It is often claimed that high technology won the Gulf War for the allies. However, a careful analysis of the ways in which the mass media was controlled after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would clearly indicate that it was not just technology which gave the allies their victory, but also the skillful media manipulationmedia. At the very outset of this article I would like to make it clear that not only the allies but the Iraqis themselves were guilty of media manipulation. Saddam Hussein used the media first of all to convince the predominantly Islamic Iraqi people that they were waging a Holy War’ against the western infidel. He attempted to portray the war as a religious affair, a cause of Allah’, hoping both to tap the resources of religious feeling throughout the Islamic world and to draw on the political capital of Muslims in the Middle East. Throughout the crisis he did not hesitate to match the tone of his rhetoric with that of President Bush.

When the allies began their air attacks on Iraq on January 17, Saddam informed the nation that the enemy had declared war, by using the phrase: ‘the mother of all battles has begun !’ He assured his people, in graphic terms, that the enemy would be burned alive and buried in the desert sands. Throughout the war the Iraqi people were never given an accurate picture of events at the front.

The fact that a Hungarian has been asked to contribute a paper on the theme of Christian hope in Europe’s future might suggest that a ray of hope for European Christianity is expected from the eastern edge of our continent: ex oriente lux. Can my message reassure the aging and, in many respects, decadent Christianity of the west?

Many outward signs have indeed been pointing in this direction. I do not believe, however, that we can judge simply from the recent papal visit to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Though spectacular crowds on our television screens have an eminent value for religious propaganda, we in the west expect something more behind these scenes. My real task should therefore be a foray into the background of the east European landscape.

My foray will be limited, since I do not trust myself outside the confines of my native Hungary. It will be uncertain, since I am going to speak of a situation reminding us of the very beginning: ‘...and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep’. At the same time we can feel that ‘the Spirit of God was brooding over the chaos’ which the last forty years of desert wandering ‘uncreated’ in a part of our common European homeland.

Name your three best friends, and then name the three nations that you most admire. This test for self-knowledge generally reveals the discrepancy between the truly significant others in our lives and what we esteem as the great and glorious nations. Generally, the three most significant and dear persons in our lives are not particularly wealthy, or powerful or prestigious, or from ‘superior’ ethnic backgrounds. Yet still we persist in identifying glory with manifest power, a fact which underscores the urgent need for Christians to recapture a proper understanding of “glory’, now almost obscured by the modem secular notion of power. For surely it is our Christian conviction that the glory of God has been revealed in the poverty of Christ?

God speaks his word of hope and love in human images (in Greek eikones—‘icons’), sacraments or ‘efficacious signs’ which move our hearts and enlighten our minds. We cannot do what we cannot at least in some way imagine or envision. We cannot believe, hope and love—our most significant ‘doing’—without enabling images (’icons’, in other words) or sacraments. We cannot perform the deeds of faith and hope and love without the living icons that constitute orientations to action. The Eternal Word of God became flesh in the perfect image of God that is Jesus Christ, in order to transform all human hearts and minds, enabling us through the gift of his Spirit to love God above all and our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus Christ and his Church are the sacrament or efficacious sign of God’s creative and sustaining and predestining activity in the universal, human story, making possible our responding love and faith and hope in God. The Christian community affirms that it has seen or experienced the ‘glory’ of God in his perfect image Jesus Christ, for the glory is the impact of God’s active presence transforming our lives.

It was not the purpose of Theology and Social Theory (whose argument has been so accurately precised by Fergus Kerr) to imagine the Church as Utopia. Nor to discover in its ramified and fissiparous history some single ideal exemplar. For this would have been to envisage the Church in spatial terms—as another place, which we might arrive at, or as this identifiable site, which we can still inhabit. How could either characterize the Church which exists, finitely, not in time, but as time, taken in the mode of gift and promise? Not as a peace we must slowly construct, piecemeal, imbibing our hard-learned lessons, but as a peace already given, superabundantly, in the breaking of bread by the risen Lord, which assembles the harmony of peoples then and at every subsequent eucharist. But neither as a peace already realized, which might excuse our labour. For the body and blood of Christ only exist in the mode of gift, and they can be gift (like any gift) only as traces of the giver and promise of future provision from the same source. This is not an ideal presence real or imagined, but something more like an ‘ideal transmission’ through time, and despite its ravages. Fortunately the Church is first and foremost neither a programme, nor a ‘real’ society, but instead an enacted, serious fiction. Only in its eucharistic centring is it enabled to sustain a ritual distance from itself, to preserve itself, as the body of Christ under judgement by the body of Christ, which after all, it can only receive. In a sense, this ritual distance of the Church from itself defines the Church, or rather deflects it from any definition of what it is. In its truth it is not, but has been and will be. (Here I am much indebted to Kieran Flanagan for pointing out that my book omitted the ritual dimension).