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.

I do not sing

Of angel fair or damosel That leans athwart a painted sky;

My little verses only tell

How human beings live and die And labour as the years go by.

I do not sing

Of plaster saints or jealous gods,

But of little ones I know,

Who paint their cheeks or bear their hods Because they live in doing so Their hapless life on earth below.

Patrick Macgill Songs of the Dead End

Patrick Macgill (1889—1962), the Donegal poet and novelist, was an articulate spokesman for a suppressed, inarticulate migrant workforce. He is also effectively an important voice of the sensitive layman in a clericalised church around the turn of the century. To give rather than to acquire is his message; to give freely and to become truly liberated is his ideal of the Church which he loved to hate: ‘If a man is born to the ould ancient faith he’ll never lose it’, it will always be there, (1918 : 200). That tension between the authoritarian clergy and the layman runs through his work. The preoccupation with sexual morality and the only moral issue runs through his scorn for that lace-curtain respectability of his time. His class-consciousness is remarkable in early twentieth-century Catholic writing, when many churches seemed to have lost their sense of personal involvement with the poor as people rather than objects of charity. That, for Macgill was the ultimate pornography. Himself a navvy in Scotland, he knew the bitter experience of the emigrant Irish far removed from the organisational church, from the main stream of secular life and effective personal relationships, and so from God.

It was easy to anticipate that there would be some criticisms of Margaret Hebblethwaite’s widely praised book “Motherhood and God” from conservative quarters, and what the criticism would be. And our publishing, in our last issue, of Deborah F. Middleton’s article “God as Mother—a necessary debate” has brought us letters from readers arguing that all who discern “motherhood” in God must be mistaken. But questions about Margaret Hebblethwaite’s book have not come solely from the right. Here Mary Pepper, one of the organizers of Christian Women’s Information and Resources (CWIRES), criticizes the book from a feminist perspective and the author replies. We shall be publishing a review which looks at the book from yet another perspective later.

Editor.

The publication of Motherhood and God by Margaret Hebblethwaite happened just as the Church of Scotland Study Group presented its controversial report on The Motherhood of God. So the book was launched amid the turbulence of dispute within the Scottish Church, evidence that the questions around gender and theology can no longer be ignored. The report, cautiously and reasonably, gives scriptural justification for describing God as Mother, but a minority of the group felt unable to agree that God might be properly addressed as Mother. (It was the outcry over a woman praying ‘Dear Mother God’ that caused the setting up of the Study Group.)

But in her very readable book, ‘about finding God in motherhood and motherhood in God’, Margaret Hebblethwaite has no difficulty at all.

An expanded version of a paper given at a seminar on “contextual theology” held in November 1983 at the Pastoral Institute at Multan, in the Punjab, Pakistan.

At the various meetings of Third-World theologians it is stated again and again that theologizing is not an academic exercise of a highly trained group of professional experts. Rather, the fundamental subject of theology is the Christian community. This is true of whatever theology exists, because it is the character of a Christian community, its life and witness, which determine the kind of theology it will produce. A truly Third-World theology, therefore, can only grow from within a community that is aware of its being part of the struggles of the Third World and has made an option for the poor and their liberation against the structures of evil and oppression.

Against this background, it is the purpose of this article to describe the history of the Punjabi Christian community and the theology which has been developed in this community, with its strengths and weaknesses, up to the present day. In this description certain directions for the future may perhaps emerge.