Sometime around the middle of the third century Dionysius of Alexandria gave his views on the Apocalypse of John. He said

Many readers have no doubt entertained such views. Dionysius was not inclined to endorse them. He would not, he said, reject a book so highly thought of by many of his co-religionists. But he doesn’t find it any more intelligible for all that. He goes on to say

The book must be meaningful, then, because he doesn’t understand it That curious position may actually provide a clue to the way the book works. What the seer saw is spectacular. But more interesting is how he saw it—or rather how he says he saw it, in his book of the vision. The significance of Revelation lies, to a considerable extent, in how the seer wrote it.

Npstra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the church to NonChristian religions issued by Vatican II, notes that the Church regards God’s election of Israel and the dispensation brought by Christ as intimately connected with one another. It is indeed important for Christians to realise that the dispensation of Israel and the disposition represented by the Church are continuous, that each forms part of a continuous and integral history of salvation. The Church acknowledges the salvific character God’s covenant with Israel, and of divine revelation to Israel in the Torah of Judaism. Indeed, the Church cherishes the Hebrew scriptures, uses them extensively in its liturgy, and views them as fundamental to its Christian faith.

Some Christians argue that the new covenant in Christ supersedes and abrogates the older covenant with Israel, and that the coming of Christ marks the end of the covenantal and salvific value of the Torah. Such Christians also argue that post-Christie Jews are rejected by God, and that the Israel of the old covenant is eliminatively replaced in the economy of salvation by a new Israel comprising gentiles who have accepted Christ. On this account, part of Christ’s mission was the destruction of the Torah and the rejection of Israel in favour of the gentiles, and the good news of Christ’s coming is not good news for the Jewish people at all but rather a curse. This flies in the face of some of our Lord’s own sayings. Does our Lord not state that he has not come to abolish the Torah, but rather to bring it to perfection, and that not a jot and a tittle of the Torah will pass away until all things are brought to their eschatological perfection, presumably in the general resurrection and judgement? For that matter, our Lord acknowledges the magisterial authority of the Pharisaic forbears of the Rabbis, saying that they speak with the authority of Moses, and that their rulings in matters of observance must be obeyed. The burden of our Lord’s criticism of the Pharisees is not that their tradition and authority is false or invalid, but rather that they fail to live up to it. As for the claim that our Lord comes to disown and reject the Jewish people, it should be noted that he tells us that he has come to the lost sheep of Israel, that he commissioned the twelve apostles to go not to the gentiles ‘but... rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’, and states emphatically that salvation itself is of the Jews.

Matthew Fox’s popular but over-simplified retelling of the history of Christian attitudes to creation makes St Augustine the prime enemy. In the table at the back of Original Blessing, Augustine is the first-named spokesperson in the enemy camp, so to speak, of ‘fall-redemption’ theologians. It might seem appropriate therefore to borrow the pages of a Dominican journal to ask whether Fox has somewhat missed the point. It seems important to correct the distorted account for two reasons, negatively because Fox’s sharp distinction into either ‘creation- centred’ or ‘fall-redemption’ theologians allows him to pretend that these two fundamental elements of Christian theology are conflicting rather than complementary; positively, because Augustine himself has a great deal to contribute to serious thought about creation.

I should like to trace three themes which Augustine explored in the light of both Biblical thought and ancient (particularly Neoplatonic) philosophy and which run through his reflections upon creation. I want to argue that far from being the pernicious influence that led the Western world to an uncritical anthropocentrism, Augustine in fact provides certain valuable insights for a balanced and properly theocentric theology of creation. The three themes I shall discuss are:

This year’s Dominican Peace Action summer school was held at Carlingford, a small coastal town just south of the border with Northern Ireland, a few miles from Newry. A useful vantage point from which to learn at first hand from those who have had to live with ‘The Troubles’ for more than two decades; and to hear from groups and participants engaged in conflict-resolution and the search for further, long-term ‘solutions’—bearing in mind the old adage that Northern Ireland has a problem for every solution’. On the principle that pilgrimages should be made to harassed as well as holy places, we made ours both to St Patrick’s grave at Downpatrick and to the R.U.C. training establishment in Belfast.

Families travelling from the U.K. were joined by Irish ‘residents’, Dominican sisters and others, who shared their experience and concentrated our minds. Hosts and guests may have come with differing agenda; but it may be fair to say that our reasons for coming together were three-fold. First, as workers for peace, it would be inconceivable to ignore or turn our backs on the unresolved conflict within our own jurisdiction: the denial of human rights which sparked off the first Civil Rights march in August, 1968,with the repercussions - military intervention, the suspension of Stormont, internment, the Anglo-Irish Agreement etc., with which we live today.

Second, considering the physical proximity of the two islands and their intimate historical association, much of that history must fill us with shame and compel us, the ex-colonial power, to metanoia. As Christians we must share in the responsibility for past crimes committed against the Irish people. And if, as the contributors to the Evangelical statement ‘For God and His Glory Alone’ recently declared, ‘the essential nature of repentance is losing face’, then we have, each in our own way, to confess that ‘we are not just victims of history—we have been wrong’.