Schreiter in his Constructing Local Theologies, have found it possible to take a rather sympathetic view of syncretism, but this seems to go with a certain sociological naivety, since syncretism is usually the product of systems of domination in which there is a wide gap between the religions of the dominators and the dominated.

There is a story of a famous medical scientist who used to tell his students, ‘These, gentlemen, are the symptoms of typhoid fever, but you will find all the cases are different.’ The same surely applies to syncretism. We need to look at particular cases, before we generalize about syncretism. In this article, I am looking at two studies of syncretising religious situations published by anthropologists in this decade, Jon P. Kirby’s God, Shrines and Problem-Solving among the Anufo of Northern Ghana, and James W. Fernandez’ Bwiti, which deals with a new religion among the Fang of the Gabon.
The Ultimate Arrogance: genetic engineering and the human future
Authors: Buchanan Keith
Published: July 2007

The work of scientists has in the last half-century brought humanity face to face with two major menaces to its survival and created a situation without precedent in human history. This twofold threat has been posed by the development of nuclear fission for civilian or military purposes and the more recent development of biotechnology or genetic engineering. We live, all of us, all of Creation, in the ominous shadow of nuclear technology. We live also in what is potentially a no less chilling shadow—the darkening shadow of biotechnology, an industry which, according to the Times of India, is ‘the fastest growing industry in the world today’.

It is more than a decade since the distinguished Austro-American biochemist Erwin Chargaff commented that these two immense and fateful scientific discoveries, ‘the splitting of the atom (and) the recognition of the chemistry of heredity and its subsequent manipulation’, both involved the mistreatment of a nucleus—that of the atom and that of the cell. He added—and it was a comment whose prophetic vision was largely ignored at the time—‘In both cases do I have the feeling that science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate.’
The Poor as a Pastoral Option for Western Europe
Authors: van Merrienboer Edward
Published: July 2007

At this time in the Church’s life there is an increased concern for its mission among the poor, yet the needs of the poor in Western Europe still seem to be a very secondary issue for the Church there. When the question of ‘of the option for the poor’ is broached it is too often in the context of another part of the world. I believe that many factors, theological and sociological, have contributed to this—too many and too vast to analyse in a brief article. However, I think that two issues demand some attention before one can propose positive direction.

It is a well-known fact that the church in Latin America has been the strongest voice calling for an option for the poor. The now historic conference of bishops at Medellin in 1968, which formally called the church into the struggle for reasonable dignity for the people of Latin America, set a tone for all later deliberations. The theology of liberation has brought non-European theology at last into the centre of theological debate. Yet too many still think of this development as the product of the wretched poverty of a particular people.

In the industrial world, which has a large middle class, it is easy to dismiss this theological development as if the option for the poor were only the need of a particular local church. This however is not the case.
Pitching the Song in the Crack: the option for the poor and the current political realities
Authors: Battle John
Published: July 2007

At the Belfast Harpers’ Festival in 1792 the official observers found themselves unable to note down the tunes in the established musical forms. The complex scales fell outside the accepted tonic range. As one observer put it

White notes I found were wrong, so were the black

For you had pitched the song right in the crack.

That the peasant people’s music could be more subtle and sophisticated than the establishment could anticipate is itself a liberating sign of hope.

Faced with the question of whether it is possible to develop a ‘liberation theology’ from within the modern British context, Enoch Powell provides a useful point of metaphorical contact. He once suggested that ‘politicians have to give the people a tune to hum’. It does seem that there is a dominant political tune buzzing round Britain today. It has caught on and is commonly hummed in public. In the past those who have stressed the need for change have turned to the notion of ‘blueprints’—despite the fact that this kind of future plan is usually two-dimensional and static, and that sometimes the dreams of architects and planners present land and property proposals but block out the people in a kind of ‘neutron bomb’ model of development. But concentrating on the tune opens up a more dynamic metaphor of process. It is certainly not a question of static futuristic modelling. Neither conforming to the dominating set tune nor simply countering it, but creatively developing new music from ‘within the crack’, could provide a resilient model.
After the Deluge: criticism as reconstruction
Authors: Wicker Brian
Published: July 2007

Morality today is clearly in a mess. The word ‘moral’ has lost almost all its bearings: it simply flies about loose in the machinery of our discourse. For example, in my own college, philosophy students are always asked the following question:

Jones has agreed with Smith to paint Smith’s house for the price of £1,000. Both agree that Jones has now done the work to a satisfactory standard.

— Does it therefore follow that Smith now owes Jones £1,000?

— Does it therefore follow that Smith now ought to pay Jones

£1,000?

