Most New Testament scholars would agree with Raymond Brown when he claims that there are only three passages in Scripture which indisputably call Jesus God, and that two of these are in John’s gospel, in the first verse and at the very end, in Thomas’ confession (20:28). And theologians are divided in their reaction to this “high” johannine christology between those who welcome it as an unambiguous declaration of the divinity of Christ, the first step towards Nicea, and those who find it very odd, perhaps intolerably odd, to address any man, even this man, as God and so can only accept it as an eccentric way of claiming that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God, or that, at worst, this is the beginning of a dogmatic tradition that betrays the man Jesus. I would like to suggest that the way forward is to recognise that something very curious is indeed happening in the Prologue and in Thomas’ confession but rather than cope with these odd statements by pretending that they are actually saying something much less scandalous (“Jesus is the man who definitively reveals God”), we must admit that they only have meaning within a particular context.

It should be possible to write a sociology of the early church which would show that particular sorts of christological claims only came to be made at a certain point in the history of the church because it was only then that the ecclesial context existed in which such claims could make sense.

In my work as a hospital chaplain I listen to many people whose daily life has been drastically interrupted by some kind of unexpected event—not always an illness— so that they have been obliged to stand back and try to take stock of all the things that have happened to them over the years. These people often say things which reveal the important part played by ritual in their lives, things like “I was married at St. So-and-So’s”, or “I remember being confirmed at St. Somewhere-else’s”. They may never have been to these churches again—most probably they have not in fact, or at least only rarely—but they remember what took place on these occasions, what it meant to them and how they felt about it. Now, when they look back, these things at least make sense. Sometimes, perhaps they are the only things that do make sense. All the meaning and purpose of a life has become attached to a particular occasion associated with a church service that they probably have not thought about for years. You could say that for them at this juncture in their lives the possibility of meaning only really exists at all because of that morning at St. So-and- So’s. You could also say that nowadays with some of our strong-minded theologically rigorous clergy they probably wouldn’t even have had that!

Christian ritual has suffered attack from several directions, notably theology, psychopathology and anthropology. Protestant theologians in particular have regarded ritual as an idolatrous attempt on the part of men and women to reach God by means of human techniques and on human initiative.

When he reviewed my book Marxism and Christianity (Oxford 1983) in New Blackfriars last December, Professor Nicholas Lash said he would be grateful for comments on his own very different attempt to confront some of the same issues as I had dealt with. He was referring to his book A Matter of Hope, published in 1981 by Darton, Longman and Todd. Here I am complying with his request. After Lash on Turner, readers of New Blackfriars can now try Turner on Lash!

Lash “aims to take Marxism seriously” (p.5) from the standpoint of Christian theology. He certainly does take Marxism seriously, at least in the sense that he gives Marx’s ideas a fair crack of the whip. The substance of his work consists in detailed, patient, lucid and by and large at least plausible reconstructions of some central themes in Marx’s thought. These include epistemological and/or ontological themes concerning “appearance and reality”, “ideology”, “truth”, “science and theory”, themes in social and anthropological theory such as “revolution”, “utopianism” and “alienation”, and above all the controverted question of the nature of Marx’s ‘historical materialism’ which,rightly, in my view, Lash sees as being the foundation of all that is distinctively Marxian about the rest. The strength of Lash’s book is, first, that he sees this distinctiveness and pervasiveness of Marx’s materialism and,secondly, that the intellectual and scholarly weight of the book is dedicated to its exploration. Indeed, as an essay by a theologian in the exploration of this and other central Marxist themes, I do not think Professor Lash’s book is seriously rivalled by anything much in the English language.

In our first article (published in last month’s issue of New Blackfriars) we discussed the tensions between the Christian Church as a model of a new kind of family and the traditional family in Greco-Roman society, and trends toward the resolution of this tension both by separating out the vision of the new community into an eschatological ascetic religious order, on the one hand, and the repatriarchalisation of the Church and the resacralization of the patriarchal family, on the other hand. It would be useful at this point to summarize the major features of the patriarchal family as that existed in Jewish and Greco-Roman society.

Patriarchy refers to a legal, social and ecomomic system of society that validates and enforces the domination of male heads of families over the dependent persons in the household. In classical patriarchal systems, such as are found in Hebrew law, this included wives, dependent children and slaves. In this sense, various groups of males are also dependent persons in patriarchal systems. However, women are subjugated persons in patriarchal societies in a different sense than either male children or male slaves. The former could grow up and become themselves householders; the latter might become emancipated and become householders. Women, first as daughters, then as wives, and sometimes even as widows dependent on the eldest son, were defined generically as persons dependent on the patriarch or male head of the household in which they lived.