In our time, solidarity has become a term increasingly used by people in relatively affluent parts of the world to express their sense of pity for, of sympathy with, of reaching out to, some oppressed or disadvantaged section of fellow human beings, invariably so submerged that they are unable to speak for themselves: the starving masses of Africa, the exploited poor of South America, the new underclass who live, surplus to requirements, redundant ciphers, without hope or dignity, in the decaying ghettos of our great western cities. Some such sentiment is the driving- force behind liberation theology—the conviction, justified by that unforgettable passage in St. Matthew’s Gospel, that if we are to find Christ in our world, it can only be in the dispossessed and wretched of the earth (when you did this to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me); together with the chilling corollary that when we ignore the poor, we are slighting the Saviour himself, telling the Son of God that his sufferings are no concern of ours.

It is no purpose of mine to disparage or belittle liberation theology, to fault the modem Church for its wholly admirable decision to identify with the poor, to choose Lazarus above Dives—this is, after all simply a copying of the Master, the imitation of Christ. If he chose to be bom powerless, it would be foolish and idolatrous for his followers to worship power. If he spoke so trenchantly about the risks of wealth, his Church, far from admiring, should feel a special compassion for those poor rich people so at risk of suffering the same catastrophe as the wealthy fool in the parable.

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’

According to the Hebrew cosmology the earth was flat and the sky was like an upturned bowl studded with stars. The earth, and the creatures of the earth, were made to serve man and are under his domination. This view sufficed for many millennia. Careful studies of the regular motions of the stars and the irregular motions of the planets were made by the Babylonians and the Greeks, and Ptolemy devised a complicated system of cycles and epicycles to describe these motions with some accuracy. It was a cosy, man-centred world.

The development of modem science destroyed this picture with a series of shattering blows. Firstly Copernicus showed that it was much simpler to suppose that the sun, and not the earth, is the centre of the world. No longer do we think of the sun serving our needs by circling the earth, night and day. It is we who are ruled by the sun. This view of the sun and the planets was firmly established by the dynamics of Newton, which enabled the orbits of the planets to be calculated from his laws of motion, together with his theory of universal gravitation.

In the following centuries telescopes of increasing power probed further into space, and it became apparent that our resplendent sun is but a rather ordinary star situated in one of the spiral arms of a vast galaxy of some two hundred thousand million stars that we see on clear nights as the Milky Way.

If everyone lived the love of God as fully as it is often talked about, it would not be a pious exaggeration to say that this world would be paradise. Unfortunately, in reality nothing is more rare than a pure, total love of God, and the proof of this is that there are so few saints, who are, by definition, people who do live this love to a heroic degree. It is also only too easy to draw up theories about the love of God and its various stages and degrees, but between word and deed there lies the will. Because Catherine was serious about living the love of God, we can sum up all her sanctity and the whole way she followed in one simple sentence, which she wrote in a letter to her bishop on 15 February 1552: ‘This is what my Lord pleases ... I want it to be pleasing to me too’ [CRE I 248], Or in what she wrote to Giovambattista de’ Servi on 20 May 1552, ‘Please pray that his most holy Majesty will, if it pleases him, grant me holiness enough to be able to fulfil my office [of prioress] to his honour; if not, then his will be done in me always, in this and in everything else’ [CRE I 266].

About a year ago I was asked if I would present a paper on the theology of laity to a conference whose title was “Patterns of Priesthood”, and whose purpose was to “attempt to open up the ground for a discussion of the subject of ministry and communion”. The inclusion of a paper on laity seemed to me then, and seems now, both significant and awkward. Primarily it is a phenomenon to be rejoiced at, in that discussions of priesthood and ministry cannot take place without a thoroughly ecclesial sense of the whole people of God. The point is clearly being made that the theology of laity—or “laicology”—is, like the theology of ministry, or of ordained priesthood, just one aspect of ecclesiology; all these subjects are concerned with looking at what it means to be Church, each from its particular angle. In expressing this we are, of course, indebted to the work of Yves Congar; in his substantial work on laity, he stressed that the purpose behind a theology of laity was fundamentally the reworking of ecclesiology and, in particular, the complementing of a dominant “hierarchology”. Following in this tradition we can recognise the complexity of ecclesiology, where studies of priesthood, laity, religious life and so forth are distinctive, but not discrete. Our basic concern, whether we are talking about laity, the ordained, hierarchical structures or charismatic gifts, is always the same: the Church as a living and structured community, whose identity is found in sharing in Christ’s ministry in a rich variety of ways.

