Reshaping Ecumenical Theology : The Church Made Whole? [1 ed.] 9780567575197, 9780567070449

Citation preview

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

This page intentionally left blank

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology The Church Made Whole?

Paul Avis

Published by T&T Clark International A Continuum Imprint The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Copyright © Paul Avis, 2010 Paul Avis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-567-07044-9 (Hardback) 978-0-567-19443-5 (Paperback)

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents




Preface

vii

1

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

2

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

21

3

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

39

4

The Hermeneutics of Unity

60

5

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

80

6

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

98

7

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

116

8

Building and Breaking Communion

141

9

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

158

10

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

185

Index of Names

1

207

This page intentionally left blank

Preface




T

he ecumenical movement is ripe for reform and renewal. Its theology needs to be reinvigorated and reshaped. Its bureaucracy deserves to be streamlined and refocused. There is general agreement across the churches about all that. Three-quarters of a century ago William Temple – successively Archbishop of York and of Canterbury and one of the founding fathers of the World Council of Churches – described the ecumenical movement as the great new fact of our era. But now we tend to take it for granted and it really seems rather humdrum most of the time, not to say a little dreary. Many church leaders and theologians saw the ecumenical movement as a new work of the Holy Spirit, but now it appears all too human. After nearly two millennia of splitting apart, of ever increasing fragmentation, of schism upon schism, the churches were being drawn by the Spirit of Christ to return to one another and, in doing so, to draw closer to Christ himself. However, although it is sometimes said that as we seek Christ we will find one another, and that in strengthening our unity with him we strengthen our unity as his Body, this has not proved true in any straightforwardly empirical sense. All Christian churches seek to worship and serve God the Holy Trinity, according to their lights, but this in itself has not made them one, nor has it always proved to be a trajectory of mutual convergence for them. A century of ecumenical endeavour has seen many gains and achievements, under God. We can be deeply thankful for the revolution in relationships that has taken place between the major churches, the transition from hostility and rivalry to respect and cooperation, and for the deep theological convergences that have been revealed, sometimes in unexpected ways, by high-level ecumenical dialogues, as they have homed in on the ‘one foundation’ of the Church that God has laid in Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 3.11) and have examined their differences in the light of that central truth. Nevertheless, there is at the present time much uncertainty, doubt and heart-searching about the future of ecumenism, the search for visible unity, coupled with real scepticism about the value of investing resources in ecumenical

viii

Preface

activity. How should we respond to this mood and how can we deal with the questions that it raises? The ecumenical movement is undoubtedly ripe for reform and renewal, but what direction should this renewal and reform take? First, ecumenism clearly needs to take much more seriously than it has done, at the official level at least, the huge diversity of Christianity that is reflected in the churches – a diversity of spirituality, worship, theology and organization. Ecumenism needs to reckon theologically with the vital sense of identity that belongs to the different Christian traditions. In other words, it needs to come to terms with the reality of difference. In my first book on this subject, Ecumenical Theology and the Elusiveness of Doctrine (SPCK, 1986), I took as my watchword John Henry Newman’s dictum, ‘You cannot have Christianity and not have differences.’ During the intervening 25 years I have worried at the issues encapsulated in Newman’s saying. I address them much more substantially and rigorously here than I did in that first attempt to grapple with these issues, as a young theologian with little experience of organized ecumenism or of the challenges and pitfalls of theological dialogue, but with some disturbing questions about recent published material (the case in point being the work on authority in the Church in the Final Report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, ARCIC). The first chapter of the present book looks at the unity and multiplicity of the Church primarily phenomenologically, but it raises the critical question that haunts the rest of the book: When does multiplicity become fragmentation? The discussion of ‘Confessionalism or a Confessing Church’ examines what the churches stand for in an age when they have come closer together in deeper mutual understanding, but in the process have somewhat relativized their historic positions. In Chapter 7, I take episcopacy as one of the most intractable differences between families of churches – those that are ordered in the historic episcopate and those ordered in a presbyteral polity. I pose the question in this way: ‘Episcopacy, Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?’ A fresh cause of disharmony within and between the churches is difference on ethical and moral teaching and practice. I suggest that the conjunction of communion and ethics constitutes a new frontier in ecumenism. And the title of my last chapter sums up that whole problematic: ‘Forging Communion in the Face of Difference’. It is not possible to make progress in clarifying these issues and then moving beyond that stage to deeper rapport between traditions and communities without taking the discipline of theological hermeneutics to the heart of ecumenical dialogue. Hermeneutics aims to create understanding, to minimize misunderstanding, to enable a meeting of minds across cultures and across

Preface

ix

time. Chapter 4, ‘The Hermeneutics of Unity’, tackles this area, but another way of looking at it is through the lens of ‘reception’ because in both cases empathetic understanding and the exercise of profound discernment are called for. Chapter 5, ‘Towards a Deeper Reception of “Reception”’, addresses this aspect. Second, mission must be integrated with unity in our thinking and in the agendas of the churches. Mission and unity should not be seen as two separate or even as two complementary activities. We cannot afford that disjunction. They must be brought together because they are, in reality, simply two sides of the one coin. There is a unity dimension of mission and a mission dimension of unity. Can we achieve a holistic grasp of unity in mission and mission in unity? Can we rise to the challenge of a missiological ecclesiology? Several chapters in this book (especially Chapter 2, ‘Rethinking Ecumenical Theology’, and the concluding chapter, where I give a brief exposition of what I regard as the missiological ecclesiology of the Fourth Gospel) make a start down that road, but there is much more to do. Third, there is a need for greater realism about what unity means and how we can reach it. The days of ecumenical pipedreams are now over. A sober, steady but progressive method is required, one that will move the churches on step by step towards fuller and deeper expressions of the unity that we have in Christ. Chapter 3, ‘New Paths in Ecumenical Method’, tackles this area. It proposes an approach that involves moving towards full visible communion by a series of stages that are clearly defined and mutually agreed by the ecumenical partners concerned. Above all, perhaps, I argue that our primary obligation to our fellow Christians is to seek to enter into communion with them and when this goal is reached, to maintain and defend that communion. I see this as a tangible outworking of the New Testament command to love our brothers and sisters in Christ. I first outlined this ecumenical imperative in the book Christians in Communion (Geoffrey Chapman Mowbray, 1990), but I develop the concept more fully here, especially in Chapter 8, ‘Building and Breaking Communion’, and in the final chapter. In this book I have taken material that I have developed and delivered on various occasions over the past decade, worked through it thoroughly, rewritten, expanded and corrected extensively, and then added chapters that broke new ground for me, so that in fact we have here a fresh work, but one in continuity with what I have said and written elsewhere. Although my daily work for the past decade and more has been to carry forward the quest for Christian unity on behalf of the Church of England, as the General Secretary

x

Preface

of The Council for Christian Unity, the views expressed here are personal, not official ones, unless the text or the references indicate otherwise (which in fact they do quite extensively, I think). At the beginning of the chapters (where applicable) I have noted the occasions and places where I previously addressed these themes and the audiences and colleagues who helped me to think through the issues, to all of whom I am much indebted. Paul Avis June 2009

1


The Church – Unity and Multiplicity1

L

ike a cut diamond, Christianity presents several facets to the world. However, unlike a diamond, it is not always brilliant and beautiful, but often deeply flawed and unattractive, sometimes downright repugnant. History and recent events show that the Church’s representatives are capable of great evil. Even the Church gathered in sacred synod is capable of wrongdoing. As the Reformers could never forget, a century before their day the Council of Constance, the greatest council of the late medieval period, had solemnly condemned Jan Hus after a travesty of a trial and had him burned at the stake.2 Yet for all the Church’s failings, faults and crimes, glimpses of its true nature continually shine out – in the saints, in selfless care of the poor and the sick, in Christian literature and art and in the excellence of the liturgy – reflecting the beauty, truth and goodness of God. However we may view it, Christianity is unquestionably multifaceted, multidimensional. It needs to be understood from several complementary angles. The Christian phenomenon fascinates historians and sociologists, for example, as well as theologians. But its multiplicity and diversity also prompt questions about coherence, fragmentation and integrity.

1 2

I explored some of these ideas in my contribution ‘The Church’, in J. Bowden (ed.), Christianity: A Complete Guide (London and New York: Continuum, 2005). See further P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006), chs 5, 7, 10.

2

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology




Three facets of the Church

The Roman Catholic layman Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) identified three major components or ‘elements’ in Christianity. He labelled them the institutional, the intellectual and the mystical. John Henry Newman (1801–90) had previously spoken, as a Roman Catholic, of the theological, the governing and the devotional functions of the Church.3 It is not controversial that Christianity is pluriform. It is the tensions and contradictions lurking within that pluriformity that are problematic. In this first chapter we are taking an initial orientation to the question of unity and multiplicity in the Church and we are concerned mainly with the first of von Hügel’s three dimensions, the institutional. Clearly, the various different churches that are spread throughout the world and throughout Christian history are institutions – whatever else and whatever more they may be – with historical trajectories, structures of authority and sustaining beliefs, goals and values. The institution that we call the Christian Church is both one and many. The work of ecumenism is played out in the tension between unity and plurality, singularity and multiplicity. The tension between unity and multiplicity in the institutional dimension of the Church is an acute one. It poses a problem for the coherence and integrity of Christianity. Was Christianity meant to be this fragmented? Before we explore the problematic of unity and multiplicity further, we should not overlook the other two dimensions identified by von Hügel. The intellectual dimension stands for the theological inheritance of the Church and its ongoing intellectual life, the theological industry that the Church generates. For while anyone, Christian or not, church member or not, may choose to study Christian theology, theologians normally have a sense of working in the community of the Church and out of a particular ecclesial tradition. In terms of the proper vocation of theologians, this is entirely appropriate and correct, but it is also an empirical fact. Theologians, we may say, work on the ideology of the institution. If the institutional dimension is, of the three, the most susceptible of empirical study, the mystical dimension is probably the most empirically elusive. The mystical element includes the private prayer and contemplation 3

F. von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion (London: J. M. Dent, 2nd edn, 1923); J. H. Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church (ed. with introduction and notes by H. D. Weidner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 24–26. See the discussion in P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation?, ch. 1.

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

3

of ordinary Christians and of those who embrace ‘the religious life’, as well as the ordered public worship of the Church. It concerns the heart and the feelings and the sense of the presence of God. It includes the formation of Christian character and the way that suffering is borne with patience. The mystical is that side of the Church’s existence that is most mysterious, yet it is also arguably the most important of all. It is, in the words of the Epistle to the Colossians, the life that is ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. 3.3). Somehow, the multiplicity within the intellectual and devotional dimensions of Christianity does not trouble us. It seems natural that there should be many diverse expressions of the intellectual dimension of Christianity, that is to say the whole corpus of Christian thought, but more particularly its theology, because theology is by its nature exploratory; it is an academic discipline and we all know that academics make a career out of disagreeing with one another. It seems equally appropriate that the mystical or devotional dimension of Christianity should be pluriform and that there should be many diverse paths of Christian spirituality, because spirituality, by its nature, is personal and unfolds over a lifetime. Our contemporary culture in the West assumes that faith is not only a personal but also a private matter, simply a question of individual preference. In the sphere of faith our culture’s motto is chacun à son goût – each to his (or her) own taste. It raises no issues of integrity or coherence that the intellectual and devotional aspects of Christianity, as a great historical movement of religious thought and spirituality, should be so diverse. But in the institutional realm we are not talking about a spiritual movement – Christianity – but about a religious institution, the Church. The Christian Church is much more than an amorphous movement and ‘the Church’ is not simply a catch-all sociological category in which to place the various discrete churches. In spite of differences and divisions, theologians have seen the Church as an identifiable visible community in time and space, though they have always insisted that there is more to the Church than that – it is in its deepest reality the mystical Body of Christ. There are several good reasons for attributing a specific identity to the Church. First, the Christian Church as such has a recognizable history that can be narrated: there is an identifiable subject that makes such projects as the Oxford History of the Christian Church possible, though each volume will be filled with a kaleidoscope of diverse details (while the Cambridge History of Christianity has a wider focus, giving a more generous account of the cultural, social, artistic and intellectual life of the Christian movement). Second, the Church has pervasive (though not common) structures of authority, which form part of

4

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

the political history of Europe and of other regions of the world (e.g. Latin America) and have helped to shape their destiny. And the Church certainly has a set of overall beliefs, goals and values that sustain its identity. Though these vary from one particular church to another, there is sufficient common ground (or family resemblance) for us to postulate them of the Church as a whole. As an institution, then, the Church lends itself to empirical description and analysis and one of the salient features of the empirical phenomenon of the Church is the combination of unity and multiplicity.




Singular and plural

Christians often talk about ‘the Church’ as though it were obvious that there is only one Church, as though this was not a problematic term, fraught with ambiguity. In hymns, prayers and confessions of faith ‘the Church’ invariably occurs in the singular. The most widely used and authoritative of the creeds, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (finalized in AD 381) refers to ‘the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’. Occurring as it does in the Creed, this statement is a confession of faith. In spite of ‘the Church’s’ visible disunity and the evident sinfulness of its members, its obvious human limitations and manifest failure to live up to its apostolic mission, the Church is ultimately one to the eyes of faith. It is vital to Christians to believe that the Church is one and that there is only one Church. Just as there is one God and one Christ, so there is necessarily only one Church. It is a theological impossibility for things to be otherwise. A New Testament statement of this axiomatic unity of the whole Christian economy invokes ‘one body and one Spirit . . . one hope . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all’ (Eph. 4.4–6). Yet, the most obvious feature of the Church to strike an impartial observer is that it is not one but many, not singular but plural. The Church takes many forms and bears many names. Its members tend to style themselves, not simply Christians, but Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Presbyterians (or Reformed), Methodists, Baptists, Evangelicals, Pentecostalists and a host of others. These brand names represent to some extent different ways of worshipping, believing and living by professed disciples of Jesus Christ. In the course of 2,000 years of Church history distinct traditions, streams of Christian practice and reflection, with organizational structures and theologies to match, have emerged, flourished, declined and sometimes disappeared. The impressive church of North Africa, the church of Tertullian, Cyprian,

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

5

Athanasius and Augustine of Hippo, was swept away by waves of invasion in the early centuries of our era, leaving little trace behind. The most obvious sign of the plurality of churches is probably the extraordinary variety of church buildings (also called church, though the word in this case comes from a separate root, the Greek kuriake, belonging to the Lord (kurios)). In some towns and cities every street corner sports a church of a different denomination. Strangely, this is not often felt to be a glaring anomaly, a contradiction in terms. Where a church of the dominant denomination stands, rival denominations have felt the urge to build a church right opposite. In London, Westminster Abbey in its existing form partly predates the Norman Conquest (mid-eleventh century). For the past century (since 1912) the massive Methodist Central Hall (not ‘cathedral’ or even ‘church’ and hardly ‘chapel’) has stood across the road, a challenge to Anglican hegemony as the church by law established. For a little longer has stood, not far away, Westminster Cathedral (completed 1903, consecrated 1910), the seat of the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. In small towns and villages, Nonconformists built their chapels as close as they could to the parish church, even in the churchyard itself, if possible, in a bid to claim sacred turf, to erect a rival temple of God. In countries touched by the sixteenth-century Reformation, church buildings have passed through various ownerships. In Europe, parish churches and cathedrals that are more than 500 years old were, until the Reformation, under the jurisdiction of Rome and were served by clergy who looked to the Pope as Christ’s vicar on earth. At the Reformation, when the papal jurisdiction was repudiated in large parts of western and northern Europe, these buildings often came under the authority of the state and of a bishop or other senior cleric who looked to the crown for his legal authority. Today in England ecumenical goodwill sometimes makes it possible for the same ancient church to be made available by the ‘resident’ Anglicans for use by Roman Catholics again, after an interval of half a millennium. Many parish churches in England display a record of their parish clergy, from the founding of the church in that place to the present day, that makes no distinction as it passes from Roman Catholic to Anglican jurisdiction at the Reformation: the list of pastors is continuous, no notice is taken of the traumas of the time. When I was looking at one record of parish priests, from medieval times to the present, with a Roman Catholic bishop, he commented: ‘We don’t keep lists like this in our churches.’ I replied: ‘This is your list as well as ours.’ As far as the Anglicans at least are concerned, the one Church and the one ministry of the Word, the sacraments and pastoral care have continued down the ages, in all essentials

6

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

unaffected by political upheaval and changes of political allegiance. Lutheranism, on the other hand, is an example of a Christian tradition that has a sharper sense of historical discontinuity. Lutherans believe that Martin Luther (1483–1546) was raised up by God to bear witness to the lost biblical truth of justification by grace through faith alone, apart from human works or merit, and to reform the life of the Church against this criterion. Lutherans continue to have a strong sense of confessional identity, which they are loath to compromise (as many of them would see it) by uniting with other churches in any way that would dilute their distinctive witness. Some Lutherans, particularly in Germany, have a strong sense of a new beginning, of a new expression of the Church springing up in the sixteenth century. And yet they happily worship in medieval churches and cathedrals where their unreformed ancestors heard mass for the living and the departed, offered prayers and gifts at the shrines of saints and made their confession to the priest. In reality, the continuity is at least as strong as the discontinuity. When the Church is looked at as a global phenomenon, what holds it together is probably as apparent as what breaks it into fragments. It may even look quite cohesive, though far from monolithic. Many churches there may be, but they all worship God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. With the notable exceptions of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Salvation Army, they practise similar forms of Christian initiation (baptism and confirmation of some sort) and celebrate the Eucharist (Holy Communion, Mass or Lord’s Supper) as their central rite. They ground their faith in God’s revelation found in the Bible (which they read and teach assiduously) and most of them use the historic creeds (the Apostles’ Creed and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed) in worship or at least as theological reference points. Almost all have a form or forms of ordained ministry, distinguished from the laity who are not ordained. The overwhelming majority of Christians are in churches that have the threefold ministry of bishops, priests (presbyters) and deacons, but some ordain only presbyters (as ministers or pastors) or only presbyters and deacons, while their senior ministers simply have wider responsibilities. They all have structures of conciliarity that enable their members or leaders to confer together and to take decisions. Considered phenomenologically, as a structured community of believers, the Christian Church is a comparatively unified entity. At the same time, it is at the institutional level that the multiplicity and diversity of churches is most apparent. The one Church of Christ that is confessed in the Creed as an article of faith may indeed be universal (catholic), but the individual churches are also now found throughout the world. During the

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

7

twentieth century, in fact, Christianity became the most extensive and universal religion in history. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are Christians and Christian churches in every country of the world.




Church, denomination and sect

Three-quarters of the totality of two billion Christians in the world today belong to the ‘traditional’ churches or, as we sometimes say, denominations. (Churches do not normally refer to themselves by the levelling sociological term ‘denomination’, but by the theological term ‘church’. It is ‘church’, not ‘denomination’ that is appropriate in ecumenical discourse.) Of the approximately 34,000 distinct Christian denominations that currently exist, most are small and local, while only about one-third of the total are the larger or historic denominations.4 In the past, larger well-established churches would dismiss their more recent smaller rivals as ‘sects’. The New Testament church has sometimes been described as a sect of first-century Judaism. That designation, though thought-provoking, is really neither correct nor helpful, since the followers of the Way (as the first Christians were called) not only saw themselves as the true or renewed Israel, the Church of the (Old) Covenant, but wished to remain in continuity with the mainstream of Judaism, and did so, with some difficulty, until the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. ‘Church’ has a range of meanings in ecclesiology today, just as it did in the apostolic church, when St Paul could speak of the church in a certain town or city, the generic church in which apostles, prophets and others ministered, and the church as the mystical body of Christ. The word church now carries a range of meanings, according to the context in which it is used, from the local congregation or parish to the national church and beyond to the universal Church. To take an English Anglican example, the statement ‘I belong to the church’ may refer to the parish (symbolized by the parish church building), to the Church of England as a national church, or to the Church catholic. Ecclesiologically, the diocese (the sphere of the bishop’s oversight and other ministry) is also ‘church’ because it is a community in which word, sacrament and pastoral care are ministered by those who have pastoral responsibility (the bishop and other clergy). While this sense of church may be unfamiliar to

4

See D. B. Barrett, G. T. Kurian and T. M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia (New York, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2001), pp. 3, 10.

8

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

ordinary Anglicans, it remains important to Anglican, Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiology. While churches are now too polite to condemn each other as ‘sects’, the term is still used descriptively in the sociology of religion. Max Weber (d. 1920) and Ernst Troeltsch (d. 1923) rehabilitated this time-worn term of disparagement, the latter developing a suggestive polarity of church-type and sect-type Christian communities in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches.5 Sects, typified by the medieval movements of protest and reform over against the all-powerful hierarchies of the Catholic Church, were characterized (according to Troeltsch) by lower social origins, alienation from the state, individualism, lay initiative, intensity of conviction, conversion and exclusive membership. However, Troeltsch pointed out that the sects preserved aspects of the authentic message of Jesus (the radical discipleship of the Sermon on the Mount) and of primitive Christianity with its way of martyrdom. They followed Christ through rejection, persecution and death. ‘Sectarian’ is still used – even by the responsible media – as a term of abuse and as equivalent to ‘extremist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ (particularly of feuding religious/political groupings in Northern Ireland). The sectarian mentality is identified as bigoted, fanatical and anti-ecumenical. But ‘sect’ as a term of opprobrium has been giving way in popular imagination to ‘cult’, an anthropological term that has been absorbed into everyday speech. A cult is a sect with mystique. ‘Cult’ often has sinister overtones. Cults are assumed to have fiendish initiation rites and to brainwash their devotees. Their powerhungry charismatic leaders are portrayed as evil and/or insane and there is a not unfounded suspicion that they tend to sexually abuse their deluded followers. If their regular thought-control processes prove insufficient, they retain their reluctant members by threats. ‘Cults’ are even more alienated from modernity than ‘sects’ and have bizarre eschatological expectations – ‘doomsday scenarios’, sometimes culminating in mass (‘assisted’) suicide. In reality, the difference between church, sect and cult is a matter of degree. One person’s sect is another person’s church. Among the thousands of denominations that exist there are many that fit the sociological description of a sect and not a few that deserve to be called cults. The ugly features of sect and cult that I have mentioned have too often found a place in the mainstream churches. In the ecumenical glasshouse in which we live today, the labels ‘sect’ and ‘cult’ are invidious and have a habit of boomeranging on their users.

5

E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches ([1912]; trans. O. Wyon, 2 vols, London: George Allen and Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1931).

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

9




Joining the Church

The subject of membership of the Church involves subtleties and paradoxes. All Christian communities have certain ceremonies of initiation and particular understandings of belonging. Almost all have a defined pattern of initiation, of which baptism and confirmation (or chrism in the case of the Orthodox) are the focal sacramental moments. But there is uncertainty among sacramentally minded Christians today (certainly among Anglicans or Episcopalians) about whether baptism constitutes complete Christian initiation, about the meaning and purpose of confirmation, and about whether baptized children should be admitted to Holy Communion before confirmation.6 One huge achievement of the ecumenical movement is agreement on a common (i.e. mutually recognized, interchangeable) baptism. But this mutual recognition is not universal since not all Greek Orthodox accept non-Orthodox baptisms and most Baptists and Pentecostalists – believing that baptism administered to infants is not real baptism – will re-baptize, on profession of faith, those who come to them from paedobaptist churches. However, the more ecumenically disposed Baptists are able to recognize a pattern of Christian initiation that is common to themselves and to paedobaptists and this is sufficient to satisfy them that candidates baptized in infancy should not be (re-)baptized.7 In addition, we should distinguish between membership of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, given in baptism, and membership of a particular Christian denomination or local church. Local membership is important to traditions of independency or congregationalism (such as Baptist churches) where Christians enter into a covenantal commitment to one another in a gathered church of professed believers. This emphasis leaves Baptists with the problem of the place and status of children within the Christian community. Children are considered not to be old enough to take responsibility for professing the faith for themselves in baptism (the human witness to faith

6

7

See P. Avis, ‘Is Baptism “Complete Sacramental Initiation”?’, Theology, CXI (861), (May/June 2008), pp. 163–69; C. J. Podmore, ‘The Baptismal Revolution in the American Episcopal Church: Baptismal Ecclesiology and the Baptismal Covenant’, Ecclesiology 6.1 (2010), pp. 1–31. See Pushing at the Boundaries of Unity: Anglicans and Baptists in Conversation (London: Church House Publishing, 2005); Conversations Around the World 2000–2005: The Report of the International Conversations between the Anglican Communion and the Baptist World Alliance (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2005); P. Fiddes, ‘Baptism and the Process of Christian Initiation’, Ecumenical Review, 54:1 (2002), pp. 48–65.

10

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

in baptism being prominent in Baptist theology). Do children belong to the Church or not? At the other end of the spectrum, Anglicanism places almost all its emphasis on membership of the Body of Christ through baptism and is relaxed about denominational loyalty. Strictly speaking, all baptized parishioners are deemed to belong to the Church of England, though they would not normally be described as ‘members’. Ministry is offered to all who will receive it and parishioners, whether baptized or not, have a right to the ministrations of the clergy, particularly in the ‘rites of passage’ – baptism and confirmation, marriage and burial or funeral rites. The Church of England is not interested in counting ‘members’, but in maximizing participation and then forming those who participate into committed disciples of Jesus Christ. Members of other Christian churches who worship in the parish church may designate themselves also ‘members’ of the Church of England and so have their names put on the church electoral roll for the purpose of taking part in church government at every level – but this is precisely an instrument of church governance and not the same as a list of members. Of course, the problem that a weak notion of membership brings is that of nominal adherence. About one-third to one-half of the population of England are members through baptism of the Church of England, but those who can realistically be described as churchgoers are only several millions – though there is a considerably larger constituency that has some form of pastoral contact with the Church of England.8 Does the scale of nominal membership discredit the Anglican approach to ministry and mission? Before leaping to this conclusion or assuming that the Church of England is a ‘worstcase scenario’ and has ‘lost’ millions of ‘members’, as is sometimes suggested, we should reflect that nominal membership is an issue for all churches. Of the well over one billion Roman Catholics in the world, only a fraction attends weekly mass or makes a regular confession to a priest. But backsliding is even more difficult to cope with in gathered church traditions, where individuals have been baptized and welcomed into membership on profession of faith and testify to having been ‘born again’, but then lapse and disappear. Where the reality of the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart and life of the believer is the criterion for membership – where experience is the test – it is much more difficult to account for backsliding than it is in a ‘folk’ church that has 8

See P. Avis (ed.), Public Faith? The State of Religious Belief and Practice in Britain (London: SPCK, 2003), especially ch. 7: D. Voas, ‘Is Britain a Christian Country?’. Also D. Voas, ‘Intermarriage and the Demography of Secularization’, British Journal of Sociology, 54:1 (2003), pp. 83–108.

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

11

a low threshold of commitment. It seems to me that neither type of church is in a position to look askance at the other where questions of belonging are concerned.




Mutual acceptance

Much of the energy of the ecumenical movement continues to be poured into attempts to bring about ‘mutual recognition’ or acceptance between separated churches, as an essential stage on the way to achieving ‘communion’ (or as some would have it, ‘full communion’) between those churches. This endeavour builds on the fact that baptism is held in common among many churches, together with the trinitarian faith that is confessed in baptism. Basic agreement in the fundamental faith of the creeds is not particularly difficult to achieve, but issues of ministerial authenticity and of sources of authority or oversight in the Church are more intractable. Growth in mutual acceptance is attained step by step with corresponding gains in practical cooperation. The Meissen Agreement of 1991 between the Church of England and the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) and the Anglican–Methodist Covenant in England of 2003 are examples of mutual recognition and commitment that attempt to heal the wounds and divisions of the past but fall short of complete ecclesial communion with an interchangeable ordained ministry. Churches that are ‘in communion’ have largely interchangeable ministers and members (e.g. the British and Irish Anglican churches and most of the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches through the Porvoo Agreement of 1996; the churches of the Anglican Communion and the Old Catholic churches through the Bonn Agreement of 1931; Anglicans/Episcopalians and Lutherans in North America through Called to Common Mission in the USA and the Waterloo Agreement in Canada). But eucharistic hospitality (welcoming each other’s members to receive Holy Communion) is practised more widely. Since the 1968 Lambeth Conference, Anglican Churches have invited baptized communicants who are in good standing in other trinitarian churches to receive the sacrament at Anglican celebrations of the Eucharist. However, eucharistic hospitality is still the exception. The Roman Catholic Church does not extend it to Protestants or Anglicans, except in exceptional or unique circumstances, including grave pastoral need. No Roman Catholic is permitted to receive the sacrament from an Anglican or Protestant minister in any circumstances.

12

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Orthodox churches are equally strict. This lack of reciprocity remains a cause of hurt and dismay.9




Great and small

Some churches are numerically huge: the Roman Catholic Church is a single global church with about 1,100 million members. It thus comprises roughly one-half of all the Christians in the world and one-sixth of the world’s population. Its ecclesiology has two main foci: the ‘local church’ or diocese and the universal Church. There is controversy in the Roman Catholic Church about the nature of the relationship between the local and the universal and about which is primary. In Roman Catholic teaching the universal Church of Christ is closely but not exclusively identified with the institutional Roman Catholic Church centred in Rome and ruled by the Pope. The parish is not as important ecclesiologically for Roman Catholics as it is for Anglicans (particularly Anglicans of the territorial Church of England) and the idea of the national church is foreign to Roman Catholicism. There are, of course, national bishops’ conferences, but these are neither ecclesiologically nor pastorally particularly significant at the present time – though many Roman Catholics would like to see Rome encouraging them to develop their potential. The Orthodox Churches, though much smaller than the Roman Catholic Church, come second in size with something in excess of 200 million members, including the family of Oriental Orthodox churches, as well as the Eastern Orthodox Churches. For the Orthodox, the Church is primarily the community gathered by the bishop at the Eucharist. Orthodox churches are self-governing (some being styled ‘autocephalous’), with their own patriarchs and metropolitans, and are not ruled by any kind of quasi-papal authority. They do not accept the jurisdiction of the Pope or the infallibility of the papal office under certain defined circumstances. The senior bishop of the Orthodox family of churches, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, enjoys nothing approaching papal status. Like the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches hold that they comprise the Church: the one Church is coterminous with Orthodoxy. Although they are deeply involved in the ecumenical 9

See the statement of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, One Bread One Body (London: CTS, 1998) and the response of the Church of England’s House of Bishops, The Eucharist: Sacrament of Unity (London: Church House Publishing, 2001).

