It was often said of good Pope John that in summoning the Council he unleashed stronger forces than he had bargained for; there were suggestions that at the end he felt these forces to be beyond his control and overpowering him. There is sometimes a naive enthusiasm in those who are most eager for renewal which blinds them to the problems raised by this renewal. One sphere in which the problems are acute and puzzling is that of the biblical renewal. The problems centre round the paradox which is overstated by the often-heard cry: ‘How is it that we are encouraged to read the Bible more and more, while at the same time we are told that less and less of it is true?’ The paradox is overstated in this form, for what we are told is not that less and less of the Bible is true, but that less and less of it is to be taken at its face value, that less and less of it can be understood without considerable training, that not all of it is of equal importance, some passages or even whole books being of very peripheral value for the Christian life, while others teach some idea which is crucial amid a waste of folklore or rabbinic legalism. The dilemma is at its most puzzling at two moments, readings in the Mass and private reading of the scriptures.

It is commonplace that the world of the Old Testament was very different from ours, that their forms of expression are very different from the ones we use today.

The story of original sin is a story told us by God through Christian tradition. As in all stories which make a point, some elements in this story are absolutely essential to its point, others belong rather to the particular style in which the story is told (and possibly another style might be equally effective), while other elements again are essential neither to point nor to style but included simply because that was the way an incident happened. But how do we decide which elements are which?

In this article I shall suggest that the essential elements in the doctrine of original sin make a point about Calvary; that the references to Adam and the origins of mankind are part only of the style in which this point about Calvary is communicated; and that it is the gospels rather than Genesis which describe the way original sin actually happened. But how does one test such suggestions?

By examining the only vehicle of the doctrine that we have: namely, the traditional interpretation; and trying to discover within that interpretation the story-teller’s point, the structure of his story and the importance of its various elements. So in what follows I shall first consider what the Council of Trent and Thomas Aquinas have to say about original sin, without questioning their presuppositions, in the hope that the purpose, structure and relative importance of the various elements of this interpretation will emerge. Only then will I try to explore the possibility of re-telling the story in a different form.

When theologians grumble and growl and commissions sit, a mere schoolmaster might have the sense to leave a book like this alone. It is true that the same theologians who bare their teeth at the little eccentricities of the Dutch Catechism have not, through the long years of damage, waved our own aloft shrieking for the faggot, an omission which anyone really interested in education must find it hard to forgive. Even without such unchristian, carping thoughts, an educator not hooked on the ancient catalogues of angelic powers might well go in to bat for the Dutch simply on the grounds that they have produced the right educational approach.

It is not only its approach that I welcome, the content is often of immediate interest and importance to the schoolmaster, e.g. the section on ‘The faith to which one is bred’ in which are discussed the problems of child education and eventual personal acceptance and conversion that are built in to the practice of infant baptism. The views expressed endear the authors to me, but more yet the manner in which the problem is discussed in the light of the experience of the reader and the attempt to initiate trains of thought—and so it is not the content so much as the catechism’s significance in education that I intend to discuss.

Other catechisms in use have not shown much interest in thought, only in answers—sometimes accompanied by dogmatically phrased ‘reasons’ in lieu of thoughtful discussion, but, with some less convincing answers, the bald statement alone without discussion or context.

I should like now to turn to a particular example and a particular pontificate, that of Gregory VIII. Gregory is, of course, the triumphalist’s hero: what history text-book is there that hasn’t its section on the Gregorian reforms? It seems to be scarcely noticed that these ‘reforms’—the division of the Church into two castes, a clerical caste with a duty to rule the laity, whose function it was to fight in causes the clergy considered worthy—are very largely what has come under attack at Vatican II and since. Nothing is more striking, I think, than the present Pope’s repudiation of one of the more notorious of Gregory’s friends, Cardinal Humbert, and his Constantinople ex-communications in 1054. Now the fact that certain policies could be reforms in the late eleventh century, yet be abuses nine hundred years later, is not in itself surprising. But in the case of Gregory there are important lessons to be learnt and important questions to be asked.

But there is the question of means too, and there is a limit to the degree to which valuable consequences can excuse bad thinking and evil actions. Gregory, it seems to me, was guilty of both. The sickening frequency with which in his correspondence the quotation ‘cursed be the hand that abstains from blood’ is found cannot be excused with a reference to troubled times. Plenty of men of goodwill were just as shocked at the time. Again Gregory’s attempts to make the Sardinians and Corsicans acknowledge that they belonged to the patrimony of Peter and must pay the pope a tax are not in themselves very important.

Three dissimilar books illustrate three aspects of that search for renewal which now characterizes so much of the life of the Church.

The Church in Transition (Geoffrey Chapman, 16s.) by Desmond Fisher, a Roman Catholic journalist, is a popular account of that great upheaval which would probably have come in any case but which was largely set in motion by Pope John. There are in most churches good simple believers who ask not in any obstinate spirit of opposition to all change, but in all innocence, ‘Why can't we just go on as we are?’ There are many books which we might put into their hands, but this is one of the clearest and best. It describes in lucid terms the preparations for the second Vatican Council and the subsequent events. Mr Fisher recognizes the importance of the Council, but sees clearly that it is only a beginning. ‘Vatican II proved the truth of the old tag—Ecclesia semper reformanda.’ ‘The aggorniamento is for all time and it must go on.’ But this work will not go on unless not only ecclesiastics but lay people are involved in it, and its ideas penetrate the thinking of Roman Catholics everywhere.