Drawing on Roman Catholic and ecumenical expertise, this article takes an honest look at the experiences and hopes of those abused. Many in the churches assume that victims seek financial compensation or legal redress. However, research indicates that many victims primarily seek truth and justice as a means of closure and that their struggles with church leadership arise when truth and justice are repeatedly withheld. This makes forgiveness near-impossible and often results in the victim being re-traumatized by the systemic re-abuse they experience. Ultimately, there is no substitute for full and genuine meeting with victims, which requires the church to lay aside its power and authority and engage with humility and proper deference to the victims abused at the hands of the church. Without such openness, the victims cannot move on, and neither can the churches.

This article documents and reflects on gender-based Contextual Bible Study (CBS) work on 2 Samuel 13:1–22 over more than thirty-five years, much of it shaped by work with Anglican communities. CBS work on the story of the abuse of Tamar provides a shape to the article, beginning with the identification of the Church by women survivors of violence as the silencer of Tamar, then of the Church as the abuser of Tamar, then of the Church as the excluder of Tamar in its lectionaries and liturgies and then of the Church as abandoning Tamar with impunity. The article summons the Church, though a CBS on 2 Samuel 13:21, to hear the summons of Tamar to change.

Speaking truth ought to be normative in churches, and yet when it does, the foundations and structures of power are often shaken to the core. This paper explores the issues of identity and integrity in ecclesiology and is concerned with the ethical paradigms and moral frameworks that need to be in place if churches are to be places where honesty and truthfulness can be normative. Churches often fail as institutions because they presume they can conduct their affairs as organizations might. Churches become anger-averse, resisting the voices and experiences of victims, in order that the flow of power and its structures are unimpeded. At that point, churches become inherently committed to re-abusing victims and are unable to hear their pain and protests, which only leads to the perpetration of further abuse.

Policy and professionalism go hand in hand. When safeguarding policy is all but absent as it is in the Church of England, it leaves clergy and others ill equipped to diagnose or to respond to concerns over abuse. Complex issues such as conflict of interest, evaluation based on verifiable objectives linked to safeguarding priorities, setting a balance between confidentiality and disclosure, safe recruitment and implementing the recommendations of safeguarding reviews are in effect left dangling. Expertise and professional judgement are needed both to develop policy and to apply it in real-world cases of prospective and actual abuse. Statistics about safeguarding cases covering associated resources, expenditure and outcomes are not readily available. Safeguarding reviews, mostly about particular cases, are difficult to generalise and ‘lessons learned’ are typically left at that without evidence of how safeguarding has changed as a result. The focus of safeguarding should be on the welfare of the people concerned, including survivors and perpetrators as well as congregations and church workers. Confrontational and legalistic approaches are all too common and do more harm than good. The objective should be to restore broken relationships, not necessarily between the survivor and the perpetrator, but between everyone involved in the case and the church.

This paper gives definitions of terms which have become critical in ensuring that Anglican churches minimize the risk of harm to all who are involved as practitioners or recipients of its ministries. This imperative is rooted in Scripture, not just the recent history or pronouncements of the Lambeth Conference 2022. The terms ‘Safeguarding’, ‘Safe Ministry’ and ‘Safe Church’ (SC) are set out with reference to the ‘Lambeth Calls’. This paper explores why such terms have come to the forefront of current theological praxis, notes historical iterations of such matters and asks why some Anglican churches or provinces may resist adopting this Lambeth Call. It offers both an apologetic for the universal adoption of SC practices and a scriptural and dominical mandate for them. The paper identifies theological and scriptural principles on which SC theory and practice might be grounded. Anglican churches and provinces are encouraged to develop a theory and practice of SC pertinent to their environment rather than adhere to abstract universal prescriptions which risk irrelevance amidst cultural and contextual particularity.

The past half-century has been a treasure trove for those fascinated by historical instances of moral panic, conspiracy theories and the enigmatic world of secretive satanic cults. The wealth of examples, ranging from the peculiar to the outright cruel, offers a captivating journey through the evolution of societal fears and beliefs. It is something of an irony that in the increasingly post-religious Developed World, the void has been filled with a multiplicity of speculative spiritualties, quasi-faith-based therapies, mystical curiosity and fascination with the paranormal. Little of the value ascribed to such a zeitgeist is evidence-based. Nor does it need to be. In a world of ‘alternative facts’ that has also steadily habituated the public into post-truth political discourse, evidence and veracity are not what they used to be.

