Theology’s role in modern society is slight, to say the least. People are not waiting with baited breath for new ideas from theologians—unless, of course, they are theologians themselves. Scientists and, for that matter, scholars in general, cannot easily be persuaded to read a theological essay. And surely it is also the case that, while theologians themselves may be rather more ready to read in the literature of the human and even the natural sciences, they will often find it hard to relate what they read to theology. It is little comfort to them to be told that other academics too know astonishingly little about what is happening outside their own field.

The specialisation that goes with expertise partly explains this state of affairs, but this fragmentation of knowledge is also a reflection of the fragmentation of human society. We are all supposed to be autonomous adult beings obliged to live together, in the same time and space. We behave like cars passing one another on the same motorway (and hopefully in the same direction), without much communication that reveals who we are, what we desire, hope for, love. When we enter the motorway we have to fight for our place. It is not self-evident that we have one. Society is not any more a warm blanket woven from many threads, where every thread the weaver may add has already its place before it is woven in. We are free. In principle we may choose our place, competing with those who happen to covet the same place as we do.

Morality today is clearly in a mess. The word ‘moral’ has lost almost all its bearings: it simply flies about loose in the machinery of our discourse. For example, in my own college, philosophy students are always asked the following question:

Students almost invariably agree that Smith now owes Jones the money, but when it comes to the question whether he ought to pay him, they begin to wobble. This is a ‘moral’ question, they say, as if this makes the answer uncertain. Given that we are in this kind of muddle about morality, perhaps it would be better to get rid of the word ‘moral’ altogether, as Elizabeth Anscombe said in her memorable paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’.

One interesting feature of contemporary Christianity is that some of the ideas which play a central part in popular religion, play little or no part in religious thought. There are in fact a good many such ideas (demonology and the active intervention of the saints for instance), but in this paper I am concerned with only one, namely ‘hell’. The idea of hell figures prominently in the preaching and beliefs of many evangelical Christians, the popularity of whose Christianity can hardly be doubted. Yet for the most part hell has no place in modern theology. It is not just that modern theologians are inclined to downplay the idea, or give ‘liberal’ interpretations of it, as might be said to be the case with miracles or the Resurrection, but that very largely they are simply silent about it.

It should be obvious that this is a feature peculiar to modern Christian thought. Earlier ages talked a great deal about hell, and even the Victorians made extensive use of it, so it is interesting to ask why this should be so. Conceived of as a question about the mentality of religious thinkers and their changing social role, any answer to it must obviously involve psychological and sociological investigation of some sophistication, but this is not the only way we can address the matter. There is at least some reason to think that the concept of hell has dropped out of theological discourse, whatever its place in popular religion, just because theologians and philosophers think it ought to.

Among the authentic writings of St Thomas Aquinas is one, addressed to the question: Utrum veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem? (‘Is the truth is stronger, when you compare it with wine, with the king, and with a woman?’) Slight as it is, it reveals both an attitude and a sophisticated approach to university education, which it would do us no harm to reflect on.

The piece is quite literally a quodlibet, which in modern usage sounds as though it ought to be a trifling thing anyway, an intellectual bagatelle. The question considered here, you may think, confirms as much. In fact the Disputatio de quolibet was something of a high-point in the intellectual life of the faculty in which it was held. And we find there, much more typically, the mature thought of the faculty’s most eminent teachers. But we do find bagatelles too, and perhaps even that, or the reasons behind it, can be instructive.

In medieval universities, the teaching was directed by a double aim: to impart coherent and substantiated bodies of knowledge, scientias; and to instruct in crafts in which those sciences could not only be developed, but could be put to use. To instruct, as the statutes sometimes put it, in the usus scientiarum. In accordance with this aim, there were two main types of teaching-vehicle. One was the lecture (lectio), in which coherent bodies of knowledge could be transmitted economically and in a context minimising distortion in transmission.

Einstein long ago said, ‘With the splitting of the atom everything has changed except our modes of thinking and thus we drift to unparalleled disaster.’ Our modes of thinking—that is the key, yet we change them with the greatest difficulty to meet a new, entirely new, situation. We now have got the power to destroy our world. We can do it slowly by exploitation, tearing up the forests, polluting the seas, piling up nuclear waste and filling even outer space with the dustbins of our technology. Or we can do it quickly. A war no-one expects suddenly starts—confusion reigns, troops panic, a nuclear weapon is fired and the gate to Armageddon opens. This is not a panic scenario. With 50,000 nuclear weapons in the world today it is a perfectly realistic one. We have, in our mad arsenals, something like 6,000 times the fire power of the whole of the Second World War. A cruise missile, made to sound so nice and small and tactical, has a warhead about ten times that of the Hiroshima Bomb—itself over a thousand times more powerful than the largest bomb of the Second World War. Yet our MoD talks about using them ‘to stop the Russians at the eleventh hour’.

