In 3rd. century Alexandria, which was a great centre of Christian theology, they say that absolutely everybody was caught up in the great debates about religion. Go to your corner butcher and while he was making your prime cuts ready he would give his opinions on the human and divine natures of Christ, on Christ’s human will and divine will, on the state of Mary – was she the mother of God or the mother of the man Jesus? – and much else besides. It all seems rather far-fetched now; one can hardly imagine going into Macdonalds and embarking on a dispute about Transubstantiation over the chicken nuggets.

But then these early Egyptian Christians were rather well informed; they were eager to know what the latest movements in Christian thinking were, and by means of what I suppose we would now call "evening classes" they were kept up-to-date with theories and counter-theories. Being a Christian – at any level of society – was like being in a great intellectual cooking-pot.

Nowadays the arguments in the Church tend to be at the extremes, either locked away in committees or the correspondence columns of The Tablet magazine, or at ‘shop floor level’ in fight-to-the-death arguments about Church decoration, etc., while everybody else just gets on with life unperturbed.

We should be exposed to different ideas, even if we do not accept them. Christ certainly spent a lot of time and effort prizing apart minds which were closed and hardened. But it is one think to have an idea or opinion which is based on information and knowledge, and quite another thing to have an opinion simply for the sake of having an opinion.

For example, am I alone in finding something rather disturbing about the case of Louise Woodward and reaction to it? The nub of the issue is that a child died of causes which were not natural, an irreversible tragedy. Yet all of us are expected to have a view on Miss Woodward’s guilt or innocence based on the most slender awareness of the issues of the case (and our exposure to a few clippings of the television presentation will hardly have helped). Not to have a view seems to be unacceptable. I find it sinister that in Miss Woodward’s home village a woman was beaten up for refusing to accept one of the yellow ribbons (indicating "Louise is innocent"). Her refusal was interpreted as meaning "Louise is guilty". Is it possible that she was actually trying to say "I simply do not have enough of this at my finger-tips to be able to form a valid opinion"? DS