Showing papers in "Theology in 1977"

Poetic and Religious Imagination

Abstract: Thus W. H.Auden, in his poem on the death of Yeats. And, as Hannah Arendt emphasizes,' there is obviously no question here of the poet praising the best of all possible worlds, congratulating the Creator on a highly satisfactory performance. Poetry it seems is not grounded in some celebratory sense of being at home in the world, but rather in the acute awareness of the world not being at home in itself, in a sense of dislocation. It is never the business of art to say, This is good, or (the corollary of that) I am good; only to say, This is, and, I am. Hence what Eric Gill aptly called the 'lover's quarrel' between art and 'prudence' or moral sensibility; art may be about world-views, even metaphysics, yet it is fundamentally inimical to ideology of any kind. The serious artist should easily comprehend the passion with which Job turns away from the neat, facile explanations, solutions and evaluations which his comforters import into his disordered experience. The brutal and overwhelming monologue which Yahweh addresses to Job and his friends is essentially a long statement of the utter alienness and inaccessibility of the order of the world to the mind of man, the impossibility of an ordered linguistic picture of it. If there are things which God alone sees (,Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?') how can speech about them ever be possible?The morning stars and the sons of God who stand at the creator's side are entitled to their shouts of joy at the world; but man is not so graced. Can you draw out leviathan with a hook? can you harness the monsters? Then the

God's Death

Abstract: In this article I wish to raise some questions about the doctrine of the Incarnation. I do not intend this to be an attack on the Christian faith as such ; my attack is directed rather at a certain way of conceiving God and his activity in the world. In a sense I shall be pleased if people regard the problems I am about to raise as unreal, since this itself will probably indicate that they are not thinking in the objectivist categories that I have in view. However I believe that what I shall say will constitute a real problem for many Christians, and it is their attitude to religious statements that I wish to challenge. In what follows I shall be working within the forms of thought about God that I reject in order to show internal incoherencies in this approach. I shall, therefore, be led to make assertions about God which I believe to be at best misleading; however, such statements, as I hope will be seen, are representative of the purest 'orthodoxy'. The important philosophical issues that are involved in the doctrine of the Incarnation, and which I wish to discuss, are presented with particular sharpness in connection with the question of Christ's death, and it is on this topic that I shall concentrate. What precisely is supposed to have happened on the cross? A man died, of course; but the issue is more complicated than that because it is also asserted that this man was God, very God. But does it not follow from this that God died on the cross? This proposition seems to follow directly from the application of the principle that logicians call the Indiscernibility of ldenticals-the irreproachable doctrine that underlies such everyday inferences as: if Tully has brown eyes and if Tully is Cicero, then Cicero has brown eyes. The principle is simply that if two words refer to one and the same entity then any genuine property possessed by the bearer of one of these names is possessed by the bearer of the other name. After all, how could things be otherwise, since there is only one individual under discussion?1 If it is allowed that an immediate implication of the doctrine of the Incarnation is that God died, then we are immediately faced with great difficulties, as will soon be seen. But it could at this point be said that the supposed implication needs modifying because in one sense, despite the traditional idea of God's simplicity, God is a complex entity since he exists in three persons-essential trinitarianism. Christ is conceived of as being just one of these three irreducible elements in the