Multiple instances of safeguarding failures and criticisms of poor process and weak governance have afflicted the Church of England for many years, despite repeated assurances that ‘Lessons would be learned’. An Independent Safeguarding Board has been formed and then abolished without being replaced. A report by Professor Alexis Jay, former Chair of Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, recommending the creation of two independent charities to oversee Church safeguarding has been passed to a Response Group and is being resisted by various groups within the Church. This article examines issues of the management of safeguarding within the overall governance of the organisation, compares issues within the Church with those which have been exposed by the Post Office Horizon scandal and considers the potential role of the audit function to concern itself with safeguarding matters as part of its oversight of risk management and corporate governance.

An article reviewing the work of Eric Mascall and suggesting that he is developing an Anglican nouvelle théologie. The importance of Mascall’s work on Christ and the Church is also explored.

Eric Mascall and Karl Barth shared a common concern with the influence of liberal Protestantism on their churches in England and Germany. They agreed this problem was best addressed through the lens of natural theology. Yet, while for Mascall a Thomistically informed understanding of natural theology was the best way to counteract liberal Protestantism’s influence on the Church, for Barth, natural theology was to blame for the Church’s confusion. The concern this paper raises was Barth’s sharp delineation between human reason and divine revelation in the end, complicit with the ontological duality of modernity that was the basis of the liberal Protestantism he was rejecting? By dealing with modernity on its own terms, Barth undermined the capacity of the Church’s ministry of Word and Sacrament to be effective agents of personal transformation. Whereas Mascall’s realistic ontology not only repudiates the idealist foundations of liberal Protestantism but also offers the Church the necessary ontology foundation for understanding its ministry of Word and Sacrament as effective embodiments of God’s transforming grace.

E. L. Mascall devoted much of his early scholarly career to developing accounts of analogy and natural theology grounded in the study both of Thomas Aquinas and in his Thomist successors. This essay examines Mascall’s account of analogy in relation to other views on analogy in his day, finding that in the 1950s, ‘image’ becomes at least as important a category for Mascall as ‘analogy’. Even while beginning from Thomist metaphysical standpoints and motivated by Thomist considerations, Mascall develops an account of thinking and speaking about God that diverges from his Thomist contemporaries, resembling more the thought of his ‘para-Thomist’ friend and colleague, Austin Farrer.

The timeless and unchanging nature of God was defended by Dr. Eric Mascall throughout his books. He argued against process theology, and in particular the works of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who was one of its foremost exponents. In his books, Mascall defended the distinction between our temporal and created nature and God’s divine and uncreated nature as found in historic theology. In a manner suited to his learning, he discussed the implications of modern physics for theology.

Given as the Pusey House Recollections Lecture 2023.

This article explores Eric Mascall’s contribution to theodicy and (possibly) providence. It offers a taxonomy of Christian responses to the problem of evil: those which see suffering as instrumental to the purposes of God, those which see suffering as inevitable within the purposes of God, and those which see suffering as inimical to the purposes of God. It offers a critique of all three families of such responses. It then locates Mascall’s theodicy on that ‘map’. It argues that Mascall’s proposal, if accepted, removes the main argument against the inimical family of responses, which it sees as fitting best with the healing ministry of Jesus, as being most unambiguously committed to the goodness of God, and as being the most pastorally sensitive of the three categories. It also raises, without advocating, the possibility that all divine action may be indirect, thus safeguarding the non-coerciveness of God without compromising eschatological hope.

This article argues that E.L. Mascall develops the eschatology of C.S. Lewis to answer three common critiques of the consensual doctrine of hell. First, Mascall argues that human persons are capable of refusing the love of God because their potential reciprocal love depends on a freedom to give the self, or refuse to do so, in an indissoluble union. Second, the perfection of the new heavens and new earth is not a numerical perfection, and the numerical imperfection of finite creation demonstrates that this is not God’s goal in creation. Third, human nature and Christian revelation reveal that persons are made with the capacity to receive grace and participate in glory, but this reception and participation cannot be coerced. In order to test the plausibility of this position, I present David Bentley Hart’s critique of Lewis’s particularism and Mascall’s answer to such objections.