In the fifth of a series of six Norton Lectures given at Harvard University in 1973 on the semantics of music called The Unanswered Question and recently broadcast on BBC 2, Leonard Bernstein said that ‘ours is a century of death, and Mahler is its prophet’. A history of the twentieth century must inevitably read as a catalogue of death and any authentic prophecy about the twentieth century must have the experience of death at its centre. Since 1914 the toll has mounted as cataclysm has been overtaken by self-inflicted cataclysm until the number of those killed during the last sixty years is no longer calculable. The optimism of the nineteenth century could be maintained until the First World War, but any attempt to perpetuate it after that has been a delusion. We can hardly be optimistic any longer about a civilization that is so self-destructive. The twentieth century experience as an experience of death has its true beginning not in 1900 but in 1914. The first fourteen years of this century were really a hangover from the bouyant bourgeois idealism of the last century. The authentic twentieth century experience was possible only after 1914. Since that first holocaust Europe and North America has moved from an initial optimism about its consequences (Lloyd George’s ‘land fit for heroes’) to disillusion, unemployment, depression and further destruction in 1939. Since 1945 we have had the initial optimism of the welfare state, followed by disillusion, unemployment, successive economic crises, followed by who knows what.

Before 1914 there were a few precursors who, we can now see, gave intimations of what was to come. These prophets had already experienced the disintegration of bourgeois culture; Schnitzler, Karl Krauss, Thomas Mann in his early novels, Mahler. Others had even set about reconstructing our perception of reality, the cubist painters between 1907 and 1914, and Schönberg.

Some twenty years ago, that wise and good man Gerald Vann wrote an article in Blackfriars about ‘The Muddled Marriage’. It was concerned with the plight of those spouses whose unions are canonically irregular, and apparently without remedy; it contended that they deserve a love and a sympathy they do not usually get; and it suggested they should be told that they were not in a state of grievous sin or cut off from the life of the Church. Such assertions could hardly go unchallenged, and a lumbering attack, Roman in origin, appeared shortly afterwards. Indeed, rumour attributes to the incident the subsequent residence of Father Vann in the diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, whither he was sent, like some latter-day Ovid, to expiate his sins by the Black See.

Times have changed, and even Canon Law is not exempt. Ever more is being written on the matter of divorce and re-marriage. The bibliography at the end of this article (to which all references are made) shows that an up-to-date survey is available of how things stand in France, Germany and the United States; New Blackfriars, in June 1973, published several interesting articles to do with African attitudes in the matter; and the items by Harrington and O’Callaghan give useful accounts of scriptural and theological reflexion, with some further reading. Still more recent are the two works that provide the starting-point for this article. The first is an essay on the theology of indissolubility, the second an account, by a former presiding judge of the marriage-tribunal in the archdiocese of New York, of his own pilgrimage towards a change of heart in the matter. The two books contain between them most of the themes to be encountered elsewhere in what is being written : I wish to use them as an occasion for some remarks on the point myself.

Is it possible for a Catholic to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ while at the same time classifying the resurrection narratives in the New Testament as examples of a special kind of fiction? Is faith in the resurrection compatible with treating the gospel accounts of an empty tomb and appearances of the risen Christ to his disciples as ‘stories’ ?

With the recent publication of The First Easter Hubert Richards has presented Catholics with problems about the literary status of the resurrection narratives which cannot be ducked by theologians and preachers because for one thing the ready availability of the book means that many Catholics who have not been able to keep abreast of current biblical exegesis have suddenly been shocked into reconsidering how they should regard the gospel stories. It is depressing, but not surprising, to hear that some enquirers are being headed off with the information that Hubert Richards has resigned from the priesthood. His faith in God and in the resurrection shines through so manifestly in his writing that we need not linger over this futile manoeuvre.

