“Christian epistemology links mystic knowledge to language. God has spoken,” Michel de Certeau writes (M.F., p. 114) Two extended metaphors for the economy of this speech act are common in the tradition. In the first, God is Speaker, Christ is the Spoken Word, the Verb grafted upon this world (M.F., p. 150) and the Spirit is the breath (pneuma) which makes this communication possible. In the second, the Spirit is explicitly linked to the writing of the Spoken Word. God is Writer and creation is His book. Certeau, as we will see, examines both these metaphors (with the economies of revelation and redemption that they imply). The speech act is fundamental to his understanding of history, creation, subjectivity and the practices of daily living. And yet, as a thinker who draws upon and develops the poststructuralism of Lacan, Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida (to name only a few), this privileging of the voice is somewhat at odds with poststructural denunciations of the author and critiques of the metaphysics of presence subtly organised around the hierarchy of speech over writing.

The aim of this paper is to examine the historical question as to whether mono-episcopal government existed in the local Church in Rome in the first century AD. It is not intended to engage upon the related task of theological reflection upon the role of bishops within the Church and their claim to be successors to the apostles in this role.

There has been a development in the Church’s understanding of ministry and authority, just as there has been a development in the Church’s understanding of the Trinity or the Incarnation. Leo the Great was as certain of the authority of the Petrine office, as he was of the reality of the two natures of the one person of Christ. The task of showing whether such developments were legitimate is ultimately a theological one, though it is one that will involve reflection upon history. It is not prima facie obvious that a high doctrine of the papacy does require that a single bishop exercised magisterial authority in Rome in the immediate post-apostolic age. Yet this question is only raised at this point so that it may be set aside. Here we consider the simpler historical question as to whether the evidence available requires, suggests, or excludes the supposition that Christian ministry in Rome in the latter part of the first century was mono-episcopal.

In Love Alone is Credible (1963), Hans Urs von Balthasar discusses love in a way that “seeks to be faithful to the theological tradition of the great saints.” Conspicuously missing from the set of “great saints” whom Balthasar praises is Thomas Aquinas. Does Balthasar imply a negative judgment about Thomas's thought on love? If so, what is the judgment? On what grounds is it made? How might Thomas answer? To address these questions, I construct a dialogue between the two, privileging Love Alone and the Questions on charity from the Summa Theologiae. The dialogue begins with a survey of ground common to Balthasar and Thomas. A second step shows how three salient aspects of Thomas's treatment of charity appear from Balthasar's perspective. A third section deepens the critique, showing that for Balthasar, both divine and human love must be conceived as utterly gratuitous in ways that Thomas downplays or denies. A fourth section asks how the account of love given by Balthasar appears from Thomas's viewpoint. A final section asks what to make of these partly overlapping, partly clashing perspectives, and suggests why both are necessary.

This paper addresses the foundations of the Church systematically as it originates in the Triune God's plan of salvation. The Church is an extension of the missions of the Son and Spirit in history. Analogies are invoked to help ground the nature and the mission of the of the Church. The paper further explores the implications of Ecclesia de Trinitate in light of Vatican II, the visible and invisible missions of the Son and the Spirit, the role of Mary and the multi‐religious context.

Newman's article, ‘On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine’, which appeared in the Rambler in July 1859, has become a natural reference point when people consider the sensus fidelium. It is helpful, therefore, to know how the article came to be written and important to be clear about what it actually said. Newman was not supporting some loose exercise in democracy, but was pointing to a vital process for the health of the Church, and encouraging the lay faithful and their pastors to work together. There are lessons too to be learnt from the way people behaved in the aftermath of the controversy. The episode may also be seen as illustrating Newman's life in a nutshell.

Several times since I left the Communist Party nearly four years ago to become a Catholic, young priests have told me that they proposed engaging in argument or debate with members of the Communist Party. In every case they have been convinced that they had not only been given all the answers to the Marxists when they were in the seminary but, in addition, that those arguments were so devastating, so unanswerable, that any audience, any Communist even (if he were honest), would at once be obliged to accept them and to admit the intellectual defeat of Marxism. But it is not as easy as that, as a brief discussion of the lines they proposed to follow and an indication on my part of the answers which the Communists were likely to produce has usually soon demonstrated.

