The decree of the Council of Mâcon (585 AD) that women do not have a soul has the honoured place in liberal demonology given to historical events that never happened. It is a tale to treasure. As the eponymous wine is sipped at elegant tables, the misguided deeds of bishops can be recalled, and the only regret must be that no Synod of Brie or Council of Camembert offers occasion for further mirth. On these occasions, facts become such skimble-skamble stuff as puts men from their dreams.

For the Council, of course, never decreed any such thing, if only for the persuasive reason that some of the bishops may themselves have been married. The penalties applied to a bishop who decrees that his wife does not have a soul are not recorded in canon law presumably as surpassing male imagination. The decrees do indeed contain stuff to fuel fires: the fifteenth requires laymen to doff their hat to a cleric the sixteenth forbids the widow of a sub-deacon to marry on pain of being confined to a convent. But neither the word ‘woman’ nor the word ‘soul’ occurs even once in the decrees.

One does not hope ever to be free of the myth—but it may be interesting to trace its history, which is complex. Briefly: in the late seventeenth century some Dutch publications alleged that the Council had debated whether women are human; this was linked in nineteenth- century France with earlier satirical literature from Italy which claimed to ‘prove’ from the Bible that women do not have a soul, and the upshot was the allegation that the Council had issued a decree to this effect. The allegation was refuted by scholars but persisted as a myth which later reachcd England first, and then Ireland, where it flourishes today.

What is it that makes us “modern”? When we think of ourselves as “modern people” —and thus distinguished from medieval or ancient or primitive peoples what are we in fact saying about ourselves? I wish to explore the suggestion of Max Weber that an important element in our being denizens of modernity is the “disenchantment” of our world. Further, I wish to explore some of the connections between Weber’s notion of disenchantment and his understanding of mysticism as a response to this disenchantment, in order to argue that the relegation of religion to “the mystical” is not so much a response to disenchantment as it is the condition for the very possibility of disenchantment. In Weber’s sociology, mysticism becomes the irrational “other” of the rational, bureaucratic use of coercive force that we, in our disenchanted world, call “politics.” In his work we can see clearly a process whereby the categories of the mystical and the political mutually create each other in such a way that mysticism—a private and irrational religious experience—becomes the only viable future for religion, and politics—the rational administration of territory through violence—becomes statecraft. In this respect, Weber seems a paradigmatic modern interpreter of religion and politics, one whose interpretive categories continue to shape our discourse. Finally, I will argue that the power of Weber’s story of disenchantment can be seen in current political and liberation theologies, even when they explicitly seek to reunite the “mystical” and the “political.”

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.

Gustavo Gutierrez, in a recent visit to Cambridge, told this story about the Medellin conference of 1968. (This is my recollection of his story and not an exact quotation.) Following that important gathering, the South American bishops received a letter from Rome. ‘We can see’, it read, ‘that your circumstances are very different from those we experience here in Europe. To enable us to help you, please send experts on South American economics, politics, sociology and anthropology to Rome. . . But don’t send any theologians because we have our own theologians here.’

Despite the fashionable sound to the phrase, theology has always been done ‘in context’. Augustine was no less contextual a theologian than Bonhoeffer, with each page attesting to the writer’s particular education, formation as a Christian, pastoral concerns and so on. Does this alarm us? Should this alarm us? If we admit to, and even delight in, the diverse contexts for the doing of theology are we ‘going soft’ on any claim to a universally valid Christian message? How do we speak of the truth and yet speak from our particularity? These are the questions I wish to consider here, questions whose significance for contemporary theology, now a global and ecumenical enterprise, need not be underlined.

I would like to begin, however, at a place seemingly remote from our own—Europe in the sixteenth century. I should like to look at one of those Reformation debates which, while distant in time and sensibility from those of our century, have repercussions which all Christians to a greater or lesser degree must still feel. For reasons which I hope will become clear, I should like to begin this discussion of ‘truth’ with a look at an exchange of letters in 1539 between Cardinal Sadoleto and John Calvin.

Let us never believe that the way in which the people in power tell us to look at the world is the only way we can look, because if we do that, then that’s a kind of appalling selfcensorship. (Salman Rushdie).

