What reason is there for belonging to the Catholic Church, or to any other church, for that matter? An answer that some people would give is: there may be plenty of good reasons, but there is no rationale. A good reason for belonging to the Catholic Church would be that you had always been a Catholic and that you felt at home in it; another would be that you were living in a Catholic country, and no other Christian church amounted to more than a sect there. These, of course, are personal reasons, applying to some people and not to others; as such, they contrast with any purported rationale. A rationale, if there was one, for belonging to a particular church would be a proposition holding good generally and not relating to certain individuals more than to others, that, in virtue of its truth, constituted a reason, perhaps a compelling reason, for belonging to that church rather than any other. Is it plausible to hold that there is no rationale, in this sense, for belonging to the Catholic Church, or, conversely, for not belonging to it?

We know that men and women have died rather than renounce, or rather than adhere to, the Catholic Church: if there is no rationale in the matter, they were pitiably deluded. There is no sense to be made of the history of Christianity unless we regard one proposition as held in common by Catholics and Orthodox, and rejected by Protestants.

Early in December 1986, I was siting in Charlottesville, Virginia, minding my own business (which is to say that I was on sabbatical leave) when a letter arrived from John Coventry, asking me to address this year’s conference of the Association on the topic of ‘ministry of the word’.

I agreed, and almost at once began to regret having done so. The topic seemed so vast, so comprehensive, so obviously central to every aspect of Christian speech and action, that I did not know where to begin. So I turned to the dictionaries, and got a bit of a shock. The Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique has only one entry under ‘ministry’, and that is ‘ministre des sacrements’. Ah well, that was back in 1929, in the dark ages before Vatican II. Things would be better in the bright new postconciliar world, a world which had witnessed the proclamation of a dogmatic constitution entitled ‘Dei Verbum’. Well, perhaps, but not much better. Sacramentum Mundi (1969) has no entries under ‘ministry’, and the New Catholic Encyclopaedia, published in 1967, has one, which reads ‘ministry, Protestant’.

Perhaps we should not make too much of this. It is, after all, perfectly possible that, gathered under other heads and quite compatible descriptions, our Catholic self-understanding has still been permeated by a sense of all our discipleship, all our prayer and compassion, all our disciplined distinctiveness, being set at the service of the word, the diaconia tou logou. Possible, but I somehow doubt it, because it was not simply the ministry of the word which had largely ceased to figure in our Catholic vocabulary.

Throughout the Catholic world there has been extensive discussion of the differences in tone, emphasis and sympathy between the two documents on the theology of liberation issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—the cautionary Instruction on Certain Aspects of the Theology of Liberation of 1984, which was primarily concerned with drawing attention to ‘deviations and risks of deviation damaging to the faith’, and the Instruction on Christian Freedom and Liberation of 1986. The concern of this article is not so much with the contents themselves of these two documents as with the different ecclesiologies which appear to have shaped those contents. The prime object is to discern what the differences between them have to say to us about the place of ecclesiology in the Church’s mission today.

The ecclesiology of the first Vatican Instruction is present more by inference than direct reference. The danger points in contemporary ecclesiology are identified as a dismissal of the hierarchical nature of the Church as the People of God, and an ecclesiology that has become too immanentist. The document admits that it is not really interested in giving a positive theology—it leaves that task to the later document. Nevertheless one can discern an emerging ecclesiology underlying the text.

At about the same time that the Instruction was released, the text of an interview given by Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation, was also published. Many of the ideas in the Instruction are the same as those in the interview.

Cardinal Ratzinger has brought out an essay collection whose third and most substantial part is devoted to what can be called the theological foundation of political ethics. These essays are worth examining, not only for their own conceptual merits, but also for the light they throw on the criticism of liberation theology which has come from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under his leadership, as indeed on the interventions in favour of human rights made by Rome during the time of John Paul II.

