Exclusive language is becoming increasingly problematic. Not only has the Feminist movement demonstrated the alienation and exclusion felt in male dominated language, but our post-Freudian environment forbids us to accept androgyny as convincing. One is female or one is male. That has to be reflected in our language. This scenario leaves us with great paradoxes in regard to our religious language, particularly in view of our ‘talk’ about the Christian sacrifice. I found an equally paradoxical source of inspiration on this issue in the writings and art of David Jones. His work is paradoxical because while hardly being a feminist (far from it!) or Freudian (he was nearer Jung), he can in the liberation of the artistic communicate the female as well as male.

In this limited exploration I am going to focus on his attitude in visual and written form to Mary and her relationship to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, her son and God. Then I will examine the role of the feminine in Jones’ handling of the Eucharist. Finally I will examine the claim that the painting ‘Aphrodite in Aulis’ is a picture of the crucifixion.

In Jones’ use of Mary as a picture of the Temple of the body of Christ he creates a layered effect of separate allusions each resting on the one before. The layering of imagery gives a different effect to a lineal arrangement so the finished picture takes on a perspective that is allowed because of all that has gone before.

Among those people who are conscious of and annoyed by the complete badness manifest in the building and decoration, in use in the Catholic Church in our days, there are very few who regard the matter as anything more than a superficial defect that can be, with care, remedied. There are few who realise the essentially malignant and even mortal nature of the infection that so ails us.

Most of these people speak with varying degrees of confidence about ways and means of ‘improving the taste of the Faithful,’ of educating people up to this or that notion. Again, others propose the copying on a vast scale the works of certain respectable and accredited masters of the past centuries, thereby improving the ‘outward appearance’ of churches and images. By this manoeuvre they hope to get the unsuspecting worshipper used to the form and comeliness of the Italian primitives and other work of men who lived in more civilized periods than our own so leading them on until, after a very few years of this aesthetic welfare- work, the most suburban Catholic will revile the pink and white- Madonnas as supplied by the ‘church-furniture shop’ and have nothing less than exact reproductions of Giotto or sixth century Byzantine.

Whatever may be said for these sincere attempts of pious people, the root of the matter is left untouched; it is not even approached. The issue is usually confused by a notion of ‘giving the best to God.’ I say confused because it creates in the mind the notion that there can be constructed a kind of scale of beauty, extending from the merely useful objects required for a church (like shelves or pipes or rubber door-mats) to the culminating point in the vestments and the sacred vessels.

Angelology may be unfashionable, but in recent years it has re-emerged in America, where it flourishes under a different name as the ‘Possible Worlds’ school of philosophy whose principal concern is with problems of ‘transworld identity’. In particular, its subtlest and most uncompromising proponent, David Lewis, has developed what he calls ‘Counterpart Theory’. This is a theory of modal quantification in which a close resemblance relation is substituted for strict identity, and it would seem to be a theory well-suited to provide a logical underpinning for what has been traditionally said of angels in their role as guardians. I have no reason to suppose that David Lewis would approve of the use to which I am about to put his Counterpart theory, and what I have to say should be regarded as no more than a modest footnote to the debate now being conducted in the stratosphere of symbolic logic with all the attendant ingenuity and zeal that once characterised scholastic disputations on the subject of angels.

For example, Aquinas discusses whether ‘morning knowledge’ and ‘evening knowledge’ are the same for angels. He explains this Augustinian distinction as follows: ‘Their knowledge of the primordial being of things is called morning knowledge; and this is according as things exist in the Word. But their knowledge of the very thing created, as it stands in its own nature, is termed evening knowledge, because the being of things flows from the Word as from a kind of primordial principle, and this flow is terminated in the being which they have in themselves.’

These words from a letter of the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer mark one of the turning points in the history of systematic theological thinking in this century.

Hardly any other theologian has provided as strong a challenge to post-war theologians as Bonhoeffer. In this article I want to give an introduction to Bonhoeffer’s theology as a whole and his concept of ‘religionless Christianity for a world come of age’ in particular. Then, in the final section, I want to discuss the relevance of Bonhoeffer for doing systematic theology in the changing theological landscape of today.

The commonly accepted opinion of Newman’s adoption of the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration and rejection of Calvinism follows his account in the Apologia that it was Hawkins’ gift, in 1824, of

This statement in the Apologia is based upon a journal entry of August 1824:

Undoubtedly, the Apologia continues to be an invaluable insight into the religious development of its author, but yet we need to be aware of its tendency to pass over the details of what was a very complicated and lengthy development.

Newman divides his spiritual journey into four broad phases: Evangelical, Liberal, Apostolical, and lastly Roman Catholic. This has the great advantage that the broad sweep of his brush portrays the dynamic of his pilgrimage towards a definite goal, but this is at the expense of some of the background to significant changes in his life, for neither the Evangelical nor the Liberal stages of his progress were entirely unmixed with other strands of thought. In particular, the Apologia does not do justice to the whole spectrum of influences to which he was subject before he went up to Oxford.