‘I have some longstanding debts: to Donald MacKinnon, who introduced me to philosophy at Aberdeen between 1950 and 1952; to Cornelius Ernst, who got me to read Wittgenstein, together with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, at Hawkesyard in 1957-60; and to Adolf Darlap, who helped me to understand Heidegger (much easier than understanding Wittgenstein), in Munich between 1964 and 1965’.

Serendipitously, a few days before being invited to contribute to these celebrations some remarks on that ‘longstanding debt’ to Donald MacKinnon, while sorting out some papers I came across three yellowing pages of typescript. On the top of the final page was written, in that inimitably energetic and near-illegible hand: ‘Done for Theology in July 1977, but rejected by the editors as unsuitable on the inflexible recommendation of Dr James Mark (reviews editor). DMM’. (This was by by no means the only occasion on which Donald had noted the inflexibility of one to whom he usually referred as ‘the brother of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police’.) The spurned offering was a review of Christopher Stead’s Divine Substance, which had been published earlier that year.

John Henry Newman believed that all Christian doctrines must be accessible to all Christian believers, both the intellectually sophisticated and the uneducated. This implied that the intellectually simple must be able to apprehend and assent to mysteries, such as that of the Trinity. This paper discussion what Newman understood by the idea of mystery. Mystery for Newman was primarily a hermeneutical problem. Mystery was a result of the human incapacity and inability to grasp the fullness of truth. In Newman, the hermeutical problematic is one of limitations of language thus leading to submission of intellect to a sublime truth.

This article examines the ways in which Anglican theologians have reflected on the doctrine of transubstantiation. The article notes that there is substantial agreement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion on the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist and that this agreement has been forged by the long established and continuing dialogue of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC). At the same time the article notes that official responses from the Roman Catholic Church, while acknowledging the worth of the dialogue, have insisted on particular theological and philosophical definitions of the nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist concerning a change in the substance of the elements. While Anglicans have not accepted this particular definition of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as defined by the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation, they have nonetheless accepted the notion of the real presence and reflected in modern times on transubstantiation. Examples of this reflection on transubstantiation by Anglicans are discussed in the hope of allowing the dialogue to continue at new levels of understanding.

Jean-Luc Marion is one of the first theologians to take seriously the force of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics as a whole, which means he takes seriously Heidegger’s claims about the “overcoming” (Überwindung) of metaphysics. In other words, when in the work of Martin Heidegger the whole of metaphysics is thrown into question, any and all of its determinations become “questionable”, that is, worthy of being questioned. Marion concedes the impact this may have for theology.

This study concerns itself with how Jean Luc-Marion attempts in the work God Without Being to speak of God after Martin Heidegger’s claims for the overcoming of metaphysics. This arises as a question about the extent to which Jean-Luc Marion has been attentive to what Heidegger says. Marion appeals to an accepted philosophical reading of Heidegger in order to inaugurate a fresh theological reading of Heidegger. Underlying this study is the view that Marion is insufficiently attentive to the complexity of Heidegger’s thinking.

In order to show how this is so in the limited space available here, I propose to undertake a re-reading of two of the key texts upon which Marion rests for his case against Heidegger in God Without Being, with, I hope, surprising results for Marion’s project. Finally, I wish to conclude with some more general remarks about the Icon, which may at least point us in the direction of a more constructive reading of Heidegger’s work.

Fundamentalism clearly is some kind of literalism, especially in biblical interpretation, a literalism sustained (for what are taken to be religious reasons) in the face of liberal amd critical reconstructions and reinterpretations of the text. In fact, of course, the critical reconstructions are often undertaken for equally religious motives. Fundamentalism expresses and exploits the worries of believers; the residually Christian popular audience takes the passion-play literalism of Zefirelli’s television film with the same uncommitted tolerance as the modernist musicals “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Fundamentalism is widely influential among some theologians too. From the time of the Modernist crisis to the run-up to Vatican II, the Biblical Commission and the Holy Office imposed something very like fundamentalism on Catholic biblical studies. Professor Barr’s book does not study such phenomena in detail, he is concerned with a Protestant fundamentalism of a more systematic kind, self-designated as conservative evangelicalism. But there is enough of a family likeness between the fundamentalisms for Barr’s critique to be serviceable in coming to terms with the recent past of Catholic biblical work, dead but not yet entirely prone.

There are three marks of the fundamentalism Barr has between his sights: the inerrancy of Scripture as an article of faith and necessary test of the orthodoxy of otherwise acceptable Protestantisms; sharp hostility to modern theology and biblical criticism; and exclusion of those who fail the inerrancy test from the ranks of true Christians, (p 1) Rightly, one begins to suspect that Barr has little sympathy for his subject, regarding it as a mistake in theology and a resistance to known critical truths. Barr has no hope of persuading fundamentalists to change their minds, though he does hope to help students make theirs up in more intelligent and deliberate fashion.

