Only a few minutes after the events of September 11, 2001, the perfidious terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were being linked with the religious sphere. It made no difference whether it was the slogan of “battle of the cultures” (S.P. Huntington) which made the rounds of the mass media or whether the public took a look at the simplistic Islamic thoughts of Mohammed Atta, which the pilot of death had left behind in his will, or whether it was in the context of the political war rhetoric which accompanied the allied attack on Osama bin Laden and the whole of Afghanistan, or whether it was in the statements made by church officials at the innumerable memorial services for the victims of the attacks: religion was or, rather, is, always involved.

The questions are obvious: What is this link between violence and religion about? Is there a potential for violence which is structurally inherent in the religious - outside or particularly also within the concrete religions of revelation: Judaism, Christianity and Islam? Does the terrorist attack on the twin towers of Manhattan - symbols of globalized capitalism - demonstrate the reawakening of “religious mania” (as the German news magazine Der Spiegel put it)? These and similar questions challenge (Dominican) theologians to give their opinions about this, since each religion determines its relationship to violence through its particular theology (cf. H.-J. Sander).

I take the term ‘Anglican’ here to refer primarily to the Church of England, though I think that the positions to which I refer in this paper would also be found in the spectrum of most of its related episcopal churches, especially the Church in Wales and the Church of Ireland whose territory includes Northern Ireland, the Anglican Diocese of Europe, and the Episcopal Church of Scotland. I have no way of ascertaining the position of all the Churches of the world-wide Anglican Communion, though again I expect that within it I would find a similar range of theological conviction about the Trinity and Mary. We also need to bear in mind the existence of the Porvoo agreement with north European Lutheran Churches. The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Latvia has not yet taken a decision on the Porvoo Declaration, and the Church of Denmark has decided not to endorse it but to maintain links with those who have. There are many difficult issues for discussion in such churches, but my point here is simply that discussion of ‘the Trinity and Mary’ is a sensitive issue not least in the Church of England’s ecumenical negotiations, especially with those Churches with whom we are now in full communion.

The second point I need to make by way of introduction is that I do not write as an official delegate of the Church of England to the XX Mariological Marian International Congress, though I hope I do justice to the complexities of my church’s position as a member of its Doctrine Commission — not that at the moment the Commission is likely to discuss the relation between the Trinity and Mary.

The final book of The Imitation of Christ is an ‘exhortation to Holy Communion’, and the last chapter begins: ‘Beware of a persistent and useless intellectual examination of this most deep sacrament, if you do not wish to be immersed in deep doubt.’ Useless, I am afraid, to warn philosophers. In what follows I distinguish two or three different ways of understanding the Real Presence in the Eucharist and, without rejecting any of them, say how far they are compatible and indicate some of their merits and drawbacks. But since this doctrine is sometimes confused with the doctrine of Transsubstantiation, I begin with a word about that.

In 1551 the Council of Trent declared that ‘through the consecration of the bread and wine, there comes about a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into his blood. And this conversion is appropriately and properly called “transsubstantiation'” (Denzinger/Schönmetzer 1642). The doctrine of transsubstantiation here endorsed is relatively clear. It states that when bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ, the matter of the bread and wine pass away into the matter of the body and blood of Christ. The purpose of the doctrine is to distinguish the Eucharistic change from natural changes such as occur when water evaporates into air or when bread and wine are consumed in the ordinary way. The Fathers of Trent and the mediaeval philosophers from whom they took the doctrine believed that these natural changes are, strictly speaking, only transformations, conversiones formales (Aquinas, ST 3.75.4).

From the late 1950s to the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch produced her own unique brand of moral philosophy which offers commentary and insight into the current debate concerning the nature of moral values. Over the years, Murdoch criticised existentialism, behaviourism, linguistic analysis and utilitarianism on the grounds that they present distorted, and at best partial, depictions of the moral life. At the root of her criticisms is the conviction that these views are out of step with experience and are too narrow to account for the reality of moral value as it manifests itself in ordinary life. Today, as the debate regarding the nature of moral values—between the realists and non-cognitivists— becomes more polarised around what have come to be defining issues, such as whether there are moral facts (moral facts being assumed to be analogous to scientific facts), her criticisms and her opposing schema continue to have validity, and offer an alternative approach to moral values and the moral life. Moreover, her philosophy contains elements which could enliven the current debate in both theology and philosophy regarding the nature of moral value.

Thomas’s trinitarian theology has a rather bad name in modern literature. He is associated with an artificial separation between the discussion of the one God and the exploration of trinitarian revelation. This, it is said, privileges the most abstract level of talk about God, and inevitably suggests that what reason can know of God as one is prior to what revelation shows us of God’s threefold life and action. And indeed, when we turn to the details of the discussion, abstraction is what seems to dominate. A brief visit to the relevant sections of the Prima Pars will leave a migrainous blur of processions, relations, notions, essential names, appropriations and much more; a certain impatience with the whole register in which he considers the question sets in well before any of the detail is examined.

What I want to do in this lecture is not to provide a full exposition of this daunting treatise, but to select certain aspects of them that have, I think, been misunderstood or neglected, so as to point tentatively towards a recovery of some of Thomas’s perceptions, both for anthropology and for trinitarian thought. And my fundamental concern is to challenge the accusation of abstractness levelled against him. The late Catherine Mowry LaCugna, in her intriguing and influential essay, God for Us.