Years ago the United Nations, in several serious reports, made it clear that this nuclear deterrence on which we put such reliance cannot be a stable system of security.

So concluded Fergus Kerr in an editorial comment published by New Blackfriars last year. His remark leads us to consider what form a British liberation theology might take, and what obstacles lie in the way of its progress.

The question of a British version of the theology of liberation has received some attention in recent years. Two important public lectures considered it, Charles Elliott’s Heslington Lecture of January 1985, and the more well-known Hibbert lecture given by the Anglican Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, in April of that year. David Jenkins’ lecture pointed out that the task would not be an easy one—certainly not a simple matter of translation from a third-world context to a first-world one:

As we shall see, there are some questions to be asked concerning Jenkins’ reluctance to envisage too close a parallel between a third-world and a first-world version of liberation theology.

Here I want to offer an interpretation of one of the most striking but in some ways least congenial aspects of late medieval English (and European) piety. The late Middle Ages was one of the most exuberant and productive periods of Mariological devotion, which manifested itself in devotional treatises and prayers, in poetry, music and the visual arts. The theological content of much of this, however, is now looked on with some suspicion and incomprehension, and the extraordinary centrality of Mary in the religious consciousness of Christians in the period from Anselm to Luther would now be pretty generally attributed to a defective Christology. Thus the apparently almost desperate late medieval reliance on the Virgin Mary as intercesser, friend of sinners, Mother of Mercy, is often taken to have stemmed from a fear of Christ and a sense of his remoteness from sinful, frail humanity. Christ on the rainbow coming in judgement, the Rex Tremendae Majestatis of the Dies lrae, was the Rex Iustitiae who would weigh men and women by their actions, and before such a dreadful scrutiny, who could stand? The suffering, weak and tempted Christ of the Gethsemene narratives and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the course of the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, and in the millennium of missionary expansion that followed, had been divinised out of his humanity. Catholic Christology, while paying lip-service to that humanity, had succumbed to a practical Nestorianism.

Into the vacuum left by this process the longings of the collective Christian heart for an assurance that God was indeed compassionate, tender, understanding, human, forced the figure of Mary, and it was she, not Christ, who came to be addressed as Most Gracious Advocate, the Christian’s Life, Sweetness and Hope.

The surrealist farce known as the Book of Jonah, surely the one consciously witty book in the Bible, is easily summarised. God commands Jonah to go and cry doom on Nineveh, a city whose viciousness has just come to his attention, but Jonah doesn’t reckon much to this mission and takes off instead for Tarshish. A divinely engineered storm threatens his ship, and he requests the crew with remarkable sang froid to pitch him overboard. God sends a fish to swallow Jonah up and spew him out again three days later, whereupon Jonah does manage to get himself to Nineveh and wanders the city proclaiming imminent catastrophe. Unusually enough, the inhabitants of the city, prodded a bit by their king, take Jonah’s prophecy to heart and repent, which infuriates Jonah so much that he goes and sulks outside the city hoping to die. God fools around with him briefly, sending a plant to shade him, then a worm to devour the plant, then a sultry wind to make him faint from heat, and finally treats him to a short homily about divine mercy.

Why was Jonah so reluctant to go to Nineveh in the first place? Perhaps because hectoring a seedy bunch of strangers about their vices isn’t the best guarantee of a long life. But in the storm scene Jonah shows scant regard for his own safety, and indeed by the end of the text is betraying a powerful death wish. The fact is that he refused to obey God because he thought there was no point, and tells God as much after he has spared Nineveh.

Religious syncretism is a currently fashionable topic, both among anthropologists and theologians. To the anthropologist, syncretism offers not only fascinating field material, but also important theoretical questions. Supposing two or more world religions are present in the same culture, as is the case with the Sinhalese of Sri Lanka. Will the internal logic of the world religion oblige its adherents to reinterpret the culture? Or will the common culture eventually obliterate the boundaries between the religions? For theologians the boundary between Christian and merely Christian-influenced is both extremely difficult to draw and extremely necessary. Whom do we admit to the local council of churches? Where does liturgical inculturation end and repaganization begin? What about the survival of pagan attitudes-devotion, for instance, to Mammon or Mars—to be found among the ultra-orthodox? Some contemporary theologians, for instance Robert Schreiter in his Constructing Local Theologies, have found it possible to take a rather sympathetic view of syncretism, but this seems to go with a certain sociological naivety, since syncretism is usually the product of systems of domination in which there is a wide gap between the religions of the dominators and the dominated.

