bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Church As Communio
Authors: Kasper +Walter 
Published: July 2007

A sharp-witted analyst of the church’s contemporary situation once said: No previous council spoke so extensively and so profoundly about the Church as the Second Vatican Council. After no other council was there such great confusion over the question of what the church is and which form it should take. Church is, as Luther said, a blind, vague word. Indeed it is not easy to say what we mean when we speak of Church.For one thousand five hundred years the church has lived out its existence and often enough suffered to sustain it in adversity. But not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the church begin expressis verbis to reflect on its nature. This reflection originally took place against a background of conflicts: conflicts between the papacy and the up-and-coming nation states, conflicts centred around John Wyclif and Jan Hus and above all against the background of debate and argument in the Reformation era. Yet, although the quarrels of the Reformation were not only concerned with individual ecclesiological questions, but much more with the general understanding of what Church is, the sixteenth century did not get as far as reflecting on what the Church’s teaching on the term ‘church’ should be. Not until the nineteenth century, in the wake of Romanticism, did the understanding of the church as such become the subject of consideration. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher who determined the direction of the Protestant Church. On the Catholic side the thoughts of Johann Adam Mohler, the theologian from Tubingen, led the way.
Worship in Spirit and in Truth
Authors: Geraghty Denis 
Published: July 2007

In her commentary on St John&rsquo;s gospel in the New
Jerome Biblical Commentary, Pheme Perkins writes:
It seems to me that an exegesis of Chapter 4 of St John&rsquo;s
gospel might throw further light on this judgement as well as illustrating
the psychodynamics of &lsquo;conversion&rsquo; and interpersonal
encounter with Christ. Chapter 4 stands on its own in the gospel and is a
brilliant theological construction. It is an intricately woven pattern of
wordplay, humour, symbolism, obfuscation, at least on the part of the woman.
An examination of the dynamic of interpersonal relating might begin with a
reflection on how anyone of us feels when meeting someone for the first
time. How do we decide whether or not we want the relationship to go any
further than our simply remaining on polite or distant terms? The decision
we take in such circumstances is very complex, acted out nearly always at
the unconscious level and made in an instant. We decide that the person is
interesting enough to reward further acquaintance or we just move away
uttering a phrase of polite disengagement.
The Panther and the Hind
Authors: Matthews Melvyn 
Published: July 2007

While reading Aidan Nichols’ book, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism (T & T Clark, 1993) I remembered the story of the country which decided that their young people should be taught to play football and that a national side should be fielded to compete with other countries. So they wrote to the Football Association in England for copies of the laws of football and sent them to their schools with instructions that the young people should learn the rules by heart, be tested in their knowledge and then be sent out to play. There was, apparently, some consternation in high places when chaos ensued and questions were asked as to why people who had learned the rules still could not play the game.Aidan Nichols has certainly learned the rules of Anglicanism but still appears—at least to this Anglican reviewer who was taught the rules by one of those whom Nichols recognises as a “separated doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church, Eric Mascall—to be unable to play the game. For there is no doubt at all about Fr. Nichols’ scholarship and the acuity of his perspective on the history and development of Anglicanism since the Reformation. But none of his perception enables him to see how or why such a perverse—in his view—beast can continue to survive as it does with such vigour and obvious self-enjoyment, or why all right thinking Anglicans do not immediately see the error of their ways and at least join a Uniate Anglican Church and so regularise their position.
Jesus, the Fossil Record, and All Things
Authors: Echlin Edward P. 
Published: July 2007

As the ecological crisis, fuelled by widespread reality avoidance, deepens, so, fitfully and hesitantly, does the religious response. “Curiously, scientific analysis points toward the need for a quasireligious transformation of contemporary culture. Whether such a transformation can be achieved in time is problematic, to say the least”, writes Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Recent Christian reflection has concentrated on the human presence, the place and responsibility, within creation, of people under God. Fruitful discussion continues about metaphors and models for human dominion, such as stewardship, sacral kingship, co-worker, and co-operative letting be.Other distinctively Christian questions are also being asked — and convincing answers demanded — that go right to the heart of the Christian religion, questions about Christ and the whole scientifically unfolding reality of life through geological history. We now realize that the cosmos is more immense than our ancestors in the faith imagined; and that our own species, redeemed in Christ and the conscious edge of evolution, is both more fragile and more vulnerable and, simultaneously, more damaging a presence within global and local ecosystems than we like to acknowledge. We are aware that there have been mass extinction events taking out whole ecosystems; in particular we are aware of the dinosaurs. Extinction events take their toll, especially through climate change and habitat loss, over millenia, even millions of years. We may be in such an extinction event in this our time, particularly in the decimation of flora and fauna including numerous insect species in the rainforests of the humid tropics.
Frei's Types
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

