In the first three volumes of his projected four-volume work on the historical Jesus, John P. Meier has articulated a position on the nature of historical inquiry that would exclude theological concerns from the pursuit of properly historical questions. For Meier, historical inquiry proceeds by means of a rigorous and commonly accepted methodology and finds confirmation in the emergence of a consensus among historians. Meier concedes that this methodology yields only a profile of Jesus’ ministry and death. This profile is a compilation of various pieces of an inherently incomplete puzzle, and to this extent, he compares the results of historical Jesus research to the popular image of Victor Frankenstein’s monster—a mass of assembled pieces, hardly identifiable as a “real” human being. When brought to bear on properly theological questions, this profile—this monster—exercises a negative function. Since the historical Jesus is a hypothetical reconstruction, it is not the object of Christian faith, but can serve as a restraint against flights of theological fancy and preserve the autonomy of the historian (or the historical critical exegete) against the encroachment of theology, or ideology.

This paper contends that Meier’s practice of historical Jesus research goes beyond the narrow methodology and the modest goals he has articulated. While Meier has remained stridently faithful to his understanding of history and historical methodology, one can recognize, not massive shifts, but rather tensions, in his work, in particular, the tension between Meier’s formal statements on methodology and his performance of historical Jesus research. The paper will seek to advance the general discussion of the relevance of historical inquiry for the Christian faith by examining the work of John P. Meier on the historical Jesus and the manner in which that work has evolved through the publication of the first three volumes of A Marginal Jew.

The third volume of the Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, translated by Herbert McCabe, is entitled (I have always supposed by him) Knowing and Naming God. These words make a concise brief for the philosopher of religion. Of its two movements, knowing God seems at first glance the more demanding and critical, yet it is evident that for Aquinas and the Patristic tradition which preceded him, naming God was of equal difficulty and weight. In fact the two cannot be separated for to name one must, in some sense know which, for the early theologians, formed an almost insurmountable obstacle to our speaking of God.

Augustine is continuously occupied with how we can know God, and with how we can name Him. It is the problem with which he opens the Confessions, for if we do not know what or whom we address then how can we call upon our Lord? To call upon we need a name, and a name involves definition and definition risks idolatrously presuming to know the divine essence.

The primary Biblical text for the naming of God for Patristic and medieval readers alike was Exodus 3. 1-14, the story of Moses at the burning bush. Moses, herding his father-in-law’s sheep, is addressed by God and in the negotiations which follow Moses asks the Deity for a name,

Over a century before the principles of the “new evangelization” were proclaimed in 1965 in Gaudium et spes (The Pastoral Constitution on the Church and the Modem World) Catherine McAuley (1781-1841), vigorously promoted its two key principles: (1) the dignity of the human person and (2) the virtue of solidarity with the suffering poor, sick, and ignorant. From her First Conferences alter founding the Religious Sisters of Mercy in 1831 in Dublin, Ireland, Mother Catherine consistently taught her Sisters to put these principles into practice in their apostolic work in education and health care.

Drawing upon Venerable Catherine McAuley’s original writings and biographies of her life and works, this article will demonstrate how she helped prepare the way for consecrated persons in the new evangelization of the Church in the modem world. The themes are divided as follows: Part I—The Dignity of the Human Person, Part II—Solidarity with the Poor, Sick, and Ignorant, and Part III—Urgent Problems for the Church in the Modem World.

In a private conversation with an occupant of Rutherford’s chair of Physics at Cambridge University, I was struck by his distance from that overall association of metaphysics and religion which we take as normative, even though, at this moment, it is understandably diversified. “I am prepared to consider the possibility of mind—though most of my colleagues are not.” That British scepticism here is not aggressive conceals from many the intellectual distance that has grown up between science and religion; it also ensures that, despite the heroism of individuals who rise above the ethos, debate is in fact rudimentary; the anti-religionists consider the battle won. English culture and paideia have lost an overarching conception of their unity. That is not the case elsewhere.

But when had this conception broken down? The background, but little known, work of Anneliese Meyer, from the Vatican Library, showed the anticipations of “modern” science in late medieval science. A.N.Whitehead saw the contribution which medieval scholasticism had made to a rational culture, including subsequent natural science. Both Descartes as the mechanist of man and animals and mathematician, and Newton as mathematician-mechanist of the Cosmos, kept their faith, as did Leibniz as mathematician-theodicean. “The Enlightenment”, about whose extent there is incomplete agreement, expressed itself in France in the unbelieving ideal of the Encyclopedic, in Germany in the religious rationalism of Christian Wolff. The position of Kant was not one of pure enlightenment. The last speculative endeavours to include natural science within an overall, complete philosophy including religion

On September 14th a central memorial ceremony was held in the New York Yankee Stadium: a multireligious, patriotic liturgy at whose centre stood the American star-spangled banner. This religious dramatisation of the Stars and Stripes in those days of terror proves that September 11th was at least a matter of religion: a matter of a violence of religious origin, whose trail of blood runs from Manhattan via Kandahar to places which are not yet known. Once religion comes into play, there is a need to criticise its potential malignancy, so that people are able to get out of the vicious cycle of religious violence. One year after September 11th these theological theses would like to contribute to the project of shedding light upon this ‘depraved part’ of all religions by emphasising eight basic differences which constitute religion and cause its characteristic dangers. Therefore current terms are to be used against their everyday usage in a strictly formal sense as instruments for analyzing sacred and profane phenomenons of religion.

