In July 1977 a group of Evangelical Anglicans addressed an Open Letter to the bishops of the Anglican communion. The Letter has recently been published together with a lengthy commentary, somewhat in the style of the Anglican/Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) Agreements, in the general reception of which this is intended as a significant intervention. This document invites attention from Catholics, not merely on tactical grounds, because of the large number of Anglicans with a Protestant cast of mind who must be respected and accommodated in any reconciliation between Canterbury and Rome, but also because of the intrinsic importance of the theological questions that the authors raise.

The tenor of the Open Letter may be judged by the Preface: “Some speak as if with the appearance of the three ARCIC Agreements the main theological discussions are already over, and we can all now move on to arranging the nuts and bolts of intercommunion with Roman Catholics and union eventually. This shows how intoxicating is the strong wine of ecumenical bonhomie, and how churchmen, like motorists, can have their heads grow muzzy while feeling that their judgment was never better. Let it be said here, with emphasis, that the signatories think that the discussions which history will see as the main ones have hardly yet begun” (my italics). Evangelicals find themselves badly under-represented in ARCIC, and they consider that the Agreements so far reached on the eucharist, the ministry, and authority, do little to show that Catholics have yet “fully assimilated the doctrinal clarifications which came out of the Reformation conflict”. That the Reformation made Christian doctrine clearer, and that the Anglican communion ‘stands in the Reformation tradition”, are affirmations that are certainly often neutralised by ecumenists.

My justification for writing about an unpublished thesis is simply that people ought to know about the work of the Reverend Dr L. A. Adeolu Adegbola, and that publishing being what it is, the thesis is most unlikely to be published as a whole. Hence, an article like this could help in the circulation of ideas.

Dr Adeolu Adegbola is a Methodist pastor from the great Yor-uba people of western Nigeria. After considerable pastoral experience, he completed his thesis, “Ifa and Christianity among the Yoruba”, at Bristol in 1976, and is, at present, Director of the Institute of Church and Society at Ibadan, western Nigeria, which aims both at keeping Christians thinking, and thoughtful people, who either never were Christians or who have drifted away from the churches, aware that there is at least the possibility of a Christian response to the pressing cultural and social questions of contemporary Nigeria. In this article, I shall outline and comment on his thesis, and indicate some of the new ground it seems to open up. One further word of explanation, as to what “ifa” is. Ifa is the Yoruba system of divination. Unlike many other African systems of divination, there is in Ifa no element of spirit possession, nor does the client have to tell the diviner what his problem is. The diviner (in Yoruba babalawo, father of secrets) may throw down a rope or chain, on which are eight similar objects, capable of giving a heads-and tails arrangement, or he may hold sixteen palm-nuts in his left hand. He then tries to take them with his right hand, noting how many remain in his right hand, but has to do this eight times, whereas one throw of the divining chain will give him a sufficient number of signs to select the appropriate figure, or odu, which is then marked on the divining board.

I want to take up the challenge made by Brian Davies in a recent article, in which he argues that natural theology remains unscathed at the hands of contemporary theological criticism. I shall try and show that his optimism is largely unfounded, firstly, by showing the confusions in his own arguments, and then by indicating some grounds for a more widespread dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise of natural theology.

For both Davies and myself, the natural theologian is one who holds that the proposition ‘God exists’ is a respectable assertion that can be rationally sustained without recourse to a priori acceptance of God’s existence, or any kind of special revelation. As Davies notes, such an approach contrasts strongly with Liberal Protestantism, and in particular Barth and Tillich, who insist that there is no justification or foundation for Christianity in the sense understood by natural theology. Barth’s own attitude is well expressed in his masterly summation of ‘Church Dogmatics’, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the bible tells me so”. Davies will have none (or very little) of this and spends some time attacking both Barth and Tillich. His first target is, however, Alasdair MacIntyre, or at least the Alasdair MacIntyre of ‘The Logical Status of Religious Belief. MacIntyre suggests that natural theology is incompatible (in the sense of trying to provide a proof) with the idea of freely accepting the love of God and that, paradoxically, the success of such arguments would be as destructive of religion as the sceptic holds their failure to be. For MacIntyre, the justification for religion is not to be discovered in the search for foundations, but by elucidating more fully what is involved in religious belief.

