Peter Hebblethwaite New Blackfriars December 1984 p. 499

Perhaps one of the most rewarding things to remember when one is playing with ideas is that nothing remains as it is for very long, and, what is rather more awkward, just as ideas are soon outmoded and superseded, so too the nature of the problems with which we are engaged changes before our very eyes. It is as if the entire process is taking place on a cinema screen where the credits continuously merge into new lines.

Even the apparently successful outcome of some process of study or legislation can be seen in the long run to have produced not so much a final answer as a formidable tariff of new problems. Medical science’s ability to reduce infant mortality and prolong the average expectation of life has created a situation in which—were it to be taken seriously—the Church’s traditional pastoral and moral teaching, with its primitive emphasis on fertility, would be a serious threat to the future. Recent matrimonial legislation to improve the position of women has been so successful that further legislation is now urgently required to protect not only husbands, but the unfortunate wives of second alliances. In the early years of this century it would have been impossible for pioneers in the Labour Movement to foresee that within a man’s lifetime the power of the unions mobilised for sectional self-interest under the laissez-faire banner of ‘free collective bargaining’ would play a decisive role in destroying a Labour government.

As every schoolboy once knew, the Church of Rome accepts the Longer Old Testament Canon rather than the shorter one read by Protestants and Jews. This means that she can invoke OT authority for the immortality of the soul (Wisd. 3. 1—9) and for the propriety and efficacy of prayers for the dead (2 Macc 12. 43—45). Apart, however, from a few proof texts of this sort, it is doubtful whether the so-called Deuterocanonical books and passages have much influence on Catholics. Take the case of the Book of Daniel. When they set out to expound Daniel Catholic writers tend either to give scant attention to the passages peculiar to the Longer Canon (so, e.g. Delcor, 1971 and Collins, 1981) or, as the present writer did in his brief commentary on Daniel (Robinson, 1971), to ignore them altogether. Should we not, perhaps, take our Canon more seriously?

In what follows, I shall first consider some general problems involved in taking one’s Canon, whether the Shorter or the Longer, seriously, without however getting entangled in the ‘canonical criticism’ debate.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the early Christian Church did not simply inherit an OT Canon from the Jewish people. The Jews, in fact, did not possess a fixed Canon for the OT as a whole until the late first or early second century of our era: the contents of the Pentateuch and of the Prophets had certainly been settled by the time of the beginning of Christianity, but the extent of the third division, the Writings, remained unclear.

Thus Hick has shown little reason to change the traditional Christian paradigm of the world religions from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican model of the universe of faiths; from a system with Christ and his church at the centre, around which the other religions revolve, to a Copernican model with all the religions, including Christianity, revolving around the central mystery of ultimate reality. It must be said that D’Costa’s critique is both powerful and ingenious. But is it correct?

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Gavin D’Costa argued that Professor John Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions is both unnecessary and incoherent. It is unnecessary because the paradox it is intended to resolve can be met without radically changing Christianity’s traditional selfunderstanding; and incoherent because it assumes a premise denied by its conclusion, namely the Christian conception of an all-loving God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ.

In order to answer our question we must first assess whether or not Hick’s argument has been adequately represented. For we will be in danger of wrongly dismissing Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution if we have not rightly understood the reasons which have led him to make it. And it is precisely at this point that we may suspect several of Hick’s commentators and critics, including D’Costa, of misunderstanding the nature and force of the considerations that weigh with Hick—and should be weighed by us when considering his proposal.

For the true Christian it is axiomatic that the fundamental form of interpretation of the Scriptures is not search for meaning or valid patterns of thought for today, but discipleship: in other words, the enactment of Christian life, the establishment and building up of the Christian community, the singular and corporate worship of God, the completion of Christ’s Church by sharing in his afflictions (cf Col 1.24). The Christian interpretation of the Word of God occurs not in any private ‘religious’ place, but out where the human race speaks and suffers, endeavours and achieves. What Christian theology executes reflectively, Christian discipleship executes practically—mediating that memory and hope which we call the handing-on of the Gospel.

Where an opposite view prevails, responsibility for present interpretative mediation of the Gospel experience no longer devolves upon the community of Christian disciples, but far too much upon Church leaders and their theologians (commissioned as if only to explain the utterances of Authority). Christian living, which should always be responsively and responsibly interpretative—my affirmation of Christ’s call—in daily life, consequently tends merely to become the obedient practising of the explained ideas of others. Those ideas are received not in the context of our own mundane experience, cultural and psychological but before it, as the utterance of an ideology from an exterior citadei. Such utterances may appear standard to all societies, tunelessly valid, unaffected by particularity of place or people—in a word, universal and unchangeable (and so undebatable); they may satisfy the minds of those who construct pervasive patterns of thought. But above all what they can do is stifle the spirit of creative participation and joyful assent. The letter is made to prevail and the document rule; but the spirit then becomes joyless.

