There is a view that Jesus was not quite as human as we are—that he was the Son of God disguised as a man, not a real man. The authors of The Myth of God Incarnate some of whom I suspect of having been brought up on this docetist heresy, are in revulsion against it. They reject it, however, not because the Church long ago threw it out as an option incompatible with her life, a heresy, but because it is found to be incompatible with the European way of life in the second half of the twentieth century. It seems odd for Christians to reject a doctrine on these grounds, since it is the very heart of the gospel to challenge conventional and accepted attitudes in any age; still, they do reject docetism, and that can’t be bad.

When Christians do this it is customary for them to do so in the name of the incarnation, the doctrine that the one person, Jesus, was both fully human and fully divine. What is peculiar to these authors is that they think the rejection of docetism involves also the rejection of its contrary, the incarnation. At least I think they are rejecting it. Professor Maurice Wiles at first talks definitely about a “Christianity without incarnation”, but then goes on to speak of it as a ‘myth’, and it is not at all clear whether a myth is always meant to be an untruth. Sometimes the authors merely seem to mean by ‘mythical’ the same as ‘subject to the limitations of religious language.’

The problems which biblical criticism creates for Catholics cannot be disposed of so summarily as Michael Dummet thinks. He dismisses “ most modern Catholic Biblical exegesis” on the grounds that it is “dishonest”, in the sense that exegetes arbitrarily postulate ancient literary forms among which they proceed to classify parts of the New Testament they cannot take literally, without their having to admit that such parts are thus either fiction or fraud. The dishonesty lies in claiming texts as divinely inspired while refusing to take them at face value. It seems to me, however, for a start, that Mr. Dummett goes wrong on two important matters of fact.

First, as to pseudonymous writing, it is just not true that exegetes have invented the existence of such literature in order to place a document such as the Second Epistle of St. Peter within a well-known ancient literary convention, i.e. the convention of writing letters as if they were being written by some famous man already deceased. Not only was there an abundance of such pseudonymous writing in the ancient world at large but evidence for it exists in Judaism as well as in early Christianity. In spite of much research and speculation (see Kummel, page 362 for bibliography), many questions remain unanswered, particularly about the motives of such writing. The principle of pseudonymous writing was not generally questioned, though cases of forgery and fraud were certainly denounced. It should not be lightly assumed that New Testament writings are pseudonymous, but there are no grounds for asserting that pseudonymous writing was necessarily dishonest, less still for asserting that as a literary convention it never existed or was soon forgotten (think of the apocryphal Christian literature of the second century and later).

What did Paul have to say about the resurrection, Geoffrey Turner asks (New Blackfriars, April 1977), as he goes on to say that I have suggested that “Paul had a simple spiritual experience”. Well, if that is the impression that I have left, I must try to make myself a little clearer.

Geoffrey Turner appeals to I Cor 15 and interprets that reference to the appearance of the risen Christ to Paul in terms of Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles of the Damascus road experience. Is it so obvious that this move is legitimate? Admittedly it has frequently been made, at least since the middle of the second century when readers of the New Testament were first in a position to turn from one text to another and begin the process of harmonising the different accounts which it is one of the major effects of modern New Testament studies to bring into question. We need to remind ourselves, however, that Luke shows no knowledge of any of Paul’s letters. In fact the picture of Paul that Luke gives in Acts is remarkably unlike the picture that emerges from Paul’s own letters. The account that one man gives of another would of course differ a good deal from a self portrait, but the differences between Paul’s own theology and Luke’s account of it in Acts are so obvious and numerous that we must reckon with the possibility, and even the likelihood, that Luke did not have much access to Pauline material. Methodologically, if we are to be cautious, we must leave open the possibility that the Lukan accounts of the Damascus road experience were not derived from Paul himself but were Luke’s reconstruction of what must have happened.

The theme of this article was suggested by an enigmatic remark of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on the final page of his book The Order of Things. “Man”, he writes, “is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” I wish to reflect upon this suggestive remark though in somewhat different and broader terms than those of its author.

Since the time of Hegel’s use of the phrase, and particularly since Nietzsche’s sensational application of it, it has been fashionable to speak of “the death of God”—the death of God at the hand of man. However, the elimination of God which it was hoped would enable the reality of man to become more effectively visible has been superseded by a more radical consideration whose consequences profoundly affect our theory and practice today. It is the consideration that a true idea of man far from emerging into assured and concrete realization is rather breaking up and disappearing into an impersonal anonymous ground. The evidence suggests that the achievement of our age is the death of man at his own hand, at least speculatively if not yet in effect.

In this essay I propose to illustrate, and draw some conclusions from, the significance of this phenomenon by situating it in the context of its historical evolution. In what will inevitably involve rather broad generalisations and systematic simplification I will try to indicate how man today has come to be seen chiefly in socio-centric, impersonal and structural terms by contrast with two previous conceptions which can be globally described as the theo-centric and the anthropocentric conceptions of man.