In Britain we believe in live and let live ... Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists and Rastafarians are all welcome to our tolerant society. But there is only one law for all of us ... Those who say their deep religious convictions prevent them from obeying the law of this land should quit Britain immediately and go and live in a country where the conflict does not exist. (Sunday Sport, 19 February, 1989 — editorial on Rushdie).

So the battle over The Satanic Verses is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. (Salman Rushdie, The Observer, 22 January, 1989).

Britain’s prized tolerant and pluralist society began to exhibit the power of its master code from the beginning of 1989, following the highly publicised second attempt at book burning by Bradford Muslims in January, 1989. (The first protest in Bolton, in December 1988, failed to get any media coverage—so it was repeated after advice that the national media be duly invited!). Text burning was encoded and enmeshed into two curiously related histories: that of Nazism and that of the history of religious bigotry and intolerance. Hence, from a major national quality paper: ‘following the example of the Inquisition and Hitler’s National Socialists, a large crowd of Muslims burnt some copies of the book’ (The Independent, 16 January, 1989).

Thus Hick has shown little reason to change the traditional Christian paradigm of the world religions from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican model of the universe of faiths; from a system with Christ and his church at the centre, around which the other religions revolve, to a Copernican model with all the religions, including Christianity, revolving around the central mystery of ultimate reality. It must be said that D’Costa’s critique is both powerful and ingenious. But is it correct?

In a recent article in New Blackfriars, Gavin D’Costa argued that Professor John Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution in the Christian theology of religions is both unnecessary and incoherent. It is unnecessary because the paradox it is intended to resolve can be met without radically changing Christianity’s traditional selfunderstanding; and incoherent because it assumes a premise denied by its conclusion, namely the Christian conception of an all-loving God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ.

In order to answer our question we must first assess whether or not Hick’s argument has been adequately represented. For we will be in danger of wrongly dismissing Hick’s call for a Copernican revolution if we have not rightly understood the reasons which have led him to make it. And it is precisely at this point that we may suspect several of Hick’s commentators and critics, including D’Costa, of misunderstanding the nature and force of the considerations that weigh with Hick—and should be weighed by us when considering his proposal.

What is striking about the reception of the account of worldliness in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prison writings is how few commentators have drawn attention to the fact that Bonhoeffer concentrates on the status of nature. To be sure, nature is not part of the definition of ‘the coming of age of mankind’. But the aim of such ‘coming of age’ is ‘to be independent of nature’. Bonhoeffer writes: ‘Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one — through organization itself.’ So the claim that ‘organization’ is now the environment of humanity is to be understood dialectically: the emancipation of humanity from nature leads to new forms of domination.

For Bonhoeffer, the attempt to escape nature thus raises once more the question of humanity. Or, as Bonhoeffer puts it, if the menace of nature is displaced by the menace of social organization, ‘What protects us against the menace of organization?’. ‘Coming of age’ is thus an anthropological development (the theme of worldliness) predicated upon the emerging independence of humanity from nature which, in turn, requires a theological response (the theme of ‘secular interpretation’). Such interpretation must address the fact that nature is now mediated to us by social contexts. So the theological interpretation of a ‘world come of age’ includes judgements about the status and significance of nature for humanity.

The difficulties raised here for Christian theology by the place of nature in a ‘world come of age’ are acute for we are driven back to the origins of modernity.

At one point in Speculum Mentis, R G Collingwood remarks that

Given the distance that can separate academic inquiry from any humane application of its results, the thinking that is fostered within the universities is often accused of being useless. With images of famine, war, and ecological disaster appearing daily on our screens, the pursuit of many avenues of learning can easily seem like the sort of treachery which Collingwood condemned. ‘We try to understand ourselves and our world’, Collingwood argued, ‘only in order that we may learn how to live’. Often the connection between learning and living is so tenuous that it seems to have been lost altogether. On any map of knowledge drawn today there must, from the point of view of the hungry, the homeless, the oppressed, be many desert areas, arid zones which seem intellectually barren and morally bankrupt. The quality of the intellectual flora which flourish in such impoverished regions is pointedly identified in Lucky Jim when the book’s hero, honestly assessing the worth of an article he has written, talks about its ‘niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudolight it throws upon non-problems’.

