bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Philosophers and the China Shop: A Reply to Brian Davies
Authors: Duffy Eamon 
Published: July 2007

Rallying to the flag first raised by Professor Michael Dummett a year ago, Fr Brian Davies has parachuted heavily down on what I suppose we must call the Dummett-Lash battlefield, though the theological poppies have now been nourished by the blood of other combatants. Not least of these is Fr Davies’ own Provincial, Timothy Radcliffe.In ‘Why Should We Believe It?’ (printed in last month’s New Blackfriars, pp. 360—368) Fr Davies is clearly worried by Fr Radcliffe’s opinion that a Catholic is ‘not committed to saying that any single saying of Jesus in the Gospels exactly reports the words of that historical person’ since it is possible ‘that in every instance his sayings have been redacted in the light of his subsequent death and resurrection, and of the theological concerns of the gospel writers’ (NB March 1988, p. 118). On the contrary, according to Fr Davies, Catholic faith depends for its very existence on clear reportage of Jesus’ own words. The Gospels ‘make some pretty extraordinary claims’: that Jesus is God incarnate, for example, and that by his cross and resurrection he conquered sin and death. We can only believe such extraordinary things if ‘sufficiently informed by one who is God and by one who knows what he is talking about’ (pp 361—6).It would, I assume, be universally agreed among Catholics that we need to be ‘sufficiently informed’ by God about what is saving truth. The debate turns on just what might count as being ‘sufficiently informed’.
The Goodness of God and the Conception of Hell
Authors: Graham Gordon 
Published: July 2007

One interesting feature of contemporary Christianity is that some of the ideas which play a central part in popular religion, play little or no part in religious thought. There are in fact a good many such ideas (demonology and the active intervention of the saints for instance), but in this paper I am concerned with only one, namely ‘hell’. The idea of hell figures prominently in the preaching and beliefs of many evangelical Christians, the popularity of whose Christianity can hardly be doubted. Yet for the most part hell has no place in modern theology. It is not just that modern theologians are inclined to downplay the idea, or give ‘liberal’ interpretations of it, as might be said to be the case with miracles or the Resurrection, but that very largely they are simply silent about it.It should be obvious that this is a feature peculiar to modern Christian thought. Earlier ages talked a great deal about hell, and even the Victorians made extensive use of it, so it is interesting to ask why this should be so. Conceived of as a question about the mentality of religious thinkers and their changing social role, any answer to it must obviously involve psychological and sociological investigation of some sophistication, but this is not the only way we can address the matter. There is at least some reason to think that the concept of hell has dropped out of theological discourse, whatever its place in popular religion, just because theologians and philosophers think it ought to.
When the Gates of Hell Fall Down: towards a modern theology of the justice of God
Authors: Gunton Colin 
Published: July 2007

The teaching that the wicked will go to hell has about it a certain logic and justice. We may not think that a loving God would wish to consign anyone to eternal torment, but that the final destination of the evil should be different from that of the good is not, on the face of the matter, unjust. A case for the extinction of the utterly evil was argued by Ulrich Simon in his Theology of Auschwitz. May it not be the case that some become so corrupted by the evil of their ways that there is nothing left for them but annihilation? ‘Extirpation is congruous with the feverish activists in annihilation. Damnation is the silent seal on their wickedness. Unforgiven and unforgivable they go to the doom which their own fantasies and crimes have already sought on earth.’ Could justice demand anything less?Why then has the doctrine of hell fallen into such disrepute? The main cause is that we have lost the concept of the justice of God. A number of reasons for the loss can be listed. First, there is the form the doctrine often took in the tradition. At least from the time of Augustine there has been a tendency to teach that the justice of God consisted in the fact that he could, had he wished, have consigned the whole of the human race to hell, but that he graciously (gratuitously?) saved a few brands from the burning. It is not wholly an accident that folk belief has often held that an unbaptised child will go to hell.
The Value of Literature: II—Shakespeare and the Tudor Homilies
Authors: Finn Richard 
Published: July 2007

