Author: Douglas Knight

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To promote the maturation of the moral conscience

There is no doubt that we are living in a moment of extraordinary development in the human capacity to decipher the rules and structures of matter, and in the consequent dominion of man over nature. We all see the great advantages of this progress and we see more and more clearly the threat of destruction of nature by what we do.

There is another less visible danger, but no less disturbing: the method that permits us to know ever more deeply the rational structures of matter makes us ever less capable of perceiving the source of this rationality, creative Reason. The capacity to see the laws of material being makes us incapable of seeing the ethical message contained in being, a message that tradition calls lex naturalis, natural moral law. This word for many today is almost incomprehensible due to a concept of nature that is no longer metaphysical, but only empirical. The fact that nature, being itself, is no longer a transparent moral message creates a sense of disorientation that renders the choices of daily life precarious and uncertain.

It is precisely in the light of this contestation that all the urgency of the necessity to reflect upon the theme of natural law and to rediscover its truth common to all men appears. The said law, to which the Apostle Paul refers (cf. Rom 2: 14-15), is written on the heart of man and is consequently, even today, accessible. This law has as its first and general principle, “to do good and to avoid evil”. This is a truth which by its very evidence immediately imposes itself on everyone. From it flows the other more particular principles that regulate ethical justice on the rights and duties of everyone. So does the principle of respect for human life from its conception to its natural end, because this good of life is not man’s property but the free gift of God. Besides this is the duty to seek the truth as the necessary presupposition of every authentic personal maturation.

Another fundamental application of the subject is freedom. Yet taking into account the fact that human freedom is always a freedom shared with others, it is clear that the harmony of freedom can be found only in what is common to all: the truth of the human being, the fundamental message of being itself, exactly the lex naturalis. And how can we not mention, on one hand, the demand of justice that manifests itself in giving unicuique suum and, on the other, the expectation of solidarity that nourishes in everyone, especially if they are poor, the hope of the help of the more fortunate?

In these values are expressed unbreakable and contingent norms that do not depend on the will of the legislator and not even on the consensus that the State can and must give. They are, in fact, norms that precede any human law: as such, they are not subject to modification by anyone. The natural law, together with fundamental rights, is the source from which ethical imperatives also flow, which it is only right to honour.

In today’s ethics and philosophy of Law, petitions of juridical positivism are widespread. As a result, legislation often becomes only a compromise between different interests: seeking to transform private interests or wishes into law that conflict with the duties deriving from social responsibility. In this situation it is opportune to recall that every juridical methodology, be it on the local or international level, ultimately draws its legitimacy from its rooting in the natural law, in the ethical message inscribed in the actual human being.

Natural law is, definitively, the only valid bulwark against the arbitrary power or the deception of ideological manipulation. The knowledge of this law inscribed on the heart of man increases with the progress of the moral conscience.

The first duty for all, and particularly for those with public responsibility, must therefore be to promote the maturation of the moral conscience. This is the fundamental progress without which all other progress proves non-authentic.

Pope Benedict to the International Congress on Natural Law

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British media

Reporting on religion in the mainstream British press is not only sometimes dreadful, it’s dangerous, and something needs to be done about it.

Making such a statement does not come easy. Journalists are notoriously reluctant to criticize the work of colleagues, and not just because it’s a great way to make enemies. We know the agonies of fact-checking and finding balance, especially facing ever-tighter deadlines. Since I occasionally write for the British press and give interviews in the U.K., I understand that religion reporting is up against a ferociously competitive media market and a highly secular audience, where some over-simplification and even exaggeration is the price of doing business.

This is not merely irritating, but dangerous.

John Allen Irresponsible reporting on religion is dangerous

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An opportunity for the Church to retrieve its sense of itself

It is in the law that the deep-seated nature of our ‘culture-muddle’ is beginning to be manifest. The secularization thesis which denied real significance to religion, also suppressed intellectual life. By divesting religious actors and institutions of their social, economic and political influence, it at the same time, permitted anomalies to flourish in many disciplines and a down-grading – or ‘disenvisioning’ – of public life. Only now is it becoming respectable again, for example, to write about the deep interrelation of religion and law. It is only the presence of minorities with different legal systems based in holy texts that has allowed this particular debate to resurface. For such minorities the privatisation of religion is unthinkable. Yet the English legal establishment resolutely maintains the secular fallacy that it is ‘neutral on religion’.

Academics who long ago jettisoned religious categories as a means of understanding anything, will have to go fishing over the side of their boats to retrieve the unthinkable. Religion is once again become a live, as opposed to a merely textual issue – in public life, in law, in social policy, and in the academy – and any political vision for Britain, merely by the exigencies of existing race legislation, will have to take religion seriously.

