I want to thank the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology for the possibility this lecture offers me of re-visiting the work of an influential Catholic figure, the Redemptorist priest, Bernard Haring. I first read his writings in the 1970s and found them exciting at the time. Imagine my pleasure at discovering that his insights retain some of the freshness that worked for me then and which, I believe, can be re-applied now. When the French Canadian theologian and ecumenist, Jean Tillard, was over in Cambridge this summer, I asked him if he thought that Haring was a true great. ‘Oh, yes’, he replied without a second’s hesitation. Now when you get a Dominican to say something nice about a member of another religious order, you know you are on to something.

So who was Bernard Haring? What did he say and write that made his a great mind? And have his ideas any relevance in today’s context? The very existence of this lecture series and the titles my fellow contributors have chosen – about ecumenism, freedom of conscience and the Church, an ethic of responsibility in contemporary Catholic theology and ethics at the end of modernity - pre-suppose that. I will illustrate their application within an ethical domain which is my own special interest, namely the world of communications and information management. In this way I want to suggest that you too could take his ideas into your own context and ask, ‘do they still work?’

So to my first consideration. Who was Bernard Haring, and what was the context in which he developed his thinking? That connection is essential. Remember that he wrote a book called Timely and Untimely Virtues – hence ‘Timely Virtues’, the title of this lecture. He was a product of a very particular period in European and world history.

Born in 1912, in south-west Germany, he wrote,

‘my childhood was marked by a loving family but also by the heartbreaking experiences of anguish and loss caused by the war.’

The Second War only added to that experience. He served in the army as a priest-medic and later noted,

‘What most influenced my thinking about moral theology was the mindless and criminal obedience of Christians to Hitler, a madman and a tyrant. This led me to the conviction that the character of a Christian must not be formed one-sidedly by a leitmotif of obedience but rather by a discerning responsibility, a capacity to respond courageously to new values and new needs, and a readiness to take the risk.’

Free and Faithful in Christ, Bernard Haring, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1978, volume one, p.2.

After Hitler, after the Holocaust, moral theology could never be the same again and Haring was one of the people who seized the opportunity provided by the moment. So this farmer’s son, who entered the Redemptorists and studied extensively in Rome, where he then taught from 1950-1986, became the leading moral theologian in the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council. The Archbishop of Milan, later to be Pope Paul VI, wrote the introduction to his three-volume compendium on moral theology which was called, The Law of Christ. Twenty-five years after its publication he returned to the same themes with another three-volume title, Free and Faithful in Christ. Hence the title of this series.

But we must not recall him simply as a writer. Dr Eloise Rosenblatt, from Berkeley’s Theological Union, remembers him as a teacher.

‘I had Bernard Haring in the mid 1970s as a teacher during summer school at the University of San Francisco. He gave a course on the sacraments, and the format was a 2-5pm slot in the afternoon for two or three weeks. It was a massive class – maybe 75 – 100 people, all banked into a chemistry lab with seats diagonally sloping toward our professor – we looked down on him. But how charming and genial was his theology of a kindly God, whose sacramental presence through Jesus was orientated to grace, wholeness, not sin or human inadequacy.

Though I only had five or six years’ experience of teaching high school at the time, I admired his teaching presence, skill and intuition. He knew the right moment in a lecture sequence to shift to an anecdote, so that our attention never flagged. I never dozed. He encouraged questions and answered them respectfully, candidly, but without rancour and without missionizing or preaching.

Having suffered the violence of war, he did not use teaching to conquer others theologically; he made no war on anyone’s soul in the name of God. This spirit was different from what would have been the triumphalist air of theology prior to Vatican II, the period in which he was taught. So how is it, I wonder, that he unlearned what he was taught, and taught what he had not learned?’

Text available at http://www.peppercornplace.com

A lovely tribute, I believe, and also a fine insight into what Haring represents in the Catholic imagination. Here was a man who grew up under one system and went on to do the theological thinking that would produce another and quite radically different one. If you want to know what the first system looked like, turn over the photo which illustrates John Cornwall’s most recent book, Hitler’s Pope. Haring talked of a paternalistic crisis of faith. As he saw it, there were questions to be asked.

