bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Remembrance of Things Past Sociological Ken
Authors: Flanagan Kieran 
Published: July 2007

In May 1996, addressing the central problems of faith, Ratzinger commented on the great disillusionment and non-fulfillment of hope that came after 1989. Covering issues such as pluralism and New Age religions, where god replaced God, Ratzinger observed that “if we consider the present cultural situation....frankly it must seem a miracle that there is still Christian faith despite everything”. For him, relativism has now become the central problem of the faith. But the issues he raises also belong to sociology. It also has to deal with relativism, nihilism and the escape into the New Age, the unexpected spiritual impulses that mark the condition known as postmodemity. Uncertainty has arisen over religious affiliations that oscillate between pluralism and fundamentalism, both ambiguous responses to modernity. The relationships between theology and culture have been affected in an inescapable manner.The Enchantment of Sociology is an effort to provide something oddly unwritten: a sociological reading of the link between theology and culture. It was conceived against the moral and cultural despond of British society between August 1991 and Easter 1995. The theological mandate for the book, as Howes notices, came from Radcliffe’s irenic hope for peace in the vexatious relations between theology and sociology. His belief was that sociology could “provide a locus for the encounter of gospel and the world” and that this would be accomplished through the internal transformation of the discipline itself. The need for sociology to re-think its place in its own field of deliberations relates to a wider sense of unsettlement in a society characterised by postmodemity where matters concerning spirituality, identity and community have become uncertain.
Evil and Religious Pluralism: The Eschatological Resolution
Authors: Cheetham David 
Published: July 2007

When Antony Flew in the 1950’s declared that religious assertions died ‘a death of a thousand qualifications’, he was expressing frustration in the face of a dogged refusal by theologians to relinquish cherished beliefs. No matter what conundrum the atheist camp hurled at the theists, they found (to their considerable consternation) that the theologians had moved the goalposts just that little further away. Although the debate following Flew’s comments addressed crucial questions concerning the meaningfulness of religious statements, it also highlighted, in my view, the durability and resilience of religious beliefs and assertions in the mind of the believer. Flew’s point was that religious believers, despite being surrounded by confusing and contradictory evidence, refuse to give up their notions and convictions concerning the divine. It is this resilience in the face of cognitive and experiential difficulties that forms the background of the following discussion.As part of this paper I will be briefly looking at John Hick’s treatment of the problem of evil and be comparing this with his response to the problems of religious diversity. The purpose for such a comparison is not to provide an exhaustive look at these separate issues in relation to each other. Neither am I concerned to engage in recalcitrant hair-splitting regarding various ideas put forward by Hick. However, I will be showing how differently Hick has treated both problems and lead into a consideration of how the eschatological dimension of his thinking can result in a wholly different ‘solution’ to the question of religious diversity. I contend that the means are available to treat both questions in similar ways because of one highly significant factor—the possibility of further opportunities beyond death.
The Trinity and the Tripartite Soul
Authors: Charlton William 
Published: July 2007

According to the Second Council of Constantinople (2 June 553) there is ‘one divinity in three hypostases or persons’. Today it is commoner to say that there are three persons in one God. No doubt these formulations come to the same thing, but what is that?The English word ‘person’ translates the Latin persona and the Greek prosopon, expressions for the masks actors wore on the ancient stage. Since the same actor might appear in different masks, playing different roles, in the same play, the word suggests that the Persons of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Spirit, are three roles the one God plays, three appearances or aspects he presents. The word ‘hypostasis’ is a philosophical term for something that exists on its own like a living organism; so to call the Father, Son and Spirit ‘hypostases’ is to suggest that they form a kind of three-membered society. Both these suggestions are unorthodox. The first is Sabellianism, the second tritheism, and these are the Charybdis and Scylla between which the speculative theologian is supposed to steer. But is such a course possible? The use of both terms by Constantinople II rather poses the problem than solves it.
The Politics of Innocence
Authors: West Angela 
Published: July 2007