In their everyday life, people experience the power of the Holy as something extraordinary, that magically attracts them and repels them at the same time—but never lets them go. It is precisely this inescapable difference which constitutes religion, at the centre of which, according to Rudolf Otto’s classic definition, there is the mysterious experience of a ‘mysterium fascinosum, tremendum et augustum’. September 11th revealed this constitutive ambivalence of the Holy, because it unveiled the double face of religion: the face of mighty violence, embodied by the pilots of death, and the face of powerless hope, embodied by the New York firemen.

The discipline of moral theology is undergoing noticeable self-evaluation. Moral theologians are exploring the connections between moral theology and Scripture, moral theology and virtue ethics, moral theology and Christology, moral theology and Patristics, moral theology and liturgy, and moral theology and spirituality. Moralists are looking for new conversation partners in order to stretch the discipline beyond the now familiar relations that once bore fruit between moral theology and philosophy, and natural law in particular. There are some stirrings to converse again with philosophy, but the noted activity most relevant to the intent of this essay encompasses the explicitly theological.

My own “Moral Theology and” discourse has centred on the theme of prayer. In so doing I am looking to reinvigorate a discipline that seems to be dying pastorally. I have come to the conclusion that the best way to form the conscience is not through formal moral theology courses and all the inner disputations that moralists have with one another. The best way to form the conscience is to teach parishioners to pray, to love God in prayer, to come to know God in prayer and worship. In this I would dispute the thematic ordering of the Catechism: the section on ethics should appear last, after a theology of prayer. In saying this, I am not arguing that moral dilemmas are immediately apprehended and solved in prayer. I am not saying that spirituality delineates specific steps to moral decision-making or that it clarifies a method to be used in such decision-making.

Philippa Foot is a good philosopher. She is a good person too, insofar as her manner of thinking, conversing, and asking questions are evidence of who she is ‘as a human being’. I begin with reference to Foot as good philosopher and human being for a few reasons. For one, I do so in order to introduce particular uses of the word ‘good’. The guiding question in Foot’s recent Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) is whether my ‘she is good’ is simply equivalent to T like it’ or ‘it strikes me in a favorable way’. Do I have some objective basis to make my claim, in reference not only to ‘good philosopher’ but also to ‘good human being’ ? Foot argues that I can be objective in both descriptions, that a non-subjective account of ‘good’ is necessary to make sense of how practical reason is both practical and reasonable. By staking out the non-subjective constraints of practical reason, she suggests that the modern ‘turn to the subject’ has come to its dead end. This dead end is a leading concern of my remarks on Foot’s Natural Goodness, and my principal aim is to advance her arguments for a teleological conception of nature, particularly human nature. But first, there is more to say about what is good.

Might I begin with the personal remark that in the course of preparing this lecture for Blackfriars in Oxford, I was quite unable to prevent thoughts of Herbert McCabe’s absence here today from occupying my mind. You must forgive me if, though he is absent physically, you are able to identify his presence intellectually within the few thoughts I offer you today; for the inclination to give some expression to the conjunction of influences which some thirty years of debate with Herbert have visited upon me personally became, in the circumstances, irresistible. Back in the early nineteen-eighties Nicholas Lash and I published in quick succession monographs on the subject of Marxism and its relation to Christian theology. We agreed on much of a theological nature, disagreed sharply on how to read Marx, so Herbert, then in his second stint as editor of New Blackfriars, invited us each to review the work of the other, Nicholas first, me to follow. With characteristically wicked wit, Herbert entitled my reply to Nicholas’ review ‘Turner Responds to Lash’. Well, today I mark my indebtedness to Herbert by means of a lecture which I am happy to concede is, in a manner, a response to Herbert’s ‘lash’, and in some spirit of emulation, could I achieve it, of that fierce clarity and energy of thought which so characterised what Eamon Duffy called ‘his mighty soul’.

Herbert McCabe taught in many ways, not least per viam provocationis. One day in the mid 1970s he provoked something far beyond his intentions with a throwaway remark about Summa theologiae I, q. 15, the question on ‘ideas’. ‘It must have been written by Saint Thomas on a platonic off day’, he declared, a comment that remained with the present writer to stimulate research in directions that might not have overly pleased Herbert. ‘Platonic’ and ‘platonist’ were not usually good words in his vocabulary, profoundly impressed as he was by Thomas’s achievement in developing Christian theology in radically new ways using the works of Aristotle, Plato’s brightest student and critic.

Thomas Aquinas himself, though, at the midpoint of his career, was convinced that the Platonists, in what they had to say about the first principle of things, were exactly right (verissima) and completely in harmony with Christian faith ‘. In fact, in a brief but potent contribution to the 1974 Thomistic Congress for the seventh centenary of Saint Thomas’s death, Andre von Ivanka asserted that as regards ‘good’, and because of the ontology supporting his understanding of it, Thomas not only ‘platonises’ but formally contradicts Aristotle. Where Aristotle argues that ‘good is not a general term corresponding to a single idea’ (.Nicomachean Ethics 1.6, 1096b25) Thomas says that ‘all things, in seeking their proper perfections, seek God himself, insofar as the perfections of all things are reflections (similitudines) of the divine being’ (Summa Theologiae I 6, 1 ad 2). Elsewhere Thomas says that ‘all things seek, as their ultimate end, to be united with God’ (Summa Contra Gentiles III. 19).