In a recent article ‘The Problem of Natural Theology’, Professor N. H. G. Robinson has considered the requirements of a ‘genuinely empirical natural theology’. For the first section of it, a very clear sorting-out of recent debates on the ontological argument, I have nothing but admiration. It ends with the question: ‘Granted that if we think of God we must think of him as necessarily existing, why must we think of God at all?’, followed by the comment: ‘We seem thrown, (...) without any prospect of rest, between apriorism and [Barthian] empiricism’. Robinson is rightly dissatisfied with that situation, and in his second section he raises the question whether there cannot be an approach to God which the debates on the ontological arguments have overlooked and which may be properly called an ‘empirical’ one, free from Barthian presuppositions. He finds what seems to be such an approach in Professor E. L. Mascall's Existence and Analogy but concludes that it is in fact after all a form of ‘rationalism’. In the third section he criticises Professor T. F. Torrance's defence of Barth's position in a way which seems to me most satisfactory, and in the fourth he makes his own positive proposals. With these I am in substantial agreement. It is only his account of Mascall's position, in particular at the end of his second section, which seems to call for critical comment. (shrink)

Trethowan argues that the apprehension of God is at the heart of any philosophy of religion which can hope to recommend itself to a thinking man and that such an apprehension is bound up with the whole range of human experience.

Process theology is far less prominent in Britain than in its country of origin, but its central doctrine of a developing God would prove, I think, to be held by many British theologians if one made enquiry. Professor Keith Ward may show which way the wind is blowing when he writes in his recent book Rational Theology and the Creativity of God : ‘only if God is temporal, can he be the free creator of a universe of free creatures; only (...) if he is eternal, can he possess that necessity which is the foundation of the world; only if he is dipolar, can he be both’. To that extent he accepts the Whitehead-Hartshorne position. Why has the the absolute timelessness of God seemed obvious so regularly to thinking religious people down the ages? It must be, I shall say, that they have felt themselves in touch somehow with another world, or rather another state, in which time is absolutely transcended. But I am not concerned only with that in this article. My business is to suggest that process theology is important for a number of reasons. I shall return to Ward's book at the end. (shrink)

The author claims to adopt a strictly empirical method, but he also claims that human experience is metaphysical. Christian thinkers, he holds, too often hesitate to admit that we have knowledge not just of God's effects, but of God himself in his effects. That God is indescribable is as it should be. There is too much talk about God -- whereas a knowledge of him can be assured only by bringing the mind to bear upon the transcendent elements in our (...) experience, the meeting place of God and man. From this point of view, the moral evidence for God (or rather of God) proves to be fundamental. This volume contains an outline of the traditional Christian metaphysics, overlaid by scholasticism and renewed for our time by (especially) Maurice Blondel, in which many theological emphases now current can be reconciled. What we need is not less metaphysics but more and better metaphysics. And the dividing line between metaphysics and mysticism, as Gabriel Marcel has said, is not easy to draw. Also this work contains detailed critiques of a good many recent writers. [Book jacket]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CRUCIFIXION: ACCIDENT OR DESIGN? Sebastian Moore, O.S.B. Downside Abbey Lastyear I was visited by an old friend from my Liverpool days. Mike and I had worked together with the young of the parish, and one summer the two of us took a couple of boys camping in France, a trial of patience which made us known to each other at some depth. He was in fact a passionately convinced (...) Catholic, and very pastoral with it. We had many and long theological discussions. On his recent visit to Downside, I was showing him and some friends round our church, when, à propos ofquite what I don't remember, he made a remark about the Catholic cult of suffering, and said, "and it's all because ofthe crucifixion, isn't it? Why don't we recognize that the crucifixion was an accident?" I didn't react, because I was dumbfounded at what seemed to be the denial ofthe mystery ofthe cross by a friend who I had no reason to believe had stopped being a Catholic. And I'm sure he hasn't. He would certainly have told me ifhe had. It has taken me over a year to figure out what is going on here, and this would not have been possible without intensive study of the work of René Girard. The only alternative to saying that the crucifixion was an accident is to say that it was "ordained by God." It is only as ordained by God that this horrible event could be presented to people as a divine affirmation that suffering is to be sought and espoused. Also, it is only as ordained by God that the crucifixion can be thought of as "appeasing God" in some way. Both the moral and the dogmatic implication ofthe crucifixion—that suffering is a good thing, and that God required a victim—are grounded in the notion that God required the crucifixion ofhis Son. And it is because this idea is quite unacceptable, unworthy of God and ofthe human mind made in God's image, that my friend concludes that the crucifixion was not required by God, not written into the eternal scheme ofthings, but an accident. 156Sebastian Moore Once the problem is clarified in these terms, more and more instances come to mind, of rejection, by Christians and others, of the whole divine ordination ofthe cross. Gore Vidal refers to Christianity as "that lugubrious religion." Mary Hunt, a prominent American Catholic feminist, introduced a workshop with the statement, "we are not about naked guys nailed to crosses, blood all over the place!" Where divine ordering is accepted the special painfulness and darkness ofthe idea is noted. Anselm refers to the doctrine as the Narnia Chronicles, to commend the notion, by referring to a dark law written into the nature ofthings beyond our comprehension. The children's suggestion that Asian should simply not comply with the Snow Queen's requirement is rejected by Asian with a mysterious impatience—the children justhaven't grown up, like the romantics who, according to Matthew Arnold, "did not know enough." Again, during a day on "the roots of violence" that I led here yesterday there was much questioning about the role ofGod die Father in the crucifixion. The problem is crystallized in the famous cry from the cross, "Why have you forsaken me?" To my confessedly lame suggestion that Jesus was "only quoting a psalm," someone remarked, "to quote that psalm at thatjuncture and not mean it, is somewhatmisleading!" Again it's the same problem. How can God be understood as ordaining the crucifixion, compatibly with the notion of God as all-loving which Christianity of course affirms? Hans Urs Von Balthasar, who is 90% pro-Girard, in the other 10% wants to hold on to something he calls "the wrath of God." Thus the seeming necessity of having God require and ordain the crucifixion is the main crisis of Christian belief. The six-year-old Willie, in Thomas Klise's amazing novel, The Last Western, puts the problem with childlike directness. He keeps interrupting catechism class with, "Why did God kill Jesus?" and is shushed by Sister. I recall that Illtyd Trethowan said to... (shrink)