bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Marxism, Christianity and Morality Replies to Francis Barker and Brian Wicker
Authors: Turner Denys 
Published: July 2007

So very great is the range and complexity of the issues now raised by the New Black friars debate that it is impossible even to state, never mind argue, a position in relation to all of them. Nonetheless, since two main contributors, Barker and Wicker make some serious criticisms of my views, at least some of them on the strength of equally serious misunderstandings of what they are, some reply is, even if insufficient, also necessary. So I shall concentrate a lot on clarifiication.First of all, then, I shall try to be clearer about what my basic contentions are, for they obviously cannot be clear from what wrote. Barker, for example, purports to agree with my thesis about Marxism and morality. This thesis was, in short, that they are historically, and therefore contingently, identical. But he then accuses me of lapsing from this thesis and offers a reason which can only show that he does not, after all, understand the nature of the identity I was maintaining there is between Marxism and morality. So I must first of all clear this up.Having done that I propose, secondly, to challenge the conception of Marxist science and of its relationship to ideologies which underpins Barker’s main criticisms of the Marxism and Christianity “strong compatibility” thesis.The clarification of this thesis is the third, and most obviously necessary task. Wicker, at least, has badly misconstrued it. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, for in the “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” paper I only mentioned, but did not formally spell out, what the “strong compatibility” thesis holds you to maintaining.
The Last Laugh of a Humane Faith: Dr. Alexander Geddes 1737‐1801
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard 
Published: July 2007

“This unaccountable, heterodox, bad priest” was the accepted verdict of Catholic scholarship on Alexander Geddes almost seventy years ago. Amid the modernist crisis that view was understandable particularly in the British Catholic Church which had struggled for respectability and acceptance during the previous half century. Geddes seemed a disturbing unmannerly radical. But today in a Church more concerned with social justice and freedom, with ecumenism and scholarly integrity, we can come to a more charitable balanced conclusion. For Geddes was undoubtedly a talented scholarly priest of liberal imagination and provocative manner. Persistent ill health especially some severe form of rheumatism, gave his wit a bitterness which he effectively employed against any species of privilege, political or religious intolerance. In his desire for conciliatory dialogue between Churches, authentic local liturgies, and a more responsible and responsive ecclesiastical authority, he was a thoroughly modem churchman.The life of Geddes may be briefly recounted. Born into a poor Catholic family in Banffshire in 1737, educated at Scalan and in Paris, he was ordained in 1764. Following a brief chequered career in Scotland, during which he acquired an LL.D from the University of Aberdeen, he lived in London from 1780 to his death in 1801. Free from pastoral demands he was able to devote himself to the intellectual life. His cosmopolitan life and training made him very much a child of the Enlightenment. His extended visits to France, 1758-64, 1766-69 and 1783, together with his continuous reliance on aristocratic patronage ensured that result. Well acquainted with Presbyterianism and educated within the Gallican tradition in the Paris of the philosophes, Geddes was associated with several leading figures in the Scottish Enlightenment. By nature gregarious, he freely associated with all denominations; Presbyterians, Anglicans, Unitarians and Quakers.
The Myth of God Incarnate
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

There is a view that Jesus was not quite as human as we are—that he was the Son of God disguised as a man, not a real man. The authors of The Myth of God Incarnate some of whom I suspect of having been brought up on this docetist heresy, are in revulsion against it. They reject it, however, not because the Church long ago threw it out as an option incompatible with her life, a heresy, but because it is found to be incompatible with the European way of life in the second half of the twentieth century. It seems odd for Christians to reject a doctrine on these grounds, since it is the very heart of the gospel to challenge conventional and accepted attitudes in any age; still, they do reject docetism, and that can’t be bad.When Christians do this it is customary for them to do so in the name of the incarnation, the doctrine that the one person, Jesus, was both fully human and fully divine. What is peculiar to these authors is that they think the rejection of docetism involves also the rejection of its contrary, the incarnation. At least I think they are rejecting it. Professor Maurice Wiles at first talks definitely about a “Christianity without incarnation”, but then goes on to speak of it as a ‘myth’, and it is not at all clear whether a myth is always meant to be an untruth. Sometimes the authors merely seem to mean by ‘mythical’ the same as ‘subject to the limitations of religious language.’
How Historical is Genesis 1‐11?
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

