1 The Independent, 17^th February, 1993.

2 Saraband: The Memoirs of E.L. Mascall (Leominster: Gracewing, 1992).

3 1982.

4 Death or Dogma (SPCK, 1937), p. 6.

5 Theology and History (Faith Press 1962), p. 5. This was Mascall’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Historical Theology in the University of London.

6 T & H, p. 17. It might perhaps be worth noting that Mascall liked this idea enough to quote the paragraph in Saraband.

7 SPCK; p. 35, within Chapter 1, ‘The Nature and Task of Theology’.

8 TGC p. 36f. Mascall goes on to criticize J.L. Houlden, D.E. Nineham and M.F. Wiles for adopting the idea that theology must be secularized and makes the point that, since Wiles ‘recognizes that that outlook is itself relative and transitory [so] his own remaking of Christian doctrine will have no permanence’. (p. 39) By its own logic, this theological method quickly manifests itself as ‘the first form of Christianity in which the deity of Jesus is looked upon as optional’. (p. 40).

9 Longmans, Green and Co.

10 For the sake of completeness, it might also be noted that he produced a volume in 1939 called A Guide to Mount Carmel, as an introduction to the works of St John of the Cross. (Dacre Press).

11 D or D, p. 57.

12 Christ, the Christian and the Church (Longmans, Green & Co), p. 68. My italics.

13 CCC p. 68.

14 CCC p. 14.

15 CCC p. 15, quoting the office hymn Verbum supernum.

16 CCC p. 15. He is taking issue with, among others, W.R. Matthews and H.M. Relton, and to an extent Charles Gore – to which theme he warms further in Chapter 2.

17 CCC p. 16.

18 Cf CCC p. 17.

19 CCC p. 19.

20 CCC p. 19. My italics.

21 CCC p. 20.

22 From the Definition. See, for instance, J. Stevenson, Creeds, Councils and Controversies, SPCK 1989, p. 353.

23 CCC p. 48.

24 Via Media (Longmans, Green and Co, 1956), p. 97f.

25 The God-Man p. 37f, at the end of Chapter II, The Man who is God.

26 Cf Prestige: the final chapters of both Fathers and Heretics, from which Mascall quotes at length (Via Media p. 100f) and God in Patristic Thought. ‘Formalism triumphs, and the living figure of the evangelical Redeemer is desiccated to a logical mummy’.

27 VM p. 109.

28 The God-Man p. 42f. Mascall goes on, ‘And it is true as a matter of experience that, when anyone claims to believe in the Incarnation but not the Virgin Birth, he is nearly always found, on closer examination, to be really an adoptionist…’

29 VM p. 109f. The section which begins here is called ‘Unity in the Person’.

30 VM p. 110.

31 VM pp. 109–111.

32 VM pp. 112–114. The hymn from which Mascall quotes ‘The ancient of days is an hour or two old’ is ‘The great God of heaven is come down to earth’.

33 VM p. 156 This is from Chapter IV, ‘Deified Creaturehood’, on Grace. ‘The union of two natures, a human and a divine, in one person infinitely exceeds in its wonder and its mystery the union of many persons in the human nature of Christ, which is what we normally have in mind when we speak of grace’. As Mascall says at the end of the book (p. 165), his four ‘problems’ (Creation, Incarnation, Trinity, Grace) ‘are themselves interrelated’, and ‘discussion of any one of them throws light upon the others’.

34 VM p. 118 Quoting a verse from the office hymn for the Blessed Virgin Mary, Quem terra, pontus, aethera which may be more familiar in J.M. Neale’s translation: How blest that Mother, in whose shrine/the great Artificer Divine,/whose hand contains the earth and sky,/vouchsafed, as in His ark, to lie.

35 Both were translated into English by Dom Illtyd Trethowan, respectively, as The Christian Sacrifice (1944) and The Sacrifice of the Mystical Body (1954). Mascall lists other contemporary authors at the beginning of Chapter 4 of the second edition of Corpus Christ, both Catholic and Protestant. ‘One of the most remarkable celestial phenomena in the theological firmament today is undoubtedly the multiple conjunction that has taken place between a large number of Catholic and Protestant luminaries on the subject of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, a conjunction that is all the more striking because it does not seem in all cases to have been either intentional or even recognised’. (p. 82).

36 The Shape of the Liturgy, Dacre Press 1945 p. 747–748. (Dix’s italics.)

37 Up and Down in Adria, (The Faith Press, 1963), p. 15, thanking his interlocutors in the words of St Thomas for their invitation to criticize their work.

38 CUP, 1962.

39 Soundings, p. 147ff.

40 In The Divinity of Jesus Christ, 1938. John Creed was Ely Professor of Divinity, d. 1940.

41 Quoted in Soundings, p. 152.

42 Quoted in Soundings, p. 152, from CCC p. 41.

43 Soundings p. 152, quoted in Up and Down at p. 64.

44 Soundings, p. 156.

45 Soundings, p. 171.

46 The title is from Acts 27.27, after which we read that the shipmen take soundings and cast anchor ‘fearing lest we should have fallen upon rocks’ (verse 29).

47 Up and Down in Adria, p. 63.

48 DLT 1965.

49 Secularisation, p. viii.

50 Secularisation, p. xii.

51 Secularisation, p. 4, quoting Romans 12.2.

52 Secularisation, p. 6.

53 Secularisation, p. 6.

54 Secularisation, p. 7.

55 Secularisation, p. 7. Mascall takes issue with Van Buren’s metaphor of ‘contagion’ in his book Jesus, Who He Is and How We Know Him, (Darton: Longman and Todd, 1985), since later patients need have had no relationship or contact whatever with the originator of the disease: ‘far from having any immediate personal relationship to us now, he has not even existed for more than nineteen hundred years’. (p. 23).

56 Secularisation, p. 106.

57 Secularisation p. 145.

58 Secularisation, p. 178f.

59 SPCK 1980.

60 TGC p. 206.

61 WHHM p. 98f.

62 WHHM p. 127.

63 Longmans, Green and Co, 1958.

64 Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture from 1934.

65 E.L. Mascall and H.S. Box, eds, The Blessed Virgin Mary, Essays by Anglicans (Darton: Longman and Todd, 1963), p. 22.

66 BVM p. 23.

67 BVM p. 24.

68 BVM p. 25.

69 A. Richardson, ed, A Dictionary of Christian Theology, (SCM, 1969), p. 207.

70 Corpus Christi, Preface to the first edition, p. xi in the second edition. References are to the second edition, Longmans, 1965.

71 CC p. 3.

72 CC p. 4.

73 CC p. 6.

74 CC p. 8.

75 Existence and Analogy, Longmans, Green and Co Ltd, 1949. See especially p. 58.

76 CC, p. 12f.

77 OUP, 1959 p. 103f.

78 CC, p. 47.

79 IBH p. 104f.

80 Saraband p. 380.