“It wasn't that I particularly supported their policies” a colleague said to me on the day after the election “but I just wanted to get rid of that other lot.” In many ways a natural conservative, she seemed to represent that vast change of mood among the electorate, for whom the Tory government had become the image of corruption, self-interest and hypocrisy, and for whom New Labour seemed to offer the hope of a re-birth of political innocence, a new national consensus about the common good. Coming from a different standpoint, it was a mood I could fervently share with her, and with so many friends who are still reliving the exhilaration of that historic night. Yet I am conscious of a paradox with regard to this great upsurge of new political hope. For the longing to avoid harm and be blameless is at the root of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations; but it is also a dangerous and corrosive passion. The lust for innocence can also be detected in the desires of the recently disgraced.In the Guardian some months before the election Hugo Young analysed the particular form of corruption that had overtaken British politics—not so much systemic financial corruption, as a form of intellectual corruption. Ministers, defending their actions after the Scott Report or in the Neil Hamilton affair, had apparently come to believe that ‘the mere fact that words and actions are theirs, unfailingly performed for the best of all possible reasons, guarantees their rectitude’. They were scandalised that the public might actually believe that they had been privately milking the political system to protect or advance their political interests.
A Response to Cardinal Ratzinger on Religious Pluralism
Authors: Hick John 
Published: July 2007

Last year Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed gatherings of eighty bishops and of the presidents of the doctrinal commissions of the bishops’ conferences of Latin America, on the subject of Relativism as the central problem for the Faith today. In religion, what he calls relativism is what most writers in this area today call pluralism. He says of the ‘so-called pluralist theology of religion’ that ‘only now has it come to the center of the Christian conscience’ (Origins: CNS documentary service, Vol. 26, No. 20, October 31, 1996, p. 311). On studying the text I find that Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking of contemporary religious pluralism, identifies me as ‘one of its founders and eminent representatives’ (p. 312).If I were a Catholic, owing allegiance to the Pope, I would probably not feel able to question Cardinal Ratzinger’s pronouncements. But as what he calls an American Presbyterian (I am not in fact an American, although I taught for a number of years very happily in the United States), I feel entitled to respond to the Cardinal as a fellow theologian—a much more eminent one than myself, but nevertheless subject to the same canons of accuracy when expounding views which one intends to criticise. The tone of the Cardinal’s address is courteous throughout and I can appreciate the concerns which he expresses from his own very conservative point of view. My regret, however, is that internal evidence reveals that he has relied on a secondary source which has provided him with a misleading version of what I have written.
St Thomas Aquinas on the “Scientific” Nature of Theology
Authors: Turner Geoffrey 
Published: July 2007

Reflecting on the practice of theology to say what theology is and the kind of knowledge it might lead to is one of the most difficult things about doing theology. St Thomas Aquinas famously did this in the first question of the Summa Theologiae. It is a brief statement that is the culmination of a line of development from the time theology was taken up by the cathedral schools in the twelfth century. It is brilliantly conceived and, in some respects, wrong.The development of theology into something like its modem sense as a rational procedure and an academic discipline owes a huge debt to Peter Abailard (1079-1142). Of course, Christian theology had been practised for a thousand years before Abailard and, in a quite different sense, can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek poets. But it was Abailard who introduced the use of dialectic (or what we would now call logic) so that truth in sacra doctrina was to be established by rational procedures and not simply by appealing to traditional authorities. It also took theology teaching beyond being little more than a literary analysis of scripture (as it had been with Anselm of Laon, for example) to being once more a speculation about the nature of God, but a speculation no longer limited to the opinions of the Church Fathers, opinions which Abailard had shown in Sic et Non were sometimes contradictory.
Catholic Marxism: Looking Forward and Looking Back
Authors: John Eric 
Published: July 2007

Catholic Marxism was deeply involved with the December Group which met annually for some years at Spode House. In most ways the December Group was the institutional form of Catholic Marxism. I was not a founding member of the group—its immediate ancestor was a magazine called Slant run by some young graduates, but I attended regularly for the last ten years of its existence. It was not called after any great event in socialist history but because it was simply convenient to meet in December. As most of its members were academics of one sort or another this is easy to understand. Since I am going to be critical in retrospect it is only fair to point out how good many of the sessions were. There was a memorable paper by Denys Turner (New Blackfriars, 1973), and for those of us who were present, there was the staggering all-day session on the Pinochet coup d’etat with Gonzalez Arroyo—recently evicted from his chair in his Chilean university—and Jacques Chamsun, Allende’s minister of Agriculture. There were some of the best, and best informed, lectures on Ireland, of which Irene Brennan’s contributions were outstanding. But what there was not was any attempt to compare and contrast as Finals papers used to say (and perhaps still do) the substance of Catholicism and the substance of Marxism.The presiding genius over Catholic Marxism wasn’t Marx, whose name was as infrequently mentioned as that of God. It was the French philosophe, Louis Althusser. He seems to me to have been a fraud from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
Schillebeeckx's Soteriological Agnosticism
Authors: Phillips Peter 
Published: July 2007

