The Problem of evil, from Epicurus via Philo of Alexandria to today, has usually been presented in more or less the same way. We are generally offered three, sometimes more, propositions:

1. 1 God is omnipotent

2. 2 God is good/loving

3. 3 Evil/suffering exists

I get my copies of New Blackfriars in a rather unusual manner, once a year and all at once, a whole years’s worth at a time. So it was only in May 1982 that I came across Fergus Kerr’s article Rahner Retrospective III: Transcendence or Finitude in the September 1981 issue. It gives such a seriously misleading view of Karl Rahner’s understanding of human nature and offers such an inadequate substitute as the proper philosophical foundation for Christian theology that it requires to be countered without delay.

As the title of his article suggests, what Kerr objects to in Rahner’s view of human nature is his notion that we are transcendent beings. What he wants to put in its place is a certain understanding of our finitude.

Kerr describes his paper as “a preliminary exploration of the basic epistemological problems in Rahner’s philosophy of man, with the tentative proposal that a quite different starting-point needs to be accepted” (p 370).

These two quotations are separated not only by several centuries, but also by opposing assumptions about how we may think about God, and about which analogies from human experience are appropriate. Interestingly, it is not the modern comment which is particularly surprising or disturbing. Whether we happen to agree with the bishop or not, the argument feels familiar. But the picture of a breast-feeding woman is by no means a traditional image of the Eucharist. Some might consider it shocking, or at least in rather poor taste, and these feelings are worth exploring.

It is a delicate and difficult matter for me, a professional student of literature, and an amateur of theology, to review a book by a professional theologian and an amateur of literature. Odium academicum is usually a much greater danger than the more-publicized variety, theologicum. But at least I have the advantage of having already acquired a deep respect for Dr Coulson’s work, and of having learnt a lot from him about Newman in reading his earlier volume.

The main thesis of this book is clearly stated as follows:

At first sight this claim is so improbable, and indeed extraordinary, that we feel it cannot mean what it appears to say. If we can appreciate Homer and Dante and Henry James because they all make a powerful appeal to the imagination, it would seem that by analogy we can simultaneously assent to Greek paganism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. Imaginatively, if our knowledge is sufficient, and our sympathies are wide enough, no doubt we can enter into all these and more. Those of us who had a classical education can remember (very likely with pleasure and gratitude) entering into the religious ideas contained in the Oresteia. But we did not for a moment think of believing them to be true. There are other statements, both religious and secular which we believe to be true, without being able or perhaps wishing to enter into them imaginatively.

Peru has a Left-wing daily paper called El Diario de Marka. On the day after Pope John Paul issued his encyclical Laborem Exercens the paper carried a cartoon covering most of its front page which summed up its view of the significance of the encyclical for the Peruvian situation. It showed a determined looking Pope John Paul carrying a banner which read: “Free Trade Unions, Right to Strike, Co-Ownership of the Means of Production and Just Remuneration, Social Justice”. He was bearing down on a rather smug President Belaunde who stood with a banner behind his back saying “Anti-Strike Decree” and thinking “Terrorist”.

The fact that such a cartoon would even appear in a Left-wing paper, let alone cover most of its front page, indicates the importance of the popular church for the Peruvian Left. This was further underlined by the amount of space and the sympathetic coverage the paper gave the encyclical in marked contrast to that given by the bourgeois press. Nor is this simply a recognition of the large number of Christians who are trade union and political militants. Perhaps more important is the new image this has given the church and the consequent expectation that a papal statement on social justice would be a broadly Left-wing document.

Occasions such as this serve to show just how significant is the popular church, both politically and ecclesiologically. Not only is it new to find large sectors of the church being the natural allies of political progressives but it is even more novel to find that this alliance has caused secular progressives to re-evaluate the meaning of Christianity itself and to come to expect that even some of its more conservative leaders must themselves be progressive if they choose to criticise society from a Christian standpoint.

