The most interesting article to come to my notice recently from the religious press appeared in the August 1988 issue of Life and Work, the monthly record of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. This issue was largely devoted to the jubilee of the Iona Community, and the Editor had the excellent idea of inviting an assessment of the Community’s achievement from Donald MacLeod, the professor of systematic theology at the (dissenting) Free Church College in Edinburgh. Perceptive, astringent, humorous, always controversial, sometimes (as has been remarked in subsequent correspondence) a little unfair, this article had the supreme merit of puncturing complacency and, at the same time, making important constructive suggestions.

Writing of what he sees to be the Community theology, Professor MacLeod says that ‘it has room for the Incarnation but not for the Atonement, and simply cannot bring itself to summon individuals (including the poor) to repentance. Terrified of proselytising, it refuses to evangelise.’ While such a tendency may characterize those who have been touched by the emphases of the Iona Community, it may be said that in the Christian world at large we have to reckon with a passionate renewal of traditional, even fundamentalist, Evangelical teaching. But what gives Professor MacLeod’s remark its peculiar point is the fact that it is addressed sympathetically to those whose theological sophistication may have immunised them against serious engagement with the themes of, for instance, A.M. Toplady’s classic hymn Rock of Ages:

It is often said that Catholics believe in the development of doctrine. But it is not a doctrine of the Catholic Church that doctrine develops. The teaching of the Church is that its faith is immutable. The Church’s primary attitude to doctrine is the principle given by St Paul. ‘Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preach to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’ (Galatians 1:8). There is, of course, an obvious sense in which doctrine does develop. For the number of defined doctrines has grown over time. But the Catholic view of this is that doctrines defined over time are contained in or implied by what was taught from the beginning. The primary role of the Church as teacher is to preserve what has already been given and to state what that amounts to as need arises. It retains the Gospel and articulates it.

If that is what the Church does, it seems fair to ask why we should believe what the Church teaches. Some would dispute this on the ground that the Church in a sense does not teach. ‘Why should we believe it?’ presupposes that someone has propounded what he takes to be a truth.

Through television Western Christians have recently been exposed to vivid images of the violent repression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. With live ammunition, three-foot clubs and cyanide tear gas, courtesy of the United States, the Palestinian protest of the occupation is being hammered into silence. Once it is silenced, it is hard to know whether Western people will continue to wonder about what is happening to those who are suffering under this occupation.

The World Council of Churches, the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians have long since assumed their stances on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. For the World Council and the Vatican, relationships to Judaism and relationship to the state of Israel are separate questions, the one theological, the other political. Generally, both have supported the two-state solution, or the granting of a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fundamentalists, by contrast, are militant supporters of an expanded Israel, based on their reading of Biblical prophecy.

The voices which are largely unheard in western Christian circles are those of Middle Eastern Christians themselves. Unlike Western liberal Christians, they generally understand that, because the state of Israel implicitly makes claims based on Hebrew Scripture, these claims must be confronted theologically.

One such statement was put together as long ago as 1967 by a group of Middle Eastern Christian theologians, headed by George Khodr, present bishop of Mount Lebanon in the Orthodox Church of Antioch. Entitled What is Required of the Christian Faith Concerning the Palestinian Problem, it lay major emphasis on the spiritual and universal meaning of Christian faith.

Some years ago, in an essay outlining Christian complicity in the Jewish Holocaust and the future of Christianity in light of that complicity, the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz wrote: ‘We Christians can never again go back behind Auschwitz: to go beyond Auschwitz, if we see clearly, is impossible for us by ourselves. It is possible only together with the victims of Auschwitz.’ When first read this statement strikes one by its boldness, and later by its depth. For Metz, the Jewish victims of Christian triumphalism and power stand before the Christian community, challenging the past but also serving as the key to the future. Of course, Christian and Jew had travelled together on a tortuous and bloody road for almost two millennia before the Holocaust; the present calls for a radically new way of journeying together, one of trust and ultimately of embrace.

Over the past months, as the twenty-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has erupted in a veritable civil war, Metz’s statement had assumed a new relevance in a different context. For on the other side of power, the Jewish people have assumed a new and unaccustomed role in relation to the Palestinian people: that of oppressors. As some Christians continue to have difficulty in admitting their complicity in the suffering of Jews, the Jewish people find it almost impossible to admit to their own complicity in the suppression of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish empowerment, mandated by the suffering of the Holocaust, should be affirmed as a good, the present impasse in Israel and Palestine cannot be addressed outside the most obvious, to some the more contradictory, of options: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

A year ago, in an editorial, New Blackfriars was complaining that the theological understanding of what Mrs Thatcher had been doing to Britain had ‘hardly even begun’.

The complaint could have been generalized. To judge by the standard of the public debate at the 1987 General Election, any in-depth understanding of Thatcherism, despite the decade of evidence on which it could draw, was non-existent. Even now it is still in its infancy. A government which claims to have wrested intellectual supremacy from the left and to be full of ideas, and which is if anything rather pleased with itself when its opponents accuse it of sacrificing something or other on the altar of ideology, has nonetheless provoked no coherent theoretical critique to speak of from its public opponents, hardly anything other than mesmerized horror.

