On 24 March Catholics committed to the cause of social justice keep the tenth anniversary of the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Here is the sermon which Herbert McCabe OP preached at Blackfriars, Oxford, at the Mass marking the anniversary last year. The gospel reading was Luke 24:1—10 (Luke’s account of the first Easter morning).

When the Brazilian Dominican Frei Betto was in prison one of his interrogators asked him: ‘How can a Christian collaborate with a communist?’. He answered: ‘For me, men are not divided into believers and atheists but into oppressors and victims’. I think this was a witty reply—it certainly wasn’t saying anything so tedious as ‘Truth doesn’t matter; let’s do something practical’. I think it was witty because it turned the interrogator’s question round in a new and surprising way, and because it challenged and disturbed his interrogator: ‘Is it worse to collaborate with atheists as I do or to collaborate with injustice as you do? When I work with atheists I do not become an atheist; but when you work for the unjust you do become unjust’.

Frei Betto was saying that it is just because he passionately thinks that truth matters and just because he is not an atheist, that his first concern is not whether people agree with him but whether they are suffering and in particular suffering at the hands of sinful men, from the lovelessness and injustice of others. His atheist comrades may have their own reasons for struggling against injustice, but for him his reason is his belief.

1. Telling the time

By current standards, St Thomas Aquinas did not have very much to say about time, and even less to say about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. When discussing the commandments, however, he did say something rather interesting about the Sabbath. Human beings, he tells us, owe a threefold duty to the head of their community: a duty of faithfulness or single-hearted loyalty, of reverence, and of service. This threefold duty is, according to St Thomas, the subject-matter of the commands to worship only God, to refrain from taking his name in vain, and to keep the sabbath holy. It is, he says, the servant’s duty to repay through service the good things received from his lord. But what we have received from this Lord, the Creator, is—everything. Hence the command to sanctify the sabbath in grateful remembrance of the creation of the world: ‘sanctifica(re) sabbat(um) in memoriam creationis rerum’. In due course, I shall return to this suggestion that it is in keeping our very createdness in mind that we keep the Sabbath holy. But, first, I want to reflect on what is entailed in learning how to pray.

But surely, you may say, we know how to pray? Jesus taught us how to pray: he taught us to say ‘Our Father ...’.

But do we really know how to say ‘Our Father’ here and now, in this place, at this time?

During the month of his seventy-fifth birthday, November, 1989, Edward Schillebeeckx published the final part of what now stands as a three- volumed Christology. His new book, Mensen als verhaal van God (‘Human Beings as the Story of God’), has taken twelve years to appear. It completes a trilogy begun in 1974 with Jezus, het verhaal van een levende (‘Jesus: The Story of a Living One’), and continued in 1977 with Gerechtigheiden liefde: Genade en bevrijding (‘Justice and Love: Grace and Liberation’). These three ‘opera magna’ combine approximately eighteen hundred pages of reflection on the identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the specificity of Christian faith. What follows is a description of the third part of Schillebeeckx’s Jesus-Quest with an overview of its structure and contents in the light of its two companion volumes, and comments on its governing preoccupation. The description is intended more as an interpretative commentary than a critique.

Professor Schillebeeckx began the exegetical research for the first instalment only a few years after the closure of the Second Vatican Council. His intention in the initial volume was not to provide an apologetical support for official church teaching, but rather to discover what was distinctive about Jesus, not as his individuality is codified dogmatically but as it is found in his practice and preaching, as these are reflected in the early credal formulas of the New Testament. Schillebeeckx sought to examine critically the intelligibility of Christological belief in Jesus of Nazareth for people today (1,33—34). Whereas the first volume addressed the issue of the ultimate identity of Jesus, the second gave more attention to various theologies of grace, especially the New Testament. The most fundamental presuppositions on which the first two books were constructed related to conditions for professing a Christian faith in the modern world. Schillebeeckx maintains that people today will no longer embrace Christianity simply on the basis of authority: conditions for believing must in some way be anchored in contemporary experiences.

The Sabbath that immediately precedes Pesah (Passover) is called Shabbat ha-Gadol, the Great Sabbath. It is this day that is commemorated in the Christian calendar as Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is a day whose mystical significance has not, perhaps, been sufficiently drawn to our attention.

Holy Saturday is in every way a Nothing Day. There is no liturgical celebration. The churches are empty. The altars are stripped. The tabernacles have been vacated and their doors stand ajar. Nothing whatever is happening. What does this mean?

It is the Great Sabbath—the Great Silence, the Great Nothing that precedes the Feast of Redemption, of liberation from slavery, of entry into the New Life of freedom.

To begin to appreciate it, to experience and savour it, we need to study the significance of the Sabbath in general. It is, no doubt, an endless study, for not only have scholars thought about it for thousands of years, but worshippers commit themselves to live it and experience it deeper and deeper throughout their lives.

‘Sabbath’ comes from the Hebrew shavat = ‘to rest’. It recalls the Creation and God’s rest when it was completed. It is characterised by cessation of creative physical activity.

Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with the question de sacra doctrina, qualis sit et ad quae se extendat. Readers of this question often assume that he is here asking about the nature of Christian theology. This assumption is open to question and in what follows I shall briefly explain why that is so and what Aquinas actually does mean by sacra doctrina.

I

The most obvious reason for refusing to equate sacra doctrina in Aquinas with ‘theology’, as that word is commonly used, is that much that would now pass for theology would not be recognised by Aquinas as sacra doctrina. In most modern discsssions, ‘theology’ does not mean ‘teaching we agree with’. It means what people who earn their living as theologians say or write. On that basis, editors and librarians, whether Christian or not, will class as theology the views of people as different as Augustine and Troeltsch, Luther and Cajetan, Schillebeeckx and Ratzinger. These pairs of authors, and others one could mention, have wildly divergent things to say, but all of it counts as theology. For Aquinas, however, not all of it would constitute sacra doctrina. That, for him, is nothing but true teaching. For him, sacra doctrina is indeed ‘teaching we agree with’. Or, more precisely, it is teaching we ought to agree with. As we read in la, 1,1, it is something revealed by God.

In the second place, ‘theology’ does not translate sacra doctrina. The proper translation is ‘holy teaching’ or ‘sacred doctrine’.