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.

The transformation of the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was, by any standard, a landmark event. It represented the unfreezing of a liturgical tradition which had seemed to many to be sacrosanct and immemorial, beyond question or change. Almost a century ago the greatest of all English liturgists, Edmund Bishop, could write without a hint of irony that “With the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V ...the history of the Roman liturgy may be said to be closed”.

Bishop himself was too good an historian to harbour romantic illusions about the timelessness or changelessness of liturgy. He had a highly developed sense of the historical evolution of worship and in fact he was a strong sympathiser and fellow-traveller with the Modernist movement, and its attempt to demythologise the doctrinaire nonhistorical orthodoxy of post-Tridentine Catholicism. But neither Bishop nor the two generations of liturgists who laboured after him to reclaim for the present the forgotten riches of the Latin liturgical tradition could have dreamed of the cultural and theological revolution which would come upon the Church in the late 1960s and 1970s, a revolution which swept away not only many of the accretions of medieval and baroque liturgical and para-liturgical practice which they so deplored, but many of their own most treasured convictions about the nature of liturgy and liturgical theology. They hoped that the liturgy, duly cleansed of accretion and distortion, would become, in Joseph Jungmann’s words, “a school of faith”. In the ancient prayers and ceremonies of the Church, Jungmann believed, would be found an endless resource, a great well of wisdom and truth.

On 20 May 1982 Pope John Paul II signed a letter founding the Pontifical Council for Culture. In it he spoke of human destiny itself being at stake in the field of culture, and he stressed that “living culture” constitutes the “ethos of a people”. Then he went on to express a key challenge for faith horizons today: “A faith which does not become culture is a faith which has not been fully received, not thoroughly thought through, not fully lived out.”.

Kieran Flanagan’s The Enchantment of Sociology could be regarded as a long footnote to that claim (which he does not quote). Even though he is suspicious of much of the discourse of inculturation, he is passionately concerned about how faith embodies itself within culture by constructing its own “habitus”—a favourite term he borrows from Pierre Bourdieu. In this respect he engages in some running battles with theologians who have misread the power of the “living culture” and whose “liberal” options for “relevance” have undermined the power of religious belonging and of the sacred. Even the Second Vatican Council’s important document (issued in 1965) Gaudium et spes, on the Church in the modem world, is accused of naivety over the question of culture, or, more particularly, of ignoring sociological insights concerning the complexity and power of culture as a product. As a result it fell into excessive optimism about the hoped-for dialogue with contemporary culture and is criticised for playing down the necessity of religious distance from the deceptions of culture.

While the Eucharist has a focus on both the past (re-presenting the passion of Jesus) and the present (feeding and nurturing us with the Body and Blood of Christ), it also is a celebration of hope and renewal. This hope provides a vision for the future, challenges the status quo, and prevents the church from falling into despair when faced with a culture that no longer lives sacramentally.

Even though hope is one of the three theological virtues, it has taken a beating in recent years. In today's secularized culture hope is synonymous with mere optimism or even wishful thinking. For a large segment of Christianity, hope means little more than heaven when you die. Even our language betrays us. A sentence such as, “I hope it may come true,” structured in the subjunctive mood and filled with uncertainty, casts a pall of doubt.

The Christian concept of hope, however, is much richer. It implies expectation, even confidence, and is centered on the promises of God. In fact, the focus of hope is not only on its content but on the act of hoping as characteristic of the community of faith. Therefore, hope is closely connected with patience, because it speaks of future promises which are already authentically experienced now, even though partially and in a preliminary form.

In recent years and in separate spheres Dorothee Sölle and René Girard have developed work relating to a theological account of the Cross of Christ which amounts to a strong refutation of substitutionary atonement. Both these thinkers come from distinct backgrounds. Sölle, a political theologian, was a student of Bultmann and has often referred to his importance for her theological development. Girard is not a theologian as such, but rather, a literary critic with strong sociological influences and considers his work to be influenced by Emil Durkheim. Nevertheless there are strong implications in his work for theology and especially christology. These two thinkers are compared here because their work has consequences for theological praxis which carries us beyond the more ‘privatised’ accounts of the Cross of Jesus Christ in many contemporary religious settings.