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

13

movement and were among the founders of the World Council of Churches in 1948, this does not imply any ecclesial recognition of other Christian churches. The Orthodox hold that the faith and practice of Orthodoxy – and therefore of Christianity itself – is essentially unchanging and unchanged and that therein lies its authenticity. The Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed and Methodist families of churches muster between 70 and 80 million members each, while about 52 million of the various shades of Baptists are affiliated to the Baptist World Alliance. The Moravians, on the other hand, while they form a global church like the Roman Catholics, total less than a million members worldwide. There are some hundreds of millions of Christians in local or regional independent Pentecostal and Evangelical churches, mainly in the southern hemisphere. ‘Non-denominational’ Christianity is spreading like wildfire through China. While the historic, ‘mainstream’ churches are declining relative to the world population (though not absolutely because of substantial accessions to these traditions in the developing world), the Pentecostal and independent Evangelical churches are growing rapidly, both in relative and absolute terms. The diversity and multiplicity of the Church may, of course, be seen as one of its strengths. Like a great tree it has grown huge branches, laden with luxuriant foliage (cf. Mt. 13.31–32). The energy that the Christian faith generates is so intense that it has forced its way into many different historical forms and is still multiplying. As fast as the centripetal impulse of Christianity, seen today in the ecumenical movement, can help churches to discover their common ground, to work together and in some instances to enter into close relationships through binding agreements, the centrifugal impulse throws other parts of the Church apart, continually spawning fresh currents of Christianity and therefore new churches to add to the more than 30,000 that already exist.




The Church of Jesus?

We should pause at this point to wonder at the apparent incongruity between the Church as it has become – a great society spanning the centuries and the globe, sometimes an empire in its own right – and its unpromising beginnings in the group of confused and unreliable disciples whom Jesus of Nazareth called to work with him. Scholars are virtually unanimous that Jesus did not

14

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

consciously intend the Church as we know it and did not foresee it. Jesus believed that his mission was the harbinger of the end times (eschaton). Divine judgement would supervene and through cataclysmic events God would make a new beginning. The scholarly consensus is, therefore, that Jesus did not expect his cause to be carried forward through history in institutional form. But before we jump to the conclusion that the Church and Jesus have nothing to do with each other we should remember that ancient Israel also was the Church of God, called to be Yahweh’s instrument for the blessing of all humankind. Jesus called Israel to repentance, signifying the renewal of Israel by appointing 12 leaders who would have seats of judgement in the kingdom. Jesus linked his impending suffering, death and vindication with the coming of God’s kingdom. The inter-testamental period had seen the development of ideas of a godly remnant, a faithful, persecuted community that would carry forward God’s cause. The New Testament identifies the apostolic community with this divine purpose and sees Jesus’ death and resurrection as constituting precisely those cataclysmic events that had been foretold, bringing a new beginning to birth. The mission of the Apostles was to carry the good news (gospel) into all the world and to all nations before the ultimate fulfilment of God’s purpose in history. So there are threads of continuity, as well as of obvious discontinuity, between Jesus Christ and the Church that bears his name. However, the eschatological framework of Jesus’ ministry is a standing challenge to the over-institutionalization of the Church. The Church is called into question; it stands under judgement. There is a need for continual conversion back to Jesus and the Kingdom or Reign of God. Sometimes it is salutary to ask: What would (rather: what does) Jesus think of us now? Have we missed his way for his people? Are we taking his name in vain in much that we claim?




Monopoly and pluralism

During the past century or so there has been a conceptual revolution in the way in which diversity and unity are understood. For by far the greater part of Church history, unity has been understood in an exclusive and monolithic sense, that is to say, as uniformity. Uniformitarianism was a dominant ideological world view in all intellectual disciplines. In the early fifth century Vincent of Lérins proposed the now famous test of theological orthodoxy: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est (what has been

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

15

believed everywhere, always and by everyone). It was assumed, for basically socio-political reasons, that there could be only one valid way of worshipping, believing and practising the Christian life. Only one church could be accommodated in a state and that one was the authentic one. The security of the state was thought to be incompatible with religious pluralism. Advocates of toleration were voices crying in the wilderness – usually stifled voices. Notwithstanding the relativizing principle of cuius regio eius religio (the religion of the state followed that of the ruling house) after 1555, theologians saw the various Christian traditions as competing expressions of Christianity and of the Church. Only one church could be the ‘true church’; all others were ‘false churches’. It was then necessary to tell which was which. Both the sixteenth-century Reformers and their Roman Catholic opponents developed sophisticated tests of the true church. For the Reformers, as we see in Article 7 of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) or Article XIX of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, the true church was identified by the true preaching of the gospel and the right administration of the sacraments. Second-generation Reformers added the test or mark of pastoral oversight or effective discipline, which was arguably implicit in the ministry of word and sacrament. Champions of the Roman Catholic Church in this period, such as Cardinal Bellarmine, countered with the claims of universality, antiquity and numerical superiority, among others. Thus the Protestants tended to apply a qualitative test and the Roman Catholics a quantitative one.10 From the conversion of Constantine in AD 312 until the nineteenth or even early twentieth centuries, uniformity of belief and of worship was enforced in Europe. Religious and political requirements were seldom distinguished. In the medieval period, dissident movements such as the Bogomils, Cathars, Waldenses, Hussites and Lollards were ruthlessly persecuted. The ‘magisterial’ Reformers (those identified with the ruler and the state) urged the suppression of the Anabaptists and Separatists (who rejected the idea of a state or folk church). In England the years 1559 and 1662 saw major religious settlements enforced by Acts of Uniformity. Not until 1828–29 were disabilities suffered by Protestant Nonconformists and Roman Catholics lifted in England. The Roman Catholic Church affirmed liberty of conscience and freedom of religion for the first time at Vatican II in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, the exclusive claims of the churches and the traditions they 10 See further P. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott; Atlanta, GA: John Knox, 1981; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), part 1.

16

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

represented were being eroded by changes in the intellectual climate. The philosophes of the French Enlightenment brought a critical rationalism to bear on various forms of unquestioned, traditional authority, including that of the Roman Catholic Church. The historical movement that succeeded the Enlightenment adopted a comparative method of research that had a relativizing effect. Later, political philosophers and social scientists showed how belief and morals were influenced by social and economic factors (notably Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim respectively), while depth psychologists (pre-eminently Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung) uncovered comparable determinative factors hidden in the unconscious.11 Economic changes were decisive in prompting the churches to make a virtue of necessity and for the first time to embrace diversity on ideological grounds. One generally recognized aspect of the process of secularization that has removed the churches from the centre to near the margins of public life in Europe has been the diversification and specialization of institutions. This process, no doubt driven by economic factors, was accompanied by the breakup of state-sponsored religious monopolies and the recognition of a diversity of religious institutions within one state or nation, so driving another nail into the coffin of Christian uniformity and giving a major incremental push to pluralism in the Church.




Difference and development

Newman once asserted, ‘You cannot have Christianity and not have differences’.12 The churches have been reluctant to admit the truth of Newman’s dictum. A prior condition for the churches being able to acknowledge the sinfulness of their divisions and to begin to seek to heal the wounds of the Body of Christ is acceptance of the validity of difference within Christianity. When we accept that a diversity of expressions of Christianity and of the Church are here to stay we begin to accommodate ourselves to it. That means 11 For exposition and evaluation see P. Avis, Faith in the Fires of Criticism: Christianity in Modern Thought (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006). 12 J. H. Newman, ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’ (1841), in C. F. Harrold (ed.), Essays and Sketches (New York: Longman, 1948), vol. 2, p. 197: ‘Christianity is faith, faith implies a doctrine; a doctrine propositions; propositions yes or no, yes or no differences. Differences, then, are the natural attendant on Christianity, and you cannot have Christianity and not have differences.’

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

17

recognizing that each manifestation of the Church may have something to teach the others and that our own preferred form may lack something that others can offer. That recognition leads to trying to understand each other better and therefore talking and even worshipping together. For the past century, since the International Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910, the ecumenical movement has stood for the recognition of difference and the imperative of reconciliation and mutual affirmation, notwithstanding the differences. Through theological dialogue and shared mission, the ecumenical movement has mapped out common ground, exposed negative stereotypes and caricatures and narrowed down the real, apparently intractable differences between the churches. Difference takes both historical (diachronic) and contemporary (synchronic) forms. Diachronic difference – difference through time – raises the question of development. The theory of the proper development of belief and practice, famously proposed by Newman in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), challenges all claims (by classical Anglicanism, as well as by the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches) to have preserved the primitive pattern of Christianity unchanged, or (in the case of ‘restorationist’ Evangelical and Baptist churches) to be replicating it directly today from the pages of the New Testament. The subversive potential of development theories is incalculable and poses a threat to the authorities in the historic churches and to the dogmas and structures that they seek to uphold. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. To vary the metaphor, development is a two-edged sword.13 For example, it may be alleged that, while the universal primacy of the Bishop of Rome cannot be supported satisfactorily from the New Testament, it can be seen as a helpful, even necessary, later development (which seems to validate the papacy). But it follows from the very terms of the theory of development that St Peter could not have been the first Pope, awarded his authority over his fellow Apostles by Christ in the Gospel (which undermines official Roman Catholic claims). Again, it may be argued that the ordination of women is a necessary and helpful recent development (a development, not a sheer innovation). But the very appeal to development highlights the fact that Jesus appointed only males as his Apostles (which undermines the argument from divine intention). It is therefore not surprising that Newman 13 For a general introduction to theories of development see N. Lash, Change in Focus: A Study of Doctrinal Change and Continuity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973); A. Nichols, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990).

18

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

and other proponents of development attempt both to have their cake and eat it by insisting that Christianity develops while remaining essentially the same. Authentic developments preserve the genuine identity of Christianity and of the Church, while inauthentic developments undermine this identity. Thus a viable theory of development demands a set of tests (such as Newman proposed) and an authority that decides whether the tests have been met (for Newman this had to be the Pope, whose formal judgement was infallible – Newman’s assumption being that a probable answer was not enough and that one had to know with certitude). If there was development, there was change and therefore difference. Differences were to be argued about and therefore the Church was a polemical institution.14 To acknowledge the principle of development is to validate diversity in the Church.




Diversity and mission

The synchronic diversity – diversity across contemporary cultures – of Christianity and of its institutional expression in the churches plays a crucial part in the success of its contemporary mission. Its diversity reflects the multiplicity of cultural environments with which the churches engage, and to which they respond, in their local contexts. The infinitely diverse forms of human need and aspiration probably can find a purchase somewhere in the manyfaceted expression of Christian belief and worship. Thus the more successful the Church’s mission is, the more diverse church life becomes. Diversity can thus be seen as a function of mission.15 However, success in mission – the numerical growth of the Church – can bring adverse consequences for the churches as institutions. The greater the diversity, the more difficult it becomes for constituted authority to exercise control. To be geared up for mission means to be adaptable and flexible and open to new movements of the Spirit. This cannot be achieved without some loosening of institutional ties. When the grip of the institution is weakened, accountability is weakened and there is less constraint on the exercise of power 14 For Newman’s theory of development see J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Doctrine (1845), in J. M. Cameron (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974); N. Lash, Newman on Development (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975); P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 2002), pp. 250–56. 15 See the discussion in Chapter 2: ‘Rethinking Ecumenical Theology’.

The Church – Unity and Multiplicity

19

by charismatic leaders over their followers and therefore more opportunity for abuse. So mission and institution stand in tension. We see these tensions brought into focus in the relationship between ‘traditional church’ and the various forms of ‘emerging church’. As historic institutions, churches guard their identity. They preserve and propagate narratives that tell of their journey in history, of the saints and heroes, especially the martyrs – also the villains – who by their life and death have defined Christianity and the Church in that tradition. For Anglicans, the story includes Augustine of Canterbury (but also increasingly the Celtic saints), Alfred the Great, Thomas à Becket, Julian of Norwich, Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer, Elizabeth I and Richard Hooker, Charles I and William Laud – and that cursory selection takes us only to the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. The Methodist identity story seems circular rather than linear: everything circles around the work of John and Charles Wesley two and a half centuries ago and Methodists are held by their gravitational field. Lutherans adhere to Martin Luther and the answer to every question facing the Lutheran churches includes a discussion of what Luther said and did about it. The identity narrative of all churches is embedded with numinous symbols. Though the emphasis varies, such symbols as the cross, the Bible, the Eucharist and the priesthood/pastorate are the common possession of all churches. Other symbols distinguish and divide the churches from each other: the Pope for Roman Catholics, the anointed sovereign for the Church of England, parity of ministers for Presbyterians. The narratives of the churches increasingly intertwine, in a way that brings both mutual support in an increasingly indifferent world and mutual critique leading to changes in attitude and practice. The history of the Church as a society or institution has been full of surprising twists and turns; no doubt there are many more to come.




Agenda

In this first chapter we have been looking, rather phenomenologically, at the tension of unity and multiplicity in the Church. What are the implications of our discussion for the task of this book? I take my cue from some words of Keith Ward: ‘The idea of the church [sic] is distinctive to and definitive

20

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of Christianity.’16 Ward’s view of the Church is, first, that it will always be diverse in its forms and institutions and, second, that this is healthy. It will be conscious of its human weakness, but it will not relinquish its hold on its divine commission. ‘It will confess its frailty, obtuseness and liability to corruption. But it will maintain its distinctive claim that within its many forms of fellowship God acts to unite humanity, and through humanity the world, with the divine life.’17 The extraordinary paradox that we encounter in ecumenism is that the Church is taken to be central to the Christian faith – of the essence of Christianity, we might say – but equally clearly Christians are not agreed about it. The recent report of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches The Nature and Mission of the Church highlights this contradiction. In the World Council of Churches the churches come together to discuss the Church, but do so on the clear understanding that they are neither required to understand the Church in any particular way nor to recognize each other as churches. While there are large areas of convergence in the report, there is also much that has to be placed in the category of ‘unresolved issues’.18 Christians fervently believe that they are united in Christ, but they are distressingly conscious that they remain divided in the way that they participate in Christ’s Body, the Church. The Church is simultaneously united and divided. It is united and divided at the same time. We are one, but we are many. We all confess Christ, but we cannot yet do so with one voice. This is the intolerable anomaly, the ultimate aporia of Christianity. What is the theological assessment of this situation? How should we respond? Where does it leave the ecumenical movement and in particular the theological dialogue that makes rapprochement between the churches possible? The sense of cognitive dissonance to which our experience of the Church gives rise has generated this book. The tension between unity and multiplicity, communion and division, harmony and discord is the issue that I attempt to address in the chapters that follow.

16 K. Ward, Foreword to G. Mannion (ed.), Church and Religious ‘Other’ (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), p. xxi. Ward’s major discussion of the Church is Religion and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 17 Ward, Foreword, p. xxiii. 18 The Nature and Mission of the Church (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2006); P. M. Collins and M. A. Fahey (eds), Receiving ‘The Nature and Mission of the Church’ (‘Ecclesiological Investigations’, 1, London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008).

2


Rethinking Ecumenical Theology1




A crisis of ecumenism?

I

t seems to many observers that the ecumenical movement has reached a watershed. Its momentum slowed noticeably in the last decade of the twentieth century. In the first decade of the new century it has definitely been faltering. The dreams that marked the heyday of ecumenism – the dream of ‘the coming great church’ and the dream of visible unity by the year ‘whatever’ now look naive, if not foolhardy. All our ecumenical endeavours seem to be shot through with doubt and uncertainty now. Inertia and apathy confront ecumenism on every side. Idealism and vision with regard to unity are at a premium; what we often have to contend with is a combination of scepticism and pragmatism. A fresh vision is now clearly needed and ecumenical theology needs to be reconstructed. The eschatological hope of the full visible unity of the Body of Christ that has motivated the ecumenical movement for nearly a century is still valid, but the way that this is articulated theologically and practically is changing. We need to meet these challenges head on. This chapter explores two aspects of that changed perception: the relationship between unity and diversity; and the connection between unity and mission. But, first, some scene-setting comments.

1

Some material from this chapter was published in an earlier form in P. Avis, ‘Rethinking Ecumenical Theology’, in P. Avis (ed.), Paths to Unity: Explorations in Ecumenical Method (London: Church House Publishing, 2004).

22

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Few informed Christians would deny that the ecumenical movement has achieved a great deal – transforming attitudes, promoting understanding, discovering common ground, stimulating cooperation, even facilitating some structural unions. However, the classical vision of visible unity (defined as all Christians in each place in visible unity with all Christians in every place) that was pioneered by the Faith and Order movement and set out by the New Delhi Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1961 has not been translated into reality, except in a piecemeal and fragmentary way. The goal of the full visible unity of the divided Christian Church continues to be affirmed by various churches, especially by Anglicans and Roman Catholics, but the practical realization of the goal seems to be receding. On the other hand, the gains that the ecumenical movement has made have been assimilated into church life. Mutual respect, understanding and cooperation between individual Christians and between Christian churches can now largely be taken for granted. Many Christians enjoy these benefits, unaware of the effort and struggle that brought them about. To some Christians, unity is simply of the heart. Charity, and with it courtesy, is what matters. ‘Spiritual’ unity is enough. The momentum of the ecumenical movement is flagging partly because its values have been transposed into church life across the board. I suggest that three specific features of the current ecumenical mood can be discerned. First, there is a greater realism about the enduring importance of the ecclesial identity of the churches that are active in the ecumenical movement. This mood of realism acknowledges how hard won and how deeply entrenched are the various positions about the nature of the Church that are held by different Christian traditions. For some (particularly in the Lutheran tradition) the Church’s unity is given by God in the ministry of word and sacrament (Augsburg Confession, article VII) – given dynamically, kerygmatically (i.e. in the action of proclaiming the gospel), in a way that cannot be tied down structurally. Linked very often to this stance is a suspicion of visible, historical structures of oversight that stems from the opposition of the popes and many bishops to the Reformation in the sixteenth century. For others, those in the broadly Catholic tradition, the Christian Church is essentially a visible, structured community or society that continues to have a real existence through time and space. For them, the life of the visible Church has a sacramental quality; structures of ministry and oversight are the channels through which the Holy Spirit normally works. Comparable differences emerge over understandings of authority, ordination, episcopacy and universal primacy. These differences in the understanding of the Church and of its visible

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

23

unity are not minor or superficial. They reflect different theological world views, so to speak. They have to do with the relations between creation and redemption, nature and grace, matter and spirit, and to that extent they shadow the tensions in the Western philosophical tradition since the Pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato and Aristotle. Few of us who are professionally engaged in ecumenical dialogue would concede that these theological differences are completely intractable. But ecumenism is increasingly seen as the art of the possible for the basic reason that different ecclesial identities go very deep and need to be taken seriously. Second, there is an urgency about mission and specifically about evangelism in an increasingly secular and pluralist culture in which the churches find themselves steadily losing ground in numbers, resources and influence. The true ecumenist knows that unity and mission are inseparable in the purposes of God (the missio dei); that they are two sides of the one coin; that God purposed to unite all things in and through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1.10; Col. 1.20). But there are some voices in the churches that do not acknowledge any intrinsic connection between mission and unity and claim that mission can be pursued successfully without being linked to unity. I believe that what they advocate is not the kind of mission that Scripture mandates, that has theological integrity and that glorifies God. While appalling damage has been done to the mission of the gospel by the public divisions and oppositions between Christians, there is undoubtedly a unique power and effectiveness in united witness and shared service. Mission pursued without a care for unity is divorced from an essential attribute of the Church and is in danger of descending into mere pragmatism. But, on the other hand, to be credible in today’s climate, the cause of unity must be explicitly linked to the cause of mission. The quest for visible unity is not only an end in itself – because it brings to light the true nature of the Church as the indivisible Body of Christ – it is also a means to an end: persuasive, effective mission and evangelism. Third, the first two concerns taken together (the reality of ecclesial identity and the imperative of mission) highlight the reality of diversity, of difference, within the broad Christian tradition. As Newman once said, you cannot have Christianity and not have differences.2 To come up, as we sometimes do in ecumenical dialogue, against the rock of apparently intractable difference prompts much greater realism than has sometimes been the case about the sort of unity that might be desirable and achievable. The urgent

2

J. H. Newman, ‘The Tamworth Reading Room’ (1841), in C. F. Harrold (ed.), Essays and Sketches (New York: Longman, 1948), vol. 2, p. 197.

24

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

demand of mission and evangelism encourages the taking of a positive view of Christian diversity as a multi-channelled medium for the gospel. But to look at diversity and difference through rose-tinted spectacles would be a serious mistake. Diversity can cover a multitude of sins. We need to bring a hermeneutic of suspicion to bear. Careful spiritual discernment is called for. It is this third area, the relation between unity and diversity, that I want to explore more deeply next.




Taking diversity seriously

When Raymond Williams published Keywords in 1976 he saw no need to include the words ‘diversity’, ‘difference’ or ‘pluralism’.3 However, they are certainly key words today and have been for some time.4 We can begin to get something of a grip on the complex issue of diversity by distinguishing between two aspects: diachronic diversity (diversity across time – historical diversity) and synchronic diversity (diversity across space – contemporary diversity). The plurality of Christian traditions of liturgy, theology and spirituality can be viewed from both angles. The historical and the contemporary interact at every point in time and space. The two dimensions correspond to the second two of the four attributes of the Church that we confess in the ‘Nicene’ Creed: unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. Apostolicity is primarily diachronic: it refers to the calling of the Church to be faithful to the mission of the Apostles and particularly to the apostolic faith in its own ongoing mission. Catholicity is primarily synchronic: it points to the universal scope of the salvation that is offered to the world through the mission of the Church. Ecumenical theology is concerned with both diachronic and synchronic diversity in the Church. Diachronic diversity comes into play in the attempt to hear, to understand and to evaluate the different participating traditions:

3 4

R. Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976; revised 1983). Explorations of plurality in theology include D. Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity (London: SCM Press, 1987) and C. E. Gunton, The One the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). A useful discussion of the political dimension of pluralism in a theological perspective is Kristen Deede Johnson, Theology, Political Theory and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

25

their origins, stories, trajectories and memories. Synchronic diversity becomes operative in the search for a unity that has integrity while embracing diversity and allowing all the partners in the quest to contribute the distinctiveness of their communities. This interactive process of mutual learning and mutual critique marks ecumenical engagement as profoundly spiritual, relational and personal. It takes place in the mode of ‘personal knowledge’, not in the dry rational analysis of texts and concepts. It is concerned with the rapport that is created between communities, not with juggling unwieldy institutions and trying to match up asymmetrical structures. It demands the art of listening empathetically and of discerning what is dear to one’s ecumenical dialogue partner, the ecumenical ‘other’. It calls for the intellectual generosity that is able to recognize the same meaning in different words and the same values in different practices, as well as the intellectual rigour that is willing to name significant differences when they are clearly evident, rather than sweeping them under the carpet. In the last resort, ecumenical dialogue requires courage to make judgements about our own tradition, when we have made the effort to know it in its integrity, and about the tradition of others, when we have made the effort to understand that in its integrity also. At the end of the day we still have to make crucial theological judgements on which we will not all agree. We have to decide whether unity is visible and structural or not (and, if so, what sort of structures?); whether episcopacy belongs to the full visible unity of the Church or not (and, if so, what sort of bishops?); whether a universal primacy is God’s will for the Church, or not (and, if so, what sort of primacy?). In making such judgements, we are not required to play down, to relativize, the diversity of the traditions. We are not obliged to pretend per impossibile that all forms of the Church are of equal value, that all ecclesiologies stand at an equal distance from God’s will for the Church. But what we are called to discern in other churches, if we can, is their fundamental ecclesial integrity, the reality of the koinonia that they enjoy with the Father and the Son and with each other through the Holy Spirit, the authenticity of their ministries of word and sacrament, the vitality of their means of grace. We are called to seek the presence of the one Church of Jesus Christ in each other’s particular churches and to solemnly and joyfully affirm it when we find it. What role does diversity play in the New Testament itself? What is the significance of the fact that a diversity of interpretations of the gospel is enshrined in the trust deeds of Christianity, the New Testament writings? It is not controversial that the New Testament canon contains a plurality of

26

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

theologies and that there are some tensions between them (e.g. between Paul and James on faith and works and between Hebraic and Hellenistic frameworks in the Gospels).5 A special significance attaches to the fact that there are Four Gospels. This does not undermine the singularity of the one gospel of Christ (for they are each ‘the gospel according to’ Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, respectively). But it does show that the one gospel is embodied in a number of canonical narratives whose theologies cannot be fully harmonized.6 We should also take to heart the pronounced diversity of practice in the apostolic and post-apostolic churches, those closest to ‘the Christ event’. Are their differences in credal confession, in liturgy and in church order merely signs of immaturity in the infant Church, teething troubles that would eventually be overcome by a centrally policed uniformity, once the great councils had taken place? Or does the diversity of the early, undivided Church bear witness to an essential and ineradicable element in the Church’s authentic life? What is indisputable is that uniformity was not an apostolic value, though unanimity was. The theme of diversity can be related also to the doctrine of creation. The belief that God’s creative power was bound to find fulfilment in all logically compatible possibilities in the world was expressed in the medieval doctrine of divine plenitude.7 To see the force of this idea we need look no further than human nature itself. Humankind, created in the image and likeness of God, is characterized by a myriad of differences. The image of God is almost infinitely varied. No two human faces, not even those of identical twins, are completely the same. The genetic footprint of an individual is unique. Every human life is a unique total mystery, known very imperfectly to the subject of it and completely only to God. Diversity reflects both the infinite creativity of the triune God and our human experience of ‘otherness’.8 Jesus Christ himself is presented in Scripture as including in a representative way in his person the diverse plenitude of the intelligent creation. He incorporates (or recapitulates as some early Fathers said) the outworking of

5 6 7 8

J. D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (London, SCM Press, 1977; 2nd edn, 1990). J. Reumann, Variety and Unity in New Testament Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). M. Hengel, The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (trans. J. Bowden, London: SCM Press, 2000). G. N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953). I. Kindt-Siegwalt, ‘Believing in Unity and Accepting Difference’, Ecumenical Review, 51 (1999), pp. 193–201.

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

27

God’s purpose in creation. Colossians 1.15ff. brings together the particularity of the Incarnation in Jesus Christ, a single, complete person, on the one hand, and the limitless scope of created diversity on the other: ‘He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.’ Unity and diversity are ‘held together’ and cohere, without violence, in him (v. 17). In him the fullness (pleroma) of God was pleased to find a unique home (katoikesai: v. 19). In this passage fullness and totality are focused, without being diminished, in a single point: in the one who is ‘the head’, ‘the beginning’, ‘the firstborn’ – in the single person on the single cross (vv. 18–20). These reflections suggest that the ultimate eschatological unity that God intends for God’s creation is one that is rich, creative and overflowing with diversity to a degree greater than we can imagine.




Diversity, unity and mission

The Incarnation of the Son of God can be seen in this light as the unique personal fusion of unity and diversity. Jesus Christ unites the universal and the particular, the eternal and the temporal. In the Incarnation, God identifies his being and purpose in a unique, definitive way with a very specific, limited, concrete set of finite particulars that comprise the life of a first-century person who was a Jewish, Aramaic-speaking, single, male Nazarene, who worked as a carpenter and died at the age of 33. As Kierkegaard suggested, this is the significance of the Pauline phrase ‘the fullness (pleroma) of time’ (Gal. 4.4).9 But this particular event happened for the sake of universal truth, so that the blessings that flowed from the Incarnation might embrace all humankind and be relevant to all types of human experience. The particular Jesus is also the universal Christ. The value of the particular event is communicated through the universalizing power of symbol, and it is through the effective symbols that we call sacraments that we also participate in that value. Christian diversity is not only inscribed in the very ‘trust deeds’ of Christianity, the New Testament, and rooted in the apostolic and postapostolic Church. It is also inevitably generated by the success of the gospel and the expansion of the Church. Diversity characterizes the human response, inspired by the Holy Spirit, to the unfathomable richness and splendour of the

9

S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 13.

28

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

gospel. The fact of diversity signifies that a proper inculturation of the gospel has occurred. Once again we see how diversity belongs to the catholicity of the Church. The Lutheran theologian Harding Meyer suggests that when the idea of catholicity is understood as standing for the universal totality, fullness and integrity of the Church, diversity and difference are seen in a new light. ‘They no longer appear as a threat to unity. Rather they can be conceived as essential marks of unity.’10 We are familiar with the imperative of unity, expressed classically in the high priestly prayer of Jn 17.21: ‘May they all be one.’ But there is also an imperative of diversity: the Lord prays not only for his Apostles but also for all those who will come to believe in him through their witness (v. 20). They too will be touched with the glory that comes from unity in multiplicity (v. 22). The Johannine post-Resurrection appearance of Jesus by the lakeside, when under his direction the disciples land a catch of 153 large fish, yet without breaking their net, points to the same truth: multiplicity, diversity, held in unbreakable unity (Jn 21.9ff.). It is, therefore, not only unity but diversity as well that is the ecumenical imperative. The Canberra Assembly of the World Council of Churches (1991) stated: ‘Diversities which are rooted in theological traditions, various cultural, ethnic, or historical contexts are integral to the nature of communion . . . In communion diversities are brought together in harmony as gifts of the Holy Spirit, contributing to the richness and fullness of the church of God.’ It is the effectiveness of mission, as the gospel is spoken into different cultures and contexts, that is the real source of diversity in the Church. This process is circular and self-perpetuating: diversity of expressions of the gospel is an instrument of mission, corresponding to the diversity of cultures. Diversity creates a multiplicity of access points for evangelization. Therefore, just as mission creates diversity, it also demands unity, so that the diversity remains rooted in the one gospel. This suggests that ecumenism is a response to the success of mission. Successful mission is the origin of diversity.




Diversity, relativism and truth

The sheer fact of overwhelming diversity, quite apart from the various ways in which it might be evaluated, points up the role of human history and culture

10 H. Meyer, That All May be One (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), p. 51.

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

29

in shaping the Church’s belief and practice. ‘The Church’s life and work are shaped by its historical origins, by its subsequent experience, and by its endeavour to make the relevance of the gospel plain to every generation.’11 Once again, diversity is seen as an aspect of the catholicity of the gospel. But this insight has subversive implications. The catholicity of the gospel implies that the Christian faith is greater than any particular individual, any specific community or any historical period is capable of grasping. At the same time, however, it is the dimension of apostolicity that provides the vital element of continuity, of essential identity. Catholicity and diversity are balanced by apostolicity and coherence. The tension between the discontinuity of diversity and the continuity of the apostolic mission ensures that the transcendence, the sovereignty, of the gospel is upheld. We never have God’s Word under our control or within our grasp. We may have stewardship, never possession. The gospel is not free-floating – it is always embodied – but it remains free under the sway of the Spirit (Jn 3.8). When we acknowledge the principle of diversity in the expression of Christian faith, we thereby relativize our own standpoint. We cannot make absolute claims for our own particular grasp of the truth while at the same time recognizing that other interpretations have authenticity. The truth stands beyond any individual’s grasp of it. No one can hold the truth in the palm of their hand.12 However, to acknowledge diversity in principle, while it has the effect of relativizing our own grasp of truth, does not relativize the Truth itself. Truth subsists in God. Ultimately, the truth is identical with God. Jesus Christ is the definitive revelation of the truth of God in so far as that can be compressed into a single, short human life: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ (Jn 14.6). It is only our human responses to the Truth that are relativized – our failure to walk the Way and to live the Life that are Christ. This is not philosophical scepticism. That school of thought either questions whether there is an ultimate truth at all (radical scepticism); or, if the existence of truth is not challenged, doubts the human possibility of apprehending it to any meaningful extent (radical agnosticism). At any rate, it holds that systems of belief and value cannot be ultimately judged one against another. In Isaiah Berlin’s idiom, belief and value systems are incommensurable: they cannot be measured one against another. That is very different to the 11 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, The Final Report (London: SPCK/CTS, 1982), p. 59 (#15). 12 K. Koyama, ‘A Theological Reflection on Religious Pluralism’, Ecumenical Review, 51 (1999), pp. 160–71.