There is a story of a famous medical scientist who used to tell his students, ‘These, gentlemen, are the symptoms of typhoid fever, but you will find all the cases are different.’ The same surely applies to syncretism. We need to look at particular cases, before we generalize about syncretism. In this article, I am looking at two studies of syncretising religious situations published by anthropologists in this decade, Jon P. Kirby’s God, Shrines and Problem-Solving among the Anufo of Northern Ghana, and James W. Fernandez’ Bwiti, which deals with a new religion among the Fang of the Gabon.

Cruelty to children is not new, though no doubt we are an inventive enough species to come up with some new forms. It could be that some of us may be more disposed to it than others, but it seems safer to assume that we all share a capacity for cruelty. Such a capacity does not have to be exercised: cruelty can be understandable without being right. Some societies and some social situations may increase the likelihood of its occurring, but they neither excuse it nor explain it away.

But if cruelty itself is not new, new in our own time is its categorisation. When we talk of ‘child abuse’, we are putting forward views on both cruelty and children which in some ways are new, or at least newly accepted, and which incorporate our contemporary notions of how human beings should conduct themselves. This categorisation is crucial to any discussion, since it provides us with the basic forms which it must take, but it does incline us to treat the phenomenon of cruelty to children as especially characteristic of our own time. The broad range of cruelty from deprivation through violation to murder is fully evident, in England at least, from a succession of court cases and official inquiries, yet it still cannot be asserted with any certainty that child abuse is more common now than in the past. Evidence from the past is lacking precisely because our forebears did not share our categorisations (or our interest in statistics).

‘The crisis of the present,’ says Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, ‘is the long deferred resumption of the crisis of modernism.’

If by the resumption of modernism Ratzinger means the method Catholic modernists used in addressing the religious crisis of their time we may fervently hope modernism does resume. For the method of the modernists is useful to us as we face an unprecedented environmental crisis.

Let us make no mistake. We are not engaged in academic theological gamesmanship. We are facing, although career churchmen are hesitant to admit it, a crisis which Jürgen Moltmann well describes as ‘a crisis so comprehensive and irreversible that it cannot unjustly be described as apocalyptic. It is not a temporary crisis. As far as we can judge, it is the beginning of a life and death struggle for creation on this earth.’

In 1918, when Tyrrell had been dead for nine years and Loisy had faded from the Church, Von Hügel expressed in a letter to Miss Maude Petrie, Tyrrell’s literary executor, his awareness that the method of modernism was permanently useful and even necessary, ‘to interpret it (the faith) according to what appears the best and the most abiding elements in the philosophy and the scholarship and science of the later and latest times.’

A cogent case could be made that Pope John XXIII was himself to some extent influenced by the method of the modernists. Even some of his expressions were akin to theirs. He spoke of ‘opening the windows’ of the Church to the modern world.

Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in all beings other than God has been the focus of much debate among Thomists. And this is how it should be, for all agree to its central importance in Aquinas’s metaphysics. Is the distinction a deduction we make from our knowledge of God’s essence, or an insight drawn from our experience? And if it is the latter, is this insight from multiplicity to unity based on the inevitable mental distinction we draw between the concept of essence and that of existence, or is it the fruit of a metaphysical penetration of the material things we meet within our world? Let us look first at the argument based on an intuition into God’s simplicity and a deduction from that intuition, and then turn to an examination of the arguments which move from the diversity of our experience to the simplicity of the source of that experience.

In the first argument, the claim is that we have a direct insight into being as being, into existence itself, that is, God. ‘Being (esse), insofar as it is being, cannot be diverse.’ If it differs, it must be by something other than it, that is, by particular essences. Is this the main-line argument for the real distinction? Many commentators (among them O’Brien and Fabro) have thought that it is. However, I believe they are mistaken. For the proof as it stands is incomplete, not in failing to offer a conclusion, but in failing to ground its major premise.

Assuming, of course, that we accept the tradition given to us in the church and take seriously the testimony of the gospels (and, in this context, particularly the Lucan testimony), we can say in a way that is not just poetical that Mary is truly the mother of justice and peace. For she is presented to us not only as giving witness to how God’s power can transform humanity, but as, in doing this, giving birth to that power, that life. She becomes the Mother of Christ; the ‘Mother of God’, as Ephesus declared her to be. By her active and willing cooperation with the divine plan, by her humility, courage and love of justice, she brings Jesus into the world and thus gives birth to the Christ. She is the Mother of the New Age, the New Heaven and the New Earth, and shows herself prepared to risk everything to see Christ embodied for us and in us so that the kingdom of God may be established on this earth. Her prophetic witness to the truth is not just a witness to what can be, nor to what God’s purposes might be in some future time; no, her witness makes the Truth present for us in such a way that reality becomes transformed by the mystery of God’s power on this earth, implementing justice and peace.