Edward Schillebeeckx’s richly thought-provoking explorations of Christology are focused in his two studies, Jesus and Christ. These works have brought out with considerable force the need to acknowledge differing, yet parallel interpretations of the person of Christ which are embodied in the life and experience of very different communities in contrasting periods of history. The New Testament itself bears ample witness to this diversity in so far as it is marked by a density of imagery and variety of interpretation which is the product of the churches both of the Jewish Diaspora and the Hellenic world which gave it its shape. The limits of this rich diversity are clearly established by discovering an identity between the exalted Christ and the life and ministry of the earthly Jesus: what Jesus said and what he did provides the necessary ground for the developing Christology of those who follow after their master. Schillebeeckx recognises what Donald MacKinnon insists on, in talking about ‘the explosive intellectual force’ of Jesus’ life and ministry, which confronts those scholars who would seek to reduce the earthly reality of the Christ event to ‘an acted parable of intellectual reconciliation’.Schillebeeckx argues powerfully that the “‘Jesus affair”... is not just a vision born of faith and based solely on the disciples’ Easter experience; it is his self-understanding that creates the possibility and lays the foundation of the subsequent interpretation by the Christians’. (Jesus, pp 311-312) For Schillebeeckx, the fundamental tenets of soteriology are established by developing the implications inherent in the call to follow after Jesus rather than by way of a developing reflection on the saving significance of Jesus’ death as such.
Newman and the Victorian Self: From Loss and Gain to the Apologia
Authors: Peck John 
Published: July 2007

This essay started with the experience of teaching Loss and Gain to an English Literature research class. I was teaching a novel that illustrated an important aspect of the intellectual history of Victorian Britain; the class had been reading a psychological novel which they found (often simultaneously) both perverse and amusing. They were, of course, laughing at Newman rather than with him. I imagine that the response I encountered is not untypical: however Loss and Gain might have been regarded in the past, it is not going to be looked at in the same way today. And when we take account of the impact of critical theory, the picture becomes even more complicated: feminist and New Historicist critics, while not necessarily taking a hostile view of Loss and Gain, are inevitably going to discuss it in a way that challenges traditional approaches. This prompts the question I want to consider: whether current sceptical critical approaches can be reconciled with a sympathetic appreciation of the serious intent of Loss and Gain?IA split in criticism becomes apparent immediately if we consider a basic point: Newman is writing about a man’s world. And why not? The Oxford of his day did not admit women. But times change, and even nonfeminist readers today are likely to be struck by the effete remoteness of the university life he depicts, perhaps seeing it as an environment that encourages a fear of women. The problems are apparent in the breakfast party that the junior tutor, Mr Vincent, arranges for Charles Reding and other undergraduates.
Romano Guardini and the Liturgy
Authors: Gorevan Patrick 
Published: July 2007

‘The Catholic liturgy is the supreme example of an objectively established rule of spiritual life.’ ‘The liturgy is the lex orandi'. These were the principles of Romano Guardini’s liturgical writings, both theological and pastoral. He sought to bring the liturgy into the centre of the Christian’s life, at the heart of the many other, more private, expressions of prayer and reverence. He offers an overview of Christian public prayer:
Prayer must be simple, wholesome and powerful. It must be closely related to actuality and not afraid to call things by their names. In prayer we must find our entire life over again. On the other hand, it must be rich in ideas and powerful images, and speak a developed but restrained language; its construction must be clear and obvious to the simple man, stimulating and refreshing to the man of culture. It must be intimately blended with an erudition which is in nowise obtrusive, but which is rooted in breadth of spiritual outlook and in inward restraint of thought, volition and emotion. And that is precisely the way in which the prayer of the liturgy has been formed.According to Aidan Nichols, if the principles of Romano Guardini on liturgy had been consistently applied to contemporary sensibility in the 1960s and 1970s, his influence might have stopped the post-conciliar liturgical reform from backing modernity as a winning ticket, just at the point when it became converted into postmodernism. This short sketch points to some of Guardini’s insights in the liturgical area, especially on questions which have recently been taken up anew by liturgical thinkers.
The Problem of Authority in Theological Education
Authors: O'Neill J. C. 
Published: July 2007