The restoration of churchly unity among all Christians is the agreed aim of ecumenical work. It is the programme announced in the opening phrase—Unitas redintegratio— of the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism (which is thus also the title). Such phraseology suggests that the unity to be restored did at some stage actually exist—that there was once, historically and empirically, an “undivided Church”, prior to the conflicts among Christians that gave rise to schisms and heresies. Reflective study of church history seems, however, to keep pushing further and further back to the point at which the Church was visibly and organically one. The Decree of Ecumenism dates the first of the divisions at the refusal of what was to become the Nestorian Church to accept the dogmatic pronouncement of the Council of Ephesus in the year 431. The convoking of that council had itself been an attempt to restore Christian unity. The further one goes back into history the more evident it becomes that it has always been necessary to restore unity. The “undivided Church” begins to look more like an endless task rather then any historically dateable empirical reality. The variety and complexity of divisions among Christians become increasingly obvious. It is not at all clear that anybody, either in the World Council of Churches or in the Catholic Church, not to mention the many other participants, has yet succeeded in working out a doctrine of the Church which does justice to the tangled anomalies of the situation.

It is a matter of commonplace that Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s most controversial novel—perhaps even, in some ways a failure. Fanny Price who occupies the central position in mediating what is widely thought to be Jane Austen’s point of view, is, in fact, almost completely antipathetic to the attitude to life revealed by Jane’s correspondence with her sister, Cassandra; while Mary Crawford—having won our approval by her good natured intelligence and vivacity—is cast aside, not merely as a threat to Fanny’s romance—what Angus Wilson has called ‘the dusty union’, but as a comprehensive danger to the very foundations of the Mansfield estate, and by extension, to the stability of the whole fabric of society at a critical period of revolutionary ferment. It is also largely agreed that Jane Austen’s supposed intention of writing a novel on the theme of ordination—with all that this implies of a conservative political philosophy—led her to abandon the ironic mode and even compelled her to impose an arbitrary didactic conclusion upon the plot so that virtue might be almost as glibly and sentimentally rewarded as in Pamela.

Ironically, much of the misunderstanding and confusion seems to have arisen because it has been believed that Jane Austen wrote her novel under the influence of Evangelical Christianity with all that this implies of regeneration and enthusiasm and disapproval of the smartly decadent values of fashionable London society. This critical response sees Mansfield Park as Jane Austen’s response to the issues of her time—a response in which the religious affirmations of the debate in the chapel at Sotherton and Edmund’s impending commitment to the duties of Thornton Lacey are balanced by secular responsibilities to the management of the estate. In this thematic reading Jane Austen assumes the mantle of Edmund Burke; and clearly, the coherence of such a reading has much to recommend it.

So the British public is not going to be able to see Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom. Perhaps some mature reflections by one who saw the film as long ago as July 1976 at the quaint Pagoda cinema in Paris, might be of interest to the readers of New Blackfriars.

At the outset it appears that Pasolini is using a device we find in his film Pigsty where he tries to tell two related stories at the same time and keeps cutting from one to the other. There is first the story from de Sade of the four, rich, degenerate men who, looking for some new stimulus for their jaded appetites plan a monumental orgy. They seek out beautiful and innocent boys and girls, take them to a remote castle and there indulge in all manner of depravities for 120 days at the end of which they torture and kill their victims. Then there is the story of the short lived fascist republic that was established at Salo in North Italy in 1943-4 and the enforced recruitment of young peasant boys to serve the Nazis in the war against the allies and their own countrymen. But it soon becomes apparent that the fascism that Pasolini is interested in is not so much Salo as the ‘nonfascist’ fascism of present day Italy under the capitalist system. The historic Salo is soon forgotten and the four men are shown as pillars of Italian society : Il Duca, Monsignore, Excellenza and Presidente. It is these contemporary figures who become the protagonists of the de Sade story. The orgies take place in three stages or gironi. A word chosen perhaps to remind us of the Dantean circles in hell. Each of them is introduced by a female character who recites the scene that is enacted before us.

