Thursday, September 21, 2023
Belief in Progress
Edmund Hill, "Muddying the Waters or — A Book for Babel," New Blackfriars, Vol. 59, No. 692 (January 1978) 21-31
(at 22):
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And so we get a naive, and really rather old-fashioned, belief in progress. "Before modern scriptural studies, theologians were unable to appreciate what a gospel is" (p. 158/9). 1900 years of Christianity without anyone knowing what a gospel is! For it appears that what the gospels are was forgotten almost as soon as they were written. Why didn't the evangelists tell anyone, for God's sake? The mind boggles at the ignorance of our ancestors in the faith, generation after generation of them. Thank heaven for being born in the 20th century, the age of water-closets, jet aeroplanes, and the appreciation of what a gospel is!Hill's article is a review of Peter De Rosa, Jesus Who Became Christ (London: Collins, 1975).
