I examine the question of how tradition is received and passed on within the Church's Councils with specific attention to the problems of continuity and discontinuity. I use the example of Vatican II's ‘Declaration on the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions’ to explore the question of hermeneutics in both receiving and passing on the teachings of the Church. By looking at the historical development of this document I try to show that three important factors at work: first, the question of biblical interpretation; second, the question of determining which elements of tradition are authoritative and which not; and third, the influence of non-theological factors upon theological articulations. Through examining these factors, I argue for one particular approach to Council hermeneutics that is able to include and correct three other approaches. I argue that correct interpretations of Council documents do not represent the closure of tradition, but the opening up of tradition to future reception and re-formulation.

St. Thomas Aquinas is primarily a theologian. He writes of Sacred Scripture not only as a theologian, but because he is a theologian. As a master of theology his essential textbook was the Bible. From earlier theologians St. Thomas received an understanding of theology, which he shared with his contemporaries and which he in turn was to deepen and strengthen: Sacred Scripture provides the auctoritas of theology. It gives rise to theology, enables and governs it. M-D Chenu has emphasized and demonstrated St. Thomas’ fundamental reliance on the Bible as the foundation of his theological work.

St. Thomas says that ‘the truth of faith is contained in Sacred Scripture.’ He understood that a cursory reading of the text would not reveal this truth very clearly, because it is in Scripture, but ‘diffusely, in diverse ways and sometimes darkly.’ Thomas provides an insight into his own approach to exegesis when he continues: ‘the result is that to draw out the truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and practice.’ Here we see Thomas the theologian approaching the sacred books in order to draw out carefully from them what faith teaches through them.

St. Thomas served the Church as a ‘Master of the Sacred Scriptures’ (Magister in Sacra Pagina) and, therefore, as J. Mahoney states, the systematic works of Aquinas do not constitute his truly magisterial activity. Mahoney notes the valuable work of H. Denifle who, in his discussion of the text-books of the medieval professors of theology, shows the Bible to be the basic text-book and indicates that ‘the theologian of that day knew no book so well as the Bible.’

Robert Schreiter has examined the topic of a Christian understanding of reconciliation in the context of large scale global violence. One of his key notions is that, along with God's grace, forgiveness extended by the victim to the oppressor is the primary element that opens the path towards reconciliation. In this way, the victim acts as the subject or agent of reconciliation. Significantly, the object of reconciliation is the oppressor's humanity – not the act committed. Such a position correlates well with Julian of Norwich's depiction of a God of no blame and no wrath which may be best understood when one distinguishes between persons and their sinful acts. While work towards social and individual reconciliation continues in post‐genocide Rwanda, a number of bona fide acts of forgiveness by survivors are supportive of these views. Without dismissing the need for human accountability and for injustices to be addressed, people such as Immaculée Ilibagiza and Célestin Musekura have been able to take that first step of forgiving by distinguishing between the humanity of the perpetrator and the act committed. Their concrete examples provide a closer look at the dynamics of a Christian spirituality of reconciliation in its theological and practical realms.

This paper addresses two questions concerning the attribution of mystery to God. First, if Christianity is neither rationalistic nor agnostic concerning the knowledge of God, then what is the proper understanding of mystery when it is attributed to God? Second, if mystery conditions all theological thinking, how can the proper understanding of mystery be applied systematically across the full range of theological reflection? The response to the first question has three parts. First, God is incomprehensible not because we do not have access to God. God communicates God's self and we can know God's essence but we cannot comprehend God. Second, Thomas Aquinas shows us how we can know God yet God remains incomprehensible. Third, I elucidate the analogy of proper proportionality in arguing that although we do not fully know what we are talking about when we speak of God our concepts are not meaningless. In responding to the second question, I argue, in response to Karl Rahner's use of mystery in his treatment of the problem of suffering, that God's power cannot be absolute but must be related to God's goodness if one is to preserve the mystery of God across the full range of theological reflection.

