In this essay I should like to raise the question: In what sense could we say that God’s providence was active in the last events of the life of Jesus, that is to say at Gethsemane and on the cross? I will proceed in three steps. First, I shall characterise Jesus’ encounter with evil. Second, I shall reconstruct the meaning attached to his life and to his relationship with the Father. Third, from the clash of evil and meaning represented in the passion of Jesus, God will be portrayed as absent-present in the midst of human suffering.

Before engaging in our reflections, a methodological note is in order. When we examine New Testament texts reporting Jesus’ words and actions, we find out that ‘the accounts are not mutually consistent either in detail or in the interpretation they offer.’ Each of the scriptural narratives or comments on the passion not only does not attribute the same words to Jesus, but casts the saving event into a particular theological vision. Therefore, most exegetes try very carefully to avoid concordism.

Next, the Gospel narratives are not ‘historical’ in the sense we moderns ascribe to this adjective. Surely they have an historic basis, but each of them tells a story the purpose of which is to highlight what it entailed for the faith of believers several decades after the resurrection of Jesus. The New Testament texts are not meant to give us some information about the inner psychology of Jesus. The details and dialogues presented are not directly biographical, but they are part of a narrative whose organizing principles are, in a sense, closer to those of a novel.

The perennial question whether translation is, in fact, possible is rooted in ancient religious and psychological doubts on whether there ought to be any passage from one tongue to another. So far as speech is divine and numinous, so far as it encloses revelation, active transmission whether into the vulgate or across the barrier of languages is dubious or frankly evil .... [thus] the belief that three days of utter darkness fell on the world when the Law was translatd into Greek (George Steiner, After Babel).

Such reflections may have a place when it comes to the translation of liturgical documents. They may even be required reading before the awesome task be undertaken. It would be indeed unfortunate if the next English version of the Roman Sacramentary in English were to spark off power cuts all over the English-speaking world!

Perhaps we need not worry. Recent articles in New Blackfriars by Eamon Duffy and Bruce Harbert have shown that the revised translation of the Roman Missal, now in draft form, shows some interesting improvements on the 1973 version: greater fidelity to the cadence, the nuances and, above all, the meaning of the original; a distancing from the Pelagian optimism which characterised the earlier translations and a return to the true Roman liturgical style: simplicity encrusted in a majestic flow and rhythm. In this article I would like to draw attention to the challenge this sort of translation faces: that of being faithful to the liturgical tradition.

Many of the ‘ordinary-speech’ translations of liturgical texts in the last twenty-five years have been faulted for falling short of the living tradition of the liturgy, reflecting rather the prevailing idiom and ethos.

What is the meaning of life? Peter Singer’s new book offers us this answer (258-9)':

In Singer’s view the greatest cause of all is “to make the world a better place”, a cause which Singer also calls, apparently without irony (or indeed even humour), “taking the point of view of the universe” (274). “Making the world a better place”, as Singer understands it, in fact means only “the reduction of pain and suffering, wherever it is found” (275). What is the reflective justification for seeing this project as the only one involved in “making the world a better place”?

Last year the Vatican issued a document, Christianity and the World Religions, prepared by its International Theological Commission and approved by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The document arises from a recognition that ‘The question of the relations among religions is becoming daily more important’, and that circumstances today ‘make interreligious dialogue necessary’. Accordingly, the Commission sets out to ‘clarify how religions are to be evaluated theologically’ by offering ‘some theological principles which may help in this evaluation’. And the Commission adds that ‘In proposing these principles we are clearly aware that many questions are still open and require further investigation and discussion’ (3-5).

Although the Report’s title continues the traditional conceit that Christianity is not itself one of the world religions, these opening statements suggest a tentative and relatively undogmatic approach which contrasts with the 1996 address by Cardinal Ratzinger himself, in which in presenting the traditional absolutist position he attacked two theologians extensively by name, seriously misrepresenting their views as a result of not having read their writings for himself. His Eminence’s failure to check the accuracy of the tendentious secondary source on which he relied is all the more surprising in view of the accurate and up-to-date section on the state of the discussion, based on a wide knowledge of the existing literature, in this Report of his own Theological Commission. Here all the main competing schools of thought, both Catholic and Protestant, are included and discussed. The Report was first drafted in 1993 and its expertise must have been available to the Cardinal, had he wished to have more reliable information.

It is beyond the scope of this short paper to compare the views of Newman and Anselm on faith and reason. Lengthy debate continues to surround our understanding of both. My purpose is to understand a comment of Newman’s concerning the interpretation of Anselm, and in so doing to address the possibility of agreement between the apparently disparate views we would expect Newman and Anselm to have concerning the particular question: is it possible to ‘convert’ by rational argument? To this end, I will (1) look at what little Newman had to say about Anselm, in the context of his views concerning the use of logic in matters of faith, (2) address the issue of the relation of Thomas and Anselm, as raised by Newman, (3) consider the role of the Fool (Psalm 14) and the notion of ‘natural words’ in shaping how Anselm thought about God, and (4) identify a degree of congruence between Anselm, Thomas and Newman.

What did Newman know of, think of, Anselm? There is little reference to Anselm’s intellectual work in Newman’s writings. Yet, Anselm has an important place in the development of Christian theology and understanding. Newman refers, in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, to the fact that Anselm is interpreted by Thomas, going on to say, “in no case do we begin with doubting that a comment disagrees with its text, when there is a prima facie congruity between them”. We might infer from this statement that Newman is happy to take his reading of Anselm from Thomas. However, in a letter addressed to Pope Leo XIII, in response to his encyclical on the philosophy of Thomas, Newman writes: