bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A Christian View of Justice
Authors: Ruston Roger 
Published: July 2007

It should be of supreme interest to anyone who is trying to come to a true Christian understanding of justice to discover as far as possible the attitude of Jesus to matters of justice. There are a number of gospel passages which suggest that he was not at all interested in the concept of justice as fairness. In his teaching there are strong indications that, with God, people do not get what they deserve, that one’s recompense does not bear any relation to one’s effort or merit. It is indicated moreover that such a rejection of justice as fairness should be adopted by men in their dealings with one another because that is the way God deals with men. I am not putting it this way merely to shock. I think that a critique of justice as strict fairness is explicit in the teachings of Jesus and that we must pay attention to it if we are to arrive at the notion of justice which his teachings do uphold, in continuity with the rest of Scripture.Some of the sayings which suggest Jesus’s indifference to strict fairness are these: The parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16a); The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32); the refusal of Jesus to divide the inheritance between two brothers (Luke 12:13-15); the sayings in the sermon on the mount, Matt. 5:44 (par. Luke 6:32-36), about loving your enemies, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”
Faith and Experience I
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

Several recent publications focus on the question of religious experience; two of them are particularly devoted to wooing the reader to share the experience of the Catholic ‘charismatic movement’, three of them represent the first published results to emerge from the work of the Religious Experience Research Unit founded in Oxford by Sir Alister Hardy. Since the problems raised by them overlap to some extent, it seems worth while to treat all five books together in a series of articles.For all its deceptively quiet style, This Promise is for You brings to light the tensions inherent in what we may call the ‘benign’ wing of Catholic Pentecostalism. There are those who are prepared to state fairly bluntly that Catholic Pentecostalism is something quite new, and that it shows up traditional piety as being, basically, ineffective, and this no doubt corresponds to the experience of the pioneers of Catholic, as of other brands of, Pentecostalism. There are occasional hints of this in Abbot Parry’s book, especially on p. 100, where he warns the reader (who is invited to use the book as a course of preparation for ‘baptism in the Spirit’) that “we are on the brink of changing a tangible, familiar, realistic, ‘normal’ life style, for an act of faith in an unseen God”. This is the kind of language we should associate with those who treat a conversion to the ‘charismatic movement’ as being, for practical purposes, a man’s first serious conversion to Christ (which of course it may be in some cases).But on the whole Parry is concerned to re-assure the reader that the ‘charismatic movement’ is very much in line with traditional piety, that there are no distinctively ‘charismatic’ virtues, that it is not particularly about ‘odd’ manifestations, that ‘baptism in the Spirit’ may be a gradual process, not a sudden experience, that none of it depends on going to any special kind of prayer meeting, and so on. The continuity with ordinary Christian life is stressed rather than the discontinuity.
The Open Letter: Evangelical Anglicans and Ecumenism
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

In July 1977 a group of Evangelical Anglicans addressed an Open Letter to the bishops of the Anglican communion. The Letter has recently been published together with a lengthy commentary, somewhat in the style of the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) Agreements, in the general reception of which this is intended as a significant intervention. This document invites attention from Catholics, not merely on tactical grounds, because of the large number of Anglicans with a Protestant cast of mind who must be respected and accommodated in any reconciliation between Canterbury and Rome, but also because of the intrinsic importance of the theological questions that the authors raise.The tenor of the Open Letter may be judged by the Preface: “Some speak as if with the appearance of the three ARCIC Agreements the main theological discussions are already over, and we can all now move on to arranging the nuts and bolts of intercommunion with Roman Catholics and union eventually. This shows how intoxicating is the strong wine of ecumenical bonhomie, and how churchmen, like motorists, can have their heads grow muzzy while feeling that their judgment was never better. Let it be said here, with emphasis, that the signatories think that the discussions which history will see as the main ones have hardly yet begun” (my italics). Evangelicals find themselves badly under-represented in ARCIC, and they consider that the Agreements so far reached on the eucharist, the ministry, and authority, do little to show that Catholics have yet “fully assimilated the doctrinal clarifications which came out of the Reformation conflict”. That the Reformation made Christian doctrine clearer, and that the Anglican communion ‘stands in the Reformation tradition”, are affirmations that are certainly often neutralised by ecumenists.
Ernst Troeltsch and the Study of Religion
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