In this article I return to a theme on which I wrote almost a decade ago in an essay entitled ‘The Holy Spirit, Authority and Doctrinal Development’. Later on I shall refer to points in the essay to illustrate my two main points in this article, (i) that doctrinal development is less a controversial matter than it was, (ii) that we can, I believe, bypass it if we pay proper heed to the more basic issues of pneumatology and of authority.

So to my title. Those who like duck to eat are constantly disappointed for there is little meat on a duck. So it will be with this article but I hope the meat there is will be nourishing. I am rather concerned that the bones should be prominent.

The first reason I would suggest that the development of doctrine is becoming, if it has not already become, a dead duck is that the debate is not being carried forward much. After I had written the article to which I have referred I did a good bit of research on the situation and I found it was almost impossible to continue writing in any profitable way upon the topic. (I have seen little fresh or additional up to the present.) If I had written further over the last few years I would be repeating myself. Secondly, the most essential factor in development of doctrine, namely, the operation of the Holy Spirit, seems very difficult to discern. Criteria about development and how we could know that it was the Spirit who was acting and also for deciding on satisfactory tests of right and lawful development were varied. There was extreme difficulty in getting areas of agreement. This point has been brought out in my earlier essay and in some of Rahner’s essays to which I referred there.

It is not so long ago that mysticism was a dirty word, the Reformation was regarded as a ‘good thing’, and a scientific education was seen as having more value than one in the ‘humanities’. But fashions change, and even genuine perspectives alter. The current fortunes of St John of the Cross are an example of what can happen and will repay examination, for this mystic, poet, and outstanding representative of Counter-Reformation Spain is again becoming popular and arousing interest. Lectures about him are attended eagerly and received with enthusiasm; books once again are being published about him.

But there is danger in this if what is happening is simply a reversion to earlier perspectives. One suspects this, for example, with regard to the reappearance from the early 1950s of Thomas Merton’s introduction to and presentation of the Maxims, Cautions and Counsels of St John of the Cross (Counsels of Light and Love, Burns & Oates, 95 pages, £1.50). Perhaps this book represents the most attractive of old-style presentations of John and his teaching, based as it is on a liberal humanism tailored to the inadequacies of modern urbanised man; but whether it really represents what John stood for is another matter. Apart from anything else, as with so much that has been written about him, it suffers from an almost total failure to take account of the appropriate context. The lesser writings of St John of the Cross presented in this book, as also his letters, arose from a very particular cultural and social situation which must be appreciated if the nature and significance of his ‘advice’ is to be understood. Even more perhaps than with his major works it is necessary to realise that these writings were addressed to particular people, or groups of people, in very special circumstances, and are dependent upon a very close relationship between him and them.

If religion means anything at all it has to be relevant to our situation. It has to be a source of hope for desperate people. I specify desperate people because those who are contented and happy rarely search for solutions until disaster forces them.

In my sixties, I try to come to some conclusions. There is not much time left and the need for solutions is more urgent. I have made a long search by attending Anglican, Methodist, Pentecostal, Quaker and other Christian churches and by reading their writers. All have made some impact but left me unsatisfied. It may be my fault that I am not satisfied, but, since my search has been genuine, I have taken some drastic measures. I have sold my house and home and come to London, with only my clothes, to work as Warden in a hostel for thirty-six homeless women. These are raw material. They come from every kind of society and collectively they have suffered everything. Very often I admire individuals; altogether, they are generally hell to live with. They do not read and their vocabulary is limited. Some are on drink, on drugs; on smoking, on bingo, on jumble-sales or on sleep. I reflect again that religion in England has been mainly the product of the middle classes expecting a high degree of articulation and academic study. Words come to mind—‘eucharist’, ‘litany’, ‘transubstantiation’, ‘atonement’. Even worse, ‘logical positivism’, ‘language-games’, ‘semantics’, ‘linguistics’. Can these help my guinea pigs? Not much.

