It should be of supreme interest to anyone who is trying to come to a true Christian understanding of justice to discover as far as possible the attitude of Jesus to matters of justice. There are a number of gospel passages which suggest that he was not at all interested in the concept of justice as fairness. In his teaching there are strong indications that, with God, people do not get what they deserve, that one’s recompense does not bear any relation to one’s effort or merit. It is indicated moreover that such a rejection of justice as fairness should be adopted by men in their dealings with one another because that is the way God deals with men. I am not putting it this way merely to shock. I think that a critique of justice as strict fairness is explicit in the teachings of Jesus and that we must pay attention to it if we are to arrive at the notion of justice which his teachings do uphold, in continuity with the rest of Scripture.

Some of the sayings which suggest Jesus’s indifference to strict fairness are these: The parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16a); The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32); the refusal of Jesus to divide the inheritance between two brothers (Luke 12:13-15); the sayings in the sermon on the mount, Matt. 5:44 (par. Luke 6:32-36), about loving your enemies, “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven, for he makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil and sends rain on the just and the unjust.”

Several recent publications focus on the question of religious experience; two of them are particularly devoted to wooing the reader to share the experience of the Catholic ‘charismatic movement’, three of them represent the first published results to emerge from the work of the Religious Experience Research Unit founded in Oxford by Sir Alister Hardy. Since the problems raised by them overlap to some extent, it seems worth while to treat all five books together in a series of articles.

For all its deceptively quiet style, This Promise is for You brings to light the tensions inherent in what we may call the ‘benign’ wing of Catholic Pentecostalism. There are those who are prepared to state fairly bluntly that Catholic Pentecostalism is something quite new, and that it shows up traditional piety as being, basically, ineffective, and this no doubt corresponds to the experience of the pioneers of Catholic, as of other brands of, Pentecostalism. There are occasional hints of this in Abbot Parry’s book, especially on p. 100, where he warns the reader (who is invited to use the book as a course of preparation for ‘baptism in the Spirit’) that “we are on the brink of changing a tangible, familiar, realistic, ‘normal’ life style, for an act of faith in an unseen God”. This is the kind of language we should associate with those who treat a conversion to the ‘charismatic movement’ as being, for practical purposes, a man’s first serious conversion to Christ (which of course it may be in some cases).

But on the whole Parry is concerned to re-assure the reader that the ‘charismatic movement’ is very much in line with traditional piety, that there are no distinctively ‘charismatic’ virtues, that it is not particularly about ‘odd’ manifestations, that ‘baptism in the Spirit’ may be a gradual process, not a sudden experience, that none of it depends on going to any special kind of prayer meeting, and so on. The continuity with ordinary Christian life is stressed rather than the discontinuity.

The restoration of churchly unity among all Christians is the agreed aim of ecumenical work. It is the programme announced in the opening phrase—Unitas redintegratio— of the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism (which is thus also the title). Such phraseology suggests that the unity to be restored did at some stage actually exist—that there was once, historically and empirically, an “undivided Church”, prior to the conflicts among Christians that gave rise to schisms and heresies. Reflective study of church history seems, however, to keep pushing further and further back to the point at which the Church was visibly and organically one. The Decree of Ecumenism dates the first of the divisions at the refusal of what was to become the Nestorian Church to accept the dogmatic pronouncement of the Council of Ephesus in the year 431. The convoking of that council had itself been an attempt to restore Christian unity. The further one goes back into history the more evident it becomes that it has always been necessary to restore unity. The “undivided Church” begins to look more like an endless task rather then any historically dateable empirical reality. The variety and complexity of divisions among Christians become increasingly obvious. It is not at all clear that anybody, either in the World Council of Churches or in the Catholic Church, not to mention the many other participants, has yet succeeded in working out a doctrine of the Church which does justice to the tangled anomalies of the situation.

It is not so long ago that mysticism was a dirty word, the Reformation was regarded as a ‘good thing’, and a scientific education was seen as having more value than one in the ‘humanities’. But fashions change, and even genuine perspectives alter. The current fortunes of St John of the Cross are an example of what can happen and will repay examination, for this mystic, poet, and outstanding representative of Counter-Reformation Spain is again becoming popular and arousing interest. Lectures about him are attended eagerly and received with enthusiasm; books once again are being published about him.

But there is danger in this if what is happening is simply a reversion to earlier perspectives. One suspects this, for example, with regard to the reappearance from the early 1950s of Thomas Merton’s introduction to and presentation of the Maxims, Cautions and Counsels of St John of the Cross (Counsels of Light and Love, Burns & Oates, 95 pages, £1.50). Perhaps this book represents the most attractive of old-style presentations of John and his teaching, based as it is on a liberal humanism tailored to the inadequacies of modern urbanised man; but whether it really represents what John stood for is another matter. Apart from anything else, as with so much that has been written about him, it suffers from an almost total failure to take account of the appropriate context. The lesser writings of St John of the Cross presented in this book, as also his letters, arose from a very particular cultural and social situation which must be appreciated if the nature and significance of his ‘advice’ is to be understood. Even more perhaps than with his major works it is necessary to realise that these writings were addressed to particular people, or groups of people, in very special circumstances, and are dependent upon a very close relationship between him and them.