bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Listening to Middle Eastern Christians
Authors: Ruether Rosemary Radford 
Published: July 2007

Through television Western Christians have recently been exposed to vivid images of the violent repression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. With live ammunition, three-foot clubs and cyanide tear gas, courtesy of the United States, the Palestinian protest of the occupation is being hammered into silence. Once it is silenced, it is hard to know whether Western people will continue to wonder about what is happening to those who are suffering under this occupation.The World Council of Churches, the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians have long since assumed their stances on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. For the World Council and the Vatican, relationships to Judaism and relationship to the state of Israel are separate questions, the one theological, the other political. Generally, both have supported the two-state solution, or the granting of a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fundamentalists, by contrast, are militant supporters of an expanded Israel, based on their reading of Biblical prophecy.The voices which are largely unheard in western Christian circles are those of Middle Eastern Christians themselves. Unlike Western liberal Christians, they generally understand that, because the state of Israel implicitly makes claims based on Hebrew Scripture, these claims must be confronted theologically.One such statement was put together as long ago as 1967 by a group of Middle Eastern Christian theologians, headed by George Khodr, present bishop of Mount Lebanon in the Orthodox Church of Antioch. Entitled What is Required of the Christian Faith Concerning the Palestinian Problem, it lay major emphasis on the spiritual and universal meaning of Christian faith.
Mater Dolorosa, Mater Misericordiae
Authors: Duffy Eamon 
Published: July 2007

Here I want to offer an interpretation of one of the most striking but in some ways least congenial aspects of late medieval English (and European) piety. The late Middle Ages was one of the most exuberant and productive periods of Mariological devotion, which manifested itself in devotional treatises and prayers, in poetry, music and the visual arts. The theological content of much of this, however, is now looked on with some suspicion and incomprehension, and the extraordinary centrality of Mary in the religious consciousness of Christians in the period from Anselm to Luther would now be pretty generally attributed to a defective Christology. Thus the apparently almost desperate late medieval reliance on the Virgin Mary as intercesser, friend of sinners, Mother of Mercy, is often taken to have stemmed from a fear of Christ and a sense of his remoteness from sinful, frail humanity. Christ on the rainbow coming in judgement, the Rex Tremendae Majestatis of the Dies lrae, was the Rex Iustitiae who would weigh men and women by their actions, and before such a dreadful scrutiny, who could stand? The suffering, weak and tempted Christ of the Gethsemene narratives and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the course of the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, and in the millennium of missionary expansion that followed, had been divinised out of his humanity. Catholic Christology, while paying lip-service to that humanity, had succumbed to a practical Nestorianism.Into the vacuum left by this process the longings of the collective Christian heart for an assurance that God was indeed compassionate, tender, understanding, human, forced the figure of Mary, and it was she, not Christ, who came to be addressed as Most Gracious Advocate, the Christian’s Life, Sweetness and Hope.
Theology and Reason
Authors: Dummett Michael 
Published: July 2007

I had anticipated learning from the contributions of others to the debate initiated last autumn in New Blackfriars by Professor Nicholas Lash and me (the debate on what has been called ‘the liberal consensus’) without reentering that debate soon, if ever. The scrupulous courtesy of Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s article in the March issue, in which he discusses whether there is such a ‘consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars, makes it easy to do that. However, I have found it impossible to let the remarks of Mr. Joseph Fitzpatrick in his March article, based on the views of Bernard Lonergan, pass without protest.Mr. Fitzpatrick’s article appears to me to encourage hostility to reason itself. He does not openly declare himself an enemy to reason, and I have no doubt would sincerely repudiate such a charge: but, all the same, what he wrote will surely reinforce hostility to it on the part of others. A large part of his contention is that, in theology, and, by implication, in other disciplines as well, deductive reasoning should be demoted. Anyone who puts forward such a thesis needs to spell out with great care exactly what he means by it if he is not to be taken, or mistaken, for an enemy of reason; and Mr. Fitzpatrick exercises very little care. He objects to ‘the habit among Catholic theologians of arriving at conclusions by often dubious deductive reasoning’ (p. 134). We have here, at the outset of his attack on the use of deductive reasoning in theology, a vital ambiguity.
Thomas Aquinas and the Real Distinction: a re‐evaluation
Authors: Brown Montague 
Published: July 2007

Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in all beings other than God has been the focus of much debate among Thomists. And this is how it should be, for all agree to its central importance in Aquinas’s metaphysics. Is the distinction a deduction we make from our knowledge of God’s essence, or an insight drawn from our experience? And if it is the latter, is this insight from multiplicity to unity based on the inevitable mental distinction we draw between the concept of essence and that of existence, or is it the fruit of a metaphysical penetration of the material things we meet within our world? Let us look first at the argument based on an intuition into God’s simplicity and a deduction from that intuition, and then turn to an examination of the arguments which move from the diversity of our experience to the simplicity of the source of that experience.In the first argument, the claim is that we have a direct insight into being as being, into existence itself, that is, God. ‘Being (esse), insofar as it is being, cannot be diverse.’ If it differs, it must be by something other than it, that is, by particular essences. Is this the main-line argument for the real distinction? Many commentators (among them O’Brien and Fabro) have thought that it is. However, I believe they are mistaken. For the proof as it stands is incomplete, not in failing to offer a conclusion, but in failing to ground its major premise.
New Arms, Old Modes of Thinking
Authors: Kent Bruce 
Published: July 2007

An address (slightly shortened here) given on 19 April, during CoventryPeace Week.Einstein long ago said, ‘With the splitting of the atom everything has changed except our modes of thinking and thus we drift to unparalleled disaster.’ Our modes of thinking—that is the key, yet we change them with the greatest difficulty to meet a new, entirely new, situation. We now have got the power to destroy our world. We can do it slowly by exploitation, tearing up the forests, polluting the seas, piling up nuclear waste and filling even outer space with the dustbins of our technology. Or we can do it quickly. A war no-one expects suddenly starts—confusion reigns, troops panic, a nuclear weapon is fired and the gate to Armageddon opens. This is not a panic scenario. With 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world today it is a perfectly realistic one. We have, in our mad arsenals, something like 6,000 times the fire power of the whole of the Second World War. A cruise missile, made to sound so nice and small and tactical, has a warhead about ten times that of the Hiroshima Bomb—itself over a thousand times more powerful than the largest bomb of the Second World War. Yet our MoD talks about using them ‘to stop the Russians at the eleventh hour’.Years ago the United Nations, in several serious reports, made it clear that this nuclear deterrence on which we put such reliance cannot be a stable system of security.
Eternal Loss
Authors: MacKinnon Donald M. 
Published: July 2007

The most interesting article to come to my notice recently from the religious press appeared in the August 1988 issue of Life and Work, the monthly record of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This issue was largely devoted to the jubilee of the Iona Community, and the Editor had the excellent idea of inviting an assessment of the Community’s achievement from Donald MacLeod, the professor of systematic theology at the (dissenting) Free Church College in Edinburgh. Perceptive, astringent, humorous, always controversial, sometimes (as has been remarked in subsequent correspondence) a little unfair, this article had the supreme merit of puncturing complacency and, at the same time, making important constructive suggestions.Writing of what he sees to be the Community theology, Professor MacLeod says that ‘it has room for the Incarnation but not for the Atonement, and simply cannot bring itself to summon individuals (including the poor) to repentance. Terrified of proselytising, it refuses to evangelise.’ While such a tendency may characterize those who have been touched by the emphases of the Iona Community, it may be said that in the Christian world at large we have to reckon with a passionate renewal of traditional, even fundamentalist, Evangelical teaching. But what gives Professor MacLeod’s remark its peculiar point is the fact that it is addressed sympathetically to those whose theological sophistication may have immunised them against serious engagement with the themes of, for instance, A.M. Toplady’s classic hymn Rock of Ages:
Thinking on the Last Things
Authors: McLean Teresa 
Published: July 2007

The four last things are death, judgement, heaven and hell, of which only one is certain: the first. Death is the key to the four last things, and thinking about death is the key to the devotion based on the four last things which flourished in a small way at various times and places during the middle ages, and in a changed form in counter-reformation Europe.Here I am not writing about the last things themselves, but about the devotion, and, even then, not about the counter-reformation devotion, which was part of a different world from the one in which the mediaeval devotion flourished, and had a completely different significance. I want to look at the four last things in the middle ages, as one devotional subject with the emphasis changing from one to another of its constituent parts so that it acted as a barometer for the mood and atmosphere in the Church.In the last twenty years or so thinking on the four last things has had something of a revival and has, I believe, again been reflecting the Church’s current moods, though in traditional style.Possibly the most noticeable feature of this devotion, or subject for contemplation, is that it has only been really popular when the religious atmosphere has been restless and when there has been criticism of the established Church to the point of disillusionment. Its popularity has also been related to concern for the individual soul. It has only been in the last few years that theologians have tried to combine communal and personal salvation in a devotion on the four last things.
What Chance for Ecumenism?
Authors: Dummett Michael 
Published: July 2007