Of course I bought them when I saw the reference to my own ‘brilliant’ work in these books. With Types of Christian Theology (Yale University Press 1992) and Theology and Narrative (Oxford University Press 1993), both edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher, we now have two substantial posthumous volumes of essays by Hans W. Frei, one of the most influential American theologians in recent years. It is not just the glancing mention of my book that invites attention, although that will turn out to be an instructive entry into critique of Frei’s typology of modem theology. The first thing is to outline the significance of his work.Born in Breslau in 1922, Hans Frei was baptized as a Lutheran but, since the family was of Jewish ancestry, they had to flee to the United States in 1938. Hans won a scholarship to study textile engineering, in which he graduated, but a lecture by H. Richard Niebuhr, visiting from Yale, completely changed his life. He enrolled as a B.D. student at Yale. On graduation he became minister of a small-town Baptist congregation in New Hampshire. After much internal struggle he decided to become an Episcopalian and to pursue an academic career. He returned to Yale in 1947, married a year later, got ordained in 1952, and received his Ph.D. in 1956 for an enormously long thesis, supervised by Niebuhr and still unpublished, reconstructing ‘Barth’s break with liberalism’. In a way, the rest of his life was spent trying to subvert liberalism in theology by making Barth’s Church Dogmatics accessible. He taught at Yale from 1956 until his unexpected death in 1988.
Religious in the Local Churches: Pointers from Aquinas
Authors: Ombres Robert 
Published: July 2007

The saint we are honouring today would have found the theme of this lecture all too familiar. St Thomas Aquinas was personally involved in the lively, indeed fierce, medieval debates that surrounded the first appearance of the Franciscan and Dominican friars in the life of the Church. Then, as before and since, religious did not always fit in immediately or obviously into the established patterns of diocese and parish. At the time of St Thomas some argued that all the attributes of the antichrist and his ministers were to be found in the new Mendicant Orders. In Cambridge there survives a medieval manuscript with an illumination showing Archbishop FitzRalph, its author and a critic of the friars, faced by Mendicant friars mingled with devils. At about the time St Thomas was writing his first polemical work, soldiers had to be sent to protect the Paris Dominicans at Saint-Jacques from riots and demonstrations. Troops had to patrol his inaugural lecture, and on Palm Sunday 1259, as he preached, St Thomas was heckled by someone trying to get a hearing for the seculars’ case. No wonder that he went into the matter of when and by what means religious can defend themselves.St Thomas’s own experience as a Dominican friar was gained in different dioceses, indeed in different countries. He dealt repeatedly with the position of religious in the Church, especially in three polemical works, in Quodlibetal disputations and in the Summa Theologiae, going well beyond the controversy over the organisation of university teaching in Paris. To guide our own exploration, we might do well to start with how St Thomas approached the task. Some problems have a way of recurring. In particular, he had to fight against two errors, the kind of mistakes still made today.
Visions of God
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

The notion that one cannot see God was established early in the Jewish tradition. The idea that the vision of Naples is so magnificent that there is nothing further to live for: “See Naples and die”, is taken one stage further in the Bible: see God and you will die. “But”, God said to Moses, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (Ex. 33.20).In fact God is said in the Bible to have put in a number of appearances to the Patriarchs. To Abraham: “Then the Lord (Yahweh) appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’” (Gen 12.7); “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him I am God Almighty (El Shaddai); walk before me and be blameless and I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous’” (Gen 17.1-2). To Isaac: “The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I shall show you ... for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath that I swore to Abraham your father’” (Gen 26.2-3); at Beersheba “And that very night the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am the God of Abraham your father, do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake’” (Gen 26.24). To Jacob at Bethel: “God (Elohim) appeared to Jacob again . . . and he blessed him. God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall you be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name ... be fruitful and multiply ... the land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you”’ (Gen 35.9-12). Exactly how God “appeared” is not made clear except in the second appearance to Isaac which was in a dream (Gen 26.24) and this may be true of all of them. It is not clear that anything was seen in any of these stories but in each case something was heard (or at any rate the recipient woke up with the conviction that God had communicated and this, of course, was expressed in certain words). All these five appearances to the patriarchs were covenantmaking events relating to land and descendants.
In Stages or on Wings?
Authors: Chater Mark F. 
Published: July 2007

