The 27th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture 15th May 1997

Nineteen years ago, when I delivered the 8th Cardinal Bea Memorial Lecture, I said this:

History obliges Jews to take account of the figure of Jesus, because Jewish life is lived in the midst of the gentiles, and for the majority of Jews that means in the midst of Christians. We are compelled to respond to Jesus—not Jesus the ancient Jew but Jesus the Christian Lord.

And I concluded with the positive judgment of Franz Rosenzweig:

Before God, Jew and Christian both labour at the same task. He cannot dispense with either.

I fully share Franz Rosenzweig’s optimistic vision, and it is in the light of this belief, and in the spirit of my earlier talk, that I accepted the invitation to come back and give a second lecture in memory of the man we are gathered to honour. We owe it to Cardinal Bea and to other predecessors who, like him, laboured to clear away the bitterness and hatred of centuries, to continue this work, each one of us in whatever way we can.

I would like to take this opportunity to push my own thinking further than I was willing or able to do nineteen years ago. In the intervening years my thoughts have moved on, and so has the climate of Christian-Jewish dialogue. I think we are ready now for some tougher talking. I hope I am not wrong about this.

In order to gain an understanding of any mediaeval liturgical text, but especially the Roman Rite, which was the central liturgical text for the Latin West, it is essential to realise that the liturgy of the Middle Ages, unike the liturgy of today, was embedded in a culture which was ritual in character. The world of commerce, for example, was sacralised through its management by the economic guilds, whose liturgical basis ensured that production was perpetually crossed out by being offered in worship. This was a time when the Offertory gifts were not disconnected from the produce of everyday life; indeed, the category itself of ‘everyday life’ was perforce a thoroughly liturgical category. For the community was not seen as a given, existing prior to, or in separation from, its reception of the Eucharist. Rather, the community as such was seen as flowing from eternity through the sacraments. The historian John Bossy has shown this by stressing the sacramental nature of all social bonds in the mediaeval period.3 Supremely, the Church as ‘body of Christ’ was ceaselessly recreated through receiving the gift of the Eucharistic body of Christ. Because of this reciprocal link between life and liturgy, any liturgical reform must take into account the fact that the liturgy which it seeks to revise is as much, or more a cultural and ethical phenomenon, as a textual one. Now, criticisms of liturgical reform, such as those implicit in what I have just said, are often dismissed as conservative or nostalgic.

These are the words of political economist and journalist Will Hutton in his now famous diagnosis of the contemporary ills of British society, The State Were In. ‘All the malfunctions of the economy are related’, argues Hutton, ‘fused by the government’s overweening desire to establish the market principle as the basis of every policy.’ (p. 14) The character of the British economy has been shaped by the collective aspiration to a gentlemanly life—to have an income for which one does not obviously labour, ideally from land, but otherwise from finance and commerce—speculation on the markets. At all events, industry, the actual work of production, has been regarded by those at the centre of power as an activity from which to keep a distance. This attitude has created a lack of commitment and poor investment on the part of finance in relation to industry which has, according to Hutton, impoverished the economy, preventing real economic growth and stability. In this approach, Britain is unique among her capitalist partners both in the West and now increasingly in Asia.

“O senseless and foolish people, who have eyes and see not, who have ears and hear not.” That would seem to be Kieran Flanagan’s verdict on liberal theologians in The Enchantment of Sociology, though the accused are not named or their unhappy deeds documented by textual reference. As a class they are those who appear to accept the sociological mode of social scrutiny while resolutely avoiding its clear implications, whereas their traditionally-minded opponents appear to reject sociology and all its works while putting forward essentially sociological arguments. Flanagan suggests that one reason liberal theologians are so disoriented in their understanding is because their location in the secular university has made them strangers to the body of the Church. He, on the other hand, is enabled both to see and to hear because he is a stranger and an alien in the body of English society. He walks in our supermarkets and our semi- secularised cathedrals assisted by distance to envisage the true nature of the secular challenge and a possible response.

One response is to find unmarked (and unremarked) theological clues scattered in the detritus of postmodemity. At the end of the line in the trajectory of modernity we may discern again our beginnings. As sociology seeks sources of enchantment to reverse the chill closure of Weber’s “iron cage” it may also stumble upon an unexpected preparation of the gospel.

