Has Liberation Theology taken root in Britain? The Times (28 August) detected it as an alien influence when the Archbishop of Liverpool and other local churchmen supported the BCC grant of £500 to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. The complaint was that although it might be appropriate in its countries of origin, with their acute poverty, cruelty, exploitation and political corruption, in Britain it can do nothing but play into the hands of political extremists. But £500 won’t go very far towards a revolution these days. It will soon be eaten up in fares and lawyers’ fees. It is clearly the sign of the churches taking sides — that is, changing sides — in a political struggle, that the Times doesn’t like. Whatever we may think of the Liverpool events, the 80s is clearly going to be a dangerous decade. There have been warnings of deepening social division, more urban conflict and a police force changing its main concern from crime-prevention to national security. If this is the way things are going, there will certainly be serious attempts by British Christians to learn lessons from the Liberation Theologians and apply them on their own ground.

It was concerns of this kind that caused a group of politically- minded Christians to organise a conference entitled “A Theology for Britain in the 80s” at Easter time this year in Digby Stuart College, Roehampton and to get funds from — the BCC. The event had been planned for two years and the participants were personally invited months beforehand and asked to prepare themselves through discussions with their “base groups”. However, judging by the lateness of some invitations, the organisers had difficulty in attracting many of the people they had first asked to this theological banquet. Some of the guests, it seems, had pressing reasons of their own for not turning up; and the organisers had been obliged, to go out and compel others to come in and fill the empty places.

It is sometimes felt that in her ironically sympathetic creation of Emma Woodhouse ‘whom no one but myself will much like’ Jane Austen deserves at least some of those strictures which see her books as damaged by the socially restrictive values of an upper middle-class point of view. It has been widely remarked that Miss Austen’s work suffers because of her cheerful acceptance of a class society, and, that, while it is true snobbery may be consistently ridiculed, her values and standards are, nevertheless, based on the assumption that social and economic inequality is a permanent characteristic of our imperfect world. As the twentieth century draws towards its close it seems that if this was Miss Austen’s opinion it is likely to be regarded as more intellectually respectable than has been the fashion for some time. In his sympathetic and perceptive essay on Emma Arnold Kettle argues that although the clarity of Jane Austen’s observation is matched by the precision of her social judgments — he sees her work as informed by ‘the delicate and unpretentious materialism of her outlook’ — there remains the important reservation that her vision is severely limited by her class background. Kettle asserts that although snobbery is held up to disdain Jane Austen’s characters never question the fundamental idea that ‘it is right and proper for a minority of the community to live at the expense of the majority’. He sees such criticism as justified not so much because Miss Austen failed to put forward a solution, but because she did not even notice the existence of a problem.

What questions is a non-professional critic entitled — indeed, bound — to put to the scholars concerning the current debate about the New Testament? What kind of comments is he entitled to offer? The studies in question are complex and specialized; they involve languages which he does not know and disciplines which he has not practised. The complexity is such that individual scholars will tell you that no one of them can master it; one has to concentrate, for example, on a single topic, such as textual study, or on only a part of the New Testament material. Communication between the scholars has become difficult, as it has in other learned disciplines, and perhaps no conspectus of what is being done in the field as a whole is possible. And yet the layman cannot leave it to the experts, since the debate concerns the documents which purport to record the events from which his faith derives, and the reactions of those who witnessed them. It is the recognition of this that leads some people to protest that the questions that scholars feel bound to ask should not be asked at all. It is felt that they undermine the faith of those who do not follow the debate but are aware of its repercussions when they reach a wider public, probably in some over-simplified and distorted form. I assume that the questions which scholars (or others) feel bound to ask ought not to be repressed: that intellectual honesty demands this, whether they are answered well or ill. I assume, equally, that the layman should not simply accept the answers that the experts offer him. He could, in fact, hardly do so, given the diversity of opinions which obtains among them. The notion of a consensus of the faithful is important, if Christians are to believe that they are, in some sense, one in Christ; but it cannot, in our present situation, be founded on a consensus of the scholars. So what is he to do if, on the one hand, he cannot ignore the debate while, on the other, it provides him with no firm and indisputable conclusions?

In 1976, Fergus Kerr reviewed Hubert Richard’s The First Easter in New Blackfriars, and followed the review, in 1977, with two articles on the empty tomb and the appearance stories in recent Catholic writing. Hubert Richard’s book made available to the British public the method and results of form-critical study of these narratives. The method had been developed in Germany and taken up by English-speaking scholars like R. H. Fuller and C. F. Evans. The form-critical method still dominates study of the resurrection narratives, although, during the past twenty years, New Testament scholars have adopted different methods for interpreting the rest of the Gospels and the epistles. The books by Fuller and Evans have been reprinted, and as recently as June 1981, Professor Kenneth Grayston offered a spirited and compressed form-critical study of the empty tomb tradition (Expository Times, June 1981, pp 263-267). The form-critical method isolates the pericope from its context and examines its form with a view to discovering its purpose and giving it a place in a history of tradition. It is part of a quest to discover what happened in history, but it is often also very useful in elucidating the genre of the passage. It presupposes that fragments of tradition can be separated from the Gospels and the epistles and that such separation and analysis can lead to accurate relative dating e.g. Professor Grayston’s comments on I Cor. 15:3-5 (p 263f). The criteria for this kind of separation are sometimes doubtful and the results uncertain, but the method has a more serious limitation. It involves losing sight of the whole for the parts, and since any statement made in isolation becomes difficult to interpret with confidence, in losing sight of the whole, meaning is lost.