In his letter to the Ephesians St Paul says that we must walk as children of light (5:8). We have here an important biblical image: walking, walking as children of light. Probably you have observed how in the Bible people are all the time walking. Walking or eating ... all the time. These two human actions are the expression of life. And it is life 1 am preaching about.

The gospel of John is a very long text but a very rich one. And, as miracle stories go, the story in it of the healing of the man born blind (9:1—41) is very long but very rich.

Both in it and in the excerpt from Ephesians which is read with it (5:8—14) Jesus is the Light. That is an idea that comes up again and again in the gospel of John. And light in John is always related to life; light and life are linked. From the very beginning of the gospel, from the first chapter, Jesus is the Light, is Life, and all the miracles of Jesus in the gospel of John are done to give life. Jesus does not do miracles to surprise people, but to give life. And this is, of course, evident above all in the story of the healing of the man born blind.

In his President’s Report three years ago, Jack Mahoney considered whether a theologian’s relation to the episcopate should not be more like that of artist to patron than mandarin to minister, and he ended by suggesting that ‘part of the role of our Association is ... to have a sacramental function’ within the local Church, both reflecting on our common faith and aiming to communicate that reflection.

During the past year, a series of in themselves apparently unconnected developments convinced me that it might be helpful as part of our fulfilment of the tasks which Jack indicated, if we were to set aside an hour for their consideration. The developments that I have in mind may be listed under seven headings:

1. 1. First, and most diffusely, I sense a growing thirst, on the part of Catholic laypeople, for continuing theological (and especially biblical) education—the impetus for which comes variously from parental responsibility, from questions of justice and peace, increasingly (I think) from concern for creation and, most generally, from the recognition that, in an ever more barbarous and philistine society, only faith appropriated and purified through prayer and shared reflection can hope to stand.

2. 2. Secondly, there is a disturbing tendency towards polarisation in our perception of the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in religious education. This is surely an area which cries out for improvement in the quality of dialogue and collaboration between bishops, catechists, and theologians.

3. 3. Thirdly, the ‘Cologne Declaration’ signed in January by 163 theologians from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, was followed by statements from theologians in France, Belgium, Italy and Brazil.

We are told to remember the Second World War, but how? I was born just a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no stories to tell of my own. Maybe that does not matter. Remembering something as awful as the War can only happen later, long after it is over. To remember is not just to sit back and let the facts surface. It is the creative business of putting things together, re-membering, so that we discover for the first time what it was really like. Robert Kee was a RAF bomber who kept detailed diaries of the war, but afterwards they did not turn out to be of much help: ‘For all the quite detailed evidence of these diary entries I can’t add up a very coherent picture of how it really was to be in a bomber squadron in those days. There’s nothing you could really get hold of if you were trying to write a proper historical account of it all... No wonder it is those artists who recreate life rather than try to recapture it who, in one way, prove the good historians in the end.’

It is like the writing of the gospels. It took forty years before the disciples could tell the story of Jesus, and of how they betrayed him and ran away. It took about the same length of time that separates us from the Second World War before the disciples could cope with remembering what had happened, and so write the first gospel. Like them we are just getting to the point where we can begin to remember.

It sometimes seems as though everyone loves a Christian, and everyone wants more of them. From a dangerous, persecuted sect of the first century, whose strange practices of consuming their god and indulging in a communal agape produced the sort of ignorant criticism in the Roman Empire that Moslems and Hindus receive in much of the West today, Christianity has become most popular religion, chief determinant of public morals and compulsory faith of any budding British monarch. It is now commonplace to challenge the progress of the Christian faith from a subversive branch of Judaism to a world religion. The highpoint of that progress, the success of Christianity in becoming official faith of the Roman Empire, looks very different today. Did Constantine convert to Christianity, or did Christianity convert to Constantine? The degree of self-criticism implied in that question represents a profound challenge to the churches.

I would like to suggest that there are two Christianities. The first is the faith that this government, in the form of the Bishop of London, the Prime Minister and Baroness Cox, is anxious to put onto every school curriculum. This Christianity encourages what seems to have become a vogue phrase in politics today, ‘good citizenship’. It supports pride in one’s national identity, respect for the institutions of state, and a type of concern for others harnessed to the sort of individual conscientiousness that volunteers for school governorships and neighbourhood watch schemes.

