A good friend of mine from Montreal, by profession a notary, told me two years ago that, judging from his experience since 1970, of the couples who come to register their marriages before proceeding to the Church, at least one in five gives the same address; meaning to say that, in the proportion of 20%, couples now seeking a Church-Marriage have been cohabiting for probably no less than a year. That figure, while not providing statistical evidence, is indicative of a trend which is gaining popularity among young people in my country—making sure their union has a chance to last before committing it to the punctilious care of the Church and Law—a trend not infrequently lamented by a sizable section of the clergy as a sad result of those young people’s loss of faith and lax morals.

Since then, I have crossed the ocean and settled in the country parish of Ngote, Tanzania, ministering to a Christian community hardly three generations old and, by God’s grace, still little touched by the mixed blessings of industrialisation. Yet of the 18 marriages celebrated in the parish in 1975, only five were between couples for whom Church-Marriage would mark the beginning of conjugal life. In 1970, such marriages had numbered 19 out of 37, while last year they were down to three out of 22. Those figures suggest that ‘trial-marriages, a troubling new fashion at home, are here becoming the norm.

Clearly linked to the issue of trial-marriage (in the sense, for this part of the world, of a matrimonial alliance locally acknowledged as legitimate even though still lacking the Church’s sanction and thus officially regarded as void by the Church) considered in this article is the problem of the decreasing ratio of Church-Marriages in relation to the overall number of conjugal unions entered upon by Church members.

What really happened on the first Easter had a wide range of ramifications. The resurrection of Jesus can be related to the Church’s mission, to past history, to one’s present faith, future expectations, personal justification and salvation. It is related to newness of life, the victory over death, the end of the law, and the defeat of sin. The difficulty in talking about the resurrection, then, for a Christian theologian is to give an adequate account of the extent of its meaning. Far too often in popular Catholic belief and theology (perhaps especially in Catholic theology) the resurrection has been thought of as a resuscitation of the flesh of Jesus Christ and as no more than an event which happened at a specific time and place in the past. Now, I am not going to argue that this was wrong in every respect, but it must be said that the great virtue of Hubert Richards’ book The First Easter: What Really Happened? is that he has brought the dimension of faith and newness of life to something which had often been thought of as a brutum factum of past history. Richards’ shift away from a traditional Catholic historicist understanding of the resurrection of Jesus is reflected by Fergus Kerr when he says, ‘The resurrection of Jesus thus cannot be reduced to, or even specially concentrated upon, his restoration to bodily life.’ It does, however, seem to me that the approach of Hubert Richards—and of Fergus Kerr, in so far as they agree—does leave us with problems.

The question arises, because Christian tradition has always assumed that these chapters are as historical as any of the historical books of the bible. For most of its course tradition has assumed this in a rather naive, quasi-fundamentalist way. The naivety of fundamentalism or literalism, is no longer intellectually possible in the light of modem historical, archaeological, palaeontological and literary criticism. But does this formidable array of criticism compel us to abandon the traditional assumption altogether?

I think not. Theologically we are still committed, not merely by the decisions of the Roman Biblical Commission, of which the latest (that I know of) and most genial is the letter to Cardinal Suhard of Paris, 16th Jan. 1948, but by the whole weight of theological tradition and the most up-to-date biblical hermeneutics (e.g. that of von Rad), to maintaining that these chapters are historical in some way or another: but it will be in a very peculiar way which the modern professional historian will not easily recognise as historical.

Rahner makes a distinction between historical in form and historical in content. It is a useful distinction to start from. To illustrate: a narrative which is historical in content but not in form would be Nathan’s parable to David, 2 Sam. 12. Its content in fact describes what David had done, but in form it was a kind of parable. It was history disguised as fiction. A narrative that is historical in form but not in content would be something like a historical novel—fiction disguised as history.

The Second Vatican Council taught that, in interpreting Holy Scripture, we must search out the meanings intended by the sacred writers, and that, in doing so, we must have regard for literary forms. I write as a layman in such matters, and will probably make mistakes on important points of detail: but I venture to write on the subject because I doubt that my general assessment is wrong. This is that, in the style of Biblical criticism now apparently prevalent within the Catholic Church, the appeal to literary forms has become little more than a formal device, serving to conceal, possibly from themselves, what the exegetes really mean; and what they mean is usually something inconsistent with any belief, however qualified, in the inspiration of Scripture, and often with more fundamental articles of Christian faith.