Bertrand Russell, by any reckoning, must count as a figure of central importance in British intellectual history. Many of his books continue to be reprinted, in cheap paperback editions, up to sixty years since he first brought them out. He is standard fare for first- year philosophy students and some of his essays are classical points of reference in current debates in the analytical tradition. In 1915 he was brought to Pulborough by Lady Ottoline Morrell to meet D H Lawrence. By that time Russell (1872 - 1970) was aged forty- three and had already achieved his most original and influential contributions to philosophy. Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was thirty, with Sons and Lovers published (Duckworth, 1913), and The Rainbow about to be so. Their common interest lay in opposition to the War — in which, to place the other main characters in this essay, F R Leavis (then aged twenty) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (aged twenty-six) were both volunteers, Leavis as a stretcher-bearer in Flanders, Wittgenstein as an officer in the Austrian army.

“They began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance . . . and their hearers were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language.”

We are the “Friars Preachers”, the preaching brethren, a community that specialises in talk. This is the mystery to which we have all been summoned. I say this community is a mystery in the sense in which a sacrament or a work of art is a mystery; there is a depth of meaning in it that is by no means obvious on the surface at first sight, a depth that reveals itself only gradually and in hints and glimpses as we enact and re-enact the mystery. Macbeth is a good thriller; but as we grow familiar with it, it yields profound secrets about man and nature and time, secrets that can only be revealed in this way, indirectly, as symbolised, as half hidden. Again, the Eucharist is a commonplace symbolic meal, a token of hospitality and friendship, but as we enter into it, it reveals the depth of love which is God, the love enacted on the cross. And so it is with us; we are a commonplace gathering of men meeting to make decisions about our work, men partly anxious, mainly bored, hoping to get a few things cleared up as well and as quickly as possible so that we can get away: but there is a depth here too.

The depth is not something alongside, added on to, associated with the surface significance; the deep meaning of Macbeth is not additional to the story of murder and intrigue; the grace of the Eucharist is not something associated with, linked with, the sacrament; the mystery of our community is not something alongside, additional to, our day to day life and work and difficulties: it is just the depth within them. We do not have a professional job together with a spiritual life, the depth and the spirituality are just in the living together and the doing of the work.

During the last ten years, a new form of Christian lifestyle has begun to be lived out — that of the consecrated virgin living in the world. At a time when many people are searching for ways of ministry in the Church that allow for real depth of commitment combined with real freedom of expression, it has escaped many people’s notice that the Church now gives her blessing to the ancient lifestyle of consecrated virginity. The consecrated virgin is a deeply committed woman who publicly vows to remain celibate for life, in order to give all her loving energies to Christ and his Church. But she keeps a real freedom of lifestyle, always choosing where, how and with whom she will live; she is thus free to follow the creative leading of the Holy Spirit in a way unprecedented among women religious in recent centuries.

The life of virginity has existed from earliest times. Christ claimed this lifestyle, according to Matthew, with his rather stark statement: “There are eunuchs who have made themselves that way for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can”. (Mat 19:12). He too apparently valued the lifestyle for the freedom it gave him — freedom to spend whole nights in prayer without depriving a loving wife of his attentions, and freedom to live how, where and with whom he liked, in order to best do his Father’s work.

St Paul, as “one who, by the Lord’s mercy has stayed faithful” to his Master’s celibate lifestyle (I Cor 7:25), several times describes virginity with tenderness and simplicity.

God is all-powerful, all-knowing and perfectly good. But there is a great deal of evil in the world. People inflict suffering on others and on themselves. And there is suffering which is not caused by what anybody does. So must we not conclude that there can, after all, be no God? This question is an ancient one, but in what follows, I shall briefly try to indicate how it has been answered by modem philosophers of religion. Then I shall comment on the answers to which I refer.

One popular line of reasoning holds that in view of the existence of evil God’s existence is simply disprovable. The charge here is that someone who believes in God is caught in a straight logical contradiction given that he also accepts that evil is a reality. Many modem philosophers take this line (which is, incidentally, sharply raised as a topic for discussion by St Thomas Aquinas in Question 2 of the First Part of the Summa Theologiae). H J McClos- key, for example, writes:

The late John Mackie expresses a similar viewpoint. He says:

I believe that a thoroughgoing fallibilism, which is supposed to apply actually to the statements constitutive of fallibilism themselves, is self-destructive, and consequently absurd. I wish to propose a less radical, but I think perfectly self-consistent, kind of fallibilism, which I shall argue is not self-destructive. A first-order fallibilism — applying to the natural science, history, and hermeneutics — may issue in, and in my opinion ought to issue in, a second- order infallibilism — applying to epistemology and metaphysics. More concretely, fallibilism is in general an infallible way of getting at the truth about the real world; or perhaps rather, fallibilism is an absolutely infallible way of tending towards the truth.

