Editorial

摘要

Although John Henry Newman wrote his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1874) in quite a different time from ours, it remains surprisingly relevant. For one thing, Newman is addressing the proper interpretation of a Vatican Council, in his case, of course, the First Vatican Council. Newman has to show that the Council's teachings are both more challenging and at the same time less challenging than what Gladstone presumes; one can imagine, mutatis mutandis, trying to explain the Second Vatican Council's content to Prime Minister David Cameron or President Barack Obama. For another thing, Newman finds himself needing to defend the relationship between the 'ancient church' and the 'papal church', that is to say, seeking to claim an ecclesial continuity in the face of evidence suggesting that the church itself may be simply a wax nose, a cultural construct radically altered in every age. And indeed the ever-present accusation today, as in the nineteenth century, is that Christianity is simply an aggregation of incompatible cultural situations and expressions - from ancient storytelling Hebrews to the eschatological zealots of Jesus' day to the Hellenizing Fathers and onward, each epoch filled with exclusion and splintering in the name of covenant and charity.