The question arises, because Christian tradition has always assumed that these chapters are as historical as any of the historical books of the bible. For most of its course tradition has assumed this in a rather naive, quasi-fundamentalist way. The naivety of fundamentalism or literalism, is no longer intellectually possible in the light of modem historical, archaeological, palaeontological and literary criticism. But does this formidable array of criticism compel us to abandon the traditional assumption altogether?I think not. Theologically we are still committed, not merely by the decisions of the Roman Biblical Commission, of which the latest (that I know of) and most genial is the letter to Cardinal Suhard of Paris, 16th Jan. 1948, but by the whole weight of theological tradition and the most up-to-date biblical hermeneutics (e.g. that of von Rad), to maintaining that these chapters are historical in some way or another: but it will be in a very peculiar way which the modern professional historian will not easily recognise as historical.Rahner makes a distinction between historical in form and historical in content. It is a useful distinction to start from. To illustrate: a narrative which is historical in content but not in form would be Nathan’s parable to David, 2 Sam. 12. Its content in fact describes what David had done, but in form it was a kind of parable. It was history disguised as fiction. A narrative that is historical in form but not in content would be something like a historical novel—fiction disguised as history.
Schooling or Education?: Africa
Authors: Visocchi Tony 
Published: July 2007

Priests working in parishes up .and down the length and breadth of Africa are faced with a severe, and ever increasing problem. They refer to it as the “school leavers’ problem”, meaning the thousands of disaffected and frustrated primary and secondary school graduates, who having completed their course of education, and armed with their hard-earned certificates find themselves unemployed and unemployable. They may have spent years in the city, have tried every avenue and have drifted either into delinquency and crime, or have gravitated back to the “bush”.They went to school in the hope that school would free them from the grinding poverty of the rural areas, by obtaining employment hopefully in town, and even more hopefully, white-collared: an easier and more interesting life than their parents’ was their goal. Their parents looked on this as an investment, insurance against their old age or infirmity, and likely as not made tremendous sacrifices to send them, equip them, and keep them there.It rarely .turns out that way and years of expense, sacrifice and effort dissipate themselves as the graduates slip back into, at best, semi-literacy. Their styles and standards of living, their outlook and ambitions are often indistinguishable from those of their “less-fortunate” brothers and sisters who did not go to school.For decades, and often in the teeth of Colonial opposition, the Churches founded schools, and brought “education” to the furthermost comers of Africa. To do this the Church, as much as the parents themselves, made huge sacrifices of personnel and material, time and money.
Uranisme et Unisexualité: A Late Victorian View of Homosexuality
Authors: Healy P.W.J. 
Published: July 2007

Between November 1927 and January 1929 there appeared in the pages of the then Blackfriars a series of articles under the name of Alexander Michaelson. They were mostly biographical vignettes in which the author recalled famous friends and acquaintances of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties: Browning, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Wilde, Beardsley. Alexander Michaelson was the pseudonym of Mark Andre Raffalovich, a wealthy man of letters and benefactor of the Church and, in particular, of the Dominican Order. Five years after the appearance of the last Blackfriars essay he died at the age of seventy-four. His family were Russian emigre Jews who had settled in Paris the year before his birth in 1864. There he had been brought up in the world of the salon; Claude Bernard, Henri Bergson, Ernest Renan, Sarah Bernhardt were among the visitors to the Raffalovich’s house.In 1882 he was despatched to England, with his former governess as housekeeper, to complete his education. Instead of going up to university, the young man sought introductions to the literary and artistic men of the day. He would write articles on authors he admired, publish them in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, and send copies to their unsuspecting subjects. Thus he met R. L. Stevenson, Swinburne and Meredith. Others he met more conventionally; but almost always his friendships were marked by precociousness on his part.His acquaintance with Wilde turned sour. Wilde reviewed a book of Raffalovich’s verse; it was not so much a bad review as a mocking one, and in the published correspondence which ensued Raffalovich was made to look more of a fool. And, of course, there was Wilde’s stinging wit which so aptly showed up pretension. The story went about of how Wilde and some friends, having been invited to lunch, arrived at Raffalovich’s front door and asked the butler for a table for six.
Questioning Critics: Hardy and Williams
Authors: Sharratt Bernard 
Published: July 2007

Literary criticism seems to be in an odd cul-de-sac at present. Two recent works by widely-esteemed critics can serve as pointers to a persistent paradox. In reviewing together the latest offerings of Barbara Hardy and Raymond Williams I don’t intend to do ‘justice’ to each volume individually, but to suggest, by their juxtaposition, a curious state of affairs: the simultaneous importance and irrelevance of ‘literature’—its importance within an educational apparatus and as the focus of a political project, and yet a concomitant sense that neither critic, or approach, has much to say about why anyone might actually continue reading poems and novels anyway. As a link, or diversion, I also glance at an aspect of Walter Benjamin’s work still largely unappreciated—his criticism of Brecht’s poems.Barbara Hardy entitles her book The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry. Almost every word here invites comment, but the most provocative is “advantage”. The ‘advantage of lyric in itself is its concentrated and patterned expression of feeling. This advantage is negatively definable: the lyric does not provide an explanation, judgment or narrative; what it does provide is feeling, alone and without histories or characters.’ (p.1). The absence of history and explanation is frequently noted, and approved; an interesting example is the quoting (p.5) of Quiller-Couch’s cut-down version of Emily Bronte’s long poem Julian M. and A.G. Rochelle: in Q’s version ‘virtually all we are left with is the intense lyrical evocation of Hope’ and this turns a narrative of tyranny and physical imprisonment into a lyric of ‘spirit tormented by flesh’ (p.6). Specific response becomes transmuted into metaphysical universality.
The Key to Marx's Value Theory
Authors: Young Bruce 
Published: July 2007

