When a Western European landed his plane among African natives who gazed unbelievingly at this enormous bird, he proudly remarked, “In one day I have covered a distance which used to take me thirty”. Thereupon the wise black chieftain came forward and aSked, “Sir, what do you do with the other twenty-nine?”

Here we have the twofold possibility of man’s fundamental decision: on the one hand technological rationality, and on the other the question of the meaning of human action.

The question also of the relationship between human hopes and expectations by self-liberation, and the God-given salvation: the question of God as connected with the context of mankind’s striving for liberation. The question of God-talk is intrinsically connected with the question of human integrity and wholeness in such a way that this question of identity cannot be solved in purely theoretical terms: it includes the question of a particular life-style — contemplative and political as well. Talk about God stands under the quest of our way of life; it is governed by the question of our real concerns in life.

Has Liberation Theology taken root in Britain? The Times (28 August) detected it as an alien influence when the Archbishop of Liverpool and other local churchmen supported the BCC grant of £500 to the Liverpool 8 Defence Committee. The complaint was that although it might be appropriate in its countries of origin, with their acute poverty, cruelty, exploitation and political corruption, in Britain it can do nothing but play into the hands of political extremists. But £500 won’t go very far towards a revolution these days. It will soon be eaten up in fares and lawyers’ fees. It is clearly the sign of the churches taking sides — that is, changing sides — in a political struggle, that the Times doesn’t like. Whatever we may think of the Liverpool events, the 80s is clearly going to be a dangerous decade. There have been warnings of deepening social division, more urban conflict and a police force changing its main concern from crime-prevention to national security. If this is the way things are going, there will certainly be serious attempts by British Christians to learn lessons from the Liberation Theologians and apply them on their own ground.

It was concerns of this kind that caused a group of politically- minded Christians to organise a conference entitled “A Theology for Britain in the 80s” at Easter time this year in Digby Stuart College, Roehampton and to get funds from — the BCC. The event had been planned for two years and the participants were personally invited months beforehand and asked to prepare themselves through discussions with their “base groups”. However, judging by the lateness of some invitations, the organisers had difficulty in attracting many of the people they had first asked to this theological banquet. Some of the guests, it seems, had pressing reasons of their own for not turning up; and the organisers had been obliged, to go out and compel others to come in and fill the empty places.

Ideas of justice held by those who are continuously in possession of wealth are bound to be different from the ideas of those who are continuously out of it. The basic anxiety of the former is to ensure the stability of the profitable order by which they are enabled continuously to take possession; that of the latter is to escape from the disorder by which they are continuously dispossessed. There is no common moral order, no community of interest between rich and poor by which it might be said that justice consists in its preservation. In a society as unequal as that of Britain, the moral order is already something broken.

Theories of justice generated by possessors are concerned with stability, even if — as with liberal reformists — this can only be achieved by a wider spread of benefits. In other words, they are concerned to define and defend a partial community of interest in which the access to wealth of those who already have it is preserved while the poverty of those who don’t is explained and justified in general, if not in particular. So they always imply the presence of a moral order behind the existing social and economic one. Furthermore, possessors are likely to hold the restricted concept of justice (see previous article), favouring commutative and criminal justice and then such distributive justice as will fit with these. The dispossessed however, when they find the voice to talk about these things — which is rare — take naturally to the comprehensive view of justice which looks for a different order altogether. The “greater justice” of the gospels is the justice of the dispossessed.

