It is well known that Anglo-Saxon poems, including Beowulf, go in for a device of repetition in varied form of key words and phrases, presumably to get the point across without boring an audience listening to the poem. No device gives the scholar more headaches. Some of these synonyms concern weapons. A lot of different words have to be rendered flatly in modern English by ‘sword’, ‘spear’ and so on. It seems to me this is more serious than many commentators have taken it to be. In Beowulf's world, swords and sword-play were the very matter of survival. My instinct tells me that the mysterious and fallible swords Beowulf used in his fights have an important significance not yet elucidated, but I do not think we shall ever know what it is. It was pointed out to me by one of the greatest scholars of the last generation that many of these so-called synonyms were in fact words for different types of weapons. It is obvious from the archaeological evidence that the Anglo-Saxons had a variety of swords and spears of different types and it takes no great guessing to think they had different names, different functions, and different, quite socialized and common-place, emotions attached to these names.

If the Spirit speaks to the listening people of God in the events of history, as well as in Scripture, then the events of this time seem to indicate that a renewed search for the springs of Christian spirituality is probably the most urgent task placed by the Spirit before the churches.

The visible church is the listening people. It is not all the people who listen, but it is an identifiable collection of those people who are supposed to be listening to God and acting on what they hear, and who indeed have pledged themselves to do so—though in some cases rather casually, or with extensive reservations. The people must listen to the breathing of the Spirit, even if the message be only whispered, but at this time it rises even to thunder.

At any time in the history of Christianity it would be taken for granted that the personal pursuit of holiness, or the imitation of Christ, or the experience of the Spirit, are indispensable to the Christian life. The emphasis is different under these three headings, but all definitions of how Christians deepen and increase their be done in the assembly of God’s people, by virtue of incorporation in Christ, with all the others who share that membership, but it also takes for granted that this is a personal matter, in which each one must strive and search, often apparently alone. The task and its rewards may belong to the whole, but they also belong to each member. The need for holiness is not new, but it is being newly demanded, with renewed urgency.

In the past two centuries an emphasis on individual holiness at the expense of a sense of social and political responsibility was an easy refuge for good people who wanted to be Christians without rocking the boat too much.

Since 1967 considerable impetus has been given to group prayer in the Catholic Church, by the Catholic Pentecostal Movement in North America. This movement began as largely a lay movement of spiritual renewal in Catholic university circles in the U.S.A. It has connexions with the Spanish-born cursillo movement, whose aim is to bring Catholics to a personal knowledge of the Lord Jesus (the evangelical terminology is deliberate), but it actually derives from the encounter with interdenominational Pentecostalism. It received massive and sensational publicity, and grew with amazing rapidity, spreading throughout the States, and penetrating into Canada. In 1969 it was cautiously approved by the U.S. hierarchy, and has also been enthusiastically recommended by one or two individual bishops.

Although it is a very variegated phenomenon, running right through it is the insistence that all Christians can and should claim ‘the promise of the Father’ in what they, with other Pentecostals, call ‘baptism in the Spirit’. That is to say, people who are already believers in Christ call down upon themselves or upon each other an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, ‘just as it was in the beginning’ at Pentecost. The usual procedure is for someone who has already had the experience to lay hands on one who is seeking it, with prayer; it is believed that this will result in a sudden or gradual unfolding of the person’s life in Christ into the charismatic manifestations, usually beginning with tongues, followed in due course by prophecy, interpretation, healing, or some such supernatural endowment or ministry.

‘A clean, well-lighted place’—the phrase occurs readily enough to anyone visiting Holland today and it has its own modulation when thought of in connection with contemporary Dutch Catholicism. Here, if anywhere, we can see translated into coherent and consistent practice much of the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and it is hardly necessary to say that the notion of a Church as a whole seriously attempting to embody that spirit and not just paying lip- service to it cannot be other than impressive. A visit to Holland provides an opportunity to see some of the ‘progressive’ theological thinking in the Church ‘in action’, as it were—thinking which made us conscious certainly of ‘the well-lighted place’, but also, and more unexpectedly, of the shadows which fell across it.

Two propositions central to modern theological thinking are the importance of establishing a view of faith as a personal commitment and recognition of the pluriform cultures in which we live. And so it is not surprising to find these assumptions shaping contemporary Dutch Catholicism.

With regard to the first, in almost every conversation we had, words like ‘authenticity’, ‘maturity’, and ‘personal commitment’ occurred with unfailing regularity. Celibacy, to take the most obvious and topical issue, was felt to be significant only if it was a freely-chosen, maturely-pondered vocation. The individual had to accept it as the only mode of life in which his personal and social fulfilment could be envisaged. Celibacy as an obligatory pre-requisite for the priesthood or, at the least, intimately bound up with its meaning and function, was seen as a legalistic intrusion into the private conscience of the person concerned.

It is an interesting exercise to trace the development in the character of Satan that takes place in the Old Testament. In the earlier strands himself, while in the later strands, when the problem of evil had become more acute in the experience of the nation and of the writers concerned, the evil and suffering inflicted upon them is attributed to supernatural beings other than Yahweh. By the time of Jesus this ‘failure of nerve’ had resulted in a complex demonology and satanology as men were borne down by this ‘cosmic totalitarianism’. In the Old Testament itself there are comparatively few allusions, let alone direct references, to hostile evil powers; a fact that is made more surprising when considered against the background provided by the demon-riddled world of Mesopotamia. Nevertheless we see this development beginning and growing. In this respect the figure of Satan is of great interest because in the role ascribed to him we have the clearest example of a development which begins with his work as ‘adversary’ and member of the heavenly council and builds up through clearly discernible stages to a supernatural enemy of God and man who organizes a kingdom of evil in opposition to God.

The conception of Satan as an individual and superhuman power occupies but a small space in the literature of the Old Testament. From the relevant references we gather that he in no sense fulfilled the role of the evil and subversive power ascribed to him in later Jewish literature.