The Philosophers and the China Shop: A Reply to Brian Davies

Rallying to the flag first raised by Professor Michael Dummett a year ago, Fr Brian Davies has parachuted heavily down on what I suppose we must call the Dummett-Lash battlefield, though the theological poppies have now been nourished by the blood of other combatants. Not least of these is Fr Davies’ own Provincial, Timothy Radcliffe.In ‘Why Should We Believe It?’ (printed in last month’s New Blackfriars, pp. 360—368) Fr Davies is clearly worried by Fr Radcliffe’s opinion that a Catholic is ‘not committed to saying that any single saying of Jesus in the Gospels exactly reports the words of that historical person’ since it is possible ‘that in every instance his sayings have been redacted in the light of his subsequent death and resurrection, and of the theological concerns of the gospel writers’ (NB March 1988, p. 118). On the contrary, according to Fr Davies, Catholic faith depends for its very existence on clear reportage of Jesus’ own words. The Gospels ‘make some pretty extraordinary claims’: that Jesus is God incarnate, for example, and that by his cross and resurrection he conquered sin and death. We can only believe such extraordinary things if ‘sufficiently informed by one who is God and by one who knows what he is talking about’ (pp 361—6).It would, I assume, be universally agreed among Catholics that we need to be ‘sufficiently informed’ by God about what is saving truth. The debate turns on just what might count as being ‘sufficiently informed’.