The average car-owner is usually unaware that he could safely put twice as much pressure in his tyres than that stipulated as ideal in the manufacturer’s manual, without having them explode in his face. What would happen where he to be appraised of this possibility? He would probably be less apprehensive of his tyres bursting when he sees a lackadaisical garage boy nonchalantly filling them. He would certainly not exceed the specified norm each time he had occasion to put some air in his tyres.

What they (mis)take for the Maker’s absolute norm regarding Christian marriage, fascinates many Churchmen as fearfully as the tyre manufacturer’s presumed upper limit. The average pastor assumes that one cannot sacramentalise beyond monolithic monogamy without destroying dogma if not the natural ideal of the family itself. Yet too neat a notion of what the Natural Law allows, coupled with a naive understanding of Revealed Truth, can block an adequate and adapted pastoral approach to marriage in the same way that a literal reading of the maker’s instructions can prevent a suitably supple attitude towards tyre filling. In both instances a perspective is urgently needed which will liberate people’s minds. Both the pastor worried about polygamy and the car-owner concerned with his tyres would benefit from a point of view which would free them from false fears. But in neither case would these new horizons automatically entail practical excesses. The car-owner’s new-found knowledge would not lead him to put twice as much air in his tyres at the first opportunity. Likewise a priest’s new awareness that customary marriage is perhaps already really sacramental, and therefore sacramentalisable, would not normally lead him to impose his insight regardless of pastoral common sense.

Evidence abounds of the continuing disenchantment of very many young people with institutional Christianity, while they retain an interest in religion and spirituality. Beyond the Vatican’s Secretariat for non-believers recently announced study, there is little evidence of the Church grasping this fact and examining it in any depth.

Two events in the space of one week recently caused me to dig out of my files material that I prepared some time ago on the religious psychology of mid and late adolescence. The first was a visit to a Christian contemplative community, only loosely connected to an established religious Order, in Sussex. There is nothing fixed or final about the numbers residing there, as they are free to come or go at will, but there are generally between nine and twelve in community. On the day of my visit and participation in their life together, there were ten young men in residence, all between 19 and 30 years of age. This community is under the direction of and revolves around the elderly Anglican priest who set it up some years ago.

The community atmosphere, very noticeable to a visitor, was impressive and seemed to be an ‘overflow’ from the morning and evening hour of movement and meditation together. Later conversation revealed that the majority of these young men, caught up in this contemplative way of life, had no interest in institutional Christianity and no desire to take part in a normal church service.

Two or three days later, as a stimulus for class-room discussion, I conducted a simple survey among the forty-nine fifth formers of the very ordinary County Secondary School in which I teach.

Within a short space of time two books have appeared, both dealing with a matter of wide current interest but at the same time both treat the issue cautiously and with some timidity. I am referring to the short book edited by Eva Alexanderson, titled The Homosexual in the Parish (Verbum, Stockholm, 1973; Swedish title : De homosexuelle i forsamlingen), and to the subsequent report of a study commissioned by the bishops’ synod of the Church of Sweden, published under the editorship of Holsten Fagerberg under the title: The Homosexual and the Church (Verbum, Stockholm, 1974; Swedish title: De homosexuelle och kyrkan). Both of these books provide subject matter for considerable reflection and will hopefully have the effect of helping us abandon a more or less conscious notion that homosexuals are, in general, somehow more sinful or perverse than heterosexuals in general. Eva Alexanderson has brought together contributions of homosexuals, both anonymous and identified by name, all of whom experience themselves and intend to continue living as Christians. To the question whether or not they are justified in this, the Swedish Church’s report provides both an historic and current overview with regard to the situation of homosexuals—seen in terms of the medical, psychological, social, theological and ethical perspectives involved. In reading it one is amazed by the abysmal ignorance, prejudice and lack of charity which has so often passed as Christian. At the same time one is delighted to find that everything in the report is taken up objectively and with a genuine desire to show that concern is felt for the right of human beings to respect, love and—in short—to a complete and full life. I don’t believe I am exaggerating when I understand the report in this way.

Denys Turner’s attractive argument for the compatibility, nay the virtual identity, of Marxism and Christianity (New Blackfriars, June 1975) is excellent as far as it goes, and I have little to quarrel with in it. But this is because it doesn’t go very far. So I’d like to press him to go on to the next step.

Marxism and Christianity are at one—indeed, are one—because each affirms that it is only by means of revolutionary socialist praxis that a community of human love can be attained, through the overturning of the capitalist system of human exploitation which for us in the present era is the incarnation of everything which is opposed to such love. All right: but then I have to ask myself am I a practising Marxist or only a sham Marxist? A practising Christian or only a sham Christian? Until some objective criteria have been established by which I can judge my own praxis, nothing has been done to help me except to juggle with words. Now it is at just this point, it seems to me, that Marxism fails because, unlike Christianity, it refuses to take the metaphysical basis of ethics seriously. Or, to put the point the other way round, it is at this point that Christianity, in going beyond Marxism, ceases to be wholly compatible with it.

The question which Brian Wicker poses to Denys Turner—how is Marxism to accommodate the notion of ethical absolutes?—is clearly one of first importance to those who, like Denys Turner and myself, would regard themselves as both Christians and Marxists. I don’t think I can give any satisfactory answer to Wicker’s question, but I can perhaps at least prepare the context for such an answer by making some general remarks about the relations between Marxism and morality. In doing so, incidentally, I shall be elaborating on Turner’s own truly pioneering earlier article in this journal, ‘Morality is Marxism’ (New Blackfriars, February and March 1973).

The question of the relevance of moral values to Marxism is at the heart of one of the most theoretically crucial debates now being conducted within European Marxism : the conflict between those revolutionary theorists for whom Marxism is in essence a humanism—an historical praxis of love and liberation—and those for whom historical materialism is in the first place a science. The adherents of the former position espouse a Marxism deeply indebted to Hegel and the work of the young Marx; the latter believe that such a case is no more than an idealist ideology of historical materialism, and claim to be restoring Marxism, after this long twentieth-century heresy, on the truly scientific basis to be found in the mature Marx of Capital. The debate—one, roughly, between the followers of Georg Lukacs and the disciples of the most prominent European Marxist theorist of our own time, Louis Althusser—has created a good deal of dust and heat among revolutionary intellectuals.

For the Lukacsians, there is an essential continuity between the work of the earlv, humanist Marx and the later scientist of Capital; for the Althusserians, there is radical rupture and discontinuity between the two phases.