Looking at Lonergan’s Method is a collection of thirteen papers issuing from a conference held at Maynooth in the spring of 1973 at which scholars from differing traditions and disciplines gathered to assess the significance of the recent work of Bernard Lonergan.

These are not the papers written for the meeting; they represent the authors’ reflections after it, in the light of the discussions that took place. Perhaps the momentum for the book was the convergence of fundamental doubts about the viability of Lonergan’s method. At any rate, for all the respect and gratitude that some of the Catholic contributors voice for what Lonergan has done over the years to loosen the hold of a certain way of doing theology, it is very striking that all but one or two of these papers make what seem such irreparably damaging criticisms of his recent work that it becomes very difficut to regard it any longer as a promising trail in the reconstruction of Catholic theology which is now so urgent a task. The book thus marks a watershed in the history of Lonergan congresses.

That Bernard Lonergan is the only figure in the English-speaking world whose achievement in Catholic theology ranks, in influence and reputation, with that of the leading theologians of our time, cannot be disputed. The years he spent lecturing at the Gregorian University in Rome (1953-1965) afforded him a unique opportunity to reach the minds of a whole generation of candidates for the priesthood—either directly or through the countless future seminary professors whom he must have taught (he sometimes had classes of 650 students!).

Within a short space of time two books have appeared, both dealing with a matter of wide current interest but at the same time both treat the issue cautiously and with some timidity. I am referring to the short book edited by Eva Alexanderson, titled The Homosexual in the Parish (Verbum, Stockholm, 1973; Swedish title : De homosexuelle i forsamlingen), and to the subsequent report of a study commissioned by the bishops’ synod of the Church of Sweden, published under the editorship of Holsten Fagerberg under the title: The Homosexual and the Church (Verbum, Stockholm, 1974; Swedish title: De homosexuelle och kyrkan). Both of these books provide subject matter for considerable reflection and will hopefully have the effect of helping us abandon a more or less conscious notion that homosexuals are, in general, somehow more sinful or perverse than heterosexuals in general. Eva Alexanderson has brought together contributions of homosexuals, both anonymous and identified by name, all of whom experience themselves and intend to continue living as Christians. To the question whether or not they are justified in this, the Swedish Church’s report provides both an historic and current overview with regard to the situation of homosexuals—seen in terms of the medical, psychological, social, theological and ethical perspectives involved. In reading it one is amazed by the abysmal ignorance, prejudice and lack of charity which has so often passed as Christian. At the same time one is delighted to find that everything in the report is taken up objectively and with a genuine desire to show that concern is felt for the right of human beings to respect, love and—in short—to a complete and full life. I don’t believe I am exaggerating when I understand the report in this way.

We have come together tonight, not only from different Christian traditions, but from different areas of thought in our own Church. We have come together to celebrate Mass, the holy mysteries in which, as Our Lord commanded, we shew forth his death and rejoice in him, our risen Saviour. But we have come together, for all our differences, in another way too. We have assembled here to celebrate Mass in a tongue that links us with a remote past older than Christianity itself, and in a form that was for centuries a distinguishing mark of the ancient church of the West. Our ceremony tonight would have been recognised at once by Pascal, by Thomas More, by Cuthbert Tunstall; and, with almost equal ease, by Bede, by Cuthbert, by Gregory. Yet in order that you should join in and recognise the ceremony yourselves, you have needed to assemble from many parts to this place—almost as a new gens lucifuga in its catacomb. It is this paradox that has prompted the reflexions I offer you.

Liturgy—the leitourgia, the public work of worship—bears on itself the marks of time and of ages that are past. Examples are easily found. Just as the outstretched hands of the priest recall the frescos depicting the earliest Christians, so his hands folded in prayer are reminiscent of a later age, and of the medieval gesture of homage. In action and posture, in phrase and word, in the very artefacts of worship, the course of our history, as Christians and as men, has left its mark.