The story of the gallant attempt of the later Middle Ages to win Asia for the Church is so often passed over with the scantiest reference, even by Catholic historians, that it is almost unknown. It covered more than a century; a century whose short opening years of high hopes were followed by long dreary ones of disappointment, persecution and martyrdom, to end in the destruction of all achievement and the expulsion of the missionaries.

The first great missionary movement, which converted the northern barbarians, was the work of the Benedictines, while the glories of the sixteenth century in the East belong to the Society of Jesus. The great missionaries of the later Middle Ages were the Franciscans and Dominicans. Both Orders bore the brunt of the battle equally throughout Asia, but Cathay and Central Asia was particularly the sphere of the Minorites, while India, Persia and the Caspian Steppes was that of the Preachers.

Victor White’s life and work are a fine demonstration of the combination of the Dominican commitment to truth and to contemplation and the handing on of the fruits of contemplation. They are also a demonstration of the very considerable cost which commitment can entail, especially when operating for twenty years on .the frontiers of theology and Jungian psychology. That Jung and White had the highest regard for one another’s work and that they disagreed strongly on the nature of evil, especially concerning Jung’s Answer to Job, is well known. The publication of the greater part of Jung’s side of their correspondence makes available to those who were not personally involved the real extent of their disagreement over a number of years and the estrangement between them which resulted. More than once White wondered what exactly it was they were arguing about, since at different times they each seemed to agree to some particular item of the argument. Their inability to synchronise such agreements between them is not to be explained by personal factors, though this plays an important part in any discussion involving psychoanalysis. The breaking point was the Catholic philosophical view of evil as a privation of good and parasitic upon it (privatio boni) and not as autonomous element opposed to it, and I shall return to this later.

Examination of the relationship between them casts light on the difficulties of making this philosophical position experientially convincing and indicates that the disagreement focussed upon this point drew upon wider areas of contention between theology and psychology.

We have seen, in very general terms, what St. Thomas understands by ‘knowledge.’ We must now try and discover something of what he means by ‘inclination,’ ‘connaturality’ ‘affect’ —with a view, at long last, to trying to understand what he means by knowledge ‘by connaturality,’ ‘by inclination’ or affectiva. It will be convenient to introduce the subject by a preliminary attempt to remove a common misapprehension.

‘Knowledge,’ we have seen, is that kind of being or reality which certain creatures are found to possess, whereby they transcend in various ways and degrees the limitations of their own identity and in a certain sense become another. But this identity they do not thereby lose; they becorpe the other, have the ‘being ‘of the other, without ceasing to be themselves. It is important to remember that such knowledge and its processes and products are but a means, an instrument. Thought is the means whereby a subject attains that which is not itself without losing its own selfhood; that whereby an J becomes a That without ceasing to be I. All our concepts, ideas, judgments, reasonings; all our organisation of these in sciences and philosophical systems, are quo and in quo, and not quod; they are that whereby, with which and in which we know, not that which we know. Words—terms and propositions and syllogisms and the books that contain them—are, in their turn, but further means and instruments whereby these means and instruments are communicated from one mind to another. They are signs of signs; and woe betide us if we fall into the academicism which mistakes the signs for the realities they signify.

This article is based on a number of texts written by Michel de Certeau between around 1969 and 1974. These texts all explore the ways in which a lucid Christian belief may endure as a resource in contemporary societies. They also indicate a form of transition. In comparison to the probing but orthodoxly circumscribed analyses of L’Etranger, ou Bunion dans la différence (1969), we see the emergence of a more open (more exposed but also freer) mode of reflection. Although Certeau would rarely return in his writings after the mid-1970’s to the question of contemporary Christian belief as such, the analytic and figurative frameworks generated by this reflection continue to inform his thought. They help us to make sense of the apparently disparate heterogeneity of his subsequent publications, taking us as they do in a series of significant zigzags between, say, The Writing of History, The Mystic Fable and The Practice of Everyday Life.