Many of us, if involved in pastoral or educational work, have witnessed a religious misunderstanding in the mind of someone in our care, and have tried to help untangle it For instance, an R.C.I.A. group leader uncovers simplistic fundamentalist contortions in an enquirer; or a primary teacher, preparing a class for their first experience of the sacrament of Reconciliation, is concerned about the children’s readiness to understand and experience God’s outpouring of forgiveness in the sacrament; or a secondary R.E. specialist is alarmed to discover that a child’s practice or concept of prayer has not changed since leaving primary school; or, finally, a parish priest or catechist, in charge of a first communion programme, is disheartened by the literalism and theological poverty of the parents. Sometimes the misunderstandings result in a good comic story to share with colleagues. Such stories can be simultaneously funny and depressing.One recent encounter caused me to reflect on religious misunderstanding. It occurred when I attended a special-occasion Eucharist, celebrated in a retreat centre, at 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. As we were queuing to go in, a woman in front of me (whom I did not know) turned round to ask: “Will this do us for tomorrow?”I assumed that this woman, aware of her Sunday Mass obligation, was wondering whether a Mass at 5 o’clock on Saturday would count, or whether it was not a little too early. As she turned the question over in her mind, no doubt she thought that if there were some ruling on the matter, then she would know where she stood, and would also be aware of what she must do.
The Original Power of Golding
Authors: Hanlon Kevin 
Published: July 2007

“I am interested in story telling and what gives power to a story”.W. GoldingThe late Sir William Golding, who died on 19 June 1993, was one of only four English writers to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was one of the greatest novelists in the years after the Second World War, for some the greatest. He was forty-two by the time his first and most famous novel Lord of Flies was published in 1954. He went on to write another ten novels culminating in Fire Down Below (1989), which was the final novel in the trilogy of a sea journey to Australia set in the early nineteenth century. The trilogy Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, was published in one volume in 1991 entitled To the Edge of the Earth and could be called the journey of modem man.Golding’s second novel The Inheritors (1955) was his own favourite and the only one which he re-read. Critics regard it as his best novel, with some scholars regarding it as his most ‘perfect’ work. It complements Lord of the Flies, and the two novels together mark Golding’s ‘primitive period.’ “They deserve special reading as companion pieces.”The Inheritors is a difficult novel and interest in Golding somewhat waned after its publication. By the time of his fourth novel Free Fall (1959) interest was reviving, and with Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors it forms a possible trilogy in which Golding explores the loss of human innocence and the consequent darkness of the human mind i.e. the emergence of evil, violence and cruelty.
Being a Christian in Europe
Authors: Lascaris Andrew 
Published: July 2007

What do we mean when we say ‘Europe’ and write about Europe as ‘a challenge to Christians’? What does it mean to be a European Christian, or rather to be a Christian in Europe? What is the identity of Europe? Identity is closely linked to memory. When a person loses his or her memory, this person’s identity is in danger of getting lost as well. There is a common European memory. This memory is weaker than our national memory and our personal memory, but it exists. It is built up out of numerous elements including: the boundaries of Europe, interdependence, cultural heritage, technological civilization, justice, individualism, fear of Islam, and the Christian past.Boundaries are vital in determining one’s identity. They fulfil the need for belonging and help to structure life. The boundaries of Europe, however, are very uncertain. When I arrived in Oxford in 1966 as a postgraduate student, I was told that this city of dreaming spires and towers was not a part of Europe. Europe was ‘the continent’; the British Isles did not belong to Europe. Ten months later I travelled to Spain. I learned that, surely, Oxford belonged to Europe, for everything north of Spain was Europe; Spain, however, was not a part of Europe. When I lectured for some days in the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, in 1988, I was told by my hosts that Poland really is the heart of Europe. The little medieval chapel of Lublin castle was supposed to prove their point: gothic on the outside, Byzantine on the inside.
Prophecy and Myth in Daniel Deronda
Authors: Every George 
Published: July 2007