What emerges from the analytic summary which is offered in this article is, I believe, a twofold conclusion. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is headed by a powerful and original theological mind. That mind is, however, alien to the philosophical and theological tradition which has provided the customary idiom for the magisterial interventions of the popes in both dogmatic and ethical issues for the last hundred years. Almost no trace of Christian Scholasticism in its Thomist-Aristotelian form can be found in these writings. Rather do they draw for their inspiration on a variety of sources rarely tapped by figures in the Cardinal’s position: Christian Platonism in its various historic manifestations; the Catholic Tubingen school of the early nineteenth century, which worked out an account of the relation between revelation and reason in the light of Kant’s critique of human understanding; and, not least, the voices of European literature.

Daphne Hampson:

Obviously the Christian church is better off with feminists than without feminists. Therefore if one is a feminist and a Christian one should stay in the Christian church and work for change. I do not underestimate what that means: how time and energy consuming, how discouraging and at times undermining it is. I remember well. We need feminists at every point in society, and I have no desire to criticise others who are holding the front at a point where I am not and cannot be. The only reasons for leaving can be that one is too desperately hurt, or that one no longer feels at home within the Christian church and religion. For me the break was not easy. As one thing after another fell away—going to the eucharist, reading the Bible, I came to wonder whether anything would remain. But prayer and a love of God, which were simply too deep in me, held. In some ways I have managed to rebuild. My religion is now more closely integrated with all else I believe about the world than it was before. I have prised apart Christianity and being a religious person—an effort which has taken time and thought and the help of others.

We are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the death of the outstanding young preacher Geoffrey Preston by publishing this trilogy. It was written not very long before he died and has not appeared in print before. Its other two parts, ‘The Church of the Son’ and ‘The Church of the Father’, we will be publishing in our July/August and September numbers.

The Church is a communion, a fellowship, a togetherness in life and liturgy. And this togetherness, this sobornost, is rooted and grounded in the togetherness, the koinōnia, of the three-personed God. To this communion we have all been given access through the incarnation of the Word of God, by his own entering into koinōnia and sobornost with us. Those who share in this togetherness of koinōnia are in the Greek termed koinonoi, a name that cannot be rendered in English with a word which preserves the same linguistic form as ‘fellowship’ or ‘communion’, and so will have to be translated ‘partakers’. Christians partake with one another of goods both material and spiritual, and this is based on their common partaking in the life of the Godhead itself.

Catholic moral theology since Vatican II has largely turned its back on certain aspects of the tradition of moral theology inherited from the time of the Counter-Reformation. What has been rejected is a false view of natural law, legalistic casuistry, and a mechanistic approach to morals which they imply. Quite rightly, theologians have sought more creative, more flexible and above all more spiritual frameworks. We need to be clear, however, about what we are rejecting and for what reason.

For some time, certain Catholic scholars have pointed out the dangers of a voluntaristic view of the nature of law, i.e. seeing law as primarily the product of the will (of man or of God). Francisco Suarez, very important in the development of the theory of natural law, has now become the object of attack, and is being blamed for much of the distortion of the Thomist understanding of law. William May has recently criticised him for his voluntarism and also for his ‘deductivism’—the creation of a highly elaborate system of laws, ranging from general laws at the top of the system from which are deduced particular regulations. This spirit of encompassing all human actions within a network of laws and precepts is the essential characteristic of legalism.

Many years of listening-in, and of occasionally contributing, to inter-church discussions of ministry, and of sharing in the shipwreck of endeavours lasting from Lambeth 1920 to the collapse of church unity negotiations in England in 1980 on the rocks of ‘ministry’—all this convinced me that light must come from a different quarter.

It came from fundamental theology in general, and in particular from the theology of revelation and faith. This is an area in which much work was done in the years after Vatican II’s Constitution De divina revelatione and in which I have long had an interest. The gist of the matter, as is well known, is that Christian faith is not ‘propositional’ or having doctrine as its object (‘the teaching of the Church’), but is a personal response to God’s self-gift and disclosure in Christ. In this perspective, ‘beliefs’ are varying expressions, more pictorial or more abstract, of how God is comprehended in the relationship he thus establishes (his act of revealing). From this it follows that all Christian doctrines, i.e. beliefs accepted by and taught in a Christian community, must in the last analysis be about Christ. And one then needs to distinguish ‘faith-statements’ from all more secondary statements of Christian experience and conviction depending on them, which may then be called ‘value-statements’.