Ernst Troeltsch is not one of the more accessible of twentieth century theologians as can be seen from a bibliography of his works translated into English which appears at the end of Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, translated and edited by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye, Duckworth, London, 1977, £12.50. Whether the translation of the four papers presented in this volume will make him more popular is rather doubtful as he here shows himself at his most heavy and turgid mainly because he writes in abstractions about methodologies. When Troeltsch does discuss issues and authors he is usually concerned with Protestant theology in the Nineteenth Century and it sometimes seems very dated (as in ‘Half a Century of Theology: a Review’ [1908]). This book, however, aims to introduce Troeltsch to a wider public particularly in Germany where he has never had much impact and this volume, curiously, is a translation of the original German including introductory articles by the English editors. These three articles by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye are tremendously helpful in giving an overall view of Troeltsch and his place in modern theology.Troeltsch is important, it would seem, mainly as a philosopher of religion rather than as a systematic theologian. He is at his best when discussing theological methodology, but when he tried to do straight theology, as in the article ‘The Significance of the Historical Jesus for Faith’ (1911), the effect could be disastrous. In this article Troeltsch assumes at the outset that traditional orthodox dogmatics had crumbled by the beginning of this century and that no one who was at all sensitive to modern intellectual sensibilities could accept the doctrine of the incarnation and that Christ had done anything concrete to redeem or save mankind. Salvation, whatever that might mean for Troeltsch, comes directly to the individual from God and, he says, is a matter of personal experience.
Faith and Experience III: Experience and its Interpretation
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

In some, perhaps most, cultures metaphysics and mysticism belong together. Even in our own society organizations which bear the name ‘metaphysical’ are likely, an examination, to be found to be concerned primarily with more or less mystical and esoteric doctrines and practices. But it is still typical of the Anglo-Saxon academic world that philosophers have, on the whole, not been frightfully eager to; tangle with mystics, nor mystics with philosophers. As a result of this it has been lamentably easy for philosophers to assume that they know what mystics are saying, without bothering to verify their allegations, and for a whole trend of spirituality to thrive off a naive rejection of the ‘God of philosophers’ in favour of the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and God knows who else’.Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis is an important symptom that this situation is changing.Most of the contributions are not concerned directly with the philosophical issues posed for philosophers as such by mysticism. Intuition and the Inexpressible by Renford Bambrough tackles the logical problem of ineffability; Nelson Pike and George Mavrodes discuss the epistemological status of mystical experiences. But otherwise most of the essays are concerned with clarifying the methodology of investigation of mysticism, and with developing and studying the concepts needed for such investigation.The ten contributors were left entirely free to choose their own topic and tactic; it is all the more impressive that a certain coherence definitely emerges from their various essays. Almost all the essays contain some kind of attack on two much loved doctrines: first, the belief that, underlying the diversity of expression to be found in mystical writings, there is either a single or at most a few varieties of essential mystical experience; and secondly, the belief that it is, in principle, fairly straightforward to disengage the essential experience or experiences from their interpretative garments.
Never Forgetful Witnesses: David Holbrook on Sylvia Plath
Authors: Smith Stan 
Published: July 2007

I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.I bed in a fish puddle.Down here the sky is always falling....I housekeep in Time’s gut-end Among emmets and molluscs,Duchess of Nothing,Hairtusk’s bride.Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poem for a Birthday’ (The Colossus) is a complex dramatic monologue, a seven-part narrative in which a psyche struggles towards birth, in ‘the city of spare parts’ which is the world. It draws for its imagery on that teenage suicide attempt fictionalised in The Bell Jar and on the experience of actual childbirth, so that at times the speaker is mother, at times child, and frequently both. Its main literary sources are the Brothers Grimm and Theodore Roethke’s early poetry, particularly Praise to the End (1951). Its heroine is a Cinderella or Snow-White princess in nightmare exile among incomprehensible and uncomprehending powers. The second chapter of David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence offers an extended commentary on this poem, ‘trying to foster the reader’s possession of poetic meaning, while endeavouring to discuss universal truths about the dynamics of human personality as seen by “philosophical anthropology”.’ For this enterprise he asks the reader’s patience, ‘ignoring for the moment certain problems of the concepts and theories I shall be using’.In fostering our possession of poetic meaning he glosses the above lines (from section 4, ‘The Beast’) as follows: ‘For “marry” here, I believe, we may read “identify”. Her concept of marrying belongs to the infant’s primitive belief that Mummy and Daddy virtually eat one another in marriage’; ‘a cupboard full of fragments of impingement—memories of her father and fragments of the mother’s “male element”;’ ‘Hairtusk is maleness, again, her father’s penis.’
De‐Institutionalising, African Style
Authors: Visocchi Tony 
Published: July 2007

