Last year Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed gatherings of eighty bishops and of the presidents of the doctrinal commissions of the bishops’ conferences of Latin America, on the subject of Relativism as the central problem for the Faith today. In religion, what he calls relativism is what most writers in this area today call pluralism. He says of the ‘so-called pluralist theology of religion’ that ‘only now has it come to the center of the Christian conscience’ (Origins: CNS documentary service, Vol. 26, No. 20, October 31, 1996, p. 311). On studying the text I find that Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking of contemporary religious pluralism, identifies me as ‘one of its founders and eminent representatives’ (p. 312).

If I were a Catholic, owing allegiance to the Pope, I would probably not feel able to question Cardinal Ratzinger’s pronouncements. But as what he calls an American Presbyterian (I am not in fact an American, although I taught for a number of years very happily in the United States), I feel entitled to respond to the Cardinal as a fellow theologian—a much more eminent one than myself, but nevertheless subject to the same canons of accuracy when expounding views which one intends to criticise. The tone of the Cardinal’s address is courteous throughout and I can appreciate the concerns which he expresses from his own very conservative point of view. My regret, however, is that internal evidence reveals that he has relied on a secondary source which has provided him with a misleading version of what I have written.

A good deal of thinking about the priest and modern society has been about the priest rather than about modern society: by this I mean that we’ve tended to begin from the theological end, with an enquiry into what difference a renewed theology makes to our conception of the priest, and then to go on from here to the sociological implications : how does this new priest with his new functions fit into modern society, and what kind of society will be created around him? But I think we need to work the other way round as well: we need to try to get some idea of the reality of our society and then see what our theological talk amounts to, in that context. The point I’ll try to make in this paper is that there are some cases in which there is a serious tension between what seems theologically sound and desirable, and the results of this in terms of a whole society. This is why theological enquiry which is basically about society – the role of the priest, for instance – can’t afford to work on vague or superficial social ideas, on social caricatures. This isn’t just an abstract warning, because caricatures of our society are frighteningly easy, and it propably isn’t a caricature to say that this is one of the significant things about our society – that it makes stock judgements and category responses easy, and offers these as convincing descriptions of our experience.

In her recent book Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Caroline Walker Bynum once again delineates with consummate skill the profoundly and peculiarly bodily character of Christian medieval piety. The cult of relics with its veneration of the dismembered limbs of saintly people, the belief in the curative powers of bodily effluvia, the austere self-disciplinary practices of certain male and female ascetes — observances such as these are cited by Bynum as illustrating the medieval notion of the human body as a locus of sacrality. The concurrent theological development of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the conviction that behind the external accidents of bread and wine lay the actual flesh and blood of Christ, also laid emphasis upon the corporeal and led to an increasing sense of the eucharist as ‘symbolic cannibalism’ in which communicants ‘ate God’. Christian art and iconography of the period reflected a similarly literalist approach to the humanity of Christ, often drawing attention to his genitalia for example, or depicting the Passion scenes with a force of graphic detail quite repugnant to modem minds.

According to Bynum each of these three strands, theology, piety and art, brought out the religious significance of the body in an unprecedented manner during the Middle Ages as a means of access to the divine, but whilst physicality was a theme which ran throughout all medieval spirituality, it was taken up with particular enthusiasm and intensity in women’s lives and writing. Women, it would appear, were unable to avoid being inculcated with contemporary androcentric articulations of their association with the body, weakness, lust and irrationality.

In her commentary on St John’s gospel in the New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Pheme Perkins writes:

It seems to me that an exegesis of Chapter 4 of St John’s gospel might throw further light on this judgement as well as illustrating the psychodynamics of ‘conversion’ and interpersonal encounter with Christ. Chapter 4 stands on its own in the gospel and is a brilliant theological construction. It is an intricately woven pattern of wordplay, humour, symbolism, obfuscation, at least on the part of the woman. An examination of the dynamic of interpersonal relating might begin with a reflection on how anyone of us feels when meeting someone for the first time. How do we decide whether or not we want the relationship to go any further than our simply remaining on polite or distant terms? The decision we take in such circumstances is very complex, acted out nearly always at the unconscious level and made in an instant. We decide that the person is interesting enough to reward further acquaintance or we just move away uttering a phrase of polite disengagement.

This article investigates the relationship between love, law, and human nature in the thought of McCabe and Aquinas. The article puts McCabe and Aquinas into conversation in order to illuminate McCabe's estimation of the natural law as an “insufficient ethic” and a feature of ethics that sheds a “great deal of light” on the matter of human morality. The article seeks to articulate the integrity of natural morality as a feature of the Divine Wisdom that ultimately perfects natural morality via the incarnation of the Son.

