A brilliant young German New Testament scholar said to me recently in an e-mail message, “What is more, scarcely anything new can ever be said; mostly it is the arrangement of well-known thoughts from a new point of view that is helpful and releases new impulses. Really new thoughts are accordingly received with great scepticism. So I often ask myself what we are actually doing.” That on the one hand, and the spurious excitement of the “Honest to Jesus!” movement, publicising the work of the Jesus Seminar, on the other hand. The Jesus Seminar meets several times a year in the United States and sets itself to decide by vote the likely authenticity of the sayings of Jesus and of events in the Acts of the Apostles. It was founded by Robert Funk. His book, Honest to Jesus, aims “to set Jesus free”, to “demote Jesus”, and to “declare the New Testament a highly uneven and biased record of various early attempts to invent Christianity.” The show will be on the road in the United Kingdom when Funk visits the country from the end of March AD 2000 to the beginning of May to hold seminars and rallies. It seems that close detailed scholarship by individuals dealing with the New Testament is regarded as boring and that the only excitement is to be gained by joining with others and getting Bishop Spong to puff your book, trying to shock the public in echo of Bishop John Robinson.

Two things ought to be said at the outset. The first is that it is an event of some significance far beyond the confines of Catholicism that the Bishop of Rome should address his fellow bishops on matters of the relationship of theology and philosophy. Whatever else we may say about the document before us, it emerges from a style of church leadership which refuses to absolve itself from the task of addressing questions of the intellectual articulation of the faith. Thereby it (quite properly) asks us some hard questions about those modem conventions whereby serious intellectual work is thought to be properly located only in the open fields of free enquiry (that is, in the institution of the university) and not in the cramped domestic culture of the church. I wonder if what has made some academics cross about Fides et Ratio is that the document refuses to stay behind the sanitary cordon with which institutions of higher learning sometimes surround themselves in order to protect their interests.

That is the first thing to be said. The second is this: it’s a pity that an episcopal judgment on these issues doesn’t do a better job of staking its claims. Partly it’s a matter of style: at times the document adopts the threateningly paternalistic tone of communications from the Kremlin in the 1940s and 1950s, urging Socialist realism in art or music: not the sort of thing to provoke thinkers to do their best work, so much as a summons to produce the goods to an officially-approved set formula.

Since this is the last lecture in the series about The Seven Deadly Sins, it might be a good idea to stand back and think for a moment about the point of such a list. That seven is a good, mystical number obviously makes us suspicious about any claim (if one was ever made) that the list of the deadly sins was arrived at by the exercise of pure reason. It is not difficult to add to them. Why is cruelty not a specific deadly sin? Cruelty does not obviously come under wrath, nor, for that matter, under pride, envy or lust. Aquinas lists cruelty (ferocitas) as a sin against temperance. He distinguishes it from ferocity and savagery (saevitia and feritas), which are ‘bestial’ vices. Cruelty, for Aquinas, is the vice of excessive severity in punishment. Its opposing virtue is clemency—the rational tempering of punishment—which Aquinas considers to be part of temperance. These are fairly persuasive distinctions. Yet Aquinas’s idea of cruelty seems to have little if anything to do with the sort of cruelty that has most caught the attention of the modern world, which was touched on by Nietzsche—the deliberate infliction of pain upon another for pleasure. This was philosophised upon even more interestingly by Jean-Paul Sartre as being part of a project to reduce the Other to objecthood, revealing and at the same time cancelling his freedom. That would seem a good candidate for an additional deadly sin.

Perhaps, though, we should think about the deadly sins as a sort of mirror image of the virtues—as these appear, for instance, in Aristotle.

The title of this article could be considered misleading in many ways. It does not at first sight disclose what I am actually writing about, i.e. marriage and ordination as sacraments. It also makes one wonder whether the two parts of the title connected with the conjunction ‘and’ actually present an alternative: i.e. does Christian ministry refer to those in specific or ordained ministry while marriage refers to those who are not in Christian ministry? Or have they got more in common than one would expect? Maybe this article ought to be more aptly named: ‘sacraments of commitment and commission’ as that briefly describes what marriage and ordination are about. Yet there are other common aspects which shed an interesting light on the topic. Both are rites which put one way of life, one form of commitment over many others. The idea of sacramental marriage makes one wonder why in an age of pluralism and plurality the church decides to bless one form of relationship, but not many possible others. The publication of John Boswell’s contentious book The Marriage of Likeness as well as the contemporary debates about blessings of same-sex relationships are signs of this phenomenon as is the question of single people whether their form of life is less valid than that of married couples. The debate over the distinction between clergy and laity makes one wonder whether the church does not support a system of privilege and expertise which devalues the work of those who do not participate in this form of privilege.