In a world so full of ‘desperate evils’, every academic must surely be faced with the question of whether there is any point in his or her work.

When I was considering what subject to treat in the Aquinas Lecture, which you had so kindly invited me to deliver, in the state of near-despair one reaches on such occasions I went to an Oxford bookshop where a selection of volumes may be bought for sixpence each and bought one at random in the hope that I might derive some guidance from it. The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872) was an at-one-time popular work of fiction by a socialist republican, Eliza Lynn Linton, though it was published anonymously. It is a story of Jesus returning to earth in mid-nineteenth-century England and of how he acted in the situation then confronting him. At the end of the book the authoress says that ‘if sociology is a scientific truth, then Jesus of Nazareth preached and practised not only in vain, but against unchangeable Law’. This gave me an idea for my address for, though she was speaking of the doctrines of Political Economy current at that time and as she understood them, it appeared to me that it might be of interest to you were I to discuss the attitude of sociologists, and social anthropologists in particular, towards religious faith and practice. It has been for the most part bleakly hostile.

It is scarcely possible to discuss social science in this country without some reference to its French background. We may regard it, if only for convenience, as beginning with Montesquieu in his great book L'Esprit des Lois (1748). In it he set out to discover the laws of social life, the necessary conditions of its existence in its various forms, but he did not, in my opinion, think of these laws in a deterministic or mechanical sense.

A synodal church makes assumptions about our basic ecclesial experience which takes place when we assemble liturgically, especially when we act eucharistically. The basic assumption is that we are a genuine human community knowing and relating to one another as brothers and sisters in baptism. Only real communities can authentically image the church's nature. This is a ‘bottom – up’ activity. If we wish this, then we must rediscover our liturgy and celebrate it in a new way as flowing out from a community and helping it to discover its own nature. This, in turn, makes demands on our understanding of ministry and its structures. While many Catholics endorse synodality, their willingness to change the shape of the presbyterate is uncertain.

Reflecting on the practice of theology to say what theology is and the kind of knowledge it might lead to is one of the most difficult things about doing theology. St Thomas Aquinas famously did this in the first question of the Summa Theologiae. It is a brief statement that is the culmination of a line of development from the time theology was taken up by the cathedral schools in the twelfth century. It is brilliantly conceived and, in some respects, wrong.

The development of theology into something like its modem sense as a rational procedure and an academic discipline owes a huge debt to Peter Abailard (1079-1142). Of course, Christian theology had been practised for a thousand years before Abailard and, in a quite different sense, can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek poets. But it was Abailard who introduced the use of dialectic (or what we would now call logic) so that truth in sacra doctrina was to be established by rational procedures and not simply by appealing to traditional authorities. It also took theology teaching beyond being little more than a literary analysis of scripture (as it had been with Anselm of Laon, for example) to being once more a speculation about the nature of God, but a speculation no longer limited to the opinions of the Church Fathers, opinions which Abailard had shown in Sic et Non were sometimes contradictory.

Might I begin with the personal remark that in the course of preparing this lecture for Blackfriars in Oxford, I was quite unable to prevent thoughts of Herbert McCabe’s absence here today from occupying my mind. You must forgive me if, though he is absent physically, you are able to identify his presence intellectually within the few thoughts I offer you today; for the inclination to give some expression to the conjunction of influences which some thirty years of debate with Herbert have visited upon me personally became, in the circumstances, irresistible. Back in the early nineteen-eighties Nicholas Lash and I published in quick succession monographs on the subject of Marxism and its relation to Christian theology. We agreed on much of a theological nature, disagreed sharply on how to read Marx, so Herbert, then in his second stint as editor of New Blackfriars, invited us each to review the work of the other, Nicholas first, me to follow. With characteristically wicked wit, Herbert entitled my reply to Nicholas’ review ‘Turner Responds to Lash’. Well, today I mark my indebtedness to Herbert by means of a lecture which I am happy to concede is, in a manner, a response to Herbert’s ‘lash’, and in some spirit of emulation, could I achieve it, of that fierce clarity and energy of thought which so characterised what Eamon Duffy called ‘his mighty soul’.