30

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

cognitive humility that has characterized the apophatic (via negativa) tradition within Christianity. The Cloud of Unknowing spoke of the God who could be loved but not known, loved with the heart but not known with the head.13 The apophatic tradition (the tradition of negative theology, of proceeding by stating what God is not) implies that there is much that we cannot see clearly, much that we can never know, a vast hinterland of mystery. A realist approach to diversity is one that takes difference to be (at least sometimes) cognitive, not just expressive, that is to say, the difference is in our thinking, the way we interpret the world, not just in the way we articulate our experience. It is not that various Christian traditions and theologies are all saying the same thing in different words and idioms, but that they are actually saying some different things (as well, of course, as some very important things on which they speak with one voice). Ecumenical work jumps too readily to the conclusion that differences are only semantic. To attribute oppositions in Christianity simply to differences of perspective or terminology is an attractive option that ecumenical dialogue has sometimes fallen for. However, a tough ecumenical theology will be alert to instances of real cognitive difference and will not allow sentiment or pragmatism to gloss over them.14 A serious acknowledgement of diversity has significant implications for the exercise of authority in the Church. It undermines the Church’s ability to take decisions in the realms of belief and practice that are intended to be the final word. (Certainly it rules out any claim to put an end to discussion, as has sometimes been tried.) Such statements cannot be definitive because they cannot be universal: that is to say, they cannot transcend their particular historical and cultural contexts. Even within one church different theological traditions and schools of thought find it difficult to understand each other and to hold dialogue because they are operating on somewhat different premises.15 There is a plurality of human responses to divine revelation. Given the reality of pluralism, none of these responses can be claimed to be the last word. If one tradition of response is privileged in this way, the validity of diversity, as an aspect of theological method, is undermined. You cannot impose uniformity

13 The Cloud of Unknowing (trans. C. Wolters, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). 14 D. Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) is a challenging, if not ultimately persuasive, example. 15 Attempts to grapple with this question include: K. Rahner, ‘Pluralism in Theology and the Unity of the Creed in the Church’, Theological Investigations, XI (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Seabury [Crossroad], 1974), pp. 3–23; S. W. Sykes, The Identity of Christianity (London: SPCK, 1974); P. Avis, Ecumenical Theology and the Elusiveness of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1986).

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

31

of interpretation at the same time as you affirm the authenticity of diverse ways of being a Christian in the Church. To put it another way, you cannot believe in inculturation and in uniformity at the same time. Once we acknowledge diversity, we remove the possibility of demonstrable certainty in the area of belief. No absolute, objective certainty can be predicated of any set of beliefs. This sentiment chimes in with the classic Anglican doctrine of probability that runs right through the centuries: from Hooker through the early Liberal Anglicans and Locke, to Joseph Butler, Burke, Keble and Gladstone, right up to A. E. Taylor and most recently Basil Mitchell. To take diversity seriously enhances the importance of probability as ‘the guide to life’ (Joseph Butler) and to that extent is amenable to the Anglican approach to theology which is practical and pastoral rather than speculative and dogmatic. ‘We live by faith, not by sight’ (2 Cor. 5.7). Faith brings its own assurance, its own conviction (Heb. 11.1; 6.11). This is enough to walk by in daily discipleship and gives a firm ground for hope. But it is not a basis for irreformable theological statements, binding on the conscience – as if to say: ‘You must believe in this way and this way only, or you cannot belong.’




How much diversity is compatible with unity?

The question of the mutual compatibility of unity and diversity can be posed either way round. In the past ecumenical theology has tended to ask: How much diversity is compatible with unity? But today we are more likely to ask: What sort of unity is compatible with diversity? In their internal discussions, churches and world communions wrestle with the question of the limits to diversity. How can diversity be affirmed without imperilling communion? The Fetter Lane Agreement between the Church of England and the Moravian Church offers a case study in communion and diversity. Chapter VI (paragraphs 50 and 51) contains a vision of visible unity that would not involve a loss of identity on the part of either partner. It stresses that the distinctive ethos of both traditions to a partnership should be nurtured and shared within visible unity in a number of key areas: spirituality, liturgy, hymnody, ways of doing theology, ways of being a Christian community, styles of oversight and episcopacy, styles of mission, ways of honouring the memories of our histories, commemoration of our saints, martyrs and of memorial days, links with global structures of fellowship, the honouring of other ecumenical partnerships. It claims that this approach to communion with diversity has

32

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

considerable ecumenical significance and could provide a model for a more inclusive united Church in England. It should reassure those who fear that making a commitment to visible unity might lead to a monolithic organizational structure. The guiding principle is that we should not ask of our partners more than we expect of ourselves: the unity that we seek with others cannot be less hospitable to diversity than the comprehensiveness that characterizes our own church.16 If diversity is related to the apostolicity and catholicity of the Church, it cannot be unexamined, uncritical diversity. Not all cultural forms of Christianity will be equally authentic: they need to be loyal to apostolic faith and order as grounded in the New Testament and interpreted by the ecumenical creeds. Diversity cannot be unconditionally celebrated. When, in a hackneyed expression, ecumenical texts simply invoke ‘rich diversity’, we suspect that the argument has dried up. The appeal to diversity always needs to be qualified. The qualifiers most commonly found in ecclesial texts (apart from ‘rich’) are ‘legitimate’, ‘tolerable’ or ‘salutary’. Vatican II speaks of ‘lawful diversity’, which seems to imply a strong role for the Magisterium in deciding and enforcing what diversity will be allowed. But Vatican II also helpfully emphasizes that the bonds that unite the faithful are stronger than what divides them.17 Pope John Paul II spoke of ‘unity in legitimate diversity’ in Ut Unum Sint.18 This rather suggests that, while there may be acceptable forms of diversity in the Church, there will nevertheless remain a unitary Magisterium that decides what expressions of diversity are legitimate. One shining truth to get clear is that diversity is not opposed to unity. The opposite of unity is not diversity but division. The opposite of diversity is not unity but uniformity. If we set our face against division, on the one hand, and uniformity on the other we should find ourselves steering a course towards communion in diversity.

16 Fetter Lane Common Statement: Anglican–Moravian Conversations (London: Council for Christian Unity, 1996), p. 29 (#52). 17 Gaudium et Spes: #92: W. M. Abbott, The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), p. 306. 18 J. Fameree, ‘Legitimate Diversity in the Roman Catholic Tradition, with Special Reference to the Thought of Vatican II’, One in Christ, 37:3 (July 2002), pp. 25–38.

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

33




Unity and mission: towards integration

The mission agenda and the ecumenical agenda of the churches are sometimes seen as alternative priorities, in the sense that you might have to choose between them. They are regarded by some as discrete activities that can be carried on separately, rather than as mutually dependent aspects of the one task of the Church. The indissoluble biblical and theological connection between them is not always appreciated. Putting unity and mission into separate compartments like that implies a deficient theology of both mission and unity. In the first place it involves a seriously inadequate view of mission – one that leaves the nature of the Church out of account and fails to grasp that mission is an ecclesiological matter. It tends to assume that mission is simply a matter of individuals evangelizing individuals and not also a witness of communities to communities and of a society to societies. The communities that are engaged in mission are the local churches (in episcopally ordered churches, the dioceses), made up of parishes that are themselves the church, engaging with the communities in which they are embedded. The society that engages in mission is the Church in its ordered life, with its structures of ministry and oversight. It relates as an institution to the institutions of civil society. When mission is radically individualized, however, its ecclesial nature becomes eclipsed. Mission is a holistic activity. To quote what I have argued elsewhere, it is ‘the whole Church bringing the whole Christ to the whole world’.19 Its essence is given in the threefold mandate of the risen Christ to the Apostles in the Great Commission (Mt. 28.18–20): to make disciples, to administer baptism and to teach all that Jesus had commanded. With only a little theological licence, this threefold task can be seen to correspond to the salient themes in the Church of England’s ordinals (the ordinal appended to the Book of Common Prayer 1662 and the contemporary Common Worship Ordinal). These themes are the ministry of the Word (proclaiming the gospel and teaching the faith), the celebration of the sacraments – principally baptism and the Eucharist – and the exercise of pastoral care and oversight. In turn, they relate to the threefold nature of the Church as the body of Christ: prophetic, priestly and royal. And this in turn reflects the threefold messianic identity of Jesus Christ, our great Prophet, Priest and King.

19 See P. Avis, A Ministry Shaped by Mission (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005).

34

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Mission is a task given to the Church for the sake of the world (Mk 16.15; Jn 3.16). A mission to the world as a whole can only be carried out by the Church as a whole. Mission is a profoundly ecclesial activity. As the mission entrusted to the Church as such, it demands united witness, shared service and the visible demonstration of ‘the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph. 4.3). By the same token, unity has sometimes had its own separate agenda. It has been thought to require a distinct set of ‘ecumenical’ activities, mostly additional inter-church meetings, that it is not easy to identify with the ‘core activities’ of the Church of Christ – worship, proclamation and evangelism. Tinged as it often is with sentimentality and pragmatism, ecumenism has lost credibility among those seized by the urgency of mission. Unity is not about doing extra ecumenical things, things that absorb precious time and energy, but about doing the things we should be doing in any case ecumenically: worshipping, witnessing, serving and evangelizing as one and so releasing energy rather than absorbing it. The prevalent dualistic thinking about unity and mission needs to be superseded by a holistic, integrated approach that affirms that they are bound together in the purposes of God. The report of the Anglican-Reformed International Commission God’s Reign and Our Unity (1984) noted that often the concern for evangelism, social justice and Church unity are set against each other. Its response was to affirm that ‘the Father . . . sent his Son to preach the gospel, to proclaim justice for the oppressed and to draw together all his disciples into the unity of the Godhead’. Therefore, evangelism, social justice and Church unity ‘are not conflicting concerns, but are complementary aspects of the one mission of God’.20 In the history of the Church a passionate concern for mission has sometimes led to an enhanced concern for unity. Conversely, when the imperative of unity is taken seriously, it is usually bound up with a commitment to mission. This logic makes sense: when the Church stands out from the world in a heightened concern for mission, the differences between the churches sink into the background and what they have in common becomes more prominent. For nearly a century, mission and unity have been intimately linked in ecumenism. It was when the modern missionary movement was at its peak, at the turn of the nineteenth century, and when John R. Mott’s slogan ‘The evangelisation of the world in this generation’ was coming into vogue, that

20 Anglican-Reformed International Commission, God’s Reign and Our Unity (London: SPCK; Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1984), p. 22 (#34).

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

35

the conscience of Christians involved in mission began to be troubled by the divisions within the Church. It was borne in upon Christian leaders that, while the churches were competing with one another and sometimes existed in a state of outright opposition, the credibility of the gospel was undermined, not least on the mission field, but also at home, and Christ was dishonoured. The International Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 brought together for the first time, on a world scale, the twin concerns of mission and unity and demonstrated their connection. However, the conference discovered by experience that mission and unity could not be held together if questions of doctrine and church order were excluded, as they had necessarily been in order to persuade Christian leaders of different persuasions to talk to each other. The unfinished ecclesiological business of Edinburgh 1910 was continued at the first International Faith and Order Conference at Lausanne in 1927, while mission concerns were channelled through the International Missionary Council (IMC). The IMC became part of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1961, which already included the Faith and Order and Life and Work movements. In the WCC unity and mission were united organizationally. Writing about these developments in 1954, Bishop G. K. A. Bell stressed the indissoluble connection between mission and unity. He quoted Charles Ranson of the IMC: ‘Wherever the Church recognises itself as standing in a missionary situation, the question of unity becomes vital. The complacency of the Churches concerning their disunity can only be accounted for by the loss of the conviction that the Church exists to fulfil a mission.’ It was no accident, Ranson pointed out, that the foundations of the modern ecumenical movement, with its concern for Christian unity, were laid by the missionary movement.21 Modern missiology is permeated by the idea of the missio dei: it is beginning to infuse ecumenical theology also. The concept, if not the term, originated with Karl Barth in the early 1930s.22 Barth began to speak of mission as an activity of God. At the Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council in 1952, mission was explicitly seen as deriving from the very nature of God and was interpreted in the light of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. According to this insight, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three Persons in one God, send the Church into the world. God the Holy Trinity did not send a fragmented Church into the world. God did not send a plurality of Churches into the world. The Church is called to unity because God’s mission is under way. 21 G. K. A. Bell, The Kingship of Christ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), p. 141. 22 See further S. B. Bevans and R. P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), ch. 9.

36

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

In his exposition of the theology of the New Testament, Alan Richardson wrote: Church unity is not a ‘desirable feature’ in the life of the Church; it is the condition of the Church’s existence, the test of whether the Church is the Church. A divided Church is a contradiction of its own nature as Church; it is witnessing to a falsehood. Its evangelism cannot be effective . . . If we took the New Testament point of view seriously, we should expect to find that the single most serious obstacle to the evangelization of the world is the disunity of ‘the churches’.23




Sending and gathering

Unity and mission are bound together in God’s undivided purpose to reconcile all things through Christ. Because they are held together in God’s salvific purpose, there is always a unity dimension of mission and a mission dimension of unity. The great theme that runs through Scripture can be construed under the rubric of sending and gathering. These two verbs encompass God’s salvific action in the world, the missio dei. God is at work in the world, expressing God’s gracious purpose in this twofold way. This divine action is the action of the triune God. According to the wisdom of the early Fathers, the action of God ab extra is the action of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity acting indivisibly, so to speak. There is a triune action in sending. The Father sends the Son into the world out of love for the world. The Father and the Son together send the Holy Spirit upon the Church to empower its mission. The risen Christ sends the Apostles into the world on behalf of the Father, at the same time enduing them with the Holy Spirit (Jn 3.16; 8.18, 29, 42; 17.18; 14.16, 26; 15.26; 16.7; 20.21; Mt. 28.19; Lk. 24.49). As Paul Fiddes puts it: ‘The reason why mission is of the very being of the church is that mission is not just imitating the sending forth of Jesus. It is a participation in the Father’s own sending forth of the Son.’24 23 A. Richardson, An Introduction to the Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1958), p. 287. 24 P. Fiddes, Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology (Carlisle and Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster Press, 2003), p. 251.

Rethinking Ecumenical Theology

37

There is also a triune action in gathering. The gracious purpose of ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’, that he ‘set forth’ in the coming of Jesus Christ, was ‘to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’. The pledge that this purpose will ultimately be completed is the seal of the Holy Spirit that already marks believers (Eph. 1.3–14). Against the background of triune divine action, the point is being made that he was sent to gather. In St John’s Gospel, Jesus foretells that when he is lifted up he will draw all people to himself, gathering them at the cross (Jn 12.32). John pointedly states that Caiaphas, the High Priest, prophesied unwittingly ‘that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God’ (Jn 11.51–52). There seems to be a deliberate echo here of the scattering of the peoples in judgement at the fall of the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11.8–9) and the promise to Abraham, that almost immediately follows in Genesis, that in him and his descendants all the families of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 12.2–3). In the Old Testament prophets, the promise that God will gather from among the nations his scattered people, and indeed gather the nations themselves together on Mount Zion (Jerusalem) is extensively developed (Isa. 43.5–6; 49.5–6; 60.1–16; Ezek. 37.21; 39.27, etc.). The Old Testament imagery of YHWH25 as the Shepherd of his people, gathering the scattered sheep into the fold of their own land (Ezekiel 34), is also echoed in St John. The Good Shepherd gathers the sheep, scattered by the wolf, into one fold by laying down his life in order that he might take it up again (Jn 10.11–18). Thus his redeemed people are gathered into the fold of the Church at the cross. But they can only be united in the power of his risen life. That life springs out of the cross. It is the cross on which Christ is glorified (Jn 17.1–5). The cross is planted in a garden, like the Tree of Life in Eden (Jn 19.41). It is as he displays his wounds to them that the risen Lord breathes the Holy Spirit upon them and sends them forth (Jn 20.19–23). St Paul also identifies the power of the resurrection with the Holy Spirit (Rom. 1.4; 1 Tim. 3.16). It is the Holy Spirit who enables baptized believers to enter into the reality of unity. Once you ground the sending of the Church in the triune nature of God, you infuse the idea of mission with the idea of unity. They can no longer be held in separation. You cannot speak of the one without the other. The one God cannot generate a mission that is fragmented and divided. Conversely,

25 YHWH is the English transliteration of the personal name of the God of the Hebrew Bible, and is sometimes translated: ‘I am who I am’.

38

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

the life of the Church, the face it shows to the world, must faithfully reflect the dynamic unity of the God who has sent it. The two interconnected movements of the missio dei are sending and gathering, mission and unity. The movement of sending out into the world is for the sake of gathering into the Kingdom. Neither sending nor gathering can happen without the other. The relatedness and the tension between them are grounded in the trinitarian action of God, which embraces both these movements. The action of God in the world must lead to unity because it flows from unity.

3


New Paths in Ecumenical Method 1

H

esitancy, heart searching and loss of confidence characterize the ecumenical movement at the present time. One of the signs of this mood of uncertainty is a more reflective, critical and realistic appraisal of what is meant by unity and how we hope to achieve it. Nearly a century of the churches’ quest for unity has brought some successes but many disappointments. As a result, we are more interested in taking the next tentative steps towards greater unity than in being precise about the shape of the ultimate goal. So the focus of attention now seems to be shifting away from models of unity (organic unity, reconciled diversity, full visible unity, conciliar fellowship, etc.) to stages of unity. We are more acutely aware that the numinous word ‘unity’ is far from straightforward. A doctoral thesis that I examined demonstrated exhaustively that ‘unity’ language is vulnerable to ambiguous, contradictory or even vacuous uses. The author used a Wittgensteinian notion of language games to arrive at a complex taxonomy of usages of ‘unity’ in ecumenical documents.2 The ‘halo’ of transcendence around the idea of ‘unity’ tends to disarm our critical faculties and can sometimes reduce ecumenical documents to the mere invocation of a hazy ideal – an ideal that is incapable of being

1

2

An earlier version of this paper was given at the Third Meissen Theological Conference (between the Church of England and the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) under the Meissen Agreement of 1991), Springe, Hanover, March 1999. I am grateful to the participants, and especially to Prof. Dr Dorothea Wendebourg, for helpful comments on an earlier version. A German translation, for which I am most grateful to Dr Paul Oppenheim OKR, appeared as ‘Stufen zur Einheit’, Oekumenische Rundschau 48 (1999), pp. 426–47. Simon Harrison, ‘Conceptions of “Unity” in Recent Ecumenical Discussion: A Philosophical Analysis’ (PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 1999).

40

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

implemented in practice. However, I believe that the rhetorical invocation of unity has its legitimate uses. There are very good reasons why unity is that sort of word. I am not convinced that a linguistically pure, univocal usage of ‘unity’ would get us very far. ‘Unity’ is a word, an idea that touches deep convictions and longings that have to do with wholeness and completeness, relationship and community, tradition and a sustaining vision. As such, ‘unity’ motivates individuals and groups to keep trying to realize it in practice.




Ecumenical methodology

In the present climate there is an increased interest in a critical approach to ecumenical methodology. The study of ecumenical method is a necessary attempt to be more reflective and rigorous in the ecclesiological work that is done ecumenically, especially in our bilateral and multilateral dialogues. Ecumenical methodology is clearly a branch, a subdivision, of general theological methodology. Theological methodology involves such questions as the following: What is meant by ‘method’? What method is appropriate to various theological disciplines and what is their relation to the methods of other disciplines on which they draw?3 We need only to remind ourselves here that ‘method’ means ‘following a way’. A method is a procedure that is adopted to attain a goal that we have in view. It conveys us from a starting point that is known (though imperfectly) to a destination that is actually hidden from us (otherwise we would not need a method to get there), but, nevertheless, may be obscurely discerned. Michael Polanyi shows that there are enough clues in the complex of factors that constitute the starting point of the enquiry to point us in the right direction: we already have a tacit apprehension of what we are seeking.4 A successful method transports the enquirer from the (broadly) known to the (broadly) unknown. While modern theology – whether in biblical studies or systematics (dogmatics) – is highly methodologically aware, the same cannot be said of ecumenical theology as it is practised in many dialogues between churches or world communions. Most dialogues, at least as their reports reveal them, seem to be generally deficient in methodological consciousness. 3 4

See P. Avis, The Methods of Modern Theology (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1986). M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1958); The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge, 1967).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

41

The work of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) is a case in point. Here is an example of a major, protracted and productive dialogue that seems (to a non-participant, at least) to have reflected little on its method.5 One example of this lack of reflection is the tension between ARCIC’s stated ideal of going back beyond the controversies and divisions of history to ‘the Gospels and the ancient common traditions’, on the one hand, and the evident need to refer to confessional statements and historically loaded terms (such as transubstantiation) on the other hand. There are at least two potential pitfalls in raising the methodological stakes of ecumenical theology. The first pitfall (and this applies to methodology across the board, whether theological or not) is to become fixated on the theoretical elaboration of method to the neglect of substantive theological enquiry in the realm of content (doctrine). Jeffrey Stout has memorably accused theologians of being ‘reduced to seemingly interminable methodological foreplay’.6 The answer to this jibe is to attempt to integrate method and substance in theology in a unified presentation of the given substance of Christian doctrine according to its own distinctive inherent nature and structure, as advocated and (to some extent practised in their different ways) by Karl Barth, Thomas F. Torrance, Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg, among others. But that integration is of course a methodological decision and it is extremely demanding to achieve – not least in ecumenical theology. The second pitfall in giving particular attention to theological method is to apply methodological criteria in the abstract, as it were, to ideas set down on paper, without paying due regard to the specific concrete context (Sitz im Leben) within which a given theology has been worked out. This is, just as much as the former, a detachment of method from content and may be regarded as an example of false consciousness. An antidote to this, as far as ecumenical theology is concerned, is to involve ecumenical theologians in the making of ecumenical convergence in the dialogues. The wisdom that it is better to have critics on the inside than on the outside is not so much a piece of political cynicism as an insight into productive method. To articulate a coherent and comprehensive theological method demands that the theologian be clear about the epistemological (and even perhaps the metaphysical) foundations of that method. Few will have the ability – let alone the skill and the time – to develop first an epistemology and then a 5 6

See P. Avis, Ecumenical Theology and the Elusiveness of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1986). J. Stout, The Flight from Authority (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 148.

42

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

methodology that builds on and follows from it, as Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner and Wolfhart Pannenberg did, to say nothing of Paul Tillich.7 For most of us, unpalatable though the truth may be, our methodology will be eclectic, amateur and rather ramshackle! It would be a counsel of perfection to insist that every exercise in ecumenical method should go back to first principles. It would be unreasonable to ask to see the epistemological credentials of every essay in ecumenical method. Such rigour is a luxury in workaday ecumenical theology. In practice, it is usually sufficient for any exercise in ecumenical theology (like theology in general) to meet four methodological criteria: it must be coherent, credible, critical and constructive. Briefly, these criteria can be explicated as follows:8 O

O

O

7

8 9

Ecumenical theology must be coherent. That is to say, it must be consistent within itself; the conclusions must follow logically from the premises and the argumentation. It must ‘hang together’ as a rational unity. Ecumenical theology should be credible. That is to say, it should not merely build castles in the air and play around with attractive ideas and pleasing phrases, but should carry conviction and have a purchase on reality. (Regrettably, it is necessary to state the obvious here!) This means that visions of unity must be related to what disciplines other than theology can tell us about the nature of communities and their identity, about tradition and the transmission of values and beliefs, and about authority, power and hierarchy.9 Ecumenical theology must be critical. That is to say, it should be rigorously self-reflective so that it is critical not only of the material, the ideas or the arguments that it is working on, but also critical of its own presuppositions. Self-criticism is of course the most difficult form of criticism and comes about through openness to genuine

B. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Longman, 1957); Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972); K. Rahner, Spirit in the World (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968); Theological Investigations, 23 vols (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1965–92); W. Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976); P. Tillich, The System of the Sciences (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981). P. Avis, ‘Theology in the Dogmatic Mode’, in P. Byrne and L. Houlden (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of Theology (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 976–1000; G. Jones, Critical Theology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). See P. Avis, Authority, Leadership and Conflict in the Church (London, Mowbray, 1992); S. Sykes, Power and Christian Theology (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

O

43

dialogue because dialogue holds up a mirror to the dialogue partners – it helps us to see ourselves as others see us, ecclesiologically speaking. Ecumenical theology should be constructive. That is to say, a responsible ecumenical theologian will not be content simply to point out deficiencies in the work of other ecumenical theologians or in the published reports of dialogues (that is the easy part), but will also have some constructive proposals to make. These proposals will contribute to an ongoing discussion and dialogue, improving, refining and building further on the work of others. The theologian who can only find fault lacks credibility – as well as friends!

One fruitful concept of ecumenical methodology is the idea of seeking unity by stages and we will home in on this notion shortly. This concept arises when we reflect on the question of how we attain our goal, the greater visible unity of the Church of Christ, however dimly perceived. The current interest in the notion of seeking unity by stages is a reflection of greater ecumenical realism – one might even say disillusionment. Grandiose dreams of unifying the churches have not been fulfilled. Some schemes, such as the scheme of 1969–72 to unite the Church of England and the Methodist Church of Great Britain (even though that also involved the concept of unity by stages) and the less immediately ambitious but more broadly based Covenanting for Unity scheme between the major non-Roman Catholic churches in England in 1981, failed.




Unity and eschatology

The idea of working for unity by stages is not merely a tactic of ecclesiastical realpolitik. There are sound theological reasons that commend it. If we understand the credal attributes of the Church – unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity – eschatologically, as all Christian traditions do to varying degrees, we may see the schema of seeking unity by stages in the perspective of eschatology. This places unity within the tension of promise and fulfilment and sets it under the rubrics ‘already present’ and ‘not yet completed’. The Church by its nature as the body of Christ participates in the fullness of Christ, but still aspires to have that realized in her more and more. This progressive fulfilment is not to be seen primarily in structural terms

44

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

– as though this eschatological unity could eventually be perfectly realized on earth, given the right structures. It is primarily to be understood in personal, relational and spiritual terms, that is to say, as koinonia. The further fulfilment of the unity of the church – its true and inalienable nature as the body of Christ – can only come about through a deeper mutual participation in the life and love of God through grace. The strengthening of the Church’s unity can only be a result of (and an expression of) the communion that Christians have with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit and therefore with each other (1 Jn 1.3). This spiritual causality is reciprocal. Communion (koinonia) with God through the means of grace (principally word and sacrament) increases Christian charity and therefore the spiritual unity of the heart. Fellowship (koinonia) with one another in Christian charity, as we share in the means of grace, brings us closer to the heart of God. Whichever way we look at it, the deepening of unity is not primarily structural and political but personal, relational and spiritual. However – and this is a vital caveat – the spiritual cannot flourish without the structural. I would go so far as to say it cannot exist without it in this created world. The personal and relational nature of unity as koinonia is not an invisible, ethereal, Platonic reality that is without purchase on the fabric of human life in this world and on all the complex, unsatisfactory, material ways in which that life is structured socially, economically and politically – a structuring from which the Church is by no means exempt. The Church’s existence is patterned on the Incarnation: divinity is embodied, united with humanity. The body of Christ is embedded in structures that are ultimately destined to disappear at the eschaton. Such mundane structures are inevitable in the Church. They are not alien to its life, but integral to it, because it cannot function without them. Therefore we must say that it belongs to God’s will that the Church on earth should be a structured community, that is, one that is ordered to its task of mission and provided with all the institutional means of carrying it out. If God wills that there should be structures, God must also will that those structures should be capable of serving, enhancing and even embodying that personal, relational koinonia that is the essence of unity. However, we need to remember that all ecclesial structures are provisional and imperfect. They stand always under the eschatological judgement of the kingdom of God. No church structure can be identified with the eschatological perfection of the glorious body of Christ. There must always remain an infinite qualitative distinction between any given form of the Church and the perfect realization of the Kingdom of God in the eschaton. The relation between the visible Church and the Kingdom must be

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

45

oblique and dialectical. Every such structure exists to serve the gospel through the ministry of word and sacrament and is therefore judged by the gospel. However, it would not make theological sense to imply that eschatology remains purely a limit-concept, an heuristic horizon. Eschatology must have consequences for the Church here and now. An eschatological ecclesiology is dynamic, drawing the Church towards reform and renewal, and these will have structural, even organizational consequences. The biblical image of the pilgrim people of God has entered deeply into ecumenical theology via Vatican II. But in this world, in order to avoid idolatry, the pilgrimage must remain an unending quest. It is not idolatry to believe that particular forms or structures participate (though dialectically) in the eschatological nature of the Church. If they do not, we have no business with them. The Church already participates here and now in the credal attributes of the Church, albeit very imperfectly and incompletely. If it does not it cannot be the Church. But it participates not only through word and sacrament but, derivatively, through other forms that are required by the gospel and exist to serve it. These are basically communal, collegial and personal forms of pastoral oversight (episkope). To take them in the order of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry:10 First, ‘personal’: the individual ministry of church leaders or bishops in providing word, sacrament and pastoral oversight in the churches for which they are responsible, together with the respective ministries of ordained and lay persons in their appropriate spheres. Second, ‘collegial’: the ministry that those leaders or bishops exercise collegially, primarily with one another, but also with the presbyters with whom they share pastoral responsibility, the cure (care) of souls. Third, ‘communal’: the forms of conciliarity or synodality in which leaders (bishops), presbyters and lay people take counsel together for the more effective carrying out of the Church’s mission, through consultation, reception, discernment and decision-making. We need to ask how seeking unity by stages can be reflected in these three ways. Can the structures of authority and oversight express partially and progressively the partial and progressive unity of koinonia? If they are regarded as mere human ecclesiastical arrangements that have no intrinsic relation to the ministry of the gospel through word and sacrament, the answer must be

10 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry [hereinafter BEM] (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1982), M26.