Is it the indisputable authority of seemingly unending power that has reduced the critical mind to silence? Or is Mrs Thatcher perhaps right? Has a philosopher-queen inaugurated a republic in which all the questions of political economy, having been answered, no longer need to be asked?

Hardly. The massive paradoxes of the Thatcher years—their blatancy must partly account for the opposition’s bewilderment— demand explanation, and, like any explanation of human affairs, that explanation will of course have a theological dimension. I am not, though, a theologian. Surely, however, the launching of a really satisfactory ‘theological critique’ of Thatcherism at least partly depends on the opening up of a rather more general discussion of Thatcherism, and what I am offering here is a contritibution to this.

According to Alvin Plantings, ‘we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers.’ He gives advice on the character such striving should have. I think his advice is bad advice, bad for philosophy and bad for Christianity. Here I shall concentrate, in the main, on the philosophical aspects of this bad advice. The aspects I have in mind are of two kinds: first, Plantinga’s appeal to considerations external to philosophy which distort the spirit of philosophical enquiry; second, Plantinga’s conception of philosophical enquiry itself.

Plantinga claims, ‘Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move ... There is also powerful evidence for this contention in philosophy’ (p. 253). How is this supposed to be established? By comparison, it seems, with the state of philosophy in the fifties vis á vis Christianity: ‘the public temper of main-line establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian: even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers’ (p. 253). These three characterisations of the fifties are very different from each other.

The first sign that Christianity in philosophy was not on the move in the fifties is supposed to be the fact that few Christians were in the philosophical establishment.

In the western world, at least, socialism is in crisis as a political force. But it is also in crisis as an intellectual creed, and it is this crisis that concerns the present article. Nevertheless, the practical and the theoretical crises are very closely allied; the real political problem for contemporary socialism may be that, increasingly, people no longer know, or have forgotten, why one should be a socialist.

One might want to re-express this as ‘people no longer see any reasons to be a socialist’. And the practical response might be to urge us, once again, to convince people that socialism is the truly reasonable path. And yet, I am going to argue that in certain crucial senses there simply are no ‘reasons’ for being socialist in the way that we have tended to imagine in the past. If, I shall suggest, we can overcome the lingering suggestion that socialism is a matter of science, of historical diagnosis, or of universally valid reason, then we shall actually be able to recover the most authentic core of the socialist tradition, and the Christian socialist tradition in particular. In the course of this argument I shall first of all establish a contrast between old-style Christian socialism and new-style Christian Marxism, and then go on to show that Christian socialism is in certain ways more in tune with a ‘post Marxist’ or ‘post modernist’ radicalism. Finally, I shall suggest how Christian socialism nonetheless moves beyond the ambiguity of the post-modern critique of capitalist society.

‘Similitude of manners’, wrote Sir Thomas More in his Life of John Picus, ‘is a cause of love and friendship: a likeness of conditions is (as Appollonius saith) an affinity’. In the first of these articles looking at the uncertain place of literature within our modem culture, and within a Christian cultivation of the virtues, I tried to show how Chaucer’s art restores friendships which have been rent by our denial of common human weakness, a likeness of conditions in frailty and sin. I suggested that Chaucer invites his readers to overcome a desire to pass sentence on their neighbours in two ways: firstly he allows us to hear our sentences on the lips of his characters, and to see the violence such dismissive voices call into being; secondly he asks us to give voice to others’ sins and, in giving voice to them, hear ourselves and our own weakness. Chaucer thus creates a language of communal forgiveness as he trains our ear, and in the laughter he raises that language effects what it signifies. In that sense we can agree with David Jones that art is sacramental, and add that literature imparts an ethics of speech.

Here I shall be pursuing this view of art as contributing to an ethics of speech, something sadly neglected by most of today’s Catholic moral theologians. Apparently mesmerized by the bits and pieces of human anatomy below the belt, they remain uninspired by our vocal chords. The past tells a different story.

At this time in the Church’s life there is an increased concern for its mission among the poor, yet the needs of the poor in Western Europe still seem to be a very secondary issue for the Church there. When the question of ‘of the option for the poor’ is broached it is too often in the context of another part of the world. I believe that many factors, theological and sociological, have contributed to this—too many and too vast to analyse in a brief article. However, I think that two issues demand some attention before one can propose positive direction.

It is a well-known fact that the church in Latin America has been the strongest voice calling for an option for the poor. The now historic conference of bishops at Medellin in 1968, which formally called the church into the struggle for reasonable dignity for the people of Latin America, set a tone for all later deliberations. The theology of liberation has brought non-European theology at last into the centre of theological debate. Yet too many still think of this development as the product of the wretched poverty of a particular people.

In the industrial world, which has a large middle class, it is easy to dismiss this theological development as if the option for the poor were only the need of a particular local church. This however is not the case.