The search for God of necessity entails a commitment to the Kingdom and its values. That Kingdom is a present and future reality. Out of our fumblings and failures, our confusion and darkness, our dreams and ceaseless striving, the Lord of history reveals his kingdom among us and brings to pass his purposes.

Inevitably the process involves repeated death and resurrection. When everything seems lost and darkness reigns, the power of God is most clearly manifested in our weakness.

The Church, we know, has no political agenda. It has, however, a divine mission to proclaim the Kingdom, witness to its values, be a sign and source of universal reconciliation and human renewal. The Church and its members must be a prophetic voice in society. We must seek always to discern the signs of the time and be agents of constructive change at every level. Experience, however teaches us that members of the Church may not speak with one voice for the way ahead is sometimes unclear.

The Church’s mission is both universal and particular. There is a global responsibility as well as one which is national and continental. The concern for our immediate country and its neighbours must never for instance blind us to the needs of the Southern hemisphere. To the best of our ability we must keep alive in our continent the sense that solidarity, interdependence and practical concern embrace the whole planet. In this connection I would remind you of what the Holy Father wrote in his most recent Encyclical Centesimus Annus concerning the universal destination of the goods of creation, both material and spiritual.

John Milbank's work is familiar to the assiduous reader of New Blackfriars, who will recall his two-part study of William Warburton, as well as his more recent essays ‘On Baseless Suspicion: Christianity and the Crisis of Socialism’ and ‘Religion, Culture and Anarchy: the attack on the Amoldian vision’. Although not incorporated materially into Theology and Social Theory, these essays open up related lines of investigation, and, having read them, one might not find his massive book so intimidating. It may be said, at least, that one might have been prepared for this venture into a post-Nietzschean theology which is also profoundly (Anglican) Catholic—an unlikely conjunction, one might have thought.

The book’s dense scholarship and theoretical complexity are formidable, but, fortunately, in the title, the epigraph and the table of contents, we are offered three clues to the brilliantly simple thesis which it takes all the learning and argument in the rest of the book to expound and substantiate.

A book entitled Theology and Social Theory in a series containing titles such as Theology and Philosophy, Theology and Politics and the like, would naturally be expected to bring together in a mutually illuminating way what everyone is likely to think of as two radically different disciplines, each with its own autonomous method and distinctive discourse—‘naturally’, that is to say, in the cultural environment of carefully protected academic specialisms which we inhabit and which the author means to disrupt. Theologians, peering through the machicolations of faith-engaging scholarship, would learn from sociologists about the ways in which ideas are shaped by social processes.

The Vatican’s case against military intervention by the US-led ‘coalition’ in the Persian Gulf was forcefully argued on the following grounds: 1) the destruction likely to be caused in the war would be entirely disproportionate to the not insignificant evil caused by Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, 2) there was every likelihood that noncombatant death and injury would be enormous, 3) there was from the start every likelihood that Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait could be secured through diplomatic activity and negotiations without resort to the application of military force. The ‘just war’ case for the Gulf War was therefore not met, as far as the Vatican was concerned, because the case for the war failed to meet the criteria of proportionate response, discrimination, and last resort. It is true that, in framing his own objections to the war, Pope John Paul II was chary of referring directly to the so-called ‘just-war theory’. But Peter Hebblethwaite’s comment that ‘John Paul is not much interested in the pros and cons of just-war theology’ fails to account for the extent to which the Pope’s arguments against the war fell within the traditional criteria.

From the outset, the Vatican’s position was shaped by a few principles which, though broadly stated, remained constants in its attitude during the Gulf Crisis. A statement appearing in the Vatican’s official daily newspaper L'Osservatore Romano (9 August) along with the first papal statement on the crisis (26 August) contained the seeds of Vatican policy as it developed over the following months.