Our practical reasoning goes well and attains its truth when we identify ways of adequately getting or realising really desirable objectives. And our objectives are really desirable (good) when they either are really desirable in themselves, or are steps on the way to getting or realising some such intrinsically desirable objective or objectives. If there is but one such intrinsically desirable objective, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know what it is. If, as seems much more plausible, there are a number of intrinsically desirable objectives, our practical reasoning cannot go well unless we know whether there is some further objective to be attained or realised by or in the pursuit of some or all of these intrinsically desirable objectives, i.e. whether there is some further point to pursuing them; and if so, what that further point or objective (‘last end’) actually is.

Some say that the true last end is some one of the intrinsically desirable human goods, say, the highest instantiation of the highest good attainable in this life, thus contemplation of God to the extent that God is knowable through His creatures. Others agree that it is some one human good, but place it beyond this life, and beyond merely human capacities, in the beatific vision and contemplation of God.

The first part of a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1984.

From very early times men have spoken of and to their gods in political images, just as they have ascribed divine characteristics to their earthly rulers. This has been the case no less in the judaeo- christian tradition than in pagan cultures. Some of the most persistent images used of God in this tradition are taken from political discourse: king, lord, judge, to mention but three. Again, abstract concepts applied to God such as sovereignty, power, majesty and dominion have a strongly political connotation. Yet remarkably little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by theologians and historians of doctrine.

In the first part of this paper (published here) I wish to consider the way in which analogies between divine and civil domination were employed among some groups in seventeenth-century England, and set this in the context of a more general thesis about the use of such analogies. I shall conclude, in the second part of this paper (which will be published in the next issue), by suggesting certain significant implications which may be said to follow from this manner of thinking and talking about God and the state.

One of the characteristics of western middle class men and women in the latter half of the twentieth century is a form of quiet cynicism. We do not wish to give credence to anyone else any longer. We have shut the door to those who would give us dreams of a better world, and are usually quite happy, even at times quite determined, to dig our own back gardens. We have, in fact, seen the rise and fall of too many heavenly cities for us to wish to build any more. Fanaticism of any kind is definitely a non-starter. One might have thought that this insularity was a particularly English disease brought about by loss of empire and the apparent failure of post-war social optimism, but it is also a disease of each western nation. It is often codified into political form by the new right or into religious form by the moral majority, but it derives, essentially, from a form of quiet, despairing selfprotectionism, resignation; a belief, if it can be adorned with that word, that nothing very much more can be done. All that can be done now, it is felt, is that people should cultivate their own situation. Religion is therefore understood as that which reinforces the sense of the individual’s importance in the face of social and cosmic collapse. The church is the last refuge for those suffering from anomie, and faith gives the individual hope in the face of darkness. Church study groups, when asked what signs of hope there are in the world, answer that there are none, apart, perhaps, from the odd place like Iona or Taize which the middle classes treat like tourist attractions rather than a places for renewal.

Why should a journal like New Blackfriars be looking retrospectively at books about mathematics? A short answer is that mathematics, or at least the myth of mathematics, affects the way we think. I shall be looking at two books which demythologise mathematics: The Mathematical Experience and Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline. These help examine the myths of proof—the myths about how mathematicians think. Part of the demythologisation process is to look at alternatives to the myths; in particular I shall look at the role of intuition, and will illustrate this with reference to Catastrophe Theory and Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The prompting for this investigation is the emergence of a new genre of books about mathematics following in the wake of Gödel, Escher, Bach, of which The Mathematical Experience is an example. It would be a fascinating aside to trace the rise of this genre from Fourteen Funny Bits of Mathematics in Avuncular Style as found on the shelves of most public libraries, alongside popularisations of pedestrian seriousness. No doubt it would mention the science-as-a-human-activity school as exemplified by Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, or Watson’s The Double Helix, a vein continued by Catastrophe Theory. It would take a venture into catastrophe theory itself to explain the emergence of Gödel, Escher, Bach—a rogue book which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for general non-fiction, a picaresque which takes in the art of fugue, Zen koans, and the Jabberwocky and leads to questions at the heart of some of the problems in the foundations of mathematics and of artificial intelligence, while remaining accessible to a child of twelve (albeit the one I know is quite bright). The audience the genre aims at seems to be not so much the interested layman, but more the new technical elite whose computer skills and mathematical awareness can be used to outflank the experience of their seniors. In my years in radar design it was interesting to watch the gradual take-over of certain departments by mathematicians in spite of the active opposition of the electronics-trained managers. In my last department over half the people there had copies of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Recently the distinguished Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar accused the almost equally distinguished Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff of not believing in Jesus’s divinity, and dismissed the liberation theology of Latin America as an export from Europe. What do Church leaders who know Boff well and have an intimate understanding of the pastoral situation in Latin America think of that?

