bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
‘Decentring’ God
Authors: Eagleton Terry 
Published: July 2007

In the good old days of the Christian-Marxist dialogue, it was comforting to think that, whatever the divergences between the two camps, they were at least united by their profoundly humanistic dimension. It is a wry historical irony that the humanistic plank which once bridged the Christian-Marxist gap has now become the blunt instrument with which Marxism belabours Christianity about the head. For the most important developments in European Marxism centre on a decisive rejection of the ‘Marxist-humanist’ interpretation of historical materialism. ‘Marxism’, announces Louis Althusser in a polemical, programmatic chapter-heading, ‘is not a Humanism’; and Michel Foucault takes comfort in the thought that ‘man is but a recent invention, a figure not two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge, and will disappear when the latter has found a new form’. Man-centred Marxism—that heretical deviation from historical materialism which pivots all on the ‘collective subject’ and its ‘praxis’—is merely a displacement of the inherently bourgeois ideology of ‘humanism’. History as the expression of the generic subject Man, en route to reappropriating his alienated being: we cannot escape this Hegelian form of Marxism merely by substituting ‘men’ for Man. For the subjects of history are not ‘men’, not even ‘social classes’, but, as Althusser comments, social formations; Marxism is the science of the laws of these social formations, of these structures of which individual men are merely the bearers. It is ‘humanism’, with its corrosive insistence on rooting all in the ‘living concrete individuals’ of history, which forestalls us from thinking through society as structure—a structure which, like the unconscious, has its reasons of which ‘living individuals’ know nothing.The ‘de-centring’ of the human subject: this is the scandalous, pervasive theme of European Marxism and structuralism. ‘Man’ or ‘men’, installed by bourgeois ideology at the heart of history and the universe, the source of all discourse and creation, is impudently dethroned.
Metaphor and Truth in Hebrews
Authors: Smith Lewis 
Published: July 2007

The image of the Church was already a complex one in the years leading up to Vatican II, whether one thinks of the picture portrayed in theological writing or of the meaning glimpsed, and perhaps apprehended, in day-to-day living, in personal prayer and in worship. But within the complexity there was in Catholic theology and practice a special stress upon the priesthood in the Church, and therefore upon the Church as a sacral, hierarchical institution, endowed with a fullness of priestly powers : of order (magisterium) and jurisdiction. This sacral-bureaucratic view came to fullest expression in Journet’s The Church of the Word Incarnate, in which order precariously maintained a primacy of honour over jurisdiction. Bishop De Smedt took a fresh and critical look at the same image when he denounced triumphalism, clericalism and juridicism in a speech he made at the Council. Freedom and fraternity were not the only fundamental Christian values to come into their own again; the stress on the living Word of God and his coming into expression in the scriptural word, and the shift towards existential modes of thinking in response to the demand of faith seeking knowledge in us and for us, in and for our time, called into question a static, clerical-priestly and authoritarian Church.The ten years after the Council have been a testing time for us all, and not least for the priests of the Church. There has been a spate of theological writing about ministry and priesthood, verging indeed, at popular levels, on the narcissistic and obsessional. Too little of it has seen that behind the question of the ministry there stands a more fundamental, christological question about the meaning of Christ’s priesthood. The more welcome, therefore, to Fr Sabourin’s study of Christ’s priesthood and the history that led up to it.
So Who's a Pentecostal Now?
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

In an important article in Gregorianum, now reprinted separately, Fr Francis Sullivan has invited us to take yet another look at the Pentecostal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’, suggesting a new avenue of approach, using St Thomas’s teaching on the mission of the Holy Spirit in la q.43.At the outset, let me confess to a growing conviction that, in the long run, the Catholic Pentecostal Movement (under whatever name it may wish to be known) will be seen to have contributed most to the Church by goading a surprising number of Christians, and even some theologians, into taking a renewed interest in the various traditions we have in the Church concerning the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Whatever reservations one may (or, perhaps, should) have about Catholic Pentecostalism, this, at least, is surely a good thing.Sullivan subtitles his essay, ‘A Catholic Interpretation of the Pentecostal Experience’. He begins by offering a working definition of ‘the Pentecostal experience’ as ‘a religious experience which initiates a decisively new sense of the powerful presence and working of God in one’s life, which working usually involves one or more charismatic gifts’. Members of Pentecostal Churches, he reminds us, would add ‘experience marked
South African Apocalypse
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

