The central commission of the national conference of bishops of Brasil feels obliged to clarify certain issues in public and to explain to the faithful how it conceives the mission of the hierarchy.

It should not be a matter of surprise that many of our brother bishops should have expressed themselves in public in these times, whether individually or together. It is today’s conditions that make it far more necessary than formerly for authority to be exercised in constant communication with members of society. . . .

Our very first reponsibility, we hold, is the furthering of brotherhood among men, as consecrated by sharing in Christ. We are in the service of love, in its fullest meaning, and that not only on behalf of members of the Church, but of all men.

It is our duty to explain our mission better. This mission is ignored by some, misunderstood by others, and deliberately falsified by certain groups who claim to be serving the Church whilst in fact furthering their own interests. Neither misunderstanding nor falsehood will make us desist from the job that is ours by divine commission and that has marked the presence of the Church in our history. . . .

We repudiate the Marxist claim that religion despoils man by consoling him with a future happiness that will compensate for frustrations inevitable on earth. And to affirm that the religious mission of the bishops must be confined to what is called the ‘spiritual life’ is in effect to accept the Marxist conception of religion.

Christianity is nothing if it is not eschatology: a hope in a promise for the future. This is what Jurgen Moltmann is inviting us to take seriously, in his very important book. It is, however, a difficult book, at least for the non-theologian; and perhaps the best way of giving a fair account of its value is to present, in some detail, the argument of the concluding chapter (the appendix on Ernst Bloch has been omitted from the English edition). The problem is to show how Christianity as eschatology actually happens. What visible form and observable shape does this hope in a promised future, which believers share, actually take in the complicated business which is modern life in an industrial society such as ours? What in fact is the relationship between the Church and the world?

We have to decide whether, as believers in modern society, we form what Moltmann calls an accommodating group, a group capable of being absorbed and assimilated by society, or a group which is inassimilable and non-conformist. We have to ask if this hope in the future which we have, compels us to resist being assimilated and adjusted to modern society. Moltmann is, of course, going to argue that if believers really conduct their lives and their thinking in the context of their hope in God’s promised future, then there will always be tension between the believing community and modern society … whatever modern society may happen to be (Moltmann clearly works in terms of the society to which he belongs: western industrial capitalism).

At the end of my previous article I proposed to examine, in this one, whether religion might not be able to offer a therapy for South Africa’s manifold neuroses, which it is beyond the power of politics to provide. The only symptom of neurotic condition which I discussed in that article was colour prejudice. There is another, related, symptom which is if anything more prejudicial to a healthy society, and that is a general devaluation of ‘the liberties of the subject’; at least it is something more disturbing even to a conservative Englishman with a long tradition of civil liberties, free association and freedom of speech in his blood. These excellent microbes seem to have been almost totally extracted from the blood stream of white South Africa; and the fault does not seem to lie simply with the governing Nationalist Party. This Party has simply been much more ruthlessly effective in giving its actual and potential rivals a treatment of repression which it experienced itself from its opponents before it came into power. It has profited by, rather than induced, an endemic lack of concern for individual liberty. It is an ironical situation, and to underline the irony, I would like to quote from the political reminiscences of Dr D. F. Malan, the first Nationalist Prime Minister after the last war.

On 16 December 1966 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted three important instruments concerning human rights. These were the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both adopted unanimously; and also an Optional Protocol to the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which was adopted by majority vote. The adoption of these texts represents one more step in the slow, but on the whole steady, progress towards an International Bill of Rights. When this project was first mooted after the Second World War, it was realized that at least three distinct stages would be necessary. First, there would have to be broad international agreement on the rights to be enjoyed by every human being. Secondly, States would have to accept a definite legal obligation to afford these rights to all persons within their jurisdiction. Thirdly, there would have to be provisions for enforcement.

These proposals sound simple enough, but it is as well to realize how revolutionary they were at the time and how many and serious are the obstacles that still have to be overcome before they can be implemented.

Traditional international law was a legal system applying essentially between States, although it made provision also for what the International Court of Justice has called ‘instances of action upon the international plane by certain entities which are not States’. Such instances have been performed by a miscellaneous collection of entities including the Holy See, the Sovereign Order of Malta, international institutions such as the United Nations and the Specialized Agencies, and even rebels granted belligerent status without yet having been recognized as States.

It has traditionally been one of the central tasks of theology to determine man’s relationship to God in his state of redeemed sinfulness. The various solutions put forward in answer to this question contributed greatly to the divisions of Western Christendom as we now know it. The controversy has nearly always turned on the question of what role man can play in his own redemption. For Luther man could only be said to be righteous on account of the merits of Christ imputed to him while he in himself always remained a sinner. Trent gives an somewhat milder form of the doctrine of Simul Justus et Peccator in attributing to man an actual righteousness by which he can make redemption his own through works. Much of the discussion is a matter of terminology, as Hans Kung has shown in his book on Barth’s doctrine of justification. Such discussions seem at their liveliest when a need is felt to return to a more theocentric theology. Luther felt that the Roman Church was turning man away from God with her doctrine of merit and so glorifying man. He felt called to remind the Church that nothing is possible without the grace of Christ and that man can never claim any righteousness of his own. The tendencies to which Luther objected can be said to have been repeated in the ‘reductionist’ theologies of Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher. The present interest of Catholics in the teaching of Marx and the theology of ‘Secular Christianity’ would certainly have seemed to him as it does now to Barth, as further examples of the reprehensible tendency to anthropocentric religion.