The argument is that sociology can locate metaphors of the sacred and of theology lodged in the calculative, administered and commodified culture of postmodemity. The existence of such metaphors in itself points to a deficiency and to a vacancy at its heart where “superstition dances on the grave of positivism”.

The musical fortunes of the German composer Paul Hindemith (18951963) waxed and waned in his own lifetime. The recent centenary of his birth, however, has brought opportunities for re-assessment of both the composer and his work, and much interest has been focussed on his masterpiece, the opera ‘Mathis der Maler’ (‘Mathis the Painter’). Two recordings of this work are now available on compact disc, and the Royal Opera produced the first ever British staging of the work on what would have been Hindemith’s hundredth birthday. ‘Mathis der Maler’ has been revealed to be an enormously powerful music-drama, remarkable no less for the historical individual who inspired it and for the circumstances in which it was produced than for the beautiful music which it contains. Hindemith wrote his own libretto for this opera, which enabled him to put forward in it a number of his own ideas about both art and music, and also to raise profound spiritual issues. In its exploration of such themes, ‘Mathis der Maler’ has a relevance that transcends Hindemith’s own day, touching on issues both contemporary and timeless. To explain the motivation behind such a remarkable work, it is necessary to set it in the context of Hindemith’s life, and of his theories about music.

Hindemith was a precocious musical talent, playing violin and viola in orchestral and chamber ensembles from an early age. He rose to prominence as a composer in the years after the First World War, and his music was much performed, in Germany and further afield, during the 1920s.

What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.

For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.

The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.

When Antony Flew in the 1950’s declared that religious assertions died ‘a death of a thousand qualifications’, he was expressing frustration in the face of a dogged refusal by theologians to relinquish cherished beliefs. No matter what conundrum the atheist camp hurled at the theists, they found (to their considerable consternation) that the theologians had moved the goalposts just that little further away. Although the debate following Flew’s comments addressed crucial questions concerning the meaningfulness of religious statements, it also highlighted, in my view, the durability and resilience of religious beliefs and assertions in the mind of the believer. Flew’s point was that religious believers, despite being surrounded by confusing and contradictory evidence, refuse to give up their notions and convictions concerning the divine. It is this resilience in the face of cognitive and experiential difficulties that forms the background of the following discussion.

As part of this paper I will be briefly looking at John Hick’s treatment of the problem of evil and be comparing this with his response to the problems of religious diversity. The purpose for such a comparison is not to provide an exhaustive look at these separate issues in relation to each other. Neither am I concerned to engage in recalcitrant hair-splitting regarding various ideas put forward by Hick. However, I will be showing how differently Hick has treated both problems and lead into a consideration of how the eschatological dimension of his thinking can result in a wholly different ‘solution’ to the question of religious diversity. I contend that the means are available to treat both questions in similar ways because of one highly significant factor—the possibility of further opportunities beyond death.

Last year Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, addressed gatherings of eighty bishops and of the presidents of the doctrinal commissions of the bishops’ conferences of Latin America, on the subject of Relativism as the central problem for the Faith today. In religion, what he calls relativism is what most writers in this area today call pluralism. He says of the ‘so-called pluralist theology of religion’ that ‘only now has it come to the center of the Christian conscience’ (Origins: CNS documentary service, Vol. 26, No. 20, October 31, 1996, p. 311). On studying the text I find that Cardinal Ratzinger, speaking of contemporary religious pluralism, identifies me as ‘one of its founders and eminent representatives’ (p. 312).

If I were a Catholic, owing allegiance to the Pope, I would probably not feel able to question Cardinal Ratzinger’s pronouncements. But as what he calls an American Presbyterian (I am not in fact an American, although I taught for a number of years very happily in the United States), I feel entitled to respond to the Cardinal as a fellow theologian—a much more eminent one than myself, but nevertheless subject to the same canons of accuracy when expounding views which one intends to criticise. The tone of the Cardinal’s address is courteous throughout and I can appreciate the concerns which he expresses from his own very conservative point of view. My regret, however, is that internal evidence reveals that he has relied on a secondary source which has provided him with a misleading version of what I have written.