If religion is once more a vital political issue – thanks in large measure to the presence of Muslims in Europe – it presents an urgent opportunity for the Church both intellectually and practically to retrieve its sense of itself and its role.

Jenny Taylor The Myth of Religious Neutrality

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Religious faith always has social consequences

People who take the question of human truth, freedom and meaning seriously will never remain silent about it. They canâ??t. Theyâ??ll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. Thatâ??s the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but itâ??s never private. It always has social consequences, or it isnâ??t real. And this is why any definition of â??toleranceâ?? that tries to turn religious faith into a private idiosyncrasy, or a set of personal opinions that we can have at home but that we need to be quiet about in public, is doomed to fail.

The mentality of suspicion toward religion is becoming its own form of intolerance. I can see a kind of secular intolerance developing in our own country over the past two decades. The modern secular view of the world assumes that religion is superstitious and false; that it creates division and conflict; and that real freedom can only be ensured by keeping God out of the public square.

But if we remove God from public discourse, we also remove the only authority higher than political authority, and the only authority that guarantees the sanctity of the individual. If the twentieth century taught us anything, itâ??s that modern states tend to eat their own people, and the only thing stopping this is a resistance based in the human spirit but anchored in a higher authorityâ??which almost always means religious witness.

You know, thereâ??s a reason why â??spiritualityâ?? is so popular in the United States today and religion is so criticized. Private spirituality can be quite satisfying. But it can also become a designer experience. In fact, the word spirituality can mean just about anything a person wants it to mean. Itâ??s private, itâ??s personal, and, ultimately, it doesnâ??t place any more demands on the individual than what he or she wants.

Religion is a very different creature. The word religion comes from the Latin word religareâ??to bind. Religious believers bind themselves to a set of beliefs. They submit themselves to a community of faith with shared convictions and hopes. A community of believers has a common history. It also has a shared purpose and future that are much bigger than any political authority. And that has implications. Individuals pose no threat to any state. They can be lied to, bullied, arrested, or killed. But communities of faith do pose a threat. Religious witness does have power, and communities of faith are much harder to silence or kill.

Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver Religious Tolerance and the Common Good

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Worship lecture

St Paul’s Theological Centre Annual Lecture

Professor Jeremy Begbie The Emotional Power of Music in Worship: Have We Anything to Fear?

14th June 2007, 7.30pm at Holy Trinity Brompton, London

Jeremy Begbie is Honorary Professor of Theology at the University of St Andrews and Associate Principal of Ridley Hall, Cambridge. Jeremy is a professionally trained musician and one of his passions is the renewal of music in worship. He is the author of many books including ‘Voicing Creation’s Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts’ (T & T Clark). The lecture will include a performance at the piano, recorded music and worship. Entry is free.

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From the heart of the Church – the University

In his 1990 apostolic constitution on Christian education, John Paul II insisted that the university is ex corde ecclesiaeâ??from the heart of the Church. He spoke of the Catholic university, of course, but the vision challenges every Christian university. In Ex Corde Ecclesiae, John Paul wrote: â??With every other university [the Christian university] shares that gaudium de veritate, so precious to Saint Augustine, which is the joy of searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge. [Such] a universityâ??s privileged task is to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.â??

There areâ??or there should beâ??different kinds of universities. At least that is the case if there is no such thing as a university pure and simple. A decision must be made, and constantly remade, to be a particular kind of university. It is sometimes said that a Christian university has a â??dual identity,â?? one by virtue of being a university and another by virtue of being Christian. I suggest that is seriously mistaken, since it assumes that the term university is neutral or self-explanatory. Every university is, whether by careful deliberation or by accident, a university of a particular kind.

The Christian university requires a structured form of conversation, both affirmative and critical, with a particular community of Christian faith. In the absence of such accountabilityâ??an accountability that is not imposed but freely soughtâ??the Christian university will most likely succumb to the institutional and ideological dynamics of other kinds of universities. It is not enough that there be a department of theology or a vibrant student chaplaincy. Indeed, as James Burtchaellâ??s demonstrates in The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches, the schools that ended up in repudiating their Christian founding began by assigning the responsibility to be Christian to theology departments and the chapel. The result was that they lost their connection with â??the Churchâ??s heart for learningâ?? and, along with it, the responsibility of inviting students to enter on the high adventure of the Christian intellectual traditionâ??a tradition ever so much richer than the reductionist Enlightenment embraced by schools that claim to be universities pure and simple.

Richard John Neuhaus A University of a Particular Kind

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Williams: multiculturalism? homogenisation!