Although Ernst Käsemann’s magisterial commentary on the Epistle to the Romans proved to be open to review and patient of analysis without much explicit reference to the doctrine of justification (of New Blackfriars March 1981), the author himself undoubtedly regards this famous Lutheran insight as the key to his reading of Paul. What is not so clear, however, is whether Käsemann’s understanding of justification in Paul has much to do with what Catholics have usually supposed that Lutherans mean. In fact Käsemann may well have offered a reading of Paul which cuts the ground from underneath the central point of contention at the Reformation. His version of the doctrine of justification in his reading of the Epistle to the Romans may therefore have greater ecumenical effects in the long run than many agreed statements. And this is not the only way in which his work is likely to prove increasingly productive, as the young Swiss Calvinist scholar Pierre Gisel brings out in the first major systematic account of Käsemann’s writings. 1 The doctrine of justification is not one with which Catholics are generally at ease. The word is seldom mentioned in Catholic sermons. Salvation, grace, sanctification, yes — that is a chain of notions with familiar Catholic resonances, and clearly they pinpoint the area at issue. But talk of justification, as of predestination, sounds like Protestant jargon. Many Catholics are surprised to hear that the Council of Trent did not (as they suppose) merely condemn Luther’s teaching but actually worked out, with considerable thoroughness, and sanctioned with great solemnity in 1547, a Catholic doctrine of justification which has formed part of the official teaching of the Catholic Church ever since.

‘What is my licence to say what I say?’ You ask and prompt me to answer a question which, I must admit, I’ve never put to myself. I’m not given to self-reflection. I live. Life is its own certainty and justification. But now that you have asked me, I've put the question to myself and so I’ll tell you why I practise theology, what theology I practise, and how.

In what name, in virtue of what? I myself see two decisive elements: on the one hand, my vocation as a friar preacher, which shapes and fills my life; on the other hand, circumstances and appeals. I’ll start with this second element, because it’s easier to explain.

I never had a plan. I’ve tried to respond to appeals, requests, circumstances. Most appeals came from outside, in the shape of requests. I receive them every day, often two or three times a day ... If anything, I’ve accepted too many. That accounts for the quite ridiculous list of my articles, whether long and learned, or brief and popular. They amount to date to some 1630 or 1640 titles! But there are also the interior appeals, inspirations. These can range from the humble enough idea to read this, follow up that reference - yes, that’s how I operate, I think that our lives are shaped even in these tiny ways - right up to the first great appeal, in the years 1928 - 1929, to dedicate myself particularly to the Church and ecumenism. Two things intimately inter-twined. Here I very soon saw what I had to do. It got more complicated as time went on, of course, but the through-line always remained the same. And I have to admit that I was filled to overflowing. I wanted to change something and I saw very clearly what it was. My brethren and friends, my comrades in arms.

Thus wrote Gerrard Winstanley in 1650, about one year after the execution of Charles I. Sketching in the economic and political conditions of an earlier revolutionary period, Engels wrote in The Peasant War in Germany:

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.

In the course of an unusually angry article on poverty in Northern Ireland which appeared in the Times of 18 March this year, it was pointed out that in a region already suffering the highest cost of living, the highest unemployment rate (17.3 per cent) and the worst housing shortage (32,000 families homeless) in the United Kingdom, the social security system is passive and waits for people to find out what benefits they might be entitled to and to claim them. Moreover, the claim forms are “impenetrable to all but the well-educated and practised claimant, a contradiction in terms”. And the fear of scrounging has seriously interfered with the system’s ability to meet the crying need. In the UK as a whole £500 million welfare benefits remained unclaimed in 1978. Ulster was well represented. Meanwhile, the Government is pouring the balance of £70 million into a factory making luxury sports cars for the American market in the middle of a world energy crisis, for the sake of 1000 jobs.

On 6 April, the Guardian reported that more than 1000 new investigators have been appointed to save an estimated £50 million in social security frauds, while at the same time it has reduced the staff of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise dealing with tax frauds, which cost about £5,500 million. As the number of security fraud officers is increased so less and less time is given by benefit officers to ensuring that claimants receive their full entitlement. And more and more people are frightened to seek their legal rights. Moreover, “home visits have been reduced and officers have been told not to help claimants to work out the intricacies of various benefits in order to decide which was the most advantageous”. Meanwhile, it is not known what arrangements the Inland Revenue have to reclaim the vast tax arrears of the Vestey business empire, which paid no tax for decades on its highly profitable chain of butcher’s shops.