Ernst Käsemann was born in Westphalia in 1906. His graduate studies, in the leisurely and protracted German manner, were coming to a close in 1933, the year in which Hitler was voted into power and his dissertation on the concepts of the body and the body of Christ in St Paul was published. From the outset, as a young pfarrer in Westphalia, he belonged to the Confessing Church: the organized opposition to the influence of National Socialism among German Protestants. At the age of forty, in 1946, he returned to academic life as professor of New Testament studies, first at Mainz, then at Gottingen, and since 1959 until his retirement at Tubingen. On the third day of his first semester as a student at Bonn in 1925 he started going to the class on the Epistle to the Romans which was being given by Erik Peterson: “the course of my study and in some sense, as befits a theologian, my life was decided” (p vii). In 1973 he published the commentary on Romans which had occupied him for many years. A third revised edition was required a year later. This is the text, very carefully and literally translated (almost pedantically, although that is a laudable fault in the present current of wretchedly inadequate translations), by Geoffrey W, Bromiley, which is now under review.

A view very commonly encountered in contemporary philosophy of religion is that it is a mistake to expect that faith should be capable of rational defence. The roots of the conception of faith as lacking rational defensibility lie far back in the history of the Church (see for instance St Paul’s remarks on faith as foolishness in I Cor 1), but it is only in the last two centuries that deep pessimism has set in about the prospects of finding really convincing a priori or a posteriori arguments in support of faith. This slide from conviction that faith is rationally warranted has not, of course, been a wholly or even mainly negative phenomenon, for it has stimulated an awareness of commissive and emotional aspects of faith which is proving very valuable in the life of the Church. The importance and profundity of much recent writing about faith is something I have no wish to dispute; yet I want to argue that it is a mistake to represent faith as requiring no support from reason, and I shall urge we are only entitled to that faith we can defend.

My argument is basically a very simple one — so simple indeed that many people will undoubtedly think that it cannot do justice to the complexity of the subject under discussion. The short response to those people is to say that they should not disregard the argument but refute it. To make the argument fully convincing, however, I shall discuss in some detail the theoretical basis which underlies it, and attempt to disarm various strategies for opposing or evading it. Finally, I shall describe a positive approach to the problem of finding reasons for faith.

In its most skeletal form the argument can be stated: faith is, or essentially involves, propositional belief; propositional belief requires reasons; therefore faith requires reasons. This clearly stands in need of some fleshing out.

As I write this a number of Catholic nationalists are on hunger-strike in protest against the operation of the courts and prisons by what they see as a repressive regime which discriminates against Catholics, which was set up by and is now supported by the armed might of another country. There are twenty six of these hunger-strikers and all of them are Polish. Very understandably, the British media which have been giving a good deal of space and time to Polish anti-government protest have not had much to say about this. Nor, indeed, have those clerical super-patriots who have felt impelled to comment on the smaller hunger-strike taking place in Ireland. For the most part these comments have shown a triumph of class-solidarity and national feeling over the free play of reason that must be most gratifying to any marxist. St Thomas says that the eye can see and distinguish any colour because it is itself colourless: if we have rose-tinted spectacles the rose-tints of the world are indistinguishable from white. Some of these clergymen seem equipped with mental spectacles through which the operations of the security forces, the interrogation centres, the courts and prisons of Northern Ireland become indistinguishable from pure white; they are indignant to find that the rest of the world sees in them more of the colour of blood.

These remarks should suffice to alert the reader to the tints he must look out for in my own mental spectacles. It is a great function of debate and argument to clean each other’s glasses, that is why hard thinking has to be a communal affair and why argument, even apart from the courtesies of debate, is itself an act of fraternal charity.

