A sacramental ontology, informed by a ressourcement of the Church Fathers, informs the theology of the mid-twentieth-century Catholic movement of nouvelle théologie. Rejecting the neo-Thomist separation between nature and the supernatural, the nouvelle theologians focused on the sacramental presence of supernatural grace in natural realities. To be sure, differences among these ressourcement theologians cannot be denied: de Lubac and Bouillard emphasized the a-scending character of human participation in divine grace, while Balthasar and Chenu stressed the de-scent of the Incarnation into the created realities of time and space. Nonetheless, the four theologians shared a deep appreciation for the Greek Fathers, which enabled them to counter the neo-scholastic separation between nature and the supernatural with a sacramental ontology.

I have called this paper ‘The involvement of God’ because I want to take part in a discussion about such questions as whether God suffers with the sufferings of his creatures, in order to ask how far God is involved in his world. I shall first try to defend what I take to be the classical doctrine of God derived from Augustine and Aquinas: that it is not in the nature of God to be involved in the suffering of the world as spectator, sympathiser or victim, but that it is in God’s nature nonetheless to be involved with his creatures more intimately than any creature could be involved with any other. Secondly I shall argue that the Christology of Chalcedon does make sense of the notion that God suffers and indeed was tortured to death; indeed, in large part it just is this notion. Thirdly, and a bit more tentatively, I shall suggest that a sacramental interpretation of Chalcedonian christology yields the whole of the doctrine of the Trinity.

The subject of God’s suffering is so popular amongst theologians today that I am quite incapable of even beginning to give a survey of recent literature—this is partly because I haven’t read enough and partly because I don’t want to misrepresent authors by isolated quotation. I shall quote very little; I am concerned with certain ideas, how they hang together and how they fall apart.

In the immortal words of Herbert McCabe, ‘Whatever we are referring to when we use the word “God” it can no more be a god than it can be a model aeroplane or half-past eleven’ (God Still Matters). This striking idea – the “atheism” of true Christianity – has, in fact, a long pedigree. This paper traces its history from the early Church to the Angelic Doctor himself. The essential point is this: if our God really is who Christians claim God is, then all our words about God – including the word “god” – must necessarily fall short.

In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas discusses the biblical account of Creation and deals at length with the production of the body and soul of the First Man and the First Woman. The soul of each, being immaterial, was created by God. But whereas the human body is normally produced by parents from the substance of their own bodies, God himself produced both the body of Adam and the body of Eve. He produced the body of Adam from earth, the body of Eve from the body of Adam. The matter used may have been different, but Adam and Eve were equally God’s own handiwork and Eve was not a child of (and hence not a dependent of) Adam.

He asks himself why God followed this (asexual) method of production and replies that it was to show that reproduction is a relatively peripheral activity in the life of the human being. The specific goal of human existence is to understand. He uses the word homo: the activities of mind are the central work of the human being qua human being, of woman therefore as of man.

In accordance with medieval practice, he states objections to his own position and seeks to refute them. Perhaps God should not have made woman at the beginning of the world? The suggestion by a theologian that God should not have done something he actually did is obviously academic. But Aquinas was an academic, and academics of all centuries find that the discussion of highly theoretical issues assists them to clarify their understanding of the real world.

This article argues for a broad compatibility between the Theology of Liberation and Catholic Social Thought. It can be argued that both of these discourses have been eclipsed in the post-conciliar period by the attention given to sexual ethics rather than the ‘social question’. Two possibilities are put forward as to how these discourses may re-connect with contemporary political and economic debates. Firstly, the notions of the ‘State of Exception’ and the homo sacer (advanced by Giorgio Agamben) have opened up new space for theological reflection centred upon the victim. Secondly, the search for a post-Rawlsian account of global justice, such as we find in the work of Amartya Sen, offers a possible version of a political ‘project’, to which both Liberation Theology and Catholic Social Thought can contribute.

Daphne Hampson:

Obviously the Christian church is better off with feminists than without feminists. Therefore if one is a feminist and a Christian one should stay in the Christian church and work for change. I do not underestimate what that means: how time and energy consuming, how discouraging and at times undermining it is. I remember well. We need feminists at every point in society, and I have no desire to criticise others who are holding the front at a point where I am not and cannot be. The only reasons for leaving can be that one is too desperately hurt, or that one no longer feels at home within the Christian church and religion. For me the break was not easy. As one thing after another fell away—going to the eucharist, reading the Bible, I came to wonder whether anything would remain. But prayer and a love of God, which were simply too deep in me, held. In some ways I have managed to rebuild. My religion is now more closely integrated with all else I believe about the world than it was before. I have prised apart Christianity and being a religious person—an effort which has taken time and thought and the help of others.