Despite growing interest in Thomas Aquinas' biblical exegesis in general, and in his reading of Romans in particular, little attention has been given to the way Thomas actually uses scripture to do theology in his most enduring and influential work: the Summa theologiae. This article makes a preliminary attempt to remedy this neglect by exploring the role played by Romans 1:19-20 in the Summa. Given the deep connection of both Romans 1 and Aquinas to the perennial debates about natural theology, we might expect Thomas’ engagement with those verses to be concerned chiefly and resolutely with the questions animating these debates. But this is not at all the case. Far from being limited to arguments for philosophical knowledge of God, the Summa's more than twenty citations of Romans 1, I argue, re-present the whole drama of Christianity in microcosm. Even according to the letter, Paul's words have many senses for Thomas. The goal of this article is to draw out these many senses and demonstrate the creative interplay of scripture and theology in Thomas’ Summa.

When I set out to prepare this paper I was mildly disconcerted to discover that what I had in mind had already been done, and done brilliantly, by an American nun, Sister Kathleen Hughes R.S.C.J. You will find it in Reconciliation, a collection of lectures given by American theologians at Notre Dame in 1986, and I must express my warm appreciation of its excellence and my debt to its contents for stimulating much that I now wish to say.

Sister Hughes’s argument was that any theological discussion of reconciliation should start from human experience, which she illustrates very broadly from both fiction and real life. It may be worth adding that the point applies not just to this one sacrament but to all. Every sacrament meets something lodged deeply in human instincts and widely expressed in human behaviour. It was not the sacrament that invented marriage. It was not the Eucharist that invented ritual meals celebrating the intimate bond between creator and creature, the gifts of creation, and human ties of affection. And so with the other key human experiences—entrance into life, entrance into adulthood, serious illness and death. The sacraments are not stuck into ordinary life like candles on a cake. They are the God-given, church-moulded, Christian ways of speaking to deep-seated human needs and instincts as familiar as the lines on our hand.

'Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come’ (2 Cor. 5.17). ‘Neither circumcision or lack of circumcision means anything, but a new creation’ (Gal. 6. 15). Such is St Paul's clear teaching.

The life of a Christian is a new life, a new life in Christ and in the Spirit. We find this divine promise of a newness of life even in the Old Testament, in prophecies which can be said to have announced the mysteries of God's grace in a unique way. In Ezekiel God tells us about the last times, the days of Yahweh, the days in which he will manifest his glory, that is, his living presence among us in this world of ours, the days of the redemption in Christ. ‘Cast away from you all your transgressions, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit’ (Ez. 18.31).

I said in a previous New Blackfriars (October 1975) that Marxism has had on the whole little to say about morality, because one doesn’t engage in moral debate with men who can only grasp morality in moralistic — and so ideological — fashion. It’s in the provisional silence of those who refuse the term ‘morality’ that, perhaps, something of its true meaning may finally emerge. The condition for the emergence of that discourse is Marxism itself — the theory and practice of political revolution. Until that condition is fulfilled, our ‘moral’ discourse is bound to remain imprisoned within the ideological, that’s to say, that when we speak ‘morally’, we won’t, for much of the time, know what we are meaning. We’ll be in the condition of all those imprisoned within the ideological, who, in the very act of speaking, fail to recognise that they themselves are being ‘spoken’, being constituted, by certain discourses quite independent of themselves, quite concealed from their consciousness, discourses which they betray, despite themselves, in the slips, contradictions, inconsistencies which fissure and deform their speaking. It’s of the essence of the ideological that in speaking, in constituting myself as a subject, I must necessarily repress, remain in ignorance, of the very determinants of my discourse — determinants which are visible only to science, to that science of social formation which is historical materialism, or that science which is psychoanalysis. As ‘I’ speak ‘I’ the coherent historical subject Terry Eagleton, it — the unconscious — speaks through me, constantly disturbing and displacing my discourse.

A good deal of thinking about the priest and modern society has been about the priest rather than about modern society: by this I mean that we’ve tended to begin from the theological end, with an enquiry into what difference a renewed theology makes to our conception of the priest, and then to go on from here to the sociological implications : how does this new priest with his new functions fit into modern society, and what kind of society will be created around him? But I think we need to work the other way round as well: we need to try to get some idea of the reality of our society and then see what our theological talk amounts to, in that context. The point I’ll try to make in this paper is that there are some cases in which there is a serious tension between what seems theologically sound and desirable, and the results of this in terms of a whole society. This is why theological enquiry which is basically about society – the role of the priest, for instance – can’t afford to work on vague or superficial social ideas, on social caricatures. This isn’t just an abstract warning, because caricatures of our society are frighteningly easy, and it propably isn’t a caricature to say that this is one of the significant things about our society – that it makes stock judgements and category responses easy, and offers these as convincing descriptions of our experience.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century Ernest Renan wrote: ‘I have studied Germany and believed I entered a temple. All I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful and moving. O my soul, it is a treasure indeed, it is the continuation of Jesus Christ. Their morality fills me with admiration, how sweet and how strong they are! I believe that Christ will come to us from there.’