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will tonight give an address at Toynbee Hall, in which he will call for a widening of the debate on multiculturalism beyond narrow considerations of ethnicity or nationality, and to take in arguments about globalisation and commerce.

Delivering the lecture, Dr Williams will address the question of the homogenisation of human beings, with the increasing dominance of the global market:

“We live in probably the least multicultural human environment there has ever been. The global market has canonised once and for all certain ways of making: industrialisation is everywhere, the network of global communication is everywhere, the effects of market forces are felt by everyone on the face of the globe….It may be benevolent to some aspects of local cultures; it may learn to speak in local accents for certain purposes, advertising or decoration but it works in one mode of production, employment and marketing, and assumes that everyone is a potential customer. It is as universal as ever Christianity or Islam aspired to be, but the substance of its universality is a set of human functions (producing, selling, consuming) rather than any sense of innate human capacity and of the unsettling mysteriousness that goes with that.”

Dr Williams will also argue in his lecture that those who wish to debate multiculturalism should first look critcally at what they mean by the term. He will suggest that the growth of cultural relativism in the twentieth century has led many to feel unable or reluctant to question the values of their own communities or those of others and that this risks the development of a secular state, which is unable and unwilling to exercise moral judgement.

Dr Williams will stress that it is not wrong to expect schools in shared cultures to teach the history or traditions of the majority. This, he will say, is necessary not because it is arbitrarily right to do so, but because children need to be able to understand how cultures evolve – and what forces, for good or ill, have come together to explain the values and traditions society currently holds.

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Christopher Roberts on Marriage

Christopher Roberts Creation & Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

Does sexual difference matter for marriage? Are there good theological reasons why the two main characters in a marriage should be a male and a female, or is marriage a more flexible covenant, which any two people can keep? Creation and Covenant analyzes latent but under-examined beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant for centuries in the Christian west. The book opens by studying patristic theologies of marriage, which rested on mostly implicit and often incompatible beliefs about sexual difference. However, Roberts argues that Augustine developed a coherent theology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Roberts traces how Augustine’s theology influenced and was developed by subsequent theologians, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Barth, and John Paul II. Finally, Roberts engages today’s debates about gay marriage.

Before becoming an academic, Dr. Roberts was a journalist. On behalf of PBS television, he covered both the Lambeth Conference in England and the World Council of Churches in Zimbabwe. During those years, he was disappointed by both the liberal and conservative arguments on homosexuality. Left-wingers seemed more interested in privacy, autonomy, and experience than in theology, and right-wingers seemed to have lots of prohibitions but little good news. In the final chapters, this book tries to do better, inviting liberals to improve the standard of their arguments, and explaining what is beautiful and persuasive about the traditional case.

This book articulates often latent and under-examined, but nonetheless significant, beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant in the Christian west. Chapter one explains that patristic theologies of marriage rested on mostly implicit beliefs about sexual difference, and sometimes these beliefs were incompatible with one another. However, chapter two argues that Augustine developed a coherent theological anthropology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Chapters three through five show that for the major subsequent pre-modern theologians, the significance of sexual difference was rarely the subject of direct discussion. Nevertheless, Augustine’s most important successors both presupposed and occasionally developed his beliefs about sexual difference. Bernard of Clairvaux shows how sexual difference in marriage is privileged material for allegories of God’s love; Aquinas emphasised the procreative significance of sexual difference; and the Reformers argued that because God made the sexes, marriage should be central to Christian life. Chapters six and seven study Barth and John Paul II, who each discuss sexual difference with a hitherto unknown degree of sustained systematic attention. Their anthropology and biblical exegesis is rooted in Christology, which leads them to conclude that humanity is created for fellowship, and that sexual difference is necessary for this fellowship. Chapter eight explains why certain contemporary and revisionist theologies of marriage, notably ones which seek a rationale for gay and lesbian marriages, are problematic. These contemporary theologies have not yet reckoned with theologically important and defensible claims about the meaning of sexual difference. The conclusion suggests that renewed clarity and selfconsciousness about the theological significance of sexual difference should strengthen any Christian ethic of sexuality and marriage, enabling the church to be more articulate in its dialogue with contemporary culture and science, and more coherent in its own internal practices.