All Christians have put themselves under obedience to God. They acknowledge God’s authority—his right to the obedience of every sentient being. They also acknowledge God’s power, since disobedience to God can only exist so long as God permits it.God’s authority is promulgated to the human race in specific descriptions of certain rewards and punishments that are attached to specified kinds of behaviour. These laws are said to be made known by authoritative messengers, the prophets. God is held to be three persons in the one Godhead. The second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God, is said to have been incarnate, to have been crucified under Pontius Pilate, to have been raised from the dead and to have ascended to heaven. It is promised that he will come to earth again at the general resurrection of all the dead, and that those who merit eternal exclusion from the presence of God will be excluded and those who are judged worthy to enjoy God’s presence will live in bliss for ever. God the Holy Spirit has been sent, and will continue to be sent, to those who submit to the Father and the Son. Among other gifts, this Spirit has given and will give wisdom to discern what is true, good and beautiful.
Imaging God: Creatureliness and Technology
Authors: Scott Peter 
Published: July 2007

The variety of ways of construing how humanity is in the image of God suggests a profound interrelation of tradition and context in theological reflection on the imago dei. For example, Colin Gunton has recently argued that the dominant ways of interpreting the imago dei at the present time are stewardship and the duality of male and female. It is not hard to see how contemporary discussions on the relations between humanity and non-human nature, and between men and women, inform such a selection. The recent work of Peter Hodgson furnishes us with a second example: being in the image of God, he argues, comprises three spheres: self-relatedness, other or world-relatedness and wholeness. Again, it is not hard to discern how such a construal is informed by the identification of three dilemmas which are, Hodgson considers, constitutive of our contemporary (Western) context: liberation from unjust social relationships; relations between Christianity and other religions; relations between humanity and non-human nature. In the presentation of the imago dei, we may safely say, tradition and context are deeply interrelated.In what follows, I shall develop one aspect of recent Christian tradition—that sociality is the mark of the imago dei—in order to explore how humanity might be in the image of God in a technological society. Thus in the last two sections of this paper, I ‘expand’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s reading of humanity as social by including the themes of spatiality and temporality. It is as social, spatial and temporal, I shall argue, that humanity is to be understood as imaging God.
Hicks, Haecs, Hocs: Diaries of a Good Bishop
Authors: Baldwin Barry 
Published: July 2007

In the preface to his edition of Manilius, Housman lamented that ‘Our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley’s Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester.’Unlike Blomfield, and his own immediate predecessor at Lincoln, Edward-King, Hicks is not favoured with any mention in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Nor was he a giant among classical scholars. But thanks to the recent publication of a selection from his diaries*, we can see him as we can see few others of his kind; these glimpses afford welcome (especially in the light of recent turmoils at Lincoln Cathedral) evidence of a good man of versatile virtues, proof that moving from academe to a see need not be a stroke of doom for classical scholars, and refutation of the old adage that nothing improves by translation except a bishop.There was no controversy over the Dean who welcomed Edward Lee Hicks to his see in June 1910. Though unremarked in Neville’s edition, he was none other than Hicks’ old Oxford tutor and examiner, E. C. Wickham, fellow-classicist and editor of Horace, whose death Hicks will presently lament, as was his wont, in choice Latin, mindful of Samuel Johnson’s instructions that ‘Epitaphs should be in Latin, as every thing intended to be universal and permanent should be.’ But ecclesiastical as well as secular immoralities were a constant thorn in Hicks’ side, thanks in large measure to the astonishing country parsons he encountered in his far-flung jurisdiction, a gallery of characters worthy of the Trollopes (Anthony and Joanna) and Barbara Pym.
Living on the Edge of Eternity
Authors: Burton‐Christie Douglas 
Published: July 2007

This was not a journey I wanted to make. One of my oldest and dearest friends, Donald Nicholl, was dying of cancer in England. Travelling there to see him meant, I knew, saying goodbye. And this was something I did not want to do. I did not want to face up to the stark fact of his impending death. I did not want to consider how I would live with the immense hole that I knew his passing would create. Somehow, from a distance, I had been able to sustain the illusion that he would not die, that his disease would go into remission, that we would again walk the Pennines together, talking excitedly of our latest discoveries, of our hopes for the future. But now, handing my ticket to the stewardess and boarding the plane, I no longer harboured such illusions. Embarking on this journey brought home to me the harsh reality I had so far been evading: my friend was dying. In doing so, it also wakened me in a new way to Donald's journey, to his struggle, amidst much physical pain and loneliness, to make his way along the narrow, steep path toward death, toward God.This was a path in many ways unimaginable to me. Certainly, I have faced up to the reality of death, struggled with it in my own way. But to be on the edge of death, to know that the end of life is near? No, I have not known that reality. But perhaps this was one of the reasons for my journey to see Donald in England: to be brought into the presence of this mystery in a way that I never would have discovered on my own. It is strange to consider this.