The Jewish thought-world which influenced Christ and the first Christians was holistic. The Bible and extra-biblical literature picture God as rejoicing in His creation. If we are properly to understand Jesus and his first followers it is necessary to understand that thought-world, including ancient mythologies which predate the Exile and were still current.

It is now commonly accepted that during Jesus’s lifetime there was, even in Palestine, a varied spectrum of Jewishness, including different degrees of adherence to the Jerusalem establishment. Not everybody acclaimed Jesus’s execution, and the conduct of persons like Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus’s own Galilean disciples (the women particularly) suggests pluralism. It has been suggested that it may have been not the gentiles but disaffected Galileans who first accused Jews of deicide or Christicide.'

According to the gospels Jesus understood his mission in terms of a cosmic conflict with fallen angels who tormented human beings. There is a remnant of this ancient mythology in Genesis 6:2 ‘The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair; and they took to wife such of them as they chose.’ Christ and his contemporaries still lived in a world peopled by angels—good as well as bad. This mythology also included memories of ancient Jewish kingship. The good king moved between heaven and earth, maintained cosmic order, and was in conflict with the fallen angels and their monstrous offspring. The king, God’s holy one, preserved the integrity of creation: humans, animals, plants, their habitats and the elements. Our best account of this mythology, so important for understanding Christ and his ecology, is almost certainly in 1 Enoch.

‘Sir, is it to us that you are addressing this parable, or to all men also?’ Peter asks this question of Jesus at almost exactly the mid-point of Luke’s gospel. The question alerts us to the importance of audiences in this gospel. A reading of the received text as a literary whole discovers that a ubiquitous and significant sense of audience distinguishes Luke’s gospel. Jesus’s mission defines itself in Luke’s gospel through a dynamic relationship with his audiences, and the evangelist’s project of witness, of instruction of conversion, too, accomplishes itself through the creation and manipulation of audiences.

From its outset Luke’s gospel acknowledges a sense of audience as well as asserting a care for purposeful narrative structure. The gospel is introduced by a formal prologue to ‘most excellent Theophilus’, who was apparently undergoing or had recently undergone instruction in the faith.

Things that have been accomplished among us are the marvellous events of the life, death and resurrection of Christ which have led to the rise of the new Christian church of which Luke’s Theophilus is, or aspires to be, a member.

Hans Urs von Balthasar is correctly perceived within the contemporary Catholic Church as an exponent of an orthodox, even conservative, understanding of the faith. His nomination to the rank of cardinal just before his death is evidence of this, as was his friendship with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Nonetheless, one aspect of his theology, that dealing with the possibility of the salvation of all souls, drew upon him ‘fire from the right.’ He was taken to task by, among others, Gerhard Hermes and Heribert Schauf. In reaction to such criticism, Balthasar wrote a book entitled Was dürfen wir hoffen? (‘What may we hope for?’), recently published in translation by Ignatius Press under the title, Dare we hope ‘That all men be saved’? One of the purposes of this article is to examine this answer by Balthasar to his critics. I believe that certain aspects of his argument are, indeed, inadequate and have been justly criticised. Nonetheless, the major question raised in the book (and, indeed, by the entire controversy) is a legitimate one—and precisely in the sense that Balthasar asks it. A second purpose of the present essay, therefore, is to suggest the parameters within which we might hope ‘that all men be saved.’

My First point is one of agreement with Balthasar. Balthasar rejects those criticisms of his own work that suggest that, in so far as we know that at least some souls are damned to eternal perdition, we may not in any sense hope for the salvation of all souls.

The controversy which arose in the summer of 1989 over the presence of a Carmelite convent adjacent to the former Nazi deathcamp at Auschwitz in Poland momentarily brought to world attention the entire field of Holocaust studies, including the theology of the Holocaust. In America, for example, various colleges and universities have established institutes for study of the Holocaust. These centres usually sponsor conferences and scholarly meetings, offer courses on various aspects of the Holocaust, and often do the important work of recording oral and video testimonies from the shrinking pool of concentration camp survivors, thereby documenting the brutality of those years. Some American states have introduced Holocaust studies components into the social studies curricula of their primary and secondary schools. In both Jewish and Christian theological circles, the Holocaust has raised anew such questions as the meaning of suffering and the existence of God, Providence and the vicissitudes of human history, and the entire Christian perspective on Jews and Judaism (including what role Christianity may have played in aiding and/or abetting anti-Semitism).

