In at least two ways it can be sensible to ask about the responsibility of theology for something or other, not just the responsibility of individual theologians. They are rather like the ways in which we can ask about the responsibility of the engineering behind some dam, say, not just that of the individual engineers, for the safety of the dam. In one, we may ask about something in the abstract nature of engineering, its concepts or principles: Was it reliance on some daring new engineering concept that was responsible for the dam’s failure? In the other way, we may ask about the received practices of engineers generally, not just about the actual practice of the engineers involved on that occasion. Do they tend, for example, to double the theoretically necessary thickness of certain structural components, and is that practice responsible for their structures withstanding more than their due of wild weather and erratic maintenance? Or do they tend to pare things down to the point where only near-perfect workmanship and near-ideal materials can keep things safe?

In at least two ways it can be sensible to ask about the responsibility of theology for something or other, not just the responsibility of individual theologians. They are rather like the ways in which we can ask about the responsibility of the engineering behind some dam, say, not just that of the individual engineers, for the safety of the dam. In one, we may ask about something in the abstract nature of engineering, its concepts or principles: Was it reliance on some daring new engineering concept that was responsible for the dam’s failure? In the other way, we may ask about the received practices of engineers generally, not just about the actual practice of the engineers involved on that occasion. Do they tend, for example, to double the theoretically necessary thickness of certain structural components, and is that practice responsible for their structures withstanding more than their due of wild weather and erratic maintenance? Or do they tend to pare things down to the point where only near-perfect workmanship and near-ideal materials can keep things safe?

I consider both kinds of question. But a recurring concern is one the President asked me to keep in mind, when inviting me to speak to the topic: the concern that there may be a ‘modern culture... in which the God-question is vitiated often right from the start in the way in which it is posed’.

Catherine Pickstock has ably sketched the achievement of Plato and his reports of the academy of Socrates as an early counter-signal to a time when the philosopher has come to embody the empirical rather than reason. But she has also had the courage, in the current philosophical marketplace, to develop the forgotten insights of Plato’s lyceum—that the pursuit of wisdom took place within the context of a cultic association, i.e. within the cycle of prayer and offering which characterised the early activity of the university. So while poetics were abandoned in Plato’s vision for the Republic, hymns to the gods were not. It is in this context that we can take time out of the great putsch of post-war British philosophy with its dismissal of metaphysics as nonsense, and attend to the reflections of a Continental philosophe from a far country. In possibly the last great work of his pontificate, Fides et ratio, we have, arguably, the most far-reaching and mature contribution of his time and one which justifies his election as a philosopher-pope. It is not inappropriate to suggest that Plato could not have wished for more in his designs for a city-state than one headed by a philosopher-king. So it seems appropriate to repristinate that sapiential dimension of philosophy for which the Pope calls in the concluding chapters of the encyclical and suggest ways in which British philosophers might grow as a result.

In the struggles that divided the Anglican community in the 1830s one of the hardest fighters was Thomas Arnold, reforming headmaster of Rugby School and polemical Broad Church divine. He attacked the Tractarians in a notorious article called ‘The Oxford Malignants’ (though the title was an editorial insertion) and regarded Newman as his principal opponent; his opposition was quite impersonal, since he believed that he had never met Newman. He was annoyed when it was reported by a third party that Newman was alleged to have asked if Arnold was a Christian. Arnold’s vehemence spoiled his hopes for a bishopric, but Lord Melbourne, the sympathetic Whig Prime Minister, had him appointed to the Regius Chair of History at Oxford. Early in 1842 Dr Arnold was in Oxford delivering his first series of lectures, accompanied by his family; his eldest son Matthew was already in residence as a Balliol undergraduate. On 2nd February Arnold dined in Oriel, his old college, where Newman had been a fellow for many years. Though Arnold was initially apprehensive and ill at ease, the encounter of these old opponents was courteous and good tempered; they talked of non-controversial subjects such as North African myths. Newman reminded Arnold that they had in fact met once before, when he had been one of Arnold’s oral examiners for the degree of Bachelor of Divinity; Arnold had not identified him on that occasion, believing he was Edward Pusey, another leading Tractarian.

There was nearly a contradictory impression between the intensive influence Haecker exercised with his writings and the atmosphere he created as a person. And even after half a century it is not easy to approach him as a historical personality. He left little about his personal life in the sense of autobiographical notes. Richard Seewald, a painter and friend of his for several decades who has left us two portraits of Haecker, describes him in a farewell article: “He was one of the most quiet and most taciturn men I knew.” Most people who met him may have had “great respect for his uprightness and a little fear to be pierced through by his clear blue eyes radiating with an unusual power ... They seemed to ask all the time: Do you quite seriously mean what you are saying? Does your life correspond to your words?” On the other hand Sophie Scholl, one of the “White Rose” martyrs, told her friend about the “impressive hours” she spent with Haecker in the afternoon of February 4th 1943, when he read for a circle of friends from his theodicy Schopfer und Schopfung (Creator and Creation): “His words fall slowly like drops which you can see gathering in advance and which fall under this expectation with a very special weight. He has a very quiet face, a look as though he would look toward the inside. Nobody ever convinced me with his countenance as he did.”