So many of our theologians and philosophers seem to live in ivory towers. Do they starve, live on social security, feel they are socially worthless, sink into apathy, drown their pain in gin or whisky? To these troubles add physical illness and emotional instability. I repeat, religion must be relevant to the situation and provide a source of hope for desperate people.

Heribert Mühlen’s “Introduction to the Basic Christian Experience” (wrongly entitled in English A Charismatic Theology), though not intended as a work of speculative theology, is nonetheless a theological work of considerable interest—probably the first so far to come from within Catholic Pentecostalism.

As we should infer from the very title of his book, one of Mühlen’s fundamental beliefs is that there is such a thing as “the basic Christian experience”. It is the “experience” of a real presence of Christ in his life, consequent upon a personal decision for Christ, that makes a man a Christian (p. 43). For Mühlen this can never be simply a private conversion experience, however: there is no experience of Christ which does not involve an experience of the church. The essential Christian experience is Jesus’s own experience of the Spirit, continued historically in the church. According to Mühlen, Jesus gave the church, not just the Holy Spirit, but his own experience of the Spirit. Reference is also made to Jesus’s experience of his Father, though it is not quite clear whether Mühlen believes the church to be the continuation of this experience too. He does maintain that the kernel of Jesus’s kerygma is his “Abba-experience”. He also says that “God gives us his experience of himself”. He regards it as an important sign that God is renewing his church that “the experience of the primitive church has today been bestowed in an historically new and surprising way to many Christians in all Churches” (p. 94).

So far I have attempted to explain from a Lonerganian perspective how literary art works and inevitably this has led to a consideration of how we, as readers, respond to literary art. To assess the capacity of Lonergan’s transcendental method to illumine the nature of critical response we could do no better, I think, than compare the structure of that method with the recorded practice of F. R. Leavis, the English critic who has arguably contributed more than anyone this century to our understanding of the nature of critical engagement with literature. Both Lonergan and Leavis emphasize the need to train and cultivate the feelings if moral maturity is to be achieved and, as a literary critic, Leavis is especially insistent on the ability of literature to effect this and, indeed, would partly justify the place of English in the university on these grounds (see ‘Education and the University’ in Scrutiny, Vol. 9). But it is on Leavis’s analysis of the structure of critical response to literature that I should like to focus. It may seem paradoxical to compare Leavis to a philosopher since he was at some pains to decline the invitation of the philosopher Rene Wellek to state ‘more explicitly’ and ‘more abstractly’ the assumptions underlying his practice and was especially resistant to the philosophical notion of a norm by which poets are measured. It has been suggested, however, that Leavis was less philosophically innocent than he protests to be and that it was the dominant logical-scientific paradigm of philosophy at that time (1937) to which he was so resistant. In any case, in his reply to Wellek and in several other places in Scrutiny he sets out the manner in which he comes to appreciate a poem and reach a critical evaluation. The importance of such recorded. practice to Lonergan’s method is that Lonergan claims to be thoroughly empirical in approach, that his mapping out of method is simply the objectification of the processes that occur spontaneously in actual practice (see Method, p. 4).

Conservatism and Catholicism have been synonymous in Britain during the past two hundred years. How that identification came about is debatable. Catholics for tactical reasons may have wished to conciliate opponents of Catholic Emancipation by emphasising their essential social and political conservatism. That image allowed the Church to capitalise on the public sympathy for the French emigre clergy who were pouring into Britain during the French Revolution: Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the French Revolution, (1790) was unwittingly the finest modern Catholic apologist. That expedient became, in the wake of the Oxford Movement a permanent feature of a Church still dependent to a degree on wealthy patrons and increasingly conscious of its social status; its hallmark dreamy spires rather than social democracy. If the Church had joined the Tory Party— or the Tory Party at prayer seemed about to return to Rome—then that was grist to the Liberal mill. If anti-Catholicism was the anti-semitism of the intellectuals, then militant liberalism could mobilise those nonconformist sentiments, temperance, disestablishment and evangelical schooling into a crusade against the whore of Babylon. It was in their political interest to portray Roman Catholicism as the bastion of conservatism. With the excesses of European Catholicism during this period the Church was indelibly identified with the most conservative forces in society. But that is to ignore another tradition, that of radical Catholicism whose most outstanding figure is Dr. William Maxwell.