Some time ago, a television programme dealt with the state of affairs in Uganda—a country that has gripped the news media for a long time. It gave the impression that the army and police were instrumental in the horrors perpetrated against the population. The police and army were set up in Uganda, as in other countries, by the colonial powers to defend the population from violence and crime at home, and aggression from outside the country’s boundaries. In so doing, the colonial powers transplanted their own institution of social control.What was intended to help the local population has become in fact in Uganda, for example, an institution of violence, aggression, crime and exploitation of the very people it was supposed to protect. Hopefully, Uganda is an extreme case but it is not the only country in Africa where governments act in a like manner. Thus one of our western institutions, established for the good of the community has become quite the opposite of what was really intended.The army and police are not in fact the only ones to have gone this way. Throughout the years that I spent living and working in the rural areas of East Africa, I constantly came into contact with doctors, nurses and other members of the medical profession working in hospitals and clinics run by the Government or the missions. One constantly heard the same story from doctor or nurse, man or woman, black or white, government or mission employed that they were frustrated. Desperately sick patients would be brought to them only to die after a short period in hospital.
Kenelm Foster on Dante
Authors: Ryan Christopher 
Published: July 2007

Kenelm Foster’s new book is a collection of essays written between 1959 and 1977. With one exception, all these studies have aspects of Dante’s work as their subject. The book falls readily into three parts. Chapters 1-5 deal with general topics: “An Introduction to the Inferno”, “Courtly Love and Christianity” (the only non-Dantean topic, but, obviously, very relevant to the main subject), “Dante and Eros”, “St Thomas and Dante”, and “Dante’s Vision of God”. Chapters 6-9 are readings of various cantos of the Comedy(and one of the pleasing features of the book is the successful retention in these and other essays of the semi-informality of the lecture style): Inferno XIX, Purgatorio XVII, Paradiso X and XIX. Chapters 10-12 consist of one long essay (over a third of the work) from which the book gets its title, on the presence of morally good pagans in Limbo, and on the philosophical and theological assumptions which lie behind this unusual idea.I cannot summarise here the main themes of this rich and varied book. But since I want to recommend it warmly to specialists and non-specialists alike, let me try to specify some features which lead me to do so. Specialists particularly will gain from Father Fsoter’s interpretation of certain passages which run counter to commonly received opinion: lucid expositions combined with detailed accounts of where and why he finds other critics’ views unsatisfactory, as for instance on Par. XIX 64-66 (“Lume non è ...” pp. 149-152). Of particular value to the non-specialist are the apparently casual but in fact careful and judicious outlines of political, literary and theological developments (e.g. pp. 34-36, 87-88, 152-54).
Literature and Theology: A Note on some Suggestions of F. D. Maurice
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G. 
Published: July 2007

Like the Cambridge ladies of e.e. cummings’ poem, who ‘believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead’, we most of us indulge in the interdisciplinary performance of literary and theological study. Walking home from the Sunday morning service we appraise both the englishing of the liturgy and the structure of the homily without much thought of whether we are right to mix literary and theological judgments. In this we ought to be encouraged. And we ought to encourage others.It is, perhaps, for such encouragement that an undergraduate asks when he puts his name down for a course advertised in ‘Literature and Theology’ like that proffered at the University of Kent. My acquaintance with such young men and women suggests to me that for them literature and theology are not at first differentiated as autonomous disciplines, for they are experienced as modes and moments of one conversation. Their centre is in the undergraduate talking.Yet the self spinning at the centre is not enough. Those works of literature and theology about which the young people talk witness to the experiences of others and thus become encouragements for them to think of those others. The ‘blessed rage for order’ proclaimed by the poet and the theologian communicates to the undergraduate a sense of their strivings and of his own unordered existence. And, though I intend to indicate here only that ordering of experience which may be suggested to those who attend to literature and theology, I am aware that something of the same discontent affects men in many disciplines and that these have all an interest in the new order.
Fundamentalism versus Tradition
Authors: Smith Lewis 
Published: July 2007

Fundamentalism clearly is some kind of literalism, especially in biblical interpretation, a literalism sustained (for what are taken to be religious reasons) in the face of liberal amd critical reconstructions and reinterpretations of the text. In fact, of course, the critical reconstructions are often undertaken for equally religious motives. Fundamentalism expresses and exploits the worries of believers; the residually Christian popular audience takes the passion-play literalism of Zefirelli’s television film with the same uncommitted tolerance as the modernist musicals “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Fundamentalism is widely influential among some theologians too. From the time of the Modernist crisis to the run-up to Vatican II, the Biblical Commission and the Holy Office imposed something very like fundamentalism on Catholic biblical studies. Professor Barr’s book does not study such phenomena in detail, he is concerned with a Protestant fundamentalism of a more systematic kind, self-designated as conservative evangelicalism. But there is enough of a family likeness between the fundamentalisms for Barr’s critique to be serviceable in coming to terms with the recent past of Catholic biblical work, dead but not yet entirely prone.There are three marks of the fundamentalism Barr has between his sights: the inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith and necessary test of the orthodoxy of otherwise acceptable Protestantisms; sharp hostility to modern theology and biblical criticism; and exclusion of those who fail the inerrancy test from the ranks of true Christians, (p 1) Rightly, one begins to suspect that Barr has little sympathy for his subject, regarding it as a mistake in theology and a resistance to known critical truths. Barr has no hope of persuading fundamentalists to change their minds, though he does hope to help students make theirs up in more intelligent and deliberate fashion.
Edmund of Abingdon
Authors: Fitzgerald E. V. K. 
Published: July 2007

