Few topics, to my mind, have been so obscured by inter-confessional debates as that of grace. Particularly, perhaps, among Catholics really everything written or said since the sixteenth century has been conditioned by reaction against, or attack upon, positions asserted to be those of the Reformers. Yet when we trundle out these statements and the arguments on which they rest, it comes as a surprise to be told that we have got the Reformers quite wrong; even their contemporaries, the theologians of the Council of Trent, seem to have been grappling with adversaries of their own making. When we go on to look, far too superficially in my case, at what seems to be the Reformed view about what we hold, the results are even more surprising.

Perhaps the Reformed take theologians more seriously than we do, but even given this, they seem, from our point of view, to be remarkably unlucky in the ones they read (but I except Professor Torrance from this).

It may well be—because Catholics have been guilty of practically every absurdity—that there are theologians who hold, or have held, that grace is a separate thing, something we can possess; or a reservoir on which we can draw. Some, not of very great repute, have certainly held that a right use of natural powers deserved or brought about a giving of grace. On a hasty reading it might appear that even the great medieval theologians regarded grace as the embellishment of an aristotelian universe. But when it is suggested that even Roman theologians regard grace as an impersonal something, a something detachable from the presence of the living God, I do not recognise anything more than the selection of one set of statements interpreted in the worst possible sense and used out of context.

Antony Archer rightly suggests (‘Dismantling the Sacrament Machine’, NB January 1975) that present Church structures impede the preaching of the Gospel, and that the laity must begin to do tasks from which they have hitherto been cut off, in particular that ‘it is urgent that the laity take preaching into their hands’. He points to the inadequacy of much present-day priestly preaching, and discusses the possibility of such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, but concludes : ‘However, such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, superficially attractive though it is, would only compound the present distortion. After all the priest is ordained to preach the Gospel and attempts to change the Church should be in accordance with its theology’. It is this last point that I wish to develop.

Nobody would deny that there are many lay people who have the gift and vocation of preaching the Gospel, and are able to do it better than most priests. But preaching remains an inalienable part of Christian priesthood. You can be a preacher without being a priest, but not a priest without being a preacher. If we stress the sacramental functions of the priest at the expense of his preaching role, or vice versa, we distort our picture of his office. Though individuals may be more suited to one task than to the other, priests must be trained for both, and both must be expected of them. To train a man to administer the sacraments without training him to preach is like teaching a violinist to stop the strings with his left hand, without showing him how to wield the bow in his right. The reason for the interdependence of the two roles lies deep in the nature of the Gospel itself. Christ came both to speak and to act: he both utters, and is, the Word of God. Indeed, it is hard to conceive what is meant by administering the sacraments without preaching, since all human gestures reveal something about those who make them, and so every sacramental act communicates, proclaims, preaches, though it may do so very badly. Bro. Antony has fallen into a trap when he says ‘By preaching is meant here verbal communication’, since the verbal is inseparable from other forms of communication.

Late-medieval conciliarism provides one theoretical model for the structure of the church, and in particular for its decision-making processes. The development of councils as a means of settling disputes which could not be settled at the local, episcopal level, and of making decisions binding on the church as a whole, in particular of defining the true faith, remains, so far as I am aware, still clouded in our fragmentary knowledge of the early church. But we may guess that the use of councils developed steadily and ‘organically’, as did the priesthood and episcopate, as the church developed its own (in many ways) unique structure in response to the needs of the time. The same appears to be true of the development of the Roman primacy. The notion that the Roman church was the final court of appeal in theological and ecclesiastical disputes, and the corresponding notion that it was incapable of error, were first developed (though I do not know how widely they were accepted in the East) in the late 4th and 5th centuries. Some, such as St Athanasius, regarded the consent of Rome as the touchstone of a true council. ‘Infallibility’ as applied to the Roman see in this sense was thus a very ancient doctrine, and some have found it as early as I Clement (96 AD.). But it was quite a different matter to say that the Roman see (or even the pope in person) could pronounce a final, binding decision on a matter of faith without an oecumenical council. As Professor Tierney has recently shown, papal ‘infallibility’ in this ‘strong’ sense was a product of disputes between the friars and the French episcopate in the late 13th Century, and it was accepted by very few prior to the Council of Florence (1439), and not all that widely thereafter. The normal view of medieval canon-lawyers was that the pope was supreme in jurisdiction, i.e. his word was law in settling disputes, but that as regards defining faith a council was required; indeed, in matters of faith, he was both fallible and impeachable.

In itself this collection of articles, letters, jokes, editorials and poems from New Christian (1965-1970) has nothing particularly to recommend it to readers five years later. Everything here was written for its own time and place rather than for export. But seen as a reminder of what New Christian stood for, as evidence to draw on should there be any other serious Christian reviews in being or possibility, it seems to me of very great value.

However we regard New Christian, praise or blame for it belongs mostly to Trevor Beeson, its permanent editor. I think he achieved remarkable success. He aimed high, and hit a lot of marks, missing only the crucial one—circulation. His short account in the Reader of what he tried for and where he failed is a model for any editor of a Christian journal. I propose to summarise it under eight heads, following each with my own comment, and drawing where necessary on the evidence of the collection.

Men and women martyred for their faith form a coherent and distinctive group—from Socrates and Stephen, through Joan of Arc, Savonarola and Thomas More, down to Dietrich Bonhoeffer in our own day. Violent death came to each in such a way that we can classify them all with Jesus.

Particular circumstances may allow us to match their martyrdoms with his passion and crucifixion. At times betrayal by former friends or similar forms of treachery led to arrest and imprisonment. The trials which preceded the death penalty frequently centred on some fatal question. Did Thomas More wish to deprive Henry VIII of the title which Parliament had granted him? How would Jesus answer when the high priest asked him : ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’ (Mark 14:61). Finally, many martyrs shared the same geography of death with Jesus—public execution. Some were, of course, butchered in their prison cells, or like Bonhoeffer led away to the sinister secrecy of a Nazi hanging. But Joan of Arc died in the Rouen market-place, Savonarola outside the old Palace in Florence, and Thomas More on Tower Hill.

Granted these and other similarities, we need, nevertheless, to be sensitive to much that gives Jesus’ passion and death its own particular profile. The differences go beyond the obvious and massive fact that no one even alleges that the other martyrs have reconciled the entire human race with God. We must not let other notable contrasts slip out of sight. Let me examine one of these.