‘Nature is never spent’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins).
‘One day soon, maybe . . . there will be no more Nature’ (Prince Bernhard, at a Wildlife Fund dinner).
‘There is no more Nature’ (Samuel Beckett, Endgame).
‘Nature fights back’ (Rachel Carson).

The disappearance of Nature is a central theme of modem fiction,. Among those novelists who tend to see it as an accomplished fact already, two responses seem to prevail. The first is typified by Robbe-Grillet’s verdict that modern man feels no deprivation at the loss of Nature, for Nature was never more than an illusion, comforting perhaps in a meaningless world but no less illusory for all that. To be rid of Nature is to be at last free. The second response is typified by Beckett’s verdict: there is no more Nature, and the loss is tragic and the deprivation catastrophic. To be rid of Nature is to be in the realm of the lost ones, in a world of sheer ‘lessness’. A third response, however, has to be considered. This is latent in Mailer’s identification of the source of our troubles about Nature in the triumph of what he calls corporation-land: that combination of technology, materialism and exploitative brutality towards the environment which is most evident in the cities of America. However, in Mailer’s case there is also a certain fascination for, as well as hatred of, this massive agglomeration of brutalities : there is pride, energy, vitality in it, as well as regimentation, pollution and despair. Mailer’s ambivalence is characteristic of a general uncertainty about ‘the big plot being hatched out by Nature’.

This uncertainty is evident enough elsewhere, in the utterances of people speaking from many different viewpoints.

Marx denied that he was a moralist. But it can hardly be disputed that anyone who thinks seriously about certain matters which have to do with morals—the nature and causes of wrongdoing and suffering in human society, and how they may be remedied—must come to grips with his arguments. To put the matter bluntly, any responsible intellectual who is not a Marxist must at times ask himself just why he is not; and in what follows, I shall try to explain why I am not. To cope with the whole range of Marx’s writings, one needs to be a specialist; those who are not so may well be, as I am, deeply indebted to David MacLellan for his admirable summary, supported with copious quotations, of the main features of Marx’s thought. For better or for worse, anyway, my Marx will be largely Marx as McLellan presents him.

It is fundamental to Marx’s thought that human relationships, and consequently the whole web of institutions which make up society, are determined by the material circumstances in which men live and work; and consequently that if you change these material circumstances, you will change human ideas and behaviour at large. This thesis is generally labelled ‘historical materialism. Now the word ‘determined’ may be understood here in a relatively strong or a relatively weak sense. If it is taken in a strong sense, the thesis is that, given the material circumstances and the means of production prevalent in a society, its members cannot but behave very much as they do. (It would appear to be incorrect to ascribe to Mans a rigid determinism applying to the details of every individual action.)

In this article I want to draw attention to one particular argument used by some modern Protestant theologians, an argument concerning the verifiability and falsifiability of Christian belief. This argument consists of an appeal to the Pauline idea of justification, but the difficulty which the argument raises concerns the meaning which is given to ‘justification’. The concept of ‘justification’ can acquire rather different meanings from the contexts in which it is used; that is to say, the meaning which ‘justification’ has on any particular occasion depends on the character of the position which it is being used to attack. Let us look at some of these positions in order to see what differences of meaning ‘justification’ may have.

Paul gave the first peculiarly Christian exposition of the idea of ‘justification’ in his letter to the Romans, though he had previously used the idea in a more rudimentary fashion in his letter to the Galatians. Paul used the idea to distinguish Christianity from any other form of religion, particularly that of Judaism. He says that justification, i.e. the state of being righteous which allows us to stand before God without fear of condemnation even though we are technically still sinners, comes through faith and not through works of the Law (the Jewish Torah). In so far as we try to justify ourselves before God by performing pious practices and carrying out morally good behaviour, we will not succeed either in performing these works successfully or in being judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.20). But in so far as we abandon any attempt to make ourselves righteous before God, in so far as we accept that God makes us stand uncondemned, we will be judged to be righteous (Rm. 3.21-6).

Thus George Moore, Tom Stoppard’s brilliant, bespectacled version of the modem moral philosopher. In Jumpers, Stoppard has managed to do with contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy what he did earlier in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Bead with modem literary criticism—to make of an academic discipline a playing field for his sport, and of its preoccupations so much grist for the artist’s mill. Stoppard’s wit draws the finest of lines between the serious and the outlandish; and his irreverence makes for good fun—at the expense of his earnest protagonist. But George wins us, albeit the way a warm puppy wins us; and we can summon a measure of sympathy for his plight. George moves in a world where all his colleagues benignly presume that intelligent people outgrow belief in God; and so, he feels defensive about his commitment to a deity fashioned of old by the philosophers.

It really does not matter to most believers today, I suppose, that the onus for proving the existence of God has passed to them. Believers are not so interested as they used to be in cornering the adversaries in the labyrinth of the Five Ways. What the believer may feel, however, is a certain social onus, as he rubs shoulders with that large company, now in the ascendancy, who look upon him as they might look upon a curious fossil unearthed in a Palestinian excavation.

That the tide has turned and the believer has ridden out with it to an exile in a foreign land characterizes the current Christian Sitz im Leben. Our poets sensed, three and four generations ago, that this would be the climate of the twentieth century.