Johann Baptist Metz has broken with this Rahnerian programme for a transcendental theology because of what he calls its ‘tendency to privatization’ (Privatkiemngstendenz). He denies thereby the universality of this transcendental experience from which Rahner builds up his system. This experience can be seen rather as the product of a particular philosophy (which is itself determined by theology) that the individual is always determined by a basic attitude towards ‘Being’, ‘death’, etc., always exists in an enduring relationship to God as ‘horizon’, etc. But these are religious presuppositions and products of a society which assumed man to be ultimately ‘religious’, the only question being whether he would explicitly accept this or deny it. In a non-religious, secular and pluralistic society, these assumptions can no longer be made.

There is no easy way of resisting the impression that of the five continents the Asian has been the least responsive to Christian missionary endeavour. While in Africa the Christians today account for over 20 per cent of the total population, in Asia not even 4.5 per cent are Christians. Yet Asia has a population which is nearly three times that of Europe and Russia, and nearly twice that of Europe, Russia and the Americas. Over Asia’s vast and densely inhabited territory, seventy-three million Christians live (except perhaps in the Philippines) in a diaspora situation—scattered, small in relative number, seemingly of little civic consequence. The question then is whether these Christians who form the Church in Asia have any relevant function towards their far more numerous non-Christian fellow citizens, and whether, beyond the boundaries of Asia, they have anything to say and to contribute to the Church Universal and to the world.

Since it is such a little flock, it may seem futile and pretentious to speak of the role of the Church in Asia. Indeed, the claim is advanced—even though the title of this paper may be misleading—that this role spans not only Asia, but the whole world. The title might of course have been framed less ambiguously as the Role of the Asian Church. But this could have carried certain never-intended separatist overtones. For it is the one Church of God which exists in Asia as in all the other continents.

Modern man seems to have lost his faith in nature. This is part of a more complicated loss of faith in himself. For the artist, anyway, nature is largely only an extension of himself, and it is primarily the artist who finds nature has become a sort of enemy. In outlining a possible new theory of our relationship with nature, we are attempting to integrate in our own work that nature which we too, as modern men, find antipathetic to our consciousness. I would like to explain more exactly what I mean by nature. This is not the nature which is looked for in empirical experience, but rather that a priori intuition of creation which we experience because of our subjective sense of our ontological contingency. A scientist, viewing what he calls facts, apprehends the causality of things, but cannot from that deduce an eternal source from which all things emanate, a source essentially different from its own emanations. For the artist, on the other hand, everything has its still centre, a centre which is somehow the very voiding of all that he perceives, an inner principle, one might say, of naughting, which is yet the most cogent affirmation which he knows of all that he sensually experiences. So we see at the very crux of our concept of nature there is a paradox, a paradox which leads the artist to distrust his own empiricism, because for him nature can never be wholly revealed. The most essential part of nature lies hidden in that which is beyond concept, and only enters into the artist’s own concepts as a certain mystery, a certain secret, or ‘shakti’, which accepts his own works as a temple for its presence, through an ineffable condescension beyond the power of the artist to understand.

We have become used since the Renewal began to seeing the Church slashed at by those who belong to it and might easily take the remark at the end of Father Hibbert’s article, ‘Christian Materialism’ (New Blackfriars, May, 1969), to be only a further, though notable, instance. There is something Christians will be hindered from doing, the article ends by saying, ‘until the Christian Church has put its house into better order and made it look less like what Christ himself referred to as “a den of thieves” What is it that cannot be effectively done at present? Christianity has just been stated to be ‘radically a materialist humanism’ and also ‘something more’. ‘For Christians it is essential to nurture, cultivate and explore their “more”, so that they may be able to offer something in their own right to the world’ (p. 431). It is this nurturing, cultivating and exploration that cannot be effectively done while the Church is like a den of thieves. It might reasonably be taken to be part of what Father Hibbert is implying, that the propagation of some such version of Christianity as his is hindered while the Church is like this.

At the risk of appearing as one of the wicked, I am drawing attention to the meaning of Father Hibbert’s materialism. I shall also mention again, but not ambitiously explore, his something more. The following passage shows us plainly the meaning of the materialism but the other thing darkly.

The publication of Colour and Citizenship, the report on British race relations prepared by E. J. B. Rose, Nicholas Deakin and seven others, and published by the Institute of Race Relations, was registered by the Press as a major event. It was the first occurrence of a kind favourable to those who hope for the defeat of racialism to have been so registered by the mass media since the publication of the P.E.P. Report on Discrimination. Those who prepared the Rose Report did so with a sense of urgency. The Survey of Race Relations, which did the work on which the Rose Report is based, had originally intended a series of detailed studies, of which four, including Rex and Moore’s Race, Community and Conflict, have already appeared. But, as the situation so rapidly and palpably deteriorated, they saw this response as inadequate: what was needed was a single comprehensive study, to make an impact on public awareness and official policy, and not a library of volumes which only the ‘experts’ would read.

The initial response must have been encouraging to the authors. The Press, that very haphazard and often insensitive seismograph for measuring the importance of what occurs, recorded the publication of the Report as an event of the first magnitude. But already disappointment must have settled on those who worked at desperate speed to get the book out before it became pointless to publish such a book at all. The columns devoted in The Times and The Guardian to summarizing the book’s contents have initiated no debate, in the correspondence columns or elsewhere, on Britain’s racial policy; the speeches of politicians contain no reference to it, nor do they seem in any way altered in tone as a result of it.