Three witnesses of the same event hardly ever give exactly the same account of it, but there is usually a sufficient measure of agreement between them to ensure the general veracity of their testimony, even if many of the details remain irreconcilable. This seems to be true of the first three Gospels. The triple tradition at first sight gives reassurance. The differences between them appear to confirm the essential truth of the account, as they suggest that the tradition has been independently attested.

If this is the impression which first strikes the reader of the Synoptic Gospels, more careful study will soon shake his confidence. When the triple tradition is subjected to word-for-word comparison in the Greek, it soon becomes apparent that the similarities are too close to be explained in terms of independent testimony. The Synoptic Gospels are actually interdependent. One evangelist has used the work of another. This means that the differences between them are not due to independent tradition, but are deliberate divergences on the part of the evangelists. And if the two later ones have been so lacking in fidelity to their common source, how can we have any certainty that the original has not been equally unfaithful to the primitive tradition on which it is based ? And if that is so, how can we ever get back to the truth of the matter, and find out what Jesus really did say and do in his life on earth?

This is the essence of the Synoptic Problem, and it has been the central issue before New Testament scholars for the past 150 years.

On 24th August the Pope solemnly opened the general assembly of all the Bishops of Latin America in the Cathedral of Bogota, Columbia. This was the second general episcopal conference to be held on the soil of South America, and the first meeting of a local Church on a continental scale since Vatican II. This assembly had been carefully prepared for over a year by bishops, theologians and experts from the whole of South America, in accordance with an express mandate from the Episcopal Commission of Latin America, created in the wake of the fast general assembly of the Bishops of Latin America held in 1955. The text which we publish below (thanks to the kind permission of the editor of ‘Informations Catholiques Internationales’) is the first half of the first part of the entire document, which consists of three parts in all: this description of the situation in the continent, a theological reflexion, and pastoral directions.

The general theme of the Medellin assembly was ‘the Church in the present transformation of Latin America in the light of the Council’. The conclusions of the assembly have since been published, but this comprehensive diagnosis of the facts remains striking from many points of view: the catching of a historic moment of awakening on the part of a whole continent, the detail and social awareness, the sense that ‘the difficult progress towards development and integration [in Latin America] could become an important catalyst in the process of unification to which the whole human race is converging today’, and the vivid realization that ‘the upheaval we are experiencing demands new attitudes of us so that we can carry through an urgent, global and profound reform of structures’ (from the Introduction to the Statement)—all these are remarkable in an ecclesiastical document.

‘The description could appear to be pessimistic, since we do not dwell on the positive factors, which do of course exist. But it is, nevertheless, a reflexion of the reality of Latin America, which is tragic, and which demands a swift and effective response.’

The points of growth and strain in our personal lives are usually those situations in which we have to fuse together our insights and our duties, or to put it differently to reconcile obligations and calls. These are the points where every Christian has to become in some sense his own theologian, within the terms of the New Testament promise that the children of God are led by the Spirit of God. While most priests are very conscious of not being professional theologians, yet they do develop by pastoral experience a rule of thumb theology in which the insights of grace, mother wit, what the Bishop said, and scraps from the textbooks mingle. Now it is surely regrettable that so little has been done to close the gap between academic theology and this kind of empirical wisdom which often enough needs rethinking and reshaping but which has qualities which are not always flourishing in an academic atmosphere. My own personal tension is not one of pastoral insight grappling with theological analysis but rather of another double focus—for as priest I must strive to see the people among whom I live as so many persons each besieged by grace, yet as an anthropologist I must see them at the level of the masks of culture and the bonds of society.

Before becoming a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers I studied social anthropology, and did field work in Angola. At the present time I am in the Diocese of Makurdi, Northern Nigeria, and after experience as a bush curate, I have been given the work of making a study of the Tiv people on whom there already exists an extensive but in several ways incomplete documentation. Here, I am trying not so much to discuss missionary work in the Diocese or Tiv religion and social structure, as work out on paper my own theologizing of my work.

The most important task facing the West today is the recovery of that spiritual tradition which, by the fourteenth century, had found widespread expression and had its representatives throughout Catholic Europe, but which was then lost in the convulsions which shook the Latin Church in the sixteenth century, as attention was directed predominantly to questions of institutional authority, dogmatic orthodoxy and political advantage. Such, at least, is the view which in varying ways has recently been expressed by men of learning and perception whose viewpoint is that of non-European and non-Christian cultures, notably Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist. There have been suggestions of a similar kind from Christians who have opened their minds to the testimony of these other religions and cultures. Five recently published books which bear upon this subject are Edward Conze’s Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature, Frithjof Schuon’s In the Tracks of Buddhism, William Johnston’s The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing, and Sisirkumar Ghose’s Mystics and Society.

The malaise of modern Western society, whose symptoms are high rates of alcoholism and other forms of drug addiction, suicide, violence, the increase of mental illness, the steady but lethal pollution of the atmosphere and the earth’s waters, and the prodigal squandering of natural resources with little thought for the future, are seen by more than one of these writers as being connected with the fact that from about the end of the fifteenth century European religion became divorced from the perennial philosophy (with its spiritual understanding of nature) of which until then it had formed a branch.

The flock will safely pick its way across the stony hills to patches of fresh pasture, for the shepherd is there and, it is hoped, his trusty dogs, yet the hyaenas can be heard, alike from the Osservatore Romano and the Guardian, calling from one side that we should greet Humanae Vitae with joyful submissiveness and from the other that we are damned if we do: it is hard to tell which howls are the more remote. (Hyaenas, of course, have their merits; they are the ancestors of animals we domesticate and grow fond of, terriers, spaniels, and so forth.) These interim notes, written in mid-September when the pastoral instruction of the English Bishops is still to come, offer nothing fresh; they follow the marks in the old ordnance maps published ever since moral theology was established as a scientific discipline about seven centuries ago. They will indicate, first, the place of abstraction in moral teaching; second, the intervention there of ecclesiastical authority; third, the argumentation offered to support a decision; fourth, its consequent appeal to natural law; fifth, the varieties of assent. For convenience these five headings are expanded into five sections.