Showing papers in "Theology in 1975"

The Trinity and Human Life

Abstract: The doctrine of Trinity suffers more than other central doctrines of the Christian creed from not being thus closely related to the practice of the Christian religion.... How many Christians today, when trying to speak ofthe faith by which they live, would select the doctrine of the Trinity as that to whose truth their whole being vibrates? How many laymen would not rather regard it as an unintelligible metaphysical doctrine which orthodoxy requires them to profess, but which has no direct relevance to their life or their prayers? How many clergy, as Trinity Sunday draws near, groan within themselves at the thought that it will be their duty to try to expound this dry and abstract doctrine to congregations for whom they anticipate that it will have but little interest? (pp. 176 f.).

Religion within the Limits of Language Alone

Abstract: Figgis's last sermon at Cambridge in June 1918 and says of him: \"He foresaw and foretold the poignant struggles which were lying ahead for the Church and the faith. He foresaw and he foretold the challenge of the new morality to the Christian way oflife. He foresaw and he foretold the challenge of the totalitarian state to the prerogatives of Christ the King in his Church. He foresaw and he foretold the resurrection of paganism, naked, unashamed, aggressive. Yet in Church and in university he missed his way or rather the Anglican Church and Cambridge missed their opportunity with him. He has no living memorial in the multifarious schools and parties of Anglicanism today [1936], as in his own day he had no office worthy ofhis talents.\"l Figgis indeed lived to be only fifty-three and, like Manning, left half a life's work unfmished including a book on Bossuet which went to the bottom in a torpedoed ship from which Figgis himself escaped. While much of the theology of his day has perished and is read no more, a reading of the corpus of the works of Figgis is what J. B. Lightfoot called \"a cordial for drooping spirits\" and strangely relevant.

Kingsley's Racial Philosophy:

Abstract: Yet, in the fmal analysis, it is Kingsley's status as an amateur that makes his views 011 science still of interest today. For his assessment of science was that of a man who was well acquainted with more than one other area ofactivity. When, therefore, towards the end ofhis life he compared political and scientific endeavour, his words are worth noting: even if they are hardly congenial to some of our present-day thinking.

Weariness with Politics: A Matter for the Church

Abstract: Politics is not simply the answer, or a set of answers, to human problems. It is itself part of the human problem, its manifestation on a social plane and its articulation in concrete historical events, with a rich interplay of fact and idea, flesh and spirit, individual and mass, person and mechanism, past and future. Politics is not merely a set of techniques and structures for distributing power and wealth in society, or for getting things done. It is also sets of symbols, which inform and give meaning to life. And often for ordinary men the symbolism of politics is more important and impressive than the political realitiesassessed in terms simply of the use of power. Much of it is boring, much frightening or disappointing. It is full of tension and of mystery. If some men apparently are able to master it in theory, they meet a response of scepticism from many of their fellows, who notice their obvious inability to master it in practice. This truth about politics is not new; in our ecological crisis it is inescapable. A common response to unmasterable mystery is to worship, but we have at least temporarily in a limited way been cured of politics as worship by the experience of the Nazi and other regimes. Although democracy is a factory of idols with a high turn-over, it rests on astanding, ever renewed processof the destruction of idols. It is this iconoclasm, more than its economic achievements, that commends democracy over against systems of ideological monopoly, in which the defence against political idolatry is not built into the political structure. But history and humanity erode the idols even in such systems, as the fates of Hitler and Stalin reveal. Where worship as a response to the bewilderment of politics becomes impossible, apathy remains a natural reaction. We refuse to be teased any longer by the riddle. There is no reason in it, and the quarrels of the politicians and parties, each claiming to bring the essential reason into things, yet differing amongst themselves with little dignity, seems merely part of the irrationality. The cycles of stop-go, of election fever and periods of parliamentary work, of promises which raise hopes followed by necessary changes of course that destroy faith all these oscillations fatigue the metal of political perseverance. Disgust with politics gives way to mere apathy, and to the search for \"third ways\", a-political politics, and for havens from politics altogether. For most people, there is little that is dramatic or explicit about this development, and many probably grow up accepting political apathy as the sensible way of life. political weariness is a great political fact. Political parties are minorities of mostly good people who exist to get things done. They take account of political apathy no further than to see how they can woo or bribe enough of the floaters out of their indecision

The “Vinculum Conjugale”: a Moral Reality:

Abstract: The doctrine of the vinculum derives from two sources: the unalterability of the past and the profound signicance of the marriage bond. Aristotle quotes Agathon: monon gar autou kai theos sterisketai, ageneta poein hass' an e pepragmena. Of this alone even God is deprived |-The power of making undone those things that have been done. and the same point was made familiar to the Western Church by St Thomas Aquinas, Deus non potest facere quod praeteritum non fuerit: God cannot make what is past not to have been. We take it as obvious: and in a sense it is; but it reveals all attitude towards time and human action in the world that is profoundly serious and moral. Other views of time hive been held which make our actions seem much less signicant and our responsibility less grave. If time were cyclic there would be no fundamcntal dierence between past and future, and no sense of my decision realizing some possibilities and irrevocably rejecting others. I would cease to appear to myself as being really an agent, and would regard myself rather as a passive spectator observing my destiny as I was carried round the giddy whirligig of the eternally recurrent circle. A similar sense of futility and irresponsibility is generated by those philosophies which tell us that time is unreal, and that no signicance should be sought in the transient veil of temporality. If tune has no meaning it does not matter what I do now in time present, nor need I mind what I have done in time past. But, per contra, if time is real and the past unalterable then it behoves me to act now while there is yet time, and to see to it that I shall not nd, when it is too late, that I have either done what I ought not to have done or left undone what I ought to have done. Seek ye the Lord while he may be found. Today | every day|-I have to choose, and by my irrevocable deeds determine the course of at least my own personal history, and perhaps that of others too. And if I am a theist, I will do so with an added awareness of responsibility, remembering the account that I must one day make. Christianity, like Judaism, teaches the reality of action, but it teaches also the forgiveness of sins. And in …