46

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

‘no’. But if they are seen as taking their place among the concrete forms that the body of Christ takes in the world (and it is never without concrete form unless we are ecclesiological Docetists or Gnostics), then a different answer is possible. To ask whether the forms or structures of the Church (though always and inevitably provisional and imperfect) can express visible unity or communion more or less adequately, more or less clearly and strongly, presupposes that there can be degrees of communion. Probably that assumption needs to be substantiated first. Not all traditions accept that communion is a matter of degree. This question is, once again, related to eschatology. The more a tradition operates with a realized eschatology, in which the fullness of God’s purposes is believed to be present here and now in the faith, worship and ministry of the Church, the less comfortable it is with the notion of degrees of koinonia. The Eastern Orthodox Churches, with their highly realized eschatology, see the Orthodox Church as the faithful, definitive embodiment of the unchanging apostolic tradition. Their two main criteria of communion – unity in the faith and unity in the bishop – are therefore quantitative, measurable criteria. A person or a church is either in communion or not. Communion is seen in rather black and white (‘either–or’) terms. At the Second Vatican Council the Roman Catholic Church moderated the realized eschatology and triumphalist ecclesiology that had sustained it through nearly two centuries of opposition. Instead, the Church is portrayed as the pilgrim people of God, travelling towards its God-appointed goal and apprehending progressively the mystery of the faith. This is an eschatology in process of realization and it entails a view of koinonia as a reality that may be more or less perfect. Given also the emphasis of Vatican II11 on the baptismal foundation of koinonia, it was possible for the council to speak of ‘a certain though imperfect communion’ (UR 3: Abbott, p. 345) between the Roman Catholic Church and non-Roman Catholics who had been baptized into the body of Christ. The Roman Catholic Church nevertheless insists that the ‘ecclesial communities’ (as it calls them) that are not in full communion with the Roman Catholic Church through the hierarchical, juridical structures that culminate in the papal office lack the fullness of the means of salvation (cf. UR 22; LG 14: Abbott, pp. 364, 33). Though this judgement is of course unacceptable – indeed offensive – to non-Roman Catholic churches, it does

11 References in the main text to Vatican II are from W. M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

47

reinforce the pattern that runs through the ecclesiology of Vatican II: communion is a matter of degrees of fullness, degrees of perfection. Though the language of fullness and perfection, applied to the visible Church, jars on the Protestant theological conscience, the suggestion that the Church fulfils its calling to various degrees, so that it is always capable of being reformed and renewed, is more palatable. The Anglican Communion does not tend to draw boundaries around the communion of the Church. The Thirty-nine Articles (following the Confessio Augustana) acknowledge that the reality of the visible Church of Christ may be identified wherever the community gathers for the ministry of the Word and the administration of the sacraments according to Christ’s institution. Since the ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ issued by the Lambeth Conference of 1920, the baptismal foundation of ecclesial fellowship has been explicitly acknowledged by the highest teaching authority of the Anglican Communion. The ordination of women to the presbyterate and the episcopate has compelled the Anglican Communion to explore the theology of koinonia to find ways of holding together those of different conscientious convictions. The Eames Commission’s reports insist, precisely in that connection, that no one should say they are absolutely out of communion with the Church and that all parties should endeavour to maintain the highest degree of communion possible.12




Stages on the way to unity

The concept of achieving unity by stages stems not only from disappointment about the fairly meagre concrete results of ecumenism and the greater ecumenical realism that resulted from this disappointment, but also from a grasp of the eschatological nature of unity, as one of the credal attributes or dimensions of the Church, which can only be realized progressively as a process in which different degrees of communion can be seen. The idea of unity by stages is far from new, but what may represent a new path in ecumenical method is the greater clarity now emerging about what those stages are and in what order they best occur.13 Whatever the origins of the idea of achieving 12 The Eames Commission: The Official Reports (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1994). 13 For another approach to the notion of unity by stages (in the context of Anglican– Roman Catholic dialogue) see E. Yarnold, ‘Reunion by Stages’, in Communion et

48

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

unity by stages, it has become increasingly accepted in ecumenical dialogue over the past 25 years. The report of the Anglican–Reformed dialogue God’s Reign and our Unity (1984) said: We are agreed that the unity we seek must be that of all Christian people . . . But since that ultimate aim cannot be achieved in one leap, it is proper to ask that churches should at all times be ready to look for opportunities for small advances towards it.14 Let us now try to identify the major steps or stages that have emerged in recent ecumenical dialogues. 1. The existence of a dialogue presupposes a prior process of general rapprochement: a protracted process of contacts and interaction that promotes greater mutual understanding and acceptance. As the churches begin to orientate to one another, they fall under the sway of each other’s gravitational pull. Ignorance, fear and hostility give way to understanding, respect and attraction. This intangible and informal process requires little in the way of permission or approval from the church authorities. Christians at every level discover Christ in one another as he is manifested in the diverse ways that they pray, worship, study the scriptures and carry out their Christian witness and service. This tacit, protracted process of mutual discovery and dawning recognition paves the way for the moment when the churches can formally recognize the Church of Jesus Christ in each other (as The Episcopal Church in the USA and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have done).15 2. But these solemn formalities can happen only after a rigorous theological enquiry, through formal dialogue, which will focus on the extent of agreement in faith, which is the sine qua non of mutual acknowledgement. All churches that are party to ecumenical dialogues recognize the crucial role of agreement in faith, though there may be a difference of emphasis. In Lutheran–Anglican dialogue in the USA, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America required assurances on doctrine, which resulted in Implications

Réunion: Mélanges Jean-Marie Tillard (Louvain, 1995). 14 God’s Reign and Our Unity (Edinburgh and London: St Andrew Press and SPCK, 1984), p. 2. 15 W. A. Norgren, and W. G. Rusch (eds), ‘Toward Full Communion’ and ‘Concordat of Agreement’ (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg; Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement, 1991).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

49

of the Gospel,16 while The Episcopal Church seemed more concerned about the threefold ministry in historical continuity (which resulted in Toward Full Communion). Agreement in faith is usually the first section of any eventual agreed statement. Where churches have condemned each other’s beliefs in the past, there is much work to be done, going back to the first principles of doctrine (as Lutherans and Anglicans have tried to do with Roman Catholics over the doctrine of justification). But where there are no mutual condemnations, where doctrine has not been an issue between them, and where churches have significant historical links, there is no need to start from scratch. Dialogues may find some of their work done for them in the form of mutually accepted creeds, related historic formularies (e.g. the Thirty-nine Articles and the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana)), and synodical resolutions that specifically refer to the partner church (e.g. the Church of England and the Methodist Church in England). In such circumstances to start doctrinal discussions de novo would be pointless, like every attempt to reinvent the wheel. 3. The first major synodical stage is that of mutual acknowledgement as churches of Jesus Christ. This mutual acknowledgement is premised on the agreement in faith (including what is believed and practised in the areas of sacraments and ministry) that has been carefully worked out in the dialogue. The Meissen Agreement17 between the Church of England and the EKD has become a paradigm of such acknowledgement. It states: ‘We acknowledge one another’s churches as churches belonging to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ and truly participating in the apostolic mission of the whole people of God.’ This constitutes a full acknowledgement on the part of each church that the other is a true and apostolic church of Christ. The importance of such a declaration can hardly be overestimated. The most fundamental claim that any Christian Church makes about itself is that it belongs to, or is a part of, the one Church of Christ. Thus the first of the Church of England’s canons (A 1) declares that it belongs to the true and apostolic Church of Christ and that no member may deny that. The Preface to the Declaration of Assent (Canon C 15) states that the Church of England is part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, worshipping the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and professing the faith uniquely revealed 16 W. A. Norgren, and W. G. Rusch (eds), Implications of the Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg; Cincinnati, OH: Forward Movement, 1988). 17 The Meissen Agreement: Texts (London: The Council for Christian Unity, 1992), #17, A(i).

50

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

in the holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic Creeds. In an act of mutual ecclesial recognition, a church is saying of another church what it says of itself. In so doing, it is relativizing itself in relation to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. It is recognizing the one Church of Jesus Christ manifested in a church that is other than – and different to – itself. The need for such a formal conciliar acknowledgement is not always appreciated. There are often already informal, tacit modes of acknowledgement: for example, common membership of an ecumenical organization (e.g. the WCC and the Conference of European Churches); cooperation in witness and service; consultation between church leaders; the practice of eucharistic hospitality; and even forms of pastoral interaction and eucharistic sharing such as those encouraged by the Church of England’s ecumenical canons. But all this is not enough. It can still leave lingering doubts about how one church really regards another. It still gives scope for individuals to assume that one church enjoys (or thinks it enjoys) advantages that the other lacks. It allows prejudiced personal opinions to undermine ecumenical goodwill. A formal synodical act of acknowledgement is intended to lay to rest all such fears, doubts, prejudices and assumptions by means of a considered, objective declaration of the ecclesial status of the churches concerned. It provides a ‘level playing field’ for the churches to consider further steps towards visible unity. The report of the Roman Catholic–Lutheran Joint Commission Facing Unity (1985) states: This act [recognition of the authenticity of ordained ministries in the respective churches] entails a recognition of the fundamental consensus that is ecclesially binding and, at the same time, a mutual recognition that in the other church the church of Jesus Christ is actualised. It declares and confirms the will of both churches to relate to each other as churches of Jesus Christ and to live in full communion (communio ecclesiarum).18 But this way of putting it raises a fundamental question: How does a church know that another church is a church belonging to the one Church of Jesus Christ? Essentially, this is an act of spiritual intuition, an operation of the sensus fidei. Just as we recognize a fellow Christian by various clues that point to the presence in that person’s life of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, so a church recognizes a sister church by various clues that reveal the Body of Christ in

18 Facing Unity (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1985), p. 57 (#124).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

51

that church. Churches see in one another ‘the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ (2 Cor. 13.14). But this kind of spiritual intuition is vulnerable to sentimentality and a relativism that is careless of truth. Objectivity is required and this is provided by a series of tests in the sphere of faith and practice. The first of these tests is variously termed a common faith, substantial agreement, consonance of faith – in other words, an affirmation of agreement in faith that allows for different historical contexts, cultural expressions and theological traditions. Following its primary statement of mutual acknowledgement as churches, the Meissen Agreement goes on to break this down in three ways: We acknowledge that in our churches the Word of God is authentically preached and the sacraments of baptism and eucharist are duly administered. We acknowledge one another’s ordained ministries as given by God and instruments of his grace . . . We acknowledge that personal and collegial oversight (episkope) is embodied and exercised in our churches in a variety of forms, episcopal and non-episcopal . . . (#17 A(ii), (iii), (iv)) Word and sacrament are required as necessary to the existence of a true church by the Confessio Augustana (Art. VII) and the Thirty-nine Articles (Art. XIX). But the ordained ministry is also implied in the requirement of the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments (they do not preach and administer themselves unaided) and so receives separate acknowledgement. The Meissen Agreement also adds a reference to pastoral oversight (episkope) as being entailed in the effective provision of a ministry of word and sacrament, its deployment and supervision. This is justified, within the Agreement, by the prior acknowledgement (following Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry) that ‘a ministry of pastoral oversight (episkope), exercised in personal, collegial and communal ways, is necessary to witness to and safeguard the unity and apostolicity of the Church’ (15 ix). The fundamental act of mutual acknowledgement is of true and apostolic churches with true and apostolic ministries of word, sacrament and pastoral oversight. The Meissen Agreement simply expounds or explicates The Augsburg Confession, Art. VII: Et ad veram unitatem Ecclesiae satis est consentire de doctrina Evangelii et administratione Sacramentorum and is true to its spirit – bearing in mind that the Lutheran confessions insist on the divine institution of the pastoral or preaching office (CA Art. V: ‘For the

52

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

obtaining of this [justifying] faith, the ministry of teaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments was instituted’).19 It is worth pausing to note carefully what the Church of England does and does not look for in order to recognize a church as true and apostolic. It does not require that the church should have bishops, and even less that it should have bishops in the historical succession. It does not insist that there be a threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons. It does, however, insist on true doctrine, grounded in Scripture and the creeds, the preaching of the Word of God, the administration of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and the provision of pastoral oversight. 4. Mutual acknowledgement does not stand alone. Ecclesial acknowledgement contains an imperative of the gospel: to attempt to realize the nature of the Church – especially its unity – together. We cannot recognize the Body of Christ in another church without the desire to share in and become united with the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity that belonging to the one Church of Christ imparts to that partner church. So acknowledgement is accompanied by mutual commitment that is premised on the agreement on the nature of visible unity. Thus in the Meissen Agreement the Church of England and the EKD commit themselves ‘to share a common life and mission’ that will advance the cause of full visible unity. ‘We will take all possible steps to closer fellowship in as many areas of Christian life and witness as possible.’ These steps are spelled out as: theological conversations ‘to encourage the reception of the theological consensus and convergence already achieved and to work to resolve the outstanding differences between us’; forms of joint oversight and consultation; sharing in worship and sacramental life, including ordinations; ministerial exchanges; eucharistic hospitality (which is encouraged); and certain forms of eucharistic sharing that fall short of interchangeability. What is significant here is that a formal act of acknowledgement, that falls short of a scheme for visible unity, nevertheless provides a sufficient basis for certain practical steps to be taken (such as shared oversight and sharing in the ministry of word and sacrament). These are steps or stages on the way to full visible unity and anticipate it, so to speak. The report of the Roman Catholic–Lutheran Joint Commission Facing Unity (1985) is instructive on the connection between recognition (acknowledgement) and further commitment.

19 P. Schaff (ed.), The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1877), pp. 11f, 10.

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

53

If in the present process of growing reciprocal recognition and reception our two churches affirm increasingly that they confess the same faith and share a common understanding of the sacraments, then they are also entitled and obliged to enter into structured fellowship with each other. With the New Testament we confess the church as ‘people of God’, as ‘body of Christ’ and as ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’. This confession does not permit us to limit the relationship between our churches to be a mere reciprocally respectful coexistence or internalization.20 Again this Lutheran–Roman Catholic document says: The growing reciprocal recognition as church thus leads us to binding common life, to active exchange and to mutual acceptance in witness, service and solidarity . . . It commits our churches . . . to a fully lived-out fellowship that requires for its realization a structured form.21 Theological acknowledgement and pastoral practice should go hand in hand. The theological work opens up the way for concrete forms of cooperation. Every step of acknowledgement should carry consequences for practice. Practical cooperation should not pre-empt agreement on the theological principles that underpin it but should follow from it. For every step of practical cooperation we should be able to show theological grounds, so that cooperation is seen as a series of considered measures based on theological principle, not on pragmatism or simply generous feelings. In the Meissen Agreement, mutual acknowledgement is the basis for some significant steps towards visible unity. But why should not mutual acknowledgement be a sufficient basis for going as far as we want to go? What more can be required for visible unity than that the churches should acknowledge one another as true churches with genuine ministries of word, sacrament and pastoral oversight? In his contribution to the Second Meissen Theological Conference, Professor Ingolf Dalferth asked: Where does the theological difference between Protestant and Anglican ordinations lie, the difference that prevents us from speaking not only of mutual recognition but also of full integration of ministries? Professor Dalferth wondered what theological significance Anglicans attribute to the threefold ministry in historical succession, such that it would add something to Protestant ministries. He

20 Facing Unity, p. 43 (#87). 21 Ibid., p. 45 (#91).

54

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

concluded that it was ‘theologically problematic’ for Anglicans to concede apostolic continuity to Protestant ministries, on the one hand, but to insist, on the other hand, that they be reincorporated into the episcopal succession in order to achieve a visible representation of the unity of the Church and full communion. He could see no theological justification for this insistence: it could only be justified from the point of view of ecclesiastical law.22 There are two sets of questions at stake here. O

O

First: what do our churches respectively believe about the nature of visible unity and particularly about its structural aspects? Is that vision of visible unity capable of being realized simply on the basis of ‘table and pulpit fellowship’ (as in the pan-Protestant Leuenberg agreement of 1973)? Are there not outstanding questions concerning the visible, structural expression of unity that need to be addressed? And are not these questions not merely matters of canon law or outward order, but profoundly ecclesiological? These are the kinds of questions on which Anglicans tend to press Lutherans for an answer. Second, and following from the first set of questions: why do Anglicans believe that ‘the historic episcopate’ (for want of a better term) is important? What is the theological assessment of both the threefold ministry and the principle of historical continuity? Are Anglicans able to show convincingly how the ministry of the bishop relates to the inalienable nature of the Church, wherever it is found, whether episcopal or non-episcopal, as one, holy, catholic and apostolic? In other words, we need to ask whether the Anglican insistence that there are further stages on the way to visible unity can be justified ecclesiologically. These are the kinds of questions on which Lutherans tend to press Anglicans.

I would begin to attempt to address these searching questions by pointing out that the mutual acknowledgement of churches does not necessarily imply that they have the same ecclesiology, though it does, I think, entail that they believe they share the fundamental principles of any Christian ecclesiology. These fundamental principles are concerned with the Christological foundation of the Church, as the Body of Christ, in the ministry of the Word and 22 I. Dalferth, ‘Ministry and the Office of Bishop According to Meissen and Porvoo: Protestant Remarks about Several Unclarified Questions’, Visible Unity and the Ministry of Oversight (London: Church House Publishing, 1997), pp. 9–48.

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

55

the sacraments. These foundational elements will be acknowledged as given in the apostolic faith and grounded in Scripture. In other words, the essential constituents or elements of the Church are derived from divine revelation. But revelation is not only given but received, not simply delivered once for all but appropriated in diverse historical, cultural, social and political contexts. This was so from the beginning. There was no moment in the life of the Church when its Christological, evangelical existence was not ‘incarnated’, embodied and inculturated in concrete structures. That is why all churches, to one degree or another, have a place for normative or primitive tradition that goes beyond what is explicitly given in Scripture. It is tradition that gives us the canon of Scripture itself, the structured rite of the Eucharist, the Creeds, the structured ministry including the episcopate and forms of conciliarity (the synodical life of the Church). The Lambeth Conference of 1930 drew an explicit parallel between the emergence of episcopacy and the emergence of the canon of Scripture and the Creeds and interpreted these as due to divine providence.23 So the apostolic faith is inevitably interpreted and applied in the specific circumstances of every age. This results in the diversity of ecclesiologies that are both cause and effect of the divisions of Christendom. All churches have ecclesiological commitments, a distinctive way of seeing the shape of the church. (The EKD contains several different ecclesiologies that reflect the confessional history of the Lutheran, Reformed and United Landeskirchen.) These ecclesiological commitments inform and influence the churches’ diverse visions of full visible unity. Anglican ecclesiology includes the threefold ministry of bishops, priests and deacons in historical continuity. Anglicans do not insist on this in order to acknowledge a church as belonging to the one Church of Jesus Christ (as the Meissen Agreement and the Anglican–Methodist Covenant testify),24 but for the sake of the full visible unity of Christ’s Church. At this point, however, a further challenge might be put. Is our ecclesiology absolute? Cannot ecumenical dialogue cause a church to modify its ecclesiology? Yes, of course it can and should! Anglican ecclesiology has been significantly changed by ecumenical involvement, particularly by BEM’s theology of apostolicity as faithfulness to the permanent characteristics of the apostolic church (BEM, M34). This has made possible mutual acknowledgement and commitment in Meissen and a more creative theology of the historic

23 The Lambeth Conference 1930 (London: SPCK, 1930), p. 115. 24 An Anglican–Methodist Covenant (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2001).

56

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

episcopate in Porvoo,25 as well as the North American relationship of ‘full communion’ between Anglicans and Lutherans. 5. A further development, which still falls short of what I understand visible unity to entail, is the possibility of collaborative episkope, the exercise of pastoral oversight, in various ways, including proclamation, teaching, mission, social action and even (most important for visible unity) ordination. Probably the first four are not controversial: Christian leaders are now used to acting together in various ways, making joint statements on issues of the day, and cooperating in mission initiatives. It is the last point, concerning sharing in each other’s ordinations, that requires further exploration. If we acknowledge another church as belonging to the one Church of Jesus Christ; if we acknowledge its ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral oversight as God-given and apostolic; if we believe that ordination is a commissioning – with authority and the gifts of the Holy Spirit – to ministry, not merely in one particular church, but in the one Church of Christ: then it seems to follow that a sharing of ministry, a collaboration in ministry, a joint exercise of ministry is appropriate and even imperative. This may still fall short of visible unity which requires a sufficient convergence of the ecclesiologies of the churches concerned to make possible full communion at the structural level (particularly in the conciliarity of synods and the collegiality of bishops with all their implications for authority). But church leaders (bishops and other senior pastors) should already stand and act together in episkope, on the basis of the mutual acknowledgements and commitments that have been made. The Meissen Agreement allows that this episkope includes taking part (with restrictions) in each other’s ordinations (17 vii): Whenever a bishop or minister accepts an invitation to take part in the ordination of another church this expresses the commitment of our churches to the unity and apostolicity of the Church. Until we have a reconciled [i.e. integrated, interchangeable], common ministry such participation in ordination cannot involve acts which by word or gesture might imply that this has already been achieved. A note adds:

25 Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe (London: Church House Publishing, 1993).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

57

For the Church of England this means that a participating bishop or priest may not by the laying on of hands or otherwise do any act which is a sign of the conferring of Holy Orders. He may take part in a separate laying on of hands as an act of blessing. This restriction, placed by Anglicans on the conduct of shared ordinations, is perhaps difficult for Protestants to understand. The Anglican position is that the full visible unity of the Church is related to its catholicity (universality) and apostolicity (continuity through history from the apostles) and so entails a visible communion in space and time. For Anglicans this unity, catholicity and apostolicity is certainly grounded in the gospel, but comes to focus in a structural way in the ministry of the bishop as a representative minister of the gospel, that is to say, of word and sacrament. Episcopal ministry bears witness, in a distinctive way, to the credal attributes of the Church. This is apparent in the whole ministry of the bishop, especially in teaching and guarding the faith, celebrating the sacraments, and providing pastoral oversight. But it comes to expression particularly clearly in ordination. Ordination should take place in a way that signifies and witnesses visibly to the unity, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church and of the ordained ministry within the Church (as representative of the royal priesthood of the community of baptized believers). The attributes of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity are signified in various ways in the act of ordination to the ministry in the Church of Christ: by the reading and preaching of the Scriptures, by the context of the Eucharist, by the stated intention of the action. It is also signified, within this context of word and sacrament, by the role of the ordaining bishop since he or she is already ordained in that ‘visible communion in space and time’, through the participation of other bishops who themselves have been so ordained. The making of bishops and presbyters in this way is thus one visible sign of the unity, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church. It is not the ground of that catholicity and apostolicity: that is given in word and sacrament as forms of the gospel which is for all places and all times. Neither is it a guarantee of the Church’s catholicity and apostolicity: that guarantee is only to be located in the gracious promise of God in the gospel that ‘the gates of hades shall not prevail’ against Christ’s Church (Mt. 16.18) – the doctrine of the indefectibility of the community of word and sacrament. The restriction of word and gesture in shared ordinations under the Meissen Agreement is intended to avoid that particular visible sign and witness being apparently shared, in a one-sided way,

58

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

with a church that does not officially accept it in the same way as Anglicans do. It is meant to honour the ecclesiological integrity of both churches. 6. In due course, after further theological convergence – especially on the nature of ordination, the ministry of bishops, and the signs of catholicity and apostolicity – this provisional arrangement, with all its incompleteness, may evolve into genuine joint ordinations, for (as Facing Unity points out), ordination is a proper function of episkope: The reciprocal recognition of ministries means essentially enabling and initiating the joint exercise of episkope out of which then the ordained ministry arises. And therefore a mutual recognition of ministries which does not initiate the joint exercise of episkope and the common ordained ministry growing out of it is insufficient for the realization of structured church fellowship.26 Joint ordinations should not be a structural device that fixes mechanically an eventual common ministry (Meissen 17 vii guards against this), but should be a natural expression of oversight that is shared as far as is possible, even when the churches concerned are not fully united. That shared oversight has theological integrity because it is grounded in a common vision of full visible unity, a fundamental agreement in the apostolic faith, mutual acknowledgement of true churches with true and apostolic ministries and sacramental means of grace, mutual commitment to cooperation and convergence. The multistranded apostolicity thus manifested cannot be thwarted by any remaining problems with regard to the integration of ministries. It must express itself in shared oversight in proclamation, teaching, mission, social concern and participation in ordinations. This ‘twin track’ approach of further theological agreement and enhanced fellowship in episkope depicts one possible route to a common, interchangeable, ordained ministry, including a common, interchangeable episcopate, that arise authentically out of the shared life, the koinonia of the churches. It could make possible a movement into full visible communion, that is, unity without reserve, without holding back, a degree of fellowship where churches are fully united, given differences of geography and language. The approach to unity outlined here means churches working as one in more and more areas of their life and mission, becoming functionally one,

26 Facing Unity, p. 56 (#119).

New Paths in Ecumenical Method

59

even before they are institutionally one. Seeking full visible communion step by step involves churches taking every opportunity to build communion at every level of the churches’ life. The unity of the Body of Christ, which is the vehicle of God’s mission in the world, will become progressively manifest, to the glory of God.

4


The Hermeneutics of Unity1

A

s a national ecumenical officer I visit interesting places, make valuable friendships and work with a wide range of ecumenical colleagues on fascinating theological questions concerning the Church, its unity and mission. When people ask me: ‘What exactly are you trying to achieve in your work?’, I reply that, in the first place, I am working for greater understanding between my own church and tradition and other churches and their traditions, and in that way laying an essential foundation for greater visible unity. The first task of ecumenical dialogue is mutual interpretation – interpreting your own tradition, especially its ecclesiology, to ecumenical partner churches, and in turn receiving their interpretation of their own traditions. We bring our perceptions of their churches and they bring their perceptions of ours. This kind of interface between the churches brings some interesting surprises: we discover that others do not believe what we thought they believed and that they do not disbelieve what we assumed they disbelieved. And they make similar discoveries about us. Above all, as we dig deep into what makes us what we are as churches, we always strike the same bedrock, the bedrock of love for Christ and his cross, and faith in his resurrection and its sustaining power. That Christological reality is revealed as the deepest root of our unity.2

1

2

An earlier version of this chapter was give at the Congrés International de Theologia ‘Paraula de Déu, Paraula sobre Déu’, Facultat de Teologia de Catalunya, Barcelona, 13–15 December 2007 and is published in Revista Catalana Teologia 33:1 (2008), pp. 137–53. A shorter version was given at a consultation, sponsored by Churches Together in England and Churches Together in Britain and Ireland in June 2008, on the World Council of Churches Faith and Order document The Nature and Mission of the Church. Cf. S. Sinn, ‘Hermeneutics and Ecclesiology’, in G. Mannion and L. Mudge (eds), The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (London: Routledge, 2007,

The Hermeneutics of Unity

61

In ecumenical work there is no substitute for meeting each other and talking through the issues. Ecumenism takes place at the interpersonal level; it is a relational activity. When we meet in dialogue, we study together, pray together, eat and relax together, as well as wrestling with problems together. Cor ad cor loquitur – heart speaking to heart, John Henry Newman’s motto. Like all forms of relationship, ecumenism shapes us and changes us. Relationships make us what we are; they constitute us as persons. We are not first of all fully formed individuals, finished products, who then present ourselves to others for a relationship. We are created as persons by our relationships with those all around us, especially ‘significant others’ such as parents, siblings, teachers, spouses and close colleagues.3 It is the same in the great enterprise of Christian unity. The experience of ecumenism enriches us, transforms us and in the end makes us different people. When enough people in the churches have been touched by the lived experience of unity and changed by it, the churches also will begin to change. But that critical mass in the churches needs to be achieved first. The churches as institutions are like huge ocean-going vessels – oil tankers or aircraft carriers – they cannot change tack quickly. Any change of direction needs to grip the whole vessel, from stem to stern; it needs to be understood on the ship’s bridge. The transforming experience of Christian unity has to pervade a church before it can influence policy and inspire reform. And reform is what it takes: a deep, penitent refreshment of our perceptions of the other and a revision of the judgements of them that have directed our stance until now.4

3

4

pp. 576–93. A Treasure in Earthen Vessels: An Instrument for an Ecumenical Reflection of Hermeneutics (Geneva: WCC, 1998). The personalist framework that is presupposed here is articulated in such works as M. Buber, I and Thou (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1937); J. MacMurray, Persons in Relation (London: Faber, 1961); A. I. MacFadyen, The Call to Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); J. D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); ibid., Communion and Otherness. ed. P. McPartlan (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006); C. Schwöbel and C. E. Gunton (eds), Persons Divine and Human (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991); P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992). On the theme of reform in the tradition of the Reformation and in the Roman Catholic Church since the mid-twentieth century see P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006), especially ch. 13.

62

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology




The ecumenical task

Deeper mutual understanding is what our work is about, because that understanding is the precondition for realizing our unity in Christ and expressing it in visible ways. Whatever goodwill individual gestures may generate, only the churches themselves, as institutions, can take steps to unity and they cannot do this unless sufficient mutual understanding has been achieved at an official level. So the test of all our efforts is whether the prerequisite of deeper mutual understanding is being achieved. Now, to seek understanding, whether of texts, cultures or communities, such as churches, is to engage in hermeneutics, the art of interpretation. Gadamer writes: ‘The way that we experience one another, the way that we experience historical traditions, the way that we experience the natural givenness of our existence and of our world constitutes a truly hermeneutic universe.’5 Looked at in this light, ecumenism is essentially a hermeneutical enterprise. To make progress in Christian unity, we need skills in the art of interpretation. So I understand the ecumenical movement as, in the first instance, a quest for mutual understanding between churches. The churches find themselves separated, for various reasons – some good, some not so good – from one another, but all the time they know that in Christ they belong together. The churches hold the unforgettable knowledge that the Church is one in Christ. This knowledge is inscribed in their DNA. In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed we confess that the Church is one. The biblical charter of Christian unity is found in Ephesians 4.4–5: ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all.’ The unity that is referred to in Ephesians is clearly not a structural, political or institutional unity (although those aspects of unity are eventually inescapable, they are not referred to in Ephesians). What that text refers to is a unity in the Spirit – the Spirit who calls God’s people together – and in the common, basic confession that is expressed in baptism. ‘In the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body’ (1 Cor. 12.13). So in one sense, according to the divine constitution of the Church of Jesus Christ, division is an impossibility. ‘Is Christ divided?’ (1 Cor. 1.13). And yet division exists. We encounter bitter division and hurtful exclusion all the time. Disunity is just as obvious in the Church as unity. We are dealing here with an intolerable anomaly, the ultimate aporia. The Church is one, but it is

5

H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975), p. xiv.

