This is the first of a series of articles intended to be an introduction to contemporary political theology. It is not meant to be a survey of movements or literature. There is already a large and increasing number of articles and books which set out to do this. But a certain amount of surveying will have to be done, since it is of the essence of political theology that it is tied to history. It is not a purely theoretical discipline which can be elaborated without regard to events. It has been generated precisely as a Christian response to events. It is a response to the historical misappropriation of theology. It is a historical re appropriation of the Bible, of the Christian tradition and of the practice of worship out of the hands of those who serve certain dominant class interests with the aid of these things. It is a critique of Christianity in its form of class ideology and at the same time a critique of those societies which use Christianity in this way. This critique is done in the name of a more authentic Christianity, faithful — it is hoped — to the true purposes of revelation. It is not therefore a mere branch of theology, to be studied alongside of a ‘theology of marriage’ or even a ‘moral theology’. It is not a ‘theology of politics’, still less a ‘theology and politics’: In the hands of the Liberation theologians at least, it claims to be a complete rethinking of theology: an entirely new turning point in the historical articulation of the Christian faith. Such a large claim will need examination. At any rate it is clear to me that theology can no longer proceed without a close examination of the role that it has played in the past and even now plays in the political determinants of human life. Christian theological innocence is now lost in this respect: as should have been acknowledged since Marx’s critique of religion. We cannot escape facing the use to which theology has been put in case the very purposes of revelation have been frustrated by this use. No politically neutral theology is now possible. Political experience has forced itself upon theology.

In this article, a number of findings of a series of focussed interviews with fifteen Roman Catholic clergy associated with four English parishes will be discussed in the light of a recent survey of clergy from three denominations. It will be shown that in a number of important respects the findings of this mail questionnaire survey were not supported by the evidence derived from taped interviews in the present research.

All the priests interviewed were or had been recently associated with one of the four parishes selected for the study of change in the Roman Catholic community in England. The parishes had been selected to reflect as far as possible with the resources available, both regional and social class variations. Two parishes were in the London area. One was a middle class commuter parish covering an area of some fifteen square miles, about 20 miles outside the city and with a Catholic density of around 8% of the population. The second was an inner-city parish occupying under one square mile in area with a large proportion of both Irish and New Commonwealth immigrants. In this parish Catholics comprised some 18% of the population. The remaining two parishes, both covering under one square mile in. area were in Preston where Catholics comprised between one quarter and one third of the population. Relatively few Catholics in Preston admitted to having any Irish ancestry. One parish was an inner-city, traditional working class parish in a state of population decline and aging associated with massive but arrested urban redevelopment programmes and the second, on the outskirts of Preston consisted mainly of new housing estates occupied by upwardly mobile people in professional, managerial and technical occupations.

During the 1979 General Election campaign, industrial relations featured as a prominent issue. Indeed, it might correctly be claimed that the general public in confidently voting in Margaret Thatcher, were voting against the alleged misuse of trade union power. Rising prices, falling standards of living and increasing violence have been popularly attributed to “big unions” striking against each other, against the housewife and against the general public. In a speech only days before the last government fell, Mrs Thatcher outlined the Conservative package to restore stability to Britain’s economic and social order: the statutory inhibiting of trade union activity, the enforcement of law and order, the creation of wealth and the reward of individual success. Such opinion was supported in the press and on television by editorial comment, by criticism of union power from the judiciary, and a former chief of police comparing union power with the Nazi control of Germany in the 1930s. The general election result and subsequent cabinet appointments indicate an important change in British politics. The electorate have voted for a radical change and they have voted for the politics and economics of the right. Characteristically, a society in crisis has opted for regression, the reassertion of old hierarchies, values and judgements, with the hope, in particular, of turning back the menace of union power, which, it is claimed, is a threat to the social order. Such perspectives have become the commonplace explanation of the world and of industrial relations in particular, and they have been clothed in the habit of St Francis of Assisi, setting them in the context of the Christian struggle for peace.

In the past few articles we have been tracing some of the ways in which philosophers and theologians have used the idea of the ineffability and incomprehensibility of God. They warn us insistently not to suppose that we know more about God than we actually do. Whether our understanding of God derives from philosophy or from revelation or from our own experience, they remind us that he is still largely unknown to us, mysterious and transcendent.