â??The question of the significance of sexual difference is at the heart of many divisions within contemporary society. It is producing hurtful tensions within all of the major Christian Churchesâ?¦.Robertsâ?? contribution to the debate is forceful and scholarly, while always charitable. This powerfully argued case for the abiding importance of our sexual identity shows how rich can be the contribution of the Christian tradition to our societyâ??s present search to understand the meaning of our lives. Even those who do not accept all of the authorâ??s conclusions should be grateful for this beautifully written and profound book. It will help us all in our journey towards understanding who we are in Christ.â?? – Timothy Radcliffe, OP, former Master General of the Dominican Order

â??Sexual ethics and gay marriage — Creation and Covenant is essential reading for anyone who wants to think about these issues in light of the Western Christian tradition. Roberts helps us see and resist the Gnostic temptation that so dominates the moral imagination of modern cultureâ?¦.A very fine book – just the sort of patient survey of the classical tradition we need, and absolutely on target as far as the core theological issue is concerned. It’s the sort of book that will be very helpful for teaching a seminar on sexual ethics.” – R. R. Reno, Creighton University, and editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.

â??In Creation and Covenant, Christopher Roberts has done both church and society a great service. â?¦We cannot go forward with any of these issues in the future without Roberts’ excellent guide to the past.â?? – Don Browning, University of Chicago and author of Marriage and Modernization Creation and Covenant

You would like a publisher’s discount? How about $78, or £39? Get in touch and I’ll pass you right along

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Benedict on Irenaeus

Dear brothers and sisters, in the catechesis on the prominent figures of the early Church, today we come to the eminent personality of St Irenaeus of Lyons.

…Irenaeus was concerned to describe the genuine concept of the Apostolic Tradition which we can sum up here in three points.

a) Apostolic Tradition is “public”, not private or secret. Irenaeus did not doubt that the content of the faith transmitted by the Church is that received from the Apostles and from Jesus, the Son of God. There is no other teaching than this. Therefore, for anyone who wishes to know true doctrine, it suffices to know “the Tradition passed down by the Apostles and the faith proclaimed to men”: a tradition and faith that “have come down to us through the succession of Bishops” (Adversus Haereses, 3, 3, 3-4). Hence, the succession of Bishops, the personal principle, and Apostolic Tradition, the doctrinal principle, coincide.

b) Apostolic Tradition is “one”. Indeed, whereas Gnosticism was divided into multiple sects, Church Tradition is one in its fundamental content, which – as we have seen – Irenaeus calls precisely regula fidei or veritatis: and thus, because it is one, it creates unity through the peoples, through the different cultures, through the different peoples; it is a common content like the truth, despite the diversity of languages and cultures. A very precious saying of St Irenaeus is found in his book Adversus Haereses: “The Church, though dispersed throughout the world… having received [this faith from the Apostles]… as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it. She also believes these points [of doctrine] just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart, and she proclaims them, and teaches them and hands them down with perfect harmony as if she possessed only one mouth. For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the Churches which have been planted in Germany do not believe or hand down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which have been established in the central regions of the world” (1, 10, 1-2). Already at that time – we are in the year 200 – it was possible to perceive the Church’s universality, her catholicity and the unifying power of the truth that unites these very different realities, from Germany, to Spain, to Italy, to Egypt, to Libya, in the common truth revealed to us by Christ.

c) Lastly, the Apostolic Tradition, as he says in the Greek language in which he wrote his book, is “pneumatic”, in other words, spiritual, guided by the Holy Spirit: in Greek, the word for “spirit” is “pneuma”. Indeed, it is not a question of a transmission entrusted to the ability of more or less learned people, but to God’s Spirit who guarantees fidelity to the transmission of the faith. This is the “life” of the Church, what makes the Church ever young and fresh, fruitful with multiple charisms. For Irenaeus, Church and Spirit were inseparable: “This faith”, we read again in the third book of Adversus Haereses, “which, having been received from the Church, we do preserve, and which always, by the Spirit of God, renewing its youth as if it were some precious deposit in an excellent vessel, causes the vessel itself containing it to renew its youth also…. For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and every kind of grace” (3, 24, 1).

As can be seen, Irenaeus did not stop at defining the concept of Tradition. His tradition, uninterrupted Tradition, is not traditionalism, because this Tradition is always enlivened from within by the Holy Spirit, who makes it live anew, causes it to be interpreted and understood in the vitality of the Church. Adhering to her teaching, the Church should transmit the faith in such a way that it must be what it appears, that is, “public”, “one”, “pneumatic”, “spiritual”.

Starting with each one of these characteristics, a fruitful discernment can be made of the authentic transmission of the faith in the today of the Church. More generally, in Irenaeus’ teaching, the dignity of man, body and soul, is firmly anchored in divine creation, in the image of Christ and in the Spirit’s permanent work of sanctification. This doctrine is like a “high road” in order to discern together with all people of good will the object and boundaries of the dialogue of values, and to give an ever new impetus to the Church’s missionary action, to the force of the truth which is the source of all true values in the world.

Pope Benedict XVI on Irenaeus (General Audience Wednesday 28th March 2007)