The Hermeneutics of Unity

63

obviously divided; it is united, yet remains fragmented. It is simultaneously united and divided. ‘How can these things be?’ Precisely in that unbearable tension lies the ecumenical imperative. The title of a recent book of essays, taking stock of the ecumenical movement at the beginning of the new millennium, sums it up: The Unity We Have and the Unity We Seek.6 Unity is already given in Christ and the Spirit, but the imperative, the vocation laid upon the Church is to grasp that unity and to express it. It is both gift and task. Ecumenical activity, as the drive to realize the unity that is already given, is therefore a prolonged and far-reaching search for understanding of one another. But to understand one another as churches must mean to understand the Church of Jesus Christ as it is discovered in one another. As those texts from Ephesians and 1 Corinthians remind us, we come to know the Church only in the Spirit and through the Spirit. The Spirit who resides in us, in our expression of the Church, reaches out to embrace the same Spirit who resides in our fellow Christians and in the expression of the Church to which they belong. Just as Christ cannot be divided, his Spirit cannot be divided. The Christ in us longs to be one with the Christ in them. Heart speaks to heart and spirit cries out to spirit. St Paul is saying something like this when he writes: ‘The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God’ (1 Cor. 2.10–11). The nature of the Church and the nature of its unity cannot be known in the abstract, a priori, but only through encounter with Christ in Christians and churches. It will not do to start with a paper blueprint of the Church and then measure churches against it (which is something, I confess, that we are all prone to do, and that all churches are prone to do). The Church is known in ecclesial praxis – practical experience of being the Church, shaped by theology, but not by theology alone. We come to know what the Church is through our experience of koinonia, that key New Testament Greek term that refers to a mutual participation or sharing in a reality that is greater than any partial appropriation of it. As the first letter of John puts it: ‘We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have koinonia with us; and truly our koinonia is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ’ (1 Jn 1.3). The ecumenical quest is a profoundly spiritual calling, a pilgrimage of faith. By the same token, when ecumenical activity lacks zest, and has become stale and

6

J. Morris and N. Sagovsky (eds), The Unity We Seek and the Unity We Have (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003).

64

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

dreary, that is because it has lost its way and drifted from its original calling, which is to seek Christ and the Spirit of Christ in all the manifestations of the Body of Christ, seeking to discern the Body (cf. 1 Cor. 11.29). Because ecumenism is devoted to understanding through a process of ever deeper exploration, it takes the form of a narrative quest – a search for the identity of the Church. But because the Church is Christ’s body, it is a search that is inseparable from the search for the identity of Jesus Christ, which must be the ultimate goal of all Christian theology.7 Identity is not so much a ‘given’ as a quest. The evolution of a coherent human identity over a lifetime can be seen as a narrative quest, a search for the unity of a character within a story.8 The same is true of communities and the traditions and histories that shape them: they are constantly evolving in ways that serve the long-term survival and success of the society. Similarly, the ecumenical process is a journey on which we are engaged in a search to grasp ecclesial identity – the identity of our own church and the identity of our partner churches. These identities are not given a priori, not presupposed, not fixed positions, but are unfolded, negotiated, disclosed in the process of dialogue. Only the Holy Spirit can reveal the mystery of the Church, as the Spirit bears witness to Christ in his Body. The longing for unity is undoubtedly inspired by the Holy Spirit and will be fulfilled by the Spirit, provided we allow ourselves to be led by the same Spirit, as the Apostle Paul urges (Rom. 8.14; Gal. 5.18). In Paul, as we have noted, the Spirit searches the deep things of God and makes them known to the Church. In St John’s Gospel, the Paraclete is the interpreter who makes known the things of Christ to the disciples (Jn 16.13–14). It makes sense to see the Spirit as the interpreter because the Spirit creates communion (koinonia, communio) and communion cannot come about until there is mutual understanding, rapport and trust. The Church, in which misunderstandings, distorted perceptions and competitive power struggles are endemic, is called to be a community of authentic interpretation, a community of understanding, a community of personal knowledge.9

7 8

9

Cf. H. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975); B. R. Gaventa and R. B. Hays (eds), Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1985), pp. 202–03; P. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992); P. Avis, A Church Drawing Near: Spirituality and Mission in a Post-Christian Culture (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 28–44. For the notion that we know only as whole persons see M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958) and for the application of this to theology J. Crewdson, Christian

The Hermeneutics of Unity

65

We can get to know someone only by inhabiting the same personal space as they do, interacting with them, living, working, thinking, eating and relaxing with them. After a while we begin to think that we understand them a bit. As we live together in a family, a marriage or a small community we gradually come to understand one another quite well, though there is always the possibility of a surprise. Then we say that a person has ‘acted out of character’, but what we really should say is that we did not know them as well as we thought we did. So too the ecumenical process of understanding involves interacting together in many ways and at various levels: not least by praying together, reflecting and studying together, and by cooperating and collaborating in forms of witness and mission to the wider world. I am convinced that the clearest, most authentic mutual understanding between still separated churches comes about when they work in harness as mission partners, that is to say in various forms of evangelization. Because then they are fulfilling together the primary task of the Church, which is make disciples of all nations, to proclaim the gospel to the whole creation (Mt. 28.16–20; Mk 16.15, longer ending). In this activity of mission they are closest to what it means to be the Church and this creates the conditions for knowing one another in truth.10




Reception and indwelling

The ecumenical experience has been described in terms of mutual ‘reception’.11 The notion of reception has been applied theologically in several ways: the reception of texts – say biblical or conciliar texts – by a community; the reception of certain new developments in the life of the Church, such as the ordination of women; the reception of the contributions of particular theologians, like Barth and Rahner; and the mutual reception of churches as

Doctrine in the Light of Michael Polanyi’s Theory of Personal Knowledge (Lewiston, NY/Queenstown, ON/Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994). 10 On the tasks of the Church within the missio dei and the relation between mission and ministry see P. Avis, A Ministry Shaped by Mission (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005) and [P. Avis, P. Gooder and M. Davie] The Mission and Ministry of the Whole Church (London: The Council for Christian Unity, 2007 [available from Church House Bookshop]). 11 W. G. Rusch, Ecumenical Reception (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007); P. Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004). See further Chapter 5, ‘Towards a Deeper Reception of “Reception”’.

66

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

they recognize, accept and begin to trust each other, so making possible an exchange of the gifts that they have to offer, for the sake of mutual enrichment and mutual correction. The New Testament, particularly the Pauline literature, is rich in ‘reception’ language, deriving from the Greek lambano and its cognates. Particularly apposite here is Rom. 15.7: ‘Receive [as the AV/ KJV translates proslambanesthe; accept or welcome; literally, take to yourselves, to your homes] one another, as God in Christ has received/accepted/ welcomed/taken to himself you, for the glory of God’. Ecumenical reception means churches taking one another to themselves; taking their members and ministers, their traditions and spirituality to themselves. Ecumenical reception means the symbiosis of churches, the interpenetration of traditions. Reception is a spiritual process and requires that we open ourselves to the other, giving theological hospitality, thinking more of what we can learn than of what we can teach, more of what we can receive than what we can give. What has recently been called ‘receptive ecumenism’ is the only sort of ecumenism worthy of the name and gets to the heart of what is going on when we interact ecumenically, but non-polemically.12 Alongside the word ‘reception’ I would put the word ‘indwelling’. In Michael Polanyi’s theory of ‘personal knowledge’ imaginative indwelling is what enables us to know reality. There is no knowledge without the engagement that reaches out and the openness that is willing to receive. Without those virtues, the world is a closed book and a book is a closed world. In hermeneutics it is imaginative indwelling that enable us to experience and so to understand a text or a life-form. We can only know from the inside, not as detached, impersonal observers. A text cannot ‘find us’, claim us, until we are inside it, living it, like those virtual reality headsets that seem to put the world out there right inside your head. But we have a higher mandate than philosophical ideas: the words of Jesus to the disciples in the Upper Room. The Farewell Discourses of the Fourth Gospel speak again and again of mutual indwelling, mutual abiding:13

12 ‘Receptive Ecumenism’ is the title of a research project in the University of Durham, England, headed by Prof. Paul Murray, devoted to mutual ‘ecumenical learning’. It was launched with an international conference at Ushaw College in January 2006. The proceedings are published as Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). A second conference took place in Durham in January 2009. 13 Cf. A. Lincoln, The Gospel According to St John (Black’s New Testament Commentaries: London and New York: Continuum, 2005), ad loc.

The Hermeneutics of Unity O

O

O

O

O

67

The mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son: ‘I am in the Father and the Father is in me’ (14.10). The indwelling of the Spirit in believers: ‘He dwells with you and will be in you’ (14.17). The indwelling of the Father and the Son in believers: ‘We will come to him and make our dwelling with him’ (14.23). The mutual indwelling of Jesus and believers in the parable of the vine and the branches: ‘Abide [meno] in me and I in you’ (15.4). The mutual indwelling of the Father, the Son and the disciples in the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus: ‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us . . . that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one’ (17. 21–23).

In words that have inspired the ecumenical movement from the beginning, Jesus prays for the unity of his disciples: ‘that they all may be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so may they all be in us’ (Jn 17.21, preferred reading). It is a unity such as he enjoys with the Father, a unity of origin and destination, of will and purpose, of love and all moral perfection. The unity of the disciples is a participation in the foundational unity between the Father and the Son, a mystical unity of mutual indwelling. The implication is that we cannot be indwelt by Father and Son through the Holy Spirit – we cannot participate in the trinitarian life of God – unless we are also enabled by the same Spirit to indwell one another. And that includes, I suggest, indwelling one another’s identity considered as a text that needs to be read, a life-form that has to be interpreted, a tradition that has to be followed. As a going out of oneself and taking up residence in another home, indwelling resonates with reception in its New Testament etymology, taking to oneself, receiving into one’s home.




The hermeneutics of dialogue

One prominent feature of the ecumenical movement is the theological dialogue, which is often set up on an international basis. The Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission is the one best known to Anglicans, but it is one of many. The Methodist–Roman Catholic International Commission is an estimable example. International dialogues, such as these, attract considerable

68

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

interest within the churches and their reports can arouse strong reactions. These dialogues do not drive the ecumenical movement, but they are a particular expression of its overall quest for mutual understanding. Dialogues between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, the World Methodist Council, the Lutheran World Federation, etc., are especially centres of ecumenical expectation, conductors of mutual suspicion or mutual reconciliation. The dialogues are an absolutely essential part of ecumenism because their task is to attempt theological convergence. Theological convergence, especially on the nature of the Church, is the sine qua non of ecumenism. Without theological convergence between the churches, ecumenical activity can degenerate into sentiment or pragmatism. Convergence is never complete and the concept of ‘differentiated consensus’ points to real gains in understanding while real differences remain. Convergence provides a basis for working together and worshipping together with integrity. Every initiative in shared life and mission should be based on the degree of convergence that has been achieved. And every step of convergence should be matched by steps in shared life and mission. Bill Rusch has called this practical outcome aspect of reception ‘differentiated participation’.14 Convergence makes formal mutual recognition between the churches possible and that demands mutual commitment (recognition and commitment are the standard pattern of ecumenical agreements). It is sad and frustrating for all concerned when genuine convergence is offered to the churches and seems to disappear into a Black Hole: it makes no difference in practice, or is even regarded with suspicion. It sometimes feels as though this is the case with ARCIC’s agreement on ‘Ministry and Ordination’ and ‘Eucharistic Doctrine’ in the early 1970s and with the various Anglican–Orthodox reports that have achieved broad convergence on ecclesiology.15 The extent of such convergence is very encouraging, but not particularly surprising for those who have a decent knowledge of the traditions concerned. But there are some who seem reluctant to accept the reality of deep convergence between the major Christian traditions. They prefer to maintain their entrenched positions and to define the other community in their own terms, which are usually a caricature.

14 Rusch, Ecumenical Reception. 15 ARCIC, The Final Report (London: SPCK/CTS, 1982). Anglican–Orthodox Dialogue, The Moscow Agreed Statement (London: SPCK, 1977), The Dublin Agreed Statement (London: SPCK, 1984 [includes the Moscow Statement]; International Commission for Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue, The Church of the Triune God (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2006).

The Hermeneutics of Unity

69

The dialogical method is not restricted to the prestigious international dialogues, but pervades the whole ecumenical enterprise in all its activities.16 Understanding comes through dialogue, as we question our partner and allow ourselves to be questioned. As we lay out the results of our conversation, we seek to discern threads of argument that link together, ways of saying the same thing in different words and of affirming the same underlying reality concealed beneath different philosophical models. These are the building blocks that contribute towards a common mind. Dialogue is not served by one party making lofty pronouncements that are meant to be beyond challenge or by pronouncing judgement on the other partner. Dialogue is served by patient, courteous explanation, by interpreting ourselves to one another, identifying inappropriate presuppositions, correcting misunderstandings, dealing with stereotypes and struggling to find forms of words that both can own as they recognize their own faith as it is articulated in fresh ways.17 As we feel our way towards a truth that is greater than any of us, light dawns in several areas. We learn how we appear to others – often a chastening experience. We recognize the part that fear and resentment, jealousy and desire play in distorting our perceptions. As we undergo questioning about the tradition that we represent, we may wonder whether we ourselves know it well enough – and that is as much as to say, in those circumstances, whether we know ourselves. And we come up against the fundamental hermeneutical challenge: can we know what it is like to be the other? If we cannot know what it is like to be the other, to stand in their shoes and to feel something of what they feel, even to some extent, understanding will elude us. But this enlightenment cannot be attained in any casual way; it will not drop into our hands. It has to be worked for by hard study combined with demanding spiritual discipline. We are talking about a process of education of the heart as well as of the head, an enlargement of the imagination, a purification of the intention and all in all a conversion to the Christ who indwells the other, just as he indwells us.18 In his recent work Communion and Otherness, John Zizioulas has made a bid to place otherness at the heart of Christian existence and at the centre of 16 Cf. B. Hinze, Practices of Dialogue in the Roman Catholic Church: Aims and Obstacles, Lessons and Laments (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006). A. Maffeis, Ecumenical Dialogue, trans. L. Fuchs (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005). 17 The avowed method of ARCIC is ‘to discover each other’s faith as it is today and to appeal to history only for enlightenment, not as a way of perpetuating past controversy’ (Preface to The Final Report, 1982). 18 Cf. Groupe des Dombes, For the Conversion of the Churches (Geneva: WCC, 1993).

70

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

ecclesiology. The relational ontology that he set out in Being as Communion is now developed to accentuate the tension between the two conceptual poles of integration and otherness. For Zizioulas human beings are ‘defined’ through the reality of otherness: it is what makes each person unique. We are created and destined for communion, but not without the frisson of otherness. Human beings uniquely have the capacity to combine communion and otherness: ‘only a person can express communion and otherness simultaneously’. In the Church, Zizioulas argues, communion (koinonia) does not stifle or threaten otherness, but generates it and allows it to flourish. True unity gives a place to otherness because it needs it. ‘Otherness is constitutive of unity,’ he claims. The Church can be described equally as communion in otherness or otherness in communion.19 We can conclude from Zizioulas’ exposition, that it is the reality of othernesswithin-communion that sets ecumenical hermeneutics its challenge. Although the structural, institutional results of ecumenical dialogue have been fairly meagre so far (though certainly not negligible), theological convergence has been substantial and has begun to change the way that the churches view one another and behave towards one another. The huge collections of documents in three volumes under the title Growth in Agreement testify to the extent of convergence.20 In some areas of dialogue, the participants have learned the valuable lesson that if they have not achieved 100 per cent agreement (has this ever happened?), what they should then do is not to find a form a words that glosses over and conceals real unresolved differences (what we call in English a ‘fudge’), but rather that they should set out a ‘differentiated consensus’. A differentiated consensus is (as I’ve already mentioned) an agreement that is incomplete, a statement of convergence that has limitations. You say what you can say together, and you say what you need to say separately.

19 Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, pp. 39–40, 29, 5, 76. W. C. Ingle-Gillis is on a similar wavelength when, within the framework of relational ontology, he insists that ‘plurality’ is ‘an ontologically significant fact of Church life’: The Trinity and Ecumenical Church Thought (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), p. 171. See also on this theme the studies collected in G. Mannion (ed.), Church and Religious ‘Other’ (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008). Miroslav Volf argues in Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville, TS: Abingdon Press, 2002) that ‘various kinds of cultural “cleansings” demand of us to place identity and otherness at the centre of theological reflection on social realities’ (p.17, italics in original). 20 H. Meyer and L. Vischer (eds), Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level (New York: Paulist Press; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1984); J. Gros, H. Meyer and W. G. Rusch (eds), Growth in Agreement II (Geneva: World Council of Churches; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); J. Gros, T. F. Best and L. F. Fuchs (eds), Growth in Agreement III (Geneva: World Council of Churches; Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2007).

The Hermeneutics of Unity

71

You flag up issues for further work. Differentiated consensus represents the convergence of two lines of tradition that have approached each other but have not yet met and joined. The outstanding example of an agreement for differentiated consensus is the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, signed by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation on Reformation Day, 31 October 1999.21




The hermeneutical task of ecumenism

I have been arguing that the search for Christian unity is essentially a hermeneutical matter, concerned with achieving mutual understanding between communities and traditions. Though there is a ‘family resemblance’ between these communities and traditions, there is also difference and the experience of otherness.22 Forms of Christianity that are not our own are sufficiently similar to allow us to indwell them to some extent: we can identify with them, own them and feel, up to a point, that this church is our concern, not merely someone else’s. The tension between sameness and difference makes it possible for us to ‘have a stake’ in them, while not belonging to them. At the end of the first conference on Receptive Ecumenism (see n. 12), I felt that I too had a stake in the Roman Catholic Church and that there was a sense that it was ‘my church’ – even though I know that that church does not accept my Anglican Orders and does not normally allow me to receive Holy Communion at the Eucharists that it celebrates. There is plenty of otherness in my relation to the Roman Catholic Church, but that does not entirely blot out the sense that there is a belonging, too.




Texts and trust

On the narrowest definition, hermeneutics concerns the interpretation of texts. It asks: What is a text saying? What does it mean? But in that little word ‘mean’ there lies much perplexity. There is a small philosophical industry devoted to 21 See further on differentiated consensus Rusch, Ecumenical Reception. 22 The notion of ‘family resemblances’ occurs in L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 3rd edn, 1968), p. 32 (no. 67).

72

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

the meaning of meaning! We immediately get into a multiplicity of questions about who is speaking to whom in the text. Is the meaning what the original author intended and how can we know that? And what if there is not a single author but a committee or a council, or if the text has been edited by someone else, or passed through centuries of redaction, like some of the Old Testament literature? Or do we intend the meaning as experienced by the reader today in his or her particular context, and if so, does that imply that the meaning is infinitely flexible? Without plunging into those contested issues, we can say, at the least, that there is an inescapable semantic element to hermeneutics. We know that we need to look closely at words and combinations of words in propositions of various kinds. We need to identify the genre of the statement in question, before making up our minds what it is saying. We need to be alert to the context in which the words are spoken. We need to hold back on judgement and critique, to bracket out the question of the truth or validity of the statement, until we are reasonably confident that we have understood what it ‘intends’ to say. But even then our work is hardly begun.23 Careful semantic enquiry was vital to the achievement of convergence on the doctrine of justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation (as previously between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion), in order to overcome the historic condemnations in this area of doctrine. The various scholastic senses in which the Council of Trent spoke of the ‘cause’ of justification had to be teased out. It needed to become clear that when Roman Catholics used the word ‘justification’ they included sanctification, whereas the dominant Reformation tradition used the term ‘sanctification’ to refer to a conceptually distinct process of personal growth in holiness following the act of justification. It needed to be stressed that when Reformation theologians spoke of ‘justification by faith’ they did not understand faith as simply intellectual assent or as a human work, but as a personal act of trust, a receptive appropriation of an act of God’s grace.24 23 An exhaustive survey of approaches is A. C. Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (London: Marshall Pickering, 1992). Thiselton has recently applied his hermeneutical principles to Christian doctrine – both doctrine as a task or discipline and particular doctrines – in The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). For a recent example of the application of general principles of interpretation to the Scriptures see J. Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, KY and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). 24 The main documents in this process are the Lutheran–Roman Catholic report ‘Justification by Faith’, Origins 13 (1983), pp. 277–304; ARCIC, Salvation and the Church (London: Church House, 1985); Lutheran World Federation–Roman Catholic Church, Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999). Major studies that helped pave the way for these agreements are H. Küng, Justification

The Hermeneutics of Unity

73

The dialogues set aside polemic in order to clarify misunderstandings and to overcome stereotypes. There was a will to succeed, to understand, and to reach agreement, though not at the expense of ‘fudging’ the problems. Karl Lehmann has defined hermeneutics as the attempt to reach inter-subjective agreement.25 Hermeneutics is indeed about the meeting of minds across a distance, and in that quest the study of words and statements has a vital place. In discourse about the Church, certain large and luminous words are unavoidable – words such as Church, unity, body, catholic, mission, sacrament, mass, Bible, bishop, pope. Such words are used in more than their ‘plain sense’. They are often deployed rhetorically to give signals, to mark a position, to point to an as yet not fully specified content. They are words that are invoked or declaimed, spoken in a different register to other more manageable words. I think that perhaps ‘unity’ is the most powerful of these. Unity is a luminous and indeed numinous word, a spellbinding word. It attracts and draws us, though some people seem to shrink from it. As I have already mentioned, a thesis that I examined several years ago analysed the use of the word ‘unity’ in a range of ecumenical statements. The author could find no common or coherent meaning attached to that word. The conclusion that ecumenists did not know what they were talking about when they used the word ‘unity’ was difficult to resist.26 This sort of exercise raises the question whether ecumenists are saying the same thing when they use the same words. We need to be constantly alert to that question. Some years ago Churches Together in England conducted an enquiry among its member churches on ecclesiology and unity, using a questionnaire. The first questions were: ‘What do you mean by Church?’ and ‘How do you use the word?’ Not surprisingly, the answers were multi-layered and nuanced, but they were not incoherent. We certainly need to ask: ‘When we use the same word, do we mean the same thing?’ But we might also ask: ‘Can using the same words help us to think the same thoughts?’ Words like ‘Church’, ‘unity’, ‘body’ have enormous resonances and carry an army of meanings in their wake. They are overdetermined; they have an aura and a numinous power. Is this simply because

(London: Burns and Oates, 2nd edn, 1981) and A. E. McGrath, Justitia Dei, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a brief discussion from an Anglican perspective see P. Avis, Christians in Communion (London: Geoffrey Chapman Mowbray, 1991), ch. 7. 25 K. Lehmann, ‘Hermeneutics’, in K. Rahner (ed.) (J. Cumming, ed. ET), Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi (London: Burns and Oates, 1975), p. 611. 26 Simon Harrison, Conceptions of Unity in Recent Ecumenical Discussion: A Philosophical Analysis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000 [PhD dissertation, University of Exeter, 1999]).

74

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of all the layers of history that they incorporate (as Polanyi suggested)? Or do they tap into something in the collective unconscious, in the Jungian sense; have they become symbols of what they stand for, participating in the reality that they represent? Either way, they are inevitable and unsubstitutable; no other words will quite do. Their depth cannot be understood purely analytically. They evoke a response from the whole person, one of empathy or of antipathy (in the case of bishop, pope or mass, they can be ‘neuralgic’ words). To understand how such words function in a text we need to adopt what Polanyi called the ‘fiduciary’ approach to language and to truth. We need to take language on trust and let it work within us, as well as for us. We have to trust it before we can test it. We have to indwell it before we can marshal it. As S. T. Coleridge put it, ‘words are not things, but living powers, by which the things that are of greatest importance to mankind are actuated, combined and humanized’.27 They have creative potential to call into experience the reality to which they point.28 They are words to meditate on, not to bandy about. The task of distinguishing meanings is still necessary, but it needs to be carried out in a humble awareness that the material we are handling has explosive power.




Distance and empathy If the narrowest definition of hermeneutics is the interpretation of texts, a wider application, developed by F. D. E. Schleiermacher, concerns the interpretation of all form of expression: written, oral and symbolic.29 While

27 S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, ed. J. Beer, Collected Works, vol. 9 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 10 (capitalization altered). 28 See P. Avis, God and the Creative Imagination: Metaphor, Symbol and Myth in Religion and Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). 29 For Schleiermacher, followed in this respect by Dilthey, to understand a text, we have to move beyond the actual words and to seek to understand the subjectivity of the author; thus grammatical interpretation needs to be supplemented by psychological interpretation. The aim amounts to the re-creation of the original creative act and thus even to understand an author better than he understood himself: Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 164. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. H. Kimmerle, trans. J. Duke and J. Forstman (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1977); ibid., Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For a concise introduction to Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics see Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics, ch. VI.

The Hermeneutics of Unity

75

particular techniques are still required (as in the interpretation of texts), it may be true to say that intuitive perception plays a larger role, because the data is more diverse and more dispersed and there are no technical methodological principles that enable us to grasp them as a whole. Gadamer has called these intuitive skills ‘tact’ – a particular sensitivity to and awareness of diverse contexts and a sense of how to negotiate them.30 Wilhelm Dilthey took Schleiermacher’s approach further, applying hermeneutics to the interpretation of whole ‘life-worlds’, large communities that are sustained by their traditions, including distinctive beliefs, symbols of identity, recognized moral values and mores, and structures of authority that preserve that identity by policing boundaries.31 These life-worlds may be in the past, requiring an historical (diachronic) hermeneutic, or they may be in the present, requiring a contemporary (synchronic) hermeneutic.32 In either case we come up against the problem of conceptual distance, either historical or cultural. Interpretation in the face of distance, in either context, is immensely difficult: a sense of resistance due to strangeness, of alienation, has to be overcome. As Gadamer puts it: ‘something distant has to be brought close, a certain strangeness overcome, a bridge built between the once and the now’.33 The feeling of otherness is palpable – though this strangeness, alienation and otherness are not complete, but only partial. We could not get started unless we had some ground in common. We find that common factor in the questing mind. It is the human mind and imagination that has shaped both them and us, so there is an essential affinity. In the mideighteenth century G. B. Vico wrote in his New Science: In the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been

30 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 16. 31 See H. P. Rickman (ed.), Meaning in History: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Thoughts on History and Society (London, 1961); H. P. Rickman (ed.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); W. Kluback, Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). 32 See the discussion of Dilthey, Wittgenstein and Apel in A. Thiselton, The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 55–61. 33 H.-G. Gadamer, ‘On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 22–23, cited A. C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons: New Testament Hermeneutics and Philosophical Description with Special Reference to Heidegger, Bultmann, Gadamer and Wittgenstein (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1980), p. 51.

76

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

made by men and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.34 The hermeneutic of remote life-worlds is not only supremely difficult, it is also painful. It hurts to peer into what Shakespeare calls ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’35 and it is equally painful to try to align ourselves with a community and culture that is different to our own. Vico spoke of the agonizing effort of empathy that was required, combined with strenuous research. Dilthey said that history was ‘a great dark book, the collected work of the human spirit, written in the languages of the past, the text of which we have to try to understand’.36 The hermeneutics of unity are no less challenging. The imperative of Christian unity is not selective, but all embracing, requiring an attitude of ‘all round and every level ecumenism’, whereby we take whatever steps we can to make more visible the indestructible unity of Christ’s body in the world. We may personally feel an ‘elective affinity’37 with certain Christian traditions, and be repelled by others. But perhaps we need to broaden our sympathies. To adapt a famous classical saying: I am a Christian and nothing Christian is alien to me.38 Just as, when we look at the lives of the saints, which are sometimes outwardly repellent in certain respects, we try to see Christ in them, so with Christians of traditions that leave us cold, something of Christ in them answers to something of Christ in us. As it evokes empathy, it bridges the distance.

34 G. B. Vico, The New Science, trans. and ed. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 96 (para. 331). This was Vico’s key principle verum factum. For a brief introduction see P. Avis, Foundations of Modern Historical Thought: From Machiavelli to Vico (London: Croom Helm, 1986), ch. 6. For a major account see J. Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico 1668–1744, 2 vols: I, The Early Metaphysics; II, Language, Law and History (Lewiston, NY/Queenston, ON/Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen, 1992). 35 W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, I, ii, 49. 36 Cited Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 156. It was a weakness of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics that he underplayed the problem of historical distance: it was the personal otherness of the subject that was the barrier for him. 37 Cf. J. W. Von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 38 Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto (I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me): Terence, Heauton Timorumenos, 77.

The Hermeneutics of Unity

77




Projection and enlightenment

The ecumenical enterprise is about working for deeper mutual understanding between separated Christian churches and the traditions that make them what they are. We seek to achieve this understanding through sharing in fellowship, prayer and ministry, and particularly as we join together in mission and evangelization initiatives. On a more intellectual plane, ecumenical theological dialogue works to remove misconceptions, demolish stereotypes, set out common ground and clarify remaining differences: in other words, dialogue creates understanding. For Schleiermacher, hermeneutics was ‘the art of avoiding misunderstandings’.39 The more we do understand each other, the more we will be able to accept each other. That does not mean that no deep intractable differences will be left, but understanding and acceptance are the preconditions for institutional changes that will enable us to express our indestructible unity in Christ in visible ways before the world. In the general theory of knowledge (epistemology), understanding comes when our powers of perception go out into the object (the other), and seek to indwell it. When we indwell a piece of literature, a work of art, a landscape or even the persona of another human being we internalize that object and it becomes part of our own subjectivity. This is how we come to know, to understand and to make sense of reality. But when the spirit of a person is drawn out without their being aware of it, unintentionally and unconsciously, and is installed itself, so to speak, in another, we use the psychological term projection. Projection has been defined as ‘the process by which specific impulses, wishes, aspects of the self, or internal objects are imagined to be located in some object external to oneself’.40 Here perception has become projection. Projection has a distorting effect, reshaping what it perceives in the act of appropriating it and fashioning it in its own unacknowledged image. As Jung put it: ‘Projections change the world into the replica of one’s unknown face.’41 A distorting process of projection can take place on a collective scale, as well as at the level of individuals – community to community, nation to

39 Cited in Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 163. 40 C. Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Nelson, 1968), pp. 125f. Cf. M.-L. Von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology (LaSalle: Open Court, 1980). 41 C. G. Jung, Collected Works, ed. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Bollingen Foundation; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), vol. 9 ii, p. 9.

78

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

nation and church to church. Collectivities can define themselves over against other collectivities. You name your enemy in order to know who you are. Anti-Semitism and general racism are particularly ugly and indeed lethal forms of collective projection. The two great collectivities that were antagonists in the mid-twentieth century were Fascism and Communism, both authoritarian, totalitarian ideologies. Horkheimer and Adorno developed the Freudian concept of ‘morbid projection’ as a critical tool against authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Morbid projection consists of the transference of socially taboo impulses from the social subject to the social object. In violently reacting against those impulses seen in the other, the individual is rejecting a disowned part of himself or herself. A combination of psychological analysis and ideological critique is needed to unmask it.42 In a sense that might appear rather trivial compared to the gigantic ideological conflicts of the last century, churches that live in the same space and compete for hegemony also define themselves over against one another (e.g. Roman Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland until very recently). But it applies across the board, not merely in extreme situations, that you know who you are when you know that you are not the other. Roman Catholics know that they are not Protestants and vice versa. Methodists know that they are not Anglicans, and vice versa. Orthodox know that they are not any of these. Whenever we perpetuate the stereotyping and stigmatizing that has proved so destructive in Christian history we entrench separation and division. No authentic hermeneutic is at work here. I speak with feeling because I often do not recognize my church in the way that some other churches describe it and pass judgement on it. However, where the hermeneutic of unity is allowed to do its work, we can come to see that the state of separation is at the same time a state of symbiosis – a pathological symbiosis that needs the other in order to react against it. We can truly confess to our fellow Christians in another church that we engage with: ‘We are what we are because you are what you are. We would not be what we are if it were not for you; you would not be what you are if it were not for us. We have made you what you are and you have made us what we are.’ Because we have each invested something deep and

42 M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1973), p. 192. For an examination of the concept of projection as a weapon used against Christian belief in Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and Jung, see P. Avis, Faith in the Fires of Criticism: Christianity in Modern Thought (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2006).