Christianity was, in Certeau’s view, in the process of ‘shattering’. While this may have seemed a provocative diagnosis in 1974, it appears today as a basic premiss for a scrupulous sociological analysis. Moreover, Certeau suggests that there is nothing intrinsically new about this process. He recalls elsewhere the major scissions already at work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Christendom broke ‘into pieces’, producing here and there new generations of believers ‘without a church’. What is unprecedented, he argues, is now the sheer extent and scale of this shattering. This development is not necessarily synonymous with an imminent extinction of Christian belief, but does modify radically the conditions in which such belief must find a voice and a horizon for action.

Raimond Gaita's moral philosophy is distinguished by, among other things, its attention to the role of embodied, enacted witness in disclosing certain moral values, and its understanding of the emotions as forms of thought. In this paper, I consider how Gaita's insights on these matters may be applied to certain questions in the philosophy of religion, paying particular attention to the nature of religious experience and ‘the problem of evil’. I suggest that Gaita's discussion of how we come to recognise moral values or ‘meanings’ can be extended to the question of how we might recognise religious meanings. On this view, religious experience may take the form of an appreciation of the meaning borne by a material context (rather than, for example, some supra-sensory encounter with a supernatural agent), and our sense of the goodness or otherwise of the world may be answerable to the authoritative example of particular lives.

I would like to begin by reminding you of an episode in the history of modern philosophy in this country which is not altogether without significance, and that is the revolt against the Hegelian absolutism which one associates with such writers as Bosanquet and Edward Caird by a very powerful collection of thinkers at once philosophical and theological, of whom perhaps the best known in philosophical circles is the late Professor A. E. Taylor and in theological circles that profound and passionate writer Peter Taylor Forsyth. I mention Taylor and Forsyth together. I knew Taylor: I did not know Forsyth personally, but to judge from the latter’s biography there was very little temperamental kinship between the two men. But both Taylor and Forsyth had this in common, that they welcomed Kant’s intense moralism. I well remember Taylor saying to me: ‘You know, MacKinnon, Kant is a very great moralist indeed. The Hegelian criticism of him is largely irrelevant. Hegel was a man without a conscience and could never understand anyone who took the moral struggle as seriously as Kant did’. Forsyth, too, in his writings found in Kant’s intense moralism—his insistence on the inescapable demand of the moral law—a rock firm to withstand the moral frivolousness that he supposed to be ultimately implicit in the Hegelian attitude; and certainly if any of you have read Bosanquet’s book, Some Suggestions in Ethics (a book well worth reading) you will agree, I think, that Bosanquet does leave little foothold for an ultimate moral seriousness—for the kind of almost existential engagement that seems involved in moral choice.

Never reluctant to provoke their readers, the Hanson brothers declare roundly that,

This vapid dismissal of an ancient doctrine is discordant with current Roman Catholic tradition represented by the Vatican Council’s document Dei Verbum, which maintains that ‘the books of Holy Scripture were written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit’. So what has led the Hansons, in the name of intelligent people of the present day, to abandon the inspiration of scripture as an untenable belief? One reason is that the Hansons equate inspiration with inerrancy, for they allege that inerrancy has been the only practical outcome of the tradition of biblical inspiration, and certainly it is the case that inerrancy was made to bear much weight in Roman Catholic tradition in the late nineteenth century and, during the early part of this century, in the anti-modernist campaign.

I (1) outline two accounts the Catholic Church gives of the human soul, calling them the Lateran and the Vienne doctrines, and (2) argue they are inconsistent. (3) I run over several difficulties in the more popular Lateran doctrine. (4) I look at three uses to which Catholics might want to put a theory of the soul, and question whether either of the theories on offer can meet their needs. (5) I distinguish the Biblical idea of resurrection from the Greek idea of immortality. Finally (6) I commend the Vienne doctrine as philosophy but advise supplementing it with a view of creation, salvation and sanctification as forming a continuum rather than a discontinuous series of episodes.