You can take the reports of the resurrection of Christ as literally as you like; you can take them as simple accounts of the historical facts. There are some slight difficulties here because there seem to be some inconsistencies between the different stories, but one thing they all have most certainly in common. None of them says or implies or hints that Jesus simply woke up from death, as from a sleep, and got up and strolled out of the tomb back to ordinary life. There have been people who have said that Jesus did wake up in this way but that was because they thought he had not died, so there wasn’t a real resurrection anyway. Nothing whatever in the New Testament suggests this.

If you take the scriptures, the earliest creeds, the writings of the early Fathers, the whole mainstream Christian tradition through the Middle Ages to our own time—you find no one has ever suggested that the resurrection meant the resuscitation of a corpse. For this reason I get a little tired of modern clergymen telling me that this is not what the resurrection is. I never thought it was; my Church never thought it was; nobody has ever thought it was.

What we have believed is that Jesus, because of his loving obedience to his Father’s mission, obedience even unto death on the cross, was raised up by his Father through the work of the Spirit, and became transformed, transfigured and is now with us as the living risen Christ.

It is occasionally said of Edward Schillebeeckx that he is a difficult theologian to understand because in the last analysis he does not have a theology! Instead, he is thought to have produced two, three, or more, quite distinct theologies, whose characteristics depend on the kinds of philosophical equipment he has marshalled in order to give conceptual embodiment to his theological convictions.

Over the past five decades, Schillebeeckx has published about four hundred and seventy theological studies. A perusal of these divulges that at different stages his writings have freely borrowed philosophical ideas from such diverse contexts as phenomenology, existentialism, Anglo-American-Scandinavian analytical philosophy, structural linguistics, semiotics, neo-Marxist critical theories of society, and twentieth-century revivals of Thomism—a list by no means exhaustive.

A survey of his publications further uncovers that for a period of about nine years, from 1963 to 1974, he did not write a single book. These years, particularly from 1966 onwards, were devoted to a determined study of hermeneutics and biblical exegesis as a preparation for interpreting Christian faith in a new way. In 1974, at the end of this incubatory period, he published Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, the monograph in which he effectively gave notice that he had radically changed his theological method. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, he had employed a method which took classical theological theories and texts as its point of departure. With the book Jesus, however, references to patristic, medieval, and papal documents have to a large extent been put aside in favour of an avowedly hermeneutical method, which is dependent on a bountiful array of exegetical data and which seeks to set past and contemporary human experiences in a mutually critical and interpretative relationship with each other.

Today probably the majority of practising Roman Catholics in England would identify themselves as English, even if their origins are not altogether English, but how deep are the English roots of this English Catholic community? The answer to that question is important because the self-understanding of any community depends, to some degree, on its understanding of its own history. Twenty years ago it was almost universally assumed that the English Catholic community was dwindling away at the end of the eighteenth century and only saved from extinction by the ‘second spring’— the great influx from Ireland and the flow of well-educated Anglican converts in the nineteenth century. Now it is known that Irish immigrants went where Catholics were in industry already, but detailed studies are needed of how so many English Catholics came to be in those places. In the May number of Recusant History’ I have done one such study for a place in the heart of industrial England, Walsall, within reach of Oscott, between 1720 and 1824, using evidence from a variety of local records. I now want to point tentatively to some elements in the situation there that have parallels elsewhere.

The first is memories of the Civil War. After defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 Charles the Second took refuge in woodlands in and around the parish of Walsall from the Presbyterian party who dominated the borough after the war and during the Commonwealth. In 1715 and 1751 the Presbyterian Meeting House there was wrecked by a mob who in 1750 celebrated Oakapple Day, the anniversary of the Restoration of Church and Throne in 1660, by hanging and burning an effigy of King George the Second with an orange in one hand and a bunch of turnips in the other.

Such a topic as this raises problems. Both Judaism and Christianity consist of a spectrum of organisations loosely associated with each other within a broad tradition, rather than neat, consistent, homogeneous religions. There is also the problem of understanding the thinking of people living in past eras and other cultures, especially as religions tend to behave as if events and experiences from the distant past—complete with detailed laws—still apply with all the force of divine authority. It will be an achievement just to identify a credible method for handling a topic such as this.