The Hermeneutics of Unity

79

difficult about ourselves in the other, we cannot see each other for what we are. Understanding is inhibited. When once we become aware of that strange mutual dependence and mutual investment, an enlightenment dawns in which truthful interpretation can now take place. We can bring to light the unity that exists deep down and begin to build in a visible way on that. To end, I slightly adapt a prayer from the Chapel of Scottish Churches’ House, Dunblane: As we meet others in their difference, give us the humility to listen, the patience to explain, and the courage to be vulnerable, so that others may encounter you through us and we may find you again in them.

5


Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’1

‘R

eception’ has emerged over the past twenty years as a key concept in ecumenical theology, but it is itself a notion that is in the process of being ‘received’.2 Reception is an emerging idea, an ‘open concept’ (as Gunter Gassmann calls it) that is still imperfectly understood. The nature of reception is being actively reflected upon and critically assimilated throughout the Christian Church. It is an idea whose time has come: it fits the more realistic mood of the ecumenical movement today and the fresh emphasis on its spiritual character and dynamics that we find in the notions of ‘spiritual

1

2

An earlier version of this material appeared in P. Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church: Reception, Communion and the Ordination of Women (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2004). The material was presented to the conference of the Churches Together in England Theology and Unity Group in June 2009 and I am grateful for the comments received, especially for David Carter’s contribution. For a general introduction to the concept see W. G. Rusch, Ecumenical Reception: Its Challenge and Opportunity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007); this supersedes Rusch’s earlier study, Reception: An Ecumenical Opportunity (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press/Lutheran World Federation, 1988). In addition to the various books and articles cited in this chapter, see also G. Gassmann, ‘From Reception to Unity: The Historical and Ecumenical Significance of the Concept of Reception’, in C. Podmore (ed.), Community-Unity-Communion: Essays in Honour of Mary Tanner (London: Church House Publishing, 1998), pp. 117–29; P. Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church; International Commission for Anglican– Orthodox Theological Dialogue, The Church of the Triune God [The Cyprus Agreed Statement] (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2006), Section IX: ‘Reception in Communion’; A. Houtepen, ‘Reception, Tradition, Communion’, in M. Thurian (ed.), Ecumenical Perspectives on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Geneva: WCC, 1983) is a prescient early discussion.

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

81

ecumenism’ and ‘receptive ecumenism’. Moreover, the more we work with the concept of reception, the more profound its New Testament and patristic foundations appear.3 There is an intriguing reflexivity in the application of reception. As we apply the notion of reception to particular, concrete issues in the life of the churches, so we clarify the idea itself. And as we become clearer about the idea, so, in turn, it sheds light on developments in Christian theology and practice. An approach to this elusive notion involves a kind of methodological spiral. The danger, however, is that reception, as a critically under-determined concept, can be made to mean many things and to justify almost anything. Although reception is an intrinsically dynamic idea because it has to do with processes of discernment and development, it needs to be pinned down as far as we can. Reception is a phenomenon that has always characterized the life of the Church. Although the Church of England has committed itself to ‘an open process of reception’ with regard to the decision of the General Synod in 1992 to make provision for the ordination of women to the presbyterate, and has therefore given the notion of reception some currency in its own polity, reception is not peculiar to the controversial circumstances surrounding the ordination of women in modern Anglicanism. It is endemic to the living, moving story of Church history and applies to the whole scope of the unceasing development that characterizes the theology, worship and mission of the Christian Church. However, as an idea, ‘reception’ is comparatively young and undeveloped. The nature of reception varies from one context to another. It is, therefore, continually being adapted and adjusted to meet fresh demands.




Two basic concepts of reception

The idea of reception has its origins in the history of law and has been taken up in literary theory. But in its theological guise it derives, like the ideas of collegiality and of primacy, from the ecclesiology of the Roman Catholic Church. In official Roman Catholic teaching reception refers primarily to the process of assimilation and acceptance, by the faithful, of teachings or decisions of the Magisterium. This assimilation is seen as a process of acceptance, an act

3

Summarized in Rusch, Ecumenical Reception, ch. 2.

82

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of obedience to the pastors of the Church – the college of bishops headed by the Pope, but in practice mainly the Pope himself – who are appointed to teach, rule and guide in the Church. Reception in the Roman Catholic tradition refers to the incorporation of the teaching of the Magisterium into the life of the Church. This sense is still very much the operative one in Roman Catholic ecclesiology, even though the work of many individual theologians may suggest greater elasticity, something more like a two-way traffic between the Magisterium and the faithful. The reality is that in all churches reception takes place informally as well as formally: there is spontaneous reception and guided reception, top-down and bottom-up reception. A substantial discussion of reception by J. M. R. Tillard concerns the reception within the Roman Catholic Church of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.4 Although the idea of reception could never lack nuance in the hands of a theologian as subtle as Tillard, the fact remains that, in its setting in the Roman Catholic Church, reception has strong overtones of a hierarchical, top-down approach. Within the framework of official Roman Catholic teaching, it is for those endowed with appropriate authority to say what is to be believed and what is to be practised. And it is for those who are called to obey and to follow to receive that direction of their faith and morals. As Vatican II insists: ‘In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent of soul.’ Even more so must this submission be made to the teaching of the Pope: ‘This religious submission of will and of mind must be shown in a special way to the authentic teaching authority of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra.’ The Pope’s supreme authority must be acknowledged with reverence and his judgements must be sincerely adhered to.5 As the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes clear, filial obedience to the Church’s teaching and discipline applies no less in the area of morals than it does in the area of doctrine. The faithful ‘have the duty of observing the constitutions and decrees conveyed by the legitimate authority of the Church. Even if they concern disciplinary matters, these determinations call for docility in charity.’ While acknowledging the role of the individual conscience, the Catechism insists that ‘Personal conscience and reason should not

4 5

J. M. R. Tillard, ‘Did we “Receive” Vatican II?’, One in Christ XXI (1985), pp. 276– 83. Cf. A. Grillmeier, ‘The Reception of Chalcedon in the Roman Catholic Church’, Ecumenical Review 22 (1970), pp. 383–411. Lumen Gentium 25: W. M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), p. 48.

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

83

be set in opposition to the moral law or the Magisterium of the Church.’6 It is clear that, in the official view of the Roman Catholic Church, not only the special, formal decrees of the Magisterium, but also what we might call the everyday teachings of the ‘ordinary Magisterium’ are to be received by the faithful in a spirit of meekness and docility, without questioning and without repining. As many a theologian disciplined by the Vatican can testify to his cost, whatever lip service may be paid to the sensus fidei (the intuition of the truth) of the faithful and to the supreme authority of conscience, when the chips are down the modern Roman Catholic Church insists that the role of the faithful, whether clergy or laity, is to receive, not in any sense to judge. The most that even Congar, a passionate advocate of reception, can claim for it is that it gives ‘credibility’ to the teaching of the Magisterium.7 This is a highly idealistic and actually unrealistic view of reception. Though stated in Vatican II and in the Catechism in an impressive and noble way, it neither fits the facts of Church history nor squares with the divisions that continue within the whole Christian Church over doctrine and morals. While the authorities of the Roman Catholic Church state these claims for themselves with an air of calm assurance, as though they were self-evident, the Eastern, Anglican and Protestant Churches demur. They do not accept a number of Roman Catholic dogmas and they do not concur with Roman Catholic moral teaching in several respects. It is not that Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant Christians and churches think that faith and morals are unimportant, or that they do not have their own principles of authority and structures for exercising it (albeit in most cases less rigid structures). It is simply that they do not accept the Roman Catholic Magisterium’s specific claims for its own authority. They believe that their stance is supported by the facts of history. Several scholars have recently reflected on the reception, over a period measured in decades and even in centuries, of the decisions of the early Ecumenical Councils. They have shown that their reception was a protracted, chequered and unpredictable process.8 In relation to Ecumenical Councils we can be sure that the Church Fathers who promulgated their decrees 6 7 8

Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), pp. 441f (#2037–40). Y. Congar, ‘Reception as an Ecclesiological Reality’, in G. Alberigo, and A. Weiler, Election and Consensus in the Church (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 68. For example, H. Chadwick, ‘Reception’, in C. Sugden and V. Samuel (eds), Christian Life and Witness (London: SPCK, 1997); Congar, ‘Reception as an Ecclesiological Reality’.

84

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

expected them to be received and obeyed. But the fact that, even in the case of major Councils – Nicaea (AD 325), Constantinople (381) Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451) – this was often far from being a straightforward process, even when the sanctions of the state were deployed in their support, calls into question the viability of a ‘top-down’, hierarchical understanding of reception. Henry Chadwick points out that ‘there are no great councils in the history of the Church whose decisions have not been subject to a process of critical assimilation or indeed . . . rejection’. Nicaea did not finally resolve the Christological question that was the reason for its being convoked, but simply generated more debate on the formula that it came up with. Chalcedon produced a ‘huge conflagration’.9 The history of the reception of General Councils raises issues of time scale, the provisionality of conciliar decisions and the place of active discernment on the part of all the faithful. Moreover, the hierarchical construction of reception as the acceptance of teaching given on authority does not fit several of its other modern, ecumenical contexts. O

O

O

The term reception is now applied to the assimilation of ecumenical dialogues (such as The Final Report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission) by two or more churches or communions that have reached a new understanding of one another.10 ‘Reception’ also refers to the way in which the creative contribution of an individual theologian who is of universal significance (Karl Barth or Karl Rahner perhaps) becomes absorbed into the bloodstream of the Church. Reception is also applied to the way in which the treasures of one tradition come to be shared with others. The hymns of Charles Wesley, which originated in the Church of England and the Methodist movement, but are now sung by Christians of all traditions, is a case in point. The papal ministry of universal primacy is a more controversial example, but responses to John Paul II’s Encyclical Ut Unum Sint and to the ARCIC report The Gift of Authority may show that there is potential for carefully defined aspects of this primacy to be received in informal ways.11

9 Chadwick, ‘Reception’, pp. 207–9. 10 See, for example, J. Willebrands, ‘The Ecumenical Dialogue and its Reception’, One in Christ XXI (1985), pp. 217–25; C. E. Clifford, ‘Reception of the Final Report: Beyond Strengthened Agreement’, One in Christ XXXII (1996), pp. 130–48. 11 On Ut Unum Sint (1995) see May They All Be One: A Response of the House

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’ O

85

Reception is now used in a particularly broad sense of the way in which two churches may gravitate towards each other and, through theological dialogue and various forms of practical interaction, may ‘receive’ each other as churches, so that they commit themselves to share their life and mission through some form of mutual recognition.12

What is striking in all these cases is that the process of reception is marked by the features of gradualness, mutuality, active discernment, responsibility, unpredictability and the real possibility of non-reception. These characteristics all register on the informal, personal and relational end of the scale of reception. They point to the only possible way in which one may make one’s own what offers itself from elsewhere, perhaps from a source that at first sight is unfamiliar, even alien. Reception brings its own labour pains; it is a costly and demanding process in which we, the subjects of reception, undergo deep inward change, indeed conversion to the truth of God. It is this broader, more informal and flexible model of reception that I now want to explore in relation to Anglicanism and the Anglican Communion. There are several substantial Anglican discussions of the concept of reception.13 However, these are all concerned with the issue of ecumenical reception in the context of the convergence of churches in faith and order, rather than with the reception of developments within the life of a particular tradition. It is precisely within Anglicanism, and specifically within the Church of England, that the idea of reception has undergone a further twist.

of Bishops of the Church of England to Ut Unum Sint (London: Church House Publishing, 1997). On The Gift of Authority (London: CTS; Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre; New York: Church Publishing Inc., 1999) see P. Fisher (ed.), Unpacking the Gift (London: Church House Publishing, 2002). 12 J. M. R. Tillard, ‘Reception – Communion’, One in Christ XXVIII (1992), pp. 307–22. G. Gros, ‘Reception and Roman Catholicism for the 1990s’, One in Christ XXXI (1995), pp. 295–328. 13 H. Chadwick, ‘Reception’. G. R. Evans, Method in Ecumenical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ch. 7; R. Greenacre, ‘Two Aspects of Reception’, in G. R. Evans (ed.), Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); N. Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins and the Practice of Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

86

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology




An open process of reception

The notion of reception becomes somewhat redefined when a church authority takes a decision that is then implemented in the life of that church and at the same time explicitly sets it in the context of ‘an open process of reception’. This is precisely what the Church of England, endorsed by Resolution III.2 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, has done in relation to the decision of the General Synod in 1992 to provide for the ordination of women to the presbyterate. The paradox of a formal decision within an open process raises a number of questions and has puzzled many. What is meant here? It is clear from the documentation of the 1992 legislation and of the Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 that the model of reception that is being deployed here is not hierarchical or ‘top down’. It does not have connotations of inevitable acceptance by the faithful of a decision made by the appropriate authority (in this case the General Synod of the Church of England with the approval of the Parliament of the United Kingdom). Rather, the model is one of dialogue, mutuality and provisionality. In this documentation, as in the reports of the Eames Commission,14 the process of reception is placed in the framework of communion (koinonia). Reception is thus not construed juridically but relationally. It is understood not as a political device for containing conflict, but as a spiritual reality that is endemic in the life of the Church. It is as though the Church of England has seen that reception is an inescapable ecclesial principle, one that needs to be acknowledged, owned and worked with. That church has recognized that major changes in the life of the Church and its ministry cannot be imposed by fiat, but require space and generosity and a certain amount of elasticity. Reception is seen as an aspect of communion, as a dynamic of giving and receiving, a partnership in the gospel (cf. Phil. 1.5) between all who have a stake in the issue that needs to be resolved. The open process of reception that the Church of England has embraced with respect to the ordination of women to the presbyterate makes sense against the background of Anglican ecclesiology. According to the Preface to the Declaration of Assent (Canon C 15 1(1)), the Church of England regards itself as ‘part of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’, not the whole of it. In Canon A1 it affirms that it ‘belongs to the true and apostolic 14 ‘Being in Communion’ (GS Misc 418) (London: General Synod of the Church of England, 1993); The Eames Commission: The Official Reports (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1994).

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

87

Church of Christ’, thus implying that the Church of Christ is something greater than itself. A church that confesses that, though it believes itself to be a true church, it is not the whole Church, is bound by its nature to seek some kind of ecumenical consensus for any actions that seem to widen the rifts within Christendom. And, by the same token, it is bound to do all it can to accommodate and contain those who believe that the decision in question is profoundly mistaken. Having said that, the churches in their state of separation must conduct themselves responsibly. They cannot be paralyzed by inaction simply because the whole Church cannot act together and as one. When has that ever been the case? Moreover, it is sometimes inevitable that a part of the Church will take a decision that plays into the existing divisions between the various parts of the Church. Every time the Church of England legislates for its life and mission it exacerbates the situation of separation between itself and the Roman Catholic Church (not to mention other Christian ecclesial traditions). When it makes canon law, it does not seek the approval of the Pope (who can and does promulgate canon law unilaterally for the Roman Catholic Church). When it authorizes a new set of liturgical texts it does not submit them for approval to the Vatican, as local Roman Catholic bishops’ conferences have to do. Rome does not appoint the bishops of the Anglican Communion and they do not make an unqualified submission to the Pope (entering into ‘hierarchical communion’) as a condition of their episcopal ministry. The claims of the Roman Catholic Church with regard to the papacy are still claims of universal, ordinary and immediate jurisdiction over all dioceses, bishops, clergy and faithful laity throughout the world (though, of course, these claims are not accepted by the churches of the Anglican Communion, or by the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, or by the Old Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, Baptist and other churches). The Reformation itself is the most striking example of the need for part (or parts) of the Church to take responsibility for the reform of its life even when it cannot carry the whole Church with it. It was a central plank of the Reformers’ platform that, where matters affecting salvation are concerned and where the conscience of Christian people is being harmed, a particular church has the right to take action, unilaterally if necessary, and indeed is bound to do so. We can see from the documentation of the period that the Reformation involved a set of emerging decisions that were offered precisely or an open, ecumenical process of reception. The innumerable polemical exchanges, academic disputations, formal hearings and colloquies, together with the constant Protestant appeals to a free and properly representative

88

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

General Council, surely demonstrate conclusively that, without compromising their convictions, the Reformers did indeed offer their various reforms for an open process of reception. Though this is seldom recognized, the Reformation was shot through with issues of reception.15 That stance, held by the Church of England and other reformed churches in the sixteenth century and not repudiated since, does not mean that the Church of England (or any other church for that matter) believes that it has the right to devise new doctrines. No church claims that right, certainly not the Roman Catholic Church. Every Christian church claims to hold fast to the trust deeds of Christianity, ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 1.3), the apostolic deposit of faith. But it does mean that the Church of England accepts that there is an imperative to articulate and to express apostolic doctrine in every specific context, both of time and of place. Doctrine needs to be embodied in practice and for that to happen church decisions are necessary. A decision to maintain the status quo – though an option in some circumstances – is no less a decision than a decision to make a change in a church’s practice.




Reception, tradition and mission

The decision whether or not to make a change in the teaching or practice of a church is an agonizing one, not only because not all churches move at the same time or in the same direction and therefore a change of course may generate ecumenical friction, but also because a church is unlikely to be unanimous about the merits of the proposal – in fact it may be split into majority and minority positions. Discerning the truth of change in the Church raises the question of the relation of reception to tradition. Several writers on reception point to the language of ‘handing on’ and ‘receiving’ in the New Testament (e.g. 1 Cor. 11.23; 15.1–3). Receiving and conferring are two sides of the same coin. You cannot receive something unless it is offered to you. ‘What do you have that you have not received?’ (1 Cor. 4.7). Receiving is an act of appropriation of what is being held out to us. What God has given is in the first place his love and because of his love he has given us his Son (Jn 3.16). We have ‘received’ Jesus Christ himself (Col. 2.6) in the act of receiving his 15 See on the Reformation and conciliarity P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006).

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

89

gospel (1 Cor. 15.1; Gal. 1.9–12).16 Tradition is the ‘given’ pole of what is being transmitted. Reception is the active pole. What is handed on does not remain unaffected or unchanged by the process. It is adapted, embodied, subject to practice and to context. The act of appropriation makes a difference. It is a complete illusion to imagine that the life of the early Church can be replicated or reproduced unchanged in our very different (but not necessarily superior) times and culture. The process of reception always sets the issue in a new light, one way or the other. It is sometimes suggested by those who know no better that the very idea of reception was invented by the Church of England to extricate it from a difficulty – the problem of wilfully persisting with the ordination of women with an incomplete consensus. Such a cynical suggestion could only be put forward in ignorance of Church history. Reception is a permanent feature of the life of the Christian Church. It belongs to its nature as catholic and apostolic. As the Spirit-guided Body of Christ, the Church is continually developing its fundamental appropriation of the apostolic faith in order to respond to fresh circumstances. To meet new knowledge, fresh insights and changes in society, the Church draws deeply on the apostolic faith, on the resources of biblical truth. Reception is, therefore, related both to the demands of apostolic continuity and to the inculturation of the faith. Since the Church’s context is always a mission context, reception is an essentially missiological concept. It is grounded in the spiritual vitality of the Church as the Spirit-bearing body. In reception, the Church is inevitably involved in an ongoing process of assimilation and discernment, changing in such a way that it reaches out in mission to the humanity that Christ came to redeem, while at the same time remaining utterly faithful to its apostolic foundation. In this light, reception can be seen as essentially the contextual – but critical – application of the Christian faith.17 On this model, it is the nature of reception to be exploratory. It is open, not in the sense that anything can happen, but in the sense of being open-ended, not forestalling the outcome. A real act of discernment and of judgement is called for and this could go either way.18 The verdict is not assumed. Reception, as I understand it, is a neutral term. Despite a common misapprehension to the contrary, it does not imply that ultimately a particular

16 Cf. J. Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, One in Christ XXI (1985), p. 190. 17 This idea is slightly differently applied by Zizioulas, ibid., p. 189. 18 See D. Brown, ‘Phronesis, Development and Doctrinal Definition’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 1 (2001), pp. 70–85.

90

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

development, one that is seen as undergoing a process of reception, will be positively accepted as God’s will for the Church. No sense of an inevitable outcome should be imported into the ecumenical concept of reception. We can see this from the various uses of reception mentioned above. We cannot, I think, assume that the work of ARCIC on authority in the Church, culminating most recently in The Gift of Authority, will get a positive response when it has been fully studied and reflected on. It is possible that it may be seen as at least as a ‘curate’s egg’ of a report – ‘very good in parts’. Similarly, it is by no means certain that the wider Church will want to endorse the distinctive theological emphases of Karl Barth or Karl Rahner, though it is surely bound to learn a good deal from them both as their massive, multi-volume writings are received into the thinking of the universal Church. It is, therefore, clearly implied in the open process of the reception of the decision of the Church of England to provide for the ordination of women that the decision could be reappraised. In other words, it is hypothetically reversible. If the General Synod were so minded, it could change its canons to the status quo ante 1993, with the result that no more women would be ordained as priests after that point. Those already ordained would work out their ministry to its conclusion without calling into question, in a canonical sense, the validity of their priestly ministry. It is not the ordinations (orders) of individual women clergy that is subject to the process of open reception. They are duly and canonically ordained and are on a par with their male counterparts. Neither Resolutions A and B (provided in the original 1992 legislation for the Ordination of Women), nor the provisions for Extended Episcopal Oversight of the Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod itself, call that in question. These provisions are there to provide space within the Church of England for those who in conscience believe that that church has acted wrongly in introducing women priests. It is a firm principle that a church has the authority to ordain those whom it considers fit subjects for ordination. When so ordained they are truly ordained. No individual or group has the power to decide that other individuals or groups within the same church are not ordained. As Canon A 4 says, those who have been duly ordained according to the ordination rites of the Church of England ‘are lawfully . . . ordained . . . and ought to be accounted, both by themselves and others, to be truly bishops, priests or deacons’. To attempt to drive a wedge in terms of validity between the orders of Anglican male clergy and those of Anglican female clergy is counterproductive. It falls foul of Pope Leo XIII’s condemnation of Anglican orders in the

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

91

Bull Apostolicae curae in 1896.19 Anglican orders, male and female, stand or fall together. The same ecclesial authority stands behind both. That is why it is vital to insist that it is the synodical decision, not the ministry of individual women, that is subject to a process of open reception.20 Unless we take seriously the hypothetical but genuine possibility that the synodical decision could be reversed (setting aside for the moment any strong personal convictions that we may hold to the contrary), we have not grasped the crucial point about an open process of reception.




Reception as discernment

The key to understanding reception in this sense is the notion of discernment. Reception involves a process of study and evaluation in which the truth (or otherwise) of a development is tested and discerned. This is an act of spiritual evaluation and judgement, in which the Church prayerfully waits on the leading of the Holy Spirit. Discernment is an element in interpretation and in understanding. That makes reception a profoundly hermeneutical matter. Reception/discernment is a pneumatological process: we look to the Spirit to guide us. Now the Spirit, though given to every baptized Christian, is primarily given to the Church as the Body of Christ. The Spirit is present corporately. If we invoke the Spirit to guide us in reception/discernment, we have to acknowledge that this is not an individual matter. Reception does not operate at the individual level. It is not a synonym for ‘the right of private judgement’. It is only as we are bound together with others through baptism, the foundational sacrament of initiation into the Body of Christ, that we can participate in a process of reception. Reception/discernment is an action that we can only undertake as we are bound together in Christ.21 This process of discernment is bound to take place not only before any decision is made, but also afterwards. A formal process of reception/discernment – one launched, for example, by a body such as the General Synod 19 See P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), ch. VII (‘Reforming the Ministry: Ordaining Women’) and ch. VIII (‘Anglican Orders: From Apostolicae Curae to Women Bishops’). 20 As Mary Tanner rightly insists: ‘Reception and Provisionality among Anglicans’, Mid-Stream, XXIX (1990), pp. 55–61, especially p. 59. 21 See D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, E. Bethge (ed.), trans. N. Horton Smith (London: Fontana, 1964), pp. 37–42.

92

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

– normally implies that an informal process of reception/discernment has been under way for some time previously. A certain momentum of conviction has built up. There is a groundswell of support for a particular development. This was certainly the case in the Church of England with regard to the ordination of women. But to know when the time is right for a critical decision to be taken, and thus for an informal process of reception/discernment to become a formal process, is a fine judgement. In this respect, ‘ripeness is all’. The true nature of reception, as a process of spiritual discernment, is brought out when we acknowledge the truth that the eventual outcome of the process is known only to God. It is hidden in the mysterious eternal purpose of God, centred in Christ (Eph. 1.10). Theologically, it is set within an eschatological framework. We may think that we can glimpse the end afar off and we may or may not be right. But, nevertheless, we journey in faith; we do not have guarantees (cf. 2 Cor. 5.7; Heb. 11.13). To participate actively in a corporate process of reception/discernment is, therefore, an act of faith. It calls for the exercise of the ‘theological virtues’: faith, hope and charity. The language of ‘integrity’, which has been much invoked around the issue of the ordination of women in the Church of England, is entirely appropriate in approaching reception. Integrity, humility and spiritual maturity are the qualities needed in order to handle profound and contentious issues (cf. 1 Cor. 2.6–16).




Ecumenical reception

Seeking to maintain the unity of the Church of England in the matter of the ordination of women, the Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 (GS 1085) urged all concerned to endeavour to ensure that ‘discernment in the wider Church of the rightness or otherwise of the Church of England’s decision to ordain women to the priesthood should be as open a process as possible’. The idea of an open process of reception brings home the fact that reception is not the concern of any one church or world communion. It belongs in a fully ecumenical context. Reception is a matter for the whole Church. Gifts and insights, wisdom and vision need to be shared. All Christians are gifted with the sensus fidei, the faculty of spiritual discernment that shapes the process of reception. In Lumen Gentium the Second Vatican Council describes it as a ‘supernatural sense of faith’, imparted by the Holy Spirit, which means that

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

93

‘the body of the faithful as a whole cannot err in matters of belief’.22 The decision of the Church of England – a church that explicitly acknowledges that it forms only a part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church – with regard to the ordination of women in a divided universal Church entails that reception must be ecumenical in scope. Any Christian church, and especially the Church of England (and by the same token all the other churches of the Anglican Communion), is honour-bound to seek ecumenical agreement, as far as is realistically possible, before making such a change to its polity as the ordination of women. It belongs to the nature of any partial expression of the Church to seek to be conformed to the whole. Sadly, we seldom see this principle being observed by the two largest churches of Christendom, the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox, because they regard themselves as the only truly authentic expressions of the one Church. But we do not always see it where we expect to see it – in churches, such as the Methodist Church that, like the Anglican Churches, confess that they are part of a larger whole. However, where this broader perspective is acknowledged, it suggests that, while there is certainly a place for vision, there is also a need for restraint. The ultimate context and horizon of a process of open reception is the full visible unity of the Christian Church. Reception is predicated on the reality that the Church is currently divided over a number of important issues of belief and practice, of which the ordination of women comprises only one, but is essentially one in Christ and is called to make that unity visible. So with regard to the ordination of women, a mission imperative may seem to pull one way; a unity imperative may seem to pull the other way.




Differentiated consensus

While unfamiliar expressions of faith and practice are being tested, the interaction of differing, even opposing points of view plays a vital part. Therefore, minorities have a special importance in holding open the possibility of rethinking assumed positions on the part of a church. When a minority bears witness to its convictions with courtesy and charity (a courtesy and charity that, we trust, mirrors the identical qualities manifested by the dominant majority) they have a right to be heard. When they argue their case on well thought out 22 Lumen Gentium 2.12: Abbott (ed.), p. 29. The pioneering work on the sensus fidei is of course J. H. Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, ed. J. Coulson (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1961).

94

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

theological and pastoral grounds they give added weight to their concerns. More than that: the Church needs to hear their voice. We cannot discern the truth without one another. A condition of hearing the ‘still, small voice’ of God (cf. 2 Kgs 19.12, AV/KJV) is that we are open and vulnerable towards those within our fellowship who believe differently. Christ’s truth will not be revealed to me if I imagine that I can hear it without listening with my sister and my brother. In the Royal Priesthood of the baptized, all the Lord’s people are prophets (1 Pet. 2.9; cf. Num. 11.29; Joel 2.28f). We have to reckon with the possibility that a prophetic word may be given to the Church through those with whom we happen to disagree profoundly. A patient process of reception allows for the possibility of the sensus fidei coming together into a consensus fidelium, a consensus of all the faithful. Within the process of reception, a consensus that points in one particular direction or another may begin to emerge. At this stage, where there is some recognition of common concerns but no resolution of the issue, views may exist side by side in a ‘directional plurality’. Consensus should not attempt to be exclusive – if it does, it is no longer consensus but the dictatorship of the majority – but it should always and as a matter of principle make space for the possibility of dissent. Participants to the debate should feel able to put all their cards on the table. No position should be despised or treated with contempt. The state of play at this stage represents a ‘differentiated consensus’ in which certain concerns are shared, there are some agreed points and some ground rules for discussion and debate are generally accepted, but the basic issue of principle remains unresolved.23 The notion of ‘differentiated consensus’ allows us to do justice to the twin realities that have to be faced: the reality of partial agreement and the reality of partial disagreement; common ground and diverging convictions; unity and disunity. Inevitably some boundaries will be drawn for the sake of distinctness and to provide mutual support, but these should not be erected into walls with no portals. The most impressive example of differentiated consensus being employed successfully as an ecumenical method is the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification of 1999 between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation. We should also reckon with the fact that there will be different perceptions of what is actually happening in the process of reception. The process is dynamic and relational (not cerebral and confrontational) in its nature and the leading issues may develop or assume different proportions. We need to be receptive to the distinctive logic of the engagement, mindful that it is a personal

23 On differentiated consensus see W. G. Rusch, Ecumenical Reception, pp. 118–30.

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

95

and relational logic, not an abstract and theoretical one. Given that sensitivity, reception as a process of discernment can lead to a new ‘translation’ where we find a new language with which to address one another. As a result, the issues can begin to look rather different. This sort of development can point to degrees of agreement and degrees of visible communion that correspond to that graduated agreement.




