Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ (Jn.II:21) Lazarus’ death breaks up a home, a family. The family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus was one of the places in which Jesus rested and refreshed himself, and it is a home that is broken by death and by the apparent absence of Jesus: ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

Many of Philip’s friends will experience his death in much the same way. Whenever one came to see Philip, one was made to feel immediately at home; one was made welcome, as he put a large gin and tonic into one’s hand and one relaxed into a deep, comfortable chair. And he communicated a sense of the Church as a large open home, in which anyone could find acceptance, peace. A place where, as St.Paul said in the second reading no one would be despised.

Perhaps the roots of this vision of Christianity lay in his own sense of family. He was devoted to his family, to his brother, Gilbert, a priest of the Church of England, to his sister-in-law, to his nephews and nieces. His house was filled with family furniture and pictures of ancestors. And he shared this open hearth with all sorts of waifs and strays who came his way.

This was why he was such a good University chaplain for eleven years. He claimed that this saved him from being narrow and dogmatic; it opened his mind. But that was because he opened himself to anyone who turned up, and especially to foreign students, when he was based at the Overseas Students’ Chaplaincy from 1966 to 1973, before he came here.

We are often told that there is something called ‘the problem of evil’. What is this supposed to be? And how should we respond to it?

It is usually understood as a problem for classical theism (sometimes just called theism), supporters of which are commonly called theists. According to classical theism, God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and allgood. In the world around us, however, we discover a great deal of pain and suffering. We also find a great deal of moral evil—morally culpable actions (or refusals to act) which diminish both those who are morally bad and those around them. The problem of evil is commonly seen as the problem of how the existence of God can be reconciled with the pain, suffering, and moral evil which we know to be facts of life. And it has often been said that they cannot be. Thus it has been urged that the problem of evil constitutes grounds for disbelief in God.

The argument here has taken two forms. First, it has been said that evil is evidence against there being a God—that evil shows the existence of God to be unlikely. Second, it has been held that evil is proof that there could not be a God. The idea here is that theists are caught in a contradiction. They cannot say both that there is evil and that God exists. Since they can hardly deny that there is evil, it follows that God does not exist.

There is a tendency among critics of ‘patriarchal’ culture or religion to point to the high status of women in early Irish or other Celtic societies as a model for change, suggesting that these societies displayed what one might call ‘actually existing feminism’. The assumption appears in otherwise scholarly works. Thus Dillon and Chadwick:

Elsewhere we are invited to ‘think of the superior place of women in early Celtic society’2. But what is the evidence for these claims?

Very few people in South Africa are satisfied with the present sociopolitical scene and its prevailing violence; most people agree that change is necessary. But that is the limit of their agreement There are great internal differences amongst both black and white people about the means to be used in bringing about change. These differences amongst people of the same race, national group and even political party complicate the problem, generate further conflict and could contribute to violence.

Alternatively, such differences could be an optimistic sign in that people often shape their political goals in terms of their own individual thought and interest, instead of just adhering to a racial or national block. Leaving aside the varieties of political aim and outlook, this article focuses on the models of ‘identity’ different groups are using or are prepared to use (consciously or unconsciously) to generate or provoke violence in South Africa. To make this analysis I have distinguished five categories: race and apartheid; fear and closedmindedness; clash of ideologies; fear and propaganda; and the international implications of conflict in South Africa. These categories should be discussed in the context of the present ‘dominating’ counteridentities existing in South Africa. These, in turn, centre around the idea of National Security, the maintenance of Afrikaner identity through racial separation, Black Consciousness, ‘ Liberalism’, Capitalism, Marxism in its various forms, the Liberation struggle and several forms of ethno-nationalism or tribal exclusiveness. It is through understanding each of these ‘counter-identities’ that we can grasp the complex forces forging South African ‘identities’.

Søren Kierkegaard told a story about a powerful king who truly loved a humble maiden. The king’s problem was: how was he to elicit from her a true love not based on mere homage or less genuine motives? He could make her a princess—but that would be an artificial and external act, testifying more to his power than his love. He could, as in the fairytales, disguise himself as a beggar and win her love as such—but true love cannot be based on deception. After much thought he realized that if the union could not be brought about by the elevation of the maiden or by his own pretence, there was only one possibility: he must resign his kingdom, and humbling himself to her station, become a slave. And this he did. God became man. No mere jest. No mere outer garment humanity. God must suffer all things, endure all things, experience all things—because God’s love is genuine.

We do not know much about Jesus’ particular temperament. We can glean from the Gospels that he liked periods of solitude, was prayerful, and had a strong sense of mission. He hated hypocrisy and had a special affection for the down-and-outs. One aspect of his personality that has not received much attention in traditional spiritual writing is that Jesus was a great party-goer.