Fr Vincent McNabb (1868-1943) was one of the most widely- known Dominicans of the English Province from the years prior to the First World War up to his death in the Second. Apart from his work internally within the Order he was well-known to Londoners for his appearances for the Catholic Evidence Guild at Speakers’ Comer in Hyde Park and for his involvement in social action, which sometimes made the tabloid headlines. He was involved in the ecumenical movement, in speaking and writing prolifically on all kinds of topics on all sorts of platforms and in all kinds of publications, sometimes far beyond Catholic or even Christian circles. He was a spiritual director and retreat giver of distinction, and he gave lectures on Aquinas under the auspices of the University of London Extension Lectures scheme — an unforgettable teacher according to many students. Clearly an apostolate of remarkable range.

He was a man who aroused strong feelings, and some within the Order were critical of him. One of the grounds for criticism concerned his involvement with Distributism, the social and philosophical movement most commonly associated with Belloc and Chesterton, and it is this area of his life which provides the focus of this article.

McNabb was unique in the influence he wielded in this most lay of movements, although in a private letter of 1932 Fr Vincent denied being a Distributist. His rejection of the label can perhaps provide a point of departure for trying to understand the place of Distributism in McNabb’s thinking.

Fr Vincent was quite clear that he was, first, a Dominican priest and, secondly, a theologian. From an early age he had held firmly that priests should not be involved in politics — in 1914 he wrote in The Tablet that ‘Tragic events during my school life in the North of Ireland have given me a deep-seated distaste for the priest-politician’.

In February of 1982 Cardinal Hume addressed a press conference on his hopes for the forthcoming papal visit to Britain. At that time the full horrors of the Falklands war were still lodged in the dim recesses of the Argentine military mind and the seemingly endless resources of British colonial nostalgia were still untapped. The Cardinal was able to speak of the renewal that the pope’s presence and message would bring as well as the challenge he would present to pastors and people calling them to “a fundamental change of ourselves”. In the euphoria that accompanied and immediately followed the Pope in Britain many people spoke of “things never being the same again”. In a few short days of glorious summer weather he was said to have given the Church here a sense of renewed confidence, hope and pride in its own history and traditions. He proved sensitive to the needs and aspirations of the various national communities that form the United Kingdom. He was openly committed to ecumenical dialogue and the tone of his speeches was so eirenic and positive that Peter Nichols in The Times wondered “if we cannot start thinking about the weekend that produced John Paul III”. Paradoxically this seems to point not so much to a renewal of the Church in Britain as to the personal conversion of the Pope to a new interpretation of the Petrine office. This interpretation has particular implications for the development of the theology of the Church as well as revealing not only the virtues of the Pope but the weaknesses of the Church in Britain. Until these implications are examined the renewal hoped for by the Archbishop of Westminster and his brother bishops in England, Wales and Scotland will be delayed if not altogether blighted.

In this essay I shall be discussing William Styron’s depiction of a theologically significant incident in his recent novel Sophie's Choice (London: Corgi Books, 1979). Since our discussion will approach this novel from a theological, as opposed to a purely literary, standpoint, it behoves us to begin by specifying the theological context of the argument that we hope to develop in this essay. This essay is concerned with the doctrine of the Atonement. More specifically: we shall argue that Styron’s narration of the episode which gives his book its title provides a basis for a criticism of all purely ‘subjective’ interpretations of the Atonement. The adherent of a purely ‘subjective’ conception of the Atonement emphasizes the manner in which the believer makes the work of Christ his own — the saving significance of Christ’s work is reckoned by the ‘subjectivist’ to lie in the ways in which individuals appropriate that work. That is to say, Christ’s saving work takes the form of a ‘subjective’ process; it is, in the words of Donald Baillie (a notable modem proponent of the ‘subjective’ conception), a “reconciling of us to God through a persuasion in our hearts that is ... a realizing of His eternal love”.

‘Subjective’ understandings of the Atonement have come to prevail in recent years. This is mainly because ‘objective’ conceptions are invariably bound up with incarnational christologies, and incarnational christologies no longer totally dominate the theological consensus. Instead, so-called ‘functional’ christologies tend increasingly to be in vogue, and since a ‘subjective’ understanding of the Atonement accords better with a ‘functional’ christology than it does with a fully incarnational (or ‘ontological’) christology, there has been a recognizable drift away from ‘objective’ conceptions of the Atonement.

That useful and interesting publication, African Arts, regularly sends out a questionnaire to its readers asking them for details of financial details, range of interests, and criticisms of editorial policy. The picture of the average reader which emerges, a prosperous art collector, or prospering would-be collector, seems to reflect the advertisements rather than the articles. Were New Blackfriars to launch such a questionnaire, one would be little surprised to find that the average reader is an under-wealthy book addict who through the articles enjoys her/his fantasies of endless and fascinating reading in well-stocked and up-to-date libraries. For such people a worthwhile, or, at least interesting, questionnaire could be constructed to test their control of semantic variations by seeing how they defined various “in” words. One problem, of course, is that “in” words must shift in meaning if they are to stay “in” indefinitely. One “in” word is “hegemony” which received from Gramsci a neat specification as the situation in which a group dominates society by means other than force, fraud, or consent. Unfortunately, the word has also become a resource for translating Chinese foreign policy statements in which “hegemony” refers to the domination of the super-powers over their allies. I want in this article to use “hegemony” in discussing Spanish colonial, and Ladino post-colonial domination of the Maya Indians of Yucatan Chiapas, and Guatemala, and the way in which Maya resistance developed new forms of authority, based on the “assumption” of some of the symbols used by their conquerors.