The goal of this article is to show how all parts of the Book of Job function coherently, co-operatively and brilliantly. Though commentators continue to assert that the frame of the work (1-2, 42:7-17) is easily separable from the body of the work (3-42:6), that contention is simply not true. The prose prologue and epilogue pose the book’s central and crucial issues, which are then partially, and slightly unrealistically, dealt with in the work’s central, poetic dialogue section. The ‘game’ of understanding the work would be much easier to play if the frame—front and back—were not there. But it is there; and it is indispensable. The prologue raises the theological stakes of the dialogue.

Five key issues are posed by the prologue, setting the agenda for the entire book. First, who is God? What sort of deity is God, according to information we receive in the prologue? Why is God employing an adversary (a satan) and what can an adversary do that assists God? What is God’s motive in calling attention to Job? How can the wager between God and the adversary, apparently entered into so casually, be benign? What is God’s presumption regarding the outcome of the wager made with the adversary?

The rhetoric of ‘New World Order’ came to prominence in the period of glasnost and its dramatic denouement in the events of 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of communism. First coined by Gorbachev in 1986, the phrase New World Order became popular particularly with Western leaders, most notably in America and Britain, as a way of describing the future development of international relations after the end of the Cold War. At the same time as Fukuyama was declaring the ‘end of history’, Western politicians were announcing that a new kind of international order would be established with the demise of communism. In the Cold War era, so the argument ran, the USSR and her allies had blocked the enforcement of international legality through the UN, and had fermented regional conflicts and wars for her own interests. The New World Order would allow the development of a new peace where the freedoms taken for granted in the West might be seen to spread throughout the world without the great obstacle which the enemy of communism, and the superpower conflict, had previously represented. The United Nations could now at last take on the role prepared for it after the Second World War. America and her allies old and new would be able to ensure peace in the world.

All communities tend to develop an account of their own origins. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People has this advantage, that all but twenty-two chapters at the beginning of the first book deal with matters in his own lifetime or so near it that he could collect testimonies from eyewitnesses or from those who had seen and heard them, as well as from written materials. His history has therefore held its place as a source, despite some criticism of his selection of evidence. It remained in English libraries through the critical years of the Reformation, and was printed in the seventeenth century in England as well as on the continent, in Latin and in King Alfred’s and in another English version. This contributed something to the Anglican view of the origin of the Church of England, in tales of conflict and reconciliation between Celtic and Roman missions. On the question of Easter Bede’s details were relevant to disputes about the change in the Roman calendar in the sixteenth century. He also said that an Archbishop of Canterbury supplemented what was lacking in an ordination by bishops whose status was in doubt.

What came to be called The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was put into shape more than a century after the death of Bede, in the days of King Alfred. It was copied and continued at Peterborough until the end of the reign of Stephen, but it did not find favour with the Norman ruling class who occupied the important positions in church and state after 1066.

Dom Illtyd Trethowan, monk of Downside, died on October 30, 1993. One of his last publications was a recent review in New Blaclfriars, but his writings, and his efforts to make available works of theology and philosophy by others, go back a very long way. His first article appeared in The Downside Review in 1935 (he subsequently came to be Editor of The Downside Review).His first book, Certainty, Philosophical and Theological, appeared in 1948. Before then he translated Eugène Masure’s seminal study Sacrifice du Chef (1944), and, as early as 1940 (together with Frank Sheed) he translated Etienne Gilson’s La Philosophic de Saint Bonaventure. Between 1948 and the time of his death he published 110 articles, plus numerous book reviews. He also produced seven substantial books, an edition of the writings of Walter Hilton, and several translations of important authors not much known in the English-speaking world—most notably, Maurice Blondel, Louis Lavelle, and Louis Bouyer.