Master, Fellows, Scholars and Friends of St Edmund’s House:It is customary on this annual occasion to delve into the scantily recorded life of St Edmund of Abingdon—in order to discover anachronistic references to the work of Newman or Newton upon which the speaker may hang his threadbare argument. In my own case the exploration did not, at first sight, augur well at all: I was indeed christened Edmund, but after the East Anglian Edmund, the patron saint of failed governors rather than of successful scholars; and perhaps even more ominously, one of Edmund of Abingdon’s great quarrels was with my ancestor Maurice Fitzgerald, Justiciar of Ireland. However, as is so often so in such cases, my good wife came to my aid, for St Edmund’s great academic contribution to Oxford, or so Roger Bacon assures us—was the introduction of the New Logic based on the Toledo Translation: in other words, the rendering into Latin of the Arabic versions of the Greek masters made in Cordoba by scholars such as Averroes, while in Europe only the dim Hibernian candle flickered fitfully in the night.However, although I shall return to St Edmund’s tenuous connexion with Islam at the end of this Address—for having hung one’s garment on a somewhat insecure peg one must presumably take it off before it brings the whole wall down with it—I think it would be more useful to pursue the main practical concern of St Edmund’s life: the relationship between Church, State and University. Specifically, I would like to draw some parallels between the role of Church and University in society in order to derive some implications for the future role of this College.
St Thomas Aquinas as a Dominican
Authors: Davies Brian 
Published: July 2007

St Simeon the New Theologian, telling the story of a young man called George writes: “For love for what he sought separated him from the world, and creaturely things and all affairs, and made him entirely of the Spirit and light. Yet all the while he lived in the middle of a city and was responsible for a house and occupied with slaves and free men, doing and achieving all the things that pertain to the present life.”With only a little modification, this description applies equally well to Aquinas, at least if we accept the accounts of him handed down to us by his early biographers. Given to rapture and religious ecstasy, supposedly “bound with a bond of chastity that shall never be loosened” (Gui, Chapter 7) he spent his active life in an entirely urban context as writer, teacher, administrator and advisor. He wined and dined with kings; he had the ear of the papacy and highest nobility as well as the offer of the loftiest ecclesiastical preferment. The Lives of the Brethren says that : “One day somebody asked Master Jordan ‘What Rule do you follow’? He replied, ‘The Rule of the Friars Preachers. And this is their Rule: to live an upright life, to learn and to teach’.” We need to see Aquinas as a man whose rule shows itself in his life and its handling of study and teaching. In this respect, although he doubtless represents ideals common to more than one religious order, common to many Christians indeed, Aquinas is typically Dominican. The Prologue to the Primitive Constitutions observes that: “Our Order was established particularly for the sake of preaching and the salvation of souls, and that our whole study should be principally and earnestly devdted to our being useful to the souls of others.
On Priestly Marriage: A Response To Father Hastings On Celibacy
Authors: Boivin Marcel 
Published: July 2007

Scandalous news has a way of getting around the world at a speed which is truly mystifying. The news of what was described to me as Adrian Hastings’ latest eccentricity was no exception. “Fr. Hastings,” I was told some time in May right here in Ngara, “is this time proclaiming disobedience to his bishop as a virtue and trumpeting the announcement of his forthcoming wedding”.In late September, I finally got hold of the offending piece (“On Celibacy”, New Blackfriars, March 1978. pp. 104-111). I soon felt less sorry for Fr. Hastings than for his detractors. In truth, I know of many priests who feel the way Fr Hastings says he does, with the difference that being better able to articulate the reasons for his feeling he can express it as a legitimate stand. Before I could quite make out the value of Fr Hastings’ arguments, I already felt sure that the most solid support for his position came from the saying of Jesus: “Go learn the meaning of the words: what I want is mercy, not sacrifice” (Mt. 9:13).The fact, however, that so many members of the Church who cannot lightly be accused of hypocrisy still maintain that all priests must lead a celibate life prevents me from sharing Fr Hastings’ certainty in upholding the opposite view. Perhaps there are reasons beyond my understanding yet within theirs which make it wrong or at least inopportune to repeal the law of celibacy. Yet, one cannot be blamed for voicing an opinion and mine is that Fr Hastings, as a Catholic priest, is indeed free to marry, as are all Catholic priests who did not choose celibacy for its own sake but only agreed to it as to a conditio sine qua non to fulfil their vocation to the priesthood.