‘Nobody comes to the Father but by me’ (John 14 : 6b). Can we really take that literally? Can we even take it seriously? ‘Nobody’ (he is talking about the whole human race) ‘comes to the Father’ (he means God) ‘but by me’ (he means himself).

There are, I think, around four or five thousand million people alive today and countless millions have lived in the past; and most of them—apart from a few eccentrics—have thought about God one way or another, communally or individually. I mean they have thought about the mystery that things are, the mysterious purpose of human life, or however they have put it; and they have sought to come to God. There have been great religions devoted to meditating on these things, whole civilisations sustained by some kind of worship of God, there has been endless striving to come to the Father. And now, amongst all these teeming millions, it is being asserted that, after all, nobody comes to God except through this individual carpenter in Palestine.

The egoism is breathtaking. Surely there must be some mistake.

Let us then think about this for a minute or two.

First of all, St John is not saying that nobody sees or understands God except by getting to know Jesus of Nazareth. People can seek to understand God, they can wrestle with this problem or explore this mystery quite apart from faith in Jesus Christ. John does not think they will get very far, for he says ‘No one has ever seen God’; but having faith in Jesus Christ will not get them any further.

High up in the Peruvian Andes, above the tree-line, above even the bushline, above the last communities where it is still possible to grow potatoes and native cereals, but just below the snow and the craggy mountain peaks, live small communities of llama and alpaca and sheep herders. Their life revolves around their animals and it is to them that the principle religious festival of the year is devoted; to them and to the spiritual powers associated with their life, indeed with all life. The herders say that the animals have a spiritual origin which connects them both with a spirit world inside the earth and also with the stars in the heavens. The people say of themselves that they have been set on this earth to look after the animals, whose true masters or owners are of a spiritual nature. They see that in many parts of the Andes greed has led to the extermination of the llamas and alpacas and this causes them deep concern, for they believe that the world will exist just so long as there are alpacas and llamas living.

Two years ago the West German Green Party described itself like this: ‘We are for an economic system orientated towards the vital requirements of people and of future generations, towards the preservation of nature and the judicious handling of natural resources.’ This awareness of the environmental dimension to economic problems led to its getting 8.5% of the West German popular vote in 1987.

We may ask ourselves where Christians have been while this awareness has been unfolding. Is Christian anthropology inadequate to care for the earth? Or have the followers of Jesus somehow lost the delicate balance between taking from the earth what is necessary and caring for this planet?

The problem seems to be with the balance. A key biblical text is Genesis 1:28, which the R.S.V. translates ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it’. Other translations have ‘conquer it’, ‘have dominion over it’ and ‘dominate it’. Yet the idea Genesis is conveying is that man is God’s viceroy commissioned to care for God’s garden, which is ‘very good’. C.H. Moule observes,

‘In one Spirit we were all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor. 12 : 13a). Repentance and faith give a man koinōnia—participation—with the Holy Spirit and by virtue of that partaking he has koinōnia too with all his fellow-Christians who are partakers with him of the same Spirit. He belongs to and within the communion of holy people, of the holy people who share holy things, the sacraments and mysteries of the Church. But the body into which we were all baptised by the one Spirit is itself the body of the Son, the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God made man. The Church, the body of the Messiah, the messianic community, is koinōnia with Jesus Christ as well as koinōnia with the Holy Spirit. True, it is through the koinōnia of the Spirit that the Church becomes the koinōnia of the Son, but nevertheless it does really become that. Paul writes to Corinth:

It is a commentary on the insouciance of English Catholicism that so far the material on the history of the 1930s has consisted of sundry memoirs, a brilliant essay by Adrian Hastings (in Bishops and Writers) and a novel by Bernard Bergonzi (The Roman Persuasion). With the aid of the Westminster Archives and the Public Records Office in Kew, Thomas Moloney has put the study of the period on a scientific basis. Even the dullish title of his book— Westminster, Whitehall and the Vatican. The Role of Cardinal Hinsley 1935-43 — gets it about right: there were subterranean links between Westminster and Whitehall that no one, least of all the Catholic press, suspected. The Southern Desk of the Foreign Office had a keen and abiding interest in Catholic and Vatican affairs.

It was particularly intrigued by the appointment in 1935 of Mgr. Arthur Hinsley as fifth Archbishop of Westminster. He was now sixty- nine. He had not lived in England since 1917, when he became Rector of the Venerabile in Rome. Further back lay the foundation and headmastership of St. Bede’s Grammar School in Leeds, and a quarrel with the local Bishop, the eccentric and irascible William Gordon. The young Fr. Hinsley fled Leeds and was incardinated in the diocese of Southwark. While a curate in South London (Sutton Park and Sydenham) from 1904—1917 he maintained his academic sharpness (according to our author, p. 21) by lecturing at Wonersh. A likely tale in the Modernist period, but that is not the sort of question that detains Moloney.