Liturgical Language, Dead and Alive

Abstract: desire is granted. He may utter a feeble protest but he cannot deny that the gift is free. O'Connor's defence and use of the grotesque makes grace as a loving and transforming power mean a great deal more than any theory which considers it as a second level built atop nature or as so enmeshed within a man that persons become time-capsules of grace. O'Connor gives us a world where we must re-examine our commonplace manners for they have become-double agents. We cannot close her books without unease or distaste, for when we read her stories our own world seems infiltrated with saboteurs. Boundaries between safe mother nature and abstruse grace have become fluid, highly provisional. Flannery O'Connor's fiction will strike many readers as foreign and provincial, but her lessons remain for the accepting reader. First, Christians-and not just Christian novelists-must re-examine what form their apologetics assume. Will we continue to write for a small audience of dwindling initiates? There is presently much talk about the need for Christianity to present the mystery inherent in the world, but very few of us are willing to make use of the desperate and bizarre images which are littered about us. Hopefully this arises from a lack of practice and not of nerve. My second point follows from this. We do well to recall O'Connor's views on the grotesque (the freak) for increasingly Christians must employ what is strange and alien, and to relate it with humour as well as seriousness. But this demands an increased awareness of manners we take for granted. We must learn to look at things as they are and avoid the Christian's sin of seeing all things as bright and beautiful. This is my third point learnt from O'Connor. The marriage of nature and grace, God and man, is envisioned precisely where we do not expect it, within the natural order. 'The more a writer wishes to make the supernatural apparent, the more real he has to be able to make the natural world, for if the readers don't accept the natural world, they'll certainly not accept anything else.' (p. 116).

In Defence of Disorder

Abstract: stipendiary ministry, however, is freed from these depressing financial constraints and is able to 'be' within even the smallest local community. Nor is this form of ministry subject to the current social pressures about work. Within the extra-parochial setting, too, the non-stipendiary minister may lose some of the objectivity and detachment of his stipendiary colleagues, because in general he must still earn a living even while ministering, but his distinction between 'being' and 'doing' may be clearer. He may not be so tempted to invent things to 'do' as a stipendiary minister. It would be foolish to offer the non-stipendiary ministry as a panacea for all the churches' financial, practical or even theological ills. A number of smaller denominations have relied too heavily and to their own detriment in the past on a part-time and sometimes ill-trained ministry. Further, there are obvious temptations facing the churches today to under-value a serious theological education-for stipendiary and nonstipendiary ministers alike (as the drop in graduate ordinands of both kinds indicates). Nevertheless, I believe that the non-stipendiary ministry has a serious contribution to make to our contemporary understanding of a theology of ordained ministry. If only because this form of ministry is relatively free of financial and work-oriented constraints it can help us all to reassess the ordained ministry as a whole. Whilst it is as varied as, or even more varied than, other forms of ministry, it does at least possess these two singular advantages, whose theological implications are crucial.

What do the Translators Think They are Up To

Abstract: An age of scepticism, it appears, is also a great age of biblical translations. Hard on the heels of the New English Bible's New Testament (1961) we had the Jerusalem Bible in 1966 and William Barclay's New Testament in 1968, and now the Good News Bible in 1976. Having been asked to review the last two, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect on the whole business of modern translation and what it seems to reveal about the state of our theology as a whole. The preface to the Good News Bible states:

On the Being of Nature

Abstract: elaborated in the first section of this paper are confirmed from the standpoint of the Church's ministry, and that the kinds of Church educational institutions which I there outlined (whether in primary, secondary, post-secondary, or special education) deserve massive, informed and deliberate support by the Church at all its levels. The nature of our Christian responsibility in society and my conviction that this responsibility must above all be acted out in the field of education find, to my mind, powerful expression in a passage from Raymond Williams' Culture and Society in the context of remarks about the development of a common culture. 'We are learning, slowly, to attend to our environment as a whole, and to draw our values from that whole, and not from its fragmented parts, where a quick success can bring long waste.... [But] this is a real barrier in the mind, which at times it seems almost impossible to break down; a refusal to accept the creative capacities of life; a determination to limit and restrict the channels of growth; a habit of thinking, indeed, that the future has now to be determined by some ordinance in our own minds. We project our old images into the future, and take hold of ourselves and others to force energy towards that substantiation. . . . Against this the idea of culture is necessary, as an idea of the tending of natural growth.... We have to live by our own attachments, but we can only live fully, in common, if we grant the attachments of others, and make it our common business to keep the channels of growth clear' (Pelican edition, pp. 322 f.) If faith can see the opportunity in education along these lines and know it to be a challenge from God in his interaction with us and his presence to us, then the Church might look with confidence towards turbulent but inspiring times ahead.