On 6 January 2002, the Boston Globe revealed that the Archdiocese of Boston (since 1980) and its archbishop Cardinal Bernard F. Law (since 1984) had repeatedly reassigned the priest John J. Geoghan from parish to parish, in spite of numerous complaints and reports and repeated psychological treatment for sexually abusing children.1 This essay invites theological reflection on the themes of sexuality and power as they pertain to the ecclesiastical crisis that this story represents and on resurrection preaching at a time of ecclesiastical implausibility.

Sexuality, Power, and a Crisis of Plausibility

As clear as we must be that paedophilia and ephebophilia are about power (“power over”) at least as much as they are about sex, we must also be clear that the crisis of plausibility on the part of the Catholic bishops in the United States, as they presently are perceived by both civil society and the believing church, is also about power. For some twenty years, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has surrendered its internal authority to the controlling authority of the Roman Curia over a wide spectrum of issues ranging from liturgical practice, to the role of women and laity in Church governance and ministerial practice, to a Catholic understanding of sexual anthropology and theology. What twenty years ago could be characterized as a collegial relationship of priests and people with bishops might often be described today as an adversarial relationship.

In a society such as our own (I am thinking particularly of Western European society) that sees little need for postulating the existence of God and no longer lives by specifically religious rules and rituals, it would seem that human intention and action could be quite adequately explicated in the language of ethics rather than theology : the opposite of good, consequently, is not evil, it is bad, that is to say, bad in the sense of being wrong morally, of willing and acting in ways that are in opposition to an accepted moral standard. The fact that it may be difficult to establish widely accepted moral standards does not invalidate the principle. When the word evil is used—and, of course, it is used—its semantic content is vague, or, if clear, then reductive, by which I mean that, more often than not, it acts merely as a kind of intensifier—so that, when one wants to express extreme outrage at an action of gross immorality, the word one reaches for is the word evil; but there would be no qualitative difference between a wrong action or intention and an evil action or intention. Given the nature of the relationship between art and its cultural context it would not be unreasonable to expect the literature of our own era to reflect this situation and, indeed, it would be surprising if it did not. We should expect the representation of evil in modem literature to take on an extremely etiolated and reductive form. But does it?

The question, who owns the Bible, forms a way of framing a theological debate between Judaism and Christianity. They both lay claim on the same Holy Scriptures, and each insists that it reads those Scriptures correctly. Here is a way, then, of conducting an interfaith disputation on the truth of conflicting claims set forth by competing religions.

Which Judaism, whose Christianity? By Judaism and Christianity we do not mean the public opinion of ethnic Jews and culture-Christians. Rather, we mean, the classical religious systems set forth in authoritative documents and practised by those who value those writings as holy. The Judaic claim on the correct meaning of Israelite Scripture conflicts with the Christian one.

There is a certain urgency about the ethical today. Amid reports of the misery and injustice that seem to accompany all our human undertakings, and with increasing demand that it prove itself useful to an expanding range of unprecedented crises, the ethical is found to occupy a crucial place in contemporary thought. It stands at the point of a change, as our desire for a better world seeks the transformation of the one in which we find ourselves, and so it is to become the means by which we may be carried over from one situation to another, by which we are to make a difference. The ethical is to save us, and so the urgency of our salvation comes to rest in a particular and intense way on the salvation of ethics itself, saved and preserved for our sake, so that we might also be rescued and kept in safety and brought into the fulness of life that is to be ours. The enormity of this expectation of the ethical has become a kind of running theme through all sorts of contemporary discourses, assuming in many cases a force that would compel agreement without question, and at times erupting in expressions of disgust or even censure at those who would defy this logic. What else are we to do or think?

There is a sense in which this ethical has become the last sounding of the thinking of being in the western tradition, taking on the now empty form of its hegemony, while that thinking of being itself is already known to be fraught with difficulty, and so pronouncing itself as the final grand narrative by which nonetheless our redemption is to be secured.