I regard this article as part of a continuing debate in New Blackfriars concerning the relations of Christianity and Marxism. But it is also an attempt, within that context, to ask and answer the question why we should continue to believe in God. I raise the question here because, it seems to me, that most of the effort expended by earlier contributors, particularly Denys Turner has been towards showing that it is possible, and even necessary for a Christian to be a Marxist. Obviously, if a Christian must be a Marxist, as Denys Turner argues, then the question whether he can, or should, continue to believe in God is raised at once. For it is a pretty widely accepted opinion among Marxists that belief in God is incompatible with their own view of things, and that anyone who is a Marxist and believes in God is something of an oddity, a man with a private religious hang-up, and quite probably an unreliable ally. Denys Turner rightly affirms that, in holding to this view of religious belief, Marxists are themselves merely hanging on to a private opinion that has nothing to do with their Marxism as such. But a Christian cannot be content with remaining there. What the Christian needs to be able to show is that, if he ought to be a Marxist just in order to be a complete Christian, it is equally the case that the Marxist ought to be a Christian just in order to be a complete Marxist. Nothing short of this will do, from a Christian standpoint: to pretend otherwise is to connive at a sell-out. I believe that at the present stage of the game there is a real danger of just such a sell-out. For example, to say, as the editorial committee responsible for Crossleft do, that ‘there can be no question today ... of Christian modification of Marxist praxis’ (which, if it means anything, means that being a Christian Marxist makes no difference at all to what, as a Marxist you are prepared to do): or that ‘the Church is basically on the side of the oppressor’ (what else, strictly speaking, can ‘basically’ mean here but ‘from the very foundation’?)—to say things like this suggests to me a readiness for just such a sell-out as I have indicated.

The historical study of the papacy begins with Peter and the study of Peter can only be undertaken in a scriptural context. I use the word ‘scriptural’ advisedly. Only if one gives the New Testament a special status as part of ‘Scripture’ does it make sense to sift its texts relating to Peter in the way traditionally done. Now one cannot accord the New Testament documents the status of Scripture on scholarly criteria alone. Scholarship has a very important part to play but it is necessarily subsidiary and incomplete.

It is conceivable, though after the last few generations of international scrutiny improbable, that evidence might come to light, or some great scholar notice something previously missed, that would make it intellectually impossible to accord the texts we have scriptural status. It is conceivable that a scholar might demonstrate that the thought of the New Testament and the language that went with the thought were impossible for the first century AD, as Lorenzo Valla did with the Constitutum Constantini. But after a century of scholarship trying to demonstrate just this, we are left with texts, all almost certainly originally written in the first century and therefore much nearer the autographs than any Latin or Greek classical texts, that so far as scholarship can tell are ‘authentic’. But this has only negative value. It means it is not intellectually disreputable to take them as texts of the time and place they purport to come from. It means that arguments of the kind one still meets that there is no evidence that Jesus ever lived can only be accepted if the same criteria be applied generally and it be freely admitted that there is no evidence that Julius Ceasar ever lived, or that Cicero wrote a line in his life—if he ever had one— or that there ever was a people called the Germans.

Not infrequently one meets scholars and laity who envisage Paul, the apostle, as a revolutionary and Jesus as a non-violent, non-aggressive person (except perhaps for his cleansing of the Temple). Is this view correct ? It will be the plan of this paper to suggest—but by no means to come to a firm conclusion-—that the opposite is true. When I speak of ‘Paul’ I shall be speaking of the Pauline school, not necessarily of the individual apostle, and when I speak of Jesus I shall not always distinguish between the ipsissima vox, the very voice of Jesus, and ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus, as redacted by the evangelists. Further in examining Pauline theology we must remind ourselves continually that in all likelihood the apostle never saw one of our written canonical gospels.

Maurice Wiles, who is Regius Professor of Theology in the University of Oxford as well as Chairman of the Doctrinal Commission of the Church of England, is that rare species, a dogmatic theologian who is neither so deeply entrenched in doctrinal fundamentalism that he sees no need for the introduction of the critical-historical method nor so anxious about its initial effects on the orthodoxy of his own thinking that he prefers to remain almost silent. He obviously does not regard his tenure of weighty and perhaps rather exposed offices as barring him from pursuing a course of enquiry which he himself often refers to in such terms as ‘daunting’, ‘dangerous and disturbing’, and the like. One may well want to argue over the detail and the force of some of these critical-historical studies of various Christian doctrines at the most decisive stages of their formation. This the author would certainly welcome. Given that most of these papers have already appeared in learned journals (the earliest in 1957), it is surprising that their intention has not been better understood. Perhaps collecting them like this will help.

In a nutshell, what Wiles proposes is that the kind of critical study of the formation of the Scriptures which began over a century ago should at last be extended systematically to the case of Christian doctrine. The model of biblical criticism suggests the necessity of an equivalent kind of doctrinal criticism (a phrase which Wiles ascribes to the late G. F. Woods). Partly because of his own background in patristic scholarship, but mainly in recognition of the decisive role the Fathers played in the formative period of Christian doctrine, it is the faith of Nicaea and of Chalcedon that Wiles is led to examine and question. There, of course, is where the dangers lie, that he foresees as clearly as anybody, and perhaps far more clearly than many of his critics.