The alarming resurgence of biblical speculation by the nuclear war-lords of the West in the last few years has drawn peace-movement Christians to sober biblical scholarship. New Blackfriars writers have pioneered the reclamation of ‘the most symbolically-rich eschatological language of the Bible, from Isaiah to Revelation, ... captured by abstentionist sects and a politically hostile movement’ and made ‘virtually unavailable to Christians who do not share those views about politics and God’s action in the world’.

The question I would like to explore here is: how, if at all, can this kind of investigation, which draws on academic exegesis but clearly goes beyond it, also help us to reclaim and wrestle with symbols and stories which superficially appear to be of a different kind, namely, the symbols and stories which speak of our earliest beginnings? With the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel? This might be termed the ‘pop’ culture of the Bible, not being seen as belonging to the specialist or to any political faction with a biblical axe to grind, but as the mythic heritage of all—timeless, beloved of Hollywood as the stuff of Epic spectacle. It is, however, the area which has long been of interest to the Western Women’s Movement, because it has come to reckon with the power of these foundational myths over our culture’s perceptions of gender. Feminists see these myths as captured and distorted by patriarchal religion and hence by patriarchal power in general.

Professor Michael Dummett, in the October New Blackfriars, quotes an article by Thomas Sheehan which asserts that there is ‘a liberal consensus’ among Catholic Biblical scholars as to the historical basis of our faith. This consensus includes such views as that Jesus did not think that he was divine, that Mary was not a virgin and that Joseph was the natural father of Jesus, that Jesus did not refer to himself when he talked of the Son of Man but rather to some future apocalyptic figure, and that the remains of his corpse are still in a tomb in Palestine. Professor Dummett maintains that these views are a denial of the solemn teachings of the Church, and in his subsequent article (the one which appeared in December) he argues that if they are accepted then ‘that teaching is reduced to a demand for the acceptance of certain forms of words, which may be taken as expressing anything one chooses’ (566). I would agree with Professor Dummett, but I would question the existence of such a consensus. In fact, in a letter published in The Tablet of 5 March, commenting on Hie Tablet’s report of the debate between Professor Dummett and Professor Lash, Father Raymond Brown (who is Auburn Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary, New York) writes:

Philosphers of religion sometimes appeal to religious experiences as evidence for the existence of God. To take one notable and philosophically sophisticated example, Professor Swinburne argues that religious experience constitutes good C-inductive ground for belief in the existence of God; and that the contribution of the argument from religious experience to the ensemble of arguments for the existence of God as a whole makes the ensemble a good P-inductive rather than just a C-inductive argument. This is a substantial claim: a C-inductive argument merely adds to the probability of some claim, without making it more probable than not. A P-inductive argument, by contrast, establishes that the probability of the claim it defends is greater than fifty percent.

Not all religious experience is covered by Swinburne’s claim. Non-theistic experiences and theistic experiences not claiming to be of God are excluded from this discussion. This article will deal with unequivocal claims to have had experience of God, not with weaker claims (to have had an experience as of God touching one, for example). Weaker claims might be indefeasible, but offer little joy for the theist. Univocal claims, by contrast, are non-trivially true if true at all.

What marks an experience as an experience of God? H.P. Owen’s definition of God as ‘the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent’ is useful in answering this question. A claim to have had an experience of an infinite, eternal, omniscient and omnipotent being, say, is a claim to have had an experience of God: here, a sufficient number of attributes secures the identification.

The Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University not long ago ran into controversy, because of its acceptance of a bequest which endows a post in theology on condition that its holder be a practising Christian. To some commentators this case appears as an ominous harbinger of what is to come: university departments, starved of public funds, will be increasingly forced to turn to private means, sometimes under conditions which threaten the upholding of academic objectivity. There is, however, a possibly irony in the Newcastle case, an irony which should cause us to ponder more deeply the pros and cons involved: the professorial research fellow at Newcastle has a brief to reflect, theologically, on the situation in the inner cities, so although the appointment has been made against the background of governmental withdrawal of financial support from the universities, the results of the new professor’s research are much more likely to be a critical embarrassment to the government than the usual more abstruse, more detached and ‘scholarly’ products of research in religious studies.

Of course, pointing up the irony is not to resolve the argument. And old whiggish purists, like Mr Tony Benn, exhibit a proper integrity when they insist that we should not look to defeat Mrs Thatcher by disinterring the power of privilege, whether princely, aristocratic or religious.