I was in Dublin a month ago when the city was galvanised by an exhibition of tableaux by Edward Kienholz. I use the verb deliberately. The tableaux were shocking, composed as they were in threedimensional assemblages to present a particular concept, and that concept worked out to the smallest detail. One of the most shocking was ‘The State Hospital’, and the following extract from Kienholz’s blueprint of the work gives some idea of the nightmarish experience undergone by the viewer, who has to peer in through a small grille:

The authors of Genesis, and other books in the Pentateuch, created their text by taking myths and stories that had arisen in various sections of their society at different stages of its development, and by means of a process of combination, re-arrangement and redaction, they re-wrote them to provide an interpretation suitable for their society in quite new historical circumstances. These circumstances were extreme — they were a people cut off from their homeland and their origins, exiles in the superior and sophisticated civilisation of imperial Babylon. In his account of the Creation and the Fall, the Yahwist historian (as scholars refer to this one of the two authorial narratives of Genesis) addresses himself to a people experiencing political subordination and alienation from the culture in which they are living. Hence, he takes up what would be an understandable preoccupation for them in such circumstances — a reflection on the origins of human culture.

Juliet Mitchell, in her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism embarks on a project that, in some sense, resembles that of the Yah-wist historian. ‘All questions relating to the position and role of women in society’ she says, ‘tend sooner or later to founder on the bedrock of “where did it all start”?’ This, too, is a question about the origin of human culture, and what it implies for the subordinate position that women find themselves in. By taking Freud’s psychoanalytical myth of the origins of patriarchal society, together with Engel’s historical materialist account of women’s subordination in the institutions of the family, private property and the state, she re-appropriates for feminism two of the most important critical traditions of our society

Maria is 21 years old. She lives in a poor barrio in the suburbs of Lima and studies economics in one of Lima’s universities. She also works as a catechist in her local parish. “I think that in the past two years there have been great advances,” she told me, “the people now are very much more conscious than before”. She sees her work as a catechist as a preparation for what she calls “political militancy”. As an example of this she told me of a march which the catechists had been involved in a month before when 2,000 people went to the Ministry of Housing banging empty cups demanding a decent water supply for their area. “Us young people accept marxism, communism, without any problem”, she added.

Senora Isabel lives in a nearby parish and at 79 has seen some more of life than Maria. When she first arrived in the area 19 years ago she used to make a meagre income by selling holy pictures of St Martin de Porres. Through the ‘hermendad’ or sodality of which she was a member she began to go along to meetings organised by a local priest. From there she progressed to be a member of the Movement of Christian Workers and for the past number of years has gone along to the annual summer schools in theology organised by the Catholic University. As her understanding of her faith changed so too did she begin to get involved in the struggles of the people.

It is sometimes felt that in her ironically sympathetic creation of Emma Woodhouse ‘whom no one but myself will much like’ Jane Austen deserves at least some of those strictures which see her books as damaged by the socially restrictive values of an upper middle-class point of view. It has been widely remarked that Miss Austen’s work suffers because of her cheerful acceptance of a class society, and, that, while it is true snobbery may be consistently ridiculed, her values and standards are, nevertheless, based on the assumption that social and economic inequality is a permanent characteristic of our imperfect world. As the twentieth century draws towards its close it seems that if this was Miss Austen’s opinion it is likely to be regarded as more intellectually respectable than has been the fashion for some time. In his sympathetic and perceptive essay on Emma Arnold Kettle argues that although the clarity of Jane Austen’s observation is matched by the precision of her social judgments — he sees her work as informed by ‘the delicate and unpretentious materialism of her outlook’ — there remains the important reservation that her vision is severely limited by her class background. Kettle asserts that although snobbery is held up to disdain Jane Austen’s characters never question the fundamental idea that ‘it is right and proper for a minority of the community to live at the expense of the majority’. He sees such criticism as justified not so much because Miss Austen failed to put forward a solution, but because she did not even notice the existence of a problem.

Much of the recent interest taken in work springs from our present plight of high unemployment, united with fears that the microchip technological revolution will increase unemployment such that we shall have to move to a leisure society, where to work is a privilege.

