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Ministry of the Word or Comedy and Philology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Nicholas Lash
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Early in December 1986, I was siting in Charlottesville, Virginia, minding my own business (which is to say that I was on sabbatical leave) when a letter arrived from John Coventry, asking me to address this year’s conference of the Association on the topic of ‘ministry of the word’.

I agreed, and almost at once began to regret having done so. The topic seemed so vast, so comprehensive, so obviously central to every aspect of Christian speech and action, that I did not know where to begin. So I turned to the dictionaries, and got a bit of a shock. The Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique has only one entry under ‘ministry’, and that is ‘ministre des sacrements’. Ah well, that was back in 1929, in the dark ages before Vatican II. Things would be better in the bright new postconciliar world, a world which had witnessed the proclamation of a dogmatic constitution entitled ‘Dei Verbum’. Well, perhaps, but not much better. Sacramentum Mundi (1969) has no entries under ‘ministry’, and the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, published in 1967, has one, which reads ‘ministry, Protestant’.

Perhaps we should not make too much of this. It is, after all, perfectly possible that, gathered under other heads and quite compatible descriptions, our Catholic self-understanding has still been permeated by a sense of all our discipleship, all our prayer and compassion, all our disciplined distinctiveness, being set at the service of the word, the diaconia tou logou. Possible, but I somehow doubt it, because it was not simply the ministry of the word which had largely ceased to figure in our Catholic vocabulary.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 68 , Issue 810 , November 1987 , pp. 472 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Rahner, Karl, ‘The Word and the Eucharist’, Theological Investigations IV. More Recent Writings, tr. Smyth, Kevin (London, Darton Longman and Todd, 1966), p. 255Google Scholar.

2 See Farrer, A.M., ‘The Ministry in the New Testament’, in The Apostolic Ministry. Essays on the History and the Doctrine of Episcopacy, ed. Kirk, Kenneth E. (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1946), p. 138Google Scholar; Kittel, Gerhard and Bromiley, Geoffrey W., ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, Michigan, W.B. Eerdman, 1964), p. 87Google Scholar; Schillebeeckx, Edward, The Church with a Human Face (London, SCM Press, 1985), pp. 72–73Google Scholar.

3 See Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics. I/I, tr. Thompson, G.T. (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1936), pp. 56–58Google Scholar. This passage is, somewhat surprisingly, one of only two places in all twelve volumes of the Church Dogmatics in which Acts 6,4 is discussed.

4 Anyone wishing to discover why that formulation is somewhat unwieldly should consult Robert Murray's illuminating study of ‘Christianity's “Yes” to Priesthoo?, in The Christian Priesthood, ed. Lash, Nicholas and Rhymer, Joseph (London, Darton Longman and Todd, 1970), pp. 18–43Google Scholar.

5 Rahner, ‘The Word and the Eucharist’, p. 278.

6 ‘Le théologien est ?abord un philologue; les techniques auxquelles il se livre sont ľinvention de son “amour des mots”, le moyen de sa fidelityéà leur mystère’, Chenu, M.‐D., ‘Vocabulaire Biblique et Vocabulaire Théologique,’ in La Parole de Dieu I. La Foi dans I'Intelligence (Paris, Editions du Cerf, 1964), p. 186Google Scholar; this essay was first published in 1952.

7 Changing Britain. Social Diversity and Moral Unity (London, Church House Publishing, 1987), p. 64Google Scholar.

8 Geoffrey Goodman, ‘Our Great British Press’, The Tablet, 13 June 1987, pp. 629–630.

9 McDonagh, Enda, ‘Prayer, Poetry and Polities’, in Language, Meaning and God. Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe, O.P., ed. Davies, Brian (London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), p. 234Google Scholar. The quotation is from W.B. Yeats's poem ‘Adam's Curse’.

10 Cf. Green, Thomas F., ‘Learning Without Metaphor’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Ortony, Andrew (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 464–466Google Scholar.

11 Quoted by Vorgrimler, Herbert, Understanding Karl Rahner. An Introduction to his Life and Thought, tr. Bowden, John (London, SCM Press, 1986), p. 139Google Scholar.