Dom Illtyd was not a monk who travelled to teach and spend lots of time outside his monastery. In 1969 he lectured for one semester in the U.S.A. (at Brown University in Rhode Island), but he was otherwise a fixture at Downside from the day that he joined the community there. Yet simply in terms of pages printed, his published works and translations clearly place him in the forefront of twentieth century British Catholics writing on religion and trying to make available the writings on religion of others.

In 1990 George Steiner was invited to give the Gifford lectures at Glasgow University. They were well received. In fact, in Donald MacKinnon’s words, they were ‘an outstanding series’. They are as yet unpublished. While we still await their publication, the paperback version of Real Presences, his most outstanding explication so far of a theology of culture, has appeared. Furthermore, in 1993 John Hopkins University Press are publishing, under the editorship of Nathan Scott, a collection of essays on various aspects of George Steiner’s work. This article attempts to assess the preoccupation with theological issues evident in Steiner’s work from the beginning.

That culture and its meaning are underwritten by God is a thesis with a long history in literary studies. From the Greeks to Proust, from the Torah to Thomas Mann, the argument that the great artist is ‘inspired’ and communicates that which transcends both himself/herself and his/her public is an ancient one. When George Steiner began defending this argument (in opposition to the formalism of New Criticism in the States) in the late Fifties and early Sixties, he might appear therefore as a late believer in the traditions of liberal humanism. He could be seen as a man ascending a path into the mountains well- trodden before him by the likes of Coleridge, Ruskin, Arnold and T.S.Eliot. Aware, from his examination of the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky of ‘genius [who] had fallen into the hands of the living God’ (T.D. p.44), he began by exploring the frontiers of language. In 1961 we find him writing about ‘the retreat of the word’ in contemporary culture in an essay with that title. Silence threatens, he prophesies. But it is the silence of the meaningless, the illiterate; the silence of ossified cliche. In the early Sixties we find him preoccupied with this silence and countering it with another form of silence—the silence of the Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus of Dante’s Paradiso—where language arches back towards its origin, ‘where the word of the poet ceases, [and] a great light begins’ (L.S. p.59). In 1966, in the remarkable essay ‘Silence and the Poet’ Steiner goes on to make the claim that here at the frontiers of language is ‘proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. . . [W]e experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God’ (L.S.p.58).

The cruelties committed in the war in former Yugoslavia profoundly shock us. Villages are completely destroyed, children, women and men, even their cattle, are killed. Women are raped and forced to give birth to the children of their rapists. The perpetrators are ordinary citizens, pleasant people, good neighbours. We do not have to look for violence that far away. Bombs go off in the city of London, children are killed in Warrington, and in revenge innocent young men are massacred in Belfast. Violence exists outside war situations as well. Domestic violence is probably the most common form of violence: incest, beating, or simply bullying. It is often hidden; in spite of everything, loyalty to parents and other members of the family overrules the urge to confide in someone, to complain and to accuse in public. Though violent novels and films may be very popular, articles and books on violence are generally not. The Bible is full of violent events, but there is relatively little literature on violence in Scripture.

Why do we accept violence relatively easily as a part of life? Why do peaceful people resort to violence in certain situations? It seems to me that violence is closely linked with justice. Violence is used to redress wrongs or to prevent injuries. The source of much violence is the thirst for justice. People always try to justify their use of violence by appealing to their right to restore injustices done to them in the past or in the present.

Organization and classification of material is essential as an aid to effective communication. Good teachers and writers will use labels to organize material, which play a valuable role in simplifying a debate. They provide a way in for the student or reader. However, this organization and classification of material is not a neutral and objective enterprise. One’s classification will hide certain basic decisions and options.