The general principle that we must take account of the literary form adopted is clear and evident. What is intended to be read as allegory must be read as allegory; what is written as fiction or as historical romance must be read as fiction or as historical romance. In reading historical accounts, we must try to assess what liberties the author was allowing himself, and not give a misplaced weight to details for which he was not meaning to vouch: we must distinguish reporting from reconstruction, must be aware of the use of devices such as compression and dramatisation. But, in applying this principle, we must, as much as in all other matters, submit to the evidence, not bend it to our will. Acceptance of the principle of literary forms is an acknowledgment of the more general principle that inspiration is not dictation. The inspired writers did not act as transcribing machines: it was not merely the hand that held the pen that was inspired, but the creative human mind itself.

I come here then, simply as a Parish Sister; yes, I have had a background of teaching. I still consider my basic missionary thrust educational but I can only speak as a Sister in Pastoral work. I will speak from nine years experience in a dockland area of Liverpool, of living and working with people there, of being there from nine in the morning till eleven at night—sometimes till one or two the next morning—for seven days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year. Just being there, living there, working there, trying to be a neighbour, a friend—in the name of Jesus. From that experience I may say things that may not make sense to you—that you may not agree with—that you may not find helpful—but just now at the beginning I want to say that I am trying to explain, as honestly and forthrightly as can, what the phrase The Sister and Education means to me in Inner City Liverpool—what my new ministry there has shown me.

Up there in Liverpool, if you are going north from the Pierhead, along the Dock Road and if about three-quarters of a mile along the docks you turn left and come “up the brew” through three sets of traffic lights, you will find a solid Victorian building-ancient but freshly painted—on the edge of Smith Estate with the name ‘The People’s Centre” in strong white lettering on the black door.

“Yeats said to me that if they knew what we thought, they’d do away with us. They want their poets dead.” Ezra Pound took no pains to conceal what he thought and, sure enough, found himself at the age of sixty in the death-cells at Pisa—open-air cages, exposed to the elements, with only a pup-tent for shelter—facing the possibility of execution for treason as a result of his war-time broadcasts on Italian radio in support of Mussolini, Hitler and fascism. Heymann’s study’attempts to chart the precise evolution which led him there, and thence to thirteen years in St Elizabeth’s Mental Asylum, medically diagnosed at his trial as a man “afflicted with a paranoid state of psychotic proportions,” and judged “of unsound mind” by a jury which took three minutes to reach its verdict.

Perhaps this is the significant phrase. Yeat’s remark was romantic braggadocio: for “do away” we should substitute “put away”. Pound’s treatment, after the initial atrocities of the Pisan cage, which induced an arguably long-imminent nervous breakdown, was “lenient” enough, in conventional terms—as if the authorities had almost conspired to avoid the embarrassment of a political trial for a man with such an international reputation and such influential friends. And to see Pound’s beliefs as a logical development from his starting-point was too risky an option in the war-ravaged Europe of 1945, where already former fascists were being rehabilitated to prop up the administration of the occupied zones, and fend off the risk of communist takeovers.

Just as pornography has almost succeeded in making sex boring, so the great tide of gloomy analysis of Britain’s ills has almost succeeded in making politics a bore. The prospect of sitting down yet another evening with a group of house-and car-owners, eating very good food and drinking wine, and hearing about how poor they all are because the Trade Unions are now running the country is as disenchanting as having to hear for the fourteenth time about someone’s gall-bladder operation. To read in newspapers, not for the fourteenth but for at least the four hundredth time, that the country is being wrecked by socialism, scrounging and threats to freedom from the extreme Left, is no longer funny, or even horrifying, but just unbearable, like the dripping of a leaky tap.

It would be a good deal less exasperating to have to read, and listen to, endless disgruntlement if the complaints were based on reality. Tiresome though it may be to get an exhaustive account of someone’s hospital operation, one can still have genuine sympathy with the teller because, after all, the operation did happen and was no doubt pretty unpleasant. The really desperate feeling comes on when you have to listen to someone’s account of unreal misfortune: the slightly dotty landlady who thinks her tenants knock on the water-pipes every night to annoy her, when in fact they spend their evenings creeping round on stockinged feet so as not to provoke her wrath, and what she needs is not new tenants but a visit from a plumber.