The first volume of Les “Senders Escarpes” de Karl Marx, by Paul-Dominique Dognin, Editions du Cerf (vol I 47F; vol II 35F) contains the German text of the original (first edition) version of Chapter I of Capital and of its appendix, as well as French translations of them, together with the fourth edition version (in French translation only). Dognin’s own critical commentary on these texts makes up the second volume of his book.The first edition version of Chapter I differs considerably from the fourth, and from the standard French and English translations. The differences relate especially to the presentation of the distinction between “value” and “exchange-value”. Dognin argues that these changes are symptomatic of fundamental difficulties in Marx’s theory of value, difficulties which he analyses at length in his commentary. Although there is little that is original in Dognin’s criticisms—they will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Bohm-Bawerk’s critique —I think he is right to highlight the importance of the value/exchange-value distinction. In my view, however, Marx’s distinction is symptomatic, not of contradictions within his theory of value, but of contradictions between that theory and that of classical economics: by means of this distinction, Marx makes a definite break with classical economics and inaugurates a new science of his own. Seen in this light, the value/ exchange-value distinction is the key to Marx’s value theory as a whole, and hence is much more important than the use-value/exchange-value distinction to which so much attention is usually given. It is, indeed, Dognin’s failure to grasp the nature of the value/exchange-value distinction which vitiates his critique of Marx, a critique which is, however, quite standard in the neoclassical tradition. Let us, then, look at the distinction itself in some detail.
Faith and Experience II: Charisms and Ecclesiology
Authors: Tugwell Simon 
Published: July 2007

Heribert Mühlen’s “Introduction to the Basic Christian Experience” (wrongly entitled in English A Charismatic Theology), though not intended as a work of speculative theology, is nonetheless a theological work of considerable interest—probably the first so far to come from within Catholic Pentecostalism.As we should infer from the very title of his book, one of Mühlen’s fundamental beliefs is that there is such a thing as “the basic Christian experience”. It is the “experience” of a real presence of Christ in his life, consequent upon a personal decision for Christ, that makes a man a Christian (p. 43). For Mühlen this can never be simply a private conversion experience, however: there is no experience of Christ which does not involve an experience of the church. The essential Christian experience is Jesus’s own experience of the Spirit, continued historically in the church. According to Mühlen, Jesus gave the church, not just the Holy Spirit, but his own experience of the Spirit. Reference is also made to Jesus’s experience of his Father, though it is not quite clear whether Mühlen believes the church to be the continuation of this experience too. He does maintain that the kernel of Jesus’s kerygma is his “Abba-experience”. He also says that “God gives us his experience of himself”. He regards it as an important sign that God is renewing his church that “the experience of the primitive church has today been bestowed in an historically new and surprising way to many Christians in all Churches” (p. 94).
The Minster as Textbook
Authors: Nuttgens Patrick 
Published: July 2007

York Minster has always provoked mixed feelings. When I first saw it as a schoolboy, and wandered around it with my father, looking at as much of the stained glass as we could see (not all of it having been put back after the Second World War) and making rough jokes about some of the classical oddities inserted by Sir Albert Richardson or his eighteenth century predecessors, I came away with a lasting impression of gloom. It now seems a false impression, though there are many people in York who regret the recent changes that have effaced that brooding presence. But what is also certain is that the Minster has undergone a spectacular piece of renewal and that the exploration of it is a new and exciting experience.It is not just the structural transformation, devised and supervised by Bernard Feilden and his professional colleagues, fundamental and important in the development of the science of restoration as it is; it is not just the cleaning and restoration of the whole Minster so that it shines like new (even the crumbling west facade, probably the main victim of an enthusiastic facelift); it is not just the new role of the Minster in attracting a vast increase in the number of tourists to the city, so that the Minster now welcomes, as tourists and worshippers, more people in a year than ever before; it is also very much the fact that the nature of the investigation and restoration—and the presence in the chapter of some outstanding scholars as well as the founding of the new university of York whose outstanding department is history—has sparked off a massive investigation of both the Minster itself as a historical document and the mass of documentation available in York, in archives now carefully preserved.
Is Debate Over Development of Doctrine a Dead Duck?
Authors: Woodhouse H. F. 
Published: July 2007