Students almost invariably agree that Smith now owes Jones the money, but when it comes to the question whether he ought to pay him, they begin to wobble. This is a ‘moral’ question, they say, as if this makes the answer uncertain. Given that we are in this kind of muddle about morality, perhaps it would be better to get rid of the word ‘moral’ altogether, as Elizabeth Anscombe said in her memorable paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’.
Girard against Fragmentation
Authors: Lascaris Andrew
Published: July 2007

Theology’s role in modern society is slight, to say the least. People are not waiting with baited breath for new ideas from theologians—unless, of course, they are theologians themselves. Scientists and, for that matter, scholars in general, cannot easily be persuaded to read a theological essay. And surely it is also the case that, while theologians themselves may be rather more ready to read in the literature of the human and even the natural sciences, they will often find it hard to relate what they read to theology. It is little comfort to them to be told that other academics too know astonishingly little about what is happening outside their own field.

The specialisation that goes with expertise partly explains this state of affairs, but this fragmentation of knowledge is also a reflection of the fragmentation of human society. We are all supposed to be autonomous adult beings obliged to live together, in the same time and space. We behave like cars passing one another on the same motorway (and hopefully in the same direction), without much communication that reveals who we are, what we desire, hope for, love. When we enter the motorway we have to fight for our place. It is not self-evident that we have one. Society is not any more a warm blanket woven from many threads, where every thread the weaver may add has already its place before it is woven in. We are free. In principle we may choose our place, competing with those who happen to covet the same place as we do.
The First Commandment: A Theological Reflection
Authors: Hamilton Gordon J.
Published: July 2007

It is easy to forget priorities, particularly our priorities about Scripture. The novel or obscure often dominate our scholarly publishing about the Bible because academics give priority to new interpretations and to solving problems. In this article I would like to reflect on two of our foundational texts: the commandment to love God in Deuteronomy 6: 4—5 and Mark 12: 28—34.

In Deut 6, we encounter the most famous statement of Israelite faith, v.4, joined to the most fundamental commandment of the Old Testament, v.5: ‘(4)Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; (5)and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might’.

A balance between the collective belief of the ancient Israelite community and the obligation of each individual is immediately struck by the simple use of pronouns: in v.4 the Lord is identified as our God; in v.5 he is called your (ms. sg.) God. Moreover, the latter has a double reference both to the collective Israel evoked in the preceding verse and to each individual Israelite. To reflect this balance between the individual and community perspectives I shall employ both ‘you’ and ‘we’.

Each of us is then commanded to love God in three ways, but ways that are usually masked in English translations. By returning to the language in which the author wrote, in this case, Hebrew, we can gain a fuller sense of God’s Word to us.
The Nearness of God
Authors: Taliaferro Charles
Published: July 2007

‘God is closer to me than I am to myself’

Meister Eckhart

Can God be closer to you than you yourself are? I believe that the answer to this question is ‘yes’. Indeed, God is such that it is impossible for you to be closer to yourself than God. Surely this is a paradoxical claim. It would be paradoxical to maintain that something could be closer to, say, a stone than a stone. Not even God could get closer to the stone than the stone itself. How then could God be closer to you than yourself? In part, I believe that the answer lies in appreciating the nature of what it is to be psychologically present to someone, including oneself. There is more to ourselves than meets our eyes, but not the eyes of God. A rich appreciation of personal identity and psychological presence can illumine the sense in which God is supremely present in our lives, indeed closer to us than we are. I spell out the nature of this Divine human proximity and conclude with reflection on what it is for someone to be indwelt by God.

I shall be assuming the intelligibility of certain classic tenets about the God of Christianity. God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, loving Creator of the cosmos. I shall also help myself to some garden-variety claims about persons. Persons have beliefs, emotions, desires, and sensations. They have a conscious and unconscious life. They act (or are capable of acting) in the world. They often have a past and future. These are not to be taken to be necessary conditions for personhood.
Mother of Justice and Peace
Authors: Brennan Irene
Published: July 2007

Assuming, of course, that we accept the tradition given to us in the church and take seriously the testimony of the gospels (and, in this context, particularly the Lucan testimony), we can say in a way that is not just poetical that Mary is truly the mother of justice and peace. For she is presented to us not only as giving witness to how God’s power can transform humanity, but as, in doing this, giving birth to that power, that life. She becomes the Mother of Christ; the ‘Mother of God’, as Ephesus declared her to be. By her active and willing cooperation with the divine plan, by her humility, courage and love of justice, she brings Jesus into the world and thus gives birth to the Christ. She is the Mother of the New Age, the New Heaven and the New Earth, and shows herself prepared to risk everything to see Christ embodied for us and in us so that the kingdom of God may be established on this earth. Her prophetic witness to the truth is not just a witness to what can be, nor to what God’s purposes might be in some future time; no, her witness makes the Truth present for us in such a way that reality becomes transformed by the mystery of God’s power on this earth, implementing justice and peace.
Theology and the Palestinian Uprising: a Jewish Perspective
Authors: Ellis Marc H.
Published: July 2007