‘God,’ ‘Theos,’ ‘Deus’ is of course a name borrowed from paganism; we take it out of its proper context, where it is used for talking about the gods, and use it for our own purposes. This is quite a legitimate piece of borrowing and quite safe so long as it does not mislead us into thinking that the God we worship (or don’t) is a god. We always do have to speak of our God with borrowed words; it is one of the special things about our God that there are no peculiar appropriate words that belong to him, as with the language of carpentry or computer-speak. He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.

For this reason it is sometimes safer to use clothes that are quite obviously second-hand, words that have been quite scandalously ripped from their proper context and stretched and bent and distorted to suit our purposes. That is one reason for preferring ‘The Father’ to ‘God’ as a name for our God. ‘The Father’ is manifestly being used in a metaphorical or extended sense and so is unlikely to mislead us. It is also the word that Jesus prefers to use.

There are probably few theological categories more contested than the image of God. The reasons why are not hard to fathom. Though the priestly writer to whom we owe the phrase nowhere specifies in what this image consists, theologians since Irenaeus have seen in it the key to understanding human distinctiveness. Though Irenaeus’ own interpretation of the imago Dei is remarkably holistic, the phrase has more often been understood in narrowly cognitive terms. And while the faculties cited as the seat of the divine image have generally been viewed as widely inclusive of all human beings, those in power have proved all too willing to question the humanity of those whose cognitive abilities they have judged somehow deficient.

Partly as a protest against narrowly cognitive interpretations of human distinctiveness, the last century has seen an increasing emphasis on the capacity for relationships with others as the defining feature of the divine image in human beings. Insofar as such capacity is also subject to variation among individuals, however, relational criteria seem as open to exclusive interpretation as those pertaining to the use of reason or will. In both cases, an essentialist interpretation of the imago Dei threatens to result in the boundaries of the human being drawn too narrowly.

As a teacher and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas sets out to investigate the nature of pedagogical activity in his treatise, On the Teacher in Articles 1-4, Question 11 of the Disputed Questions on Truth. His analysis of teaching and of the teacher’s role are informed, as one might expect, by his epistemological views and theological beliefs. One of the first issues that Aquinas has to confront is a theological one, namely, whether or not one can describe any human being as a teacher if one believes that God is the pre-eminent teacher as the primary source of all knowledge. While the latter proposition may seem rather problematic to contemporary Western thought, it was an acceptable issue for discussion in Aquinas’s time and is formulated by him in various ways in a number of the objections cited at the beginning of Article 1. Many of these appear to originate from the Augustinian tradition, together with some others from scriptural sources, and all of them argue along the lines that the Christian belief in God’s noetic power is difficult to reconcile with our human capacity to function freely as independent cognitive beings. In terms of pedagogy, this becomes a debate about the very existence of an authentic human pedagogy if God is believed to be teacher par excellence. Aquinas decides to deal with this problem at the outset.

In Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 Thomas Aquinas proposes five ways or models of atonement. These are, in order, the ways of merit, satisfaction, sacrifice, redemption and efficient causality. In line with the patristic and mediaeval tradition, Aquinas presents these five models very much in terms of what Hans Urs von Balthasar might call a theodramatic ‘action’ between God and humanity—a drama centred on the person of the incarnate Son who in some sense or other offers recompense to his Father for our sins. This theodramatic approach to soteriology dominates Catholic thought from Anselm to Balthasar and Protestant thought from Luther to Barth and beyond, but it takes little account of the latest thinking in historical Jesus studies or of current interpretations of Paul and other New Testament writers, and in this article I would like to suggest a way of rereading Summa Theologiae 3a, q48 in the light of what might be termed the Schweitzer/Sanders/Wright understanding of Jesus and Paul.

For Albert Schweitzer, Jesus was an eschatological prophet who saw himself as heralding the end of the age and who, when his preaching did not result in the anticipated apocalypse, effectively ‘broke himself on the wheel of history’ in order to bump human history over into the next phase. Paul picked up on this, and (according to Schweitzer) his ‘Christ-mysticism’ explored the various ways (being ‘in Christ’, dying and rising with Christ, mystical body, Holy Spirit) in which Christians become bound up with the Messiah whose death has inaugurated the eschatological kingdom.

‘I have some longstanding debts: to Donald MacKinnon, who introduced me to philosophy at Aberdeen between 1950 and 1952; to Cornelius Ernst, who got me to read Wittgenstein, together with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, at Hawkesyard in 1957-60; and to Adolf Darlap, who helped me to understand Heidegger (much easier than understanding Wittgenstein), in Munich between 1964 and 1965’.

Serendipitously, a few days before being invited to contribute to these celebrations some remarks on that ‘longstanding debt’ to Donald MacKinnon, while sorting out some papers I came across three yellowing pages of typescript. On the top of the final page was written, in that inimitably energetic and near-illegible hand: ‘Done for Theology in July 1977, but rejected by the editors as unsuitable on the inflexible recommendation of Dr James Mark (reviews editor). DMM’. (This was by by no means the only occasion on which Donald had noted the inflexibility of one to whom he usually referred as ‘the brother of the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police’.) The spurned offering was a review of Christopher Stead’s Divine Substance, which had been published earlier that year.