The news that in France not only have prostitutes occupied churches as part of their campaign for a better treatment under the law, but that priests have taken their part against the police, could be interpreted as one of the more bizarre aspects of life in the common market. Yet this incident can provide food for thought about the style of life of the clergy themselves. When society is stable, vocations to the priesthood can be fostered by drawing attention to the status of the priest in society and the points of likeness between him and the schoolmaster, doctor, and other professional classes. It is only in these days of uncertainty and change that we can begin to entertain the thought that there might be a parallel with the oldest profession of all.

Religion like sex cuts right across society and class. It stands for basic forces in mankind that neither cold logic nor social pressures can adequately control or express. No wonder then that anyone whose way of life calls attention to the inadequacies of society in these matters will be regarded with suspicion and hostility. One has to proceed with prudence and caution. Quite apart from whether it infringes the citizen’s right to be unmolested, door to door evangelism can be counter productive. Soliciting is a crime. The customer has to make the first move. Part of the skill of the game is to elicit that initial request and to do this all manner of artistry is needed. The wares one is hawking have to be desirable, one has to create curiosity and interest, to dress up, to know human nature so as to play on natural instincts, to practise a few mincing liturgical steps, to give an ecumenical glad-eye.

Two summers ago, some friends of ours lost their 14-year-old son. He slipped while clambering around on a family picnic at the seaside—so innocuous in the sunshine!—and three days later they were told that he would never recover consciousness. It was explained to them that he could of course be kept ‘alive’ indefinitely if that was their wish ? Had our friends been Catholics, would they have found it any easier to make the decision to turn off the machine? I doubt it.

Yet I feel it should have been. Recent work on bereavement records the regularity with which the bereaved are prey to feelings of guilt over negligences to the dying person or the inevitable feeling where an illness is long-drawn out, that the sooner death comes, the better. What is likely then to be the psychological effect on those bereaved by their own decision, and how badly do they need the moral support and comfort of a caring but clear-headed church in this predicament? Outsiders accuse the autocratic Catholic Church of still issuing rule-of-thumb directives on all moral questions, and since, alone of the Christian churches, she still maintains an absolute stand on the taking of life (as those with experience in the abortion field well know), it would amaze them to learn that in such an agonising decision as this, the Church appears to have so little positive help to offer. Why ? One can of course suggest reasons : positive ones, such as the one of which my father constantly reminded us in our days of youthful revolt, that a Church which claims to speak to all peoples and for all ages must exercise a wise conservatism and not rush into rash statements; and the corollary : that the Church prefers to avoid rigid statements where the situation is uncertain and still in the process of developing—as is clearly the case with topical medical techniques.

‘It was a violent time’. Thom Gunn’s description of the Elizabethan age (‘A Mirror for Poets’) could equally be applied to the 1950s. Again and again the poetry of this decade returned to the central theme of violence, yet, constantly, shrank back from engaging with it. Gunn’s own poetry, replete with latent aggression,, nevertheless strove to contain its smouldering energy in couplets and formal stanzas and histrionic poses (‘Even in bed I pose’) as impersonal and self-disciplining as those nazi uniforms and leather-jackets with which his poems abound. The motor-cyclists of ‘On the Move’ seemed to offer an adequate parallel to his own poetic stance:

Much of the writing of ‘The Movement’ tried to explore the barbarous hinterland which recent history had shown lay behind the genteel littoral of western civilisation, but most poems had an air of ‘donned impersonality’ which seemed to brand them as exercises rather than explorations. The doubt was too profound, the revelation of depravity too recent and too raw, to make total candour possible. For many poets, an ostensibly empirical interest in the quotidian became, in fact, a rationale for escapism.

Poor St Paul: with, ‘Wives be subject to your husbands’, he has a pretty bad reputation as a misogynist. I will try to show, however, that examination of his writings proves that this reputation is undeserved and to indicate how it has grown. So that it has become what Dr Caird describes as: ‘one of the most firmly held of the prejudices and half truths which together comprise the biblical semiliteracy of the man in the street’.