Reception and communion

‘Truth is wrought out by many minds working together freely,’ wrote Newman.24 Reception is fundamentally a personal, relational and communal reality, not primarily the subject of a paper transaction or a juridical decision, though these may be needed in order to implement the results of reception. Effective reception presupposes a certain milieu, a qualitative ecology, with regard to the relation of Christians who are engaged in the process of reception/discernment to one another. Reception cannot happen without communion. It is koinonia that underpins and sustains the process of reception/discernment, as it does all authentic dynamics of ecclesial existence. As Sagovsky suggests, it is the central reality of the Christian life, indeed of all life.25 Koinonia is grounded in baptism and expressed and strengthened in the Eucharist. In baptism we are placed by the Holy Spirit into the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12.13). We are thus made one both with Christ, the Head of the Body, and with all the members. We cannot have the one without the other. We cannot distance ourselves from the members without impairing our fellowship with Christ our Head. Our unity with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is the very same unity that unites us with our fellow Christians (1 Jn 1.3f). Those with different views, passionately held, are all bound together in the baptized Body. That is no doubt how the Good Lord designed that his Church should be. He did not foresee unanimity, comfortable consensus and the absence of conflict. The New Testament gives no encouragement to that idea – quite the contrary. Sagovsky writes: ‘Conflict is integral to life in community. It is not the presence of conflict that is unhealthy for communal life, but the premature suppression of conflict in the interests of an inauthentic unity.’26 Jesus intended 24 Newman to R. Ornsby, 26 March 1863: C. S. Dessain (ed.), The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 20 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 426. 25 Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins and the Practice of Communion, p. 2. 26 Ibid., p. 8. On conflict in the Church see also S. W. Sykes, The Identity of Christianity

96

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

that his disciples should wrestle with truth in all humility and learn from one another. As Sagovsky has brought out with reference to the dialogues of Plato, koinonia involves dialogue.27 The way that Christians handle that process of dialogue is almost more important than the conclusions they arrive at. They are bound together on The Way (sunhodos). If reception is primarily the process of waiting upon the Holy Spirit at work within the Body to enable the discernment of truth, we cannot participate in the process unless we remain in the Body. To switch to the equivalent Johannine metaphor, the branches only remain attached to the Vine while they remain attached to each other (Jn 15.1–11). That mutual abiding or indwelling is above all eucharistic. As Zizioulas argues, the Eucharist is the definitive context of reception and the Anglican–Orthodox dialogue report The Church of the Triune God reinforces the point: ‘the Eucharist is the proper context of reception and . . . reception is not complete without eucharistic communion’.28 It is as we are united in the Eucharist that we are open to the Spirit’s brooding over the Body of Christ, breathing on it (cf. Gen. 1.2 AV/KJV; Jn 20.22). To breach eucharistic fellowship over differences in the Church, as some have done, is to damage the process of reception and hamper the leading of the Spirit. The Eames Commission was right to warn that no one should say that they are out of communion with those views they may oppose. That wisdom is reinforced if we consider that to put ourselves out of communion is to put ourselves outside the process of reception, and to put ourselves outside the process of reception is to put ourselves outside the sphere of the Spirit’s guiding. An authentic understanding of reception presupposes a corporate, organic understanding of the Church. It points to the idea of a Church listening to itself, listening to the Spirit within it and listening and responding to minority voices within it, before making the portentous judgement that the consensus fidelium on a contentious issue has been attained. The Church of the Triune God insists that the authority of the Holy Spirit should not be claimed for a development until the process of reception is complete.29 That does not mean that the Church is paralyzed and unable to take decisions, but it does mean weighing the moment very carefully, honouring the consciences of those

(London: SPCK, 1984). 27 Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins and the Practice of Communion, pp. 9f and ch. 3. 28 Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, pp. 191ff; Church of the Triune God, p. 103 (#14, ii). 29 Church of the Triune God, p. 108 (#19, vi).

Towards a Deeper Reception of ‘Reception’

97

who reject the consensus and bending over backwards to accommodate their concerns, without putting a time limit on that ‘economy’.30 It was a Roman Catholic, though not a typical one, Lord Acton, who said: ‘The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.’31

30 Cf. Greenacre, ‘Two aspects of reception’, p. 41 and P. Avis, ‘The Episcopal Ministry Act of Synod 1993 as a Bearable Anomaly’, in P. Avis (ed.), Seeking the Truth of Change in the Church, ch. 9. 31 R. Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven and London: Yale, 2000), p. 216, citing H. Paul (ed.), Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone (London, 2nd edn, 1913), p. 53.

6


Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?1

T

he sixteenth-century confessions have been major markers of identity for Lutheran, Reformed and other Protestant churches in the centuries since the Reformation. Their confessions distinguished them, not only from the Roman Catholic Church, but from each other. During the ‘confessionalisation’ period of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the theological confessions became vehicles of the relevant political regimes and so took on an ideological character, which deserved to be approached with a degree of suspicion. This development compromised the integrity of the confessions in the minds of many. Denominational confessional identity is widely called into question today, in the context of the ecumenical movement, where the churches have learned to confess the faith together, rather than over against one another.2 The Western churches find themselves defending their identity within a prevailing post-denominational consciousness at the popular level. The general public is largely oblivious of denominational identities – it is hard enough for them to have any clear sense even of what is Christian, let alone the various brand labels of Christianity. Churchgoers have become more eclectic as social and geographical mobility have increased: they are drawn to the church

1 2

An earlier and shorter version of this chapter was presented at the Societas Oecumenica Conference at Leuven, August 2008 and was published in Catholica 62 (2008: 4), pp. 257–72. Cf. Confessing the One Faith: An Ecumenical Explication of the Apostolic Faith as it is Confessed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381) (Faith and Order Paper 153, Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1991).

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

99

that meets their needs and those of their families, to where they are comfortable with the worship and welcomed into the activities of the fellowship. For them, it is very much a secondary question whether that church is Methodist or Anglican, Baptist or Roman Catholic. The post-denominational culture is eroding the profile of the major traditions and causing them to make adjustments by reordering their priorities to reach and attract the unchurched. In these circumstances a common confessional identity becomes a means of maintaining a profile in the face of an increasingly secular culture and society. The Leuenberg Concord of 1973 is a benchmark example of an intraProtestant, trans-confessional agreement that overcame the divisions and anathemas of the Reformation era in Europe between Lutherans and Reformed by finding a new way of stating doctrines (Christology, the Eucharist, predestination) that had previously been in conflict.3 Although the Leuenberg agreement has been very fruitful in facilitating doctrinal convergence in ecclesiology between the participating traditions and has enabled more than 100 Protestant churches in Europe to enter into ‘table and pulpit fellowship’, it has done so at the cost of relativizing to some degree the confessional identities of the participating churches.4 It is probably true to say that within the Leuenberg Church Fellowship (now the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe) the role of the historic confessions is currently somewhat uncertain in the churches that have upheld them until now and that this must inevitably be having some effect on the self-consciousness and the public witness of those churches, a witness that has been shaped by those very confessions for several centuries. We cannot speak of the Protestant confessions today without thinking of the ‘Confessing Church’ in Germany in the 1930s. The Confessing Church protested, especially in the Barmen Declaration (1933) against the betrayal of the gospel by the ‘German Christians’ and their bishops, who had absorbed 3

4

Konkordie reformatorische Kirchen in Europa (Leuenberger Konkordie)/Agreement between Reformation Churches in Europe (Leuenberg Agreement)/Concorde entre Eglises issues de la Réforme en Europe (Concorde de Leuenberg) (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 1993). Leuenberger Kirchengemeinschaft, Sakramente, Amt, Ordination Sacraments, Ministry, Ordination [Leuenberger Texte 2] (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 1995); [Kirche Jesu Christi] The Church of Jesus Christ: The Contribution of the Reformation towards Ecumenical Dialogue on Church Unity, W. Hüffmeier (ed.), [Leuenberger Texte 1] (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 1995). See further M. Beintker, ‘The Church of Jesus Christ: An Introduction’, Ecclesiology 1:3 (2005), pp. 45–58; M. Davie, ‘The Church of Jesus Christ: An Anglican Response’, Ecclesiology 1:3 (2005), pp. 59–86.

100

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

the Nazi ideology and colluded with the Antichrist. Their confessions had not saved them from this act of apostasy. As for ourselves today, inspired and humbled by the example and witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his colleagues, who were ‘faithful unto death’, we know that, whatever we make of the historic confessions, the Church of Christ must always be a ‘confessing Church’, holding fast to Christ and his word before the world. Principally through George Bell, Bishop of Chichester (the half-centenary of whose death in 1958 we are commemorating at the time of writing), the Church of England extended the hand of friendship to Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, both before and during the war. Bonhoeffer’s many links with Britain and his several visits have recently been fascinatingly described by Keith Clements.5 In 2005 the Christian world marked 60 years since Bonhoeffer’s death, and in 2006 we marked the centenary of his birth. In remembering Bonhoeffer and Bell, the Church of England has had its connection to the Confessing Church renewed. So we might well ask: Is there an Anglican perspective on confessions and confessionalism? In particular, I ought to ask: Is the Church of England a confessing church?




Is Anglicanism confessional?

I have to admit that confessional consciousness lies quite outside the experience of almost all Anglicans. Anglicanism is not confessionally minded. It does not see itself as standing for a confession alongside other confessions. The consciousness of Anglicans with regard to the Christian faith and the Christian Church is not a confessional one. But that does not mean that the Anglican tradition has never experienced a confessional consciousness. The episode in the history of the Church of England – a truly traumatic episode – that corresponds to the ‘confessionalisation’ period in European Christianity, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, is the Civil War and Commonwealth period. This episode saw the abolition of the Church of England ‘as we know it’ and the substitution of Presbyterianism based on the Westminster Confession. In this respect, England shared in the confessional wars of the Continent and the destruction and anarchy that they brought with them. However, the Anglicanism that succeeded the Commonwealth, at

5

K. Clements, Bonhoeffer and Britain (London: Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, 2006).

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

101

the Restoration of the monarchy and Church in 1660–62, though hardened in attitude and less tolerant and flexible than the outlook that preceded these convulsions, was not really confessional, but both catholic and reformed. Unlike Lutherans with regard to Martin Luther and Methodists with regard to John Wesley, Anglicans do not typically say that God ‘raised up’ Thomas Cranmer, John Jewel or Richard Hooker in the sixteenth century in order to reveal some saving truth or to reform the Church.6 Anglicans most certainly do not say that God ‘raised up’ Henry VIII – in order that he might break the English Church’s connection with the papacy and destroy the monastic foundations! On the other hand, Richard Hooker thanks God in fulsome terms for Queen Elizabeth I, whose accession to the throne put an end to Mary Tudor’s bloodbath of Protestants. Under Mary, Hooker wrote, the reform was as if almost it had never been: till such time as that God, whose property is to show his mercies then greatest when they are nearest to be utterly despaired of, caused in the depth of discomfort and darkness a most glorious star to arise, and on her head settled the crown, whom himself had kept as a lamb from the slaughter of those bloody times. Under Elizabeth, ‘that glorious and sacred instrument’ through whom God worked, the reformed religion was raised miraculously from the dead, so that (as Hooker puts it) people could hardly believe their own eyes.7 The Elizabethan settlement is certainly a benchmark episode in the evolution of Anglicanism, but it is not its defining moment or its crowning glory. No, Anglicanism is not equipped to be confessional. There are several reasons for this. First we have no adequate confessions, as such. The Thirtynine Articles of Religion are not a full-blooded confessional document, but more like a pragmatic tool for church government. They do not aim to give a proper account of the teaching and practice of the reformed English Church. They are selective, not comprehensive. They do not expound doctrine in any fullness and they have no liturgical function. They deal briefly with a range of controversial points, refuting various anti-trinitarian, Roman Catholic 6

7

Barth notes that the Reformed confessions are not personalized either; Zwingli’s name is never mentioned in the Swiss-German confessions and Calvin’s only once in the entire literature: K. Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, 1923, D. L. Guder and J. J. Guder (trans. and eds), (Louisville, KY and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), p. 13. R. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Iv, xiv, 7 (Works, ed. J. Keble, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1845, vol. 1, pp. 487–88).

102

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

and Anabaptist tenets.8 They leave many questions unanswered and their selectivity and brevity has left them open to wildly divergent interpretations (the most notorious being John Henry Newman’s attempt, in Tract XC of 1841, to argue that the Articles did not exclude the teaching of the Council of Trent). The Articles are an assemblage of statements; they cannot be made to witness to one central truth, in the way that, for example, Gustav Aulén claims that the Reformation confessions are synonymous with justification by faith.9 Some appeal must be made to the Articles, but this appeal will always be weakened by their truncated and ambiguous character. As Bishop Hensley Henson once put it: ‘Some Anglican Confession is clearly indispensable. The only Confession we possess is gravely unsatisfactory.’10 Karl Barth also was profoundly unimpressed with the confessional credentials of Anglicanism, regarding it as seriously impoverished in this area. In his lectures on the Protestant confessions he described ‘the Anglican view of the Church’ as ‘remarkably isolated’ and detected ‘a certain noticeable flatness of doctrine’, for which Anglicans tried to compensate by emphasizing the structures of the Church. Anglicanism ‘groped uncertainly’ for the faith, and the Thirty-nine Articles were ‘banal’ in setting morality alongside religion.11 It should not be forgotten, however, that in the sixteenth century the Church of England saw itself as one of the Reformation churches and, in turn, it was seen by them as one of that family. Although the English Reformers preserved a critical distance from Luther and Calvin as individuals and were sometimes a little disdainful of them, especially of Luther’s foibles, they did not disown their theology.12 There was a consensus of Reformation theology and the Church of England was part of it. Even where internal Protestant controversy was most intense – in eucharistic doctrine – the arguments about 8

For example, Article 9, ‘Of the Justification of Man’: ‘We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine and very full of comfort . . .’ There is more on the ‘historic formularies’ of the Church of England in P. Avis, The Anglican Understanding of the Church (London: SPCK, 2000), pp. 52ff. 9 G. Aulén, Reformation and Catholicity, trans. E. H. Wahlstrom (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), pp. 55–63, at p. 58. Aulén’s exposition of iustificatio sola fide as the action of God in Christ through the Word and sacraments is edifying. 10 H. H. Henson, Bishoprick Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 110. 11 Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, 1923, pp. 128–9, 151. 12 See further P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Historical Perspective (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 2002), pp. 21ff, 41ff.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

103

the presence of Christ were contained within a wider area of agreement on the nature and purpose of the sacrament. (Bucer and Calvin believed that if Luther and Zwingli had not been so intransigent, neither being willing to be instructed by the other, agreement on the presence of Christ in the sacrament could have been attained.) H. Strohl’s phrase, ‘la concordance très grande des thesès de tous les Réformateurs’, must include the English Reformers.13 Even Hooker, who set out to subvert Calvin’s influence among his contemporaries in late sixteenth-century England, acknowledged that ‘all the reformed churches’ were ‘of our confession in doctrine’.14 The Thirty-nine Articles were included in various compendia of Reformation confessions in the sixteenth century itself and in the late nineteenth century Philip Schaff included them, together with the Church of England Catechism, among ‘The Creeds of the Evangelical Reformed Churches’.15 But the development of Anglicanism cannot be freezeframed in the sixteenth century; Anglicanism now is not what it was then; it has undergone a continuous development, which is not ended yet. For the first three centuries of the reformed English Church, there existed, with certain differences of emphasis that were not by any means unimportant, an essential theological consensus, a common understanding of the identity of that church within Christendom.16 The Church of England was a reformed church and stood in continuity with the earliest expression of Christianity in Britain. It appealed to the Scriptures and the Fathers for its doctrine and order. It rejected several medieval innovations and the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome. The monarch, like a godly prince of the Old Testament and like the Emperor Constantine and his successors, watched over the church and was its ‘supreme governor’.17 What Stephen Sykes has called the ‘progressive de-confessionalisation’ of Anglicanism, began with the attack on the Reformation by the more radical protagonists of the Oxford Movement and continued, as a result of longterm Tractarian influence, with the downgrading of the Thirty-nine Articles by successive Lambeth Conferences (especially that of 1968).18 Sykes himself

13 H. Strohl, La Pensée de la Réforme (Neuchâchel, 1951), pp. 5f. 14 Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, iv, xiii, 9 (Works, vol. 1), p. 478. 15 P. Schaff, The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1877). 16 P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, ch. 3: ‘An Anglican Consensus’. 17 Henry VIII awarded himself the title ‘Head’ of the Church of England, though explaining that this applied only in temporal affairs. His immediate successors, Edward VI and even the Roman Catholic Mary Tudor, continued this usage. Elizabeth I changed the title to ‘Supreme Governor’ and so it has remained to this day. 18 S. W. Sykes, art. ‘Anglican Theology’, in A. Hastings et al. (eds), The Oxford

104

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

has prioritized the liturgy, backed by canon law, as the doctrinal backbone of modern Anglicanism.19 Alongside the historic formularies, the Church of England gives a high value to the ecumenical agreed statements that have been endorsed by the General Synod or by the Lambeth Conference (e.g. the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission’s statements on ministry and ordination and on eucharistic theology, and the Porvoo Common Statement between the British and Irish Anglican Churches and the Nordic and Baltic episcopal Lutheran Churches),20 as doctrinal norms. The ‘historic formularies’ of the Church of England comprise, in addition to the Articles, the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) 1662 and the Ordinal that dates from 1550, but which received its definitive form in 1662. Neither of these two documents is seen by Anglicans as having a particularly confessional character. However, it could be argued that the BCP has at least an implicit confessional character because of the weight that Anglicans lay on the principle Lex orandi lex credendi. If we are asked what we believe, we refer the questioner to our liturgy. In our worship we express our beliefs and testify to them before the world. This would tie in with St Paul’s saying to the Corinthians that ‘as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim (kataggellete) the Lord’s death until he comes’ (1 Cor. 11.26). To proclaim (kataggellein) is close in meaning to ‘to confess’ (homologein). For Calvin, a confession was ‘a testimony of the inwardly conceived faith’.21 For Anglicans (and perhaps not for Anglican only), the liturgy is testimony before the world as well as doxology before God. So it could be said that the liturgy takes the place of a conventional confession for Anglicans. Second, Anglicanism is psychologically unsuited to confessional stances. As a tradition, it is reluctant to take sides and likes to think of itself as non-

Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 21. For the various stances taken up by the Tractarians with regard to the Reformation and Continental Protestantism see P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church, chs 8–12. The hostility of the extreme Tractarians towards the Reformation tradition was anticipated by the Nonjurors at the end of the seventeenth century, but they were in schism from the Established Church; see ibid., pp. 147–51. 19 S. W. Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (London and Oxford: Mowbray, 1978), pp. 93ff. 20 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, The Final Report (London: CTS/SPCK, 1982); Together in Mission and Ministry: the Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe (London: Church House Publishing, 1993). 21 Calvin, CR 35 [=CO 7]: 312, cited Barth, The Theology of the Reformed Confessions, p. 17.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

105

partisan. Most Anglicans (but by no means all) are uncomfortable about being described as ‘Protestant’, even though they are happy to acknowledge their debt to the Reformation. ‘Protestant’ sounds negative and the confession of our faith cannot be negative. It stands historically for a protest against the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome where we believe that it does not belong; and although the Anglican Communion, by its very existence, shows that it still upholds that protest, to call yourself ‘Protestant’ is to identify yourself, not by the whole (catholic) faith, but by one issue. Hensley Henson, no mean interpreter of Anglicanism, defends the word Protestant (citing the historian and Bishop of Oxford, William Stubbs) on the grounds that what the apparently negative term refers to is generally a very positive and constructive expression of Christianity.22 Anglicanism has described itself since the seventeenth century as ‘catholic and reformed’ or ‘reformed catholic’. This attempt to embrace two major expressions of the Christian tradition, which have been locked in conflict, makes Anglican confessional identity, such as it is, highly ambiguous. In the ecumenical movement, Anglicans have tended to see themselves as playing a mediating role, aspiring to bring opposing positions together, reconciling traditions that are at variance. If we add a third dimension, the liberal, enquiring, critical mentality that has been associated with the Broad Church, we make Anglican identity even more complex and resistant to confessional categories.23 The document Catholicity, submitted to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1947 by a distinguished group of moderate Anglo-Catholic scholars, made a virtue of this complexity: The post-Reformation Church of England was not the result of a [particular] theology. It had no Luther, no Calvin, and nothing comparable to the massive system of the Council of Trent. Political expediency played a large part in the shaping of its course . . . Within the comprehensiveness laid down by the Elizabethan Settlement, the Church of England included those who learned their doctrine chiefly from the continental Reformers, those who gave greater value to the appeal to the ‘Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops’, and those whose outlook owed most to the learning of the Renaissance . . . these three types of Anglican have their successors in the Evangelicals, the Anglo-Catholics and the Liberals. This comprehensiveness opens the way for the Church of England [sic] 22 Henson, Bishoprick Papers, pp. 98–101. 23 For the Broad Church tradition in the nineteenth century see C. R. Sanders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Tradition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942).

106

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

to be a school of synthesis over a wider field than any other Church in Christendom.24 Third, the way that theology is studied in British (not only English) universities militates against a confessional mind-set. The study of theology in British universities is not confessionally segregated. There are very few chairs or lectureships devoted to particular Christian traditions.25 Students are not reared in an atmosphere that is sensitive to confessional issues. The training of Church of England clergy is divided between residential colleges, which are closely linked in to university departments of theology, and non-residential regional courses, which are ecumenical in their constitutions, even if populated largely by Anglican ordinands. The result, as I have written recently, is that ‘many theologians who are practising Anglicans do not come across in their writings as self-consciously Anglican. You can read some Anglican theologians and not know that they are Anglican.’26 Fourth, there is some truth in the view, propounded by certain influential Anglican theologians, that Anglicanism has no doctrines that are uniquely its own: it simply teaches the Catholic faith of the Church through the ages. This stance is not simply saying Anglicans have not invented any new doctrines – all churches would say that – it is claiming that there is nothing distinctive about Anglican doctrine. The purpose of this gambit is not ignoble. It is to assert the orthodoxy of Anglicanism, and the continuity of the reformed English Church and of its sister churches throughout the Anglican Communion, with the undivided Western Church. It used to be said that the Church of England is the Catholic Church in England. We still hold that, but not in an exclusive sense, as though no other churches in England were part of the Church Catholic. If you listen carefully to the ‘no special doctrines’ argument it is possible to hear the sound of a saw cutting off the branch Anglicans are sitting on! Stephen Sykes and I have challenged this stance and shown that, if you believe that you are a church, you must at least have a distinctive ecclesiology to support

24 Catholicity: A Study of the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West, being a Report presented to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Dacre Press, 1947), p. 49. The report went on to claim that ‘the history of Anglican theology shows that it possesses a power of construction which has made for synthesis rather than for division’ (p. 49). 25 Certain Regius Chairs at Oxford and the Van Mildert Chair at Durham have to be held by Anglican clergy. The recently established Bede Chair at Durham is dedicated to Roman Catholic theology. 26 P. Avis, ‘Doctrine in the Church of England’, Theologische Lituraturzeitung, Heft 7/8, July–August 2008, pp. 762–76.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

107

that claim.27 But it is doubtful whether ecclesiology on its own is sufficient to constitute a confessional identity. Finally (and related to the question of special doctrines), Anglicans have sometimes gloried in the supposed ‘provisionality’ of Anglicanism. They have seen it as a temporary ecclesiastical expedient, destined to pass away by being absorbed into the wider Church. The modesty of this expression of Anglicanism is perhaps rather endearing. It is also admirable to imply that the way that you define your church implies a regret for the divisions of the Reformation and a longing for reunion. But do we hear the representatives of acknowledged confessional churches admitting that their churches, too, are merely provisional? I think not. The truth is, I believe, that all churches, without exception, are provisional in the light of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that we confess in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. So there is a proper recognition of provisionality, one that does not make an exception of one’s own church, and that must radically affect the confessional consciousness of one’s church. In the case of Anglicans, the recognition of provisionality inhibits a confessional consciousness.28




Confessional or ‘confessing’?

On the other hand, a robust sense of ecclesial identity is healthy for any church. A feeling of belonging and of ownership with regard to our own church is vital and we should be able to take a modest pride in our tradition. I am inclined to admit a proper, chastened sense of confessional identity and I refer to three sources to substantiate this point. A Roman Catholic voice encouraging us to take confessional identity more seriously is that of the late Cardinal Willebrands, formerly President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Addressing the 1984 Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation in Budapest, Willebrands spoke of the need for a ‘reconfessionalization’ of the ecumenical movement. He insisted that conversations between communions, and cooperation across church boundaries, should not be allowed to destroy the identities of Christian communities. Ecumenism should aim to reconcile, not to ignore the diversities of the historic traditions. Any future union between churches that had lost their 27 See the discussion in P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), ch. 3. 28 See the discussion in ibid., ch. 1.

108

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

communal sense of identity, loyalty and self-respect would be meaningless, he insisted. We should not sit lightly to our heritage or play it down for the sake of ecumenical goodwill. A Protestant voice urging us to look to our identity as members of an historic Christian tradition is none other than that of Karl Barth. No one was more insistent on the imperative of Church unity and the scandal of separation than Barth. ‘There is no justification,’ he wrote, ‘theological, spiritual or biblical, for the existence of a plurality of churches genuinely separated . . . and mutually excluding one another . . . A plurality of churches in this sense means a plurality of lords, a plurality of spirits, a plurality of gods’.29 However, for Barth, the only way to authentic unity is through an affirmation and exploration of the particular identities of our separated traditions. It would mean a flight from credo unam ecclesiam, insists Barth, if churches tried to bring unity closer by ceasing to take their distinctiveness seriously, by letting go of the special responsibility that has been entrusted to them, ‘by denying and renouncing their special character for the sake of internal or external peace, by trying to exist in a kind of nondescript Christianity’ – a state of ecclesiological ‘featurelessness’ (p. 678). No, each church is called primarily to take itself seriously in its distinctiveness and separateness, for only from there can it reach out to the one united Church. But what does this involve in practice? First, according to Barth, it involves paying full attention to the historical intentions of that church in its origin, giving a voice to its past witness, and seeking to articulate once again the decision of faith that was called for at that time in a situation of conflict; then seeking to cherish, renew and develop it (p. 680). Second, it means that each church should not listen only to the voice of its own tradition, but should also hearken attentively to the voice of the other traditions and communities, to discern what the Lord of the Church is saying through them. ‘It is a question of everywhere taking seriously faith in the real presence of Jesus Christ.’ He will keep his promise to be in the midst, even of a divided Church, for he does not deny or disown the diversity of ecclesiastical traditions, doctrines and forms (p. 680). Barth warns, however, that the continued existence of a separate tradition of the Christian Church can be justified only when it can be claimed to

29 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics, G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrrance (eds), (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 1975), IV, 62, p. 675.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

109

be for the sake of Christ and his service, and is deemed vital for faith and salvation – being captive, like Luther, to the Word of God (p. 680). An ecumenical (actually joint Roman Catholic–Protestant) voice encouraging us to take confessional belonging seriously is that of the Groupe des Dombes. In For the Conversion of the Churches (1993), the Groupe made a helpful distinction between ‘confessional allegiance’ and ‘confessionalism’. Confessional allegiance is an honest recognition that, as Christians, we belong in a particular place on the spectrum of Christian traditions. Ecumenical dialogue demands that the partners should be firmly and comfortably rooted in their own tradition. Confessionalism, on the other hand, represents the hardening of confessional identity into an attitude of self-justification, over against another confession or tradition. In itself, confessional identity is good and indeed inevitable. But it is subordinate to the gospel, of which it is a mediated expression, and remains faithful to the truth that it stands for only in so far as it constantly converts to the gospel. If it turns back again and again to the gospel, it will be saved from hardening into an ideological confessionalism.30 I conclude from the discussion so far that, while a particular church may not be necessarily a ‘confessional’ church, it must always be a ‘confessing’ church. Unless it confesses Christ before the world, it cannot be the Church. If the Church is the sacrament of salvation, it must be the Church that believes and the Church that confesses – the believing Church is the confessing Church. The Church confesses God in its liturgy, its proclamation, its teaching and the way it conducts its life and affairs. John Webster writes: In confession, the Church simply assents to God’s reality, uttering its ‘Amen’ to God’s manifest being and works . . . in the entirety of its being and in all its activities the Church acts out the basic structure of confession – it celebrates in all it is and does the fact that it is the creature of God’s mercy.31

30 Groupe des Dombes, For the Conversion of the Churches (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1993), pp. 24–25. 31 J. Webster, Holiness (London: SCM Press, 2003), p. 67.

110

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Confessing Christ in the New Testament and in the Reformers




The most substantial New Testament text referring to confession of faith is Rom. 10.9–10. Paul appears first to quote a baptismal formula familiar to his readers (‘If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved’) and then to add a comment of his own (‘For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved’). The words go to the centre of the Church’s message and to the heart of discipleship. Their setting is worship, the text is liturgical.32 Elsewhere (1 Cor. 12.1–4) Paul lays it down that no one can confess the Lordship of Christ – ‘no one can say “Jesus is Lord”’ – ‘except by the Holy Spirit’. The Church’s confession is given her by God. To confess is a dynamic action in the present. It is the Spirit who gives power of utterance, as on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2.4). The confession cannot simply be handed down through the centuries, but must be ‘proclaimed afresh in each generation’, as the Church of England’s Preface to the Declaration of Assent (Canon C 15) puts it. So even the great historical confessions need to be reclaimed, ‘re-received’, in every age and that means that they will be interpreted, understood and applied differently. There will be a continuity of argumentation about their significance and this will both build on the tradition and develop it further. To believe in the heart is not, however, a private, secret inclination of the feelings towards God, but an act of adhering to and appropriating the truth of the Church’s confession and making it one’s own. As Käsemann says, this faith is not about ‘inwardness’ because in the Bible ‘the heart as the centre of personality means existence in its totality’.33 But the faith of the heart is actually inseparable from the confession of the lips. This faith is defined as faith that must speak. ‘No one can believe with the heart without confessing with the mouth’ (Calvin).34 The affirmation ‘Jesus is Lord (kurios)’ implies the resurrection; he is 32 E. Käsemann, Commentary on Romans, G. W. Bromiley (trans. and ed.), (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 291; J. D. G. Dunn, Romans 9–16 (Word Biblical Commentary, Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1988), p. 616. 33 Dunn, Romans 9–16. 34 J. Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans and to the Thessalonians, trans. R. MacKenzie, Calvin’s Commentaries, D. W. and T. F. Torrance (eds), (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1961), p. 228.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

111

the Risen Lord and he could not be Lord if he were not risen from the dead.35 But the idea of Christ’s resurrection necessarily contains the idea of his death. The affirmation that he is ‘risen from the dead’ is the climax of salvation history and implies everything that has led up to it. As Calvin puts it here with thought-provoking compression: ‘The resurrection of Christ includes his death.’36 When we confess Christ, we confess the crucified and risen one. ‘I am the first and the last and the living one. I was dead and see, I am alive forever and ever’ (Rev. 1.17–18). As the twentieth-century Anglican biblical scholar Sir Edwyn Hoskyns never tired of emphasizing, crucifixion and resurrection are inseparable: they are one word – Crucifixion-Resurrection.37 In his Lectures on the Epistle to the Romans of 1515, Martin Luther drew out the mystical and ethical dimensions of confession. Luther had not yet arrived at his ‘Reformation breakthrough’, but he speaks of yielding all to God and God’s creatures and keeping nothing for oneself. This takes place through faith, whereby a man makes his own mind captive to the word of the cross and denies himself and denies all things to himself, for he is dead to himself and to all things. And thus he lives only to God, ‘to whom all things live’ (cf. Lk. 20.38), even those that are dead. While this abnegation of self and oblation to God reside in the heart, it must find outward expression because to confess is what faith does. ‘For confession is the principal work of faith by which a man denies himself and confesses God and thus he both denies and confesses to such an extent that he would deny his own life and all things rather than affirm himself.’ The believer ‘dies in his confession of God’ and ‘forsakes himself in order that God may stand’ and with God his confession.38 Just as each of the faithful confess with their lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God has raised him from the dead, so too the Church as a body must believe and confess. So what and how does the Church confess?