“Dear Father — Our Black People here have been quiet lately. I still think they’re doing -wrong by burning down their own schools and townships. Why not do it in the white areas?“There are so many why’s about our black people, will theS.A. government be able to answer it?“1. Why is there apartheid in most churches except the Catholic church?“2. Why does the black man not have the same education as the white?“3. Why does the black man have to do a job and the white gets the credit for it?“4. Why can’t the black man occupy the same position as the white?“5. Why must the black man sit upstairs in a bus, when the white sits downstairs?“6. Why in the first place did they bribe the black man and steal his land? South Africa belongs to the black people.“7. Why is there apartheid in hospitals?“8. Why, if there’s been a road accident, can’t the black man help the white?“9. Why, if I take Michael to hospital do they first help the white and let me wait for hours?“10. Why can’t the Black people work in Cape Town? — They must produce a pass.“11. There are so many why’s who can answer it?“I have two African guys working for me, and I love them. They’re well educated, decent and religious. I took Michael to work one Saturday. He played with them, walked about the factory with them and even ate with them — the white was astonished. — Do you know what the black man then said to the white? He said, ‘Sir, this child is just like his mother, his heart is open’. Then I thought to myself: Who’s child on this earth will play with a black man and eat with him.
Poverty, Wealth and the Church in the Developing Countries
Authors: Visocchi Tony 
Published: July 2007

We are all very aware of the glaring inequalities that exist between the rich and the poor countries of the world, and of the cries for help (usually in the form of financial aid) that come from every side One thing that is overlooked, either because we feel that we can do nothing about it, because we are too diplomatic, because we do not want to meddle in the internal politics of nation states, because we ourselves are hardly an example, or because we are in fact profiting from the situation, is the growing imbalance of wealth inside many of the countries in Africa today. The fact that we feel we can do nothing, or do not want to do anything has helped to hide the situation, to relegate it to a limbo. Very often we just do not want to talk about it. And yet there can be no hope of development if this very basic problem is not tackled.That it exists is evident to anyone who has ever worked in Africa. The usual dichotomy is between rural and urban areas, wealth accumulates in the cities and not in the rural areas, although at times up to 95% of the population live in the countryside and provides the nation’s wealth. The cities give the impression of a progressive, intense and thrusting development, the rural areas appear to be stagnant or even regressing.And yet to portray the problem in these terms is only to tell half the truth; there is a mixture of poverty and wealth in both urban and rural areas. Each African country has at least one showpiece of a city; tall buildings, offices, apartments, or hotels. There are flyovers, underpasses, or freeways; elegant shopping centres dot the town which is no doubt surrounded by affluent suburbs.
Paul's Experience: Sighting or Theophany?
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

What did Paul have to say about the resurrection, Geoffrey Turner asks (New Blackfriars, April 1977), as he goes on to say that I have suggested that “Paul had a simple spiritual experience”. Well, if that is the impression that I have left, I must try to make myself a little clearer.Geoffrey Turner appeals to I Cor 15 and interprets that reference to the appearance of the risen Christ to Paul in terms of Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles of the Damascus road experience. Is it so obvious that this move is legitimate? Admittedly it has frequently been made, at least since the middle of the second century when readers of the New Testament were first in a position to turn from one text to another and begin the process of harmonising the different accounts which it is one of the major effects of modern New Testament studies to bring into question. We need to remind ourselves, however, that Luke shows no knowledge of any of Paul’s letters. In fact the picture of Paul that Luke gives in Acts is remarkably unlike the picture that emerges from Paul’s own letters. The account that one man gives of another would of course differ a good deal from a self portrait, but the differences between Paul’s own theology and Luke’s account of it in Acts are so obvious and numerous that we must reckon with the possibility, and even the likelihood, that Luke did not have much access to Pauline material. Methodologically, if we are to be cautious, we must leave open the possibility that the Lukan accounts of the Damascus road experience were not derived from Paul himself but were Luke’s reconstruction of what must have happened.
Kingsley Amis: in search of the Simple Life
Authors: McCabe Bernard 
Published: July 2007

A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.
Ariadne and Justification
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G. 
Published: July 2007