The work of both thinkers shall be interpreted here and then a discussion on the relevance of that work will follow. This is especially important when it comes to the issue of violence and religion. Violence is used broadly here and refers not only to physical violence, but also to psychological violence within interpersonal relationships and human communities. Both argue against substitution as a christological concept since it reflects sacred or divine violence. Both see the Cross of Christ as a refutation of violence rather than the sacred justification or sanctioning of that violence. It seems, especially in Sölle, that the Cross is intimately linked to the concept of God, as far as Christian faith is concerned. If one perceives God in the face of the crucified, then it is all too easy to think of God as the one who sanctions the violence done to Christ on the Cross.

For those familiar with the themes of traditional female spirituality in the Christian West, the dreary saga of Thérèse Martin and her death at the age of twenty-four in 1897 can only come as a grim reminder of the symbolic burden by which women have carried in their persons the dualistic designation of the spirit at war against the flesh. In the past the story of Thérèse has divided the Catholic faithful between traditional adherents of her cult, and those who opposed it in the name of a more virile postVatican II spirituality. More recently interest in her has extended beyond its traditional bounds. Monica Furlong’s biography, written from outside the Catholic community, provided a long overdue reappraisal of the young woman’s ambiguous character, from a frankly feminist perspective. Furlong concluded that the vitality and strength of determination typical of the young adult Thérèse has often been hidden from view by the sickly cult of weakness and submission that sprang up after her death.

Thérèse’s asceticism, which has come to be known as the Little Way, is an asceticism which reaches its apogee in her uncomplaining spirituality of suffering and death. By the time Thérèse died, a few months short of her twenty-fifth birthday, she had developed a spirituality of the body which stood over against a theology of considerable insight.The orthodoxy of her assertion of the gratuity of divine love, and of her conclusion that God cannot be pleased by heroic effort, but accepts the imperfect human being without question of merit, is expressed with all the clarity and conviction of so distant a figure from her in time, if not altogether in temperament, as Martin Luther. But the profundity of her basic theological insight is not the subject of this article.

The prospect of meetings provokes a variety of responses: dread, despondency, lethargy, scepticism, cynicism, and, occasionally, hope and the prospect of progress. Much of the natural aversion, it seems to me, centres on the inherent capacity of meetings to engender disagreement. Disagreement, however, so often ignores yet still rests upon a more fundamental agreement among participants, an agreement which very often only comes to the fore, discretely, when the air of the meeting clears and the assembly adjourns for lunch. By reflecting upon Emmanuel Lévinas and Thomas Reid, this paper argues that more attention, and attentiveness, needs to be given to the proto-agreement upon which any subsequent (dis)agreement rests.

Lévinas opens Totality and Infinity by simply stating in the Preface that ‘[e]veryone will readily agree... (on conviendra ais?ment...)' and then proceeds to argue the priority of ethics, with its thought of the infinite, over knowledge understood as a counterpart to ontology’s reductive comprehension of the other to the same. The problem, however, is that not everyone does readily agree with Lévinas, as is evident in Derrida’s criticism of the rationality of Lévinas’ position. In Violence and Metaphysics, Derrida draws attention to ‘the theoretical incoherence of the notions of pure infinity and absolute otherness, or exteriority.’ Like a ‘square circle,’ the concepts of an ‘absolutely other’ or an ‘otherwise than being’ are empty intuitions and are meaningless. Lévinas’ relation with absolute alterity is a thought which one cannot think, a logical contradiction inviting a sceptical response.

The traditional division of Luke’s Gospel between chapters 15 and 16 conveys a hidden meaning to the reader: a meaning which was not intended by Luke himself who did not make the division. The meaning is roughly: now we have finished with Jesus’s parables on forgiveness; now we are moving on to another topic, the right use of money; here are a couple of parables on that issue.

Luke gives no signal in his text that he sees a change of subject at this precise point. There are signs of a shift at verses 9 and 14 of chapter 16, but this leaves open the possibility that the parable of the wasteful steward might be linked in its meaning to the three parables of chapter 15.

In a sense the parables of the lost coin (Luke 15:8-10) and the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) are also about money, but everybody agrees that looking after money properly is not the point of these parables. The point of the lost coin story is brought out in verse 10. As regards the prodigal son, the final saying of the father in the story gives the meaning: ‘It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found’ (Luke 15:32). This directly answers the complaint of the Pharisees that Jesus receives sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:2).