What he meant by ‘Christ’ was: ‘A pure cult, a religion without priests and without exterior practices, resting entirely on the heart's feelings, on the imitation of God, on the Immediate relation of our conscience with the Heavenly Father . . . Jesus founded religion in humanity as Socrates philosophy . . . Jesus founded absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing except the sentiment.’ That is one of the strong currents which Germany sent into the maelstrom of modern European civilisation. Kant, Hegel, Strauss, ‘Baur, Goethe were the sources.”

In 1936 Abbot Ildefons Herwegen spent four weeks in Italy. In an audience the late Pope said that he had himself been able to establish that liturgical life in Germany was on the increase, and that this was a strong support for Holy Church in these days of strife and suffering. And this is another current of which Maria-Laach is the source.

Europe is one. Its unity is not an opposition of races and nations overcome by commercial, diplomatic or cultural contacts.

Early European travellers among savage peoples generally related that they had little or no religion. Anthropological writers often give the impression that they have little else. This contrast is, of course, to some extent accounted for by the great increase in knowledge about these peoples, but it is also due to a wider definition in modern times of what may be regarded as a religious fact. If the early traveller found among a people nothing corresponding to what he himself had been brought up to regard as religion he was prone to report that they had no religion, only some superstitions. As, however, the definition of religion was extended by anthropologists to cover ancestor cults, totemic observances, fetishism, and even magic and witchcraft, the part played by religious conceptions in the simpler societies received greater emphasis. The widening of the definition would seem to be due in part to changes in our own intellectual atmosphere. The early explorers were Christians. The early anthropologists were not. For the explorers had religion and the savage had not. But the positivism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, associated in most people’s minds with the name of Comte, had had so strong an influence that the positions tended to become reversed in anthropological theories from the middle of last century till well into the present one. Since it was then held that religion is a way of thinking characteristic of the earliest phase of human development, savages had to be portrayed as totally lost in its darkness. Sir James Frazer, speaking of primitive religion, asserted that ‘the life of the savage is saturated with it’. Lévy-Bruhl declared that ‘the reality in which primitive peoples move is itself mystical’.

Whatever he did was quickly done, but neither hastily nor in a hurry. This is particularly true of his reading and writing, both of which in sum mounted up imperceptibly to a great deal. His published books and pamphlets, of which even his most intimate companions rarely knew anything until they suddenly appeared ready for printing, are but a small part of the writing he left behind him. This consists of official documents, letters and postcards, plans of sermons and lectures, quotations from books read, and the student’s notes to which he was forever adding something. Considering the busy life he led and the little leisure he was allowed, the extent of his reading and his accurate memory of what he read are very remarkable. Much of it was done in trains and on long voyages. At one time he devoted the time spent in the noisy Underground trains in London to the study of Russian, and made some progress with it. He read history seriously all through life. He returned constantly to his early theological and ecclesiastical studies, refreshing them and keeping them up to date by reading new work as it appeared, preferably such as had a practical bearing on his own special duties. For the nourishment of his own soul and those others whom he had helped in their spiritual life he persevered with his study of the mystics.

While Judaism, Christianity and Islam are now commonly classed together as ‘Abrahamic religions’ it seems clear from what Paul the Apostle writes that, from the Christian point of view, Islam should not be regarded as ‘Abrahamic’

Many questions have been raised concerning the logical validity of Aquinas's Fourth Way. Some commentators judge the Fourth Way to be problematic while others find it delightful. In this paper, the Fourth Way is understood as a reflection on what it is to attribute to things around us scalar predicates. Does the Fourth Way not resemble what Wittgenstein observes when speaking about ‘the standard meter’? If so, is the Fourth Way significantly different from what might be called a ‘mystical’ line of thinking? If not, it would be this mystical meaning that is used in the Way with respect to ‘God exists’. How should we understand this mystical meaning? By noting that beauty appears as a response-dependent property and by stressing that in order to attribute it to something we must possess certain virtues. Beauty would then be relative to virtues which are linked to the mystical meaning of ‘God’. Why could such a use, concerning the predicate ‘beautiful’ (even if that is not mentioned in the Fourth Way) not constitute an explanation of ‘what we call God’? This is a question to which the reading of the Fourth Way might lead.

This paper explores Christianity's ambiguous relationship to capitalism by engaging Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities as a way of rethinking Marxism's critique of religion from the standpoint of political economy. Following Etienne Balibar's distinction between the theory of ideology and Capital's theory of fetishism, I examine how the later Marx conceived of religion as socially conditioned by the society of commodity production, which takes on religious dimensions. Commodities are the basis for a concept of fetishism which commands total subjection, alienating human beings under capitalism. This critical focus also reveals Christianity in its totalizing role as a symbolic structure shaped by the inescapable logic of exchange-value, money, and universal equivalents. Nonetheless, Christianity retains the impetus to anti-fetishism, provided it unites with the Marxist science of critical perception. This anti-fetishistic union focuses on the transparent and revolutionized social relations of real presence as the nonalienated reverse of fetishism's false presence. A critical apophaticism, tempered by the materialist amendments of Marika Rose and Slavoj Žižek, offers the bridge to such a union and highlights the anti-fetishistic avenues of failure and utopia.