I wish to defend a version of the Cosmological Argument. But the phrase ‘the Cosmological Argument’ has been used to refer to various arguments, some of them very different from each other. Let me, then, say at the outset that with some of these I am either out of sympathy, or I am just plain unsure.

Take, for example, the argument for God’s existence offered by Locke in Book IV, Chapter X of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ‘Man knows’, says Locke, ‘by an intuitive certainty that bare nothing can no more produce any real being than it can be equal to two right angles’. So for Locke, if anything exists it is caused to exist by something else. And Locke thinks that what belongs to anything that exists, its nature, must be derived from something else, and that God therefore exists. For if something exists, says Locke, it must have been caused to exist. This means that ‘from eternity there has been something, since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’. But this argument is invalid. According to Locke, if something has existed from eternity, there is an eternal being. ‘If, therefore’, says Locke, ‘we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something’. But all Locke’s argument shows is that there has always been something, which is quite compatible with there having been a whole host of different things. In other words, Locke thinks he has proved the equivalent of:

The early Church engaged in a trenchant, philosophical debate over the nature of scriptural interpretation. Some writers on hermeneutical method showed great insight and perspicacity; others seemed to make less of the problem it raised than they ought. Although most held some general view of inspiration of the scriptures, it was more often over the question of interpretation that they disagreed. We shall examine one or two of the philosophical difficulties of hermeneutics which were raised by early Christians and which are debated still.

There were, of course, many areas of disagreement about how scripture ought to be interpreted but we can distinguish two major schools of thought, both of which cover a broad spectrum of ideas: the literalists and the allegorists.

a) The literalists: these were the people who believed that scripture could, somehow or other, be taken “at face value”; that there is an obvious and evident meaning of the text or, alternatively, that there is no hidden meaning.

A great literalist was Porphyry (c. 230 - c. 305), one of Christianity’s detractors. He attacked the allegorising tendency in the Church when he wrote of those “who boast that the things said plainly by Moses are riddles, treating them as divine oracles, full of hidden mysteries, and bewitching the mental judgment by then-own pretentious obscurity, and so they put forward their own interpretations” (Against the Christians, III).

One of the high points of St John’s Gospel comes near the end, in chapter 20, in the confrontation between Jesus and the disciple Thomas. Jesus, crucified but now risen from the dead, has already appeared to his disciples as a group, sending them out as the Father had sent him, and breathing out the Holy Spirit upon them (20: 19 — 23). But on that occasion Thomas was not there. When the others tell him: ‘We have seen the Lord’, he will not believe them. ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe’ (v 25). Now, eight days later, Jesus appears to them all again, and this time Thomas is with them. Jesus takes up the challenge made by Thomas to the other disciples: ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing’. Thomas answers: ‘My Lord and my God’, and Jesus finishes the encounter with the words: ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ (vv 26-29).

One of the reasons, and perhaps the most obvious one, why St John tells this story is to provide some help for Christians who, living years after the events of Easter, and never having seen the risen Lord, have difficulty in believing that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

The origin of the Urban Theology Unit resides, I fancy, in a quite fundamental question which has seemed to me to be elemental in any search for Christian discipleship. It was something like: Where do I have to place myself so that Gospel things happen to me?

I had satisfied at least myself that the peculiar and distinctive genius of Christianity lay in its uncovering and empowering certain secular dynamics which were for the wholeness of humanity.

The call to be a disciple, in this light, was therefore the call to place oneself strategically, so that the dynamics of the Christ-events could be recognised and entered into. The evangelical motive, “What must I do to be saved?” was therefore secularised into “Where must I be that salvation happens?” The church therefore had to be discovered around and within those events, people and movements which could be part of the on-going secular dynamic which continued the acts of Jesus. The acts of Jesus, in turn, were the immediate and often microcosmic happenings which embodied and pointed to the Kingdom of God.

It seemed to me, further, that the calling of a theologian always had to be secondary to the calling to be a disciple — or, more pertinently, that a theological vocation was impossible except as a development of a discipleship vocation. This meant that theorising had to issue from commitment, speaking from acting, systematising from experimenting. Indeed, I later learned that the whole life pattern of Jesus reflected this kind of dialogue between engagement and withdrawal, conflict and spirituality, politics and privateness, and that the peculiar group that he called into being likewise existed as alternative communal society (the New Israel) and as his own alternative inner being (the Body of Christ).

This paper was originally written for the Glencar Summer School, the theme of which for that year was Liberation. The space for this contribution was entitled ‘Liberation in the Family’. As a Christian feminist, my own concern in the area of family is how women can serve in the family of God; this latter I take to be as different from The Family (of popular and sociological imagination) as the Kingdom of God is different from say, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the two parts of this article, I hope to explore the experience of a group of women so as to demonstrate the meaning that is fully entailed by ‘Liberation in the Family’. That is, I believe, that it necessarily involves us in a reappraisal of our whole theological understanding of the Body and the Spirit.

Recently there have been several attempts to introduce Latin American liberation theology into this country. These attempts can usually be recognized by their chief catchphrase — ‘doing theology’. ‘Doing theology’ is represented as being a practical and political affair which everyone can take part in, and which is the opposite and alternative to academic theology, which is believed to be remote, abstract and oriented to the elite. But the problem with this approach to ‘doing theology’ is that it tends to leave us with another abstraction. What in Latin America was the result of a historical and political process, and the naming a new reality as a result of this process, becomes in translation to our historical reality simply a new abstraction.