In a recent issue of Building Design, a journal which every architect in Britain receives, a review of Glasgow’s Garden Festival comments that one would expect it to be about gardens but that it turns out to be also about architecture.

A few weeks earlier the Tate Gallery organised a one-day symposium on art, architecture and Deconstruction. A piece of architecture which the philosopher Jacques Derrida, inventor of Deconstruction, claims as a rare incarnation of his ideas is the Parc de la Villette in Paris, designed by the architect Bernard Tschumi with Derrida’s, and other architects’, participation. One would expect such an architectural ‘demonstration project’ to be about buildings but in fact it turns out to be also about gardens.

And both are also about science and industry.

I want to ask some questions about this conflation of buildings, gardens and technology. My argument asks whether the technique of Deconstruction is applicable, even meaningful, in the context of architecture; it ‘deconstructs’ Derrida’s writing about La Villette, and finally tries to answer the question about buildings, nature, art and technology in terms of power.

Deconstructing architecture

The best way to start the discussion is to start where Derrida starts—with language, and especially the written text. Much of Derrida’s work questions the logocentric basis of Western philosophy. That is, the idea that speech, one step away from directly perceived truth, is the pure form of argument, and the written text, one further step away, is a dangerous and second-best necessary evil, brought into being by the need to give philosophy a history.

Let us not forget that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head: that Jesus, the Father of the Poor, had less than the foxes with their holes; and always remember that Jesus worked among the lepers, the prostitutes, the sinners, the outcasts. Yes, Jesus caused scandal by his work among those marginalised by society.

Jesus too was called ‘the Nazarene’: ‘Jesus the provincial’; He could just as easily have been Jesus from Middlesbrough, or Jesus from Hull. If Jesus walked the face of the earth today, would He weep again over the city? Over Hull or Middlesbrough? How would He react to such contemporary problems as Aids, the apparent breakdown of family life, the scourge of unemployment, the plight of the homeless, and the tragedy of young drug addicts? Of one thing we can be sure, if he was to visit Hull, he would be on our outer estates of Bransholme, Orchard Park and North Hull—and he would react. But this, of course, begs the question.

Jesus is still with us; by his own promise he is with the Church, and in his own words he is in our fellow men and women. ‘Whenever you do it to the least of my brethren you do it to me.’

I had anticipated learning from the contributions of others to the debate initiated last autumn in New Blackfriars by Professor Nicholas Lash and me (the debate on what has been called ‘the liberal consensus’) without reentering that debate soon, if ever. The scrupulous courtesy of Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s article in the March issue, in which he discusses whether there is such a ‘consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars, makes it easy to do that. However, I have found it impossible to let the remarks of Mr. Joseph Fitzpatrick in his March article, based on the views of Bernard Lonergan, pass without protest.

Mr. Fitzpatrick’s article appears to me to encourage hostility to reason itself. He does not openly declare himself an enemy to reason, and I have no doubt would sincerely repudiate such a charge: but, all the same, what he wrote will surely reinforce hostility to it on the part of others. A large part of his contention is that, in theology, and, by implication, in other disciplines as well, deductive reasoning should be demoted. Anyone who puts forward such a thesis needs to spell out with great care exactly what he means by it if he is not to be taken, or mistaken, for an enemy of reason; and Mr. Fitzpatrick exercises very little care. He objects to ‘the habit among Catholic theologians of arriving at conclusions by often dubious deductive reasoning’ (p. 134). We have here, at the outset of his attack on the use of deductive reasoning in theology, a vital ambiguity.

Not the least of the things that are interesting about the vigorous dispute between Professor Michael Dummett and Professor Nicholas Lash in the October and December 1987 issues of New Blackfriars is that it provides an excellent opportunity for testing the practical relevance of Bernard Lonergan’s much-discussed method for theology. The dispute is at heart a dispute about the appropriate way of doing theology, at least within the Roman Catholic church, and here is a chance for seeing how Lonergan helps us to discern the flaws (and the strong points too). But first of all quite a lot must be said about that method of Lonergan’s, and this will fill two-thirds of this article. Lonergan may well be the theologian who will best assist us in delivering Christian theology safely into the twenty- first century, and beyond. His thinking bears the stamp of the Catholic trust in the compatibility of reason and faith, of science and religion, of the God of philosophy and the God of revelation, while at the same time the foundational role he allocates to conversion accords with one of Protestantism’s basic religious insights. And, in a world in which religious fundamentalism holds such sway, he also insists on the indispensability for theological inquiry and doctrinal enrichment of objective research and scientific rigour. Nevertheless, in Lonergan’s writings it is at times difficult to see the wood for the trees. So here is an impressionistic account of the wood.

