We are told to remember the Second World War, but how? I was born just a few days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no stories to tell of my own. Maybe that does not matter. Remembering something as awful as the War can only happen later, long after it is over. To remember is not just to sit back and let the facts surface. It is the creative business of putting things together, re-membering, so that we discover for the first time what it was really like. Robert Kee was a RAF bomber who kept detailed diaries of the war, but afterwards they did not turn out to be of much help: ‘For all the quite detailed evidence of these diary entries I can’t add up a very coherent picture of how it really was to be in a bomber squadron in those days. There’s nothing you could really get hold of if you were trying to write a proper historical account of it all... No wonder it is those artists who recreate life rather than try to recapture it who, in one way, prove the good historians in the end.’

It is like the writing of the gospels. It took forty years before the disciples could tell the story of Jesus, and of how they betrayed him and ran away. It took about the same length of time that separates us from the Second World War before the disciples could cope with remembering what had happened, and so write the first gospel. Like them we are just getting to the point where we can begin to remember.

The Church’s liturgy calls on Christ as Rex gentium, ‘King of the nations’, the One whom they all ‘desire’, the Corner-stone that unites them. It appeals to him, therefore, to ‘come and save man whom you made from clay’. In this celebrated Advent antiphon, the Church affirms the relevance of Christ to world history and, more specifically, to the fate of the many peoples of the world whose histories contribute to the single history which is that of the world as a whole. The text intimates that this history constitutes an implicit call for his Coming, and it states quite explicitly that only Christ can unify their different and (presumably) divergent histories, and make them one.

My concern here is a vast subject which, it is probably fair to say, historians and philosophers in England, even when believers, would by and large regard as taboo ... and in this they would doubtless be joined by the majority of theologians. The relevance of Christ to world history, and, in particular, to the fact of its multiple national differentiations, is, they would say, simply too large a subject to talk sense about. English historians, with occasional exceptions like Arnold Toynbee, do not think it a proper part of the historian’s task to identify the structure of the historical process as a whole. The philosophy of history is not, in England, the study of the wider meaning of that process but, rather, the justification of any limited statement about the past. English philosophers of history avert their gaze in horror from their Continental counterparts, whose vaulting metaphysical ambition has produced schemes like Hegel’s (history as the coming of Reason to selfconsciousness) or Marx’s (history as the formation of a socialist society where the specific essence of humanity will be realised in uncoerced labour).

Last July, while in Paris for this year’s most widely-covered anniversary, Mrs Thatcher pointed out—correctly—that the French Revolution was not the first move towards Human Rights.

Whether this was worth saying (especially during the celebrations of that Revolution) is questionable. Previous moves towards Human Rights had been countered either deliberately or by neglect, so that the French Revolution was perceived to be necessary, and some of the previous moves towards Human Rights cited by Mrs Thatcher had never had any effect in France. This, though, is not the only question, nor even the most important one.

Among steps towards Human Rights, Mrs Thatcher cited the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. Now, were these in fact reall anything at all to do with Human Rights‘?

Certainly, ‘I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the Land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage’—suggesting slavery is antithetical to people’s good and God’s desires—makes a good start in this direction. But ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ denies the Right to religious freedom. (I am not arguing that this, or any other of the Ten Commandments, should be abandoned. What I am questioning is whether this has anything to do with Human Rights.)

Mary’s role in the first chapter of St Luke’s Gospel is integral to the author’s overall design, introducing his major themes of Christian discipleship and social justice. This chapter, which forms part of Luke’s infancy narrative, has been neglected by many modem biblical scholars. On the one hand historical critics have relegated it to the realm of ‘secondary source material’. On the other hand it has not readily attracted the serious attention of new hermeneutical schools that have arisen in the area of biblical studies, in particular feminist theology. Perhaps this is because one of the main characters featured in these chapters is Mary, the mother of Christ, who is a figure radical feminists tend to dismiss rather than use as a role model. One notable exception to the body of feminists who have rejected the figure of Mary is Rosemary Ruether. She has demonstrated that devotion to Mary and allegiance to feminist ideals do not have to be mutually exclusive. Although the Church has concentrated on certain aspects of the Marian tradition which centralise Mary’s passivity and immaculate nature, these are not central themes in her portrayal in the New Testament. Like the Liberation theologians of the Third World, Ruether puts the biblical evidence at the heart of her argument and assesses the tradition of the Church in its light. She takes as her evidence Luke’s Gospel, where Mary is portrayed as a character with an active role to play in God’s plan for the salvation of the world. Here I shall extend Ruether’s insight into Luke’s portrayal of Mary to suggest that this character provides an important clue to understanding the purpose, unity and integrity of the Gospel itself.