There have always been questions about God, but it was only recently that these took the form of doubt. Our ancestors studied the Scriptures and enquired from their priests and prophets, not because they expected a final and definitive solution but because they encountered a mystery that gave no rest to a questioning mind. Each answer gave rise to new questions, driving people on in their search, awakening in them a desire for a knowledge that could only be satisfied in the beatific vision.

But for the present generation a new and more basic question has emerged, a question that is of a different kind because it asks to be settled before we engage ourselves in the further search for God. First we need to know whether belief is not based upon an illusion. How are we to be certain about God’s existence; how can we dissolve our doubts as to whether the object of our faith is real?

Unfortunately the ‘proofs’ have done little to convince those who are not already convinced; others are left with their doubts. Most philosophers now profess that God, if he exists, is necessarily beyond the limited scope of our knowledge, a mystery on which every purely rational thought is wasted, a dimension too inaccessable to be explored, a matter of faith rather than of demonstration.

And so, in one sense, we seem to have returned to the time before the Enlightenment when true knowledge of God was given with faith and not with rational insight.

But doubt is still with us, and it would be naive to presume that it will be dissolved in a vigorous faith. For how can faith be vigorous when it begins with doubt ? Is it not inevitably somewhat supercilious, conditional because we cannot be certain that it is about anything at all ?It is hard to commit oneself to something which may be an illusion, and it is unrealistic to expect that our doubt will be dispelled by a total faith to which that very doubt is an obstacle.

In what must have been one of the most dynamic decades in the history of theology the name of Harvey Cox has constantly appeared. It would be enough for a theologian to have made a substantial contribution to one development within the period, but Cox has been at the centre of several different movements, not all of them mutually compatible. The history of his own progress during the eight years from 1965 is an interesting commentary also on what has been happening to theology in the period, more particularly the status of religion in Europe and North America.

Cox suddenly emerged on the theological scene in 1965 with his bestseller The Secular City. It may be seen as an appropriation of the work of the later Bonhoeffer. He spent 1962 in Berlin, participated in the Marxist-Christian dialogue of the time and was much influenced by Bonhoeffer’s idea of ‘religionless Christianity’. Perhaps Marx had been right and religion should be superceded. On his return to America he wrote The Secular City. ‘Much of that book represents my attempt to do for the American scene what Bonhoeffer had done for his’. Whether or not Bonhoeffer knew what he meant in writing of religionless Christianity we may doubt if he would have recognised Cox’s book as a continuation of the same theme. The link is rather with Bonhoeffer’s theme of ‘world come of age’. Bonhoeffer was the first Protestant theologian of standing for a generation who dared to put in a good word for the secular world. Under the influence of Barth the secular world was constantly condemned for Promethean tendencies. The enemy of the Nazis, the prisoner of the Gestapo was under no illusions of the reality of evil in the world, but he could see also the strength and achievement of that world.

Before examining Mr Allen’s particular criticisms of the CIIR Comment 19 on the Middle East, it is necessary first to dispel some of his misconceptions about the Catholic Institute. Through its regular newsbrief Comment CIIR gives the background to particular situations, usually international in character and examines them in the light of Catholic social teaching and values. In this way CIIR attempts to bring to the attention of the Catholic community in this country international issues of justice and peace which are quite properly their concern. Where the role of the Catholic Church is integral to the discussion, this is examined —for example, recent Comments on Portuguese Africa, Brazil and Chile. It is true that in Comment we do not quote extensively from official Church sources; rather we make references to these as necessary. As a Catholic body, we give a Catholic view, but it is only a Catholic view. Perhaps Mr Allen would care to specify where he feels the Comment is uncatholic or unchristian?

Quoting from an article in the Tablet of 15th June 1974, Mr Allen criticises our ‘selective approach to complex problems’. The article went on to say :

It seems that CIIR is being criticised not for what it does say but rather for what it has not. Whilst some may consider it a valid criticism of the CIIR that in recent years it has not produced anything on the persecution of Christians in communist countries, such criticism in no way invalidates what it has already said on Northern Ireland, Portugal or the Middle East.

Two summers ago, some friends of ours lost their 14-year-old son. He slipped while clambering around on a family picnic at the seaside—so innocuous in the sunshine!—and three days later they were told that he would never recover consciousness. It was explained to them that he could of course be kept ‘alive’ indefinitely if that was their wish ? Had our friends been Catholics, would they have found it any easier to make the decision to turn off the machine? I doubt it.

Yet I feel it should have been. Recent work on bereavement records the regularity with which the bereaved are prey to feelings of guilt over negligences to the dying person or the inevitable feeling where an illness is long-drawn out, that the sooner death comes, the better. What is likely then to be the psychological effect on those bereaved by their own decision, and how badly do they need the moral support and comfort of a caring but clear-headed church in this predicament? Outsiders accuse the autocratic Catholic Church of still issuing rule-of-thumb directives on all moral questions, and since, alone of the Christian churches, she still maintains an absolute stand on the taking of life (as those with experience in the abortion field well know), it would amaze them to learn that in such an agonising decision as this, the Church appears to have so little positive help to offer. Why ? One can of course suggest reasons : positive ones, such as the one of which my father constantly reminded us in our days of youthful revolt, that a Church which claims to speak to all peoples and for all ages must exercise a wise conservatism and not rush into rash statements; and the corollary : that the Church prefers to avoid rigid statements where the situation is uncertain and still in the process of developing—as is clearly the case with topical medical techniques.

Late-medieval conciliarism provides one theoretical model for the structure of the church, and in particular for its decision-making processes. The development of councils as a means of settling disputes which could not be settled at the local, episcopal level, and of making decisions binding on the church as a whole, in particular of defining the true faith, remains, so far as I am aware, still clouded in our fragmentary knowledge of the early church. But we may guess that the use of councils developed steadily and ‘organically’, as did the priesthood and episcopate, as the church developed its own (in many ways) unique structure in response to the needs of the time. The same appears to be true of the development of the Roman primacy. The notion that the Roman church was the final court of appeal in theological and ecclesiastical disputes, and the corresponding notion that it was incapable of error, were first developed (though I do not know how widely they were accepted in the East) in the late 4th and 5th centuries. Some, such as St Athanasius, regarded the consent of Rome as the touchstone of a true council. ‘Infallibility’ as applied to the Roman see in this sense was thus a very ancient doctrine, and some have found it as early as I Clement (96 AD.). But it was quite a different matter to say that the Roman see (or even the pope in person) could pronounce a final, binding decision on a matter of faith without an oecumenical council. As Professor Tierney has recently shown, papal ‘infallibility’ in this ‘strong’ sense was a product of disputes between the friars and the French episcopate in the late 13th Century, and it was accepted by very few prior to the Council of Florence (1439), and not all that widely thereafter. The normal view of medieval canon-lawyers was that the pope was supreme in jurisdiction, i.e. his word was law in settling disputes, but that as regards defining faith a council was required; indeed, in matters of faith, he was both fallible and impeachable.