‘Similitude of manners’, wrote Sir Thomas More in his Life of John Picus, ‘is a cause of love and friendship: a likeness of conditions is (as Appollonius saith) an affinity’. In the first of these articles looking at the uncertain place of literature within our modem culture, and within a Christian cultivation of the virtues, I tried to show how Chaucer’s art restores friendships which have been rent by our denial of common human weakness, a likeness of conditions in frailty and sin. I suggested that Chaucer invites his readers to overcome a desire to pass sentence on their neighbours in two ways: firstly he allows us to hear our sentences on the lips of his characters, and to see the violence such dismissive voices call into being; secondly he asks us to give voice to others’ sins and, in giving voice to them, hear ourselves and our own weakness. Chaucer thus creates a language of communal forgiveness as he trains our ear, and in the laughter he raises that language effects what it signifies. In that sense we can agree with David Jones that art is sacramental, and add that literature imparts an ethics of speech.Here I shall be pursuing this view of art as contributing to an ethics of speech, something sadly neglected by most of today’s Catholic moral theologians. Apparently mesmerized by the bits and pieces of human anatomy below the belt, they remain uninspired by our vocal chords. The past tells a different story.
Modernists and the Modern Environmental Crisis
Authors: Echlin Edward P. 
Published: July 2007

‘The crisis of the present,’ says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘is the long deferred resumption of the crisis of modernism.’If by the resumption of modernism Ratzinger means the method Catholic modernists used in addressing the religious crisis of their time we may fervently hope modernism does resume. For the method of the modernists is useful to us as we face an unprecedented environmental crisis.Let us make no mistake. We are not engaged in academic theological gamesmanship. We are facing, although career churchmen are hesitant to admit it, a crisis which Jürgen Moltmann well describes as ‘a crisis so comprehensive and irreversible that it cannot unjustly be described as apocalyptic. It is not a temporary crisis. As far as we can judge, it is the beginning of a life and death struggle for creation on this earth.’In 1918, when Tyrrell had been dead for nine years and Loisy had faded from the Church, Von Hügel expressed in a letter to Miss Maude Petrie, Tyrrell’s literary executor, his awareness that the method of modernism was permanently useful and even necessary, ‘to interpret it (the faith) according to what appears the best and the most abiding elements in the philosophy and the scholarship and science of the later and latest times.’A cogent case could be made that Pope John XXIII was himself to some extent influenced by the method of the modernists. Even some of his expressions were akin to theirs. He spoke of ‘opening the windows’ of the Church to the modern world.
Understanding Thatcherism
Authors: Boyle Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

A year ago, in an editorial, New Blackfriars was complaining that the theological understanding of what Mrs Thatcher had been doing to Britain had ‘hardly even begun’.The complaint could have been generalized. To judge by the standard of the public debate at the 1987 General Election, any in-depth understanding of Thatcherism, despite the decade of evidence on which it could draw, was non-existent. Even now it is still in its infancy. A government which claims to have wrested intellectual supremacy from the left and to be full of ideas, and which is if anything rather pleased with itself when its opponents accuse it of sacrificing something or other on the altar of ideology, has nonetheless provoked no coherent theoretical critique to speak of from its public opponents, hardly anything other than mesmerized horror.Is it the indisputable authority of seemingly unending power that has reduced the critical mind to silence? Or is Mrs Thatcher perhaps right? Has a philosopher-queen inaugurated a republic in which all the questions of political economy, having been answered, no longer need to be asked?Hardly. The massive paradoxes of the Thatcher years—their blatancy must partly account for the opposition’s bewilderment— demand explanation, and, like any explanation of human affairs, that explanation will of course have a theological dimension. I am not, though, a theologian. Surely, however, the launching of a really satisfactory ‘theological critique’ of Thatcherism at least partly depends on the opening up of a rather more general discussion of Thatcherism, and what I am offering here is a contritibution to this.
The Certainty of Change: questioning Brown's answer to Dummett's problem
Authors: Gifford Paul J. 
Published: July 2007

The seductions of centrismProfessor Michael Dummett, in the New Blackfriars article last October which opened what is now quite a long debate, questioned the propriety of Catholic theologians espousing views which contradict traditional Catholic beliefs; to contradict such pronouncements in his opinion makes nonsense of belonging to the Catholic Church. It was Thomas Sheehan’s 1984 article, arguing that the ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars is irreconcilable with traditional or official Catholicism, which prompted Dummett to write in the first place, and it has been mentioned several times since then in the debate.Here I would like to draw attention to the way an eminent scripture scholar, Professor Raymond Brown, responds to Sheehan’s charge. Brown is a particularly good example to consider, firstly because he has frequently addressed himself to precisely this issue, but mainly because among Catholic scholars his standing is unquestioned. Professor Nicholas Lash, in his response to Dummett, wrote—surely correctly—that Brown’s ‘massive erudition, unswerving loyalty to Catholic Christianity, and endless painstaking judiciousness of judgement have made him (in seminaries and elsewhere) the most widely respected Catholic New Testament scholar in the English-speaking world’.Consider how Brown addresses this problem of the apparent contradiction between traditional Catholicism and what biblical scholars are now saying. First, he repudiates the picture of Catholic scholarship painted by Sheehan. The ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic scholars, says Brown, is a figment of Sheehan’s imagination. As he says again in a March letter quoted by Fr Timothy Radcliffe in ‘Interrogating the Consensus’, the vast majority of Catholic scholars are ‘centrists’, like himself.
Gardens of Delight and Deception
Authors: Märkus Thomas A. 
Published: July 2007