To start at all we must have a working definition of sin, whatever the difficulties, so the working definition is: ‘Sin is whatever is thought to ignore or defy God’s revealed will’. Some of the consequent questions are: How is God’s will revealed? What does it reveal? What constitutes defiance of it? Most of what follows looks at some of the answers given by Christians and Jews at various times. Finally, a conclusion is reached about common elements in what Jews and Christians understand by ‘sin’, and how to talk about it. Like all true mysteries, sin cannot be described comprehensively, but this does not mean that we have to retreat into silence. There is a way of talking theology which preserves integrity.

Both Jews and Christians share common ground in their belief that what Christians call the Old Testament contains the revealed will of God, even though Christians then modify their attitude towards the Old Testament in the light of what is contained in the New Testament.

Those whose enthusiasm for exploring the interweaving of religion and literature has encouraged them to reconstruct the history of theology so that the great tradition runs from Jesus’ parables and the Gospels through, say, Justin’s tale of the old man on the beach and Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the ‘Dream of the Rood’ and the Grail Cycle, the novels of George Eliot and of Cardinal Wiseman, up to some manageable modern poet, have usually not found a place for the Schoolmen. Even those who content themselves with considerations of theologians as readers, and whose topics are illustrated by references to Paul’s reorganization of Menenius’ fable of the talking stomach, to Luther’s likening of the theologian to the literary critic who elucidates the Georgies, and to that most interesting and attractive of modern popes, John Paul I, writing fan letters to Mark Twain and Dickens as well as to Jesus, rarely bring even Aquinas into their conversation. The rest of us may pause at this. Willing enough, it may be, to get along without Albert and Biel, not feeling called to defend even Duns Scotus usque ad effusionem sanguinis, we would not think it respectable to surrender Aquinas.

It would be improper, certainly, to rummage in the Summa Theologiae for immediately modern answers to particular questions, but it must be in order to expect a theologian as methodically sensitive as Aquinas to have meditated on the general topic of the relation of the forms of a theological science to the literary forms he encountered in Scripture.

The forms for my Poll Tax registration are sitting in my kitchen as I procrastinate about how to deal with them. The whole process of registration and the tax to which it is a prelude seem so despicable that I would gladly decide at this point not to fill in the form and begin the process of non-compliance. When Ministers say that this tax is fairer than the present system I feel anger and also a sense of powerlessness. There seems to be little doubt about the injustice of a tax which charges the richest person in a locality the same as the poorest. Yet another part of me recognizes what a fruitless gesture non-compliance would be, seeing that the mechanism exists to sequester my resources: I will have to pay it whether I like it or not. Is there room for manoeuvre in responding to this injustice? How best can I work constructively to remedy this injustice when there seems to be little space for any alternative action?

In situations like this there are two important tasks for me as a Christian. Firstly, I am determined to join with those who feel similar revulsion to this piece of legislation, with its regressive attitude to taxation and alarming implications for civil liberties. Secondly, while I have to renounce my desire for ready-made answers to my problem, whether in Scripture or Tradition, I must attend to what the Spirit is saying to the churches today, but use the necessary discernment to enable my path of discipleship to be in continuity with our ancestors in the faith. What I want to attempt in this article is to put on paper some of the clearing of the Biblical ground that enables me to continue the journey of faith and take into account this new challenge to our contemporary witness.

What must I believe to be a Catholic? Catholicism is a highly variegated phenomenon, with an extraordinary diversity of beliefs, practices and traditions. Is this Tradition an inheritance to be cherished, or a stifling burden?

This question becomes especially acute when the Church tries to discover its identity in a new culture or society, as when Paul brought Christianity to the world of the Greek city, or, in our own day, when we ask what it might mean to be a Catholic in monetarist Britain. One way to answer this question would be to scrutinise the Tradition, to see if one can discern an essence that must be preserved, while leaving one some freedom to be creative. Clifford Longley recently described a liberal conservative theologian, such as Karl Rahner, as one who ‘sits under obedience to Tradition, and applies his intellectual ingenuity to the negotiation of as much freedom as can be justified within those limits.’ Many Catholics can identify with that picture. But I would suggest that if one looks at the genesis of the New Testament one can discover a different paradigm of the relationship between tradition and creativity, fidelity and freedom.

There were several moments between the time of Jesus and the canonisation of the New Testament when the Church was faced sharply with the question: What must we believe? What in the inherited tradition must be preserved? This was so with the Pauline mission to the Gentiles, with the gradual separation of Christianity and Judaism towards the end of the first century, and with the emergence of the Great Church in the second to fourth centuries.