This presentation (in the medical sense) of the problem affects the diagnosis and affects, too, the way we think of work. For instance, very few commentators seriously challenge the equation of work with paid employment. This shoft-term focus excludes areas of work which should be included both because they are definitely work, and also because taking cognizance of longer-range matters might help us see the present position more clearly, although at a greater distance from the plight of the depressed ex-steel workers of Consett. Incidentally, here it is worth remembering that if we look at the world as a whole, the vast majority of its inhabitants are not in paid employment — they are either outside the market economy altogether, living in subsistence societies, or, as in Britain, supporting those in paid employment by the hidden subsidy of home work, the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing necessary for the maintenance of society, and the consuming necessary for the maintenance of our kind of capitalist society. Thus out of a British population of some 55 million, only about 18 million are in paid employment. On the old model of society these 18 million were seen as supporting the rest; a shift in the phantasm, partly brought about by reflecting on the possible consequences of the micro-chip, has enabled us to see things a little differently — the old,

In this paper, I am concerned with some of the ways in which religious language resonates with our sense of being a self, and especially a bodily self. At present we often tend to counterpoise language to the biological and we stress the conventional even arbitrary aspects of language. Religion, however, tends to give language a force that is comparable to that of biology. It is not only that words are creative in that flat which makes the world, or the word which Mary hears as the conception of her son. The whole pattern of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is a pattern only because similarities of meaning have historical force, as the sacrifice of Isaac is linked to the sacrifice of Christ for instance. Things of similar meaning tend to be taken as linked in actuality, either by historical causality, or by being seen as different manifestations of a basic underlying pattern. In general, religious language tends to give a real dimension to linguistic usage that we would tend to say is ‘only metaphorical’: T was in the seventh heaven’, ‘Christ is present in the Eucharist’. Those religious traditions in which the issue of such language being ‘only metaphorical’ has arisen, have rejected it as a sufficient account of what they mean. There is no question of our being able to translate religious usage into metaphorical or poetic usage in any easy fashion. But attention to meta even if we cannot always take it as comprehensible. Thus consideration of what it means to be ‘lost in thought’ may help us to understand a little more what someone may mean when they say ‘whether I was in the body or out of the body, I know not’.

Karl Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith, published in 1978, which is no doubt a masterpiece, nevertheless relies fundamentally on a very controversial picture of man as the being who transcends his finitude just by recognizing it — and this transcendence is something pretty substantial even if difficult to put a finger on. It enables Rahner to make the idea of God intelligible and even quite obvious and natural. The speed with which Rahner draws the reader into .his “system”, and the immense rewards in theological assurance and in spiritual stimulus if one goes with the tide, dissipate the difficulties about the initial move. The text is in any case very hard to understand in detail, or else the Anglo-Saxon reader, putting it all down to the foreign idiom, gives it the benefit of the doubt. This paper is a preliminary exploration of the basic epistemological problems in Rahner’s philosophy of man, with the tentative proposal that a quite different starting-point needs to be accepted.

One could say I was startled into examining Lonergan on praxis What startled me was the remark of Lonergan in his essay, “Theology and Praxis”, to the effect that to ask whether theology is a praxis “is to ask whether there are basic theological questions whose solution depends on the personal development of theologians”.

Why should that have startled me? Because, as it stands, it establishes praxis as, first, simply a matter of consciousness, and, second, a function of individual development. Such a concept of praxis startles because it contradicts one’s prior expectation. Two key insights are operative in the modem, that is the post-Hegelian, problematic of the relationship between theory and practice, a problematic dominated by the thought of Marx. The first is that the human activity or praxis which fashions and transforms human beings and grounds the modes of human living is labour, that is, human action as a productive force. It is in acting upon nature to satisfy their material needs that human beings bring about modification in their own nature and develop varying forms of social order and modes of human thought and existence. In other words, the question of praxis is in the first place the question of the dependence of ideas or consciousness upon the productive forces and relationships that constitute the basis of every human society. The second insight behind the recent currency of the term “praxis” is that the activity or practice to which consciousness and theory are linked is social practice. In other words, the question of praxis is in the second place the question of the dependence of our thinking and our judgments, the formation of our consciousness and our production of theories, upon the historical development of human society and upon the place where we find ourselves in that society.

