Walking a Tightrope: The Jesuit Robert Bütler and Muslim–Christian Dialogue in Pakistan

This article deals with the Swiss Jesuit Robert Andreas Bütler (1915–1996) and his attempts to develop Muslim–Christian dialogue in Pakistan between the 1960s and 1980s. It focuses especially on his correspondence with the Islamist ideologue Sayyid Abu ’l-A?la Mawdudi (1903–1979), one of the most influential Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century and a major figure in South Asian Islam. On the basis of their written exchange, the article identifies challenges to Muslim–Christian rapprochement against the backdrop of state-funded Islamization and rising political tensions in Pakistan. It demonstrates how Bütler’s efforts became entangled in postcolonial struggles for a national identity, thereby revealing the limits of Vatican II-inspired approaches to Muslim–Christian dialogue.     

Inter‐religious Encounter

This article examines Robert A. Yelle's Semiotics of Religion. The author argues that the project is weakened by an over-privileging of language as the only mode of semiosis. Using the figure of Orpheus and the semiotic exteriority of music, the author suggests that a semiotics of religion must escape this most fundamental logocentrism if it is not simply to perpetuate the ideological gestures Yelle works hardest to expose.     

Albert Pighius's Controversial Work on Original Sin

Abstract

Pighius's Controversies were first published in 1541 and apparently went through nine separate editions by 1586, although one of these never existed and two others incorporate copies of earlier editions. The first of the sixteen ‘controversies’, on original sin, proved to be controversial and was later branded as semi-Pelagian. Pighius had it printed on his way from the Worms to the Regensburg Colloquy, but was prevented from publishing the volume until after the collapse of the latter. He announced that he had been displeased with the first printed version and that he had had the first signature reprinted. The Cambridge University Library has a copy of the first edition with two different A signatures, the first of these being a unique and hitherto unnoticed examplar of the earlier, cancelled, printing. This copy also contains two hand-written notes banning the publication of the first controversy for the time being. The most likely explanation is that Nicholas Granvella, the imperial chancellor, wrote these notes, banning (until the conclusion of the Regensburg Colloquy) first the publication of the first controversy and later the publication of the entire first volume of the Controversies, comprising the first nine controversies. The article concludes with the cancelled text, collated with the text found in all of the later versions.     

Robert Singleton's Sermon at Paul's Cross in 1535: The ‘True Church’ and the Royal Supremacy

Abstract

On 2 April 1535, Robert Singleton, chaplain to Queen Anne Boleyn, preached a sermon at Paul's Cross. The unique, surviving printed copy of the sermon is housed in the Wren Library of Lincoln Cathedral. From 1533, Singleton had been a member of the circle of avant-garde evangelicals gathered at the margins of the Tudor court under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell. His sermon at Paul's Cross contributed to an orchestrated campaign in support of Cromwell's legislative programme, then proceding through Parliament, to sever all links of ecclesiastical jurisdiction with Rome and to confirm Henry's headship of the Church of England. The sermon interprets Paul's allegory of the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem in the Epistle to the Galatians as a model for thinking about the distinction between the invisible and visible Church. Singleton harnesses Pauline ecclesiology in an apology for the royal supremacy. Presented here is a transcribed copy of the original printed version.