Oliver O'Donovan

Just war revisited

Dedicatory introduction 1. Just War revisited 2. Counter-insurgency war 3. Immoral weapons 4. War by other means 5. Can war-crimes trials be morally satisfying? 6. Afterword: without authority.

John Finnis On Moral Absolutes

There are few Christian moralists writing today with whom it is ! more rewarding to engage than with John Finnis. He has brought to moral-theological discussion, not always noted for the rigour of its proceedings, a demanding level of rational argument and a fruitful cross-fertilisation with contemporary jurisprudence and philosophy. He has stood for a tough-minded conservative Catholic morality, but has usually subordinated the contentious special issues (abortion, contraception etc.) to the task of defining a moral theory, with the aid of which he has sustained a relentless polemic against the school of Catholic’proportionalists’ which formed the new wave in the decade immediately following the Second Vatican Council. Working in close accord with his American friend Germain Grisez and other sympathetic collaborators, he has helped to propound a comprehensive theory of moral value and decision that has become the hallmark of a new

Prayer and Morality in the Sermon on the Mount

The Lords Prayer is at the centre of the Sermon on the Mount in a section on restraint in religious performance. The flanking sections treat of the opposition of lower and higher law, and of simplicity of agency, themes reflected in the central section in the opposition of public and secret. The Lords Prayer inducts the worshipper into the elementary relations of the universe: the Father, the source of intelligible governance of the universe; the community of human beings created to live and act within the world; the temptation which is the final test of the enterprise of human living.

Book Reviews: Moral Theology: American Protestant Ethics and the Legacy of H. Richard Niebuhr. By William Werpehowski. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2002. Pp. 232 (pbk). Price

original of four volumes) where he attempts to contemplate the unique aspects of Mary’s personal-social identity. She is the woman that exists ’between paradise and the fallen state’. She is the point of communion ’between Old and New Testaments’ and she is viewed in eschatological perspective as the woman ’between time and eternity’. In the third part of Steinhauer’s work, by far the shortest section, the author provides an exposition of von Balthasar’s theology of the all-embracing Marian principle of the church. She contends his perspective gives a new way of looking at Marian devotion and apparitions. It is in Mary that the church coming from Christ finds its personal centre and the full realization of its ecclesial idea. For von Balthasar there is a direct continuity between Mary of Nazareth’s historical role in the act of redemption and the role of ’Mary-church’ co-working with the risen Christ who continues his redemptive work in the world through, with and in his body-bride. Steinhauer concludes by summarizing the Marian as the all-embracing dimension of von Balthasar’s theology. This thesis is a very fine and detailed study. It is very focused, working skilfully through von Balthasar’s symphonic approach to the topic under review. In the final section it might have been possible to tease out further ’concretions’ of the Marian dimension within the church today. With solid foundations now in place, a further goal for Steinhauer might be to engage with some of the issues emerging from contemporary reflection on women in the church in the light of her studies of von Balthasar. It is to be hoped that a more popular version of this thesis work (and indeed

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If the standard intellectual histories of Western civilization told the truth about the ebb and flow of ideas, the Gifford Lectures, designed to treat religion and ethics as a ’strictly natural science’, would have been founded a hundred years or so earlier than they actually were. But it was not until 1887 that Lord Gifford left the world, bequeathing the Scottish Universities this icon of intellectual distinction. The argument about how they were conceived, then, is not a real encounter between the ages, but an expression of the inner tensions of twentieth-century intellectual life itself. The Giffords became an object of interrogation in their own right: at least one series of Gifford Lectures has been devoted wholly to the Lectures, and Karl Barth anguished publicly from Lord Gifford’s podium over the

Book Reviews: Systematic Theology With the Grain of the Universe: The Church's Witness and Natural Theology - Being the Gifford Lectures Delivered at the University of St. Andrews in 2001. By Stanley Hauerwas. London: SCM Press, 2002. Pp. 249. Price £13.95. ISBN 0-334-02864-7

the moral problems he tackles. It was through careful reasoning that Ramsey attempted to build bridges and gain a hearing in the public square. In this he persisted in believing that his contemporaries were still close enough to Christian ideas to be able to hear theologically based arguments. In theorising about what the Christian moralist should be doing, he always had sympathy for natural law thought which accepted this point. The same also goes for his use of the creation-covenant motif. But it goes little further than sympathy; Ramsey’s theological roots, which were strong but also often hidden, were not really in the soil of natural law. The heart of Ramsey’s writing was surely the intricate reasoning and powerful argument on just war and medical ethics. His reasoned argument was theologically based; and as McKenzie makes clear, based in Scripture and a wide range of Christian tradition. His summary gives a good account of this, but in the end

Book Reviews : Kierkegaard: A Biography, by Alastair Hannay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 496 pp. £30. hb. ISBN 0521-65077-2

ver thirty years ago R. A. Markus’s monograph Saeculum gave O a new impetus to the scholarly discussion of Augustine’s political ideas. It also gave some countenance to the interpretation of Augustine as a forerunner of political liberalism, who defined political society in such a way as to bypass justice and to refer only to cooperation in the pursuit of material wealth, so leaving metaphysical and moral decisions outside the sphere of political rule. This interpretation (by no means the whole, or even the most important part, of what Markus had to say) has since come in for

Book Reviews : Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, by John von Heyking. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. No price. ISBN 0-8262-1349-9

’publicity’. Being made known is as old as social life itself, and as diverse; but this word, a coinage of the late eighteenth century, expresses an experience of it which is no more than a couple of centuries old. It is, therefore, one of many possible approaches to an enquiry about ‘modernity’. As soon as we embark on such an enquiry, we find ourselves sailing between a Scylla and a Charybdis. Neologisms are the sparks which fly from the furnace of experience, and they exaggerate discontinuity. Later reflection, however, tends to attribute the appear-

The Concept of Publicity

Power’s book thus supplies some of the necessary intellectual and historical context lacking in Schall’s, but for a reliable account of the philosophical coherence and depth of Maritain’s abiding contribution, Schall’s work is much to be preferred. Both, however, serve as further evidence of a renewed appreciation today for what we might call classical Christian political concerns. If the somewhat abstract and ahistorical character of earlier accounts of such concerns left a

Book Reviews : A Global Ethic and Global Responsibilities: Two Declarations, edited by Hans Küng and Helmut Schmidt. London: SCM, 1998. 152 pp. pb. £9.95. ISBN 0-334-02740-3

Christian thinking about the role of government, between the articulation of Christian moral realism along the lines of MacIntyre’s work (with which he aligns himself) and any justified affirmation of liberal political society. This weakens an otherwise excellent book that should help to set the agenda for continuing work in Christian ethics. To the extent that this work must proceed from where MacIntyre is up to, it will need to look at Aquinas on the role of political authority, and there