John Henry Cardinal Newman died on 11 August, 1890. In the summer of the centenary of his death the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued an Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian. It is a topic by which Newman was much exercised. In this article I would like to look at the Instruction in the light of two ideas adumbrated by Newman, each of which involves a distinction between positive and negative models of the role of the Magisterium.

The Vatican Council of 1870 was a major landslip in the history of Catholic theology, and for much of the following decade Newman was riding the after-shocks generated by its definition of papal infallibility. His central concern was to assimilate what he understood to be the true teaching of the decree Pastor Aeternus into a structure which would still allow scope for theological responsibility. In November 1874 an intemperate pamphlet by William Gladstone gave Newman an opening for a formal and public statement of his reaction to the definition. A Letter Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Recent Expostulation was dated 27 December 1874 and was published in January 1875. In the Letter Newman was of course particularly concerned with infallibility, ecclesial and papal, rather than with magisterial teaching in general, but his reflections are of wider application.

Newman observes that authoritative statements may be either positive or negative:

I am one of many people of faith active in the African National Congress and the Mass-Democratic Movement in South Africa. What I propose to do in this paper is to make you party to a discussion about religious pluralism which presently exercises people of faith like myself in the ranks of the ANC and the Mass-Democratic Movement. As part of a discussion in progress, conducted in a context which values collective work and the achievement of consensus, it is deliberately rough-edged, tentative and open-ended, intended to facilitate the extension of the discussion rather than to say the last word in it.

What Hick calls ‘the universe of faiths’ is well-represented in the ranks of this liberation movement. In it people of different faiths are united in a common struggle for justice and peace in their land. People of faith involved in the struggle for justice and peace do not lead lives in which the religious and the political are split one from the other. On the contrary, the political and the religious come to form a seamless whole in the lives of people of faith involved in the struggle. If I may borrow a phrase from Albert Nolan, the struggle is experienced in a religious mode by people of faith, and this religious modality of the struggle for unitary non-racial democracy is a common feature of the experience of comrades of different faiths. But struggling for fundamental change in a country makes theological demands upon people of faith, not the least of which concerns religious pluralism.

Last January the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Robert Runcie was giving one of the addresses in the service being held at Westminster Cathedral to mark the 25th anniversary of Vatican IPs decree on ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio. Referring to the ecumenical implications of the use of the words subsistit in, he said: ‘After Vatican II the Church “subsisted” in the Roman Catholic Church, a small linguistic change, but a world apart in self-understanding.’ He was echoing the thoughts of Fr Grillmeier, the distinguished Jesuit theologian: these two words ‘constituted a development of unforseeable dimensions’.

Sadly, it appears that there are those in Rome engaged in preparing the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church who would wish to change the words of the Council fathers. To understand properly what is going on we must go back over some familiar old ground.

Lumen Gentium, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, states that the visible Church, structured hierarchically, and the invisible Church, the Body of Christ, are not to be thought of as two realities, but as one complex reality having a human and a divine element:

Both the ‘coherentist’ and the ‘foundationalist’ theories of the justification of our claims to empirical knowledge are subject to considerable difficulty, as Laurence BonJour admirably brings out in his book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. (Coherentism is the view that justification of a proposition is always and exclusively a matter of its coherence with a whole system of propositions; foundationalism, that it is at least sometimes also a matter of its having foundations in things which are not propositions, typically a range of sense-impressions or observations of physical objects.) BonJour argues, however, that while the difficulties encountered by the foundationalist view are insuperable, a version of the coherentist position can be salvaged by considerations which render it proof against the usual objections. I myself maintain exactly the opposite view, which I shall try to defend in what follows.

If every empirical belief requires justification by another empirical belief, we seem to be faced with either a vicious circle or an infinite regress; and the sceptical conclusion appears to follow, that there is no reason to think that any empirical belief is true. The foundationalist tries to stop the regress by maintaining that some empirical beliefs are justified in a way that does not depend on inference from other such beliefs. One influential way of doing this (and the one which I shall try to defend) is to maintain that while indeed all empirical beliefs have to be justified, in the case of some of these beliefs, the justification consists of reference to mental states other than beliefs which do not themselves have to be justified; these are described in various ways by various authors, but are usually said to be ‘given’, ‘represented’, or something equivalent.

Mahayana Buddhism is called the religion of grace. In other words, the very core of its teaching is dependent on the compassionate work of Amida Buddha, the Saviour of all sentient beings. In this article I, who am today a Christian, would like to show how, through the Jodo Shin- shu teaching which was established by Shinran (1173—1262), and which very fully embodies the essence of Mahayana Buddhism’s teachings, I came to understand the doctrine of ‘Nishu Jinshin’ (‘Two kinds of deep belief’), and why this doctrine has been so important in my religious development.

To do this I must first write about the beginnings of my knowledge of Christianity. When, for the first time, I heard the name of Jesus Christ, from my elementary school teacher, Miss Yamano, I was just six years old. One day, in her class, we were talking about the greatest people in the world, and she told us the stories of Buddha, Hideyo Noguchi and Jesus Christ, among others. I still clearly remember what she told us about Jesus Christ: ‘Jesus Christ is the man crucified on the cross for all people’s sake.’ I remember it because I was deeply impressed by this, and wished to meet this man. However, since I was a small boy, I did not know anything at all about an institutionalised Christianity. Nevertheless, from that time onwards, Jesus Christ became a great man for whom I longed. He was also the first person to teach me the value of self-sacrifice for the sake of others, something the consciousness of which grew steadily stronger in me under the influence not only of people whom I met but also people whom I knew through their writings.