Some years ago, in an essay outlining Christian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust and the future of Christianity in light of that complicity, the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz wrote: ‘We Christians can never again go back behind Auschwitz: to go beyond Auschwitz, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only together with the victims of Auschwitz.’ When first read this statement strikes one by its boldness, and later by its depth. For Metz, the Jewish victims of Christian triumphalism and power stand before the Christian community, challenging the past but also serving as the key to the future. Of course, Christian and Jew had travelled together on a tortuous and bloody road for almost two millennia before the Holocaust; the present calls for a radically new way of journeying together, one of trust and ultimately of embrace.

Over the past months, as the twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has erupted in a veritable civil war, Metz’s statement had assumed a new relevance in a different context. For on the other side of power, the Jewish people have assumed a new and unaccustomed role in relation to the Palestinian people: that of oppressors. As some Christians continue to have difficulty in admitting their complicity in the suffering of Jews, the Jewish people find it almost impossible to admit to their own complicity in the suppression of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish empowerment, mandated by the suffering of the Holocaust, should be affirmed as a good, the present impasse in Israel and Palestine cannot be addressed outside the most obvious, to some the more contradictory, of options: solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Why Should We Believe it?
Authors: Davies Brian
Published: July 2007

A contribution to the debate initiated by Michael Dummett in October 1987.

It is often said that Catholics believe in the development of doctrine. But it is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church that doctrine develops. The teaching of the Church is that its faith is immutable. The Church’s primary attitude to doctrine is the principle given by St Paul. ‘Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians 1:8). There is, of course, an obvious sense in which doctrine does develop. For the number of defined doctrines has grown over time. But the Catholic view of this is that doctrines defined over time are contained in or implied by what was taught from the beginning. The primary role of the Church as teacher is to preserve what has already been given and to state what that amounts to as need arises. It retains the Gospel and articulates it.

If that is what the Church does, it seems fair to ask why we should believe what the Church teaches. Some would dispute this on the ground that the Church in a sense does not teach. ‘Why should we believe it?’ presupposes that someone has propounded what he takes to be a truth.
What Theology Is
Authors: Nichols Aidan
Published: July 2007

Trying to describe to newcomers what theology is can be an instructive exercise. This article sums up whatwassaid in a series of introductory talks on Catholic theology given to first-year students at the Angelicum University, Rome.

I will begin by mentioning three possible definitions of the theological task that I cannot accept, on the principle that many good definitions are arrived at by ruling out what things are not. Each of these ‘negative definitions’ will be to some extent a caricature, yet all caricatures have some relation to reality. Moreover, each of the rejected definitions will prove to have incorporated in it an element of value. This element is capable of being disengaged and used afresh in a positive definition of the theological task to be offered in the second part of the article.

Three negative definitions

1. A first account of the theological task that one might meet has it that theology is the misguided attempt to turn into a science something which is strictly mysterious: the dogmas, or as we say (precisely) the mysteries of the Christian religion. Since these mysteries by definition transcend the scope of the human mind, what is the point of trying to work them out intellectually? As Lord Dacre of Granton has put it, theology is ‘sophisticated ninnery’. If we have accepted a revealed religion, we must take the consequences. The consequences are that we cannot theorise about a revelation. We can only reform our own attitudes and feelings on the basis of it.
The Homosexual and the Vatican: an American attempt at dialogue
Authors: Cunliffe C.R.A.
Published: July 2007

Four years ago the contributors to Robert Nugent’s A Challenge to Love discussed the position of gay and lesbian Catholics in the Church in the aftermath of the 1975 Vatican declaration on sexual ethics. Now Sister Jeannine Gramick, co-founder with Father Nugent of New Ways Ministry, has co-edited with Pat Furey (a pseudonym used ‘for professional reasons’) The Vatican and Homosexuality. This is a collection of reactions to the Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued in October 19863. Of the nineteen participants in the earlier symposium, only Gramick and Nugent re-appear among the twenty-five leading Catholic educators, journalists, activists and officials who write in it.