Jean-Luc Marion, along with several other contemporary French phenomenologists-cum-theologians, represents a curious final shift in the course of twentieth-century theology. In the traditions of neo-orthodoxy and the nouvelle théologie, they seek to think God through the pure reception of his word, which alone gives to us God himself. This strictly theological talk requires no philosophical foundations, and presupposes no metaphysical categories, not even that of Being, which most of all insinuates a false necessity. And yet, such a thinking out of the resources of revelation alone is specifically seen by Marion and many others as according precisely with the demand of modern philosophy in its ‘phenomenological’ variant that we should accept nothing as true except according to the conditions in which a phenomenon presents itself to us in excess of any preceding categorical assumptions. One can even go a stage further not only does the God known from himself alone fall within the phenomenological understanding of ‘donation’ as the one transcendental condition for simultaneous existing and knowing; this God most of all fulfils the demand for pure phenomenality, for reduction to ‘the thing itself’, since in this instance solely it is impossible for anything in my experience, including my own subjectivity, to persist outside of the donating gift as the independent site of my reception of it. Hence God, whether announced through an ultimate ‘natural’ appearance, or else revealed through historical events, retains, against all conceptual idolatry, his absolute initiative, and yet operates as the phenomenon of all phenomena, the absolutely preceding call which ‘interlocutes’ us as subjects and provides transcendental permission for all other awareness.

Chenu is ninety. Although he may remain far less renowned in the English-speaking world than many of his juniors, such as Congar and de Lubac among his compatriots, not to mention Rahner, Lonergan, Hans Küng, and perhaps Hans Urs von Balthasar now, his intervention in the history of reading Aquinas, as well as the part that he played in the profound shift of Catholic consciousness that was precipitated by Vatican II, may well hold much greater promise of continuing significance.

What that significance might be is suggested by the republication, at the insistence of some of his friends, of the small book which he published in 1937, and which the Holy Office placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1942.

(As a young Dominican, in 1958, I remember being admonished by the librarian, the late Fr Cornelius Ernst, who had himself drawn my attention to it, that, although the book stood on the open shelves of the study-house library, I needed special permission to read it. The Index was abolished in 1966.)

While the Christian emphasis on creation as a free and gracious gift is often juxtaposed with Neoplatonic notions of world-production as the emanation of being from the First Cause, I argue in this essay that there is no obvious contradiction between the doctrines of creation ex nihilo and emanation ex deo in Aquinas's thought. This is partly because the Christian teaching that the world is created ‘from nothing’ was never intended to deny that it was from God, but to deny that it was made from anything other than God. By drawing on the Liber de Causis to support his explanation of creation as the emanation of all being from the universal cause, Aquinas provides us with a way to foreground a doctrine which belongs to the foundations of Christian faith but which rarely receives sufficient attention in systematic theology – namely, the omnipresence of the God who is in everything.

Esoteric and often frustratingly organised, his utopian philosophy has been dismissed, by Christians and Marxists alike, as a confused and idiosyncratic amalgam of heresies. Yet within his writings, which span half a century (born in 1885, he died at nine-two), there can be shown to be a remarkable unity of thought. Furthermore, themes and perspectives can be discerned which arguably continue even today to be of relevance to both Christianity and Marxism and to the dialogue between them, and which make Bloch a philosopher of more than just historical interest.

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.

The Pope’s encyclical on Development, Populorum Progressio, has drawn attention to a man, Père Lebret, who is better known in many parts of the Third World than in Europe and particularly in the English-speaking world, but whose life is, nevertheless, expressive of one of the main trends that have marked the development of humanity and of the Church during the last decades.

In marking him out as one of the principal instigators of this encyclical, Paul VI knew better than anyone that he had not intervened in its detailed preparation simply as an expert, but that it was his experience and his life which had given him the essential inspiration for it. And those who knew him realize that his work and thought are one with his life; so much so, that if his writings were to pass away, in the way writings do, there would still remain the mark he has left on the history of his time and the direction which, largely thanks to him, some men and some commissions have given to their life and work.

In our present preoccupation with the problem of our relations with the Third World, it would, therefore, seem to be useful to recount the main stages of his life, in order to understand better some of the forces which determine the direction of history in the sense of an ever closer interdependence of nations.

Failure to attend to the claims of theology as a public form of discourse has made us blind to the true causes of our attachment to the university. In what follows I want to explore why it is that liberal societies continue to value the university but increasingly find it difficult to articulate coherent reasons for its defence. I shall argue that any plausible defence of the value of the university within Western societies requires the concomitant recognition of two propositions: first, of the moral value of the search into the meaning of human freedom and, secondly, of the certainty that human freedom can only properly be exercised in obedience to the objective order of truth. I shall further argue that, for all its strengths, Liberalism as a political doctrine cannot conceptually unite these two propositions because of its commitment to a voluntaristic interpretation of freedom. As a modest proposal for constructive progress in this debate, in my concluding remarks I suggest three ways that St. Augustine's early educational thought makes more intelligible our own educational ideals than do major competing accounts.

