This article is an attempt to sketch some salient features of the relationship between Christians. The Christian church is not a crowd, not even a crowd made up of devotees of a particular football club to take an example. It is a community and yet the persons who compose it are persons, because of their interrelationship, and individuals, because often their particular qualities or gifts are intensified.

They are a community ‘in Christ’, the body of Christ and this fellowship is not so much horizontal between the different members as vertical because they are ‘in Christ’ or alternatively we could say they share a common life, that imparted by the Holy Spirit the Life Giver. This viewpoint, while not provable from the New Testament, receives support from it.

The members who share this common life remain persons, indeed their individuality is developed and enhanced. In relationship lies the differentia of being person; this has vertical and horizontal links, with the Holy Spirit and with other people, especially often Christians. Personality, growth to mature persons, is realised in response to Him, and in fellowship with life in all its varied aspects. Aspirations can be met, self-realisation achieved, self-expression maintained. For the Christian, becoming a person is the practice of divine sonship.

The question which Brian Wicker poses to Denys Turner—how is Marxism to accommodate the notion of ethical absolutes?—is clearly one of first importance to those who, like Denys Turner and myself, would regard themselves as both Christians and Marxists. I don’t think I can give any satisfactory answer to Wicker’s question, but I can perhaps at least prepare the context for such an answer by making some general remarks about the relations between Marxism and morality. In doing so, incidentally, I shall be elaborating on Turner’s own truly pioneering earlier article in this journal, ‘Morality is Marxism’ (New Blackfriars, February and March 1973).

The question of the relevance of moral values to Marxism is at the heart of one of the most theoretically crucial debates now being conducted within European Marxism : the conflict between those revolutionary theorists for whom Marxism is in essence a humanism—an historical praxis of love and liberation—and those for whom historical materialism is in the first place a science. The adherents of the former position espouse a Marxism deeply indebted to Hegel and the work of the young Marx; the latter believe that such a case is no more than an idealist ideology of historical materialism, and claim to be restoring Marxism, after this long twentieth-century heresy, on the truly scientific basis to be found in the mature Marx of Capital. The debate—one, roughly, between the followers of Georg Lukacs and the disciples of the most prominent European Marxist theorist of our own time, Louis Althusser—has created a good deal of dust and heat among revolutionary intellectuals.

For the Lukacsians, there is an essential continuity between the work of the earlv, humanist Marx and the later scientist of Capital; for the Althusserians, there is radical rupture and discontinuity between the two phases.

Antony Archer rightly suggests (‘Dismantling the Sacrament Machine’, NB January 1975) that present Church structures impede the preaching of the Gospel, and that the laity must begin to do tasks from which they have hitherto been cut off, in particular that ‘it is urgent that the laity take preaching into their hands’. He points to the inadequacy of much present-day priestly preaching, and discusses the possibility of such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, but concludes : ‘However, such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, superficially attractive though it is, would only compound the present distortion. After all the priest is ordained to preach the Gospel and attempts to change the Church should be in accordance with its theology’. It is this last point that I wish to develop.

Nobody would deny that there are many lay people who have the gift and vocation of preaching the Gospel, and are able to do it better than most priests. But preaching remains an inalienable part of Christian priesthood. You can be a preacher without being a priest, but not a priest without being a preacher. If we stress the sacramental functions of the priest at the expense of his preaching role, or vice versa, we distort our picture of his office. Though individuals may be more suited to one task than to the other, priests must be trained for both, and both must be expected of them. To train a man to administer the sacraments without training him to preach is like teaching a violinist to stop the strings with his left hand, without showing him how to wield the bow in his right. The reason for the interdependence of the two roles lies deep in the nature of the Gospel itself. Christ came both to speak and to act: he both utters, and is, the Word of God. Indeed, it is hard to conceive what is meant by administering the sacraments without preaching, since all human gestures reveal something about those who make them, and so every sacramental act communicates, proclaims, preaches, though it may do so very badly. Bro. Antony has fallen into a trap when he says ‘By preaching is meant here verbal communication’, since the verbal is inseparable from other forms of communication.

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.

In itself this collection of articles, letters, jokes, editorials and poems from New Christian (1965-1970) has nothing particularly to recommend it to readers five years later. Everything here was written for its own time and place rather than for export. But seen as a reminder of what New Christian stood for, as evidence to draw on should there be any other serious Christian reviews in being or possibility, it seems to me of very great value.

However we regard New Christian, praise or blame for it belongs mostly to Trevor Beeson, its permanent editor. I think he achieved remarkable success. He aimed high, and hit a lot of marks, missing only the crucial one—circulation. His short account in the Reader of what he tried for and where he failed is a model for any editor of a Christian journal. I propose to summarise it under eight heads, following each with my own comment, and drawing where necessary on the evidence of the collection.

Men and women martyred for their faith form a coherent and distinctive group—from Socrates and Stephen, through Joan of Arc, Savonarola and Thomas More, down to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own day. Violent death came to each in such a way that we can classify them all with Jesus.

Particular circumstances may allow us to match their martyrdoms with his passion and crucifixion. At times betrayal by former friends or similar forms of treachery led to arrest and imprisonment. The trials which preceded the death penalty frequently centred on some fatal question. Did Thomas More wish to deprive Henry VIII of the title which Parliament had granted him? How would Jesus answer when the high priest asked him : ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ (Mark 14:61). Finally, many martyrs shared the same geography of death with Jesus—public execution. Some were, of course, butchered in their prison cells, or like Bonhoeffer led away to the sinister secrecy of a Nazi hanging. But Joan of Arc died in the Rouen market-place, Savonarola outside the old Palace in Florence, and Thomas More on Tower Hill.

Granted these and other similarities, we need, nevertheless, to be sensitive to much that gives Jesus’ passion and death its own particular profile. The differences go beyond the obvious and massive fact that no one even alleges that the other martyrs have reconciled the entire human race with God. We must not let other notable contrasts slip out of sight. Let me examine one of these.