Latin-American, Asian, black and feminist Liberation theologies have in common that theology becomes re-defined from and by the perspective and experience of the oppressed group. The hope was that through doing theology from the margins—or from the ‘underside of history—the central models (paradigms) of traditional theology would be transformed: ethics becomes Liberation Ethics, concepts of God, Christ, and Spirit are grounded in the experience of the struggle for justice, the Bible is read as a text of Liberation, and a new readiness would appear to dialogue with the ‘submerged’ faiths of oppressed peoples.

My argument here is that the paradigm shift did not go deep enough. Looking around at the worsening crises of the world—African famine, environmental disasters, structural violence and the ineluctable spirals of poverty—it seems to me that Liberation Theology has not succeeded because it has not as yet tackled the roots of oppression in language and logic itself. Tracking the roots of oppression to their theological and philosophical sources is a necessary activity of liberation. It means questioning the foundational myth on which our western civilisation is based. Even the feminist attempts to construct a new ethics have not gone far enough. For example, American psychologist and educationalist Carol Gilligan attempted to construct an ethics of care and responsibility, based on her research, as opposed to an ethics of justice and fairness, (the categories of her colleague, Lawrence Kohlberg).

Martha says to Jesus, ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ (Jn.II:21) Lazarus’ death breaks up a home, a family. The family of Mary and Martha and Lazarus was one of the places in which Jesus rested and refreshed himself, and it is a home that is broken by death and by the apparent absence of Jesus: ‘If you had been here, my brother would not have died.’

Many of Philip’s friends will experience his death in much the same way. Whenever one came to see Philip, one was made to feel immediately at home; one was made welcome, as he put a large gin and tonic into one’s hand and one relaxed into a deep, comfortable chair. And he communicated a sense of the Church as a large open home, in which anyone could find acceptance, peace. A place where, as St.Paul said in the second reading no one would be despised.

Perhaps the roots of this vision of Christianity lay in his own sense of family. He was devoted to his family, to his brother, Gilbert, a priest of the Church of England, to his sister-in-law, to his nephews and nieces. His house was filled with family furniture and pictures of ancestors. And he shared this open hearth with all sorts of waifs and strays who came his way.

This was why he was such a good University chaplain for eleven years. He claimed that this saved him from being narrow and dogmatic; it opened his mind. But that was because he opened himself to anyone who turned up, and especially to foreign students, when he was based at the Overseas Students’ Chaplaincy from 1966 to 1973, before he came here.

Sometime around the middle of the third century Dionysius of Alexandria gave his views on the Apocalypse of John. He said

Many readers have no doubt entertained such views. Dionysius was not inclined to endorse them. He would not, he said, reject a book so highly thought of by many of his co-religionists. But he doesn’t find it any more intelligible for all that. He goes on to say

The book must be meaningful, then, because he doesn’t understand it That curious position may actually provide a clue to the way the book works. What the seer saw is spectacular. But more interesting is how he saw it—or rather how he says he saw it, in his book of the vision. The significance of Revelation lies, to a considerable extent, in how the seer wrote it.

The Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, two Carmelite friars living on the top of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land, a few Dominican friars, and some 200,000 other Christians, clerical and lay, share something special with me which marks us out, in some respects, from our other brothers and sisters in Christ. We are all bom and bred Jewish, and we share this characteristic with all the apostles, with the Mother of our Lord, and with our Lord himself. Some of us are more aware of our Jewish background than others, and some of us are more deeply steeped in the traditions of Rabbinical Judaism than others of our group. Are we ex- Jews, people who have abandoned their Jewish identity by accepting Jesus as our Messiah, or do we remain Jewish in Christ? I believe that we remain Jewish in Christ, and that Christ calls us to strengthen, to nurture and to cherish our Jewish identity within his body, the Church. There are many people who disagree with this proposition. There have long been Christians who believe that Jews are called to abandon their Jewish identity when they are baptised into Christ, and who see the persistence of Jewish identity among baptised Christians as an affront to our Lord. For such people, my belief in the persistence of my Jewishness and in the importance of the Jewish identity of people like me is folly at best and apostasy at worst. Many Jews concur with this view, albeit from a different angle, viewing all Jews who become Christians as apostates who have abandoned any identification with the Jewish people and have joined hands with those who have persecuted them and murdered them. The baptism of Jews, on their account, is a bar to fellowship, a stumbling-block. I would like to essay a discussion of Jewish-Christian identity and its dilemmas within the Church.