Sociology is a necessary evil on the academic landscape. It is the discipline we all like to hate. Somehow, sociology fits everywhere and yet belongs nowhere in particular. It does not have the finesse of philosophy, the vision of theology or the grace of classics, but as a mongrel child of the Enlightenment it plays about with their deepest insights. Sociology reflects modernity, but in a way that confirms an instinctive dislike of its basis. In the academic game of musical chairs, sociology is left standing, when the waltz ceases, and other disciplines sit awaiting the next score. Yet behind this facade of dislike, an odder and deeper crisis confronts sociology.

In the past two decades, philosophy, literary studies, history and classics have all become entwined in sociology which stands at the analytical crossroads directing a busy traffic in concepts up the high road of modernity. But as its rhetoric becomes woven into the humanities, the distinctive voice of sociology has become muted. Critical theory, embracing linguistics, post-structuralism, phenomenology and post-modernism, to name a few, now have squatter’s rights within sociological theory. Textual exegesis forms the basis of much critical philosophy which sociology has to recognise, but is uncertain how to use. Whereas Dilthey laid the philosophical basis for the autonomy of the cultural sciences against the clutches of the natural sciences, an equivalent exercise has yet to be undertaken for sociology in relation to the competing demands of other disciplines also to speak of culture. Despite their sophistication, modern philosophers such as Rorty, MacIntyre, Derrida and Levinas yield slight sociological insights. There are two sides to the analytical coins to be spent in the cultural marketplace. Sociology makes its own purchases, and these are not the debased offerings of the ‘thick’, incapable of reading the classical texts of philosophy in all their nuances. Too often one gets thick philosophical works with a very thin amount of sociology sandwiched in the centre. Anyhow, sociology has its own problems in dealing with culture.

Emancipating Saint Paul from both his imagined “spiritual” prison and interpretations that cast him as Nietzsche's venomous priest, Alain Badiou reads Paul as providing the resources necessary for standing in the face of the endless flows of global capital that characterize the geopolitical landscape at “the end of history.” Read against the background of the apparent triumph of political and economic liberalism I will argue that the most compelling aspect of Badiou's reading is that he finds in Paul a universalism that resists the rampant automatisms of capitalism. Moreover, I will be primarily interested in the extent to which Badiou's reading of Paul radically calls into question the conclusions not only of those self-proclaimed prophets of the ethics of alterity but also of those theologians that are finally unable to give up the desire to control outcomes and master contingency. In this way I will argue that, despite his proclamation of Christianity as a fable, Badiou can be helpfully read as a profound theological resource that points toward the shape of a radical ecclesiology that refuses to be defined on the artificial terrain of modernity and struggles instead in all its fragility to remain faithful to the resurrection.

The two changes (1, a new rite; and 2. the move to the vernacular) that occurred in the eucharistic liturgy of the Roman Rite have often been seen as simply evolutionary, liturgical variations: this perception suited that time of great change in the liturgy, and has continued among many in that they assume that these changes are somehow optional. However, this change is better seen as a change in paradigm: no longer is the general understanding of the Eucharist based in catechesis or theology that is parallel to the liturgy, but the understanding of the Eucharist is a function of participating linguistically in the actual event of the Eucharist. This paradigm shift needs to be appreciated if we are to discuss the state of eucharistic theology and liturgical celebration today.

A number of modern historians have reminded us that the history of the West has been the history of revolution. And these revolutions have occurred not merely as the result of an objective crisis in society, but because a crisis was precipitated by the emergence and action of a new dynamic proletariat. In each case, this proletariat had been captured by a new vision of a new social order. Its members found themselves excluded from the benefits of the status quo, or repelled by its injustices. Eventually they reached a point where their consuming passion was to bring the old order down and build a new and they were willing to sacrifice their lives so that this could happen.

These movements became disruptive forces in their societies; in some instances, they overthrow the old order and, eventually, organized society on a new foundation, with new structures of economic, social and political life. They often failed to achieve their goals, yet when we look back on our history today, we can see that many of the most significant breakthroughs toward a more human society have occurred as a result of these revolutions.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the emergence of such revolutionary forces is once again the order of the day. In the United States, this new proletariat has made its appearance among the black militants and the radicals of a new student generation. But it is in the Third World, and especially in Latin America, that this phenomenon is most widespread.