The revival at Covent Garden this season of Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, though it was but indifferently well directed and sung, confirmed me in a supposition that this opera affords the Christian a useful pair of images for his meditation upon the ways in which God is said to justify man. The musical action of Ariadne presents whomsoever would employ them with lively images for the common faith of Christians and for the different doctrinal formulations of this faith by Roman and Lutheran theologians. It suggests, also, how far these formulations may be related to that faith. The theologian’s nice arguments are rendered immediately appreciable in Strauss’ music. Whether he, or Hofmannsthal his librettist, had ever been confronted with the excitements of the sixteenth century disputants, Strauss, in the composition of this delightful opera, was exploring for himself just that relation of seeing to knowing which is structurally so important for doctrines of justification, and he was doing so within a context which most naturally suggested that a man might come to share in the divine life.‘Seeing’ is commonly taken as a strong metaphor for all kinds of ‘knowing’, not only that which depends on our opening our eyes. This much, at least, is evident. Nodding in comprehension, I say ‘I see’.
Recent Catholic Writing on the Resurrection (1) The Empty Tomb Story
Authors: Kerr Fergus 
Published: July 2007

The foundation of Christianity, as fact and doctrine, is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus who was crucified,“a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”(I Cor 1: 23-24).Great efforts have been made over the centuries to spell out the presuppositions and implications, historical, metaphysical and theological, of this event, and it is unlikely that anything wholly new will be discovered now. In the last ten or fifteen years, on the other hand, study of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament has quickened dramatically, among Catholics, and it is important for us all to recognize that some divergence of interpretation is now established. Without attempting even to summarise the ever increasing Catholic literature on the subject, or to examine the various problems which the divergence creates, and which the new interpretation involves, it seems worthwhile to delineate briefly some features of the approach to the gospel accounts of the Resurrection to be found in some recent Catholic theology from Germany. The same approach may be traced elsewhere, most notably in major works by the Dominican theologians Christian Duquoc and Edward Schillebeeckx, but since neither of these has yet been translated into English, it seems more useful to limit this survey to three more accessible works: Hans Küng’s On being a Christian, Walter Kasper’s Jesus the Christ, and The Common Catechism. It is not a matter of accumulating authorities for the new approach; it is rather a question of registering how widely accepted the new approach already is.
Principalities and Powers in Ephesians
Authors: Yates Roy 
Published: July 2007

The plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. (Eph. 3: 10)One of St. Paul’s contributions to our understanding of the powers of evil is to sum them up in the phrase ‘principalities and powers’. For him they represent the sum-total of evil powers that threaten men both heavenly and earthly. The author of Ephesians takes over the concept in his emphasis of Christ’s exaltation and victory over evil. For him Christ’s victory and redemption is cosmic in scope, yet peculiarly practical in that its effects are to be worked out in the Church and in the lives of believers.In 1:21 the ascended Christ is described as sitting at the right hand of the Father above, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion’. This list represents the cosmic totality; everything that in any way is in a position of power and influence in the universe. The all-inclusive nature of the phrase is underlined by the addition of, ‘and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’. There is no attempt made to set the powers in any order of preference, or to define any of their individual characteristics. ‘The Writer is concerned not to give us information about the denizens of the unseen world but to help our imagination to picture the exalted glory of Christ.’ Are the powers referred to good or bad? The need for them to be put in subjection under his feet points at least to the inclusion of subversive heavenly powers. By his exaltation Christ is not only supreme over the whole universe, but also head of the Church.
One more Analysis of Britain
Authors: Dummett Ann 
Published: July 2007

Just as pornography has almost succeeded in making sex boring, so the great tide of gloomy analysis of Britain’s ills has almost succeeded in making politics a bore. The prospect of sitting down yet another evening with a group of house-and car-owners, eating very good food and drinking wine, and hearing about how poor they all are because the Trade Unions are now running the country is as disenchanting as having to hear for the fourteenth time about someone’s gall-bladder operation. To read in newspapers, not for the fourteenth but for at least the four hundredth time, that the country is being wrecked by socialism, scrounging and threats to freedom from the extreme Left, is no longer funny, or even horrifying, but just unbearable, like the dripping of a leaky tap.It would be a good deal less exasperating to have to read, and listen to, endless disgruntlement if the complaints were based on reality. Tiresome though it may be to get an exhaustive account of someone’s hospital operation, one can still have genuine sympathy with the teller because, after all, the operation did happen and was no doubt pretty unpleasant. The really desperate feeling comes on when you have to listen to someone’s account of unreal misfortune: the slightly dotty landlady who thinks her tenants knock on the water-pipes every night to annoy her, when in fact they spend their evenings creeping round on stockinged feet so as not to provoke her wrath, and what she needs is not new tenants but a visit from a plumber.Complaints about plutocratic coal-miners, suggesting that they are the sort of people who go out in Rolls Royces running down the starved and downtrodden middle classes, and about the dangers of Communism, which is actually weaker in the United Kingdom than in any other European country, are far harder to take even than such a landlady’s fears.
Theology and Natural Theology
Authors: Davies Brian A. 
Published: July 2007