The very next verse is: ‘He also said to the disciples...’ Luke 16:1). The natural way to read this is: here is a follow up story on the same theme, but directly aimed at the situation of the disciples rather than the complaint of the Pharisees.

Particular thinkers and their work seem to create significant intellectual waves at particular times and thus determine and define subsequent inquiry. We all know of the powerful consequences of Kant’s reading of Hume, but even more startling is the effect that Hegel had on the seventeen year old Ernst Bloch: ‘I read the Phenomenology of Spirit erotically—as I wrote at the time “the spiritual nightingale is singing within” in this park, this wilderness—and that is how I understood the Phenomenology as I have never understood it since’. One could respond to Bloch’s experience of the Phenomenology with the suggestion that he would have been better off reading Freud, but there is no doubting the excitement of an intellectual encounter that transforms our way of seeing the world. While Jean-Luc Marion’s book, God Without Being, cannot be placed in the same league as Hegel’s Phenomenology, it has nevertheless, in recent years, attracted much attention in English-speaking theological circles and for good reason. God Without Being, the first of Marion’s books to be translated into English, is a beautifully written book that blends a postmodern concern to overcome the impasse of ontotheology with a sensibility for things premodern—especially negative theology and the mystical tradition. This intellectual fusion of metaphysical and post-metaphysical themes is evident in one question which summarises Marion’s study: ‘Does God give himself to be known according to the horizon of Being or according to a more radical horizon?’ (xxiv) Thus the quest for a God without Being; a journey which Marion undertakes in order to expose that more radical horizon which is characterised by God’s ‘most theological name—charity’.

The success of the Jubilee 2000 Campaign for the remission of the debts of the poorest countries of the world may depend on understanding the implications of certain kinds of unrepayable debt, in a way that relates less to any sort of charity than to an analysis of economic, social and political history. The debts of the poorest countries are unrepayable because of their huge scale in relation to the resources of the debtor, though not so huge in relation to the wealth of the creditors, in most cases the world’s richest countries, principally the G7. We may note to begin with that these debts were largely incurred in the 1960s and subsequent decades by the governments of newly-independent countries, mostly very poor and rather backward, in pursuit of a rapid development in their economies, infrastructure and educational resources, but that this incurring was almost entirely shaped on the advice of the creditors whose apparent expertise, monetary and technical, dominated the whole process. That is to say, western governments, international agencies and private companies presided over a process whereby relatively uninformed politicians in newly-independent countries accepted huge loans for inadequately thought-through projects, oblivious of the long-term consequences for their economies of the need to service such debts in the future. Doubtless the situation was made worse by the corruption and inefficiency of many of the governments concerned, but the effect of such corruption was greatly enhanced by the willingness of western financiers to play along with governments well known for their corruption, the loans of the IMF to Mobutu’s Zaire being just one particularly blatant case.

Simplifications are dangerous at the best of times and the same may be said of applications of general principle to particular circumstance. In this vein it seems appropriate to offer some thoughts on the recent document of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales entitled The Common Good. A document which purports to offer a moral diagnosis on a specific socio-economic context is, like a surgeon, heavily dependent on antecedent data in arriving at that diagnosis and thence at a remedy for ills detected. In this short study we cannot hope to conflate the entire corpus of Catholic Social Teaching into a few words but it may be helpful to focus on the diagnostic aspects of the recent document of the Conference, viewing it as essentially applicative of previous interventions of the Roman magisterium, and thus be able to discern some possible avenues of interpretation for the future.

Diagnosing the problem, especially with regard to socio-economic conditions, must offer the ecclesiastical spectator the most challenging of tasks, given the shifting and undulating nature of the economic landscape. The historio-genesis of the first official contribution to the problem, Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum, bears this out, and yet there are a number of observations from that document which would resonate well with even the most sceptical of economic analyses of our time. Thus Leo XIII observed:

Introduction

Awareness of environmental issues, seems, if anything, to be on the increase. In spite of fears that the public debate about the ‘green’ agenda would fade, rather like the anxiety over a threat of a nuclear holocaust, which is now far less prominent compared with the 1970s, politicians today seem even more aware of the need to include environmental concerns in their policy statements. Yet there still seems to be a gap opening up between political affirmations and cries for more radical restructuring. This gap has led to heightened tension, exemplified by the high profile displays of attachment to the land shown by characters such as Daniel Needs, alias ‘Swampy’, who, in January 1997 buried himself underground in an attempt to prevent an A30 ‘improvement’ programme near Fairmile in Devon. Such actions may seem extreme, but they epitomize the dissatisfaction, especially of the young, with the ineffectiveness of politicians to make any real difference and an almost total lack of clear national transport policy. Such dissatisfaction is expressed in other ways as well: now more young people belong to voluntary environmental groups than political parties. Official jargon and teaching feels alienating for those who want to see real practical advances in the way we treat our planet. Such language also spreads into official Church documentation on other issues in a way that alienates many ordinary men and women.