Complaints about plutocratic coal-miners, suggesting that they are the sort of people who go out in Rolls Royces running down the starved and downtrodden middle classes, and about the dangers of Communism, which is actually weaker in the United Kingdom than in any other European country, are far harder to take even than such a landlady’s fears.

Having described the new approach to the empty tomb narratives (NEW BLACKFRIARS, July 1977), we must next investigate what some Catholic theologians now believe about the gospel narratives about appearances to the disciples of the resurrected Jesus. As before, we limit our enquiry to The Common Catechism, and to the recent books by Walter Kasper and Hans Kung.

Hans Küng in fact says almost nothing about the appearance narratives themselves. He behaves here like the most traditional scholastic theologian. He develops his view in opposition to that of the distinguished young Catholic exegete Rudolf Pesch, and indulges in a good deal of speculation about the metaphysics of the risen body. He leaves aside all detailed reference to the gospel texts.

As far as the speculation goes, Kung starts from the assumption that the Resurrection is “essentially a work of God on Jesus” (p. 349): that is to say, he is in no doubt that the Resurrection is something that happened to the crucified Jesus—it was not something that happened in the minds and hearts of the disciples. Kung cannot be accused of subjectivising Easter or of reducing it to any kind of human discovery or projection. Since the Resurrection is “an act of God within God’s dimensions”, Küng believes that it cannot be described as a historical event, as he says, “in the strict sense”:

During the recently celebrated women’s liberation year, the cry—and indeed a just cry—was for equal rights with men in those social and economic areas where male dominance reigns. For the same work, the same wages, no matter the sex; in marriage, equality of status and the same rights, for both husband and wife; in general social benefits, no difference between men and women. The Church for countless centuries, despite the relative franchise it gave to women in its very early days based on a universalistic ethic, has been an impregnable bastion of male power. No wonder the call for female liberation has penetrated into the traditional churches, especially the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The result so far is not very encouraging. Admittedly women are allowed to do more than in former years and are often strongly represented in local Church councils, but to become a priest, and therefore eventually a bishop remains a strictly tabooed function for women. In the Free churches, the interdict has been removed in modem times but few women have in fact been ordained and even fewer have reached positions of prominence as Church leaders.

But if women’s cards are poor in bidding for equality in function and leadership, they have a very good hand in their general support of the church. Their attendance and devotion are out of all proportion to the position they occupy in the hierarchical structure. At Mass on Sundays, on weekdays, coming out of a Baptist or Anglican Church, who predominates? Always the answer is females. This phenomenon which appears so widespread invites curiosity and enquiry. The parish priest wonders about it and seeks schemes to restore the balance, for example by providing, as was the custom, men’s clubs and boys’ clubs, and getting men to do masculine things in and around the parish.

The many recent discussions in the churches on the “ministry of women” have only served to reveal the sterility of the topic when considered as an end in itself, apart from the wider context in which it belongs, a context which itself needs to be re-examined: the responsibility of every member of God’s church to minister.

The arguments on women and the priesthood face a particular danger in the Roman church, where there is an unhealthy focus on priesthood, to the exclusion of every other aspect of Christian ministry. This has produced a church in which rigid conformity to the three estates—the priesthood, the “religious life”, the lay state—has blinded its members to Christ’s exhortation to every soul to seek out freedom and wholeness. The result has been a misuse of the concept of vocation. Any member of the church who gives exceptional evidence of a spiritual dimension to his life, or exhibits an interest in the workings of the institutional church is expected and channelled to go on to something higher, and this means to take a step up the hierarchical ladder which has been devised. In this way his universal Christian vocation is subsumed into a specialist vocation which the church regards as superior. Such a system fails to profit by and encourage the growth of those of its members who are permanently committed to the lay state. Most especially is this anachronistic in the modem world where education and the tools of civilisation are no longer the special charge of the church but within the grasp and gift of everybody. Such a development in the Christian world should be joyfully accepted as heralding the replacement of institutionalised and elitist knowledge by equality of opportunity and, therefore, of contribution.

The foundation of Christianity, as fact and doctrine, is the resurrection from the dead of Jesus who was crucified,

Great efforts have been made over the centuries to spell out the presuppositions and implications, historical, metaphysical and theological, of this event, and it is unlikely that anything wholly new will be discovered now. In the last ten or fifteen years, on the other hand, study of the resurrection narratives in the New Testament has quickened dramatically, among Catholics, and it is important for us all to recognize that some divergence of interpretation is now established. Without attempting even to summarise the ever increasing Catholic literature on the subject, or to examine the various problems which the divergence creates, and which the new interpretation involves, it seems worthwhile to delineate briefly some features of the approach to the gospel accounts of the Resurrection to be found in some recent Catholic theology from Germany. The same approach may be traced elsewhere, most notably in major works by the Dominican theologians Christian Duquoc and Edward Schillebeeckx, but since neither of these has yet been translated into English, it seems more useful to limit this survey to three more accessible works: Hans Küng’s On being a Christian, Walter Kasper’s Jesus the Christ, and The Common Catechism. It is not a matter of accumulating authorities for the new approach; it is rather a question of registering how widely accepted the new approach already is.

The God of the Psalmists and the prophets was not in nature, He transcended nature—and transcended, likewise, the realm of mythopoetic thought. It would seem that the Hebrews, no less than the Greeks, broke with the mode of speculation which had prevailed up to their time.

At least until the advent of counter-cultural occultism, we of the post-medieval West, whether we regard ourselves as heirs of the secular Greeks or of the pious Hebrews, have liked to think that our own speculation has broken completely with mythopoetic thought. As successors to the rationalists and empiricists, many of today’s philosophers have attempted to find ultimate knowledge through “scientific” investigation, and, failing, have settled for an understanding, not of the Ultimate but of mere phenomena. Nor have we lacked our “prophets” who, in the footsteps of Luther, have eschewed human reason, seeking ultimate knowledge directly from God’s mouth. Yet both our prophets and our philosophers have tended, at least until very recently, to shun the whole ambiguous realm of mythopoetic thought and expression. To the philosopher, mythopoetry is imprecise, an unscientific and indirect way of dealing with reality. To the prophet, it is unworthy of the transcendent God who has taken the trouble of bypassing myth by revealing himself directly. So the philosopher looks below, to man’s own wits, to find, if not clear and distinct Cartesian ideas then clear and distinct descriptions of phenomena, and the prophet looks above, to God, for his clear and distinct word.

A delicate shift of tone occurs at that point in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot when Pope abandons the lethal wit of his “Bill of Attainder” against London society, fashionable, professional, literary, and turns to the other business of the poem, the quiet praise of his father, a simple man who only knew “the language of the Heart”. It is a triumph of Horatian satire, a telling move from the essentially comic to a sustaining solemnity. All good comic writers, whatever genre they choose, ultimately want to be able to do something like this, they want their comic perceptions of life’s complexities to issue in simple visions of serious truth. Novelists, who depend so much on establishing a reliable “voice”, have special problems when their natural mode is comic. When the habitual expression is a grin or a grimace that all-important modulation is far from easy to carry off. An interesting case is the contemporary comic novelist Kingsley Amis. Modern British comedy is notably off-hand and sardonic in tone, and the sought-for shift from hard-bitten cerebration to the large simplicities of the language of the heart is correspondingly hard to make.

But Amis clearly wants to make it. “Serio-comic”, he has said of himself, and if in his quirky, variegated oeuvre, social novels, sex novels, mystery novels, love stories, science fiction, plain verse and plain man’s criticism the comic is everywhere, the simply serious tries hard to be there too.

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.

One of St. Paul’s contributions to our understanding of the powers of evil is to sum them up in the phrase ‘principalities and powers’. For him they represent the sum-total of evil powers that threaten men both heavenly and earthly. The author of Ephesians takes over the concept in his emphasis of Christ’s exaltation and victory over evil. For him Christ’s victory and redemption is cosmic in scope, yet peculiarly practical in that its effects are to be worked out in the Church and in the lives of believers.

