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.

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 a previous article, (New Black friars Jan 1981) I argued that the eschatological interpretation of biblical theology is, ultimately, the only possible site for the creation of a feminist discourse. To put it in more assimilable terms: the contradiction of being a woman and a feminist is only finally resolvable in the context of Christian eschatology. This is rather a large claim, so I shall try to substantiate it.

Most theology hitherto has been based on an essentially androcentric perspective as a result of the fact that it is founded on an essentially androcentric anthropology. In recent years, attempts have been made by some anthropologists to bring an alternative perspective to bear on the material of their discipline: thus, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, the editors of a recently published collection of essays by a number of female anthropologists state in their introduction that the aim of the book is to ‘demonstrate the importance of women’s lives for our understanding of the human record’. I think it is important to consider what implications their conclusions, and those of other feminist scholars, have for non-androcentric theology, for a feminist hermeneutics.

At first sight, their conclusions wouldn’t seem to be very comforting to feminists. ‘The current anthropological view draws on the observation that most and probably all contemporary societies, whatever their kinship organisation or mode of subsistence, are characterised by some degree of male dominance’. And further on they say ‘. . . although the degree and expression of female subordination vary greatly, sexual asymmetry is presently a universal fact of life’.

In much contemporary discussion of ethics, the Roman Catholic tradition — particularly in questions of sexual morality — has been characterized as the last refuge of the absolute. On questions such as the morality of contraception, the Church has been remarkably out of phase with other churches and other ethical traditions, insisting on a particular approach to natural law theory which has, by now, become identified with the Roman Catholic tradition.

It is interesting then, to find the following footnote in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Ethics, as edited from Bonhoeffer’s papers by Eberhard Bethge:

Writing at a time when the Roman Catholic tradition maintained a strong consensus on the question, Bonhoeffer notes that this tradition “does not indeed, as is often asserted, maintain that reproduction is the only purpose of marriage. No one did that before Kant”.

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.

In an interesting and important essay entitled ‘The Soul’s Conquest of Evil’. Professor W. W. Bartley III argues that it is virtually impossible for man to overcome or subdue his own evil will. Bartley claims that it is a conditio sine qua non of man’s conquest of evil that he possess self-knowledge, but he is pessimistic about man’s capacity to gain the self-knowledge needed to triumph over his evil will. Bartley quotes with approval the words of C. G. Jung:

It is Bartley’s contention that the search for self-knowledge is a costly and perilous venture, undertaken successfully by only a few exceptional individuals. Prima facie, what Bartley and Jung say seems to be not without plausibility; most of us find it hard to be good precisely because we fail to acquire that clarity of vision which is so important if we are to struggle successfully to be moral beings. Nevertheless, Bartley’s position cannot be accepted without substantial reservations, and in this essay I propose to examine his position more closely, and attempt to show why I am inclined to reject his arguments.

We have come together today as members of a Christian community because of our concern for the many thousands of men and women who are suffering persecution and torture throughout the world. Just as any divided family will forget its differences in times of crisis, so we are today united before God by that very problem.

Part of the excitement and also the difficulty of being a Christian is that it is a continuing process of exploring what it means to be a disciple of Christ. Just when we think we have got it sorted out, something happens to upset our complacency so that we are left, a little bruised, saying “where did I go wrong”? The only thing to do when that happens is to go back to the Gospels and look again to see how Jesus did it. As Paul tells us “Christ is the image of the unseen God”. It is only by looking to Christ that we shall learn how to walk towards our Father.

I would like, then, to explore with you for a few minutes the stance of Jesus Christ in the face of torture — what he taught his disciples and how he faced his own torture and death. By focussing on the man Jesus we should then be able to widen our gaze, to look beyond his death on Calvary, to the continuing crucifixion in our own time.

The trouble about the gospels for many of us is that they become so familiar that they lose their impact; we cease to be rattled, unnerved, by what Jesus is saying. Take for example, Christ’s assurance to his followers that they would be persecuted. “You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake” (Mk. 10:18), “Brother will betray brother to death and the father his child ... You will be hated by all men on account of my name”.

