“The struggle of the African National Congress is a truly national one. It is a struggle of the African people, inspired by theiT own suffering and their own experience. It is a struggle for the right to live. During my life-time I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

These are the last public words of Mr Nelson Mandela before he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1964. He evidently thought then that democracy had a future in South Africa, though he had already been driven to the conclusion that it could only be achieved by some kind of revolutionary violence.

At the end of their frank and comradely talks, the Presidents issued an agreed statement. . . . Not only politicians, it would seem, should concern themselves with such things. Official custodians of doctrine in Churches which claim to teach truth on an important range of issues are showing marked enthusiasm for talks — le dialogue even, in some places — and for issuing agreed statements. Precisely what, however, is being agreed on in an agreed statement? Or, what is it that political negotiators or separated brethren are to be understood as really doing when issuing an agreed statement? That question will not quite be answered in the present inquiry, but enough hazards risked by the well-intentioned when they make such statements will be exposed, to make it easier for someone with enough real knowledge of a wide enough and fair enough sample of agreed statements in doctrine and in politics alike to work out a good answer. My direct interest is in theological doctrines here, and in hazards arising from inadequate analysis. It may well be, however, that in producing agreed statements in doctrine that are of real worth, the crucial issues are neither theological nor analytical, but rather political. I conclude therefore by discussing some of the significant points raised by a jurist only a few years ago in a paper which should be taken into account by those concerned before a new wave of agreed statements comes out.

Agreed statements, it should be acknowledged, have played no inconsiderable part in Christian doctrine and in Christian theologies: ‘It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us ...’, ‘This sacred synod decrees . . .’ ‘We believe in God . . .’, and so on. They have played their part in Heilsgeschichte too: There came false witnesses, but their witness did not agree. . . . Then came two false witnesses, who said . . . Simply by agreement false witness does not become true, nor false doctrine trustworthy.

Among the many questions raised by the Gospel stories of Jesus’ miracles, half a dozen are perhaps particularly pressing. How do the miracles differ from magic (if they do; Morton Smith’s recent book Jesus the Magician argues that they do not)? What criteria is one to invoke to distinguish authentic from inauthentic miracles in the Gospels? What have Form and Redaction Criticism to say about the miracle narratives? Do the Gospels see the miracles of Jesus in a different light from the oral tradition and from the historical Jesus? Are the ways that Jesus, the oral tradition and the evangelists saw the miracles valid and/or mandatory for Christians today? I hope to say something by way of answer to each of these questions, but my method will not be to examine the questions in the abstract, but to look at three specific miracle stories and to attempt to cope with the problems that each throws up.

First, though, one general point. Namely, that the New Testament evidence makes it very difficult to subscribe to the view that Jesus did not work any miracles at all. In the Gospel of Mark, 209 out of 666 verses (the figures come from Richardson) deal directly or indirectly with miracles. Press back into the Gospel sources, if you will, and look in turn at Q, Mark, special Matthew, special Luke, and John and in each (probably independent) source Jesus is seen as a miracle worker.

The decade that preceded Vatican I saw what was by far the most intensive and exciting theological debate there has ever been in modern English Catholic history. Compared with the pious torpor of the decade that preceded Vatican II, certainly, the zest and odium of theological exchange prepared the clergy and educated laity in England more thoroughly for the proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility than was the case anywhere else in the Catholic world. It is true, of course, that nobody elsewhere expected papal infallibility to be so high on the agenda at the Council. The English debate, through Manning’s extraordinary influence at the Council, may even be described (with little exaggeration) as the key factor in ensuring that papal infallibility was moved to the head of the agenda.

The Dublin Review, from 1863 onwards, was the principal organ of the “New Ultramontanism”. In that year the editorship passed to William George Ward, the most brilliant of all the ex-Anglicans from Oxford who dedicated their energies to “Romanizing” the English Catholic community. A fellow of Balliol College by 1834, when he was twenty-two, Ward of course took minor orders but it was in mathematics and logic that his brilliance lay. As the DNB entry delicately puts it, “his union of a severely logical intellect with a craving for more concrete assurance in matters spiritual than reason can afford” led him inexorably to seek communion with Rome. Censured by Convocation on a famous occasion in the Sheldonian Theatre, because of his “Romanism”, Ward at once resigned his fellowship, married, and became a Catholic six months later. Six years later, in 1851, much to the horror of most of the Catholic clergy, Ward had been installed, against strong opposition both within and without the college, as lecturer in moral philosophy in the Westminster archdiocesan seminary.