The future of the theology of liberation is hidden in a cloud of controversy. Nevertheless, I have a shrewd suspicion that, whatever the aspirations of the religious authorities might be, we are dealing with an approach to the Bible and a way of Christian discipleship which is so deep-rooted that it will be difficult to dislodge, at least in some areas of Latin America. This is not to suggest that the way ahead for the liberation theologians is going to be an easy one. But the fact is that in a country like Brazil there is an intimate link between this theological approach and the life of the church. The importance of the basic Christian communities in the lives of ordinary Christians and in the work of the theologians of liberation themselves cannot be overestimated. They have provided the framework and the foundation on which its edifice has been built. There may be moves against practitioners of the theology of liberation, but there will still be the setting for that theological reflection. What is more, there are signs that the theological method has been appropriated in certain quarters of North American and European theology. But what most concerns us here is the fact that the theology of liberation is producing distinctive approaches to biblical interpretation which in my view demand a hearing from us.

To define precisely the boundaries of a book review, a review article, and an article which draws on a book for its themes would seem to propose nice, indeed over-nice, questions; and what is over-nice tends to become nasty. If we seek to contextualize the term “book review” by insisting on the prior causality of an editor who selects both book and reviewer, this is not a book review at all, which is as well, as it would suggest an outrageous delay if a book published in 1978 were reviewed now. Nor is this even a review article, since I am not so much considering Jan Vansina’s The Children of Woot for its own valuable content, namely a discussion of the evidence for the history of the Kuba of Zaire, but rather as a jumping-off ground for reflections on two quite separate topics, the validity of historical knowledge as such, and the possibilities for development available to African societies in the pre-colonial era. The flavour that New Blackfriars has developed over the years comes surely from the recognition by successive editors of the areas of interplay of the sacred, the scholarly, and (in a very wide sense) the political as a primary focus, perhaps the primary focus. This encourages me to claim that Vansina’s suggestion (p. 242) that “the Kuba past consisted of more than events concerning a few people in a corner of the tropical woods” can be given a wider range than even he might intend.

A revised version of a paper presented in 1983 at the third Oxford conference on the theology of Austin Farrer.

Freedom has a central place in Christian anthropology. We may begin our consideration of the notion, somewhat idealistically, by focusing attention on the most exalted sense of freedom, which, according to Christian tradition, is that of man’s true freedom in relation to the God who made him. This true freedom may be defined as the spontaneity of unrestricted and undistorted love, as man realises his true nature as a creature made in the image of God. In the end, in the consummation of all things in the life of heaven, the creature will for ever exercise this true freedom, in both thought and action, as the love of God, now unambiguously manifest, elicits the free, the spontaneous response of love in the communion of saints.

Such a conception of man’s true freedom raises many theological and philosophical problems. The most important theological problem is that of the relation between grace and free will. Indeed, the free will spoken of by contrast with grace appears to have little in common with the true freedom which is the fruit of grace. According to the dominant stands of Christian anthropology, man is not free to realise his true freedom. On the contrary, he is in bondage and can only be freed by grace. On this view man’s free will is very limited indeed. The main philosophical problem with this conception of man’s true freedom is whether such freedom of spontaneity presupposes a more basic liberty of indifference whereby man is able to opt for any one of a range of genuine alternatives, not only equally good alternatives,

Why should a journal like New Blackfriars be looking retrospectively at books about mathematics? A short answer is that mathematics, or at least the myth of mathematics, affects the way we think. I shall be looking at two books which demythologise mathematics: The Mathematical Experience and Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline. These help examine the myths of proof—the myths about how mathematicians think. Part of the demythologisation process is to look at alternatives to the myths; in particular I shall look at the role of intuition, and will illustrate this with reference to Catastrophe Theory and Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The prompting for this investigation is the emergence of a new genre of books about mathematics following in the wake of Gödel, Escher, Bach, of which The Mathematical Experience is an example. It would be a fascinating aside to trace the rise of this genre from Fourteen Funny Bits of Mathematics in Avuncular Style as found on the shelves of most public libraries, alongside popularisations of pedestrian seriousness. No doubt it would mention the science-as-a-human-activity school as exemplified by Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, or Watson’s The Double Helix, a vein continued by Catastrophe Theory. It would take a venture into catastrophe theory itself to explain the emergence of Gödel, Escher, Bach—a rogue book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general non-fiction, a picaresque which takes in the art of fugue, Zen koans, and the Jabberwocky and leads to questions at the heart of some of the problems in the foundations of mathematics and of artificial intelligence, while remaining accessible to a child of twelve (albeit the one I know is quite bright). The audience the genre aims at seems to be not so much the interested layman, but more the new technical elite whose computer skills and mathematical awareness can be used to outflank the experience of their seniors. In my years in radar design it was interesting to watch the gradual take-over of certain departments by mathematicians in spite of the active opposition of the electronics-trained managers. In my last department over half the people there had copies of Gödel, Escher, Bach.