Those who are drawn by the idea of that “infinite ignorance” which was proclaimed by Evagrius may find all this quite delightful. But may not some people rather feel that they are left with almost no God at all? We may recall the tragic conclusion of Cassian’s account of the anthropomorphite controversy in Egypt. When at last old Paphnutius is convinced of the truth of the anti-anthropomorphite theology, he throws himself on the ground, howling. “Poor, poor me!” he cries out. “They have taken away my God and now I have no God to hold on to. I do not know whom I am to worship now or whom I am to pray to” (Coni. 10,3).

As Bowker says, “No matter how ‘God’ is constituted, if there is no feedback at all into the actual situations and experiences of life, plausibility is under maximum strain; if no effect of God can ever be discerned or specified, then in effect God is nowhere” (The Sense of God p. 84). Now maybe there is good reason for saying that that is precisely where God is. But does our negative theology not tend to make God so remote from our actual situations and experiences, does it not make it so difficult to accept anything at all as an “effect of God”, that it eventually ceases to be plausible to talk of God at all?

The gospel preached by Jesus promised the liberation of man and woman, both Jew and Gentile (see Matt. 11: 4-6; 12: 18-21; Luke 3: 4-6; 4: 18-21; 6: 20-23). Essential to this liberation — though not the whole of it — is liberation from injustice and oppression. Since this is what people do to one another, the gospel promises the rectification of human communal living. Salvation itself consists in belonging to the redeemed people of God, living according to his will. Human beings are not saved one by one, on their merits, but by their becoming members of a a new people raised from the dead in Jesus Christ. So belonging to this people is salvation for those who were oppressed and salvation too for those who were their oppressors, in so far as they have repented of their injustices and learned to live in a different way. But if men do learn to practise justice, it is not this which saves them, but their belonging to Christ. Justice as it is ordinarily understood — a respect for the rights of others — is not saving in itself. Nor would a society which faultlessly observed the demands of this justice be equivalent to the Kingdom of God. Jesus in his preaching demanded something greater than this justice (see Matt. 5: 17-48; Luke 6: 27-38; Matt. 25: 31-46). Matt. 25: 31-46). But it is not adequate to identify this “some-thing greater” as love, in the sense of virtue distinct from justice. We cannot, like some modem philosophers, make a sharp distinction between the virtue of justice, having to do with rights, and the virtue of love and benevolence, which is supererogatory. (The scriptural reasons for not making this sharp distinction in theology are discussed in my article, “A Christian View of Justice” in New Blackfriars, August 1978).

The Open Church Group in Great Britain has been campaigning to persuade homosexuals who “feel separated from their churches because of their nature to reconsider their position and return to the practice of their faith”. The problem which the group envisages is a real, though variable one. Attitudes among theologians may be slowly changing (though not all of us would agree that in this field all change is for the good); but, as two American writers on female homosexuality have put it, “Inroads into religious thought and re-evaluation are a slow and cumbersome process. [Lesbians] live in the now.” It is scarcely sufficient to shrug the shoulders and say “In time, it will all work out”. This is not enough for Christian fellowship, because Christian fellowship belongs to the now, not to the contingent future.

Attitudes in the Churches which go so far as to deny Christian fellowship to ‘sexual minorities’ may be reduced to one simple, if generally unrecognized factor: dread. Mystery misconceived is dread: it is distracting, zwiespältig — dividing the mind against itself, making neutrality impossible. It is the negative side of holy fear: it is what St Paul presumably meant when he warned against the destructive consequences of unworthy communion. Whatever the aetiological reasons which might be adduced in hard clinical fashion to ‘explain’ what has been called ‘sexual deviance’, it remains at the end of the day for a great many ‘normal’ people, and therefore for a great many Christians, an object of dread, something which unsettles their security.

A major difficulty in any discussion of abortion is the immediate impulse that most people experience to label one another as either pro- or anti-abortion. The abortion debate has been stultified by this facile stereotyping and authentic dialogue rendered virtually impossible.

On the one hand, the anti-abortion camp is characterised as populated by conservative Catholics blindly following male-originated absolutist directives. While on the other side, the ground is depicted as thick with radical feminists driven by self interest while despising children, marriage and men.

In this article I shall attempt to place Ernest Hemingway in an intellectual tradition that continues to exert enormous influence on our civilization. The paradox of placing Hemingway, of all people, in an intellectual tradition will be dealt with in passing. What I wish to do straightaway is to say what I mean by an intellectual tradition; I shall then sketch the particular tradition I have in mind; the body of the article will be devoted to substantiating the thesis that Hemingway belongs to this tradition. By way of conclusion I shall say why I believe this kind of thesis, the establishment of which requires a combination of philosophical and literary analysis, is important.