In recent years, I have come to think that at the risk of stretching hermeneutical principle, the opening line of the Gospel of John could be rendered, “In the beginning was the Story.”

In his superb little book on parables, John Dominic Crossan said in Ins good Irish fashion, “we live in story like fish in the sea.” Story-telling is the art of making sense out of life, and because of that, out of grace, God, and revelation. Story does not simply support us cn a sea of chaos, it teaches us how to survive and flourish. When we want to know who we are and where we’re going, whether as individuals or as a people, we tell stories. Personal stories, family stories, corporate myths and legends, the great stories—all of them help us establish identity and build a world. The story-teller is one of the most beloved members of society and, I think, one of the most important. I want to explore the role of the Story-Teller as Evangelist, that is, as Preacher, and the Preacher as Story-Teller.

What I hope to do, provisionally and inadequately, is to explore the dimensions of story and story-telling as a way of proclaiming not merely good news, but the good news, the relevance of story to preaching the Gospel. First I intend to look at imagination, dreaming, and memory as the faculty or spiritual power which personally grounds our story-telling. Then, I will look briefly at myths, parables and memoir as examples of stories, ending with a brief glance at some evangelical story-tellers.

A witness to the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem in the early first century would not have been able to identify any aspect of what was going on as sacrifice. Here was merely a judicial murder performed with some cynicism by the Roman administration of a difficult province. For the Temple administration Jesus’s death was understood as a matter of an expediency pointedly ironised by the author of John’s Gospel: ‘You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50). There seems little doubt, on the other hand, that the gospels, as well as Paul, place the death of Jesus firmly within a hermeneutical framework provided by the sacrifice of Passover; this, in turn, leads to the early claim that Christ’s death is to be understood in relation to the forgiveness of sins. This theme is already present in the primitive credal statement preserved in I Cor. 15.3, which Paul seems to have inherited from Palestinian Christians and most probably from the Jerusalem church itself.

Such a reading of the New Testament material has been challenged by René Girard in a body of work which represents one of the most profound of recent attempts to explore the meaning of sacrifice in the roots of human society. At the danger of oversimplifying the complexity of Girard’s argument, he suggests, in a series of powerful studies, that human society is born in violence.

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schönberg, establishing private societies for the performance of contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composers have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

There has been a resurgence of interest in a particular kind of contemporary music in recent years. This has been a surprise to many, especially the composers involved, because we live at the end of a century that has seen a retreat by the composing community from the larger music loving public. If one looks back to the early days of the century we see figures like Schonberg, establishing private societies for the performance of Contemporary music. A perception is beginning to emerge within the composing community that the priorities of composeIs have in some way separated from the priorities of the larger music-loving public. At the very time when a museum culture was beginning to be the main priority of classical music listeners, composers were going into a very exploratory mode. In the century of the holocaust and the loss of meaning generally, composers have gone into a kind of laboratory phase when the very nature of music was the stuff of their investigations. Composers like Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio and the young Turks of the post-war generation took music into a very abstract phase indeed by making explorations into the purely abstract nature of music but with an ideological and idealistic desire to turn their backs on the past. They wanted to start afresh from year zero, as it were, to write a music that was untainted by tradition, a music that would not have any resonance of a failed bourgeois culture.

How should one respond to the death of realism, the death of the idea that thoughts in our minds can represent to us the way things actually are in the world? For such a death seems to be widely proclaimed by contemporary philosophers.

In summary, they argue that since we only have access to the world via knowledge, it is impossible to check knowledge against the world in order to see if it corresponds with it. This is a powerful and some might say unanswerable contention, and yet if we accept it, it seems to follow that there can be no such thing as truth at all. But how can Christians accept such a state of affairs, or accommodate themselves to it, since truth has always been held to be a predicate of God himself, and of Jesus Christ, the truth incarnate?

Animals are in the news these days. As so often, the world of the image and the soundbite encourages muddle, and we need to take a step back if we are to sort and integrate our conflicting ideas and emotions Let me begin with a popular caricature of the animal-lover: he, or more probably she, keeps a garden full of goats and chickens; she takes a break at weekends to liberate the odd rat from its laboratory; and she spends the little spare time she has left in campaigning to save the rainforests. The caricature, however, soon begins to reveal its contradictions when we are faced with a concrete problem. Take, for example, the release of mink into the countryside by members of the Animal Liberation Front In this case, the people most affected, and most angered, by this action were those directly involved in the welfare of animals: farmers, conservationists and pet-owners. The problem with the ‘liberation’ of mink is, precisely, that it is bad for other animals; and it clearly reveals that concern for the welfare of animals is a complex business. Our lack of clarity about this complexity is the main reason why debate about issues such as fox-hunting has proved so confused and inconclusive.

In this article I shall describe three types of animal-lover, whom I shall nickname, for reasons that will become obvious, Libbie, Connie and Aggie. In exploring how, in their different ways, these three care for animals, I examine different possible ways of understanding the Christian claim that creatures are good.