The Auschwitz convent controversy focused attention on the entire realm of Holocaust studies. But what the controversy did not do was to foster discussion about the central issue upon which the controversy turned: what is the Holocaust?

It is the ambiguity of the definition of “Holocaust” which provided fertile soil not just for the debate over the Carmelite cloister at Auschwitz but also for other disputes. During his June 1991 pilgrimage to Poland, Pope John Paul II was criticised by some Jewish organisations for speaking of abortion on demand as a “Holocaust” of the unborn.

I wish to argue against the widespread view that divine revelation does not consist in a set of propositions. I think that I can show conclusively that a non-propositional view of revelation cannot be reconciled with Christianity.

What are propositions? I cannot do better than quote from Natham Salmon and Scott Soames:

What makes us say of any discourse that it has or that it lacks ‘integrity’? Usually we can answer this in terms of whether such a discourse is really talking about what it says it is talking about. This is not necessarily to make a pronouncement on the integrity or otherwise of this or that speaker, who may or may not know that the discourse serves a purpose other than what it professes. It would be quite in order to say—as a Marxist might—that eighteenth century aesthetics was an integral part of the ideology of bourgeois cultural dominance, that what determined its judgments and strategies was a particular pattern of economic relations, without thereby saying that Johnson or Hawksmoor was a liar, or that Bach did not ‘mean’ it when he wrote ad maiorem Dei gloriam at the head of his compositions. Somebody perpetuating such an aesthetic today, when we know (according to the Marxist) so much about its real determinants, would be dishonest: they could not mean what an eighteenth century speaker meant because they know what that speaker (on the charitable interpretation) did not—the objective direction, the interest in fact served by the discourse. The discourse is without integrity because it conceals its true agenda; knowing that concealment robs us of our innocence, the ‘innocence’ of the original speaker; for we know too that speech cannot be content with concealment.

Why is it so important that speech should not conceal its purposes? Discourse that conceals is discourse that (consciously or not) sets out to foreclose the possibility of a genuine response.

When Gustavo Gutik published his Teologia de Liberation. Perspectivas in 1971, he can hardly have imagined the significance his work would take on in the following decades. The very title has become embedded in the language of a whole generation of theology students as a rough description of a school of thought, or a movement, that reaches from the Philippines and Korea, through Asia and Africa, to Latin America. For some people, the question of liberation theology has become the yardstick against which all other theological approaches are to be measured, and the movement to which one’s response is the indicator of the seriousness of one’s Christian commitment.

As a university chaplain, I have found that the appeal of liberation theology to students has contributed greatly to the formation of the community I save. Its prophetic voice appeals strongly to compassionate men and women who are trying to give a Christian expression to their own concerns about poverty, violence and exptaitation.In my own ten years of involvement with British solidarity organisations and human rights groups focussed on Central America, particularly Nicaragua and El Salvador, I have seen the flood of books by liberation theologians since 1971 eagerly read by colleagues, Christian and non-Christian alike.

Dr Gilbert Murray (1866—1957), one of the most distinguished academics of his time, was well known for his incisive criticisms of Christianity. His reconciliation to the Catholic Church shortly before his death stirred up quite a lot of controversy and the truth of it was even questioned. Canon John Crozier, who ministered to Murray during those weeks, feels he can now write a full account of how it happened.

The Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford, on ‘Worship and Theology’, was delivered by the Revd. Dr Maurice Wiles, the Regius Professor of Divinity in the University. In the course of it he touched on the agnostic’s prayer, so movingly described by Dr Anthony Kenny in his book The God of the Philosophers. Dr Kenny had written:

Just Deterrence by the ‘Pembroke Group’—a ‘distinguished group of civil servants, servicemen, service chaplains, theologians and academics’ to quote the blurb—claims to be about ‘Morality and Deterrence into the Twenty-First Century’. Actually it is about the morality of nuclear deterrence as practised by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Inevitably, therefore, the book has the character of an epitaph. Of course the corpse of East-West deterrence is still twitching. Nevertheless, old-style deterrence is to all intents and purposes defunct. As Saddam has shown, new-style deterrence is about something very different. Today the question Hugh Beach’s contribution poses is all too relevant: could anything be worse than a war?

Just Deterrence is not a great book, like Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, or Finnis, Grisez and Boyle’s Morality and Realism. For reasons beyond the editors’ control, it is not a strikingly apt intervention as was Walter Stein’s Nuclear Weapons and Christian Conscience in 1961, but neither is it perniciously muddle-headed, like Michael Novak’s Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age. Like Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence edited by Geoffrey Goodwin in 1982, (with which it has much in common, including certain authors) it has some very closely argued chapters, and others which are certainly stimulating if, in the end unacceptable; together with yet others which are, to my mind, badly wrong. As an epitaph, it is well worth scrutinising closely as we peer at what is written for our edification on the gravestone of the Cold War.

Ever since Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 150 CE) there has been a tradition within the Christian Church of harmonizing the life of Jesus and blend together the four gospel accounts so as to compose a biography of the Lord. Perhaps nowhere is this tendency to harmonization more clearly demonstrated than in the sayings of Jesus from the cross. In fact, there are seven so-called ‘sayings from the cross’ recorded within our New Testament, but it sometimes comes as a surprise to discover just how these seven sayings are distributed. We note the following table:

1. The Sayings of Jesus from the Cross

• §1.) ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:33/Matthew 27:46)

• §2.) ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.’ (Luke 23:34)

• §3.) ‘Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise. (Luke 23:43)

• §4.) ‘Father into your hands I commit my spirit.’ (Luke 23:46)

• §5.) ‘Woman behold your son ... Behold your mother. (John 19:26—27)

• §6.) ‘I am thirsty.’ (John 19:28)

• §7.) ‘It is finished!’(John 19:30)

2. Distinctives in Presentation within the Gospels

The first thing to notice about the distribution of the sayings is that the sole saying recorded in both Matthew and Mark is the same, probably due to Matthew’s reliance upon Mark for the passion narratives in his gospel. This means that if the only gospel we had was Mark, we would have quite a distinctive picture of the crucifixion. Here, the only statement of Jesus is one of extreme dereliction, of forsakeness and isolation.

The term ‘solidarity’ is in danger of developing into a clich?. It has been employed so often as a kind of ‘compassion football’ between a guilt-ridden (for some) oppressor ‘First’ World and an indignant (for some) oppressed ‘Third’ that its significance has become opaque. That lack of precision undermines its value for clarifying the relevant Christian response to the divisions between North and South, powerful and powerless, in our world. Solidarity shows us a way which eschews both a patronising attitude and a sense of guilt on the part of the North, and a feeling of being alone in the struggle on the part of the South. Solidarity empowers both and leads to a deeper understanding of what Jon Sobrino, recalling St Paul’s injunction, calls ‘bearing with one another in faith’.

In this article I wish to explore the theological roots of solidarity in an attempt to recapture the flavour of its deeper meaning in a belief that solidarity is a key concept for those who ‘hunger and thirst for what is right’ (Mt 5:6). I follow Albert Nolan’s argument that its roots are found in the Old Testament, but that it broadens its scope when Jesus begins his mission. The new theology of neighbour then becomes the model of solidarity for later thinkers, theologians and activists (‘militantes’ to the Latin Americans) in both the Third World and the West, in their struggle to live an authentically human, and therefore authentically Christian life. Lying at the core of solidarity is co-responsibility for the planet, and the humanisation of life for every being on it, by ridding the world of the structures of widespread injustice and deep-seated division which disfigure the created oneness of humanity.