In a recent issue of Building Design, a journal which every architect in Britain receives, a review of Glasgow’s Garden Festival comments that one would expect it to be about gardens but that it turns out to be also about architecture.A few weeks earlier the Tate Gallery organised a one-day symposium on art, architecture and Deconstruction. A piece of architecture which the philosopher Jacques Derrida, inventor of Deconstruction, claims as a rare incarnation of his ideas is the Parc de la Villette in Paris, designed by the architect Bernard Tschumi with Derrida’s, and other architects’, participation. One would expect such an architectural ‘demonstration project’ to be about buildings but in fact it turns out to be also about gardens.And both are also about science and industry.I want to ask some questions about this conflation of buildings, gardens and technology. My argument asks whether the technique of Deconstruction is applicable, even meaningful, in the context of architecture; it ‘deconstructs’ Derrida’s writing about La Villette, and finally tries to answer the question about buildings, nature, art and technology in terms of power.Deconstructing architectureThe best way to start the discussion is to start where Derrida starts—with language, and especially the written text. Much of Derrida’s work questions the logocentric basis of Western philosophy. That is, the idea that speech, one step away from directly perceived truth, is the pure form of argument, and the written text, one further step away, is a dangerous and second-best necessary evil, brought into being by the need to give philosophy a history.
The Difficulty of Making Sense
Authors: Lash Nicholas 
Published: July 2007

To believe in the ‘infallibility’ of the Church is not to suppose that we are reliable, but that God is. It is to believe in the effectiveness of God’s act, God’s coming as Word and Spirit to the world he makes and, making it, makes his own, his dwelling-place, his temple. It is to believe that this effectiveness is un-failingly exhibited in the truthfulness of witness borne, in word and action, to this fact, this truth, this Word of life. But this is not easy to believe because the evidence surrounds us on every side that we have been given licence to corrupt, to falsify and to destroy—through egotism, carelessness, incompetence and greed—ourselves, each other, and the world.We know what needs to be said: there is (for example) nothing obscure or unfamiliar about the Apostles’ Creed. But how to say what must be said in such a manner as to enable our contemporaries (and ourselves!) to hear, in our utterance of it, that one word for all seasons, one same surprising Gospel for every creature—and not some alien, strange, purely particular and puzzling tale, some kind of ancient folklore or science fiction—this is no easy matter. The difficulty of making sense, of making Christian sense, is the difficulty of so expressing the content of the Creed, in word and action, as effectively and properly to clarify, to throw some light upon, our various circumstances, responsibilities and predicament: our politics and science, our poetry and plans and hopes and fears, our private pains and public enterprises, our disease, and happiness, and tedium, and death.This task, of saying simply what needs simply to be said, this teaching task, this ‘magisterium’ that is the Church’s mission, can only properly be executed in the measure that, always and everywhere, we are attentive, listening before we speak, inquiring before we answer, watchful. This is not a recommendation to regress to pre-critical patterns of interpretative practice. There is no going back upon the lessons learnt in the experiment of modernity, the freedoms (in principle) secured. It is, rather, an invitation to move towards post-critical maturity and, in so doing, to find fresh sense in ancient truth.
Christianity and the Limits of Tragedy
Authors: Worthen J.F. 
Published: July 2007

I wish to argue for two related theses. Both concern the debate that has been conducted in recent times about the compatibility of Christianity and tragedy; as typical protagonists we might select Steiner from the side of those viewing an unbridgeable chasm, and MacKinnon as a seeker of common ground. The first thesis for which I am arguing is that much Christian defence of the compatibility of the tragic insight with the truth of the gospel too easily accepts the definition of the tragic insight supplied by critics such as Steiner; a brief survey of actual texts, for the purposes of this article the works of the Greek tragedians, uncovers a far more intricate and ambiguous picture. The study of this new picture paves the way for the second thesis: that the core of the good news, the resurrection of the crucified one, only constitutes the negation of tragedy in so far as it remains its perfection, its completion, its limit, and to that extent its affirmation.At the heart of the argument lies the question of evil, of how, if at all, it is to be understood. In tragic drama, evil appears with three faces apparently alien to Christian faith: the face of incomprehensibility, the face of ineluctability, and the face of irrevocability. We shall take each of them in turn.As far as the first aspect, the incomprehensibility of evil, is concerned, it would seem that this must be denied by Christianity. Christianity is the religion of a God who is at once transcendent and benevolent, i.e. providential.
Living Stones: A retreat with Palestinian Christians
Authors: Prior Michael 
Published: July 2007