It is not all that easy to say what is meant by an intellectual tradition in the present context. It does not refer to a single, unified philosophical system but rather to a set or series of philosophical systems that hang together naturally because of certain assumptions or methodological principles common to all of them. It is a fairly loose mesh of ideas the various strands of which represent distinct lines of development but nevertheless interconnect and sustain each other in certain important respects. The three main strands of the tradition to which I shall assign Hemingway are empiricism, behaviourism and naturalism. It will be necessary to say briefly what each is or stands for and why they can be considered as amounting jointly to a distinctive pattern of ideas.

Traditional British empiricism received its classical statement from David Hume and it is to Hume that I shall refer in outlining this philosophical option. The importance empiricism places on the senses and on sensations — what Hume calls ‘impressions’ — is vital. The contents of the mind are divided into ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’, and ideas are said to derive from impressions.

“Christian socialism is,” according to Karl Marx, “but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart burnings of the aristocrat”. As always Marx had an element of truth. In the generation before the appointment of Henry Manning to the See of Westminster, British Catholic social concern, if not aristocratic, was undoubtedly paternalist in character. The faults are obvious but alternative strategies in the grim reality of mid-nineteenth century Britain are less apparent. In the prevailing social and economic condition of British Catholics, any immediately effective alternative strategy would be hard to imagine. On these foundations, Cardinal Manning was to build his much publicised social concern and within the Catholic community, these limited, paternalistic ideas of reform were to persist long after the social and economic condition of the laity had changed beyond recognition. In both phases, the paternalist and the socialist, the peculiar condition of the Scottish Catholic community produced imaginative lay responses: Robert Monteith and John Wheatley were indicative.

The traditional interpretation of British Catholic social concern has invariably stressed the role of Cardinal Manning. His social interest is contrasted with the more severe intellectual approach of Newman: immediate pastoral considerations defeated longer term interests. Though Manning’s original contribution might be challenged, he remains of great stature. Even in Derek Holmes More Roman than Rome: English Catholicism in the Nineteenth Century. (1978), the relative position of the two men, Manning and Newman, is well portrayed and central. But whichever personality attracts our sympathy and wins our support, they are both clerics.

The period between the publication of the encyclical ‘Divini Red-emptoris’ (On Atheistic Communism) in 1937 and the election of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, was marked by a definite and fundamental change in Vatican/Communist relations. This study attempts to chart this development, explaining exactly how and why this transformation has occurred. The few other studies of this subject have all lacked a historical perspective, and have therefore tended to encourage the false notion that the views and action of the successive popes have remained the same. Part I of this essay examines the hostile intransigence of Pius XI and Pius XII during the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, and centres upon the startling change of attitude promoted by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The more cautious but perhaps more significant promotion and extension of this Joh-anine ideal by Paul VI over a longer period of time will be analysed (along with a brief look at the state of Vatican/Communist relations in the present day). In Part II this study is essentially Vatican centred; the Church is large and often ambiguous, and local hierarchies, groups of militant lay Catholics, Christian Marxists, prominent theologians, and individual clergy, have only been analysed when they influence or have helped to change the Holy See. Papal speeches and letters, promulgations and edicts from the Holy Office and the other Vatican Congregations, and particularly Papal encyclicals, have been used extensively, and other primary material such as journals, reviews, newspapers and other contemporary writings have been consulted where necessary. The change in the nature of communism and the policies of the communist world (primarily the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, but also China, Indo-China, Latin America and the European Communist parties) I have treated as a secondary development due to limitations of time, space and sources.

On Thursday, 4th October, 1979 James Mackey, formerly Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies in the University of San Francisco, delivered his inaugural lecture as Thomas Chalmers Professor of Theology in the University of Edinburgh. The lecture hall in New College, the Divinity Faculty of the University, was filled to overflowing. Undoubtedly it was Professor Mackey's reputation which had drawn many members of his audience to hear him. Strange to say, that reputation was established not by any of his written works, nor by any extensive familiarity with his personal biography. What had attracted some, at least, of his hearers was his appointment having been the subject of an unprecedented debate in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in May of this year.

In a previous article (New Blackfriars, September 1980) I launched an attack on the ultramontane party and policy which appears to dominate the Vatican at the moment, and to be attempting a return to the high centralisation in the Holy See of all authority, all decisive control over the Church that marked the epoch between the first and second Vatican Councils, 1870 — 1962. I said this looks to many people like an attempt to dismantle the work of Vatican II, or at least to quench the spirit of that council.

