In my view to assert that God exists is to claim the right and need to carry on an activity, to be engaged in research, and I think this throws light on what we are doing if we try to prove the existence of God. To prove the existence of God is to prove that some questions still need asking, that the world poses these questions for us.

To prove the existence of God, then, would be rather like proving the validity of science — I don’t mean science as a body of established facts set out in textbooks or journals, but science as an intellectual activity, the activity of research currently going on; and not just routine research which consists in looking for the answers to clearly formulated questions by means of clearly established techniques, but the research which is the growing point of science, the venture into the unknown.

It is perfectly possible to deny the validity of this. It is perfectly possible to say we now have science; (we didn’t have it in the eighth century, let us say, but we have it now). It is just there; from now on it is all really just a matter of tidying up a few details. Now of course all the really great advances in science have come by questioning just that; by questioning, let us say, whether the Newtonian world is really the last word, by digging down and asking questions of what everybody has come to take for granted. But you could imagine quite easily a society which discouraged such radical questioning.

The gospel preached by Jesus promised the liberation of man and woman, both Jew and Gentile (see Matt. 11: 4-6; 12: 18-21; Luke 3: 4-6; 4: 18-21; 6: 20-23). Essential to this liberation — though not the whole of it — is liberation from injustice and oppression. Since this is what people do to one another, the gospel promises the rectification of human communal living. Salvation itself consists in belonging to the redeemed people of God, living according to his will. Human beings are not saved one by one, on their merits, but by their becoming members of a a new people raised from the dead in Jesus Christ. So belonging to this people is salvation for those who were oppressed and salvation too for those who were their oppressors, in so far as they have repented of their injustices and learned to live in a different way. But if men do learn to practise justice, it is not this which saves them, but their belonging to Christ. Justice as it is ordinarily understood — a respect for the rights of others — is not saving in itself. Nor would a society which faultlessly observed the demands of this justice be equivalent to the Kingdom of God. Jesus in his preaching demanded something greater than this justice (see Matt. 5: 17-48; Luke 6: 27-38; Matt. 25: 31-46). Matt. 25: 31-46). But it is not adequate to identify this “some-thing greater” as love, in the sense of virtue distinct from justice. We cannot, like some modem philosophers, make a sharp distinction between the virtue of justice, having to do with rights, and the virtue of love and benevolence, which is supererogatory. (The scriptural reasons for not making this sharp distinction in theology are discussed in my article, “A Christian View of Justice” in New Blackfriars, August 1978).

St Francis of Assisi is perhaps one of those few men of whom it can be said fairly: He is a man for all times. Much has been said and will no doubt be said on the reasons for this wonderful popularity which somehow seems to transcend the bounds of time and conquer the hearts of men of all creeds and none. There are indeed many reasons why Francis of Assisi continues to hold such a magnetic sway over the lives of so many but it would seem that at the very core of all of these is the Christ-centredness of his life. For St Francis, Christ Jesus, Incarnate, Crucified and Risen, was all. He it is who was the-pattern to which Francis would conform himself totally. St Francis made no conditions but rather he made a total surrender. In a manner at once simple and direct and yet immensely profound do the writings of this most human of saints ring out with the clear affirmation: Deus Meus et Omnia! In this meditation an attempt will be made to illustrate from these writings the christocentric character of St Francis’ way of life and to show how such considerations can be sharply relevant to our times.

Karl Rahner writes as follows (Foundations of Christian Faith, page 431): “In view of the mode in which eschatological statements are made in the Old and New Testaments, a Christian is always tempted to read and to interpret the eschatological statements of Christianity as anticipatory eyewitness accounts of a future which is still outstanding”. The meaning of this sentence, according to Hugo Meynell (New Blackfriars, July/August 1980, page 348), is that Rahner is warning us against the temptation of thinking that eschatological statements tell us anything, or have any bearing upon, what is to happen to us when we die: “Perhaps it is stupid of me not to be able to see what is being denied here, unless it is that Christians have some kind of expectation for the future after the end of the present life”. Dr Meynell thus reads the sentence as if it were stressed as follows: “In view of the mode in which eschatological statements are made in the Old and New Testaments, a Christian is always tempted to read and to interpret the eschatological statements of Christianity as anticipatory eye-witness accounts of a future which is still outstanding”. What we are being warned against, then, is the notion that eschatological statements refer to the future. This is the only sentence which Dr Meynell quotes to support his suspicions that Karl Rahner does not hold orthodox Catholic beliefs about the afterlife.