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.

We live in a time in which the boundary fences between the various disciplines are being dismantled—at least as far as the social sciences and humanities are concerned. Take, for example, the work of Michel Foucault. Is it philosophy, history, sociology or political science? Again, where would one place the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida? Under the guise of literary theory it has profoundly changed the enterprise of literary criticism, and some think it is finally bringing to an end the hegemony of historical criticism in the theory and practice of biblical interpretation. With a nod towards Thomas Kuhn we could say that across the social sciences and humanities there is a search for new paradigms.

Students of that questionable discipline, called variously science of religion, history of religions, religiology, religious studies, comparative religion, or simply religion, are well used to a cloud of uncertainty obscuring the legitimacy, function and defining method of their academic project. About the only point of agreement is that the science of religion is not theology—and even that distinction is understood in different ways. Other questions abound. Is there a single science of religion, with a defining method, distinguishing it from such related sciences as anthropology and sociology? Or, is it a collective name for a group of sciences and disciplines with no single methodology? Is there a strictly empirical science of religion or is the study of religion essentially a hermeneutic discipline, demanding a methodology appropriate to one of the Geisteswissenschaften? One could continue along these lines, multiplying questions. Enough has been said to indicate what all its practitioners know, the uncertain status of the academic study of religion. By the ‘academic study’ of religion I mean that study when disengaged from the controlling authority and presuppositions of any particular religious tradition or organization.

In the course of the past twenty years René Girard has offered us a theory of the structure of human desire. Because desire is something very fundamental, his hypothesis is far-reaching and it gives us many original and, I believe, plausible results. However, not everything is explained and put into a new light because of a new insight into the structure of human desire. Thanks to Girard’s hypothesis, I think we can see how many apparently very varied things may have much more in common than we thought, and sometimes we can even perceive much better why there are differences and what they are. But even I, who have restricted myself in the three articles on Girard which I have published in New Blackfriars’ mainly to expounding his hypothesis, consider that hypothesis to be less embracing than Girard himself sometimes seems to think.

Nevertheless, although any debate on Girard’s hypothesis is welcome, precisely because it helps us to see what is valuable and what is not, and although it is a pleasure to see Charles Davis in the July/August issue of New Blackfriars contributing to this debate, the attitudes which Davis brings to the debate make constructive discussion difficult. It seems to me that Davis feels akin to the postmodern position which assumes that a universal and unifying vision of reality is impossible and that it is doubtful whether reality is a unity; that perhaps there are more realities than one at the same time. Holders of this view can thus only be suspicious: ‘Suspicion, critique, uncovering: all can be turned upon oneself’ (p. 327) in a never-ending process. I myself feel closer to those attempts which, like Girard’s, try to dismantle the boundary fences between the various disciplines, constituting a parallel movement to postmodernism.

The use of ‘Adam’ in the New Testament is by no means extensive. The name itself occurs only nine times (Luke 3:38; Romans 5:14a and b; 1 Corinthians 15:22; 45a and b; 1 Timothy 2:13 and 14; Jude 14), but in a wide variety of senses. Sometimes its use is built upon the Genesis account’s portrayal of Adam as the first human creature: Adam is seen as the historic progenitor of the race. This is most clear in Jude 14 (a quote from Ethiopian Enoch 1:9), where Enoch is described as ‘the seventh generation from Adam’. Here the meaning is quite straightforward. ‘Adam’ is simply spoken of as an historical figure. In the same way, the Lucan reference to Adam is set within the genealogical table of Jesus, beginning with Jesus himself, and running backwards until it climaxes in the first created man. By such a structure the historical relationship between Jesus and Adam is emphasized and Jesus is seen to fit within the flow of human history. We who live in the 20th century are immediately presented with a difficulty by such an emphasis upon the historical side of the Adam stories.

Fortunately, the complete meaning of ‘Adam’ within the New Testament is not restricted to such a narrow historical basis as we see in Jude and Luke. We do find, in some of the other passages, hints of typological significance of ‘Adam’. ‘Adam’ as a theological category is thereby rescued and is able to have some contemporary meaning.

The task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought—in particular, his views on community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.

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.

I am making a systematic theological point about the relationship between moral conscience and the experience of God. While the same theme may be taken up as a moral theological question, my intention is to explicate in part the meaning of ‘God’ as implied by the Christian witness of faith, and so I am approaching the theme as a systematic theologian and not from the perspective of moral theology. That is, I intend to ask primarily about the significance of moral conscience for understanding our experience of God, and not vice versa.

Clearly the phrase ‘the experience of God’ is systematically ambiguous, and I will argue that the term ‘moral conscience’ or ‘dictates of conscience’ is also systematically ambiguous, and that recognition of this ambiguity helps us resolve a cluster of philosophical and theological problems that accompany any assertion that moral conscience is a mode of the experience of God. (‘The experience of God’ is also grammatically an ambiguous phrase, of course. Here I will be using it as an objective genitive unless otherwise indicated.)