Dear Sir,

I would like to apologise for my behaviour yesterday. Maybe if I try to explain . . .Would you be able to understand the real meaning of what lies behind these words? Will you . ..? I am not asking for pity or sorry; I am not even asking for sympathy for myself. I ask you only to know, to be aware, and to respond before it is too late.

Why YOU? I do not know with certitude; it is a mixture of elements: that’s you, Sir, as you have emerged from nothingness into my soul: somebody I do not know, and somebody I know so well, so well . . . Somebody I feel I want to cling to, somebody I have to run away from.

The other day . . . that stupid tooth of mine once again came loose and I was quite disappointed to have to go back to the surgery: I do not like dentists, you know. Anyway, anticipating a big row with the surgeon who had made that botched job, I felt encouraged to hurry there. However, it wasn’t the blond one in the clinic, it was you: a big guy, somewhat fat, young, with lots of selfconfidence, but, at least, approachable; in some way aggressive, but then ... willing to be friendly. Tall, powerful, steady; a young professional with a whole life ahead to be enjoyed ... you reminded me of “the other one”, long ago. So similar you and he . . .! Even your hands! Even that polite aggressiveness! That smile of yours . . . of his . . . the way you looked at me ... he looked at me . . . and said: “Sh! do not worry little one, do not be afraid. Sh! Little one, little one . . . Sh!” He was leaning on his side on the upper deck of the bunk.

This essay is an attempt to illustrate the idea that the way in which God’s grace works in man is more obvious in a situation of persecution than in one of so-called peace, for in the former the contrast between good and evil, the graced and the graceless, is sharper and therefore easier to see.

St Thomas Aquinas, the great thirteenth century theologian, defines that mysterious entity “grace” as a “share in the Divine nature”. Having read this we recognize that he has said both everything and nothing. In this life we perceive God only as “a dim reflection as in a mirror” (ICor. 13:12) and we can therefore know nothing of his nature, so we cannot catch hold of Grace and say “it is this”, or “it is that”. Granted the impossibility of talking about God, of finding words adequate to discuss his nature, we can nevertheless attempt to understand what happens to a man when he deliberately lays himself open to God’s action.

In this paper we should like to examine some rhetorical aspects of theological language. Before doing so, it is necessary to argue for the view that there is a special mode of discourse appropriate to theology, as opposed to the view that theological language is composed of statements which differ from others only in terms of their subject-matter. There is a distinguished history of opposition to the view we propose; in a very ancient debate it has repeatedly been maintained that theology should be concerned only with discovering and promulgating true statements about God and our knowledge of God, and that any concern with developing sorts and styles of language can only distract and distort. This position is connected with another, which has received support from natural-scientific quarters since the mid-19th century especially: it presents a contrast between academic and non-academic language, founded on the contention that academic discourse occurs in the course of researches where the truth of a statement matters, but virtually nothing else about it does. According to this position, as long as a statement is true it should not matter to the researcher whether anyone finds it important or believable, or whether it impinges on anyone’s interests or needs. (Hence the expressions, presumably used chiefly in non-academic circles, ‘an academic point’, or ‘of merely academic interest’.) The concept of rhetoric can be used to point to misguided features in this type of position, whether it is taken up in relation to theology or in relation to research in general. But theology, more obviously than most subjects, highlights the dubiousness of trying to erect a linguistic ideal without attending to the effects on language of its most communicative aspects.

The Homecoming is, in one sense, a play about two women, one absent from the home, the dead wife and mother, Jessie, and the wife of the son, Teddy, who comes into the house and takes Jessie’s place, but in taking that place converts it into new functions.