It is the argument of this article that the ‘theology of religions’ debate has been stifled by an over-emphasis on the standard threefold paradigm. I will be taking issue with John Hick’s judgment: ‘the simplest and least misleading classification is the now fairly standard threefold division into exclusivism (salvation is confined to Christianity), inclusivism (salvation occurs throughout the world but is always the work of Christ), and pluralism (the great world faiths are different and independently authentic contexts of salvation/liberation) ‘. I am not alone in wanting to point out the cracks in this paradigm, but I want to go a stage further and attempt to formulate one option which cannot be embraced by the traditional paradigm.

The underlying problem with the traditional classification results from the conflation of three matters:

1. The conditions for salvation.

2. Whether the major world religions are all worshipping the same God.

3. The truth about the human situation.

The traditional paradigm emphasizes the first, is confused about the second, and, with regard to the third, links truth questions with soteriology. This is easily exposed as unsatisfactory.

The potential for theology to act as a partner in dialogue with the natural sciences is itself a subject for dispute. Those who argue that dialogue is not possible propose that theology is concerned with questions which are outside the realm of science. Such questions are answered through a mystical approach to God that defies the very presuppositions that are the basis of scientific research. The recent tendency amongst theologians to portray early scientists as the archvillains, rather than the priests of creation is noteworthy in this regard. At the opposite end of the spectrum there is the attitude which treats theology as another science. This is not so much a rehabilitation of the idea of theology as ‘queen of the sciences’, but a redefinition of theology taking into account scientific methods of research. The latter form the basis of an hermeneutical approach to scripture which takes account of recent research in historical criticism. A third and perhaps mediating approach, looks at the history of the philosophy of science and insists that these early scientists considered that their belief in nature as having a supernatural element did not hinder the advancement of science. The call now is for a reenchantment of science so that it recovers a more holistic approach characteristic of these early researchers. The clash between the first and third alternatives is that in the first case the scientists are blamed for the current ecological crisis, while in the latter they are heralded as angels of light from the past.

That we live in a world of all manner of racial, cultural and ideological difference, of profound specificities and contingencies, is a trite fact of existence. Such awareness is nothing new. Indeed it was a containing feature of Aquinas’ intellectual perspective. The title of one of his major works—Summa Contra Gentiles—indicates as much. What is new in our time is a growing if still somewhat grudging appreciation of this fact of difference, and the realisation, still halting on the whole, that there is an important sense in which difference is creative and so must be celebrated. In the role of theologian and scholar of religion, and as a tribute to Aquinas’ comprehensive philosophical-theological vision, I propose in this article to inquire into this sign of our times (Mt. 16.3), to assess its significance, and to indicate, with special reference to the study of religion, how it might orient our lives.

Just over 25 years ago, on the last day of October 1967, John Hick, on assuming the H G Wood Chair in the University of Birmingham, gave his inaugural lecture, entitled ‘Theology’s Central Problem’. ‘Today. . . theology’s central problem,’ he declared, ‘is not so much one within theology as around theology, enfolding it entirely and calling into question its nature and status as a whole.’ ‘This issue,’ he continued, ‘at once central and all-embracing, presents itself... as a problem concerning religious language. In a sentence the issue is whether distinctively religious utterances are instances of the cognitive or of the noncognitive uses of language.’

The decree of the Council of Mâcon (585 AD) that women do not have a soul has the honoured place in liberal demonology given to historical events that never happened. It is a tale to treasure. As the eponymous wine is sipped at elegant tables, the misguided deeds of bishops can be recalled, and the only regret must be that no Synod of Brie or Council of Camembert offers occasion for further mirth. On these occasions, facts become such skimble-skamble stuff as puts men from their dreams.

For the Council, of course, never decreed any such thing, if only for the persuasive reason that some of the bishops may themselves have been married. The penalties applied to a bishop who decrees that his wife does not have a soul are not recorded in canon law presumably as surpassing male imagination. The decrees do indeed contain stuff to fuel fires: the fifteenth requires laymen to doff their hat to a cleric the sixteenth forbids the widow of a sub-deacon to marry on pain of being confined to a convent. But neither the word ‘woman’ nor the word ‘soul’ occurs even once in the decrees.