Gramick cites The Tablet as having called the document ‘violently hostile’, and The Month as having noted a failure to address ‘the reality of homosexuals in their living of Christian discipleship’ (p. 93). In the United States, the editors say, reactions were ‘as might have been expected, swift and strong’. One prominent Catholic and former Trappist monk writing in the Washington Post dismissed the letter as ‘homophobic rantings’. A more dispassionate and scholarly response came from the Archbishop of San Francisco, John R. Quinn: his article ‘Toward an understanding of the letter’, first published in America, is reprinted here.
Advice to Philosophers who are Christians
Authors: Phillips D.Z.
Published: July 2007

Cardinal Mercier Lecture 1988

According to Alvin Plantings, ‘we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers.’ He gives advice on the character such striving should have. I think his advice is bad advice, bad for philosophy and bad for Christianity. Here I shall concentrate, in the main, on the philosophical aspects of this bad advice. The aspects I have in mind are of two kinds: first, Plantinga’s appeal to considerations external to philosophy which distort the spirit of philosophical enquiry; second, Plantinga’s conception of philosophical enquiry itself.

Plantinga claims, ‘Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move ... There is also powerful evidence for this contention in philosophy’ (p. 253). How is this supposed to be established? By comparison, it seems, with the state of philosophy in the fifties vis á vis Christianity: ‘the public temper of main-line establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian: even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers’ (p. 253). These three characterisations of the fifties are very different from each other.

The first sign that Christianity in philosophy was not on the move in the fifties is supposed to be the fact that few Christians were in the philosophical establishment.
Religion, Culture and Anarchy: the attack on the Arnoldian vision
Authors: Milbank John
Published: July 2007

The Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University not long ago ran into controversy, because of its acceptance of a bequest which endows a post in theology on condition that its holder be a practising Christian. To some commentators this case appears as an ominous harbinger of what is to come: university departments, starved of public funds, will be increasingly forced to turn to private means, sometimes under conditions which threaten the upholding of academic objectivity. There is, however, a possibly irony in the Newcastle case, an irony which should cause us to ponder more deeply the pros and cons involved: the professorial research fellow at Newcastle has a brief to reflect, theologically, on the situation in the inner cities, so although the appointment has been made against the background of governmental withdrawal of financial support from the universities, the results of the new professor’s research are much more likely to be a critical embarrassment to the government than the usual more abstruse, more detached and ‘scholarly’ products of research in religious studies.

Of course, pointing up the irony is not to resolve the argument. And old whiggish purists, like Mr Tony Benn, exhibit a proper integrity when they insist that we should not look to defeat Mrs Thatcher by disinterring the power of privilege, whether princely, aristocratic or religious.
The Philosophers and the China Shop: A Reply to Brian Davies
Authors: Duffy Eamon
Published: July 2007

Rallying to the flag first raised by Professor Michael Dummett a year ago, Fr Brian Davies has parachuted heavily down on what I suppose we must call the Dummett-Lash battlefield, though the theological poppies have now been nourished by the blood of other combatants. Not least of these is Fr Davies’ own Provincial, Timothy Radcliffe.

In ‘Why Should We Believe It?’ (printed in last month’s New Blackfriars, pp. 360—368) Fr Davies is clearly worried by Fr Radcliffe’s opinion that a Catholic is ‘not committed to saying that any single saying of Jesus in the Gospels exactly reports the words of that historical person’ since it is possible ‘that in every instance his sayings have been redacted in the light of his subsequent death and resurrection, and of the theological concerns of the gospel writers’ (NB March 1988, p. 118). On the contrary, according to Fr Davies, Catholic faith depends for its very existence on clear reportage of Jesus’ own words. The Gospels ‘make some pretty extraordinary claims’: that Jesus is God incarnate, for example, and that by his cross and resurrection he conquered sin and death. We can only believe such extraordinary things if ‘sufficiently informed by one who is God and by one who knows what he is talking about’ (pp 361—6).

It would, I assume, be universally agreed among Catholics that we need to be ‘sufficiently informed’ by God about what is saving truth. The debate turns on just what might count as being ‘sufficiently informed’.
The Goodness of God and the Conception of Hell
Authors: Graham Gordon
Published: July 2007

One interesting feature of contemporary Christianity is that some of the ideas which play a central part in popular religion, play little or no part in religious thought. There are in fact a good many such ideas (demonology and the active intervention of the saints for instance), but in this paper I am concerned with only one, namely ‘hell’. The idea of hell figures prominently in the preaching and beliefs of many evangelical Christians, the popularity of whose Christianity can hardly be doubted. Yet for the most part hell has no place in modern theology. It is not just that modern theologians are inclined to downplay the idea, or give ‘liberal’ interpretations of it, as might be said to be the case with miracles or the Resurrection, but that very largely they are simply silent about it.