My central hypothesis is that the experience of moral conscience is a primary mode of the experience of God, if not the most important mode. This hypothesis is hardly without controversy: at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when D.F. Schleiermacher argued against any simple identification of moral conscience and religious experience, it has been recognized to be complex and problematic. Schleiermacher wrote in 1799 that religion ‘must be something different from a mixture of opinions about God and the world, and of precepts for one life or for two. Piety cannot be an instinct craving for a mess of metaphysical and ethical crumbs’ (Schleiermacher, 31).

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:

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’.

‘Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came’. The remark (made by Alfred Loisy) locates, with pin-point accuracy, the place of the Church on the map of salvation-history. Its existence here and now, in the time-span between the Lord’s first and second Comings, is to be a sign of that Kingdom where there will be no more need for Church. By its very being the Church proclaims the comings of that Kingdom and is committed to being a question-mark set against all earthly societies and against any particular form of social organisation, institution or project. Among Christian thinkers few can have rivalled Augustine in constructing their thought within such an eschatological perspective. A sense of the huge distance that divides ‘here’ and ‘now’ from ‘there’ and ‘then’ runs like an axis through his mature thought. The first part of this article attempts a brief summary of his view of the nature of human society ; the second part is a reflection within such a perspective on the political tasks of a prophetic Church in a modern secular society.

Christian thought in the first three centuries was dominated, as it was bound to be, by the Pauline and, for that matter, the rabbinic tradition of thinking about social existence: the Christian, like the Jew, was necessarily an alien in his society, a traveller with no permanent home in it, The one and only just society was that which God would bring about in His Kingdom. In relation to earthly societies, Christians were aliens; in relation to God’s Kingdom they were subjects, awaiting God’s act to establish the society in which they would be gathered, rather than active participants in its creation, still less, its rulers.

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.

The celebrating of a Marian Year in 1987—8 helped to stimulate reflection on the process by which faith in God is evolving through the medium of the Church’s Marian tradition. By highlighting the figure of Mary, it posed the question: how are the Church’s Marian doctrines able to articulate their truth within the variety of contexts in which they are received?

In the period between Lumen Gentium and Redemptoris Mater* we have witnessed a theological debate concerning the symbolic character of statements made by the Church about Mary—a debate that questions whether the Church’s Marian doctrines are necessarily grounded in historical events. The purpose of this paper is to describe briefly the contours of the debate concerning theological statements about Mary and to suggest that Bernard Lonergan’s notion of conversion can provide a more adequate contemporary understanding of the ongoing role of Marian symbols and doctrines in the lives of believers.

A talk given in a retreat for eucharistic ministers in November 1988.

Sooner or later, in Christian ministry, we find we are having to talk to somebody about death, their death or the death of a loved-one, and we are not going to do this very well if we have avoided thinking about death ourselves, avoided asking ourselves what death means—or should mean—for the Christian.

In St Peter’s, Rome, there is a statue by Michelangelo. We have all at least seen photographs of it at some time or other. It is a pieta. That’s to say, a statue of the dead Christ with his mother. We see the broken bloody corpse of Christ lying gently in the arms and lap of his grief-stricken mother, his head facing upwards, his torn limbs drooping down. The statue tells even the most casual tourist a simple story: this is a mother holding the dead body of her son.

But Michelangelo’s Pieta does far more as well. It shows the deep trusting relationship that existed between the mother and the son. How many of us who have seen it cannot be moved by the face of Mary? She is truly beautiful and in a strange way serene. Her skin soft, gentle and warm. And in her beauty she shows her grief. In her tenderness is shown her pain. In the motherly embrace of her dead son is shown her great grief. The agony and joy of being a mother cry out at us from the stone.

Michelangelo uses other images to heighten our understanding and our empathy. We see, hidden under her garment, the gentle curve of her breasts—breasts which sustained life in the early months of her baby son. But above all there is the gaze of Mary into the face of her son—that gaze of total pity, total loss, total love.

To look at Wittgenstein’s influence on our contemporary religious thought raises all sorts of problems. The first is that, as a philosopher, he gave little attention to religion; his main writings contain no more than a few enigmatic references here and there. Nevertheless it is hardly possible to pick up a book on philosophical theology (in English at least) which does not refer to him. That might perhaps be explained by the pervasive influence that he has exerted on philosophical thought generally. But we must recognize that the leads which emerge from his thought in both periods of his philosophical activity seem to be predominantly negative. He offers two successive challenges to us to examine the ways in which we use language and what we communicate in doing so, each of which seems radically to question the language of theology.

The first came in the Tractatus, when he set out to show that the method of formulating the problems of philosophy rests on a misunderstanding of the logic of language (Preface). He was concerned, as Pears puts it, ‘with the general theory of factual language, and with the general theory of reality which he believed that he could deduce from it.’ The structure of reality determines the structure of language, and the structure of language is such that ‘What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak on that one must be silent’ (Preface). He was not prepared, like the logical positivists, to deny the existence of mysteries of which he did not think it possible to speak; ‘We feel that even if all questions in the field of scholarship are answered the problems of our lives are still quite untouched.

