Through television Western Christians have recently been exposed to vivid images of the violent repression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. With live ammunition, three-foot clubs and cyanide tear gas, courtesy of the United States, the Palestinian protest of the occupation is being hammered into silence. Once it is silenced, it is hard to know whether Western people will continue to wonder about what is happening to those who are suffering under this occupation.

The World Council of Churches, the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians have long since assumed their stances on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. For the World Council and the Vatican, relationships to Judaism and relationship to the state of Israel are separate questions, the one theological, the other political. Generally, both have supported the two-state solution, or the granting of a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fundamentalists, by contrast, are militant supporters of an expanded Israel, based on their reading of Biblical prophecy.

The voices which are largely unheard in western Christian circles are those of Middle Eastern Christians themselves. Unlike Western liberal Christians, they generally understand that, because the state of Israel implicitly makes claims based on Hebrew Scripture, these claims must be confronted theologically.

One such statement was put together as long ago as 1967 by a group of Middle Eastern Christian theologians, headed by George Khodr, present bishop of Mount Lebanon in the Orthodox Church of Antioch. Entitled What is Required of the Christian Faith Concerning the Palestinian Problem, it lay major emphasis on the spiritual and universal meaning of Christian faith.

Here I want to offer an interpretation of one of the most striking but in some ways least congenial aspects of late medieval English (and European) piety. The late Middle Ages was one of the most exuberant and productive periods of Mariological devotion, which manifested itself in devotional treatises and prayers, in poetry, music and the visual arts. The theological content of much of this, however, is now looked on with some suspicion and incomprehension, and the extraordinary centrality of Mary in the religious consciousness of Christians in the period from Anselm to Luther would now be pretty generally attributed to a defective Christology. Thus the apparently almost desperate late medieval reliance on the Virgin Mary as intercesser, friend of sinners, Mother of Mercy, is often taken to have stemmed from a fear of Christ and a sense of his remoteness from sinful, frail humanity. Christ on the rainbow coming in judgement, the Rex Tremendae Majestatis of the Dies lrae, was the Rex Iustitiae who would weigh men and women by their actions, and before such a dreadful scrutiny, who could stand? The suffering, weak and tempted Christ of the Gethsemene narratives and the Epistle to the Hebrews, in the course of the great Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, and in the millennium of missionary expansion that followed, had been divinised out of his humanity. Catholic Christology, while paying lip-service to that humanity, had succumbed to a practical Nestorianism.

Into the vacuum left by this process the longings of the collective Christian heart for an assurance that God was indeed compassionate, tender, understanding, human, forced the figure of Mary, and it was she, not Christ, who came to be addressed as Most Gracious Advocate, the Christian’s Life, Sweetness and Hope.

Assuming, of course, that we accept the tradition given to us in the church and take seriously the testimony of the gospels (and, in this context, particularly the Lucan testimony), we can say in a way that is not just poetical that Mary is truly the mother of justice and peace. For she is presented to us not only as giving witness to how God’s power can transform humanity, but as, in doing this, giving birth to that power, that life. She becomes the Mother of Christ; the ‘Mother of God’, as Ephesus declared her to be. By her active and willing cooperation with the divine plan, by her humility, courage and love of justice, she brings Jesus into the world and thus gives birth to the Christ. She is the Mother of the New Age, the New Heaven and the New Earth, and shows herself prepared to risk everything to see Christ embodied for us and in us so that the kingdom of God may be established on this earth. Her prophetic witness to the truth is not just a witness to what can be, nor to what God’s purposes might be in some future time; no, her witness makes the Truth present for us in such a way that reality becomes transformed by the mystery of God’s power on this earth, implementing justice and peace.

I had anticipated learning from the contributions of others to the debate initiated last autumn in New Blackfriars by Professor Nicholas Lash and me (the debate on what has been called ‘the liberal consensus’) without reentering that debate soon, if ever. The scrupulous courtesy of Fr. Timothy Radcliffe’s article in the March issue, in which he discusses whether there is such a ‘consensus’ among Catholic biblical scholars, makes it easy to do that. However, I have found it impossible to let the remarks of Mr. Joseph Fitzpatrick in his March article, based on the views of Bernard Lonergan, pass without protest.

Mr. Fitzpatrick’s article appears to me to encourage hostility to reason itself. He does not openly declare himself an enemy to reason, and I have no doubt would sincerely repudiate such a charge: but, all the same, what he wrote will surely reinforce hostility to it on the part of others. A large part of his contention is that, in theology, and, by implication, in other disciplines as well, deductive reasoning should be demoted. Anyone who puts forward such a thesis needs to spell out with great care exactly what he means by it if he is not to be taken, or mistaken, for an enemy of reason; and Mr. Fitzpatrick exercises very little care. He objects to ‘the habit among Catholic theologians of arriving at conclusions by often dubious deductive reasoning’ (p. 134). We have here, at the outset of his attack on the use of deductive reasoning in theology, a vital ambiguity.