I will begin by mentioning three possible definitions of the theological task that I cannot accept, on the principle that many good definitions are arrived at by ruling out what things are not. Each of these ‘negative definitions’ will be to some extent a caricature, yet all caricatures have some relation to reality. Moreover, each of the rejected definitions will prove to have incorporated in it an element of value. This element is capable of being disengaged and used afresh in a positive definition of the theological task to be offered in the second part of the article.

Three negative definitions

1. A first account of the theological task that one might meet has it that theology is the misguided attempt to turn into a science something which is strictly mysterious: the dogmas, or as we say (precisely) the mysteries of the Christian religion. Since these mysteries by definition transcend the scope of the human mind, what is the point of trying to work them out intellectually? As Lord Dacre of Granton has put it, theology is ‘sophisticated ninnery’. If we have accepted a revealed religion, we must take the consequences. The consequences are that we cannot theorise about a revelation. We can only reform our own attitudes and feelings on the basis of it.

From the discussion in the pages of New Blackfriars that has followed on my article of October 1987, ‘A Remarkable Consensus’, I have learned much. Half of my article was devoted to the prospects of reunion with the Orthodox; and from the fact that none of the commentators has so much as mentioned that half, I conclude that anxiety for such reunion is not acute among the British Catholic intellegentsia. I think this attitude to it is mistaken: it is among our most urgent needs. Since the schism, the Catholic Church has been, intellectually and spiritually, a crippled body, paralysed, as it were, down the whole of one side: we need once more to become one with Eastern Christians for the sake of our own health, at least as much as for their advantage.

The work of scientists has in the last half-century brought humanity face to face with two major menaces to its survival and created a situation without precedent in human history. This twofold threat has been posed by the development of nuclear fission for civilian or military purposes and the more recent development of biotechnology or genetic engineering. We live, all of us, all of Creation, in the ominous shadow of nuclear technology. We live also in what is potentially a no less chilling shadow—the darkening shadow of biotechnology, an industry which, according to the Times of India, is ‘the fastest growing industry in the world today’.

It is more than a decade since the distinguished Austro-American biochemist Erwin Chargaff commented that these two immense and fateful scientific discoveries, ‘the splitting of the atom (and) the recognition of the chemistry of heredity and its subsequent manipulation’, both involved the mistreatment of a nucleus—that of the atom and that of the cell. He added—and it was a comment whose prophetic vision was largely ignored at the time—‘In both cases do I have the feeling that science has transgressed a barrier that should have remained inviolate.’

The four last things are death, judgement, heaven and hell, of which only one is certain: the first. Death is the key to the four last things, and thinking about death is the key to the devotion based on the four last things which flourished in a small way at various times and places during the middle ages, and in a changed form in counter-reformation Europe.

Here I am not writing about the last things themselves, but about the devotion, and, even then, not about the counter-reformation devotion, which was part of a different world from the one in which the mediaeval devotion flourished, and had a completely different significance. I want to look at the four last things in the middle ages, as one devotional subject with the emphasis changing from one to another of its constituent parts so that it acted as a barometer for the mood and atmosphere in the Church.

In the last twenty years or so thinking on the four last things has had something of a revival and has, I believe, again been reflecting the Church’s current moods, though in traditional style.

Possibly the most noticeable feature of this devotion, or subject for contemplation, is that it has only been really popular when the religious atmosphere has been restless and when there has been criticism of the established Church to the point of disillusionment. Its popularity has also been related to concern for the individual soul. It has only been in the last few years that theologians have tried to combine communal and personal salvation in a devotion on the four last things.

What can recent theories in evolutionary biology about the problem of altruism contribute to a Christian perspective on the nature of humanity?

Altruism is considered a ‘problem’ because Darwin’s theory of natural selection leads us to expect all organisms, including humans, to be selfish. According to the theory of natural selection those traits which we expect to see in the natural world are the ones which have conferred on their bearers the greatest reproductive success. As altruism means the giving of aid, a preliminary reading of Darwinism suggests that altruism poses a challenge to the whole theory of adaptation by natural selection. Sociobiology has a great deal to say about the evolution of altruism in non-humans. How far does the study of altruism in non-humans help us to understand altruism in us?