Daniel Deronda is the last of George Eliot's novels, and the one that describes her contemporaries. Mary Anne Evans, who became Marian, Polly to her intimates, and concealed her feminine identity under the pseudonym of George Eliot, was a schoolgirl at the time represented in Middlemarch . The religion described in Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede was in substance hers until 1841. When in 1856 she began to tell tales about it she had already translated The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by D.F. Strauss and The Essence of Christianity by Feuerbach. But she could write of ‘the real drama of Evangelicalism’ as one who had experienced it from within when the Evangelical revival stood for serious religion, for the conviction of sin.In Daniel Deronda ‘hurrying march of crowded Time towards the world-changing battle of Sadowa’ where Prussia defeated Austria in July 1866, dates Daniel's wait in Genoa for his unknown mother, who will tell him that her father and his were both Jews, like Mirah who in the July of the year before stepped into his boat opposite Kew Gardens with the cloak that she had soaked in the river to hasten her drowning. Something has been told beforehand of his background at home with Sir Hugo Mallinger at Topping Abbey, at Eton and at Cambridge and a German university, and of his suspicion of his illegitimacy; but his meetings with Mirah, with her brother Mordccai, and with Gwendolen Harleth, who became the wife and then the widow of Grandcourt, Sir Hugo’s nephew and the heir apparent to his baronetcy, all belong to 1865 and 1866.
Aquinas on God's Knowledge of Evil Intentions
Authors: Brown Montague 
Published: July 2007

In order to understand how God could know evil intentions, two things are requisite: an understanding of how God knows and an understanding of the nature of evil. It is a well-known doctrine of Thomas Aquinas that God knows his creation through knowing himself. As the ultimate explanation of potentiality and change in the world, it could not be that God himself is in any way potential. Hence he does not learn about his creation from his creatures. Rather, God knows all his creatures and their actions through knowing his own simple nature. It is also a well-known doctrine that evil is the privation of good, and that evil is only known through knowing good. Putting these two doctrines together, it follows that God knows evil in the world by knowing the good that he is. While this explanation seems adequate to explain physical evils (e.g., the mouse’s demise is explained by God’s understanding himself as able to be participated by the good which is eagle), it is not clear how this explanation can handle God’s knowledge of evil intentions since these intentions do not seem capable of being explained in terms of something essentially good.In order to better understand this problem and set up the grounds for some legitimate answer, it is necessary to treat each of these issues separately and in some greater detail. Thus, in the first section, God’s knowledge as it concerns his creation in general and in particular will be discussed.
“Christology”: What's In a Word
Authors: Mansini Guy 
Published: July 2007

Yes, Christology is the logos or science of the Christ. But science is the invention of the Greeks, and while Christos is Greek, too, it does duty here for “Messiah.” The word contains the encounter of Jerusalem and Athens that has been the sustaining event of the whole of Western culture, which, in these days, and notwithstanding the abiding vigour of Indian thought, is increasingly the culture of the world. And already thus far “Christology” proves itself a weasel word. For if indeed we speak of an “encounter” of two “cultures,” then Athens bids fair to absorb Jerusalem as just one more collection of human conventions and nomoi. But if we say that “Christology” signifies the destruction of proud arguments (logismoi) and the capture of every thought unto the obedience of Christ (see 2 Cor 10:4-5), then it may be thought that logos can no longer recognize itself here.Or maybe this meeting of Jerusalem and Athens inscribed in “Christology” is just a confusion. “Messiah,” originally a title, here means the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, and functions as a proper name. So Christology is the science of an individual man. According to the most thoughtful of the Greeks, however, there can be no logos, no science, no episteme, of the individual as such.Neither for us moderns is science of the individual as such. Chemistry may be about radium, but it isn’t about this radium atom. It’s about the nature of radium, and so tells you about this atom insofar as it has the common nature. But it doesn’t give you the history of this atom, or that one, or any one.
Indissolubility, Divorce and Holy Communion: An Open Response to Germain Grisez, John Finnis and William May
Authors: Lawler Michael G. 
Published: July 2007

Gentlemen, I read in the June 1994 edition of this Journal your Open Letter to Bishops Saier, Lehmann and Kasper (hereafter NB) concerning their joint Letter regarding Pastoral Ministry to the Divorced and Remarried (hereafter PL) and their Principles of Pastoral Care (hereafter PPC). Both their letter and yours concern me to the extent that, as you correctly point out, they concern “the entire Church” (NB, 321). As a theologian in the Church, entrusted with the theological education of the Church, married, divorced and remarried and celibate alike, I was both delighted to read your letter and intrigued by its argument. I thought you and I and the body of the Church might benefit from further clarification. You will be aware that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (hereafter CDF) and the three Bishops issued in September 1994 further communications on this topic, published in Origins, October 27, 1994 (hereafter OS). I shall return to these in my final section.Your letter delighted me because it sought to do the theologian’s task, the pursual in the scientific manner proper to theology of a deeper understanding of the Word of God and the communication of that understanding. I am delighted to pursue the matter further with you, for your argument intrigued me, as much as from what it left unsaid as from what it said. For the sake of conciseness and clarity, I choose to deal with only two focused, and not unconnected, matters which are of concern to me as both a theologian and a marriage (and divorce) counsellor.