At least in the western tradition nothing so affects our attitude to God as our recognition of evil and suffering. An important factor in the modern bourgeois indifference to God has been a cultivated exclusion of evil from our consciousness. It is not long since English moral philosophers searching for an example of moral evil could only come up with promise breaking; the liberal imagination shied away from real sin, just as commercial advertising shies away from suffering. It is a commonplace that prisons and hospitals are not only institutions for dealing with crime and sickness but also for hiding them.

The authors of Genesis, and other books in the Pentateuch, created their text by taking myths and stories that had arisen in various sections of their society at different stages of its development, and by means of a process of combination, re-arrangement and redaction, they re-wrote them to provide an interpretation suitable for their society in quite new historical circumstances. These circumstances were extreme — they were a people cut off from their homeland and their origins, exiles in the superior and sophisticated civilisation of imperial Babylon. In his account of the Creation and the Fall, the Yahwist historian (as scholars refer to this one of the two authorial narratives of Genesis) addresses himself to a people experiencing political subordination and alienation from the culture in which they are living. Hence, he takes up what would be an understandable preoccupation for them in such circumstances — a reflection on the origins of human culture.

Juliet Mitchell, in her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism embarks on a project that, in some sense, resembles that of the Yah-wist historian. ‘All questions relating to the position and role of women in society’ she says, ‘tend sooner or later to founder on the bedrock of “where did it all start”?’ This, too, is a question about the origin of human culture, and what it implies for the subordinate position that women find themselves in. By taking Freud’s psychoanalytical myth of the origins of patriarchal society, together with Engel’s historical materialist account of women’s subordination in the institutions of the family, private property and the state, she re-appropriates for feminism two of the most important critical traditions of our society

The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.

The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:

As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.

The true Church is a believed Church; in a real sense we have to ‘believe’ the Church, for the Church can only be recognised in its essential nature through faith. Yet the Church as the ‘called out’ community of the faithful is not simply invisible; it is both visible and invisible. As the people of God, the Church is essentially a ‘people’, and thus is visible. As the body of Christ, the Church is a ‘body’, and thus is visible. In the concrete visible Church there is a mixture of wheat and tares.’ Because the Church consists of human beings, and sinful human beings, renewal and reform of the Church is always necessary. In every age and generation she is faced with the task of presenting herself anew. It is with this understanding of the constant renewal of the Church — ecclesia semper reformanda — that we approach our subject.

The Unity of the Church is not primarily a unity of members among themselves, but is essentially a given unity which has its origin in God himself in his triune being of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This unity was actualized in Jesus Christ himself and made efficacious in the Holy Spirit. The whole New Testament message bears witness to this unity of origin. The classic texts are well known: 1 Cor 1: 10-30; 1 Cor 12; Gal 3: 27f; Rom 12: 3-8; Acts 2:42; 4: 32; John 10: 16; 17; 20-26; Eph 4: 1-6. There was indeed a consciousness of unity everywhere, and it was this consciousness of unity which was one of the factors which constituted the Church. This consciousness of unity became an essential element in the Church’s self-definition, as one of the four characteristics of the Church set out in the Nicene Creed: ‘We believe one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’.