The Jew is never more uneasy than when faced with a text from the New Testament. Aware of the scriptural authority that such a text holds for the Christian, the uneasiness is compounded when what, basically, the Jew is offering is an opportunity for Christians to listen in, as it were, on a Jewish interpretation of one of the most important texts in the New Testament.

There are, of course, historical considerations that determine how a Jew understands the New Testament. For much of the past, if Jews read or studied the gospels, it was only for polemical purposes. One of the first figures to abandon such an attitude was Claude Montefiore, an English Jew, founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in Britain. In 1909 Montefiore published The Synoptic Gospels, consisting of an introduction, translation and commentary on the first three gospels. The aim of such a book was two-fold: to dissipate the patronising and negative attitude which Jews held towards Christianity and to reveal the true spirit of the Jewish religion to Christians.

Montefiore’s attitudes roused dissent and suspicion among the Jewish community. For him, Jesus linked on to the prophets and sometimes seemed to go beyond them. But as Montefiore revealed, for the Jew it was not the personality or life of Jesus that was important but the teaching:

In the February issue of New Blackfriars, Rowan Williams explored the unity of theological discourse. He asked what criteria might be used in setting limits to pluralism—how we can go about deciding what should be allowed to count as a statement of Christian truth. He concluded that we must go beyond the domain of formal theological language and look to the way in which a theology becomes enfleshed: ‘the unity of Christian truth is perceivable to the extent that we can perceive a unity in Christian holiness’.

I believe that, in an important though rather complex way, Williams is right, and in this article I would like to explore that complexity and to offer some observations on the understanding of Church which implies and is implied by that insight.

One obvious criticism which could be made of Williams’ position is that it shifts the problem of unity rather than solving it. If ‘the unity of Christian truth’ is to be discerned through ‘a unity of Christian holiness’, this latter unity must be in some way recognizable. And that raises a question.

On this view it is not particularly helpful to say, for example, that what unites Mother Theresa and Simeon Stylites is their shared Christian faith. Rather, it is the other way round. What holds the articulated faith of the fifth and twentieth centuries together is the fact that spending forty years on the top of a column and tending the sick in Calcutta somehow display ‘continuities of Christian patterns of holiness’. I would want to say that in the end it must be so. But how can we know?

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 Church’s liturgy calls on Christ as Rex gentium, ‘King of the nations’, the One whom they all ‘desire’, the Corner-stone that unites them. It appeals to him, therefore, to ‘come and save man whom you made from clay’. In this celebrated Advent antiphon, the Church affirms the relevance of Christ to world history and, more specifically, to the fate of the many peoples of the world whose histories contribute to the single history which is that of the world as a whole. The text intimates that this history constitutes an implicit call for his Coming, and it states quite explicitly that only Christ can unify their different and (presumably) divergent histories, and make them one.

My concern here is a vast subject which, it is probably fair to say, historians and philosophers in England, even when believers, would by and large regard as taboo ... and in this they would doubtless be joined by the majority of theologians. The relevance of Christ to world history, and, in particular, to the fact of its multiple national differentiations, is, they would say, simply too large a subject to talk sense about. English historians, with occasional exceptions like Arnold Toynbee, do not think it a proper part of the historian’s task to identify the structure of the historical process as a whole. The philosophy of history is not, in England, the study of the wider meaning of that process but, rather, the justification of any limited statement about the past. English philosophers of history avert their gaze in horror from their Continental counterparts, whose vaulting metaphysical ambition has produced schemes like Hegel’s (history as the coming of Reason to selfconsciousness) or Marx’s (history as the formation of a socialist society where the specific essence of humanity will be realised in uncoerced labour).

Since my experience is probably typical of many Catholics, it might be a useful exercise to begin this paper by sharing with you my own personal journey through various understandings or paradigms of sin. I believe it has been a journey of healing, because my earlier understanding of sin was very crippling and has probably left me scarred for life.

DISOBEDIENCE is the word which captures my initial paradigm of sin. While this model presumed an internal dimension to disobedience, the external dimension loomed far more important. Psychologically ‘disobedience to authority’ was the dominant notion. This was emphasized by the fact that the gravity of the sin was often determined by the commanding or prohibiting authority. Certain actions were commanded or forbidden under pain of mortal sin. Other actions, admittedly, were regarded as mortal sins because the ‘matter’ was grave in itself. Yet even here the determination of grave matter was sometimes a matter of decision by authority—no light matter in the area of sexual sin, for instance! In my teens I once had to write out 100 times: ‘Tintinabulum vox Dei est’. That says it all! The ‘disobedience’ paradigm, in the form I absorbed it, was individualistic, act-centred and voluntarist. It offered no help in developing a capacity for moral decision-making or conscience-formation.