Sociobiological theories for the evolution of altruism Sociobiology, the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour, dates as a named discipline from only 1975, when E.O. Wilson’s now much-discussed book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, was published. As altruism manifestly requires social behaviour—an organism cannot be altruistic on its own!—theories for the evolution of altruism lie at the centre of sociobiology.

The first biological explanation for altruism was, however, proposed by none other than Darwin himself. Having developed the theory of natural selection, Darwin went on to consider how the sterile castes in many social insects could have evolved. He realised that it might be argued that such castes could not have evolved by natural selection because the bearers of traits associated with sterility leave, by definition, no offspring, but he proposed that sterility in such circumstances could evolve by a process he termed ‘family selection’.

Rallying to the flag first raised by Professor Michael Dummett a year ago, Fr Brian Davies has parachuted heavily down on what I suppose we must call the Dummett-Lash battlefield, though the theological poppies have now been nourished by the blood of other combatants. Not least of these is Fr Davies’ own Provincial, Timothy Radcliffe.

In ‘Why Should We Believe It?’ (printed in last month’s New Blackfriars, pp. 360—368) Fr Davies is clearly worried by Fr Radcliffe’s opinion that a Catholic is ‘not committed to saying that any single saying of Jesus in the Gospels exactly reports the words of that historical person’ since it is possible ‘that in every instance his sayings have been redacted in the light of his subsequent death and resurrection, and of the theological concerns of the gospel writers’ (NB March 1988, p. 118). On the contrary, according to Fr Davies, Catholic faith depends for its very existence on clear reportage of Jesus’ own words. The Gospels ‘make some pretty extraordinary claims’: that Jesus is God incarnate, for example, and that by his cross and resurrection he conquered sin and death. We can only believe such extraordinary things if ‘sufficiently informed by one who is God and by one who knows what he is talking about’ (pp 361—6).

It would, I assume, be universally agreed among Catholics that we need to be ‘sufficiently informed’ by God about what is saving truth. The debate turns on just what might count as being ‘sufficiently informed’.

The two narratives in Exodus 18, in which Jethro joins the Israelites in a sacrifice (w. 1—12) and counsels Moses on how to organize the Israelites (w. 13—27), appear to some highly esteemed commentators to have ‘no substantive relation to each other’ (Noth, 1972:136) except for the prominent role played in both by Moses’ Midianite father-in-law. I hope to show, however, that the two episodes go well together. I hope too that the reader will agree that, as so often is the case with OT material, Ex 18 has light to shed, if only obliquely, on an issue that preoccupies us still; in this case, that of authority.

The two accounts are doubtless very ancient; are, indeed, in substance probably historical, for the nation would scarcely without historical warrant have credited a foreigner with the important role given to Jethro in Ex 18 (Welch, 1932:192). It looks, however, as though a redactor has made a conscious choice to insert the story at a different point from that at which it was found in the tradition as it came down to him.

The picture of Moses declaring God’s ‘statutes and laws’ (18.16) and using them to resolve judicial disputes implies that the Sinai-revelation has already taken place (cf. Dt 1.9—18), and indeed at 18.5 the location for the episode is specifically stated to be ‘the mountain of God’; yet the redactor has elected to tell the story before the arrival at Sinai (19.2).

It is easy to forget priorities, particularly our priorities about Scripture. The novel or obscure often dominate our scholarly publishing about the Bible because academics give priority to new interpretations and to solving problems. In this article I would like to reflect on two of our foundational texts: the commandment to love God in Deuteronomy 6: 4—5 and Mark 12: 28—34.

In Deut 6, we encounter the most famous statement of Israelite faith, v.4, joined to the most fundamental commandment of the Old Testament, v.5: ‘(4)Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; (5)and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might’.

A balance between the collective belief of the ancient Israelite community and the obligation of each individual is immediately struck by the simple use of pronouns: in v.4 the Lord is identified as our God; in v.5 he is called your (ms. sg.) God. Moreover, the latter has a double reference both to the collective Israel evoked in the preceding verse and to each individual Israelite. To reflect this balance between the individual and community perspectives I shall employ both ‘you’ and ‘we’.

Each of us is then commanded to love God in three ways, but ways that are usually masked in English translations. By returning to the language in which the author wrote, in this case, Hebrew, we can gain a fuller sense of God’s Word to us.