High up in the Peruvian Andes, above the tree-line, above even the bushline, above the last communities where it is still possible to grow potatoes and native cereals, but just below the snow and the craggy mountain peaks, live small communities of llama and alpaca and sheep herders. Their life revolves around their animals and it is to them that the principle religious festival of the year is devoted; to them and to the spiritual powers associated with their life, indeed with all life. The herders say that the animals have a spiritual origin which connects them both with a spirit world inside the earth and also with the stars in the heavens. The people say of themselves that they have been set on this earth to look after the animals, whose true masters or owners are of a spiritual nature. They see that in many parts of the Andes greed has led to the extermination of the llamas and alpacas and this causes them deep concern, for they believe that the world will exist just so long as there are alpacas and llamas living.

In November 1869 Father Charles Meynell, professor of philosophy at Oscott, finished reading the proofs of the Grammar of Assent. Returning them to Newman, he wrote: ‘Well, I have learnt a great deal from you: I had no notion that an inference was such a leaky sort of thing!’.

When, at the end of January, the Vatican Justice and Peace Commission advised debtor countries of the Third World that they were not always morally obliged to repay their international creditors, the announcement did not set off even a tiny ripple in the world’s money markets. But when Reagan blunders yet again or Thatcher slips back in the opinion polls the major stock markets react nervously. The Church is somehow excluded; it does not play any role in the making of economic decisions, though, today, these so deeply influence our personal lives. And Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes accepts at least one of the basic presuppositions of modern economics as a good one: progress ought to be made—albeit it ought to be made within the moral order and oriented to serve mankind. We can read subsections 64 and 65 as a criticism of the modern economic and social process, but at the same time they seem to approve fundamentally of what they criticise.

What the preachers, theologians and synods of 400 years ago had to say about economic practices seems to have had relevance. This is not to say that people did what they were told, but, even when they neglected Church warnings and prohibitions, at least they knew that they did so. Today economics is thought to be a science, a field reserved for experts only, an autonomous process clearly separated from the contents of the Christian tradition.

The doctrine of God’s immutability has a basis in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, it is generally accepted. But, as is usually the case with most descriptions of God found in these sources, the belief that God does not and cannot change is not developed in any great detail. Given the Semitic thought patterns and linguistic expressions, which are concrete, this is not surprising. Nevertheless, there are certain passages which seem to provide a foundation for regarding God as immutable. For instance, in Mai 3:6 Yahweh says, ‘Surely I the Lord do not change.’ In Ps 101:27 the Psalmist addresses Yahweh: ‘Thou art the same and thy years have no end.’ Moreover, Yahweh’s revelation of himself as other than the world and man (Hos 11:9), Lord of all creation (Is 6:5; Ps 97:5), the almighty (Ps 135) who resembles nothing in the created world (Ex 20:4, Dt 5:8) and other similar descriptions apparently support that belief since God is unlike his creatures, who are subject to change. On the other hand, the Israelites experienced Yahweh as a living God (Jdg 8:19; 1 Kgs 17:1) who is actively and personally present to his people. Yahweh was their Lord and Master. In fact, the Old Testament is a record of that personal involvement of God with his people. The Old Testament, therefore, believed in a God who was utterly other but who despite this status listened, talked, wept, walked, judged and loved.

With the birth of Christianity this dual conception of God gains more significance.

Archer has written a timely sociological analysis of the present state of Catholicism in the United Kingdom. It is a ruthless, honest, almost clinical account of the ironic and paradoxical effects of the flabby liberal rhetoric that has shaped the practice of the post-Conciliar Church in Britain. It is unevenly written; some of its liturgical conclusions are a bit odd; and many will find it cynical and unconstructive. Yet it is a book that deserves debate.