Many Catholics assume, wrongly, that this concentration of authority and controlling power in the hands of the Holy See, i.e. of the pope as an institution, is how the Church was instituted by Jesus Christ. They assume that in essentials the Church has always been like that from St Peter onwards. This is an assumption that the pervasive ultramontane theology — or rather ideology — does nothing at all to discourage. A trivial illustration may be had from the new English breviary. The old Latin breviary (and the new Latin one also, I presume) used to give saints their ecclesiastical rank in naming their feasts or in heading selections from their writings; so we would have “St Elizabeth, widow”, “St Edward, king”, “St Bede the venerable, priest”, “St Thomas, martyr and bishop”, “St Augustine, bishop”, “St Gregory the Great, pope”, and so on. The new English breviary has dropped this old-fashioned formality — whether rightly or wrongly is a matter of taste. But it has made one exception. Holy popes remain popes first and saints second; so we have, for example, “A reading from the letter of Pope St Clement I to the Corinthians”, or “From a sermon of Pope St Leo the Great”, but not “A reading from the first letter of Apostle St Paul to the Corinthians”, and certainly not “From a sermon of Bishop St Augustine”.

One of the main points of crisis in modem civilization concerns, in my view, the relation of conscience and authority. Where these two are not simply taken to be polar opposites, neither tolerating the claims of the other, the one is often subordinated to the other. This may be right. Unfortunately what should then dominate is often made subordinate and vice versa. Thus Fr Eric D’Arcy writes:

D’Arcy goes on to quote Newman in support:

Now we may I think take these authors as referring here to a common, non-technical notion of conscience which, we might want to say, is our knowledge, either of what we ought to do or of the rightness or wrongness of what we have done, or merely the memory of an unambiguously evil deed. But here at once the difficulty would meet us of the erroneous conscience. If this is as much a conscience as a correct one is then it seems we cannot characterize conscience as knowledge, not even as our knowledge. It will only be a seeming knowledge of right and wrong, and a seeming only to ourselves moreover.

Karl Rahner, as we saw last time (New Blackfriars May 1980), believes that, however much of Barth’s work may endure, it has not settled the questions raised by Liberal Protestantism To that extent, then, Rahner sides with those who think that no amount of massive reaffirmation of classical Christian doctrine can ever dispense us from facing Bultmann’s programme of demythologization.

Schleiermacher, who died in 1834, was the first theologian to face up to the problems of making sense of Christian faith in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. No doubt, by the close of the century, the movement he initiated had degenerated into mere accommodation of Christianity to the spirit of the age. Barth’s outcry, particularly in the 1921 version of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, was a necessary protest against critical methods in biblical exegesis which amounted to rationalism, and against an emphasis on religious experience in systematic theology which promoted subjectivism. The counterpart in the Catholic Church to Barth’s protest was the encyclical letter Pascendi issued by St Pius X in 1907 condemning Catholic Modernism on much the same grounds as Barth rejected Liberal Protestantism. Even allowing for the difference in literary genre, and ecclesiastical function, Barth’s commentary is obviously an incomparably richer human and Christian document, and of altogether greater intellectual distinction. The papal letter, as far as the doctrinal part goes, was apparently composed by Joseph Lemius (1860-1923), an extremely influential Roman theologian otherwise known best as an effective protector of Mercier’s reputation and of the kind of neo-Thomism he was promoting at Louvain, which others in the Vatican suspected (rightly, as it turned out) of being disturbingly open to ‘modem’ philosophy.

Latin America in recent years has presented the world with a new development language and by the same token a new concept of Development. In an effort to disassociate themselves from the inadequacies of past development thinking, the term “development” itself has been dropped in favour of “liberation”. The proponents of such a change have been led as much by reflection on their own experience at grass roots level, as by the influence of such thinkers as Teilhard de Chardin, Fanon, Marcuse, Mao Tse Tung, Nyerere, Guevara and the Gospels as one would expect in the case of Bishop Camara and theologians such as Guttierez and Segundo. Even the works of one of the main exponents of this trend, Paolo Freire, although not making direct allusion to Gospel texts, uses a language steeped in Christian and evangelical culture.