We are told in the First Letter of Peter: ‘Come to him, to that living stone rejected by men, but in God’s sight chosen and precious, and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.’In 1984 Christians in the village of Ibillin, in Galilee, said to a British group of pilgrims that visitors to the Holy Land should not confine themselves to visiting the ancient shrines of past ages; they should also visit the ‘living stones’ of the Land. From this originated the setting-up of an ecumenical organization in Britain called ‘Living Stones’.Last year a group associated with this organization, but predominantly made up of Vincentians (namely, priests of the Congregation of the Mission, founded by St Vincent de Paul), decided to make ‘a retreat through pilgrimage’ in the Holy Land. It was my conviction that the Land, its peoples, and its history combine to provide an extraordinarily powerful context in which to ‘make a retreat’. What would be unique about this one was that it would include meetings with indigenous Christians, living in the throes of the intifada.Some idea of what that meant both for the group and for the Christians that the group met is best conveyed in the words of some of those Christians.
Bullitio and the God beyond God: Meister Eckhart's Trinitarian Theology
Authors: Reynolds P.L. 
Published: July 2007

Two of the most striking and memorable features of Meister Eckhart’s treatment of the Trinity are these. First, in several passages in the Latin works he uses the metaphor of bullitio—literally ‘boiling’ or ‘bubbling’—to explain the inner trinitarian life of the Deity; that is, to explain how and why there is procession within God. Secondly, in several passages in his German sermons he distinguishes between the personal, trinitarian God and a distinctionless, nameless ground or Godhead that transcends this. The latter distinction, apparently, is considered to exist within God: prima facie, at least, the distinction is not merely economic or between ‘God within’ and ‘God without’. My intention in this study is to examine each of these aspects in turn, to suggest how they are related, and to consider what all this can tell us about the general character of Eckhart’s trinitarianism.Our task presents us with a problem which must always arise in the study of Eckhart: that of bringing together the Latin Eckhart with the German Eckhart and attempting to take a unified view, and this while conserving the peculiarities of each. Bullitio is a Latin word and, as far as I know, the notion is applied to the Trinity only in the Latin works. It may be noted, however, that there is a related family of German words such as ûzbruch and ursprunc which Eckhart uses to denote the idea of the supreme fountain-head or source, or the original outpouring, outspringing or outbreak of being. One of the things I wish to suggest in this study is that the distinction between God as Trinity and as Godhead is not made in the Latin works.
What Kind of Relativism?
Authors: Thompson Ross 
Published: July 2007

In his 1976 book New Testament Interpretation in an Historical Age, Denis Nineham advanced the thesis of cultural relativism in theology this way:
While the events of Jesus’ career were such as to demand interpretation in terms of a unique—indeed literally final—divine intervention, given the presuppositions of certain circles in first century Jewish culture, they might not have seemed to demand such an interpretation given different cultural assumptions, for example to a modern western observer if such a one—twentieth century presuppositions and all—could be carried back to first century Palestine on some magic carpet or infernal time machine.Broadly speaking this is the theory that the relation between facts on the one hand and language and interpretation on the other is perpetually shifting. Facts that will demand one kind of description in one cultural context will require a quite different kind in another and conversely a given term or description will mean different things in different contexts.
A Sermon for Low Sunday
Authors: McCabe Herbert 
Published: July 2007

You can take the reports of the resurrection of Christ as literally as you like; you can take them as simple accounts of the historical facts. There are some slight difficulties here because there seem to be some inconsistencies between the different stories, but one thing they all have most certainly in common. None of them says or implies or hints that Jesus simply woke up from death, as from a sleep, and got up and strolled out of the tomb back to ordinary life. There have been people who have said that Jesus did wake up in this way but that was because they thought he had not died, so there wasn’t a real resurrection anyway. Nothing whatever in the New Testament suggests this.If you take the scriptures, the earliest creeds, the writings of the early Fathers, the whole mainstream Christian tradition through the Middle Ages to our own time—you find no one has ever suggested that the resurrection meant the resuscitation of a corpse. For this reason I get a little tired of modern clergymen telling me that this is not what the resurrection is. I never thought it was; my Church never thought it was; nobody has ever thought it was.What we have believed is that Jesus, because of his loving obedience to his Father’s mission, obedience even unto death on the cross, was raised up by his Father through the work of the Spirit, and became transformed, transfigured and is now with us as the living risen Christ.