The issue is not merely a technical one within philosophy, but seems to be of some general cultural importance. Fallibilism is in effect an attempt to set out foundations for knowledge, or, what amounts to the same thing, to provide a way of distinguishing between knowledge which is adequately grounded, and so amounts to ‘knowledge’ properly so-called, and what merely makes some pretensions to be ‘knowledge’. As a result of the alleged failure of fallibilism and of other attempts to provide foundations for knowledge, the conviction has got about that knowledge neither has nor needs any such foundations. If this principle is once seriously accepted and consistently applied, the urgent question of how much of what anyone claims to be knowledge actually is so, and how much is not, can only be settled at the level of dogma and prejudice. If it is not, this can only be due to saving inconsistency; since to provide criteria in virtue of which any claimant to the title of knowledge can be rationally vindicated as such is nothing else than to provide foundations for knowledge.

The desire to consider Jesus from the perspective of Judaism may arise for various reasons. I have recently returned from New York City, where for years a formal and informal “Jewish-Christian dialogue” has been flourishing. Judaism is a major cultural force in New York, and the Church must relate to Jews if she is to engage the society in which she lives. Accordingly, this dialogue is not only historical and theological; its agenda is often determined by practical conflicts between Christians and Jews. A more purely theological root of the desire for such dialogue is, on the other hand, often expressed. The three great forms of biblical monotheism — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have so much in common, it is frequently claimed, that each should be able to learn from the others, and certainly should appreciate enough about the others to avoid the sickening instances of religious oppression which deface the histories of each. Finally, there is a sound historical reason for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Jesus was Jewish, and the New Testament was written during the most crucial period in the development of Judaism. As we will discuss, one cannot be adequately understood without reference to the other. This basic, historical side of Jewish-Christian dialogue is our present concern, although we would by no means deny the importance of its theological and pastoral aspects.

There is no doubt that Jesus was Jewish, not only ethnically, but also socially and theologically. We find him in the Gospels teaching and disputing as a rabbi, discussing questions of how Torah should be applied, using figures of speech and methods of argument also used by other rabbis. A recent volume by Geza Vermes, entitled Jesus the Jew (1973), represents a bold attempt to place Jesus in the context of Judaism. His work is subtitled, A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, and certainly to understand Jesus as a Jew is historically crucial.

Original sin, nowadays is usually not welcomed by most Christians of Western culture. Religious traditions on original sin are felt to be uncomfortably strange in our society where people, by common consent, see themselves so unconnected to others that the actions of one person are supposed to leave other people untouched. Such cultural agreement is at the roots of a society that believes every person is free and able to achieve whatever he/she wants. Since original sin doctrines clearly deny such “unconnectedness”, no wonder they are often rejected and reduced to a teaching as simplistic as “a spot on a child’s soul!” This articles suggests that original sin traditions can speak to our contemporary culture, challenge some of its deepest presuppositions, and lead to new levels of awareness of what it means to be Christian in today’s world.

To understand the meaning of doctrines which are expressed in what anthropologists call mythical tales or myths, it is relevant to recognize the different representations of the world which flow from different mythical tales, and the effects of those different representations. I submit that a doctrine as “religious” as Original Sin says a lot about how we envision the civil organization of society. Furthermore, the present disregard for this doctrine is related to social and political respresentations. I will thus compare the basic assumptions of the original sin myth with another set of assumptions, those underlying the individualistic world view which is sometimes summarized in-another myth: the civil religion of free enterprise.

Various interpretations of original sin have attempted to articulate individual and collective dimensions of the sinful condition. These interpretations at the same time propose diverse understandings of the relationship between history and our present actions. Classical Catholicism seems to identify original sin with the tendency of each individual toward selfishness and personal aggrandizement.