It is absolutely right that the young priest should be sent out with a knowledge of Marxism—for it is now, apart from anything else, the basis of all education from the elementary school to the university in nearly a quarter of the world today—and it is obviously necessary that he should be given entirely convincing answers at the time, or the consequence might well be that our seminaries would begin to produce members of the Communist Party instead of Catholic priests. But, when visiting seminaries, or talking to their younger products, I have sometimes felt that this outlining of the Marxist case followed by instruction in the pat answers to it is all a little too easy. First you put up a simplified, truncated version of Marxism and then provide the unanswerable answer. The result is a foregone conclusion. It is rather in the same category as those very popular but, I always feel, rather phoney ‘two pulpit’ performances where one priest puts up Marxism as an Aunt Sally and the other proceeds to knock it down.

The mind of man has an inborn bias towards unity. Hence the unity of ideas which even the anarchic self-realizer cannot escape. Hence, too, a critique of the history of ideas must always appear an angular if not arbitrary cross-section through the jungle of fact. If the mind of man was a machine we could take it to pieces, but because it is organic and even supratemporal, it is always more than a welter of faculties and even more than its history. So that if criticism is so specialized that it forgets that the whole mind is more than the sum of its parts it becomes geometrical and is an escape from the truth: geometry is a measure of matter and not of mind. Again, the reality the mind experiences is not a mere metaphor for something else that the mind in its otherness cannot reach, and not mind-stuff or a construction the mind has put on the real. The external world, and the whole of it, means everything to the mind: closing the mind to it is like closing the body to air; it is intellectual death. Unless we grow into the real, and the whole real too, we become unreal people: we not only stop seeing objectively, we stop being objective. The history of the ideas of unreal people is therefore a history of unrealities, and the critic who shows how they hang together in the unreal mind is proving again that there is method even in madness. If he forgets however that the mind is more than its history, he becomes a determinist who begs the question and equates mind and matter.

Thomas Aquinas is celebrated for many things in the history of Christian theology, but one is the revolutionary place he gives to the thesis that Christ acquired knowledge by way of empirical experience. That his claim should be so revolutionary strikes us today as odd. Any reflection on Christ's knowledge ordinarily begins today by stressing how the Word of God assumed our ordinary human limited ways of knowing. In medieval times, however, theologians found it extremely difficult to accept that Christ acquired knowledge by the normal empirical, experiential route. A crucial role in Aquinas's theological advance beyond this position was played by his philosophical commitments, within the wider context of the soteriological character of his Christology. However, there are problems involved in Aquinas's particular theological position on Christ's acquired knowledge and his wider picture of Christ's knowledge. The same philosophical means that enabled Aquinas to recognise the reality of Christ's acquiring knowledge also led him into an overall picture of the perfection of Christ's knowledge that was not so satisfactory. Part of the solution to the difficulties into which Aquinas gets himself can be found in a philosophical position already employed by him in his mature account of Christ's knowledge.

The dispute between two of Princeton Theological Seminary's leading Barth scholars concerning theological ontology invites engagement from the contemporary Thomistic tradition. On the one hand, McCormack argues that, in a fully Barthian theological ontology, divine triunity is constituted by the pretemporal election of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Hunsinger contends that this election is expressive of an antecedent trinity. In the light of scholastic disputes between Dominican and Franciscan theologians, McCormack's proposal is seen to resemble aspects of the Bonaventurean account of triune relationality, particularly the account of procession as constitutive of personal distinction and the affirmation of a primordial ‘primity’ adhering to the Father's innascibility. Whilst McCormack seeks to avoid an undetermined originary plenitude, his treatment of the divine attributes as logically consequent to election risks attributing to pretemporality a status akin to originary primity. Affirming, with Hunsinger, an eternal trinity antecedent to election, the Thomistic tradition nonetheless contains the resources necessary to prevent this antecedence becoming a dissociative antecedence. As such, Thomism preserves divine aseity whilst equally safeguarding against the disconnection of logos asarkos from logos incarnandus that McCormack regards as an unwarranted metaphysical speculation that bypasses the particularity of revelation in Jesus Christ.

From the Editions du Cerf, 229 Boulevard Latour-Maubourg, Paris—7e, we have received copies of new periodicals issued by that publishing-house, already so well-known for La Vie Intellectuelle and La. Vie Spirituelle. They include Fêtes et Saisons, Cahiers de l’Art Sacré, and La Maison Dieu, the quarterly organ of the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique (250 francs for a year’s subscription). From the same source come two new series of books, Lex Grandi and La. Clarté-Dieu. A detailed survey of these encouraging signs from France will appear in an early number of The Life of The Spirit.