In the period in which Shakespeare wrote Measure for Measure, he was regularly investigating ways in which the drama might reflect and explore matters in doubt. In the Histories he had attempted to support certitudes upon which Man might depend, or at least find it useful or even necessary to depend; but after Henry V he was more interested in what was the experience of living with a philosophy or belief than in how it might be justified and made to work. Julius Caesar is a play of “isms”: stoicism, epicurism, absolutism, and so on; Hamlet, as a Renaissance scholar-prince, seeks a place to stand between the “isms” of chivalry and those of the new politics. In Measure for Measure, a morality play warping towards tragedy, it was the “isms” of practical Christianity which came under scrutiny.

Shakespeare’s working knowledge of the Bible has long been recognised, though he seems to have been more familiar with some books of the New Testament than with others. Matthew is more extensively quoted than the other three Evangelists together; Romans is more extensively quoted than even 1 and 2 Corinthians together. Romans was, of course, the great “Protestant” letter, and Shakespeare could be expected to know it more intimately than any other. Echoes of Romans, in terms of quotation, paraphrase, and shared terminology, are notably denser in Measure for Measure than in any other of Shakespeare’s plays. That this is not an accident, but rather evidence of a carefully planned investigation of Paul’s terminology and dialectic is what I am proposing in this paper. Whatever else he is doing, Shakespeare is testing out Romans.

St Francis of Assisi is perhaps one of those few men of whom it can be said fairly: He is a man for all times. Much has been said and will no doubt be said on the reasons for this wonderful popularity which somehow seems to transcend the bounds of time and conquer the hearts of men of all creeds and none. There are indeed many reasons why Francis of Assisi continues to hold such a magnetic sway over the lives of so many but it would seem that at the very core of all of these is the Christ-centredness of his life. For St Francis, Christ Jesus, Incarnate, Crucified and Risen, was all. He it is who was the-pattern to which Francis would conform himself totally. St Francis made no conditions but rather he made a total surrender. In a manner at once simple and direct and yet immensely profound do the writings of this most human of saints ring out with the clear affirmation: Deus Meus et Omnia! In this meditation an attempt will be made to illustrate from these writings the christocentric character of St Francis’ way of life and to show how such considerations can be sharply relevant to our times.

In the preface to the thirteenth volume of his Schriften zur Theologie, which appeared in 1978, Karl Rahner speaks of a fourteenth volume as nearing readiness for the press and to be published in late 1979 (to the best of my knowledge it has not yet appeared), and, although he does not say so in so many words, his tone suggests that the fourteenth will be the last of the series which began in 1954. Since the appearance in 1961 of Cornelius Ernst’s translation of the first volume, and the inauguration of Rahner’s Theological Investigations (with an allusion to Wittgenstein in the title), the English version has kept pace very creditably, despite inexorably rising costs and perceptible decline in concern with systematic theology, not to mention the difficulty of finding competent translators. The publication of Theological Investigations XVI, admirably translated by David Morland of Ampleforth, giving us the first half of Schriften XII (1975), the volume which Rahner dedicated to his mother on her hundredth birthday, offers an opportunity to review the series so far, and perhaps to underline the author’s most characteristic perspectives and concerns, or at any rate to outline pathways in this forbiddingly massive corpus of some 7000 pages of text.

It should be noted at the outset that the first six volumes of the English translation correspond exactly to the first six volumes of the original. As Rahner’s productivity was released in the wake of the Vatican Council his collected essays became increasingly substantial. The densely printed German volumes proved too unwieldy for us, with the result that the next four volumes to appear were split in two and thus yielded eight volumes in the English edition. The eleventh volume of the Schriften is the only exception to the rule that the series is devoted to miscellanies of articles, lecture texts and so on, by being confined entirely to Rahner’s work on the history of the sacrament of penance.

The topic of prayer is important to Christians and a number of recent books have been largely concerned with it. One of the latest is Hubert Richards’ What Happens When You Pray? a work that is likely to gain a lot of readers since Richards is now one of the most popular religious writers in Britain. Unfortunately, however, he is also somewhat misguided, and what follows is intended to say why. I do not want to write at length, and much of what I argue needs detailed development that I do not provide. But I still want to hold that more can be said of prayer than Richards allows. If you can begin to see why I am right, my purpose here will have been achieved.

To put things in perspective, it ought first to be agreed that much of what Richards says is, in fact, correct. Take, for example, the following remarks on God:

All of that is thoroughly in order. We have to talk of God in words which are normally applied to objects in the world, and, in doing so, we can often make statements that are perfectly true. But God is not an intelligible subject possessing attributes. He is not a member of a class or genus, not a being among beings. As Aquinas puts it, God ‘is identical with his own godhead, with his own life and with whatever else is similarly said of him’.