Introduction
One of the compelling issues in public discourse across the world at present is the idea of truth. Can we discern it? Does it exist? Does it matter when falsehood is widespread and unchallenged? For men and women of faith this raises a particular challenge in terms of how we communicate what we believe, since most forms of religious faith involve some idea of a deity who communicates with humanity through words and other media: this is particularly important in the Christian tradition as lived out in the Catholic Church. So last year's conference of the Catholic Theological Association focussed on the nature of this communication in different ways: the keynote papers, most of which are included in this volume, covered the nature of religious language itself, the background in the Fathers, the future of religious language in education, religious language and atheism, religious language and holy places, and the ways in which God speaks to us through the world of art and music: this last theme was covered in an interview session with the composer Roxanna Panufnik, illustrated with examples from her music. The theme of religious language was also covered in short papers, covering areas such as Revelation in the scriptures, religious language and philosophy, religious thought in modern popular music, liturgy and the contested area of gender identity. The Association is also committed to reflecting theologically every year on the ongoing crisis of child abuse in the Catholic Church and this also took place.
Stephen Bullivant begins this collection by examining language about God, which is essentially what theology is, and his discussion circles around Justin Martyr's well-known saying “We confess that we are atheists”. The challenge of the early Christians to the gods of Rome finds a parallel in some modern atheism that fails to understand what is meant by “God”. Ernst Bloch was nearer the mark in saying that “only an atheist can be a good Christian, and only a Christian can be a good atheist.” Bullivant works with the ideas of Herbert McCabe, a former editor of this journal, who showed that everything we say about God falls short of what God is.
How can this important and necessary theological discourse be incorporated into school and university programmes is the concern of Anthony Towey. He reflects on recent attempts in Britain to develop the curriculum for Religious Education in schools in a rapidly changing social and religious context. In a contribution from the floor in the discussion after Professor Towey's paper, Theo Hawksley said that in our current setting teaching theology is rather akin to TEFL, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and this was in the thoughts of many of us during the conference. Towey frames an approach that can restore Theology to a legitimate place in the school curriculum, an approach that adopts a redefinition of Theology that does not presuppose faith in either the student or the teacher.
David Brown thinks that all the disciplines that make up traditional theology are deficient insofar as they fail to engage believers, not only in their arguments but in their conclusions too. Some form of imaginative engagement is required to broaden the relevance of theology. Professor Brown took us into the world of art with a slide presentation to suggest one possible form of such engagement. Here – without the slides but with internet links – he takes us into the world of Constable and Mondrian; Tanner, Piero della Francesca and Perugino; Andrea del Sarto and Titian; and Christa, a controversial feminist crucifix, to show how one's theological discourse might be enlarged.
Religious communication outside conventional language does not only come from art but can come from place, particular locations, as Alistair Lockhart explores. Rather than looking at familiar pilgrimage sites, he takes three fairly modern religious groups to show how they found an expression of their religious principles in the respective locations at the heart of their social organization. Some form of “holy ground” can be found in all religions and draws believers into the theological world it represents.
Janet Soskice looks at how we address God and makes it clear that the names we use of God are not divine attributes. Her provocation is the claim of Walter Kasper, a claim that has influenced Pope Francis, that mercy is the first attribute of God and also God's name. A broad-ranging discussion around the problem of whether in naming God we can know anything about God finally focuses on the name that God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai, which for earlier Christian writers was seen as a name for Christ, and so introduces the incarnation into the question of what we can know about God.
This collection of conference papers is concluded by three important contributions that were presented as short papers on the conference theme. Adrian Brooks looks at the later work of Yves Congar, which was much concerned with pneumatology. But his work was rooted in the Word, in which pneumatology was related to Christology. Congar's concern was to avoid a christomonism, something that Catholic theology has been accused of, by including the Holy Spirit.
Mary McCaughey approaches Joseph Ratzinger through his understanding of the Second Vatican Council's Dei verbum, which looks at the Word in the church and its tradition. To do this she goes back to his post-doctoral research on Bonaventure and relates it to his later work to form a theology of history around the Word. Within this are many dimensions including his interest in prophetic voices and the place of Mariology.
Finally Beata Toth points the way to a theology of speech in a most original way by drawing on two interlocutors from her native Hungary: the poet Janos Pilinszky and the literary critic and exegete Istvan Jelenits. She is also able to relate their ideas to the later work of Benedict XVI in his Verbum Domini. In the end she thinks that communication, speech, is a matter of love and she gives this a Trinitarian dimension by using Augustine to give a threefold pattern to speech through love.