‘A moral theology which gives first attention to the fundamental option and the fruits of the Spirit (a Christian theology of virtues) strongly de-emphasizes the question: "Which norms best allow me to control and to judge others?" There is, however, a quite different question: "What kind of norms will serve as criteria for my actions (thoughts , words and deeds), once I have understood the more basic question: "What kind of person does God want me to be, and for what kind of community and human relationship does the law of the Spirit incline me?" This approach allows a genuinely christian vision of norms and criteria.’

Timely and Untimely Virtues, B.Haring: St Paul Publications, Slough, 1986, pp 27-28.

Here was a man who wanted Catholic moral teaching to have a fresh starting point. To find it he turned, not to manuals of Canon Law, not to hand-wringing at the sheer wretchedness of the human condition, but to the Bible. ‘So what?’, you might say. Re-examine the context, for when Haring was writing – and this is why I remember him – Catholic scripture studies were undergoing a renaissance. Jerome Murphy O’Connor and his colleagues were working on a new Biblical commentary. With the advent of the Jerusalem Bible, the English Catholic community could let go of the Douai translation and Ronnie Knox’s too. The availability of critical Biblical scholarship meant that we could both understand and believe Haring when he wrote:

‘Throughout the Old Testament, it becomes ever more clear that religion is not a philosophy about ideas but a history of a living God with his people, and that everything depends upon how the people listen to God, receive his message and his messengers and respond to him. The New Testament proves even more the impossibility of reducing faith and morality to a system of laws or a philosophy of ideas.

At the very heart of the New Testament is Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Man, the Son of the Living God. This is the newness of Christian ethics: that the Father has given us everything and, indeed, has given us himself by sending us his beloved Son, his Word incarnate.’

Free and Faithful in Christ, Bernard Haring, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1978, volume one, p.15.

From a solid-state depiction of ethics as a bundle of requirements and rules and norms, Haring moved Catholic thinking to a new place. Galileo would have been thrilled as Haring demonstrated ‘Eppur si muove’. So, yes, it does move. And we can move with it.

So where do we move to? Is Haring merely an enthusiast, someone who was desperate to create a brave new world and a brave new moral order to replace the hideous ones which had overshadowed his youth? Is he anything more that a comforting liberal who took too little account of the sheer perversity of human nature and the damage inflicted by original sin? Or does he offer something considerable? I believe he does, because he wrote about what he called ‘covenant morality’, the life of faith of a whole community, rather than of individuals. He described a dense network of relations we have with each other and with God and which are judged on the grounds of the love and care we show one another, rather than through a brownie-points system where we log up virtue as a personal possession and are saved by works, rather than by faith. As the Catholic theologian, Charles Curran, said of Haring,

‘He proposed a biblical, liturgical, Christological and life-centered moral theology. He pioneered a new approach to moral theology that opposed the method of the manuals with their concern for training confessors for the sacrament of penance by learning how to distinguish what is sinful and the degrees of sinfulness.

Häring's moral theology was based on the covenant -- the good news of God's loving gift for us and our grateful response. Christians are called to growth and continual conversion in their moral life and in their multiple relationships with God, neighbour, world and self. He staunchly opposed any legalism that made God into a controller rather than a gracious saviour.

Two significant developments occurred in his moral theology. The earlier Häring, as indicated by the title of The Law of Christ, still saw law as the primary model of the Christian life. But in 1978 his new three-volume moral theology, written this time in English, was titled Free and Faithful in Christ, which indicates the move to a more relational model for the moral life and the rejection of a legal model.

The second development involved a growing emphasis on the healing power of nonviolence. Häring was truly a person of peace who often candidly and forcefully stood up for his position, but his manner was always nonviolent. Even among nations the later Häring emphasized the need for nonviolence, although he did not totally exclude all use of force.

Some criticized Häring's moral theology for its lack of scientific rigour and its often homiletic style. There is some truth in these criticisms. Häring was never primarily an academic writing learned tomes in search of academic promotions and acclaim. He wrote for the church and the people of the church. However, his work came from a deep and creative intelligence that helped to reshape the entire discipline of Catholic moral theology in the post-conciliar era. In his various writings he also showed a broad knowledge not only of theology and scripture but also of sociology, psychology and medicine.’

That was a long quotation, but an important one. It demonstrates that there is an inherent problem here. After all, Haring advocated an intelligent kind of morality that it is very hard to police. You need to know that as a teaching as well as a centralising Church, the Roman Catholic Church, inevitably had a problem with him. For on the one hand, Haring advocated loyalty to its institutions, yet on the other, he encouraged people to think hard about personal responsibility. He took a firm stand against Humanae Vitae in 1968 (the papal encyclical that opposed contraception). During the 1970s he was subject to investigation by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, despite the fact that he had begun to have recurrent bouts of cancer. Subsequently he reacted to Pope John Paul II'’s encyclical of 1993, Veritatis Splendor by writing.

‘Let us ask our Pope: are you sure your confidence in your supreme human, profession and religious competence in matters of moral theology and particularly sexual ethics is truly justified? … We should let the Pope know that we are wounded by the many signs of his rooted distrust and discouraged by the manifold structures of distrust which he has allowed to be established.’

Cancer deprived Haring of his larynx in 1979 and so of his voice. He had spoken German, French, Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish as well as Russian which he had learnt during the War. But he continued to study, to add to the massive collection of ninety books which he wrote, and to pray in retirement.

In a way, Haring wrote his own obituary in 1982 when he claimed, with customary modesty,

‘I am only one voice in a great choir that sings out the invitation of the Lord, "Become a truthful image of God".’

Called to Holiness, Bernard Haring, St Paul Publications, Slough, 1982, p. 7.

He died in 1998 after what his students called,‘a courageous life, dedicated to love, faith, truth and human dignity’.

Text available at http://www.usao.edu/-facshaferi/haring1.htm

So what have we learnt? Haring believed in theology. He believed in the theological enterprise and did not want it to be what he described as ‘a philosophy about ideas’. Now you have to make your own mind up over that. He used the Bible intelligently and taught that ethics is about discernment, responsibility and building up the community. Above all, he saw that to be free and faithful is to be in Christ. Those of you who are not Catholics may think that you sit light to what I have said so far. I think you would be misguided to do so. There is a warmth and generosity and humanity to Haring which we all need to hear. Is this what Bonhoeffer would have sounded like had he survived? After all, Bonhoeffer knew that ethics is about an affair of the heart and that our Christology drives it.

So do his ideas work nowadays? Have they an application in our context? Can they be ‘timely virtues’ for us? Let me try to develop an idea with you.

Yesterday I went down Sidney Street here in Cambridge and bought some vegetables at the supermarket. I went to Boots the Chemists to pick up a prescription and then on to the bank for money. At each of these points of contact with the outer and commercial world, I became a participant in the information revolution. Then I went home and picked up my emails. After this I visited www.lastminute.com to check out some flight details on my computer. At each of these points of contact with the inner world represented by the Internet, I became a participant in the communications revolution.

I could go on. I could tease out the implications of each of these transactions. At the supermarket, I am offered a fidelity card, with its seductive promise of discounts or air miles. This masks a strategy. For the supermarket is able to log my transactions and to stock its shelves with the goodies I most enjoy. Big Brother knows that I like Gentleman’s Relish and have a penchant for parsnips. Subtly I am customising the shelves where I shop, both restricting and enhancing my choices there.

At the chemist’s the drama is replicated. Here a database is being built. It looks harmless enough and serves me well, for I am glad to be able to pick up the medicine I need and to know that it will always be in stock. But what about the portfolio or portrait represented by this logged record. If I were to seek some fancy kind of medical insurance at some point in the future, what would be the status of this log?

I didn’t actually go in to the bank. I stood on the street and grappled with plastic and PIN numbers. I could have been anywhere, but for the fact that a camera was trained on me and so there is a record that I was not anywhere, I was somewhere. As we know, CCTV is alive and well and living in Cambridge. As are bollards…

My point is that, in the outer world, we inhabit technology. We are items in an information databank, as well as human beings. Whether we like technology or not, we are part of the information revolution. It drives our social discourse because it enables us to communicate more quickly and efficiently than ever before. So how is the technology to work for us and not against us? What are the ethical implications for how we live in the public domain, let alone how we run our own lives?