What is one to make of the phenomenon of Séamus Heaney? Widely praised by academics and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, he has held chairs at Harvard and at Oxford, is the subject of an extraordinary number of theses and studies, and in 1996 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In addition, he has a huge and enthusiastic following among the general public, and his latest volume of poetry The Spirit Level was last year on the best-seller list for several weeks, and this year has won Whitbread awards not only in the poetry section but also as Book of the Year.

Heaney has many very obviously appealing qualities as a person. With his traditional Catholic upbringing in a large family, and his still surviving rural background in Co. Derry, he seems an enviably rooted man. Much of his poetry is direct and accessible, and in the lecture-hall or on the radio he is a relaxed and affable presence. Yet alongside the warmth and ease of manner lies a complex and at times agonised character who has searched deeply both into his vocation as a poet and into the function of poetry itself, and some of his own words about this quest may justify referring to it as a truly spiritual pilgrimage; for example, in an article written in 1978 he describes the poetic vocation as requiring ‘a religious commitment to the ever-evolving disciplines of the art, which the poet has to credit as his form of sanctity’, and it is one of Heaney’s most disarming characteristics that he has not shirked from making known the pressures and tensions of his search.

According to the Preface to St. Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus Homo, the work, among other things, “prov[es] by necessary reasons ... that it is impossible for any man to be saved without [Christ].” In the course of this project, Anselm must clarify what is meant by salvation— without knowing this, we could not know whether salvation could be brought only by Christ. Anselm develops an understanding of salvation involving a deliverance from the punishment that is our due because of our sin, and a correlative restoration to blessedness, which deliverance and restoration are made possible by Christ’s “satisfaction” for sin. Hence, the question of the meaning of salvation and the need for Christ as savior includes the question of the meaning of satisfaction. Now, the Cur Deus Homo has been received as one of the most significant contributions to the Church's understanding of soteriology; most recently one finds echoes of Anselm's understanding of satisfaction in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 615). For this reason it is worth inquiring into what Anselm means by “satisfaction.”

It is my intention in this essay to examine especially those sections of Book I of the Cur Deus Homo which treat the relationship between salvation and our deliverance from the devil, and to propose that one finds in Anselm's understanding of satisfaction a requirement for justice even for the devil (something that Anselm's rejection of the idea that our salvation requires payment of a ransom to the devil has tended to obscure).

“It wasn't that I particularly supported their policies” a colleague said to me on the day after the election “but I just wanted to get rid of that other lot.” In many ways a natural conservative, she seemed to represent that vast change of mood among the electorate, for whom the Tory government had become the image of corruption, self-interest and hypocrisy, and for whom New Labour seemed to offer the hope of a re-birth of political innocence, a new national consensus about the common good. Coming from a different standpoint, it was a mood I could fervently share with her, and with so many friends who are still reliving the exhilaration of that historic night. Yet I am conscious of a paradox with regard to this great upsurge of new political hope. For the longing to avoid harm and be blameless is at the root of our highest spiritual and moral aspirations; but it is also a dangerous and corrosive passion. The lust for innocence can also be detected in the desires of the recently disgraced.

In the Guardian some months before the election Hugo Young analysed the particular form of corruption that had overtaken British politics—not so much systemic financial corruption, as a form of intellectual corruption. Ministers, defending their actions after the Scott Report or in the Neil Hamilton affair, had apparently come to believe that ‘the mere fact that words and actions are theirs, unfailingly performed for the best of all possible reasons, guarantees their rectitude’. They were scandalised that the public might actually believe that they had been privately milking the political system to protect or advance their political interests.