Editor: It was Professor Michael Dummett who, fourteen months ago, with his controversial article ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, started the sharpest debate that has run in our pages for many years, and we are here affording Professor Dummett the final word. However, although we are now closing this debate, many of the same issues will be touched on again (if from rather a different angle) in the special issue which we will be publishing in February, ‘What Counts as Catholic Teaching?’. Rowan Williams, Nicholas Lash, Edmund Hill OP, Timothy Radcliffe OP and Paul Parvis OP will be contributing to this. Later in the year Dominican Conferences will be mounting a conference based on it.From the discussion in the pages of New Blackfriars that has followed on my article of October 1987, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, I have learned much. Half of my article was devoted to the prospects of reunion with the Orthodox; and from the fact that none of the commentators has so much as mentioned that half, I conclude that anxiety for such reunion is not acute among the British Catholic intellegentsia. I think this attitude to it is mistaken: it is among our most urgent needs. Since the schism, the Catholic Church has been, intellectually and spiritually, a crippled body, paralysed, as it were, down the whole of one side: we need once more to become one with Eastern Christians for the sake of our own health, at least as much as for their advantage.
Aquinas's Quodlibet XII, qu. 14
Authors: Moonan Lawrence 
Published: July 2007

Among the authentic writings of St Thomas Aquinas is one, addressed to the question: Utrum veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem? (‘Is the truth is stronger, when you compare it with wine, with the king, and with a woman?’) Slight as it is, it reveals both an attitude and a sophisticated approach to university education, which it would do us no harm to reflect on.The piece is quite literally a quodlibet, which in modern usage sounds as though it ought to be a trifling thing anyway, an intellectual bagatelle. The question considered here, you may think, confirms as much. In fact the Disputatio de quolibet was something of a high-point in the intellectual life of the faculty in which it was held. And we find there, much more typically, the mature thought of the faculty’s most eminent teachers. But we do find bagatelles too, and perhaps even that, or the reasons behind it, can be instructive.In medieval universities, the teaching was directed by a double aim: to impart coherent and substantiated bodies of knowledge, scientias; and to instruct in crafts in which those sciences could not only be developed, but could be put to use. To instruct, as the statutes sometimes put it, in the usus scientiarum. In accordance with this aim, there were two main types of teaching-vehicle. One was the lecture (lectio), in which coherent bodies of knowledge could be transmitted economically and in a context minimising distortion in transmission.
Reading, Writing, and Aquinas
Authors: Swanston Hamish F.G. 
Published: July 2007

Those whose enthusiasm for exploring the interweaving of religion and literature has encouraged them to reconstruct the history of theology so that the great tradition runs from Jesus’ parables and the Gospels through, say, Justin’s tale of the old man on the beach and Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the ‘Dream of the Rood’ and the Grail Cycle, the novels of George Eliot and of Cardinal Wiseman, up to some manageable modern poet, have usually not found a place for the Schoolmen. Even those who content themselves with considerations of theologians as readers, and whose topics are illustrated by references to Paul’s reorganization of Menenius’ fable of the talking stomach, to Luther’s likening of the theologian to the literary critic who elucidates the Georgies, and to that most interesting and attractive of modern popes, John Paul I, writing fan letters to Mark Twain and Dickens as well as to Jesus, rarely bring even Aquinas into their conversation. The rest of us may pause at this. Willing enough, it may be, to get along without Albert and Biel, not feeling called to defend even Duns Scotus usque ad effusionem sanguinis, we would not think it respectable to surrender Aquinas.It would be improper, certainly, to rummage in the Summa Theologiae for immediately modern answers to particular questions, but it must be in order to expect a theologian as methodically sensitive as Aquinas to have meditated on the general topic of the relation of the forms of a theological science to the literary forms he encountered in Scripture.
Are Homosexuals Sick?
Authors: Moore Gareth 
Published: July 2007

Recently in the Church a particular way of talking about homosexuals has become popular. Talk of perversion, sins against nature, and so on, has been less to the fore, giving way to a quasi-medical vocabulary, and a way of talking about gay people has developed which is more consonant with modern thinking. Now they are not so much wicked as sick; they suffer from something called ‘the homosexual condition’. It is not so much that they commit horrible and disgusting sins as that, unfortunately and through no fault of their own, they have a tendency or disposition to perform such acts. It is still a morally bad thing if they actually give way to this tendency, but it is not sinful that they have it; it is like a tumour in their moral insides. Thus homosexuality was described as a ‘condition’ in the 1975 Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics:A distinction is drawn ... between homosexuals whose tendency is ... transitory or at least not incurable: and homosexuals who are definitively such because of some kind of innate instinct or a pathological constitution judged to be incurable.There are many kinds of condition; we speak of social conditions, economic conditions, conditions of hygiene, and so on. But here it is the medical condition that is being taken as a model for homosexuality. That is clear from the reference to possibilities of cure and to ‘pathological constitution’.
Civil Disobedience: A Sign for Jonah
Authors: Eggleston Barbara , Finn Richard 
Published: July 2007

