A witness to the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus on a hill outside Jerusalem in the early first century would not have been able to identify any aspect of what was going on as sacrifice. Here was merely a judicial murder performed with some cynicism by the Roman administration of a difficult province. For the Temple administration Jesus’s death was understood as a matter of an expediency pointedly ironised by the author of John’s Gospel: ‘You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed’ (John 11.50). There seems little doubt, on the other hand, that the gospels, as well as Paul, place the death of Jesus firmly within a hermeneutical framework provided by the sacrifice of Passover; this, in turn, leads to the early claim that Christ’s death is to be understood in relation to the forgiveness of sins. This theme is already present in the primitive credal statement preserved in I Cor. 15.3, which Paul seems to have inherited from Palestinian Christians and most probably from the Jerusalem church itself.

Such a reading of the New Testament material has been challenged by René Girard in a body of work which represents one of the most profound of recent attempts to explore the meaning of sacrifice in the roots of human society. At the danger of oversimplifying the complexity of Girard’s argument, he suggests, in a series of powerful studies, that human society is born in violence.

Around ten years ago the Order for Christian Funerals (henceforth OCF) was published. Given personal extended pastoral and liturgical use, I would like to make one suggestion which may prove equally useful to others involved in preparing the Funeral Liturgy. I have found the use of “Night Prayer” of The Divine Office a real boon in celebrating the Vigil for the Deceased with Reception at the Church.

The Schelling revival has never quite reconciled itself to the Swabian’s religious anima. Schelling’s Hegel-critique may now be recognized as something like a proto-deconstruction of Idealism’s ‘paroxysmal’ self-assertion; but, we are told, this ‘anti-logocentric’ kernel has usually to be extricated from a mystical-theosophical shell. Likewise, there may be vast, fruitful depths to Schelling’s stricture that Being is irreducible to thought; nonetheless, Schelling’s “apparently dead theology” is best either forgotten or else ‘translated’ into the lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean deconstruction, Rortyian postmodern pragmatism, etc. The religious concerns of Schelling’s later work are, it seems, little more than an embarrassment for those driving the revival.

Despite profound gratitude towards those (principally Bowie) who have done so much to instigate the current Schelling renaissance, I want to suggest here that we should not be so quick to brush aside, or ‘translate’, Schelling’s theologico-religious interests—for such a dismissal leaves us not just decontextualizing Schelling’s Hegel-critique, but, as well, missing out on a crucial Schellingian contribution to contemporary debate about the question of onto-theology. Schelling’s continuing relevance is more than his blowing open the Hegelian Identity of Thought and Being; it is also his concomitant reinstatement—not merely incidental to but fundamental for his critique of Idealism’s auto-apotheosis—of the ancient Platonic conviction that the divinity ‘is’ epekeina tes ousias, beyond Being or any metaphysical construction.

The Dominican theologian and cardinal, Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534), known as Cajetan after Gaeta, his birthplace, is best remembered for two things. Firstly, he is the expositor of Aquinas, whose monumental commentary on the Summa is included in the Leonine edition of Aquinas’ works. As a consequence of this canonisation, Cajetan’s commentary is either treasured or vilified, to the extent that it is judged to represent Aquinas accurately or not; meanwhile, more subtle developments, not to mention overt disagreements, tend to be overlooked. Secondly, and more widely. Cajetan is remembered as the Roman prelate who met with Martin Luther for three days in October 1518. At those meetings, characterised typically as a dialogue of the deaf, Cajetan sought to persuade Luther to withdraw a number of unorthodox theological opinions. Several years later, Cajetan was involved, albeit peripherally, with the Roman commission that drew up the formal condemnation of Luther’s teaching.

It is commonly and plausibly assumed that the rest of Cajetan’s work is to be understood in the light of his involvement with Luther, especially his commentaries on biblical texts, which he worked on from 1524 until his death in 1534. The conventional view of the biblical commentaries (found in various forms in Iserloh, Weisheipl, Parker, Janz and others), runs roughly as follows: the Reformers had appealed to scripture alone, and on the basis of scripture were challenging the papacy and Roman traditions; Cajetan, therefore, set out in his biblical commentaries to meet his adversaries on their chosen territory, and to demonstrate, with scholastic patience and rigour, that the Roman use of scripture was sound, that the Bible belonged to the Catholic Church.