My interpretation of his text suggests he is arguing as follows. A slow process of ecclesiastical embourgeoisement has been the main product of the theological hopes of the seventies, an ironic result for a rhetoric of egalitarianism that reached its most ludicrous level of cant amongst radical theologians, whose slant sent many out of the Church. One fringe developed another, and a ‘charismatic chicanery’ (to use Archer’s apt phrase) came to pass, apolitical and ecstatic, making natural friends with the house groups and other Evangelical sects beloved of sociological study. English Catholicism was caricatured, and the debates these fringes generated obscured the social conditions of religious practice of the silent majority. Archer’s book gives a sociological expression to their existence, and for that reason is of immense theological value.

He presents an image of a liberal Catholic Church developing Anglican traits and increasingly hopeful of slipping into the Establishment, a denomination amongst others in a safe part of the political landscape. A ‘safe’ set of house theologians are allowed to roam out, some producing a liberation theology that has inadvertently become an instrument of recruitment to Protestant Fundamentalism.

‘Your culture, which shows the lasting genius and dignity of your people, must not be allowed to disappear.’ With these words Pope John Paul II greeted the aborigines gathered to meet him at Alice Springs during his tour of Australia in November 1986.

The stance which the Pope took in giving his strong support to a minority ethnic group was in line with views he had expressed in other parts of the world, notably in the case of the Indians in Colombia earlier in the year, and on his visit to New Zealand, prior to his arrival in Australia, where he praised the values of the Maori culture. Both the Maoris and the aborigines of Australia had welcomed him with a lively and colourful display of traditional dance and song. These occasions would truly have amazed the missionaries of the last century, most of whom worked so hard to wean the peoples of their allotted territory from their native rites and customs.

Has the Church, then, been inculturated in these places? Has it accepted local cultural forms as expressions of Christianity? A beginning has been made, but complex questions remain. The Maoris were disappointed that they were not given their first Maori bishop. The aborigines cannot even boast a Catholic priest of their own race. Besides the theological issues, the question of separate church structures for different ethnic groups is under debate, complicated by the large numbers of mixed race people, who are not sure where they belong.

In the last Sunday homily that he delivered before his death in March, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador spoke of the turbulence and changes convulsing his country, but also pointed out to his people their source of stability and balance in the midst of a changing world: ‘May we have one thing firmly anchored in the soul: our faith in Jesus Christ, the God of history. He does not change.’ His words echo the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the poetry of the mystics, and the daily prayer of the Church. The Second Vatican Council teaches that ‘beneath all changes there are many realities which do not change and which have their ultimate foundation in Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, yes, and forever.’ St. Teresa of Avila spoke in her poetry of the God who ‘never changes’ and ‘alone suffices’. The Church prays that in the midst of life’s changes God may ‘strengthen us through his immutability’. The common insight in all of these examples is that the God of Christian faith is a God who does not change.

In our own time, there are many who do not share that insight. They fail to see how an unchanging God can be the object of our Christian faith, hope, love, and prayer. Their concern can perhaps be best addressed by returning to the teaching of that theologian who is recognised both by those who defend and by those who question the doctrine of divine immutability as the best representative of the authentic teaching of the Church on this subject: St. Thomas Aquinas.

I find it hard to comment on Flanagan’s contribution. He is exemplifying an attitude rather more than he is conducting an argument, and I do not have a clear-cut alternative to so confidently display.

Some portions of Archer’s book and the structure of feeling which informs it are, perhaps, highlighted by Flanagan’s endorsement of it, but the latter seems to write as if there was a single obvious case or as if Archer would endorse his own position. I simply cannot see this. There is something powerful and disturbing that Archer has touched upon which has this quality precisely because it does not issue from a somewhat intégriste version of the short-comings or failures of Conciliar reforms.