The seductions of centrism

Professor Michael Dummett, in the New Blackfriars article last October which opened what is now quite a long debate, questioned the propriety of Catholic theologians espousing views which contradict traditional Catholic beliefs; to contradict such pronouncements in his opinion makes nonsense of belonging to the Catholic Church. It was Thomas Sheehan’s 1984 article, arguing that the ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars is irreconcilable with traditional or official Catholicism, which prompted Dummett to write in the first place, and it has been mentioned several times since then in the debate.

Here I would like to draw attention to the way an eminent scripture scholar, Professor Raymond Brown, responds to Sheehan’s charge. Brown is a particularly good example to consider, firstly because he has frequently addressed himself to precisely this issue, but mainly because among Catholic scholars his standing is unquestioned. Professor Nicholas Lash, in his response to Dummett, wrote—surely correctly—that Brown’s ‘massive erudition, unswerving loyalty to Catholic Christianity, and endless painstaking judiciousness of judgement have made him (in seminaries and elsewhere) the most widely respected Catholic New Testament scholar in the English-speaking world’.

Consider how Brown addresses this problem of the apparent contradiction between traditional Catholicism and what biblical scholars are now saying. First, he repudiates the picture of Catholic scholarship painted by Sheehan. The ‘liberal consensus’ among Catholic scholars, says Brown, is a figment of Sheehan’s imagination. As he says again in a March letter quoted by Fr Timothy Radcliffe in ‘Interrogating the Consensus’, the vast majority of Catholic scholars are ‘centrists’, like himself.

It would seem that literature these days is increasingly a matter of taste. We are helped, not to learn and practise discrimination between the good and the bad, but to buy and consume according to our ‘special interest’. We ask of a play or novel, not whether it will sharpen our understanding, nor whether it may damage our sensibilities, but that it should appeal. It has not always been so. When Chaucer chose to take his leave of the reader at the end of the Canterbury Tales with a formal apology—though no mere formality—for the ‘translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees’ it was precisely their appeal for which he sought to make amends.

The recognition of the power of stories to shape character, and to shape language, has led to the Tradition, a canon judged worthy of study and constitutive of our culture. That Tradition is now under attack. Where it has not already been dismissed as irrelevant, it is rejected as ‘elitist’, a snub too hastily dismissive of Leavis’ wish for ‘an English School ... designed for an elite’ Literature, has even been deemed the creation of a powerful, wicked literary institution in which the universities are prime movers. Terry Eagleton has argued in his book Literary Theory that

The alarming resurgence of biblical speculation by the nuclear war-lords of the West in the last few years has drawn peace-movement Christians to sober biblical scholarship. New Blackfriars writers have pioneered the reclamation of ‘the most symbolically-rich eschatological language of the Bible, from Isaiah to Revelation, ... captured by abstentionist sects and a politically hostile movement’ and made ‘virtually unavailable to Christians who do not share those views about politics and God’s action in the world’.

The question I would like to explore here is: how, if at all, can this kind of investigation, which draws on academic exegesis but clearly goes beyond it, also help us to reclaim and wrestle with symbols and stories which superficially appear to be of a different kind, namely, the symbols and stories which speak of our earliest beginnings? With the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel? This might be termed the ‘pop’ culture of the Bible, not being seen as belonging to the specialist or to any political faction with a biblical axe to grind, but as the mythic heritage of all—timeless, beloved of Hollywood as the stuff of Epic spectacle. It is, however, the area which has long been of interest to the Western Women’s Movement, because it has come to reckon with the power of these foundational myths over our culture’s perceptions of gender. Feminists see these myths as captured and distorted by patriarchal religion and hence by patriarchal power in general.

At the Belfast Harpers’ Festival in 1792 the official observers found themselves unable to note down the tunes in the established musical forms. The complex scales fell outside the accepted tonic range. As one observer put it

White notes I found were wrong, so were the black

For you had pitched the song right in the crack.

That the peasant people’s music could be more subtle and sophisticated than the establishment could anticipate is itself a liberating sign of hope.

Faced with the question of whether it is possible to develop a ‘liberation theology’ from within the modern British context, Enoch Powell provides a useful point of metaphorical contact. He once suggested that ‘politicians have to give the people a tune to hum’. It does seem that there is a dominant political tune buzzing round Britain today. It has caught on and is commonly hummed in public. In the past those who have stressed the need for change have turned to the notion of ‘blueprints’—despite the fact that this kind of future plan is usually two-dimensional and static, and that sometimes the dreams of architects and planners present land and property proposals but block out the people in a kind of ‘neutron bomb’ model of development. But concentrating on the tune opens up a more dynamic metaphor of process. It is certainly not a question of static futuristic modelling. Neither conforming to the dominating set tune nor simply countering it, but creatively developing new music from ‘within the crack’, could provide a resilient model.