The theology of women's ministry is a comparatively new item on the Church's agenda. It is less than two decades since the Church of Scotland took the historic decision to open its ordained ministry to women. At the time it seemed a controversial step, and many must have wondered where it would lead the Kirk. I think that we can truthfully say that it has not led to any dire disasters, but rather to the enrichment of the ministry. That has also been the experience of many other Churches which in recent years have opened their ordained ministry to women. But controversies remain. The 1985 General Synod elections in the Church of England were dominated by the issue of women's ordination, with feelings running high in pressure-groups on both sides. In some Churches the introduction of women's ordination has exacerbated divisions already existing among members. Some of the major Christian denominations, including both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, do not permit any form of ordination for women. Even within denominations like the Church of Scotland, where the introduction of women ministers has occurred without disruption, there are still members who have doubts about whether it is really right. In many small Christian groups women are debarred from all but the most informal ministry, because it is considered unbiblical for them to preach, address assembled Christians publicly, or presume to teach men about spiritual matters.

Michael Polanyi's thought has received increasing attention from theologians over the last few years. He offers both an historical and a critical analysis of the intellectual roots of contemporary Western culture. One aspect of this is his diagnosis of Locke's contribution to the emergence in Western epistemological theory of the supremacy of demonstrative knowledge over faith. This is reported, for instance, by Professor Thomas Torrance, quoting, first, this passage from Locke's Third Letter on Toleration:

For whatever is not capable of demonstration … is not, unless it be self-evident, capable to produce knowledge, how well grounded and great soever the assurance of faith may be wherewith it is received; but faith it is still, and not knowledge; persuasion, and not certainty. This is the highest the nature of the thing will permit us to go in matters of revealed religion, which are therefore called matters of faith; a persuasion of our own minds, short of knowledge, is the last result that determines us in such truths.

It is the year 1117 and the place is the little Church in the Orcadian Island of Egilsay. It is Easter and the Service is in progress. The people have heard the Epistle and Gospel, and now they are bringing their gifts to the old priest. The bread and wine is the sign of the giving of themselves; in an Orcadian writer's words: ‘With these they offer God everything that is theirs — their bunions, their jars of oil, bright hearthstones, the long nights they lie awake listening to the sea on the rocks when the fishermen are out’. Says the priest, ‘Will it be, perhaps, that one or two of these same earthy people will be quickened, that the green shoot and the golden stalk will soar out of their brutishness, fit ones for the threshing floors of purgatory? Doubtless. All of them, I pray. For this we were born. … Once more I have done it. What seems to be impossible has happened. The Body and the Blood of Our Lord lie on the altar before me. It is accomplished. The church is drowned in a terrible and beautiful silence. … God is come among us. Our little gifts of bread and wine he returns to us loaded with blessing and beauty and peace and love and glory illimitable. Ecce Agnus Dei. Himself he gives to us. … And so now when I bless the people of Egilsay at the end of the Mass, I bless him in particular whose face is as bright and as doomed as a stone with spring sunlight on it that the builders will soon gather into a new wall.

The theology of liberation poses social, hermeneutical, and theological issues when it asks, ‘Who is Jesus Christ for us today?’ The social question of human and political liberation is a matter in which theology cannot remain indifferent, though theology qua theology is not simply social analysis. The hermeneutical question of the influence of social context and ideology on biblical interpretation casts suspicion on methodological naïvety, though theology qua theology is not simply epistemology. Without ceasing to confront the social and hermeneutical aspects of theologizing, liberation theology unavoidably poses the Christological question, ‘Who is Jesus Christ?’

Abstract

The essay explores the relationship between Christian faith, ethical thought and political action. It examines two views of the matter. First, the autonomy thesis, advanced by writers such as Edward Norman in his Reith Lectures and elsewhere, which claims that Christianity in general is independent of political concerns, and that Church leaders in particular have no business engaging in political debate, or using their teaching authority to commend or condemn the actions of governments. Second, the commitment thesis, here derived from writings of Kenneth Leech, which maintains that fidelity to the biblical revelation involves an explicit commitment to Christian humanism, and thereby to practical opposition to capitalism and support for radical socialism.

Christian theology is an important perspective for theorizing about education. This article develops a possible theological perspective on religious education. RE these days is seldom Christian education. It is dominated by secular assumptions: it is to be open, multi-faith and descriptive. What might a Christian theology of education say of these developments? In section 1 the question is raised why RE should be taught in schools at all. In section 2 a theological analysis of what may be called ‘the climate of unbelief’ is attempted, and it will be shown how several of the assumptions of the new RE arise directly out of this. In section 3 some fresh criticisms of the phenomenological approach to religion are made, which if they are sound, will indicate that this approach need not be preferred to more traditional approaches to teaching religion. In section 4 it is suggested that both the alleged fact of modern secularity and the fear of religious absolutism provide no grounds for embracing a purely descriptive approach to religion. There is a simple, practical conclusion – there should be more Christian Studies and less Religious Education in schools.