Ernst Käsemann was born in Westphalia in 1906. His graduate studies, in the leisurely and protracted German manner, were coming to a close in 1933, the year in which Hitler was voted into power and his dissertation on the concepts of the body and the body of Christ in St Paul was published. From the outset, as a young pfarrer in Westphalia, he belonged to the Confessing Church: the organized opposition to the influence of National Socialism among German Protestants. At the age of forty, in 1946, he returned to academic life as professor of New Testament studies, first at Mainz, then at Gottingen, and since 1959 until his retirement at Tubingen. On the third day of his first semester as a student at Bonn in 1925 he started going to the class on the Epistle to the Romans which was being given by Erik Peterson: “the course of my study and in some sense, as befits a theologian, my life was decided” (p vii). In 1973 he published the commentary on Romans which had occupied him for many years. A third revised edition was required a year later. This is the text, very carefully and literally translated (almost pedantically, although that is a laudable fault in the present current of wretchedly inadequate translations), by Geoffrey W, Bromiley, which is now under review.

One could say I was startled into examining Lonergan on praxis What startled me was the remark of Lonergan in his essay, “Theology and Praxis”, to the effect that to ask whether theology is a praxis “is to ask whether there are basic theological questions whose solution depends on the personal development of theologians”.

Why should that have startled me? Because, as it stands, it establishes praxis as, first, simply a matter of consciousness, and, second, a function of individual development. Such a concept of praxis startles because it contradicts one’s prior expectation. Two key insights are operative in the modem, that is the post-Hegelian, problematic of the relationship between theory and practice, a problematic dominated by the thought of Marx. The first is that the human activity or praxis which fashions and transforms human beings and grounds the modes of human living is labour, that is, human action as a productive force. It is in acting upon nature to satisfy their material needs that human beings bring about modification in their own nature and develop varying forms of social order and modes of human thought and existence. In other words, the question of praxis is in the first place the question of the dependence of ideas or consciousness upon the productive forces and relationships that constitute the basis of every human society. The second insight behind the recent currency of the term “praxis” is that the activity or practice to which consciousness and theory are linked is social practice. In other words, the question of praxis is in the second place the question of the dependence of our thinking and our judgments, the formation of our consciousness and our production of theories, upon the historical development of human society and upon the place where we find ourselves in that society.

In my last article, “Priestly Ministry or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order”, I surveyed the history of the second plank of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism; namely hierarchical clericalism. Now we must examine the roots of the chief item of this distorted ecclesial ideology, the concentration of all authority in the papal institution. For this purpose Church history divides fairly neatly into two halves, the first millennium and the second millennium of our era.

The first millennium, we could say, saw the gradual development of the doctrine of the universal primacy of the Roman Church and its bishop in the Catholica, such as it was eventually defined, together with the doctrine of papal infallibility, in 1870. The dogmatic constitution Pastor Aetemus of Vatican I, could have been promulgated (with some modifications to language and style which would chiefly have been improvements) by any pope from Leo the Great (ob. 461) to Gregory the Great (ob. 603), without anyone in Rome or the West thinking it very unusual, though there would no doubt have been demurrers from the East. But the practice of Eastern bishops, throughout the Arian and then the christological controversies that raged in the 4th and 5th centuries, shows that in fact they accepted the unique position of the Roman Church as the touchstone of orthodox faith. Rome was never heretical.