This is an essay that I have wanted to write for a long time. Perhaps not exactly this essay but one like it. In fact, I once did so, about twenty years ago. That essay was all about the rights of conscience: how our consciences are formed; and how to be Catholic means to be free. But the article was turned down by the editor of the journal in question because my remarks on conscience were ‘meat being offered to babes who can only take milk’. If the Catholic ‘babes’ had been given such meat twenty years ago perhaps they would not have suffered such pains from the diet which recent events have provided for them. Yet what saddened me most about the episode was the editor’s assumption that anything written by a Catholic must in some sense be ‘definitive’.

This notion that an article has to be definitive leads to articles being mass-produced, all of the same form and, above all, identical in tone, very solemn, rather omniscient, final in their judgments, givng an air of finality even to their non-judgments, donning the judge’s black cap even when pronouncing the accused not guilty. This means to say that writers are encouraged to pretend that one of their half-thoughts is a thesis, and two of their half-thoughts a whole book (a publisher once asked me to turn an article of twelve pages that I had published into a book of 140 pages, saying ‘You needn’t add anything of substance to it’; he produced a series of such books).

It is presumably comparatively simple to overthrow a régime and start a new one if you have sufficient resources, either of good-will, of money or of arms, or a judicious mixture of the three. Whether this is likely to be a practical method of ushering in the millennium, as opposed to more limited goals like making things a bit better for some people, is a debatable problem. The evidence is not coercive, and in any case I have no intention of debating it. My point, to put it crudely, is that in England and America, at least, this method of changing society doesn’t seem likely to be possible for some time to come, and that to assume it is the only way must lead either to the abandonment of effort, or the watering down of aims, or to a lot of self-delusion about what the possibilities actually are. This last is quite prevalent, because if you deeply believe that drastic change is essential, and that life is scarcely bearable except in the hope that it will come, there is a strong motive for persuading oneself that it will come soon. This is bolstered up by much discussion among groups of like-minded people, especially young ones.

The trouble about this is that when someone with this kind of belief moves out of the inner circle of the faithful, and comes up against the ignorance, indifference or sheer perverseness of other people, he is appalled and disgusted, and often very much surprised. This is especially likely when the people concerned are very young.

It seems to me only fair to begin this paper by inquiring whether the topic indicated by the title actually exists in any serious sense, or whether it has simply been conjured up by a trick of language within the general and familiar process of academic over-production and waste-making. The fact that a considerable literature more or less concerned with the topic does undoubtedly exist provides no guarantee of the existence of a genuine problem; for some at least of this literature tends to heighten one’s suspicions rather than to assuage them.

The title is, at any rate, ‘World Religions and Christian Theology’, not ‘World Religions and Christianity’. By ‘world religions’ I understand those religions which have not been confined to a particular ethnic or political unit but are found in more or less diversified forms remote from their place of origin. It is clear enough that Christianity is one of these world religions, in so far as we allow ourselves to use the word ‘religion’ with an appropriate looseness; we need do no more than declare ‘religion’ a family-word, where the different items all to be called religions need not share a single definition but form an irregular network. Now this paper does not attempt to consider the place of Christianity among world religions. This is not only because my own equipment for such a task would be wholly inadequate, but also because I suspect that no one’s equipment would be.

Dr John Marsh, in his excellent Penguin commentary on St John’s gospel, remarks that ‘the gospels read so very much like historical narratives of what took place that it requires effort not to treat them exclusively as such, but to understand them as much more concerned to indicate what was going on in the narrative provided’ (p. 52). One must make the same effort when faced with the differences between the four gospels: these are not simply re-editions, revisions, expansions of one basic ‘life of the historical Jesus’. As Dr Marsh puts it:

This is well said, and nowadays commonly recognized. But is it enough? Is one merely shifting from the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ facts, to the idea that later gospels were written to correct earlier gospels’ theological ideas? To shift from thinking of gospellers as biographers to thinking of them as theologians seems still to perpetuate the idea that the gospels are four examples of one type of writing.

I am sometimes asked how I reconcile being a monk with my involvement in movements devoted to the Alternative Society. I think we should turn that question upside down. A monk is ipso facto involved in the enterprise of the Alternative Society, and the wonder is that so few seem to realize it.

After all, what do we mean by the alternative society? We mean, I take it, that we have glimpsed, far away, a vision of what it might be like for man to be free; a dream of human society in which love is all you need, in which death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more (that’s from the Apocalypse, actually). And not only that. We have decided to stake all on that vision, that dream. We have committed ourselves to living as if man were really like that, as if society could really live by love alone. We have let ourselves be subverted by utopia, and can never be the same again.

And that is the definition of the Church, and most especially of the religious orders. The Church is, according to the Second Vatican Council, the present sign and nucleus of the future kingdom, the new creation; and religious orders are in particular called to live their whole lives as a witness to this future, this Utopia.