Pedro Casaldaliga is not a familiar name even to those in the English speaking world who take an interest in the Latin American Church. Yet within Latin America he is one of the most highly regarded figures in the ‘radical’ wing of the Church. A spry, fifty-seven year old Spaniard, he is one of those figures that move the Latin American heart more than any other type of hero—a Catholic bishop committed to the poor. His diocese of Sao Felix in the Matto Grosso in Brazil has been the constant scene of struggles between the multinational corporations and estate-owning landlords on the one hand, and the indians and landless poor on the other. Bishop Pedro’s stance in favour of the latter has caused him to be the target of many assassination attempts. He arrived in Managua, Nicaragua, in late July to show public support for the fast being carried out by the foreign minister, Father Miguel “Escoto, long a friend of his. As a European, though one who has lived in Brazil since 1967, he was particularly keen to draw more European attention to that struggle of which Nicaragua is the focal point.

Recent confrontations between the Vatican and the Sisters of Mercy, as well as with other groups of women religious, particularly with Americans, reveal a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship of Church and State, the sacred and the secular, held by the nuns, on the one hand, and the Vatican, on the other. Current Vatican policy assumes a rigid line between Church and State which makes any office-holding, either elected or appointed, in government, by either a priest or a nun, incompatible with the religious vocation. Although the first conflict between the Vatican and Sister Mansour of the Sisters of Mercy appeared to be primarily over differing interpretations of the relationship between personal morality and public policy in the specific case of payments for abortion, subsequent conflicts with the Sisters of Mercy over other nun office-holders went beyond specific differences over Church teachings on moral issues. The holding of any public office was defined as out of bounds for priests or religious: in other words, the Vatican pressed (and continues to press) for a very harsh interpretation of the restriction in the new Code of Canon Law (canon 285, 3) and for its world-wide observation.

A similar line has been taken in the case of the four priests who hold public office in the Nicaraguan revolutionary government and, most recently, the Italian priest who has been elected as a socialist to the European Parliament. In each case the resolution of the conflict is to force the person involved either to resign the public office or else be removed from their religious order (or, in the case of a diocesan priest, be suspended from priestly duties).

That was written by Bonhoeffer during that period of his imprisonment in Tegel between April and August 1944 when, having faced up to the prospect of a long time in prison due to the delay of his trial, he settled down to critical and creative theological work.

On the 12th of May Pope John Paul II will arrive in Holland for his pastoral visit to the Dutch Church. What kind of Church will he meet? It will be a different Church from the Church that drew the attention of almost the whole western Christian world in the sixties. The bishops are very different, and because the Second Vatican Council changed in many ways the theology but not the organisation, the bishops still largely determine the policy. Changing the bishops still means changing the Church, in spite of all the talk about participation of the laity.

We must start with a little chronology. In the seven dioceses in Holland only two bishops may now be considered to be more or less sympathetic with the Church of the sixties, and both of these seem to be afraid to express their sympathy clearly and publicly. Since the restoration of the hierarchy in 1853 the chapter of a diocese where the bishop has died or resigned has had the right to propose, through the nuncio, three names to the Pope. The Pope has never been obliged to appoint any of those proposed, and sometimes he did not. However, since 1979 not one of the names of the appointed bishops has been on any of the lists of the chapters. In December 1970 a young conservative curate, A. Simonis, was made bishop of Rotterdam. Cardinal Alfrink and his colleagues hesitated for some time to ordain him, but after his promise to cooperate with the other bishops they decided to accept him.

The time is right for a good biography of Pope John XXIII. It is, of course, ridiculous that the Catholic Church—all 780 million of us, as I recently read—should be so decisively affected by the personality of a single man. It is only with the invention of railways, telephones, aeroplanes, and now television, that the solitary in the Vatican has acquired such power. The ‘modern world’, which Pius IX sought to keep at arm’s length from the Papal States, soon provided the media for an unprecedentedly intense personal veneration of the ‘Holy Father’. The successor of Peter now enjoys a supremacy in the Church that Peter himself evidently never had (see Acts 8:14 and 11:2, and Galatians 2:11). With the triumph of Ultramontanism, the whole body has been surrealistically distorted by a grotesquely inflated ear (I Corinthians 12:17). The traditional ecclesiology of the Catholic Church as the communion of local churches has been re-established in theory—but, for the most part, we remain captured, and captivated, by media-promoted adulation of the individual. The power of the ‘world’ over the Catholic Church is as insidious as ever.

One of the worst effects of media domination is instant oblivion for yesterday’s men. In longer historical perspective, of course, the tolerance and the initiatives of Paul VI will seem obvious. At present, with men in control who cannot see the other side of a question, he is remembered only as a rather sad and dithering figure.