The delay in publishing the Dead Sea scrolls, long a quiet academic scandal, was recently thrust into the forefront of the news by The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception?. Its authors, M.Baigent and R. Leigh, two qualified experts in discerning arcane conspiracies, manifestly Find the world a threatening place. They give reality to their nightmare of Vatican world domination by claiming that the moment the scrolls were discovered a prescient Vatican, foreseeing the damage that first-century documents (then still unread!) must inevitably cause the faith, inserted its inquisitorial minions, the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem, at the beginning of a process which to date they have consistently subverted. An hilarious thesis to those who know the facts, but disturbing to those forced to rely on titillating innuendo.

A major archaeological discovery is usually a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Time and time again chance, not planning, is the decisive factor. Had Heinrich Schliemann dug another sector of Troy, he would never have found the spectacular gold objects he identified as Priam’s treasure. If Kathleen Kenyon had placed her main trench 15 metres further north she would never have brought to light the 8000 BC tower which is the earliest evidence of urban organisation.

Europe’s recovery from the destruction of World War II was slow, and achieved only with massive U.S. aid. Europe was shattered psychologically as well as physically. Since the late 19th century the major European powers had lost their economic lead to the U.S.A., and probably also to the dynamic Russian Empire. But Russia’s isolation after 1918 and American isolationism had obscured this reality until the end of the war, when these two countries emerged, to many it seemed overnight, as nuclear superpowers, glowering at each other across a prostrate Europe. It seemed as if Europe had been definitively side-lined as a major player on the world stage.

The post-war attempt to unite western Europe economically and politically was designed to challenge what seemed to many to have been an inexorable shift in the global power balance. But even if European unity were ultimately to be achieved through this process—and at first the most that seemed attainable was a limited measure of economic integration between six of Europe’s thirty-odd states—it appeared unlikely that this could ever produce much more than a slowing down of the process of Europe’s relative decline vis-ik-vis the new super-powers.

Yet forty years later the Europe thus launched is being called in aid by a collapsing Soviet Union to save it from disaster and possible famine. Moreover within Europe itself the attractive power of the European Community is proving embarrassingly strong, with applications for membership currently threatening to overwhelm it. And it is towards the much more open economy of western Europe rather than towards the U.S. that many countries in the rest of the world now look when seeking to improve their trading opportunities.

Gustavo Gutierrez, in a recent visit to Cambridge, told this story about the Medellin conference of 1968. (This is my recollection of his story and not an exact quotation.) Following that important gathering, the South American bishops received a letter from Rome. ‘We can see’, it read, ‘that your circumstances are very different from those we experience here in Europe. To enable us to help you, please send experts on South American economics, politics, sociology and anthropology to Rome. . . But don’t send any theologians because we have our own theologians here.’

Despite the fashionable sound to the phrase, theology has always been done ‘in context’. Augustine was no less contextual a theologian than Bonhoeffer, with each page attesting to the writer’s particular education, formation as a Christian, pastoral concerns and so on. Does this alarm us? Should this alarm us? If we admit to, and even delight in, the diverse contexts for the doing of theology are we ‘going soft’ on any claim to a universally valid Christian message? How do we speak of the truth and yet speak from our particularity? These are the questions I wish to consider here, questions whose significance for contemporary theology, now a global and ecumenical enterprise, need not be underlined.

I would like to begin, however, at a place seemingly remote from our own—Europe in the sixteenth century. I should like to look at one of those Reformation debates which, while distant in time and sensibility from those of our century, have repercussions which all Christians to a greater or lesser degree must still feel. For reasons which I hope will become clear, I should like to begin this discussion of ‘truth’ with a look at an exchange of letters in 1539 between Cardinal Sadoleto and John Calvin.