In this article I return to a theme on which I wrote almost a decade ago in an essay entitled ‘The Holy Spirit, Authority and Doctrinal Development’. Later on I shall refer to points in the essay to illustrate my two main points in this article, (i) that doctrinal development is less a controversial matter than it was, (ii) that we can, I believe, bypass it if we pay proper heed to the more basic issues of pneumatology and of authority.So to my title. Those who like duck to eat are constantly disappointed for there is little meat on a duck. So it will be with this article but I hope the meat there is will be nourishing. I am rather concerned that the bones should be prominent.The first reason I would suggest that the development of doctrine is becoming, if it has not already become, a dead duck is that the debate is not being carried forward much. After I had written the article to which I have referred I did a good bit of research on the situation and I found it was almost impossible to continue writing in any profitable way upon the topic. (I have seen little fresh or additional up to the present.) If I had written further over the last few years I would be repeating myself. Secondly, the most essential factor in development of doctrine, namely, the operation of the Holy Spirit, seems very difficult to discern. Criteria about development and how we could know that it was the Spirit who was acting and also for deciding on satisfactory tests of right and lawful development were varied. There was extreme difficulty in getting areas of agreement. This point has been brought out in my earlier essay and in some of Rahner’s essays to which I referred there.
To Suffer or to Reign?
Authors: Cyprian Terry 
Published: July 2007

Because of the prominent role of individual Christians in South Africa who have opposed apartheid and exposed its brutalities, we are accustomed today to think of the South African Church as one of the most unrelenting opponents of racial oppression in that country. From the gadfly missionary Dr. John Philip of the 1820’s to Dr. Beyers Naude of our own time, there stretches a tradition of bold prophetic speaking. However, a closer look at the role of the Church, especially from the viewpoint of some Latin American theologians, raises some disturbing questions about the South African Church’s past history and present situation, the more so when the comments of those who are speaking prophetically today are taken into account.There are interesting parallels between the development in society of the Churches of Latin America and South Africa. Argentinian theologian Jose Miguez Bonino writes that regarding his subcontinent:“. . . there is no doubt that the Christian faith, co-opted into the total Spanish national-religious project, played the role of legitimizing and sacralizing the social and economic structure implanted in America. It served as an ideology to cover and justify existing conditions. God in his heaven, the king of Spain on his throne, the landlord in his residence: this was ‘the order of things’, God’s eternal and sacred order.”Protestantism was a late arrival in Latin America, entering between 1870-1890. Its arrival helped undermine the overwhelming predominance of Roman Catholicism, but in a way that far from liberating the poor, instead subtly imprisoned them further.
The ‘Subject’ and the ‘Self’: A Note on Barker's Cartesianism
Authors: Turner Denys 
Published: July 2007

The argument / have with Barker is by now played out, at any rate over “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” (New Blackfriars, June 1975). From the start I knew that that article had its shortcomings. But it is, essentially, corrigible. I think I know what I wanted to say in it, though I acknowledge that what I wrote did not always say it. Barker, however, has a habit of regarding what I write as just a very extended parapraxis, all the surface deficiencies being but symptoms of the fact that what I want to say is, literally, unspeakable. The very fact that I should want to put down these deficiencies of formulation to subjective conditions of production would itself be symptomatic of the degree to which I am held in thrall by the ideology which is the true author of what I wrote— the ideology according to which “subjects” (e.g. Denys Turner) are the authors of, among other things, texts. All this would be by the way were it not that, in Barker’s view, it is its captivation by the ideology of “the subject” which is the chief ideological element in Christianity and the chief reason why Marxist science cannot debate Christianity. For the ideological nature of Christianity makes it the (potential) object of Marxist science, not a discourse it can debate with on equal but different terms.I have no objection in principle to this apparently high-handed procedure, analogous as it is to the Freudian habit of giving Freudian explanations of the critics of Freudian theory. After all I myself argued (“Marxism, Christianity and Morality”, New Blackfriars, April 1977, p. 191), that the mark of any science is its capacity not merely to explain what ideology fails to explain but also to explain why ideology cannot explain what it fails to explain.
Sense and Word in Liturgical Language
Authors: Birch David 
Published: July 2007

When E. Gordon Craig in 1922 wrote,“To man words come easiest and earliest to lie with. So that now in this twentieth century nearly all speech is a lie. I would not go so far as to laughingly admit that speech of that kind was an art. I should rather call it a mess.”he was making the distinction between the role of language as a vehicle for communicating essentials, and the role of language as an art-form. As a theatrical designer who was to revolutionise traditional concepts of theatre, he was keenly aware of the difficulty in using language to represent exactly those things we wish to communicate to others. One word may have a variety of meanings, or because of constant use in a multitude of ways, have lost much of its original meaning. Reliance on the word itself is therefore not always the best or most effective guide to meaning. He continues:“Once a merely natural thing—it became an art; but when it exceeded its natural term of life, having talked itself hoarse-black in the face—the silver of speech rubbed off and we came to the lead underneath, and inside the lead . . . lies.”