Given that the article “Preparing the Way for the Lord” was published in its unrevised form, it seems necessary to provide some orientation for readers concerning the substantive differences between that draft and the intended final manuscript. Initially, when seeking to describe the relationship between science and religion- specifically between evolution and Christianity-I chose the metaphor of a boxing match, to convey the conflict and tensions that existed between the two camps. As my explicit aim in the article was to promote conciliatory dialogue between the two parties, the “fight” metaphor no longer seemed appropriate and was excised from the revised version. In the printed article, however, fossils from the earlier metaphor remain, e.g. “This is a mighty punch to pack” (p.522) should read “This is a formidable assertion” and “the bout” (p.526) is reconceived of as “the engagement” with the world.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Herbert McCabe OP, the best theologian / have ever met, whose work will remain exemplary for all who aspire to think theologically in the twenty-first century.

George Bush’s ‘axis of evil’ is presumably part of what this conference is about. Certainly, the intentional killing of the innocent, that is people who have done us no harm, must be one of the most blatant examples of evil anybody can think of. Dealing with this evil has, alas, become one of the pre-occupations of the present age. The last century saw enough of it, from Auschwitz and Hiroshima to Srebrenica and Omagh. But today we are confronted by what many see as a new form of this evil: namely suicidal terrorism. Yet even this is not so unambiguously evil that people cannot find religious justifications of it. Indeed the existence of a religious industry for justifying killing the innocent is, I take it, part of the evil that we are dealing with at this conference.

Many Muslims, and perhaps some Christians too, think of those who perpetrate suicidal murders as martyrs for the faith, specially blessed by the Almighty with a vocation to kill. Some even find arguments for it in the Qu’ran or in Islamic law, or in the Old Testament. But before we rush in to condemn their arguments, we must remember some precedents. The most obvious is that of Samson.

The claim of Judaism to own the Bible rests on four facts, and one further claim. No reasonable person can deny the facticity of the facts I shall adduce in evidence of the Judaic claim of possession. The claim is a matter of interpretation of Scripture: who is right about its main point, as I shall explain.

The first fact is, Judaism takes seriously and keeps the laws set forth in Scripture. In contemporary Judaic life there are disagreements on details, but no one who affirms the authority of the Torah denies the commandments. Take the Sabbath for example. It is the seventh day of the week, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. We keep that law. Christians do not. Take the matter of the covenant of circumcision, beginning with Abraham. We keep that law, Christians do not. Christians focus on their liberation from the law of the Torah; they do not keep the Sabbath as God commanded it; they eat forbidden food; they do not observe the laws of the Torah. Why should they even want to claim to own Scripture at all, if they do not keep important commandments that Scripture sets forth?

The second fact fundamental to the Judaic claim to own the Bible turns from law to theology, specifically, Scripture’s theology of Israel, defined as the people called by God to his service in the Torah. The Jewish people today as for all the centuries from the beginning of Scripture to the present finds in Scripture its story of itself.

I came to know Gareth Moore’s work, initially, by being asked to be the publisher’s reader for what was later published as Believing in God (T.&T. Clark 1988). The book presents one of the most masterly analyses of “belief in God” in the philosophy of religion. The original title of the manuscript was “God as Nothing,” in which it was argued that we cannot understand belief in God without understanding what it means to become nothing before him. I suggested, foolishly perhaps, that the title should be changed. On the one hand, given a culture that emphasizes rights more than obligations, I feared that talk of human beings as “nothing” would be mistaken for a denigration of them. On the other hand, I feared that the denial of God as a “something” would be misunderstood as reductionism, or even atheism. The change of title, while it makes central the author’s concern with belief in God, does not indicate the distinctiveness of its discussions. In any event, the book has not had the attention it deserves.

I invited Gareth Moore to the annual philosophy of religion conference at Claremont Graduate University more often than any other speaker. He read the following papers: “Tradition, Authority and the Hiddenness of God” published in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief ed. Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (Macmillan 1995); “Death and Transcendence,” published in Religion without Transcendence? ed. D.Z Phillips and Timothy Tessin (Macmillan 1997); and “Hearing the Voice of God” to be published in Biblical Concepts and Our World ed. D.Z Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (Palgrave).

That the two theses of compatibilism (free will; determinism) are incompatible is hard to show. However, compatibilists always incorporate three irrational moves into their arguments, by committing an endless regress, by begging the question, by asserting without evidence. Each of these moves can be shown to be tolerable in the short run, but their persistence raises the probability that the arguments in which they are employed are unsound.

The supposed contradiction which incompatibilists charge compatibilists with holding is extremely difficult to discover. In the form:

1. x could have not done A

2. x could not have not done A

the contradiction holds. However, when we state the two positions more informally as

3. A person could have done other than what that person did;

4. A person’s doing what that person did is the determined result of all history combined with all the natural laws

it seems possible to formulate aspects under which both propositions hold.