I cannot here go into a detailed exegesis of all the extracts from St Paul’s letters in which women are mentioned, but one central point must be made clearly from the start. St Paul had one main concern. That was, to preach the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus. His mission was not concerned with women as women, or with their place in society or even in the local churches. It was not as a sociologist that Paul wrote but as an apostle. He was concerned above all to preach what Christ had done for all mankind. He was concerned to show people how a new relationship with God could be found through being in Christ. The new relationship with God came through the new covenant established by Christ’s death and resurrection. Through baptism into Christ, people were given the new seal; just as circumcision had been the old seal of God’s relationship with his old people, and the law had been their relationship with God. There would of course be repercussions in social relationships which would follow from the realisation of the new relationship with God through Christ. But if we look at Paul from a particular standpoint: what has he to say about women only?, we are asking a question which he did not ask.

Just before nine o’clock I dragged my tired frame in through the school doors and on towards the staff room.

Like that frustrated character Billy Liar I would like to machine-gun down that irritating cheerful face in the comer. I pour out my tea and sip it quietly, consulting my timetable. On the wall across the road a painted slogan reinforces the image of my first class, 4F.

At the first piercing sound of the bell Mr. C. rises sharply and makes off in the direction of the Technical rooms. I would like to bomb that bell for ever but instead make my way wearily upstairs to room 5, open the door, and walk over to the desk. I am soon followed by a few lads who make towards the desks at the window.

I pick up a book, Your Life of Our Lord, and try to think of 2c’s R.K. lesson while a few more boys come trickling in the door. I acknowledge them with a casual look and they join their mates. I have given up struggling with these lads. They resist all efforts to get them to read or to write.

Slant, the journal of the Catholic left in Britain in the 1960s, began publication in 1964 and ended in 1970. Its formation and development were the result of factors both within and outside the Catholic Church. The development of the ‘New Left’ in Britain seemed to open up an area of potential middle-class radicalisation. After Hungary and Suez in 1956 what appeared to be required was a de-Stalinised, socialist humanism, responsive to the specific conditions of welfare-state capitalism whilst being at the same time internationalist in its perspectives. In the early 1960s the New Left was a political tendency—with all the vagueness which that term implies. It represented a hesitant, exploratory analysis, which was only later to refine its insights into a more rigorous critique of contemporary capitalism.

The first of these quotations was written by Newman in 1845 in his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The second was written by Marx and Engels three years later in The Communist Manifesto.

Newman’s essay can be seen as the beginning of a genuine sense of history in the world of Catholic Theology. The Communist Manifesto can be seen as having a similar role for the history of ideas. Catholic Theology could never be the same again after Newman’s essay and secular history could never be the same again after the Communist Manifesto.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore more than a few of the implications of the Marxist view of history as class struggle for Newman’s view of doctrinal development. I am not aware that anyone has ever given a Marxist analysis of Newman’s famous essay. There are, however, a number of Marxist treatments of the history of the Church and of Christian doctrine—notably by Engels and Karl Kautsky. These treatments are all written from the point of view of a rejection of belief, both in God and in any meaningful degree of historical certainty about the existence of Jesus Christ.

The reasons for Marxist atheism are well known and can be found in the philosophical background of the young Marx. The reasons for the extreme scepticism over New Testament origins can be traced to early nineteenth century biblical criticism and to the work of the bosom friend of the young Marx at Berlin in the 1830s, Bruno Bauer.

Denys Turner’s attractive argument for the compatibility, nay the virtual identity, of Marxism and Christianity (New Blackfriars, June 1975) is excellent as far as it goes, and I have little to quarrel with in it. But this is because it doesn’t go very far. So I’d like to press him to go on to the next step.

Marxism and Christianity are at one—indeed, are one—because each affirms that it is only by means of revolutionary socialist praxis that a community of human love can be attained, through the overturning of the capitalist system of human exploitation which for us in the present era is the incarnation of everything which is opposed to such love. All right: but then I have to ask myself am I a practising Marxist or only a sham Marxist? A practising Christian or only a sham Christian? Until some objective criteria have been established by which I can judge my own praxis, nothing has been done to help me except to juggle with words. Now it is at just this point, it seems to me, that Marxism fails because, unlike Christianity, it refuses to take the metaphysical basis of ethics seriously. Or, to put the point the other way round, it is at this point that Christianity, in going beyond Marxism, ceases to be wholly compatible with it.