We cannot escape the fact that at USAF Upper Heyford people are ready to kill the innocent. That readiness is at the heart of our deterrent policy. And if we support that policy, acquiesce in these plans, then that readiness to kill the innocent, however reluctantly, is in our hearts also. We harden our hearts. I think we can best explain why we did the limited and public damage that we did by telling a short Bible story, about that reluctant prophet Jonah. He too is hard-hearted. He wants to see Nineveh destroyed, even when the people have repented. He is cross with the God who has mercy on them. So God causes a gourd, a castor-oil plant, to grow up and shelter Jonah. And then God destroys it. And Jonah is furious.Then God says:
‘You had pity on the plant for which you did not labour, which you did not make grow, which sprouted in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left...?’(4—10f.)
Tradition and Creativity: The Paradigm of the New Testament
Authors: Radcliffe Timothy 
Published: July 2007

What must I believe to be a Catholic? Catholicism is a highly variegated phenomenon, with an extraordinary diversity of beliefs, practices and traditions. Is this Tradition an inheritance to be cherished, or a stifling burden?This question becomes especially acute when the Church tries to discover its identity in a new culture or society, as when Paul brought Christianity to the world of the Greek city, or, in our own day, when we ask what it might mean to be a Catholic in monetarist Britain. One way to answer this question would be to scrutinise the Tradition, to see if one can discern an essence that must be preserved, while leaving one some freedom to be creative. Clifford Longley recently described a liberal conservative theologian, such as Karl Rahner, as one who ‘sits under obedience to Tradition, and applies his intellectual ingenuity to the negotiation of as much freedom as can be justified within those limits.’ Many Catholics can identify with that picture. But I would suggest that if one looks at the genesis of the New Testament one can discover a different paradigm of the relationship between tradition and creativity, fidelity and freedom.There were several moments between the time of Jesus and the canonisation of the New Testament when the Church was faced sharply with the question: What must we believe? What in the inherited tradition must be preserved? This was so with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, with the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century, and with the emergence of the Great Church in the second to fourth centuries.
Who does the Teaching in the Church?
Authors: Hill Edmund 
Published: July 2007

The semi-official answer to this question, ‘Who does the teaching in the Church?’, the answer that would be given by the average official of the Roman Curia, or the average Catholic bishop, would probably be that it done by a rather mysterious entity called ‘the Magisterium’ (or, with more formal emphasis, ‘the sacred Magisterium’). By this is meant, in theory/practice, ‘the pope and the bishops’, and in practice/practice, the Holy See.The notion that the teaching of doctrine is the exclusive preserve, privilege and duty of the pope and bishops is bizarre, surely. I mean, I doubt if the pope or any of the bishops were themselves taught their catechism, before they reached their present exalted office, by popes or bishops in illo tempore—or that the catechisms they were taught from were actually compiled by any pope or bishop.This distortion of reality arises from the application of the word ‘magisterium’ (which means ‘mastery’ or ‘the status and function of a master’) to the traditional and authentic Catholic doctrine that final authority in matters of doctrine, the final judgment where there is controversy, is the responsibility and right of the pope and the bishops. The use, or rather misuse, of the word ‘magisterium’ in this sense is very recent in the history of theology. Its first and comparatively innocuous employment in an official document is to be found in Gregory XVI’s brief Dum acerbissimas, of 1835, condemning the errors of George Hermes. Its far from innocuous apogee was attained in Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis of 1950, in which it appears at least eleven times.
On the Function of Heresy
Authors: Parvis Paul 
Published: July 2007

One of the things which must count as Catholic doctrine is the affirmation that it is possible to get it seriously wrong. In this article I hope to offer some remarks on the function of heresy in the articulation of the Church’s faith. I would like to begin with a question, the possible answers to which have implications: how much do heretics sleep?By 1843, John Henry Newman had come to believe that heretics were by nature sluggish creatures. In his fourteenth University Sermon, on ‘The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine’, Newman spoke of the ‘ordinary torpor’ of heretics from which they ‘never wake up … but to exchange courtesies and meditate coalitions’.That was in its own way a radical answer, a radical break with the age-old view that heretics were ever-active, ever-vigilant. This view had, in particular, been the answer of virtually the whole of that patristic tradition in which Newman’s thought had been so largely formed.