One does not hope ever to be free of the myth—but it may be interesting to trace its history, which is complex. Briefly: in the late seventeenth century some Dutch publications alleged that the Council had debated whether women are human; this was linked in nineteenth- century France with earlier satirical literature from Italy which claimed to ‘prove’ from the Bible that women do not have a soul, and the upshot was the allegation that the Council had issued a decree to this effect. The allegation was refuted by scholars but persisted as a myth which later reachcd England first, and then Ireland, where it flourishes today.

Ian Markham makes two basic contentions in his article ‘Creating options: Shattering the “exclusivist, inclusivist, and pluralist” paradigm’. The first is that the threefold paradigm of approaches to the question of salvation outside explicit Christianity are flawed and therefore unhelpful. The second is that his own tentative proposal further indicates this point, for his own position does not fit neatly into any of the three approaches. I think that Markham’s arguments for his first contention are not entirely convincing and therefore his own proposal fails to fit the categories, not because it has created a new option, but because it leaves certain questions unanswered and introduces a certain amount of confusion. In fact I will suggest that the usefulness of the three categories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism allows us to see more clearly what type of questions he leaves unanswered and thereby justify themselves heuristically in providing a basis for criticising those who question their viability. This brief reply has as its main purpose to defend the threefold paradigm in the theology of religions.

This is not to say that these three categories are problem-free. It is simply the case that a sustained and convincing critique of them is yet to be produced. I agree with Markham that Michael Barnes develops a sophisticated Trinitarian inclusivism despite his claim to break the paradigm. Kenneth Surin’s critique of the paradigm is of an altogether different nature. Surin seems to redescribe the terrain so that there are no valid theological questions left, only political-sociological questions.

While reading Aidan Nichols’ book, The Panther and the Hind: A Theological History of Anglicanism (T & T Clark, 1993) I remembered the story of the country which decided that their young people should be taught to play football and that a national side should be fielded to compete with other countries. So they wrote to the Football Association in England for copies of the laws of football and sent them to their schools with instructions that the young people should learn the rules by heart, be tested in their knowledge and then be sent out to play. There was, apparently, some consternation in high places when chaos ensued and questions were asked as to why people who had learned the rules still could not play the game.

Aidan Nichols has certainly learned the rules of Anglicanism but still appears—at least to this Anglican reviewer who was taught the rules by one of those whom Nichols recognises as a “separated doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church, Eric Mascall—to be unable to play the game. For there is no doubt at all about Fr. Nichols’ scholarship and the acuity of his perspective on the history and development of Anglicanism since the Reformation. But none of his perception enables him to see how or why such a perverse—in his view—beast can continue to survive as it does with such vigour and obvious self-enjoyment, or why all right thinking Anglicans do not immediately see the error of their ways and at least join a Uniate Anglican Church and so regularise their position.

‘Desire nothing except to be pleasing to him and to do his most holy will’ [CRE I 28]. This simple formula, inspired by the relationship between Christ crucified and his Father, and lived ever more intensely in the most radical way by Catherine, provides the key to an integrated reading of her spirituality, of which it is the heart. But how does it actually take shape in practice? Will it not don the emaciated face of renunciation, gloomy earnestness, human frustration, all-enveloping pain, self-denial and deprivation? The reality is in fact quite different. There is not a single letter in which Catherine does not invite people to be ‘cheerful’ [cf. CRF VII. 3 163-167], This certainly does not mean a superficial, silly cheerfulness which is only skin-deep and unpredictable in its durability. What Catherine encourages is a cheerfulness which does not exclude the heights and the depths of the various states of spirit people find themselves in as their circumstances vary, whether internally or externally, but which remains constant even in times of pain and tribulation. It is a cheerfulness which is rooted in its depths in the very mystery of God and whose intensity flows from faith, hope and the love with which it abandons itself to God’s plan in the specific life of each individual.