During the last decade a large number of books on the resurrection have appeared, which reflect a wide range of theological perspectives. What is puzzling is not that there should have been such an interest in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but that the interpretations should have been so various. Why is there no unanimity of understanding concerning the resurrection? After all it is an event that is described in only a few short texts; why do exegetes find it so difficult to interpret these texts? The previous sentence, however, has already introduced us to some of the problems involved in this extremely complex hermeneutical situation. Is the resurrection an event? and is it (can it be) described in the New Testament? Exegetes and dogmatic theologians differ over these problems as much as over their understanding of the texts, and yet what is the relation of such questions as these to the linguistic content of the texts?

These reflections are prompted by the publication of an English translation of an interpretation of the texts concerning the resurrection by the distinguished French exegete Xavier Léon-Dufour. The bulk of Léon-Dufour’s book is presented as a straightforward interpretation of the texts, from the christological hymn of Philippians 2.6-11 and other Pauline and pseudo-Pauline literature to the major texts of Corinthians 15 and the closing chapters of each of the Gospels. Léon-Dufour offers an interpretation of the meaning of the texts not only in the limited literal sense but also in the wider context of the whole gospel message of each of the evangelists. One has the impression of an exegete with a distinguished past moving towards the end of a career and wanting to make a final statement on that most important of ‘events’.

I’m sitting next to Evelyn, in the choir stalls of the hospital chapel. Evelyn, who has been a patient in this hospital for at least twenty-five of her fifty years, is singing away lustily with the rest of us. But the words she is singing are quite different from the ones I’m singing. So different in fact that I can’t make them out at all. But, no matter; ‘God is his own interpreter, and He will make it plain’, the rest of us sing.

In Religious thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, Ronald Goldman says that ‘some religious experiences are so profound and personal and mysterious that it is doubtful if they are communicable at all, except through the emotional language of the arts’. In Evelyn’s case, it is simple enough. She can’t read. She is simply feeling religious emotions and singing religious words in a religious way; the result is, she sounds just like the six-year-old child quoted by Goldman:

In fact, Evelyn is perfectly capable of what Goldman would consider to be ‘adult’ religious thinking, and I know this because I’m preparing her for Confirmation in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, not understanding the words of Cowper’s hymn is certainly not stopping her from undergoing a genuinely religious experience. In fact, she is worshipping more completely and wholeheartedly than we are. She is more totally involved in an experience of Divinity. Although they are opaque to us, the words she is using fit her experience exactly. The parallel with glossolalia is obvious.

Few topics, to my mind, have been so obscured by inter-confessional debates as that of grace. Particularly, perhaps, among Catholics really everything written or said since the sixteenth century has been conditioned by reaction against, or attack upon, positions asserted to be those of the Reformers. Yet when we trundle out these statements and the arguments on which they rest, it comes as a surprise to be told that we have got the Reformers quite wrong; even their contemporaries, the theologians of the Council of Trent, seem to have been grappling with adversaries of their own making. When we go on to look, far too superficially in my case, at what seems to be the Reformed view about what we hold, the results are even more surprising.

Perhaps the Reformed take theologians more seriously than we do, but even given this, they seem, from our point of view, to be remarkably unlucky in the ones they read (but I except Professor Torrance from this).

It may well be—because Catholics have been guilty of practically every absurdity—that there are theologians who hold, or have held, that grace is a separate thing, something we can possess; or a reservoir on which we can draw. Some, not of very great repute, have certainly held that a right use of natural powers deserved or brought about a giving of grace. On a hasty reading it might appear that even the great medieval theologians regarded grace as the embellishment of an aristotelian universe. But when it is suggested that even Roman theologians regard grace as an impersonal something, a something detachable from the presence of the living God, I do not recognise anything more than the selection of one set of statements interpreted in the worst possible sense and used out of context.