When God created all things in His Wisdom, we are introduced to His work in three stages because we cannot understand all the works of God at once. So God instructs us about these elemental things which happened before men existed on this world, and He tells us that in the beginning of His creation He created the good things, the basic things, the things which could, as it were, contain all the other things that He wanted to make. On the first day He created the Light, and on the second day He created the Heaven, and on the third day He created the Earth and the Sea and all the things which grow on the earth. All these things are the good things. God said so and it is so.

Then there was the second stage in God’s creation. God could have left these things to grow; the seeds of life were in the earth. They were given on the third day and all seems to be complete; but it was not enough for God. More than the seeds of life were needed for them to prosper. It was not good enough that they should be just good. Things need more than the seeds of life if they are to live; they need the blessing of God, if they are to be fruitful. The work of the second three days was the work of blessing what was already good. On the first day God created light, but on the fourth day He made the stars which shine in the light.

The transformation of the liturgy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council was, by any standard, a landmark event. It represented the unfreezing of a liturgical tradition which had seemed to many to be sacrosanct and immemorial, beyond question or change. Almost a century ago the greatest of all English liturgists, Edmund Bishop, could write without a hint of irony that “With the Missal and Breviary of St Pius V ...the history of the Roman liturgy may be said to be closed”.

Bishop himself was too good an historian to harbour romantic illusions about the timelessness or changelessness of liturgy. He had a highly developed sense of the historical evolution of worship and in fact he was a strong sympathiser and fellow-traveller with the Modernist movement, and its attempt to demythologise the doctrinaire nonhistorical orthodoxy of post-Tridentine Catholicism. But neither Bishop nor the two generations of liturgists who laboured after him to reclaim for the present the forgotten riches of the Latin liturgical tradition could have dreamed of the cultural and theological revolution which would come upon the Church in the late 1960s and 1970s, a revolution which swept away not only many of the accretions of medieval and baroque liturgical and para-liturgical practice which they so deplored, but many of their own most treasured convictions about the nature of liturgy and liturgical theology. They hoped that the liturgy, duly cleansed of accretion and distortion, would become, in Joseph Jungmann’s words, “a school of faith”. In the ancient prayers and ceremonies of the Church, Jungmann believed, would be found an endless resource, a great well of wisdom and truth.

The 1960s were an incredibly busy and productive time for the Dominican Yves Congar (1904–1995). In addition to drafting many seminal passages of Council documents, including Dei Verbum 8, which is the subject of this paper, he also wrote his historical-theological masterpiece, Tradition and Traditions between 1960 and 1963. Drawing on the latter's explicit references to John Henry Newman, this article unpacks the particular ways in which Newman's thought contributed to the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation through the reception by and writing of Congar. Particular attention is paid to the connatural way of knowing which stems from the gifts of the Holy Spirit, typically alluded to by Newman in his meditations on the faith of Mary.

In this paper, I propose to deal with various sacred realities that helped the people of Israel deepen their relationship with God over the years: die Aik of the Covenant, the desert Tabernacle, the Temple, the Sabbath and other feasts, the synagogue, religious meals and creation itself.

Of all the sacred objects of Old Testament Religion, the one that must have ranked among the most sacred was the Ark of the Covenant. It was constructed at Sinai, according to the instructions of the Lord, from acacia wood (Ex. 25.10ff.). It was a box two and a half cubits long, one and a half cubits wide and one and a half cubits high. It contained the two tablets of the law (1 Kings 8.9), a jar of manna and Aaron’s rod (Ex. 16.33; Heb. 9.4). It was covered by a gold plate called the kapporet (die mercy seat) at either end of which, facing each other, there were cherubim. The Aik was not only a powerful symbol of the Sinai covenant, it was also a location of divine presence “There I will meet with you...”(Ex. 25.22).

The cultures surrounding Israel provide some insight into the culdc thought that lay behind the construction of the Ark. In the Ancient Near East there was a custom whereby a treaty document was often placed in a container which served as the footstool for a deity. Thus the decalogue was placed in its container, the Ark, and this then became God’s footstool.

The Tabernacle

The aik was housed in the Tabernacle or the Tent of Meeting.