In trying to understand the world, or, at least that part of it with which we are involved, we can look for a prophet, or even turn prophets ourselves, or we can tell stories about the world. The excellence of the prophet is that he parts the wheat from the chaff; the excellence of the story-teller is that he makes chaff look like wheat, perhaps even transmutes it into wheat. The poet, if he is lucky, is something of both prophet and story-teller: the theologian, if he is, as many theologians appear to be, unlucky, will falter when he should speak in prophetic judgement, and fail too in the task of imaginative transmutation. In apocalyptic, the two modes of understanding are fused, as we see in Daniel or Revelations, much to the bafflement of most of us. But for the purposes of this review, it seems possible to see prophecy and story-telling as complementary and inter-acting opposites. Perhaps I should say that I am myself more in sympathy with the story-teller than the prophet; but I shall try to be fair as I mpve between the polar interests of my fellow-Adrians, the prophet-watching of Adrian Hastings and the story-hearing of Adrian Roscoe, taking a look in between at that prophetic institution in which so many stories end, namely marriage.

Because of the prominent role of individual Christians in South Africa who have opposed apartheid and exposed its brutalities, we are accustomed today to think of the South African Church as one of the most unrelenting opponents of racial oppression in that country. From the gadfly missionary Dr. John Philip of the 1820’s to Dr. Beyers Naude of our own time, there stretches a tradition of bold prophetic speaking. However, a closer look at the role of the Church, especially from the viewpoint of some Latin American theologians, raises some disturbing questions about the South African Church’s past history and present situation, the more so when the comments of those who are speaking prophetically today are taken into account.

There are interesting parallels between the development in society of the Churches of Latin America and South Africa. Argentinian theologian Jose Miguez Bonino writes that regarding his subcontinent:

Protestantism was a late arrival in Latin America, entering between 1870-1890. Its arrival helped undermine the overwhelming predominance of Roman Catholicism, but in a way that far from liberating the poor, instead subtly imprisoned them further.

As the wife of an Anglican priest, and an Anglican myself it was with particular personal interest that I read Fr Adrian Hastings’s article on celibacy (New Blackfriars March 1978), in which he described how he had come to the decision that he was free as a Catholic priest to marry. My understanding of the church and the priesthood coincides with that of most Roman Catholics, except that I have always had difficulty in understanding what it was about priesthood and marriage that made them incompatible. In spite of this, and in spite of my undoubted support for Fr Hastings’s position, I want to draw attention to the disadvantages of a married priesthood. For me the practical and social side-effects are not theoretical but constitute part of my everyday experience. From this experience, and from my reflection on it for ten or more years, I have come to the conclusion that the clergy family plays a part in the ‘domestication’ of the church. By this I mean the tendency of the church to be a tame and cosy club shoring up the status quo rather than a prophetic and critical institution within society. I do not believe that having a married clergy causes the ‘domestication’ of the church; rather it upholds it and reinforces it. Thus, the erastianism of the Church of England, with its married clergy, is well known, but in the past all denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, with its celibate clergy, have taken up a similar conservative stance, associating themselves with the powerful in a divided society.

When E. Gordon Craig in 1922 wrote,

he was making the distinction between the role of language as a vehicle for communicating essentials, and the role of language as an art-form. As a theatrical designer who was to revolutionise traditional concepts of theatre, he was keenly aware of the difficulty in using language to represent exactly those things we wish to communicate to others. One word may have a variety of meanings, or because of constant use in a multitude of ways, have lost much of its original meaning. Reliance on the word itself is therefore not always the best or most effective guide to meaning. He continues: