Based on a paper presented at the International Symposium on Sociology and Theology, Oxford, January 1986.

What relationship, if any, is there between contemporary apocalyptic and the contemporary Peace Movement?

Whatever it was in its original form, in its current form apocalyptic is the belief that God is moving in history to a violent climax in which he will defeat his enemies, both human and supernatural. The appearance of Christ will mark the end of this age and the beginning of a thousand- year reign of peace for the elect. We are now living in the End Times and it is possible to detect the signs of the End in natural disasters and political/military events. These signs are a warning to human beings. For those who have eyes to see, they have been clearly prophesied in the Scriptures. Repentence and belief in Christ is required for a person to be saved from the great tribulation which is about to come.

Such beliefs are shared by a range of contemporary Christian groups, though these differ in important ways amongst themselves, especially over the interpretation of historical events and the nature of the final war: for instance, whether or not it will be a nuclear war. Such beliefs appear to be on the increase in the United States and perhaps also in Britain, even among members of the main-stream churches. It is not difficult to see the increased fear of nuclear holocaust as a major factor in the new popularity of apocalyptic beliefs.

In 1983 one of the most powerful nations in the world, the United States, fought one of the weakest, Grenada. Even in this lopsided affair, which lasted only a few days, twenty innocent people were killed when United States fire hit a mental hospital. The American people received this news with equanimity, in that they had become inured to the slaughter of innocent people, say by the Nazis against the Jews or by the Soviets against their own people, but also by their own government’s bombers at the end of World War Two or by its lieutenants at My Lai. Nuclear weapons notwithstanding, the issue of noncombatant immunity poses the greatest threat to the continued efficacy of the just war theory.

At present James Turner Johnson, of Rutgers University, editor of The Journal of Religious Ethics, offers perhaps the most sophisticated treatments of just war theory, specifically Christian just war theory, and he astutely claims that a primary task of the Christian ethicist is to reintroduce acquaintance with what has been lost in Christian tradition (HT, 300). But what is the Christian tradition regarding noncombatant immunity? Obviously no answer to this question can afford to ignore St. Thomas Aquinas, but exactly was his position on this issue? The American Catholic Bishops and various Thomistic textbooks, acting as distilling agents for the various drops of Catholic tradition, imply that for St Thomas it is always wrong to intentionally kill noncombatants, which leaves open the possibility of killing some noncombatants if such killing is compatible with the proportionality dimension of the principle of double effect.

In 1830, three centuries after the Reformation, which had turned followers of ‘the old religion’ into an oppressed minority, there were some 700,000 Roman Catholics (hereafter ‘Catholics’) in England and Wales. The Catholic Emancipation Act had just become law. By 1903 their number had risen to at least a million and a half. During that period the Catholic Church in Britain could be described as made up of three groups: those old families that had hung onto their Roman faith and their English property (the ‘recusant families’); the Irish, new families which had fled from famine and persecution and—devoid of property—had congregated in the larger towns; and the converts from the aftermath of the Oxford Movement. Intermarriage, industrialisation and the emergence of professional classes came to erode these distinctions, as did the power of an increasingly liberalised and fluid secular society to absorb sub-societies into the wholeness of the body. The First World War put the stamp of irrevocability on that process, though Catholics still retain a recognisable community identity.

The story of the cautious renewal in modern times of relations between the CatKolic Church and another ancient institution, the University of Oxford, has something to say to quite a number of people interested in the Church, because it is the story of how the Church has tried to cope with an unusual issue in a situation of social and religious change.

From the Reformation until the last quarter of the nineteenth century the University of Oxford—described by Catholics of the period as ‘one of the two national Protestant universities’—was an Anglican preserve from which professed Catholics were barred.

In an article in The Times, published to coincide with the premiere of the film Amadeus early in 1985, the playwright Peter Shaffer said that his own apprehension of the divine was very largely aesthetic. What he meant is illustrated by a remark he quoted from his play Amadeus, on which the film was based: ‘The God I acknowledge lives, for example, in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart’s Masonic Funeral Music’, and indeed by the whole of that play. Shaffer’s statement and the view expressed in his work raise some profound theological questions, and provide an interesting point of comparison with a leading 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, for whom Mozart ranked almost as a Father of the Church. I want to use the comparison between them to raise some questions about the role of the Holy Spirit in creation, particularly the Spirit’s connection with beauty, both in nature and in art.

Shaffer and Barth

Shaffer’s theology is simple: for him Mozart was an instrument of the spirit of God. The remark which he quoted in his article is put into the mouth of Antonio Salieri, the Viennese court-composer, who is depicted by Shaffer as recognizing the spirit of God speaking through Mozart, but led by jealousy to attempt to block this spirit. Early on in Amadeus Salieri says ‘Dimly the music sounded from the salon above ... It seemed to me I had heard a voice of God—and that it issued from a creature whose own voice I had also heard—and it was the voice of an obscene child’ (p. 37).