To the European outsider the achievement of political independence in the last few years by most of the countries of Africa may appear as the ending of a story: the story of European colonisation and overseas rule, and the story of the nationalist struggle for freedom. As these are now over, it is presumed that conditions of stability must have been established, and that an era of uneventful development is about to ensue. When there is instead a revolution or other disturbance, one easily concludes that the country in question was not after all ready for independence. In the hands of a John Biggs Davison or a Patrick Wall every apparent deviation from western normality becomes one more item in a terrible catalogue of the sins of independent Africa: a ghastly warning which the white leadership of Rhodesia and the South are only too right to heed. This view does, of course, work on the curious supposition that a people not possessing economic and political stability should, ipso facto, be ruled by someone else. It seems to me that approaches of this kind to what is going on in Africa today present us with a dangerously false focus, implying as they do that the acquiring of independence should have marked the term rather than be the condition for the great process of building the new society. In fact it is that process which is going on now and I find it far more interesting than what happened before independence, but it is of its nature something which involves instability, tension and the immaturity which is inevitable when people are just beginning to face, collectively and individually, a wide range of new situations and problems.

It is disturbing to realize how little the educated reading public knows about Africa, in spite of the fact that this continent has rarely been out of the news for the past decade. Reporters in the daily press, as well as columnists in the weeklies, may perhaps be excused for paying attention principally to rapid change or abnormality, since they take this to be their function. Perhaps too the reading public, however educated it may be, has been conditioned to expect the spectacular and the violent; the main features of living, largely constant, shifting only gradually in character and emphasis, do not make news.

There was something very distasteful about the way Ghana’s preparations for independence were watched by the daily press; it was clear that reporters expected a disaster when Africans took over the government of a state after so much shorter a period of tutelage than had been given to India and Pakistan. ‘Barely a lifetime of British rule.’ people found themselves thinking, ‘it’s bound to lead to civil strife, and the collapse of order. Then I suppose we’ll have to go in again to clear up the mess’. But the Ashanti people didn’t revolt; Ghana has remained internally at peace, though the methods she has used have caused dismay in Britain. This dismay need in many cases not have arisen. If some newspapers had tried more conscientiously to give an account of the social and cultural forces that made two-party democracy an unsuitable, in fact an unstable, form of government in Africa at the present time, readers would have been less alarmed or less despondent about the collapse of parliamentary opposition in one country after another.

In giving the fullest account ever of attitudes to contraception throughout the history of the Church, Professor Noonan has done us all a service and written an important and valuable book. His perception and industry are admirable; so, I would add, is the intellectual and physical stamina which has brought him across so vast a Sahara of human folly. He does not disguise his opinion that the tradition is open to change, but his account contains a wealth of texts and references that provide matter for the reader’s verdict without dictating it. I should like to pick out some of the themes in his story – some only, by no means all – and reflect on them.

Two extreme conclusions about sex were drawn in the early Church. One denied that it was a matter for legislation among the redeemed; the other obliged the redeemed to abstain from it under pain of sin. The outrageous consequences of the former opinion made it less dangerous than the latter, in favour of which there were texts enough in the New Testament which, taken out of context, could be cited. The curiously lame replies of the orthodox Alexandrian theologians to this encratism appealed less to Scripture than to the contemporary philosophy of Stoicism, which conceived legitimate sexual activity in purely procreative terms, and drew strict analogies with agriculture and stock-breeding. For Christians to use sex in such a way was, theologians contended, legitimate; its use inspired by passion was sinful; and any use of it where procreation was impossible (as in pregnancy) or prevented (by drugs) removed the one bulwark against the rigorist objections, and so was also wrong.

This note is provoked by some recent discussions in New Blackfriars and elsewhere, which have been about making the presence of Christ effective in the world in terms of social justice. It is not enough, we are rightly told, to preach in a vacuum; a pointless activity if no-one is listening. Social action means, if it is to go beyond isolated individual benevolence, political action: the point is made both in the Editorial and in Mr Eagleton’s article in the December 1965 number. In a general way, I agree with this position, but there seem to me several implications in it that need to be examined.

In the first place, should we not be careful to avoid the kind of implicitly totalitarian attitude that gives supreme importance to the political order at the expense of every other kind of human activity? One recalls Nkrumah’s amiable motto: ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom . . .’ On the whole, one would have thought Christians would avoid this particular trap, but I can imagine some eager Christian radicals, so intoxicated with the discovery that in battling in the political arena they are doing Christ’s work, that they exaggerate the importance of that particular way of doing it. On a basis of respect for persons, one needs to recognise that there are many admirable people in this world, who contribute a great deal to society, but to whom politics means nothing at all: many, but by no means all, of them are women.

The other day the members of a Youth Club asked if something could be done to prevent people who came to address them from talking about sex. They said, with considerable feeling, that nearly every speaker seemed to think that youth was interested in very little else; which is, of course, not true. It is not teenagers who are so much concerned with sex as their elders, who continue to produce and read a stream of books and articles. Reaction against secrecy has led to an over-anxious campaign to assert the importance of sex, which in turn is in danger of producing the reaction that sex does not matter much anyway. A good many people have become bored by sexual experience itself, and the last thing they want is to be further bored by reading about it.

A balance has to be struck somehow, and the four books listed below illustrate awareness of this in very different quarters. On the whole they illustrate the growing recognition that the fundamental question to be tackled has to do with the nature of human beings; what is being human ? For the Christian this is a theological question, answered in terms of our creation by God in his own image and likeness. Our life, even on the simplest level and at any time or place, must be somehow like God’s own life if it is to be truly human.

We are told something of what God’s life is in the doctrine of the Trinity.