Christian Insights Research Articles

Treasures In The Heavens: some early christian insights into the organizing of worlds

Treasures In The Heavens: some early christian insights into the organizing of worlds

Church: Brotherhood and Eschatology

The purpose of this paper is to explore the idea that there has been some change in our understanding of the nature of the Church in the last ten years or so. I suggest that we are being encouraged to think now more in terms of the Church as the people of God and as mystery, but that these two themes finally converge. There is, of course, no prospect of tying up all the loose ends that there must inevitably be in a paper as brief and ambitious as this.My first thesis is that we are in the middle of discovering a new sense of the Church as a community, as a community with a mission, as a ‘movement’, and that this springs from our retrieval of the original primitive Christian insight that the Church is nothing if it is not the people of God, and should then issue into a renewed belief in the fraternal structure of the Church. I should emphasize that this is a discovery of what the Church should be, not of what it actually is.It is clear that the documents of Vatican II have made it respectable to talk about the Church in terms of the people of God. It was not always so. While it is, of course, impossible that any single concept could ever catch what one means by any phenomenon as complex as the Church, it is important to decide which to start from, for this will govern one’s whole understanding of the Church.

The Limits of Liberalism

Rosemary Haughton’s latest book is an interesting and original attempt to connect literary, psychological, personal and Christian insight in a way which illuminates the meaning of being human for a Christian and at the same time creates common ground between Christian and non-believer. As such it is a significant achievement: the explorations of love, freedom, maturity, community are done with a sensitivity and intelligence which comes from a blending of common experience, in the psychology of personal relationship, with a sense of Christianity as a depth within this common knowledge. There are excellent individual accounts of the relation of childhood attitudes to the gospel, of the experience of passion and community and communication, and these add up to a book which represents the most deeply creative point in one important contemporary Christian tradition – the tradition of liberal, open, personal concern with the concretely human in actual relationships.To say this is also to indicate, negatively, the book’s weakness. For the liberal tradition is not the only one in modern Christianity and when it stands alone, as it does here, it demonstrates at once its strengths and failures, as an account of ‘the human’. It is dangerous to quarrel with a writer’s self-imposed limitations, and yet in a book which treats of the ‘human’ these can be indicative: the focus, very firmly, is on the personal, psychological, the immediately known and experienced, not on history, politics, institution, society, structure.