With the appearance of its eighteenth and nineteenth volumes, the English translation of Karl Rahner’s Schriften zur Theologie now stands complete in a score of volumes (I reviewed the twentieth, which appeared in 1981, in February last year). Completion was timed for Rahner’s eightieth birthday, which was on 5 March.

Some of the essays refer in footnotes to subsequent papers, so a supplementary collection will eventually (even soon) be necessary. The publishers are to be congratulated on staying the course. The translators have sometimes nodded, and some have occasionally been defeated by Rahner’s tortuous sentences and idiosyncratic jargon (it has never been kept uniform). It is pleasant to record that the last three in the series (two volumes of the German edition) have been undertaken by Edward Quinn: needless to say, they reach the standard set by Cornelius Ernst in his pioneering version of the first volume (1961).

The text of a brief report presented to the Upholland Theological Consultation of April 1984, at which Fergus Kerr OP gave the paper which we published in June.

Introduction

Nine years ago, the editor of The Month invited me to reflect on the state of English Catholic theology. In preparation for this Consultation, therefore, I turned back to the article I produced on that occasion and asked myself: how much has changed?

By and large, I think, very little. Others of you are better placed than I am to comment on the state of theology in seminaries, colleges of education, and houses of study of religious orders. In the universities, the Catholic contribution has continued to grow quite impressively (at least so far as numbers of both staff and students are concerned). But these resources of largely lay theological competence continue, I think, to be insufficiently appreciated by the Church in this country. (I have the impression that the theological preparation for the Liverpool Pastoral Congress illustrates this neglect.)

Where the publication of original, scholarly, creative work is concerned, we are still nowhere near making a contribution proportionate to our resources. To be blunt, I have especially in mind here a problem which I call ‘the reticence of the religious’—who have not, for the most part, even the excuse of vows of silence! On the other hand, in the very important area of high level popularisation, we owe a great debt of gratitude to Michael Richards for his series Introducing Catholic Theology.

In the May local council elections in the borough of Congleton, Cheshire, I stood as a Labour Party candidate in one of the wards. It consisted of rich Cheshire farmland and the result was quite predictable. I received 106 votes to the Tory 432. If Labour had won in the ward of Brereton, it would have signalled “the end of civilization as we know it”, and, to employ the phrase of Caspar Weinburger, U.S. defence spokesman, when interviewed on BBC World Service, the capitulation of the west to “Soviet hordes”. That, however, is not the point of this article. I am a “practising Catholic”, by which is meant a Catholic holding to the teaching of the Church and attending the sacraments. Now, a little down the road on which I live there happen to be a number of Catholic families, also “practising”, indeed pillars of the local Church. But in contrast to me two of these families supplied the bulk of the ten signatures the local Tory candidate required for his nomination. That is quite a public commitment because their names went up in print on the town hall and local parish notice boards, where I spotted them. As a political commitment it is second only to standing as a candidate. It was this which set me thinking if in fact we can talk about a Catholic social ethic.

Most New Testament scholars would agree with Raymond Brown when he claims that there are only three passages in Scripture which indisputably call Jesus God, and that two of these are in John’s gospel, in the first verse and at the very end, in Thomas’ confession (20:28). And theologians are divided in their reaction to this “high” johannine christology between those who welcome it as an unambiguous declaration of the divinity of Christ, the first step towards Nicea, and those who find it very odd, perhaps intolerably odd, to address any man, even this man, as God and so can only accept it as an eccentric way of claiming that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God, or that, at worst, this is the beginning of a dogmatic tradition that betrays the man Jesus. I would like to suggest that the way forward is to recognise that something very curious is indeed happening in the Prologue and in Thomas’ confession but rather than cope with these odd statements by pretending that they are actually saying something much less scandalous (“Jesus is the man who definitively reveals God”), we must admit that they only have meaning within a particular context.

It should be possible to write a sociology of the early church which would show that particular sorts of christological claims only came to be made at a certain point in the history of the church because it was only then that the ecclesial context existed in which such claims could make sense.

We hear much today, particularly from conservative American Christians, about the need to restore the Biblical view of the family. It is assumed by these spokespersons that the “Biblical family” is a male-dominated nuclear family consisting of a working husband, a non-working wife, who is full-time “mother”, and several dependent children. What is really being assumed here is that the Bible endorses a conservative version of the late Victorian, Anglo-Saxon patriarchal family. Such rhetoric about the “Biblical view of the family” lacks a sense of the socio-economic history of the family over the last three to four thousand years. It is taken for granted that this Victorian ideal of the patriarchal nuclear family was created in the Garden of Eden and has remained static ever since, until a recent period in the twentieth century when, for some inexplicable reason, it began to be “undermined” by feminism, gay rights and delinquent children. It is not necessary, then, to reflect upon the norm itself the forces that are challenging it, but simply to restore what is presumed to have always been, as the expression of God’s will.

(A sermon given at an ecumenical peace service in Brighton on 17 February 1984)

Sometime in October last year, President Reagan gave the following little homily on the scriptures to a Jewish acquaintance: “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if—if we’re the generation that is going to see that come about. I don’t know if you’ve noted any of these prophecies lately, but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we’re going through.” You know, I think he’s right—that is, apart from confusing the Book of Revelation with the Hebrew prophets.

Until recently these words did nothing more for me than bring back nostalgic memories of Handel’s Messiah from my childhood.

A paper presented at a symposium on East-West monasticism held in Kansas City in August 1983, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of Abhishiktānanda (Henri Le Saux OSB).

This verse is freely translated from the Mahānārayana Upanishad and was apparently a favourite of Swami Abhishiktānanda’s, for he quotes it, in differing guises, several times. I think it fairly epitomizes his insight and his realization.

I have only recently made the acquaintance of Swami Abhishiktānanda and am not really entitled to speak of him. There are those who can, foremost among whom would be Dom Bede Griffiths. But I am so attracted to Swami Abhishiktānanda, so moved by his inspired writings on the life of renunciation and the non-dual experience, that I would like to offer the little I have to say to his memory.

Swami Abhishiktānanda was a French Benedictine monk, Dom Henri Le Saux, who, after thirteen years in a Benedictine monastery, received permission to go to India in 1948. There he and Fr. Jules Monchanin founded the ashram of Shantivanam (Forest of Peace) as “an attempt to integrate into Christianity the monastic tradition of India”.

In 1949 he met Śri Ramana, called the Maharishi or great seer, in the south of India, at the foot of the sacred mountain Arunāchala.

I The Holy See’s critique of liberation theology

In its document Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’ the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith not only accepts but welcomes the advent of a ‘theology of liberation’, seen as a theological exploration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a ‘message of liberty’ and as ‘liberating power’. The CDF finds fault, therefore, not with the project but with its execution, not with liberation theology as such but with the structure and content of a significant proportion of the liberation theology currently being written. Just how much a significant proportion might be is impossible to determine. On the one hand, some writings of the more extreme members of the school offer the most complete textual confirmation of the portrait by the CDF. Thus in a work put into English in 1977 we read that a theology which accepts the truth of historical materialism (i.e. classical Marxism) will ‘assume his (Marx’s) theory completely in order to see what sort of faith , if any, is possible on that basis’. A moderate liberationist, Gustavo Gutierrez, admits in the preface to a work by a more radicalised colleague thast it would be ‘disingenuous’ to deny the danger of reductionism of just the kind now identified by the CDF. On the other hand, the genre of the document is not textual description so much as logical or conceptual projection. That is, it appears to be concerned with the end-state to which a consistent application of the principles involved in current liberation theology would lead, rather than with a description of a representative mean in the present state of liberation theology.