Given at Great. St Mary’s Cambridge on 19 February 1985

We are supposed to live in an age in which belief is harder than ever before. In fact the Dean of Emmanuel thinks that belief in any traditional form is just not possible for modern men and women. According to him, humanity in the late twentieth century finds itself alone in a disenchanted universe, the age-old props and comforts of religion have fallen away, and we are left with an austere, demanding, individual task of imposing meaning on the inane, of making ourselves and our ideals the heart of a heartless world. If we choose to call these ideals God, well and good; but when we say we ‘believe’ in God we don’t mean, the argument goes, what people in the past have meant by that. Their God was a sort of super-hero, a Dr Who figure, who made the lightning flash and the sun rise and who could be invoked to fend off the horrors of existence. This is superstition, says Don Cupitt, and so is any account of God which does not acknowledge that God is simply the sum of our human values, representing “their ideal unity, their claims upon us and their creative power”. In other words; penetrate to the heart of religion, look closely at the image in the shrine, and what you will find is not the unseen God, but a mirror. The true name of YAHWEH is Narcissus. And we have heard this before.

Finding myself at Le Saulchoir, the French Dominican study-house near Paris, towards the end of September 1962, was a daunting and exciting experience. My first meal, in the meticulous asceticism of that lofty gymnasium-like refectory, consisted of half an artichoke, a lump of cheese, and as much thin beer as one wanted. A month later, as complaining letters home would confirm, I felt hungry, cold, lonely, alien, and profoundly depressed by the oppressive weight of lectures. The liturgy, with its drilled schola, ran with praetorian precision. When my week came to preside at the conventual mass I was told that my performance was ‘détraqué’ and ‘relâché’—and these were not complimentary epithets. At the end of the academic year I was told that my dissertation was too ‘literary’—that I needed to be more ‘scientific’. With the two laid-back Brazilians and the three irrepressible Dutchmen, I constituted the handful, in this pagoda of exact ceremonial and dedicated cerebration, who knew that other Dominican ways were possible.

On the other hand, with sermons and lectures by Chenu, Congar, and so many others of that character, in the inaugural year of the Council, how could I not delight at being in a great theological power-station at such a time? The lectures were often dreary—but I remain grateful to have had that experience of good old-fashioned Thomist scholasticism. I shall not forget my excitement at Claude Geffré’s exposition of Thomas Aquinas on the Passion of Christ, or the recreation of his treatise on the Virtue of Charity by Jacques Pohier ...

Within the framework of the “empiricist” philosophy widely assumed in English theology, there is a serious problem about how to represent God’s action in the world. This applies equally to God’s action in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and to God’s action today through the Holy Spirit. Here I will argue that the problem can be eased by a change of philosophical framework. I will do so in dialogue with Maurice Wiles’ The Remaking of Christian Doctrine which reveals with outstanding honesty and clarity the difficulties that the empiricist framework throws up.

By the “empiricist” framework I mean a general set of philosophical presuppositions that are deeply entrenched within our culture in general, and widespread within our university departments of science, philosophy and theology in particular. Of these (often only implicit) presuppositions I am interested in just two: firstly, that the chief function of language is to represent or “picture” reality; secondly, that “action” must take place via some causal mechanism, the model for which is given by the causal mechanisms of the natural sciences. Thus the only relation that language can have to action is to “picture” it.

This pair of assumptions is peculiarly deadly for theology, because it pushes back our possibilities for conceptualizing God’s action to only two. Either we think of God’s action as the communication of knowledge about a state of affairs—a picture of reality—or else we must see it as an intervention in the causal nexus so as to rearrange the course of events in the physical world.

For the true Christian it is axiomatic that the fundamental form of interpretation of the Scriptures is not search for meaning or valid patterns of thought for today, but discipleship: in other words, the enactment of Christian life, the establishment and building up of the Christian community, the singular and corporate worship of God, the completion of Christ’s Church by sharing in his afflictions (cf Col 1.24). The Christian interpretation of the Word of God occurs not in any private ‘religious’ place, but out where the human race speaks and suffers, endeavours and achieves. What Christian theology executes reflectively, Christian discipleship executes practically—mediating that memory and hope which we call the handing-on of the Gospel.

Where an opposite view prevails, responsibility for present interpretative mediation of the Gospel experience no longer devolves upon the community of Christian disciples, but far too much upon Church leaders and their theologians (commissioned as if only to explain the utterances of Authority). Christian living, which should always be responsively and responsibly interpretative—my affirmation of Christ’s call—in daily life, consequently tends merely to become the obedient practising of the explained ideas of others. Those ideas are received not in the context of our own mundane experience, cultural and psychological but before it, as the utterance of an ideology from an exterior citadei. Such utterances may appear standard to all societies, tunelessly valid, unaffected by particularity of place or people—in a word, universal and unchangeable (and so undebatable); they may satisfy the minds of those who construct pervasive patterns of thought. But above all what they can do is stifle the spirit of creative participation and joyful assent. The letter is made to prevail and the document rule; but the spirit then becomes joyless.

Leonardo Boff, a 47-year old Franciscan from Brazil, has become one of the best known names in Catholic theology owing to the controversy surrounding his book lgreja: Carisma e Poder (Ed Vozes, Petrbpolis, 1981). The close coincidence in time of Boff’s interview with Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome about the book, and the publishing of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith’s criticisms of some aspects of liberation theology, has caused some misunderstanding about the issues at the core of the controversy. Two widely-held misapprehensions had better be cleared up now, before we venture any further. They have been repeated over and over again in the press—when Boff and Ratzinger met, at the beginning of last September, one of the things they warmly agreed about was the shoddiness of the media coverage of the affair.

First of all, it was not—this time—Rome that made the first move. On the contrary. Boff had appealed to Rome. When his book was attacked by Dom Romer, Assistant Bishop of Rio de Janeiro and President of the Archdiocesan Commission for the Doctrine of the Faith, he turned to the Vatican. His own very detailed account of the affair, “Minha convocaçao à Sagrado Congregaçeo para a Doutrina da Fé: um testemunho pessoal” (which appeared in Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira vol. 44, fasc. 176, Dec. 1984, pp. 845—852) confirms this.

Secondly, and more importantly, the book does not in fact appear to be about liberation theology specifically. Any controversy involving so prominent a writer of liberation theology is bound to have a “political” dimension,