Edward Schillebeeckx’s richly thought-provoking explorations of Christology are focused in his two studies, Jesus and Christ. These works have brought out with considerable force the need to acknowledge differing, yet parallel interpretations of the person of Christ which are embodied in the life and experience of very different communities in contrasting periods of history. The New Testament itself bears ample witness to this diversity in so far as it is marked by a density of imagery and variety of interpretation which is the product of the churches both of the Jewish Diaspora and the Hellenic world which gave it its shape. The limits of this rich diversity are clearly established by discovering an identity between the exalted Christ and the life and ministry of the earthly Jesus: what Jesus said and what he did provides the necessary ground for the developing Christology of those who follow after their master. Schillebeeckx recognises what Donald MacKinnon insists on, in talking about ‘the explosive intellectual force’ of Jesus’ life and ministry, which confronts those scholars who would seek to reduce the earthly reality of the Christ event to ‘an acted parable of intellectual reconciliation’.

Schillebeeckx argues powerfully that the “‘Jesus affair”... is not just a vision born of faith and based solely on the disciples’ Easter experience; it is his self-understanding that creates the possibility and lays the foundation of the subsequent interpretation by the Christians’. (Jesus, pp 311-312) For Schillebeeckx, the fundamental tenets of soteriology are established by developing the implications inherent in the call to follow after Jesus rather than by way of a developing reflection on the saving significance of Jesus’ death as such.

Any attempt to understand the various influences which have shaped the thinking of Pope John Paul II on the fiftieth anniversary of his priestly ordination must reckon with the 32 years of Karol Wojtyla's priesthood prior to his papal election in 1978. Indeed, in total honesty, one must also probe the 26 years of Wojtyla's youth and early adulthood prior to his ordination November 1, 1946. Someone with even a basic knowledge of the thought of Karol Wojtyla has to acknowledge the profound degree of continuity between the prepapal thought of Karol Wojtyla and the papal thought of John Paul II. Unfortunately, Karol Wojtyla's prepapal thought remains a neglected field of study, less so among philosophers than among theologians in the United States, but still a field worthy of more attention than it has received. In this essay I want to discuss some of the influences of Wojtyla's thought during those Polish years, influences which in my judgment have left lasting marks on his thought. I identify seven such factors, though I would not claim that this list is exhaustive. These seven factors are rather convenient points around which to arrange the prepapal influences on John Paul Il's thought. These seven are: (1) the interwar Polish ethos; (2) Polish literature; (3) Carmelite mysticism; (4) Neoscholastic Thomism; (5) Lublin Thomism and phenomenology; (6) interwar and postwar Catholic thought in Poland; and (7) the Second Vatican Council.

It is only comparatively recently that there has been an attempt to examine issues in environment and development together, rather than separately. The shift in attitude by the greens came as a result of the realisation that poor nations are forced to destroy their environment in order to survive and by the developers as a result of a new awareness that policies which destroy the very basis for change are invalid. The broad agreement in the notion that both environment and development are interconnected applies regardless of the particular models of development or environment.

Liberation theology identifies with a particular model of development which arose at a time when the global and political implications of environmental issues were largely ignored. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that environmental concerns are rarely, if ever, mentioned in the classical texts. The purpose of this paper is to explore both the challenge of the environment to liberation theology and its possible contribution to an inclusive environmental theology. Some models of development are more likely to be compatible with particular environmental philosophies. What contribution, if any, can liberation theology make to the current debate?

In the post-war era the conventional wisdom of the so-called ‘modernisation’ theory held that in order to achieve development so called ‘underdeveloped’ nations must adopt a profit incentive and find ways and means for economic productivity.

Introduction

Social scientists show a surprising lack of interest in the influence of climate on social and cultural life. Montesquieu’s claim that climate influences social life usually falls on deaf ears these days. Can anyone seriously believe that the Economic and Social Research Council would fund a research project to test the hypothesis that “in cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations”? Yet, I know that my mood is affected by weather conditions. It is difficult, however, to know exactly what the effect is and whether the same conditions are invariably associated with the same effects. My responses to The Enchantment of Sociology are a good case in point. I read it in proof in bleak midwinter; I read the published volume under a blazing Umbrian sun. The responses were quite different, but, as I shall explain, it is not easy to see why my responses to the book’s arguments varied with these different climatic conditions. In fact, the results were counter-intuitive in some respects, so perhaps this is why Montesquieu’s climatic thesis is regarded as problematic.