Maurice Wiles, who is Regius Professor of Theology in the University of Oxford as well as Chairman of the Doctrinal Commission of the Church of England, is that rare species, a dogmatic theologian who is neither so deeply entrenched in doctrinal fundamentalism that he sees no need for the introduction of the critical-historical method nor so anxious about its initial effects on the orthodoxy of his own thinking that he prefers to remain almost silent. He obviously does not regard his tenure of weighty and perhaps rather exposed offices as barring him from pursuing a course of enquiry which he himself often refers to in such terms as ‘daunting’, ‘dangerous and disturbing’, and the like. One may well want to argue over the detail and the force of some of these critical-historical studies of various Christian doctrines at the most decisive stages of their formation. This the author would certainly welcome. Given that most of these papers have already appeared in learned journals (the earliest in 1957), it is surprising that their intention has not been better understood. Perhaps collecting them like this will help.

In a nutshell, what Wiles proposes is that the kind of critical study of the formation of the Scriptures which began over a century ago should at last be extended systematically to the case of Christian doctrine. The model of biblical criticism suggests the necessity of an equivalent kind of doctrinal criticism (a phrase which Wiles ascribes to the late G. F. Woods). Partly because of his own background in patristic scholarship, but mainly in recognition of the decisive role the Fathers played in the formative period of Christian doctrine, it is the faith of Nicaea and of Chalcedon that Wiles is led to examine and question. There, of course, is where the dangers lie, that he foresees as clearly as anybody, and perhaps far more clearly than many of his critics.

On February 4 of this year, the Christian world commemorated the 70th anniversary of the birth of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran minister-theologian hanged by the Gestapo in the waning days of World War II. Bonhoeffer was only thirty-nine years old at his death; his influence on the Church in Germany seemingly at an end. And, yet, today a generation and a half later, Christians are still inspired and challenged to a more genuine faith by his letters from prison, and by his The Cost of Discipleship, Life Together, and other writings. In many ways Bonhoeffer has been more influential after his martyrdom than he ever was during his teaching and preaching career in the years prior to his participation in the conspiracy against Hitler.

It is with a certain circumspection that a Marxist enters the kind of debate represented by the articles of Denys Turner, Brian Wicker and Terry Eagleton on the problems of morality, Marxism and Christianity. This is not because he any longer fears that guilt by association which was once so characteristic a feature of (Stalinist) ultra-leftism by which anyone who even passed the time of day with a ‘petit-bourgeois idealist’ was automatically suspect and probably a class traitor, but rather because, in entering such a discussion, the Marxist simultaneously acknowledges that there is a discussion to be had—something real is at stake—and also his relative inadequacy to participate in it. This sounds like conceding defeat immediately but is intended to echo Terry Eagleton’s schematic but accurate map of the Marxist tradition—on the one hand a neo-Hegelian idealism stemming from the work of Lukács, fully equipped with a humanist ideology, and on the other the structural-scientific work of Althusser, programmatically anti-humanist—and thus to indicate right from the start that the English Marxist at least is bound to be caught wrongfooted. He is bound to look back and see that a Christian-Marxist dialogue was easier all round under the old socialist humanist regimé, but equally the Marxist is newly aware of the inadequacies of that theoretical past, the errors which led to irrationality in theory and defeat in practice and the correction of which are, for him, the primary theoretical concern. Marxism is now establishing for itself a new rigour the central thrust of which is towards the purging of eclecticism from itself and the preclusion of united fronts with other discourses at the level of theory.

In an important article in Gregorianum, now reprinted separately, Fr Francis Sullivan has invited us to take yet another look at the Pentecostal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’, suggesting a new avenue of approach, using St Thomas’s teaching on the mission of the Holy Spirit in la q.43.

At the outset, let me confess to a growing conviction that, in the long run, the Catholic Pentecostal Movement (under whatever name it may wish to be known) will be seen to have contributed most to the Church by goading a surprising number of Christians, and even some theologians, into taking a renewed interest in the various traditions we have in the Church concerning the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Whatever reservations one may (or, perhaps, should) have about Catholic Pentecostalism, this, at least, is surely a good thing.

Sullivan subtitles his essay, ‘A Catholic Interpretation of the Pentecostal Experience’. He begins by offering a working definition of ‘the Pentecostal experience’ as ‘a religious experience which initiates a decisively new sense of the powerful presence and working of God in one’s life, which working usually involves one or more charismatic gifts’. Members of Pentecostal Churches, he reminds us, would add ‘experience marked

In 1951, after a twelve-year silence, Anthony Powell, who had produced several Waugh-like novels in the Thirties, published A Question of Upbringing, a gently witty and evocative meditation on the past in which Nicholas Jenkins, soon recognisable as a Powell self-portrait, reviews the course of his life from his late teens at Eton, through Oxford, and into the London social and literary scene of his early twenties and this century’s thirties. The novel, which was well received by the usual people—V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly, Waugh himself—turned out to be the first instalment of an immense roman fleuve, entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, comprising twelve novels, the last of which, Hearing Secret Harmonies (William Heinemann, London, 1975), has now appeared. The first six, in two trilogies, cover the 1930s; there is a war trilogy; and a final trilogy in a rapidly developing time-span covers the post-war years up to the late Sixties. The series deserves attention, apart from any other reason, as probably the last major flourish in the long, honourable tradition of English social fiction.

The books are mostly about people meeting and trying to deal with one another—as friends, enemies, rivals, sexual partners, spouses. Jenkins develops and observes a network of relationships both tenuous and intense, friendships and loves that ripen and fade and fall. All this is presented in a huge casual anecdotal recit, a series of largely comic social encounters in which each character is present as himself or herself and also present as a social force, with the narrator’s voice providing the balancing clues about the situation.