The house is quite clearly associated with the absent wife and mother, the home’s centre, because of its very unhomely qualities. Where there had once been a ‘living-room’ with enclosing walls to make it both warm and safe, there now is an open back wall (‘The back wall, which contained the door, has been removed’). This is quite positively identified for us with the missing woman by her son, Teddy, when he and his wife are first in the room:

As so often in Pinter, suggestions build up behind the formal language, and we can think of the house as having tried to get rid of Jessie, or as having been opened up to more light and more air. But the domestic arrangements have now altered so that Lenny has what he calls ‘a kind of study, workroom cum bedroom’ (p 25) downstairs next to the ‘living room’, much as he might have a room in a large house which had been turned into bed-sitter accommodation.

In the previous article of this series, Authority and Ministry in the New Testament, I set out to show how two planks of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism not only have no basis in the New Testament, but are actually at odds with the whole spirit of these foundational documents of the New People of God. The major plank is, of course, the concentration of all authority in the papacy, with the inevitable stress on uniformity that will accompany such a policy; the second or supporting plank is hierarchical clericalism, the promotion of the clergy, in particular of bishops, as a ruling priestly class in the Church. In this article I will confine myself to this second plank, and investigate how this particular distortion and obscuration of true gospel values arose in the Church. We shall try to discern as far as we can what is sound in the developing tradition of the Church’s doctrine and practice of ministry from what is sick and in urgent need of reformatory healing.

We discovered two things from an examination of the New Testament evidence on the Christian ministry. First, that in the New Testament Churches there was no distinction between bishops and presbyters, these being simply two names for the same persons, one (‘bishop’) denoting the office or function of ‘overseeing’ the community, or being ‘in charge’, the other (‘presbyter’) denoting rank or status, that of elder or senior member. Secondly, that nowhere in the New Testament are these bishops/presbyters talked of in sacerdotal language as priests.

The world being what it is, a ‘peace movement’ is bound to be a haven for odd-balls, eccentrics, the awkward squad: people who go against the direction of the current and resist the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, a movement composed solely of such people will always lack effective organisation, and its protests will peter out into mere idiosyncrasy. I think that these two facts go far to explain why the English Dominicans have been somewhere near the centre of the Catholic peace movement in Britain ever since it began (if one can talk of a beginning) with the founding of PAX in the mid-thirties of this century. For the English Dominicans — at least as far as my experience goes — are themselves an awkward squad: a regiment of misfits and individualists. I don’t know much about the Dominican Order elsewhere in the world: I suspect that outside Britain they may be very different. Neither do I know much about their history in this country. So I speak ‘existentially’, as the jargon goes, from my own personal observation only.

My first experience goes back to the Oxford of the early nineteen-fifties: and to feel the difference then between, say, the atmosphere of Jesuit Campion Hall and the atmosphere of Dominican Blackfriars was to experience an almost tangible shock. As I remember it now, Campion Hall was like something out of Henry James: a rich tapestry of dark browns and reds, complex and subtle in its visual as well as its intellectual organisation. Its inhabitants wore their black suits and soutanes as a uniform: one had to dig quite deep to discover the person within. Dominican Blackfriars, by contrast, was light and airy; a set of variations upon the theme of whiteness and transparency.

In my last article, “Priestly Ministry or Hierarchy: The Sacrament of Order”, I surveyed the history of the second plank of the ultramontane platform of magisterial papalism; namely hierarchical clericalism. Now we must examine the roots of the chief item of this distorted ecclesial ideology, the concentration of all authority in the papal institution. For this purpose Church history divides fairly neatly into two halves, the first millennium and the second millennium of our era.

The first millennium, we could say, saw the gradual development of the doctrine of the universal primacy of the Roman Church and its bishop in the Catholica, such as it was eventually defined, together with the doctrine of papal infallibility, in 1870. The dogmatic constitution Pastor Aetemus of Vatican I, could have been promulgated (with some modifications to language and style which would chiefly have been improvements) by any pope from Leo the Great (ob. 461) to Gregory the Great (ob. 603), without anyone in Rome or the West thinking it very unusual, though there would no doubt have been demurrers from the East. But the practice of Eastern bishops, throughout the Arian and then the christological controversies that raged in the 4th and 5th centuries, shows that in fact they accepted the unique position of the Roman Church as the touchstone of orthodox faith. Rome was never heretical.