The purpose of this paper is not to make yet another attempt to show that these two sentences are contradictory. The purpose is to show that compatibilism entails

(a) a vicious regress;

(b) the begging of the question of the originating power of animate beings;

(c) the assertion without evidence of the unity of physical nature according to the model of the movement of the sun and the planets.

(a) Vicious Regress

The Free Will Thesis: Causality according to the laws of nature is not the only causality needed to account for all events in the world; to understand them and to take purposive action in the face of more than one possible action, for each of which we can possibly be held responsible, we need also to assume a causality through freedom.

The last few decades have seen a revival of interest among Anglo-American philosophers in natural theology, especially in what is an important part (though not the whole) of it, philosophical arguments for God’s existence. Of course, such arguments have been discussed for centuries, but the present situation contrasts strikingly with much of the twentieth century, when it was assumed by most analytic philosophers that they had been refuted definitively by Hume, Kant, and some later philosophers. There was, too, at that time opposition to the whole enterprise of natural theology in certain theological quarters, most notably, as we shall see, in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics.

No doubt discussions will move to and fro in future centuries, as they have done in past ones. My purpose now, however, is not to follow particular arguments and their counter-positions, but to suggest that there at least two good religious reasons (apart from Biblical texts like Rom. 1:19-20 and Acts 14:17) why natural theology is likely to flourish perennially: (1) behind particular arguments there are certain natural human reactions, especially wonder — not just at the beauty or intricacy of the world, but also at its very existence, at the fact that there is something rather than nothing; (2) theistic arguments are inverse forms of fundamental religious doctrines, e.g. Cosmological arguments reverse the doctrine of Creation, in that the latter claims that God brought the world into being and sustains it in being, whilst the arguments seek to infer His existence from that of the world or from some very general feature of it.

The question of whether Peter was indeed the first bishop of Rome has recently gained popular prominence in the United States due to the best seller by historian and papal critic Garry Wills who vigorously dismisses the entire idea as myth. Although simplistically and sensationally presented, Wills’ thesis relies on the view of many, albeit more subtle, critical scholars that Peter could not have been a bishop at Rome because there were no bishops in Rome until the middle of the second century A.D. Several years ago, David Albert Jones O.P., challenged in this journal this common view of episcopacy in the first century. One scholar, Francis Sullivan S.J., recently responded specifically to Jones’ challenge by reaffirming the apparent majority view. This article will briefly refer to Sullivan’s critique of Jones, and will present in a new light the New Testament evidence showing that Jones’ questioning of the reigning critical view is indeed well-founded and long overdue.

The heart of Jones’ challenge is highlighting the flawed assumptions underlying the reasoning used to deny a first century episcopate: 1) the ideological tendency to view apostolic ministry as “free, loose, inspired and lay” while seeing “the emergence of clerical forms as a fall from primitive innocence” (Jones, p. 142); and 2) the denial of the existence of a first century episcopate based on the alleged silence of early documents. In essence, Jones rightly detects a pervasive bias in the critical literature against developed church structure as somehow contaminating the springtime of apostolic Christianity.

In asserting his four facts, Professor Neusner also puts pointed questions to Christianity, every one of them both serious and telling. Answering them involves spelling out the facts of revelation as they are perceived and taught by the Church.

First, “Why should they even want to claim to own Scripture at all, if they do not keep important commandments that Scripture sets forth?” This question strikes accurately at a sensitive spot. During the second century a teacher in Rome, Marcion, insisted that the New Testament should stand alone as Scripture, and that anything connected with Judaism should be expurgated from the one Gospel he liked (Luke) and Paul’s letters. He has had pale imitators ever since, but the Church then and now has authoritatively rejected the idea that the Old Testament can be dispensed with.

The letters of Paul, which Marcion made the basis of his views, undermined his position. The teacher whom the Church regarded as “the Apostle”, once its primary constituency was non-Jewish, himself emphasized that Israel has a permanent place in the history of salvation. Why should that be the case? Because, he said, from the Israelites came “the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises” (Romans 9:5). If you want to know what these things are, you need the Scriptures of Israel. Paul understands that all these gifts are only fully realized in the final gift of Israel: the coming of “Christ according to the flesh” (Romans 9:6).