According to Alvin Plantings, ‘we who are Christians and propose to be philosophers must not rest content with being philosophers who happen, incidentally, to be Christians; we must strive to be Christian philosophers.’ He gives advice on the character such striving should have. I think his advice is bad advice, bad for philosophy and bad for Christianity. Here I shall concentrate, in the main, on the philosophical aspects of this bad advice. The aspects I have in mind are of two kinds: first, Plantinga’s appeal to considerations external to philosophy which distort the spirit of philosophical enquiry; second, Plantinga’s conception of philosophical enquiry itself.

Plantinga claims, ‘Christianity, these days, and in our part of the world, is on the move ... There is also powerful evidence for this contention in philosophy’ (p. 253). How is this supposed to be established? By comparison, it seems, with the state of philosophy in the fifties vis á vis Christianity: ‘the public temper of main-line establishment philosophy in the English speaking world was deeply non-Christian. Few establishment philosophers were Christian: even fewer were willing to admit in public that they were, and still fewer thought of their being Christian as making a real difference to their practice as philosophers’ (p. 253). These three characterisations of the fifties are very different from each other.

The first sign that Christianity in philosophy was not on the move in the fifties is supposed to be the fact that few Christians were in the philosophical establishment.

Cruelty to children is not new, though no doubt we are an inventive enough species to come up with some new forms. It could be that some of us may be more disposed to it than others, but it seems safer to assume that we all share a capacity for cruelty. Such a capacity does not have to be exercised: cruelty can be understandable without being right. Some societies and some social situations may increase the likelihood of its occurring, but they neither excuse it nor explain it away.

But if cruelty itself is not new, new in our own time is its categorisation. When we talk of ‘child abuse’, we are putting forward views on both cruelty and children which in some ways are new, or at least newly accepted, and which incorporate our contemporary notions of how human beings should conduct themselves. This categorisation is crucial to any discussion, since it provides us with the basic forms which it must take, but it does incline us to treat the phenomenon of cruelty to children as especially characteristic of our own time. The broad range of cruelty from deprivation through violation to murder is fully evident, in England at least, from a succession of court cases and official inquiries, yet it still cannot be asserted with any certainty that child abuse is more common now than in the past. Evidence from the past is lacking precisely because our forebears did not share our categorisations (or our interest in statistics).

The Department of Religious Studies at Newcastle University not long ago ran into controversy, because of its acceptance of a bequest which endows a post in theology on condition that its holder be a practising Christian. To some commentators this case appears as an ominous harbinger of what is to come: university departments, starved of public funds, will be increasingly forced to turn to private means, sometimes under conditions which threaten the upholding of academic objectivity. There is, however, a possibly irony in the Newcastle case, an irony which should cause us to ponder more deeply the pros and cons involved: the professorial research fellow at Newcastle has a brief to reflect, theologically, on the situation in the inner cities, so although the appointment has been made against the background of governmental withdrawal of financial support from the universities, the results of the new professor’s research are much more likely to be a critical embarrassment to the government than the usual more abstruse, more detached and ‘scholarly’ products of research in religious studies.

Of course, pointing up the irony is not to resolve the argument. And old whiggish purists, like Mr Tony Benn, exhibit a proper integrity when they insist that we should not look to defeat Mrs Thatcher by disinterring the power of privilege, whether princely, aristocratic or religious.

Rallying to the flag first raised by Professor Michael Dummett a year ago, Fr Brian Davies has parachuted heavily down on what I suppose we must call the Dummett-Lash battlefield, though the theological poppies have now been nourished by the blood of other combatants. Not least of these is Fr Davies’ own Provincial, Timothy Radcliffe.

In ‘Why Should We Believe It?’ (printed in last month’s New Blackfriars, pp. 360—368) Fr Davies is clearly worried by Fr Radcliffe’s opinion that a Catholic is ‘not committed to saying that any single saying of Jesus in the Gospels exactly reports the words of that historical person’ since it is possible ‘that in every instance his sayings have been redacted in the light of his subsequent death and resurrection, and of the theological concerns of the gospel writers’ (NB March 1988, p. 118). On the contrary, according to Fr Davies, Catholic faith depends for its very existence on clear reportage of Jesus’ own words. The Gospels ‘make some pretty extraordinary claims’: that Jesus is God incarnate, for example, and that by his cross and resurrection he conquered sin and death. We can only believe such extraordinary things if ‘sufficiently informed by one who is God and by one who knows what he is talking about’ (pp 361—6).

It would, I assume, be universally agreed among Catholics that we need to be ‘sufficiently informed’ by God about what is saving truth. The debate turns on just what might count as being ‘sufficiently informed’.