Theology and Ethics
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Strong Protagonism and Weak Presence: The Changes in Tone of The Voice of God (Alison, 2007)

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My motive for beginning with a grammatical niggle is that it points towards something more properly theological. If we start with “For God so loved…”, then all our concentration and effort goes into imagining the emotional intensity which lies behind the manifest activity. What is really interesting is not so much what happened, about which we can satisfy ourselves with the briefest of enquiries, describing it in very spare terms. What would really be interesting is the degree in which the act was intended, the push behind it, the emotional force with which the principal agent of this activity carried it out. If, on the other hand, we begin with “It was in this way that God loved”, then we have no prior access to some supposed interior life of God, modelled on our own. Instead it is that which is visible, that which is manifest in the activity itself, which becomes the lure for our fascination. And it is only in the degree in which we allow ourselves to be pulled inside that activity, and what we can discover starting from it, that we begin to get some notion of God’s love.

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Advent and Christmas Lectionary Meditations (Alison, 2007)

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We are used to the imagery of God communicating by God’s word, and so think of our responses to God as aural: listening, and obedience (from ob-audiens – intense hearing). Yet how much of the religion of Ancient Israel was a priestly religion of Presence! We forget that one of the central images of God’s communication in the Scriptures is that of the Shining face. From the Priestly Blessing of Numbers 6 to the continuous references in the Psalms, it is expected that worshippers will see the radiance of God’s face, and in its light, they too will shine.

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Love Your Enemy: Within a Divided Self (Alison, 2007)

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In passages like the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus was not teaching something called “morals”. He was making available an anthropology of desire, and one that presupposes an understanding of who we are, how our selves are constituted, which seems to have a great deal in common with what we are now learning from the scientists.

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“He opened up to them everything in the Scriptures concerning himself” (Lk 24, 27b): How can we recover Christological and Ecclesial habits of Catholic Bible Reading? (Alison, 2007)

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I propose to do two things with you this evening. The first is to read a passage of Scripture, in the rich sense of “offering a reading” of it. And the second, if time and your patience permits, is to draw out some of the consequences of the method which I shall have used in order to come up with this reading. I’m aiming at making a contribution to something which I intuit as being important for the future of our Catholic life: the recovery of the habits necessary for a reading of the Scriptures which is both Ecclesial and Eucharistic. The route to this recovery winds through the filling out of our sense of how it is that the Anointed One of God, the “Χριστός”, makes available for us a fulfilled reading of the texts which we have received.

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How do we talk about the Spirit? (Alison, 2007)

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And the first point of that, is that we’re talking about God. We’re not talking about an add-on, we’re not talking about – as Brenda said, we’re not talking about something ‘tacked on’ in the wake of God – when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we are talking about God. And one of the greatest temptations for us when talking about God, which we fall into ever so easily when talking about the Holy Spirit, is talking about an ‘it’ – which is why I think sometimes, in the New Testament, and particularly in the Lucan writings, the word is not ‘the Holy Spirit’, but simply ‘Holy Spirit’. There’s no article. And it’s worth remembering how easily we are betrayed by tiny little bits of grammar; we’re not talking about an ‘it’, we’re talking about ‘I AM’ – a ‘quality’ of ‘I AM’ – and I just wanted to bring that out.

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God and Desire (Alison, 2007)

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Well, I’ve started here, not because I really wanted to talk to you about Original Sin (though no Catholic discussion about God and Desire can bypass the issue), but because it is my claim that the doctrine of Original Sin is an important piece of the grammar of how we talk about God. It is, or should be, a permanent reminder that we humans do not come to talk about God from a stable, fixed, starting place which we can dominate by our discourse. On the contrary. If God is true, then the starting place for our discourse is always as those in the midst of undergoing something. We always start as those who, having thought of ourselves (depending on our self-importance) as minor or major protagonists, in a narrative which we thought we understood, are always having that narrative blown apart by the emergence of another narrative in which someone else is protagonist, and we are peripheral in a way which turns out to be surprisingly reassuring. Or, in other words, the kind of “we” that has brought each one of us into having the unsteady and instable thing we call a “self”, an “I”, over time, that “we” is being radically restructured, and each of us is finding ourselves losing a certain sort of self so as to be given a quite different one in relationship to quite a different sort of protagonist.

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Finding a narrative (Alison, 2007)

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God squads, the world over, and in all religions, want quick decisive rulings which separate good from bad. But Jesus throws a monkey wrench in the decisive-ruling machine works. He tells them that before you can apply the word of God, you need to have dwelt under it, and sunk into its digestive juices for a long, long time, so as to make quite sure that you are not using it to sacrifice people, but instead, to show them God’s mercy and love.

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Three Holy Week Sermons (Alison, 2007)

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What I’m going to be attempting to do as we walk together over these days towards Good Friday is dwell a little in a passage from Zechariah which is very familiar to us from this time of year: And I will pour out on the House of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that when they look on him whom they have pierced they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps bitterly over a first born. (Zech 12:10)

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On helping the Faithful negotiate confusion (Alison, 2007)

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we are witnessing the fleshing out in a particular local Church of the mechanisms which the Catholic faith has given us to maintain unity, work through our being scandalized by change, and enabled to learn what is true over a time of discernment. The overarching priority is not to allow scandal at change to block us from receiving the grace which Our Lord seeks to give us through the sacraments. And then to make sure that this grace, and the new life it produces in us is available in ecclesial form so that others can be invited in as well. I think this has come about because Church authority has become aware that the advent of “matters gay” in recent years may not primarily center on sexual ethics at all. Rather it concerns an emerging anthropological truth about a regular, normal and non-pathological variant within the human condition. In other words, it is not that the Church’s teaching about sexual ethics is being challenged by insufficiently heroic people, but that the field of application of that teaching is being redefined by emerging reality. And of course it is proper to the Catholic faith, where Creation and Salvation are never to be completely separated, that it takes very seriously “what is” as informing “what should be” rather than trying to force “what is” to fit into an understanding of “what should be” derived from other sources.

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Taking the Plunge: Immersed in Theology (Alison, 2006)

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One of the privileges of studying theology within the clerical formation programs of the Catholic Church is that you get to study philosophy first. For at least three years. This can seem interesting and exciting when you’re immersed in it—it certainly hones the intellect for debate. At other times it can seem soul-crushing and destroying—what has this nitpicking linguistic analysis got to do with preparing me to preach the gospel? In retrospect, the true extent of the privilege becomes clearer: when it comes time to study theology, the pupil has been primed to interpret, to be able to remove words and concepts from the meaning foisted on them by the gut, to separate them from their inherited baggage and to begin to detect where contemporary religious ideology and real thought might begin to diverge, and how to follow the latter.