This is intended to be a practical comparison between two approaches. Accordingly it would be as well to start with a few truisms that are shared between them. In the first place, people only discover themselves and the world through their relationships with other people and this relationship is primary. Perspectives on the world follow and are fashioned by these relationships. In view ©f this, theology may be said to be reflection on human experience specifically understood as directed towards God. Thus Schillebeeckx (1969:214) describes man, from a theological point of view, as ‘a free being who must define himself in and towards the world in dialogue with God’. This may be contrasted with the definition of one sort of sociology, ‘critical sociology’, described by Hansen (1976:3) as ‘an invitation to become an involved, critical explorer of human and societal possibilities’.

Unless the theologian is to consider for the most part his own experience (the source of much individualistic agonizing of an existentialist sort commonly characterized as bourgeois sociology) he must perforce draw on some systematic body of reflection on the human condition. Traditionally, this has been provided by philosophy, but in more recent times the social sciences have rather cornered the interaction business.

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

The true Church is a believed Church; in a real sense we have to ‘believe’ the Church, for the Church can only be recognised in its essential nature through faith. Yet the Church as the ‘called out’ community of the faithful is not simply invisible; it is both visible and invisible. As the people of God, the Church is essentially a ‘people’, and thus is visible. As the body of Christ, the Church is a ‘body’, and thus is visible. In the concrete visible Church there is a mixture of wheat and tares.’ Because the Church consists of human beings, and sinful human beings, renewal and reform of the Church is always necessary. In every age and generation she is faced with the task of presenting herself anew. It is with this understanding of the constant renewal of the Church — ecclesia semper reformanda — that we approach our subject.

The Unity of the Church is not primarily a unity of members among themselves, but is essentially a given unity which has its origin in God himself in his triune being of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This unity was actualized in Jesus Christ himself and made efficacious in the Holy Spirit. The whole New Testament message bears witness to this unity of origin. The classic texts are well known: 1 Cor 1: 10-30; 1 Cor 12; Gal 3: 27f; Rom 12: 3-8; Acts 2:42; 4: 32; John 10: 16; 17; 20-26; Eph 4: 1-6. There was indeed a consciousness of unity everywhere, and it was this consciousness of unity which was one of the factors which constituted the Church. This consciousness of unity became an essential element in the Church’s self-definition, as one of the four characteristics of the Church set out in the Nicene Creed: ‘We believe one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’.

In this paper it will be argued that the type of situation in which the question, Does God exist, becomes urgent for the questioner is fundamentally a rhetorical situation. It is also a situation where theology is forced to provide rhetorical answers — in the special sense of ‘rhetoric’ outlined here (as well as in last month’s edition of this journal). This is partly because of the influence on theological language which is exercised by its recipients’ needs, and partly because rhetorical discourse is, from an epistemological point of view, uniquely suitable for talking about God.

When it seriously matters to someone whether God exists or not, at least this much can be said about his situation: it is one where it is felt to be urgent that some position should be reached or some decision made, but where the grounds for doing so fall considerably short of theoretical certainty. They fall short, too, of the ordinary logical and empirical grounds on which we are used to reaching decisions on simpler matters. Nonetheless, when the problem of God’s existence becomes compelling, its very importance means that no solution to it is likely to be experienced as adequate unless it conforms to the highest standards of reasonableness available for dealing with such a question. At the same time, the questioner is putting his enquiry not only as an intellectual being but also as a person with emotional and moral dispositions; he requires conviction from a source which he can respect in these terms, and in order to understand an answer and to gain any satisfaction from it he needs to perceive it from an emotional situation which at least allows of its appreciation. Though one need not, for example, feel hilarious in order to believe in God, one is not likely to be able to do so from a position of total despair. The affective state of the questioner must in some way, then, be taken into account when he is provided with any attempt at an answer.

Another one safely on the shelf, with only five more to come, and then all fourteen thick volumes of Karl Rahner's Schriften zur Theologie (1954-1980) will be translated into English, in some twenty-one slimmer and somewhat more manageable ones. This particular instalment is the second part of the volume which Rahner put together shortly after the celebration for his seventieth birthday (the volume itself was dedicated to his mother on her hundredth birthday).

The only comparable oeuvre by a Catholic theologian of Rahner's generation would no doubt be that of Hans Urs von Balthasar, but the translation into English is lagging far behind.