While Judaism, Christianity and Islam are now commonly classed together as ‘Abrahamic religions’ it seems clear from what Paul the Apostle writes that, from the Christian point of view, Islam should not be regarded as ‘Abrahamic’

‘Synod’ and ‘synodality’ have become synonymous with Pope Francis. Since Pope Paul VI instituted the Synod of Bishops as a permanent office in 1965, there hasn't been any pontificate that has given these matters as much profile and attention as his has. Why is this the case, and what is Pope Francis’ vision for a synodal Church? More fundamentally, what is synodality, according to tradition of the Church, and Pope Francis? Several years into both local and global synodal-type processes and formation gatherings, it seems many people, even prominent Church leaders, readily admit that they still do not fully understand it. For this reason, this article sets out to provide a general overview and introduction.

Many questions have been raised concerning the logical validity of Aquinas's Fourth Way. Some commentators judge the Fourth Way to be problematic while others find it delightful. In this paper, the Fourth Way is understood as a reflection on what it is to attribute to things around us scalar predicates. Does the Fourth Way not resemble what Wittgenstein observes when speaking about ‘the standard meter’? If so, is the Fourth Way significantly different from what might be called a ‘mystical’ line of thinking? If not, it would be this mystical meaning that is used in the Way with respect to ‘God exists’. How should we understand this mystical meaning? By noting that beauty appears as a response-dependent property and by stressing that in order to attribute it to something we must possess certain virtues. Beauty would then be relative to virtues which are linked to the mystical meaning of ‘God’. Why could such a use, concerning the predicate ‘beautiful’ (even if that is not mentioned in the Fourth Way) not constitute an explanation of ‘what we call God’? This is a question to which the reading of the Fourth Way might lead.

Hans Urs von Balthasar is correctly perceived within the contemporary Catholic Church as an exponent of an orthodox, even conservative, understanding of the faith. His nomination to the rank of cardinal just before his death is evidence of this, as was his friendship with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Nonetheless, one aspect of his theology, that dealing with the possibility of the salvation of all souls, drew upon him ‘fire from the right.’ He was taken to task by, among others, Gerhard Hermes and Heribert Schauf. In reaction to such criticism, Balthasar wrote a book entitled Was dürfen wir hoffen? (‘What may we hope for?’), recently published in translation by Ignatius Press under the title, Dare we hope ‘That all men be saved’? One of the purposes of this article is to examine this answer by Balthasar to his critics. I believe that certain aspects of his argument are, indeed, inadequate and have been justly criticised. Nonetheless, the major question raised in the book (and, indeed, by the entire controversy) is a legitimate one—and precisely in the sense that Balthasar asks it. A second purpose of the present essay, therefore, is to suggest the parameters within which we might hope ‘that all men be saved.’

My First point is one of agreement with Balthasar. Balthasar rejects those criticisms of his own work that suggest that, in so far as we know that at least some souls are damned to eternal perdition, we may not in any sense hope for the salvation of all souls.

When he reviewed my book Marxism and Christianity (Oxford 1983) in New Blackfriars last December, Professor Nicholas Lash said he would be grateful for comments on his own very different attempt to confront some of the same issues as I had dealt with. He was referring to his book A Matter of Hope, published in 1981 by Darton, Longman and Todd. Here I am complying with his request. After Lash on Turner, readers of New Blackfriars can now try Turner on Lash!

Lash “aims to take Marxism seriously” (p.5) from the standpoint of Christian theology. He certainly does take Marxism seriously, at least in the sense that he gives Marx’s ideas a fair crack of the whip. The substance of his work consists in detailed, patient, lucid and by and large at least plausible reconstructions of some central themes in Marx’s thought. These include epistemological and/or ontological themes concerning “appearance and reality”, “ideology”, “truth”, “science and theory”, themes in social and anthropological theory such as “revolution”, “utopianism” and “alienation”, and above all the controverted question of the nature of Marx’s ‘historical materialism’ which,rightly, in my view, Lash sees as being the foundation of all that is distinctively Marxian about the rest. The strength of Lash’s book is, first, that he sees this distinctiveness and pervasiveness of Marx’s materialism and,secondly, that the intellectual and scholarly weight of the book is dedicated to its exploration. Indeed, as an essay by a theologian in the exploration of this and other central Marxist themes, I do not think Professor Lash’s book is seriously rivalled by anything much in the English language.