Flanagan certainly writes with panache but the telling and amusing swipes at some contemporary liturgies have to be disentangled from the rather less amusing idea of ‘the present failure of the Church to keep the working classes in practice.’ It is a matter of common experience that there are, at least for some people, severe problems of a sense of loss of transcendence and sacrality in much contemporary liturgy. The problems here are part of the question of the distinctiveness of Catholicism in the latter part of the century, and more particularly in Britain. It is, however, hard to come at these issues when a core part of the article rests upon appeals to ‘the sociological’, taken as crucial and probably rather a good thing, as against ‘the cultural’, which is variable and generally dangerous, if not just bad.

One of the topics to which Karl Rahner devoted a good deal of thought is what he called ‘searching Christology’. He did not think that Jesus Christ comes to human beings as a ‘bolt out of the blue’, so to speak, as an event for which they are totally unprepared; rather, Jesus the Christ comes to a human being who is open, even disposed, to recognize his significance, who is already—indeed always—a being who is searching for the Christ. In this article I am outlining Rahner’s searching christology, for I do not think it has received the attention it deserves, and then I am offering some of my own comments and critical reflections on the topic.

For Rahner, one of the things which precedes the human acceptance of Jesus Christ as God’s revelation is a human search in which, as we shall see, human beings are enough aware of what they are looking for to be able to recognize it when they find it. It is the detailing of what human beings are searching for that interests him.

He attempts to verbalize (albeit in the Christian terms with which he is most familiar) what he takes to be universal human experience. As humans, according to Rahner, we are beings of transcendence who reach out beyond ourselves toward others and ultimately toward the one beyond all limits, the one whom Christians call God (even if we do not always articulate that explicitly).

How can the Letter to the Hebrews apply priestly, cultic language to Christ while the gospels always present him as a lay man? In them he is shown ignoring the rules of cultic purity, touching lepers and corpses, declaring all food clean and cleansing the Temple. The priests are primarily to blame for his death. I am not concerned here with what the historical Jesus actually thought about purity or the cult, but with a clash of theologies. Is Hebrews a retreat from the lay spirituality of the gospels? Having killed Jesus, do the clerics subvert his gospel? One can only answer that question by looking at the function of the cult in the Jewish tradition and at what Hebrews does with the language of liturgy. Why was the image of a celestial cult, shared with ‘innumerable angels in festal gathering’ (12:22) quite so attractive? Would not an eternal banquet be a more obviously appealing image of heavenly bliss than a never-ending service?

It is an intriguing fact that in the first century many Jewish and Christian groups could imagine nothing more exciting than sharing with the angels in the celestial liturgy. Perhaps the most remarkable parallel to the Letter to the Hebrews is ‘The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice’, the Sabbath Shirot, found at Qumran. According to Carol Newsom this cycle of thirteen songs, describing the angelic liturgy, was supposed to give the singers a mystical experience of being transported to heaven to worship with the angels.

In the Johannine letters we learn that ‘Our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ (1 John 1:3b). In a second Johannine idiom, we ‘abide in’ the Father and he ‘abides’ (or ‘indwells’, ‘remains’ or ‘makes his home’) in us. As we have seen, it was in the Spirit that we were baptised into the koinōnia of the Son: yet the origin and goal of the process is neither Son nor Spirit but the Father himself. We have fellowship with the Father because ‘God’s seed abides in whomever is begotten of God’. That is, we have fellowship with the Father precisely as Father, to the degree that we are made one New Man with the Son, conformed to the Son’s image, being members of the Son’s body. We stand where the Son stands, and have that same filial relationship with the Father which the Son himself enjoys. We form one body with the Son, living by the same Spirit or vital principle as he, and living before the same Father, the ultimate mystery of existence. This mystery, the Ground of being and the granite of it, we learn to perceive as personal and to address as ‘Father’. The disciples of Jesus once asked him to teach them to pray as he does; in response they receive the Pater Noster. The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer of those who stand where Jesus stands.