The general credibility of theology was once widely held by theologians to depend on a successful natural theology. Today things are different. There are certainly some contemporary advocates of natural theology—and a few of these are even theologians; but it is presently fashionable to reject natural theology in the name of theology itself. But are there cogent, theological reasons for dismissing natural theology? I shall suggest that the best known modern defences of an affirmative reply are unacceptable.According to the natural theologian, ‘God exists’ is a respectable philosophical assertion which can be rationally sustained without recourse to the prior acceptance either of God’s existence or of any special revelation. Typically, he insists that ‘God exists’ is rational, provable, justifiable or demonstrable. Bearing these points in mind, what is the nature of the theological opposition to natural theology?We can begin to answer this question by noting the view that the nature of theism renders irrelevant the notion of arguing or reasoning or making inferences about God. Some observe that this is the position of the Bible. Biblical writers, it is argued, “did not think of God as an inferred entity, but as an experienced reality”. Others explain that proofs must result in abstraction, “a pale shadow of the living God who is the putative object of biblical faith”. In this connection we might note some remarks of Alasdair MacIntyre. In Metaphysical Beliefs MacIntyre points to the enormous importance of faith where religious belief is concerned. He thus argues that natural theology, considered in its familiar guise as the presentation of supposedly demonstrative argument, is out of place in religion.
The Long Dialectic of Rain and Sunlight
Authors: Tatham M.A. 
Published: July 2007

Those of R. S. Thomas’ poems which can be called—if somewhat loosely—religious, are frequently variations of a dichotomy one term of which appears to have the poet’s qualified approval. And our confidence in the integrity of Thomas’ response to the complexity of his experience is sustained because, as we constantly discover, the preferred term in one variation of the dichotomy becomes the less favoured term in another. Sometimes, indeed, the less favoured term may even be identified with the overtly religious position. Nor are we required to share Thomas’ faith; he is neither insistent nor didactic and consequently there is no problem of distinguishing between the poet and the believer. Indeed, R.S.Thomas is not only immune to the virus of apologetic religiosity but he sustains a dialogue in which faith and unfaith are held in unresolved tension. If his world clearly differs from the one we are familiar with in Larkin’s Church Going it does so, not because it is fundamentally different, but because it is approached from a less familiar direction.Curiously pehaps, since both are Anglicans, R.S.Thomas’ poetry is quite unlike Betjeman’s, and this is not simply a matter of technique, but has to do with attitudes, and especially their very different ideas about the importance of social artefacts. However much Betjeman deplores Slough’s bogus Tudor bars he delights in the bricky beauty of small towns—the area formerly castigated by Hopkins as ‘Oxford’s base and brickish skirt’ and in this—as in a good deal else, R.S.Thomas is closer to Hopkins. The mere physical threat is seen as having important spiritual implications, although for Thomas the pain is less acute, less fraught, and less creatively tuned to transmit the fleeting energy of living movement.
Against Natural Theology
Authors: Grimes Alistair 
Published: July 2007

I want to take up the challenge made by Brian Davies in a recent article, in which he argues that natural theology remains unscathed at the hands of contemporary theological criticism. I shall try and show that his optimism is largely unfounded, firstly, by showing the confusions in his own arguments, and then by indicating some grounds for a more widespread dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise of natural theology.For both Davies and myself, the natural theologian is one who holds that the proposition ‘God exists’ is a respectable assertion that can be rationally sustained without recourse to a priori acceptance of God’s existence, or any kind of special revelation. As Davies notes, such an approach contrasts strongly with Liberal Protestantism, and in particular Barth and Tillich, who insist that there is no justification or foundation for Christianity in the sense understood by natural theology. Barth’s own attitude is well expressed in his masterly summation of ‘Church Dogmatics’, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so”. Davies will have none (or very little) of this and spends some time attacking both Barth and Tillich. His first target is, however, Alasdair MacIntyre, or at least the Alasdair MacIntyre of ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief. MacIntyre suggests that natural theology is incompatible (in the sense of trying to provide a proof) with the idea of freely accepting the love of God and that, paradoxically, the success of such arguments would be as destructive of religion as the sceptic holds their failure to be. For MacIntyre, the justification for religion is not to be discovered in the search for foundations, but by elucidating more fully what is involved in religious belief.