For English speaking readers of my generation Simone Weil was one of a galaxy of French writers who came to the fore just after the last war. I am thinking particularly of Congar, de Lubac, Daniélou, arid Marcel. Time has dealt with their reputations very differently. Who remembers Marcel now? If Cardinal Daniélou is known to more people than Father Daniélou ever was, it is for rather special reasons. But in total these writers were a major cause of that aggiormamento in the Church we are still learning to cope with. They put out ways of thinking about theology both radically new and very traditional and in the process they devalued utterly the bankrupt pseudo-scholasticism that then ruled the roost. The most important of these writers were unquestionably de Lubac and Congar: but Daniélou too, is not to be forgotten with his work on typology. These theologians were among the first to have what is now commonplace—genuine argument and discussion with non-papist theologians of similar status. Some of them took part in an ecumenical seminar in Paris out of which came Oscar Cullmann’s magisterial book on Peter. Less well-known than these is the Anglican Father Hebert, whose books on The Authority of the Old Testament and the Throne of David had considerable influence on Daniélou (to put it mildly). It is symptomatic of the time that I myself first heard of Hebert’s books through Daniélou’s review in Dieu Vivant. This periodical was the New Blackfriars of the day; although it was no more all-embracing of the Catholic intellectual milieu than is New Blackfriars, it was equally representative of an important current of opinion.

Robert Bessède’s account of late nineteenth-century Catholic culture in France, in his recent study La Crise de la conscience catholique (Paris, 1975), is typical of traditional commentaries on this period. A particular stance—an attitude of despair in the face of history—with its origins in a minority group caught in very specific historical circumstances is transformed by special pleading into a universal phenomenon, to become eventually one more symbolic embodiment of the eternal crucifixion of man. If we look, for instance, into Bessède’s work, which claims to consider objectively the whole movement of ideas at this period, but has its real centre of interest in traditionalism and in the writers of the Catholic Revival, we find that he wholeheartedly adopts the Revival’s own blinkered perspective, refusing even to try to decipher the historical particularity inscribed in their ideology. Ostentatiously dismissing the contribution which the “historian of ideas” can make in such a domain, he prefers to speak of “mysterious” impulses, “feelings”, always and universally the same, which are “the basis and motive force of history”:

The general credibility of theology was once widely held by theologians to depend on a successful natural theology. Today things are different. There are certainly some contemporary advocates of natural theology—and a few of these are even theologians; but it is presently fashionable to reject natural theology in the name of theology itself. But are there cogent, theological reasons for dismissing natural theology? I shall suggest that the best known modern defences of an affirmative reply are unacceptable.

According to the natural theologian, ‘God exists’ is a respectable philosophical assertion which can be rationally sustained without recourse to the prior acceptance either of God’s existence or of any special revelation. Typically, he insists that ‘God exists’ is rational, provable, justifiable or demonstrable. Bearing these points in mind, what is the nature of the theological opposition to natural theology?

We can begin to answer this question by noting the view that the nature of theism renders irrelevant the notion of arguing or reasoning or making inferences about God. Some observe that this is the position of the Bible. Biblical writers, it is argued, “did not think of God as an inferred entity, but as an experienced reality”. Others explain that proofs must result in abstraction, “a pale shadow of the living God who is the putative object of biblical faith”. In this connection we might note some remarks of Alasdair MacIntyre. In Metaphysical Beliefs MacIntyre points to the enormous importance of faith where religious belief is concerned. He thus argues that natural theology, considered in its familiar guise as the presentation of supposedly demonstrative argument, is out of place in religion.

A good friend of mine from Montreal, by profession a notary, told me two years ago that, judging from his experience since 1970, of the couples who come to register their marriages before proceeding to the Church, at least one in five gives the same address; meaning to say that, in the proportion of 20%, couples now seeking a Church-Marriage have been cohabiting for probably no less than a year. That figure, while not providing statistical evidence, is indicative of a trend which is gaining popularity among young people in my country—making sure their union has a chance to last before committing it to the punctilious care of the Church and Law—a trend not infrequently lamented by a sizable section of the clergy as a sad result of those young people’s loss of faith and lax morals.

Since then, I have crossed the ocean and settled in the country parish of Ngote, Tanzania, ministering to a Christian community hardly three generations old and, by God’s grace, still little touched by the mixed blessings of industrialisation. Yet of the 18 marriages celebrated in the parish in 1975, only five were between couples for whom Church-Marriage would mark the beginning of conjugal life. In 1970, such marriages had numbered 19 out of 37, while last year they were down to three out of 22. Those figures suggest that ‘trial-marriages, a troubling new fashion at home, are here becoming the norm.

Clearly linked to the issue of trial-marriage (in the sense, for this part of the world, of a matrimonial alliance locally acknowledged as legitimate even though still lacking the Church’s sanction and thus officially regarded as void by the Church) considered in this article is the problem of the decreasing ratio of Church-Marriages in relation to the overall number of conjugal unions entered upon by Church members.