It should be obvious that this is a feature peculiar to modern Christian thought. Earlier ages talked a great deal about hell, and even the Victorians made extensive use of it, so it is interesting to ask why this should be so. Conceived of as a question about the mentality of religious thinkers and their changing social role, any answer to it must obviously involve psychological and sociological investigation of some sophistication, but this is not the only way we can address the matter. There is at least some reason to think that the concept of hell has dropped out of theological discourse, whatever its place in popular religion, just because theologians and philosophers think it ought to.
When the Gates of Hell Fall Down: towards a modern theology of the justice of God
Authors: Gunton Colin
Published: July 2007

The teaching that the wicked will go to hell has about it a certain logic and justice. We may not think that a loving God would wish to consign anyone to eternal torment, but that the final destination of the evil should be different from that of the good is not, on the face of the matter, unjust. A case for the extinction of the utterly evil was argued by Ulrich Simon in his Theology of Auschwitz. May it not be the case that some become so corrupted by the evil of their ways that there is nothing left for them but annihilation? ‘Extirpation is congruous with the feverish activists in annihilation. Damnation is the silent seal on their wickedness. Unforgiven and unforgivable they go to the doom which their own fantasies and crimes have already sought on earth.’ Could justice demand anything less?

Why then has the doctrine of hell fallen into such disrepute? The main cause is that we have lost the concept of the justice of God. A number of reasons for the loss can be listed. First, there is the form the doctrine often took in the tradition. At least from the time of Augustine there has been a tendency to teach that the justice of God consisted in the fact that he could, had he wished, have consigned the whole of the human race to hell, but that he graciously (gratuitously?) saved a few brands from the burning. It is not wholly an accident that folk belief has often held that an unbaptised child will go to hell.
The Value of Literature: II—Shakespeare and the Tudor Homilies
Authors: Finn Richard
Published: July 2007

‘Similitude of manners’, wrote Sir Thomas More in his Life of John Picus, ‘is a cause of love and friendship: a likeness of conditions is (as Appollonius saith) an affinity’. In the first of these articles looking at the uncertain place of literature within our modem culture, and within a Christian cultivation of the virtues, I tried to show how Chaucer’s art restores friendships which have been rent by our denial of common human weakness, a likeness of conditions in frailty and sin. I suggested that Chaucer invites his readers to overcome a desire to pass sentence on their neighbours in two ways: firstly he allows us to hear our sentences on the lips of his characters, and to see the violence such dismissive voices call into being; secondly he asks us to give voice to others’ sins and, in giving voice to them, hear ourselves and our own weakness. Chaucer thus creates a language of communal forgiveness as he trains our ear, and in the laughter he raises that language effects what it signifies. In that sense we can agree with David Jones that art is sacramental, and add that literature imparts an ethics of speech.

Here I shall be pursuing this view of art as contributing to an ethics of speech, something sadly neglected by most of today’s Catholic moral theologians. Apparently mesmerized by the bits and pieces of human anatomy below the belt, they remain uninspired by our vocal chords. The past tells a different story.
Modernists and the Modern Environmental Crisis
Authors: Echlin Edward P.
Published: July 2007

‘The crisis of the present,’ says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘is the long deferred resumption of the crisis of modernism.’

If by the resumption of modernism Ratzinger means the method Catholic modernists used in addressing the religious crisis of their time we may fervently hope modernism does resume. For the method of the modernists is useful to us as we face an unprecedented environmental crisis.

Let us make no mistake. We are not engaged in academic theological gamesmanship. We are facing, although career churchmen are hesitant to admit it, a crisis which Jürgen Moltmann well describes as ‘a crisis so comprehensive and irreversible that it cannot unjustly be described as apocalyptic. It is not a temporary crisis. As far as we can judge, it is the beginning of a life and death struggle for creation on this earth.’

In 1918, when Tyrrell had been dead for nine years and Loisy had faded from the Church, Von Hügel expressed in a letter to Miss Maude Petrie, Tyrrell’s literary executor, his awareness that the method of modernism was permanently useful and even necessary, ‘to interpret it (the faith) according to what appears the best and the most abiding elements in the philosophy and the scholarship and science of the later and latest times.’

A cogent case could be made that Pope John XXIII was himself to some extent influenced by the method of the modernists. Even some of his expressions were akin to theirs. He spoke of ‘opening the windows’ of the Church to the modern world.