In 1:21 the ascended Christ is described as sitting at the right hand of the Father above, ‘all rule and authority and power and dominion’. This list represents the cosmic totality; everything that in any way is in a position of power and influence in the universe. The all-inclusive nature of the phrase is underlined by the addition of, ‘and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come’. There is no attempt made to set the powers in any order of preference, or to define any of their individual characteristics. ‘The Writer is concerned not to give us information about the denizens of the unseen world but to help our imagination to picture the exalted glory of Christ.’ Are the powers referred to good or bad? The need for them to be put in subjection under his feet points at least to the inclusion of subversive heavenly powers. By his exaltation Christ is not only supreme over the whole universe, but also head of the Church.

One of the factors that has constantly bedevilled the debate about the admission of women to the priesthood is the uncertainty about what a priest is in Christianity. It must be obvious that we can’t come to any sound conclusions in this matter until we have a theological understanding of the meaning of priesthood and how it relates to the other ministries in the church. The relationship with other ministries is one of the important things to establish if we are going to arrive at a clear idea of what priesthood is. Is it a universal category that in some way comprehends all the other ministries in the church? Or is it just one among many, the central one perhaps, yet not including the others? (One of the questions we have to face after all is why many women who seek to take their rightful place in the ministry feel that they will have got nowhere until the priesthood itself is open to them. What idea of the priesthood lies behind this ambition? Is it the right one? Or is it a historical distortion?)

It is a fact that many theologians in modern times have deplored, that in the Roman Catholic Church there has for many centuries been a gradual absorption by the ordained, sacrificial priesthood of nearly all the other ministries in the church. This is well illustrated by the way in which the sacrament of Orders has been administered since the early middle ages. Ordination meant essentially giving to a man the power of celebrating the Eucharist. The climax of a long series of preparatory rites was the anointing of the hands of the candidate and the bishop’s handing over to him the sacred vessels.

Francis Barker’s refreshing contribution to the New Blackfriars debate on Marxism leads me to pursue my own thoughts a little further. Barker and Eagleton have both accused me of idealism: it is part of my purpose to show that this accusation is false. On the contrary, if Marxism can claim to be scientific, so too (I maintain) can Christian theology. Indeed, Marxism will only become completely scientific, i.e. have shed all residual elements of deforming ideology when, ceasing to need to incorporate within itself a systematic misrepresentation of Christianity, it can be said to have become identical with it. But that is a matter for the distant future.

To begin with, it is agreed I think that we are discussing questions of theory: the relative claims to scientific status of certain forms of discourse. Neither side is likely to deny that at the level of actual praxis, there is an enormous amount of ideological distortion around. But what we are talking about is what Althusser calls ‘theoretical practice’. And it is my contention that what I shall call ‘scientific theology’ is scientific in the sense that, like Marxist science, it claims to be able to provide a ‘symptomatic reading’ of ideologies. Such a theology will consist of concepts and rules whereby not only the Christian ideology (that is, the Christian religion as a lived praxis) but also the ideological elements in Marxism, can be critically distinguished and dealt with.

Since the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the late Sir Herbert Read, author of Reason and Romanticism, was an influential figure in literary England, Romanticism as an avowed literary attitude has suffered an eclipse, even if vulgarized forms of Romanticism are more prevalent in society at large than ever before. Less prominent than Read was the equally Romantic critic and moralist, J. Middleton Murry. Among Murry’s younger associates was F. A.Lea, the author of several studies of Romantic writers including Shelley, Carlyle and Nietzsche. Now Mr Lea has come forward with a book of literary studies which again raises the Romantic banner. Voices in the Wilderness, studies of six “prophetic” writers of the modem age, Blake, Wordsworth, Carlyle, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Arthur Koestler, is the second volume of a dual work the first volume of which, The Ethics of Reason, is a philosophical examination of attempts from Socrates onwards to define “the good man”. Voices in the Wilderness, however, is complete in itself, and constitutes a very revealing exposition of the Romantic viewpoint.

Like most people whose thoughts and feelings are not limited to their own immediate circumstances, Mr Lea is appalled by the joyless collectivism towards which human societies seem inevitably to be progressing. He diagnoses the root of our trouble to lie in the Utilitarian philosophy born, he believes, out of eighteenth-century materialism with its seductive creed of “happiness here”, confused pragmatically and illogically with an abstract Christian altruism based on contradictory expectations of “happiness hereafter”. One of the consequences of this pervasive Utilitarianism is a widespread present inability to achieve originality, i.e. to penetrate beyond general concepts fixed by language into the truth of particular perceptions: to see things as they miraculously are.