The Ramsden sermon, preached before the University of Oxford at St.Mary’s Church on 19 May 1985; first preached in Bulawayo Cathedral, Zimbabwe, on 28 October 1984.

‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3.30). These words are offered to us in the fourth gospel as a comment by John the Baptist, not only on his relationship with Jesus, but also on the relationship between two groups of people—his own disciples and those of Jesus. Both had been baptizing. While Jesus himself had earlier been baptized by John, he had now developed a separate movement and more and more people, it seems, were transferring from one to the other. While the two movements were thus distinct, there remained a loose communion and much sympathy between them. Yet, as Jesus’ group advanced, so John’s declined. This can hardly not have been painful for John and bewildering for some of his more staunch disciples. But he accepted it.

I would suggest that this relationship, as also the appositeness of John’s comment upon it, provides a model for the interpretation of a number of subsequent crucial turning points within Christian history.

There is, first, that of the late apostolic period. On the one side was the senior church, that of Jerusalem. ‘You see, brother,’ Paul was told on one of his visits to the city, ‘how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed; they are all zealous for the law’ (Acts 21.20). Here was a considerable group of Christians, some of whom had undoubtedly known Jesus personally, some of whom were related to him by family ties, and all of whom were immersed in the scriptures.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, the important Swiss theologian, will be celebrating his eightieth birthday on August 12th.

Pope John Paul’s singling out of Hans Urs von Balthasar for the Paul VI award, for his contribution to Catholic theology, almost certainly marks his emergence as the preferred Catholic theologian of the pontificate. Interest in his thought is bound to increase, especially with the English translation of his master-work Herrlichkeit, now proceeding. Our aim here is to present what can only be an introductory picture of the man and his work, still—amazingly—so little known in the English-speaking world in spite of the fact that his eightieth birthday is at hand and he has been writing for fifty years. We are not attempting to summarize everything (that would be an impossibility) but considering the central theme of his writing, his Christology.

Balthasar was born in Lucerne in 1905. It is probably significant that he was born in that particular Swiss city, whose name is virtually synonymous with Catholicism in Swiss history. The centre of resistance to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, in the nineteenth it led the Catholic cantons in what was virtually a civil war of religion, the War of the Sonderbund (which they lost). Even today it is very much a city of churches, of religious frescoes, of bells. Balthasar is a very self-consciously Catholic author. He was educated by both Benedictines and Jesuits, and then in 1923 began a university education divided between four Universities: Munich, Vienna, Berlin—where he heard Romano Guardini, for whom a Chair of Catholic Philosophy had been created in the heartland of Prussian Protestantism—and finally Zurich.

The doctrine of Christ should be the most comprehensive way that Christians express their belief in redemption from all sin and evil in human life, the doctrine that embraces the authentic humanity and fulfilled hopes of all persons. The theological categories adopted by early Christianity to define the doctrine of Christ—early Christology, in other words—would seem to be inclusive of women. And yet, of all Christian doctrine, it has been the doctrine of Christ that has been most frequently used to exclude women from full participation in the Christian Church. How is this possible?

Early Christianity used the word ‘logos’ to define that presence of God which has become incarnate in Jesus Christ. This term drew on a long tradition of religious philosophy. In Greek and Hellenistic Jewish philosophy, the divine Logos was the means by which the transcendent God came forth in the beginning to create the world. The Logos was simultaneously the immanence of God and the ground of creation. Through the Logos God created the world, guided it, was revealed to it and reconciled the world to God.

The Logos was particularly related to the rational principle in each human soul. By linking the term Christ, the Messiah, through which God redeemed the world, to the Logos, early Christianity prevented a split between creation and redemption threatened by early gnosticism. The God revealed in Christ was the same God who created the world in the beginning, the authentic ground of creation manifest in fulfilled form over against the alienation of creation from its true being.

That was written by Bonhoeffer during that period of his imprisonment in Tegel between April and August 1944 when, having faced up to the prospect of a long time in prison due to the delay of his trial, he settled down to critical and creative theological work.

Baron Friedrich von Huegel wrote to Maude Domenica Petre in February 1910:

My dear, dear Maude,

You, now that Fr. T. is gone, are about the only English Catholic, with whom I have felt, with whom I feel, profoundly at one in these most complex and straining transition-problems (Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Huegel, p. 240).

Fr. T. was of course George Tyrrell, who had died, excomunicated in 1909. Maude, born in 1863, belonged to an old Catholic family which had combined dying for the Pope with a tradition of Cisalpine resistance to intolerable papal decrees. In childhood she resolved to become, when she grew up, a saint, a philosopher and a martyr (p. 6). When doubts assailed her, a learned Jesuit recommended that she should go to Rome to study the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas.

Off she went, accompanied by a chaperon, and her puzzled aunt, Lady Lindsay, used to explain to inquisitive friends: ‘Maude has gone to Rome to study for the priesthood’ (p. 8). Though she wrote ceaselessly and well, her books have long been unobtainable. She has been referred to and exploited in all writings on the Modernist crisis, but she has always appeared as a subordinate figure, the devoted slave of Tyrrell and vestal virgin guarding his sacred flame. Clyde F. Crews has written the first book’ which treats her as interesting in her own right, and not merely as an appendage of others.

She emerges with enhanced reputation from this full-scale treatment.