Now to my inner world. I call it an inner world because it is a lonely world. There is nothing but you and the screen as you sit in front of your computer. You gaze into cyberspace. How are we to come alive in cyberspace? What are the issues which face us as we arrive there, as we become part of a communications revolution, as well as an information one?

We know that information is a social and cultural resource. That is why we have always had good libraries in our universities and have invested time and energy in imposing library discipline. Our ethic was fairly simple: no talking; no eating. And also no copying. We have always had dramatic sanctions for plagiarism. But nowadays, in 1999, the issues we face are far more complicated than previously. We are part of the information revolution. We need to consider questions of social allocation and control, along with the associated problems such as privacy, access and public interest. We need to think about currency and authority. How up-to-date is the material we use and where does it come from? As we begin to realise that information has become a commodity and that it has a price, so too we have to re-assess what we are doing with it. Once we worked at the level of values; now we are driven by market forces. One of the assets we boast of in our university prospectuses is our IT provision.

The Internet has a bad reputation. It is portrayed as teeming with sex maniacs or cheating students, bent on getting an essay answer from some obscure source to pass off as their own. Its value as an information provider is also misunderstood, for it is extremely difficult to search the Internet if you do not have a grid or a strategy to interpret it by.

And in our own times, as sacred texts from all our traditions tumble their way onto the Internet, along with much else that seems to cheapen or trivialise human experience, the loss is obvious. We lose control and ownership. Its images enter our very imagination and distort our sense of what is real or unreal. Lord Habgood has warned of the dangers of worshipping the great God ‘Choice’.

It is not simply ‘teaching Churches’ or academic institutions which fulminate against the Internet at this point. Each of us is driven by a vision of orthodoxy; we aspire to get it right. And along comes the Internet and says, ‘but there are lots of different rights’, and ‘your orthodoxy has to compete with mine’. So, in any analysis, is it more than the ultimate post-modern artefact or plaything? Is its only message that ‘more is better’ and ‘even more is best’? . We have choice, certainly, an abundance of it at the moment, but how are we to exercise it with discernment rather than to worship it? How can an ethic be brought to bear in the world of technology and communications? True discernment lies in wrestling with this question. Now those words are pure Haring, think about them: choice and discernment. Remember them when you bemoan the fact that the net is hard to search and hard to police.

The information and communications revolution is like another Protestant Reformation. People have access to the word, even to the most sacred word, the Bibles of our modern world. Can we trust people who enjoy such autonomy in the presence of the word? Will they go off and create their own morality, their own religion? How can we build an ethic of trust? Is there any theological underpining to sustain us as we become cybertravellers?

I would argue that there is, and that the solution is to be found in our theological heritage. Christianity is a Trinitarian religion: communication lies at the heart of the Godhead. That is why community is so central to our human endeavour. Community is the fruit of true communication. The working out of love. That is why we can ask further questions of all our communications systems. We have a template for evaluating them and their influence. We are able to judge them because we can assess their capacity to respect personhood – and I use this word deliberately, rather than individuality - relationship and true encounter in community.

So what about the Internet? If it is simply an information-gatherer, then it is a particularly seductive one and one which we need to watch. Or is it more than that? Does it provide a metaphor for understanding our times? There are those who would argue that it can. They see the Internet with visionary intensity, stretched out like a woven web around our world, bringing people inexorably closer to each other, and setting up a cocoon of communication which is constantly changing shape, glowing with intensity as continents come in and out of sleep. According to this reading, the Internet is the ultimate message bearer. But is there not more to be said? Submit it to the test of love and it could be that the greatest of its messages has nothing to do with its function as an information provider; the greatest of its messages is that communication between named people - known and unknown - generates community.

What I am saying is that there is a theological tool for constructing a morality for the Internet. Just because a sphere of influence (such as cyberspace) is new, and because we will interact with it in new ways, this does not mean that an ancient discipline – in this case theology – cannot be applied. Bernard Haring – amongst others – gives me the confidence to insist that theology works. If you protest that this is a believer’s morality and so not universally valid, I would point out that its starting point may well be within the religious domain but that its end point makes absolute human sense.