35 J. A. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible; London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1993), p. 588. 36 Calvin, The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, p. 227. 37 E. C. Hoskyns and N. Davey, Crucifixion-Resurrection: The Pattern of the Theology and Ethics of the New Testament, G. S. Wakefield (ed.), (London: SPCK, 1981). 38 M. Luther, Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia, Hilton C. Oswald (ed.), (Luther’s Works 25; Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), p. 411.

112

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology




Confessing the sin of the Church

First, it confesses its own sin, failure and weakness. It makes confession of its own unworthiness to be God’s human instrument, an earthen vessel for God’s treasure (2 Cor. 4.7), which is Jesus Christ and his gospel. (As Luther said in the Ninety-five Theses: ‘The true treasure of the Church is the holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God.’) It is no accident that we use the same word ‘confession’ when we acknowledge our sins and when we acknowledge God and the gospel. The one paves the way for the other. Unless we first confess our need of God, we cannot confess what God has done to meet that need. Bonhoeffer, in the Ethics, defines the Church as the place where guilt is recognized and confessed: the personal guilt of her members, her own failure to proclaim often enough and clearly enough the message God has given her, and ‘the apostasy of the western world from Jesus Christ’. This confession of sin clears away a barrier of guilt and enables the form of Jesus Christ to emerge once again in the Church.39 Jesus makes the authentic human response to God; he offers perfect human worship. As Schillebeeckx puts it, Jesus Christ is ‘the supreme realisation of the response of human love’ to God’s love, and he makes this response ‘in our place’ and ‘in the name of us all’. The acts of the Church are the acts of Jesus Christ in his body. One of the essential acts of the Church is to confess sins. In this too Jesus Christ is at work, confessing through his Church the sin of the world.40 The Anglican theologian R. C. Moberly spoke of Jesus as ‘the perfect penitent’, who offered to the Father on the cross not only the sacrifice of total obedience, but also ‘the sacrifice of supreme penitence’, the perfect identity of his own will with God’s condemnation of sin. ‘He voluntarily stood in the place of the utterly contrite – accepting insult, shame, anguish, death . . . in his own inner consciousness accepting the ideal consciousness of the contrite.’41 In The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer shows that confession of sin is the essential precondition for confession of faith. Disciples are called to live lives of complete truthfulness, transparent to God and to God’s truth. 39 D. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, E. Bethge (ed.), trans. N. Horton Smith (London: Collins, Fontana, 1955), pp. 110–16. ‘The confession of guilt is the re-attainment of the form of Jesus Christ who bore the sin of the world’ (p. 116). 40 E. Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God (London: Sheed and Ward, 1963), p. 18. 41 R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality (London: John Murray, 1901), pp. 129–30.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

113

Those who follow Jesus and cleave to him are living in complete truthfulness. [They] have nothing to hide from their Lord. Their life is revealed before him, Jesus has recognised them and led them into the way of truth. They cannot hide their sinfulness from Jesus . . . At the moment of their call Jesus showed up their sin and made them aware of it. Complete truthfulness is only possible where sin has been uncovered, and forgiven by Jesus. Only those who are in a state of truthfulness through the confession of their sin to Jesus are not ashamed to tell the truth wherever it must be told.42 Of course, the Church is always confessing its sins; confession – both general (liturgical) and private (sacramental) – is almost routine. Why is it then that, when the Church addresses the world around it, which is made up of individuals, families, communities and networks of individuals who have something special in common, it is so often heard as self-righteous and morally superior? Why does so much of the Church’s public discourse consist of telling others where they have gone wrong and fallen short or even that their lives are lacking in moral integrity? We are heard as condemning, not affirming; excluding, not welcoming. With its track record of appalling moral failure – the oppression of women and slaves; the persecution of dissenters, homosexuals and Jews; the exploitation of children and animals; its collusion with Fascism and Communism – the Church is in no position to claim the moral high ground. When it does, which is most of the time, its witness is fatally flawed and its confession is inaudible. Second, the Church confesses the name of Jesus, or more correctly, Jesus as the Christ: not only the incarnate Jesus Christ, but the baptized, tempted, preaching, healing, Jesus Christ, delivering from oppression; and not only him but the rejected, crucified Jesus Christ; and not only him but the risen and glorified Jesus Christ, who pours out his Spirit on the Church. The name ‘Jesus Christ’ sums up salvation history and encapsulates the apostolic faith. The personal name ‘Jesus’ stands for the human being, in fact the man, whom God chose (or to speak the language of faith, sent) as the one who would be the embodied presence of God, present to bring salvation, because his name means ‘the LORD saves’. The title ‘Christ’ stands for his fulfilment of the age-old promises of God and the hopes of the people of God, ancient Israel, because it means the one who is anointed and, against that background, anointed by

42 D. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (London: SCM Press, 6th edn, 1959), p. 125.

114

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

God, with God’s own Spirit, as prophet, priest and king, a corporate, representative figure who includes his people within himself and bestows his Spirit on them. Yes, the twofold sacred name sums up the faith of the Church as it is expressed in the Apostles’ Creed and the Creed of Nicaea-Constantinople. As John Webster has argued, confession is the Church’s response to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. It is an act or event before it is a document or a text. Creeds and other confessional formulae emerge out of the Church’s basic action of confessing God and exist to serve and enable the act of confession; in that act, ‘the church binds itself to the gospel’.43 The Church emulates the confession that Christ himself made before (epi) Pontius Pilate (1 Tim. 6.12–13), a confession of the truth of God and of God’s claim on human lives.44 The words in which the Church most rejoices are the two words ‘Jesus Christ’. As the eleventh-century hymn puts it: ‘Jesus, the very thought of thee/ With sweetness fills my breast.’ Nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame, Nor can the memory find, A sweeter sound than thy blest name, O Saviour of mankind.45 The first and last words of the Church’s prayer before God are ‘Jesus Christ’ and the first and last words of the Church’s confession before the world must be the words ‘Jesus Christ’. But we have to admit, if we are honest, that it is not those words or that Person that usually linger in the memory of those who hear the Church speaking today.46

43 J. Webster, Confessing God (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005), p. 69 (71). 44 I am not persuaded by J. N. D. Kelly’s argument that epi should be translated ‘in the time of’, rather than ‘before’, with the suggestion that Christ’s confession should be identified with his crucifixion, just as Timothy’s confession was made at his baptism: J. N. D. Kelly, The Pastoral Epistles (Black’s New Testament Commentaries: London: A.&C. Black, 1963), pp. 141–44. 45 English Hymnal 419, trans. E. Caswall. Cf. EH 405: ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds/In a believer’s ear!/It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,/And drives away his fear,’ by John Newton. 46 I have argued elsewhere that Anglican theology is not sufficiently focused on Jesus Christ and does not talk enough about him: P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), ch. 10: ‘Jesus Christ in Modern Anglican Theology’.

Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?

115




An unashamed confession

It is God’s sovereign purpose that ‘every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil. 2.11). The Church is the first so to confess, the herald of confession, the pioneer confessor. In its mission of evangelization it leads others to believe and so to confess. The Church should never be ‘ashamed of the gospel’, reluctant and half-hearted in confessing it, consumed with self-doubt, tentative and unconvincing in its confession, for the gospel is ‘the power of God unto salvation to everyone who has faith’ (Rom. 1.16). But that is how the Church sometimes appears today. So often we do not hear the Church speaking gospel, taking the name of Jesus Christ upon its lips, willing to know nothing but Christ crucified (1 Cor. 2.2; 1.23), and talking simply and clearly, with the freedom that the Spirit gives, of God’s redeeming love for humankind. When the Church falters in speaking of Christ and his gospel, it falters in its confession and fails to live up to its commission (Mt. 28. 19–20; [Mk 16.15–16]; Jn 20.21–23; Acts 1.8). If this is the nature of the Church’s confession – namely that it takes the twofold form of confession of its own sins, failings and weaknesses and confession of Jesus Christ as good news for the world, God’s gift of salvation to meet the deepest needs of humankind – then we need to ask what sort, what genre, of written confession is appropriate. The first form of confession, that of sins and failings, is made liturgically when it is the community confessing. The second form of confession, that of Jesus Christ and all that is contained in and implied in his name, is made, not only in the liturgical action, but also in word and deed within the world – words of challenge and of hope, backed by deeds of solidarity and compassion. If that is the case, is it really a bad thing that Anglicanism does not have massive resources of historical formularies, in comparison with say Roman Catholic or Lutheran ‘confessions’, that it has been restrained in condemning – anathematizing – other confessions, and that it reveals its faith primarily in its prayers?

7


Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?1

W

hile Roman Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans continue to insist that episcopacy is essential, in one way or another, to the unity of the Church, Protestants in churches that are presbyterally, not episcopally, ordered continue to point out that bishops have been a cause of dissension in the Church down the ages. While ‘Unity in the bishop’ is a watchword of catholic ecclesiology, ‘Beware the bishop’ seems to be the motto of some Protestants when it comes to unity. To take a particular, topical example, it has proved so far impossible for English Anglicans to convince German Protestants of the EKD, with whom they are in a special relationship through the Meissen Agreement of 1991, that they should take the historic episcopate into their system as a contribution to the visible unity of Christ’s Church. Our colleagues in the EKD, whether Lutheran, Reformed or United by confession, point to the fact that most of the German episcopate in the sixteenth century failed to support the reform, while many of the bishops actively persecuted the Reformers and their followers. How could such bishops be regarded as the linchpin of unity? No, they say, bishops are not the glue of the Church: they are often the ones who are the cause of division.2 The aim of this chapter is to move beyond this stand-off and to offer

1

2

Some material in this chapter appeared in an earlier form as ‘Episcopacy and the Foundation and Form of the Church’, in I. U. Dalfert and P. Oppenheim (eds), Witnessing to Unity: Ten Years After the Meissen Declaration (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2001), pp. 121–34. See particularly the essays by Ingolf Dalferth and Dorothea Wendebourg in Witnessing to Unity.

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

117

a reconciling account of episcopacy in relation to the visible unity of the Church. My thesis is that the episcopal office plays a significant role in the visible unity of the Church because episcopal ministry is not an additional extra, an external factor imported into an existing situation where the Church continues its mission and ministry, but is the most fully representative form of the Christian ministry that every church upholds and values. I will argue that episcopal ministry is that particular form of the ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral care, which has special significance for the mission and unity of the Church precisely because it is a gospel-focused ministry. But I begin by sketching in some key aspects of how the Church and its oversight have been understood in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions.




Luther, the gospel and the Church

Martin Luther and the other sixteenth-century Reformers concentrated with laser-beam intensity on the gospel of Christ. They looked at all the impressive structures and accumulated riches of the medieval Church – its formidable power in affairs of state, its pervasive influence over every aspect of the life of the faithful, its stupendous temples, its numerous religious orders, its libraries of scholarship – and they said (to slightly adapt the words of Luther’s Ninetyfive Theses): ‘No, all this is not what is truly precious: the true treasure of the Christian Church is the holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God.’ Luther was barely interested in the Church as an institution. For him the Church is constituted as a living, experienced reality by the presence and action of Christ. This presence and action are effected dynamically through the preaching of the Word of the gospel and the enactment of the gospel sacraments. Where the gospel is found, Christ is present, and where Christ is present, the Church must truly exist. Christ cannot be without his people; he is inseparable from his little flock. The gospel is infinitely precious because it locates and identifies both Christ and the Church. In his explanation of the Ninety-five Theses, Luther said: ‘Nothing in the Church must be treated with greater care than the holy gospel, since the Church has nothing which is more precious and salutary.’ Luther again affirms, ‘Christ has left nothing to the world except the gospel’.3

3

J. Pelikan (ed.), Luther’s Works (LW), 55 volumes (St Louis, MO/Philadelphia, PA: Concordia/Fortress Press, 1955–1975), 31, pp. 210, 230.

118

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

In Luther’s understanding, this gospel is not invisible or disembodied, but enacted dynamically in the ministry of word and sacrament. On various occasions, Luther gives several criteria for discerning the existence of the true Church. Sometimes he is concerned to demonstrate visible continuity with the ancient catholic Church (ecclesia sancta catholica) and finds this in the external means of grace, especially the ministry of word and sacrament. On other occasions, he speaks pastorally, in order to reassure the evangelical communities that Christ is among them to bring salvation. He insists that the true church, wherein salvation is to be found, may be recognized by certain marks. Though Luther can speak fairly expansively about these, they come down in the end to the two indispensable marks of the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. ‘The Church must be sought where the sacraments are purely administered, where there are hearers, teachers and confessors of the word.’4 However, Luther will sometimes radically reduce all this to the gospel. .

The gospel is before bread [i.e. Eucharist] and baptism the unique, most certain and noblest symbol of the Church, because through the gospel alone the Church is conceived, formed, nourished, generated, instructed, clothed, adorned, strengthened, armed and preserved – in short, the whole life and substance of the Church is in the word of God (tota vita et substantia Ecclesiae est in verbo Dei).5 But even here, for example, Luther immediately goes on to state that he is speaking of the ‘vocal and public voice of the gospel’. Although Luther sometimes stresses ‘gossiping the gospel’ by ordinary believers, he is also clear that there is a public, authorized, representative ministry of the gospel. When Luther speaks of the gospel alone, his rhetoric is not meant to exclude the public ministry of word and sacrament, but to affirm it.6 It seems to be fully consistent with Luther’s position when the Augsburg Confession (Confessio Augustana) states (Art. VII) that ‘The Church is the assembly of saints in which the gospel is correctly (recte) taught and the sacraments are rightly (recte) administered’. The German text of the article brings out the evangelical rather than legal intention of this in the expression ‘according to the gospel’ (laut des Evangelii). It is, of course, a confessional 4 5 6

LW, 6, p. 149. LW, 7, p. 721. See P. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1982; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), ch 1.

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

119

position for Lutherans that the public ministry of word and sacrament, in the service of the gospel, is of divine institution (CA Art. V). This is endorsed in the Leuenberg text The Church of Jesus Christ (2.5.1.1, Tampere thesis 1: ‘The churches from both [Lutheran and Reformed] traditions which have signed or are participating in the Leuenberg Agreement concur that the “ordained ministry” belongs to the being of the Church’).7 Luther’s interpretation of the gospel as the sole creative source of the Church, as the definitive embodiment of Christ’s presence (together with the sacraments), radically challenged the hierarchically structured model of the Church that had developed in the medieval period. This model remains intrinsic today to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Church. In this understanding, the Church is pyramid-shaped and both authority and sacramental grace flow downwards from Christ through the pope to the bishops and priests and through them to the faithful laity. However, Luther’s position appeared to be subversive not only of medieval hierarchical distortions of the Church, but also of the Church as an ordered, structured community or society in any sense. It seemed logically to entail that the Church in its visible, institutional aspect is dispensable. This conclusion certainly would not be acceptable to Lutherans, let alone Anglicans! Lutheran scholars themselves have recognized this implication of Luther’s ecclesiology. Werner Elert writes: ‘For a time it could seem that the Reformation in Luther’s sense meant the destruction or abolition of the Church.’ By burning the papal bull excommunicating him, together with the corpus of Canon Law (Elert suggests), Luther was repudiating ‘not only the existing form but any legally constituted form of the Church’. Elert makes the further disturbing claim that Luther’s doctrine of the universal priesthood ‘abolishes on principle every organizational element without which the Church cannot exist as a unit above the individual’. He suggests that Luther spiritualized the Church to the extent that ‘when one pursues these thoughts to their logical conclusion, it is eliminated as a formative energy of history’.8 The Lutherans and other Reformers were accused by their Roman Catholic opponents of postulating a Church that was invisible and intangible, a Platonica civitas, a Platonic state like the utopian society for which Plato

7 8

Die Kirche Jesu Christi/The Church of Jesus Christ: The Contribution of the Reformation towards Ecumenical Dialogue on Church Unity (Leuenberger Texte, Heft 1, Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2nd edn, 1996), p. 97. W. Elert, The Structure of Lutheranism (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1962), pp. 255–58.

120

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

legislated in The Laws and hoped to see set up in Sicily (as he recounts in his seventh and eighth letters). This meant an ideal Church that had no real existence, and about which you could claim anything because it was a hypothetical Church, elevated above history, politics and fallen human nature – impervious to what Kant later called ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. Luther replied to this criticism that he did not want ‘to build a Church as Plato wants to build a state, which would be nowhere’.9 Melanchthon wrote in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: ‘We are not dreaming about some Platonic republic, as has been slanderously alleged, but we teach that this Church actually exists, made up of true believers and righteous men scattered throughout the world and known by certain outward marks, open and visible to the eyes of men.’10 The subtlety of Luther’s teaching about the Church invited the criticism that his ecclesiology was unreal. Of course Luther did not hold that the Church was entirely invisible, but that its deepest meaning could only be perceived with the eyes of faith. The Church was a Christological reality and its empirical manifestations did not reveal its true nature. According to Luther, the Church is ultimately indifferent to all questions of time and place, though it is not absolutely independent of them. The histories of particular places, such as Rome, Constantinople or Canterbury (or Wittenberg or Geneva, for that matter) cannot make any ultimate difference to the Church. The life of the Church touches place and time obliquely, tangentially. For Luther, Christ abolished all restrictions as to place when he taught that the kingdom of God comes not with observation, so that no one can say, ‘Here it is’, or ‘There it is’, for ‘the kingdom of God is within you’. Luther admits that ‘without place and body there is no Church’, yet body and place are not the Church and do not belong to it. All such matters are indifferent and subject to Christian liberty.11 Luther’s is a radically dialectical way of speaking about the Church. It affirms and negates at the same time. The Church is visible, tangible and identifiable, on the one hand, and invisible, elusive and mysterious on the other. The Church has a double aspect and cannot be reduced to either of these. It seems that for Luther the Church emerges into visibility out of the darkness of divine mystery. It is manifested in the preaching of the Word (the gospel) and the giving of the sacraments (baptism, confession, the mass). But the emergent, manifest Church is merely the tip of the iceberg. The full reality of the Church 9 D. Martin Luthers Werke, Weimar, 1883–2005 (Weimarer Ausgabe) WA, 7, p. 683. 10 T. G. Tappert (ed.), The Book of Concord (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959), p. 171. 11 WA, 7, pp. 719f.

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

121

remains ‘a high, deep, hidden thing which one may neither perceive nor see, but must grasp only by faith through baptism, sacrament and word’.12 Luther’s legacy leaves us with some questions about the relation between the dynamic Christological centre of the Church and its visible expression in structures that have continuity (visible structures by definition have continuity). How does the Church becomes visible as the Church? Is it essential that it should have structures of visible continuity? How is it actually embodied? The Leuenberg document The Church of Jesus Christ states: the tradition of the Reformation distinguishes two ways of speaking about the church and relates them to each other. On the one hand, the church is an object of faith and, on the other, it is at the same time a visible community, a social reality that can be experienced in the diversity of historical forms and shapes.13 Anglicans would be able to endorse this statement without any difficulty. Clearly, word and sacrament are highly visible activities. They register on our senses. They are embodied in an ordained ministry that, as a God-given institution, must be tangible and visible. The pastoral care and oversight that Christ exercises among his people through their pastors is also a highly visible activity. The Church’s structures are precisely forms of oversight. They take communal, collegial and personal forms. Their task, above all, is to make provision for the ministry of word and sacrament in order that the mission of the Church may be carried forward. Thus they have a pastoral nature and are intrinsically related to word and sacrament. As we shall see, this is as true of Anglican structures of oversight as it is of Lutheran or Reformed. When the Church meets in synods of its lay and ordained members for this purpose it has a public profile. Is this an essential aspect of the Church’s existence, that it should be visible and embodied in both time and space? Or is it a peripheral, contingent aspect? The Meissen Common Statement insists that ‘a ministry of pastoral oversight (episkope), exercised in personal, collegial and communal ways, is necessary to witness to and safeguard the unity and apostolicity of the Church’14.

12 LW, 41, p. 211 [WA, 51: 507]. 13 The Church of Jesus Christ: The Contribution of the Reformation towards Ecumenical Dialogue on Church Unity, #2.2. 14 The Meissen Agreement: Texts (London: The Council for Christian Unity, 1992), #15.ix.

122

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

What is the appropriate liturgical expression of the visible continuity and ecumenical communion of the Church? Is it not, among other things, the participation of bishops, who have themselves been consecrated in visible continuity and ecumenical communion, in the consecration of new bishops, so that their episcopal oversight of word and sacrament may be visibly related to the continuity of apostolic ministry and the wider ecumenical fellowship – a visible, representative communion in time and space?




Gospel and Church in the Anglican tradition

Luther’s single-minded concentration on the Christological foundation of the Church in the Word and sacraments of the gospel was shared by the English Reformers. In this matter at least, if not in others, they were disciples of Luther. It is superfluous to illustrate how solidly the English Reformers teach the doctrine of justification by grace through faith. Article XI of the Thirty-nine Articles says: ‘We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort . . .’ The Article goes on to refer to the official Homily that deals with salvation and justification.15 The biblically grounded doctrine of justification by the free grace of God, apart from meritorious works, received by faith, was the critical criterion that the English Reformers applied to what they regarded as medieval abuses: the propitiatory sacrifice of the mass for the living and the departed, the cult of the saints, the rule of clerical celibacy, the religious life and all forms of ‘works righteousness’. In the theology of the English Reformers, precisely because justification by grace through faith was crucial, the preaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments decisively eclipse matters of the outward ordering and oversight of the Church. Although the structures of the episcopate, the dioceses and the parishes continued unbroken through the upheavals of the sixteenth century, the English Reformers regarded the outward ordering of the Church, the arrangements for its governance and oversight, as secondary – as adiaphora. The Reformers were content to let the magistrate (the King or 15 For a helpful discussion of the relation between the gospel and the structured life of the Church, see L. Weil, ‘The Gospel in Anglicanism’, in S. Sykes, J. Booty and C. Knight (eds), The Study of Anglicanism (London: SPCK, 2nd edn, 1998).

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

123

Queen), prescribe the structures of oversight. If Henry VIII had said, ‘We will have no more bishops’, that would probably have decided the matter. In the first phase of the English Reformation, outward forms of oversight were not seen as important for visible continuity. Continuity was important, but it was continuity in the profession of the true faith, the gospel. The English Reformers insisted that, at the Reformation, the English Church had (as Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s, put it) returned to Christ and his holy Apostles.16 Its primary loyalty was to the gospel. It was, as Hooper put it, ‘bound unto none other authority than unto the voice of the gospel’.17 They defined the Church by its relation to Christ: not hierarchically through human mediation, but mystically through the Holy Spirit working in word and sacrament. For Bradford, the Church is ‘a communion or a society of saints . . . a society or partaking of Jesus Christ which is the “head” of the same’.18 This theme of mystical participation in Christ through the sacraments (accompanied, of course, by the Word of God, for there is no sacrament without the Word) becomes stronger in Richard Hooker (d. 1600) and Lancelot Andrewes (d. 1626). It is pronounced in the Book of Common Prayer (1662). The English Reformers agreed with Luther that the gospel must shine out at all costs and at whatever sacrifice. One thing is needful, they assert; all else is secondary. To save the gospel, all outward forms of order and structure – even the fabric of the Church’s unity – are expendable. Only in this way, wrote George Downham, Chaplain to King James I, can we ‘redeem the most precious jewel of the gospel, which is to be redeemed (if need be) with the loss of all outward things’.19 However, the emphasis of Anglican ecclesiology did not remain entirely where the Reformers placed it.20 The later High Church tradition in Anglicanism had a rather different perspective to that of the first Anglican Reformers. It looked back (as all strands of Anglicanism tend to do) to Richard Hooker (because of his sense of the organic life of the Church, participating in God through the sacraments). Its first great exponent was Lancelot Andrewes, who insisted that episcopacy derived from the Apostles and was divinely ordained

16 H. F. Woodhouse, The Doctrine of the Church in Anglican Theology 1547–1603 (London: SPCK, 1954), p. 21. 17 Early Writings of John Hooper (Cambridge: Parker Society), p. 27. 18 J. Bradford, Sermons (Cambridge: Parker Society), p. 146. 19 N. Sykes, Old Priest and New Presbyter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 76. 20 For what follows in the next paragraphs see P. Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church: Theological Resources in Ecumenical Perspective (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2nd edn, 2002).

124

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

for the Church. For a time, its most powerful advocate was William Laud, the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury. These divines were more interested in realities than in names and titles. Hooker and Andrewes recognized the Lutheran and Reformed churches and their ministries. Hooker held that a corrupt episcopate could be abolished and reconstituted from the presbyterate. Andrewes maintained that episcopacy belonged to the agenda not the credenda of the Church: it was not de fide. Protestant Superintendents were bishops by any other name. Even Laud, who argued that episcopacy was a mark of a true church, was able to recognize Lutheran ministries on the grounds that Lutheran Superintendents preserved the reality of episcopal order and used a title that was known to the early Church. At the time of the Restoration of the monarchy and the Anglican episcopate and liturgy in 1660–62, such High Church divines as Henry Hammond and Herbert Thorndike further elevated the claims of episcopacy and the necessity of episcopal ordination. However, even they do not judge non-episcopal continental churches negatively, seeing them as imperfect only in their polity because of their lack of episcopacy. They by no means unchurch them. What they do not justify is the separation of Presbyterians and Independents from the Church of England when it could not be claimed that doctrinal error was being required as a condition of communion. Hammond and Thorndike belong to the consensus of Anglicanism at this time: that the Church of England was a reformed church, that there was one foundation of the Christian Church and it was not bishops, and that the Protestant churches of the Continent were to be held in fraternal regard. The High Church tradition emphasized the visible signs of grace in the Church and regarded them as channels through which the divine life was mediated to Christians. The High Churchmen gave a high place to the sacraments, to episcopacy, to the Church’s control of its doctrine and discipline, and to the jure divino monarchy. However, they continued to uphold the reformed, Protestant character of the Church of England. Although they gave more emphasis to the fruits of good works, arising from justification, than some Reformers did, and some were infected by moralism, they valued the changes that the Reformation had brought: the vernacular Bible and liturgy, communion in both kinds, a ministry that was free to marry, a recognized role for lay people in church matters, the duty of particular churches to reform themselves. The High Church tradition was radicalized by the Nonjurors at the end of the seventeenth century and by the Hutchinsonians towards the end of the eighteenth. High Church ecclesiology flourished on the eve of the Oxford

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

125

Movement, which gave it a rather different twist. The combined effect of the Nonjurors, the Hutchinsonians and the more militant Tractarians was to alienate the Church of England from the continental Protestant churches. The early Tractarians were concerned to recover the spiritual nature of the Church and to recall it to its apostolic foundation. They were as implacably opposed to the Roman Catholic Church as they were to Protestant Dissent in England. The Oxford Movement was a kind of reformation. Its leaders were inspired by the vision of the primitive Church. The early Fathers and martyrs were like contemporaries to them – a standing rebuke both to the lukewarm Tory Establishment of Church and State in the early nineteenth century and to the Utilitarian, Erastian Whig reforms that followed. Newman imagined what Athanasius or Ambrose would think if they could visit the Church of England. In how many parish churches or cathedrals would they find that deep seriousness with God, that self-abasing, Godglorifying, world-renouncing ethos of the primitive Church?21 The Tractarians looked at the public face of the Church of England, at its ancient universities, its architectural wonders, its attachment to the Crown and said: ‘No, the true life of the Church is where the catholic faith is taught and the catholic sacraments are administered. The Church of Christ is not a department of the civil service: it is apostolic or it is nothing. Bishops are its true leaders.’ The Tractarians lack the Reformers’ rhetoric about the gospel. Though not all of the Tractarians were ignorant of the Reformation or hostile towards it, the more radical of them, such as R. H. Froude, W. G. Ward and Newman himself, were implacably hostile to the Reformers. They knew little about their theology and judged them by anachronistic standards. They were prejudiced against them as those responsible for destroying the unity of the catholic Church. The Tractarians did not speak the language of ‘gospel’ but of the faith of the Church, ‘the faith once delivered to the saints’ and of the authority of the visible Church to implement that faith in the lives of its members through pastoral discipline. Not surprisingly, it was those who were most anti-Reformation who eventually were among those who converted to the Roman Catholic Church. By the standards of Reformation theology, some Tractarians’ grasp of the evangelical faith was shaky. Given their overriding concern to promote in the Church that ‘holiness without which no man shall see the Lord’, it is hardly surprising that the Reformers’ doctrine of justification, which sometimes spoke

21 J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, J. M. Cameron (ed.), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 185.

126

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of justifying righteousness as external or alien (but not only that), should have been distasteful to some of them. It is ironic that the Reformers’ fundamentally relational understanding of justification has now been vindicated as authentically biblical and Pauline by ecumenical study in the dialogues between the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran Churches respectively, on the other. Newman’s own attempt to develop a mediating doctrine of justification, though among the most purely theological of his writings, is flawed by contorted logic, special pleading and other forms of sophistry.22 Anglicanism today has recovered its balance. It has rediscovered the gospel and is committed to proclaiming it in mission. The doctrine of justification by grace through faith is affirmed by Anglicans of all persuasions. The royal priesthood of the laos is affirmed and celebrated. There has been a shift away from a sacerdotal understanding of the ordained ministry towards a pastoral and representative one. Lay ministry is blossoming and the laity have a vital role in church government through the synodical structures. The Holy Scriptures are acknowledged as the paramount authority for Christian doctrine and are studied in parish groups throughout the Church. The Evangelical tradition is the strongest of the various strands within the Church of England, but its witness has permeated the whole Church. The boundaries between one tradition and another are increasingly difficult to discern. On the other hand, however, Anglicans retain a concern for the outward ordering of the Church. Recent years have seen a growth in interest in ecclesiology. While Anglicans recognize the reality of oversight (episkope) in churches that are not ordered within the historic episcopate (and have affirmed this in a number of agreements, beginning with Meissen), they continue to define themselves, to some extent, with reference to the historic episcopate. Anglicans do not see the gospel, expressed in word and sacrament, as in any way separate from their structures of oversight. On the contrary, they regard those structures as intimately related to the ministry of the gospel in word and sacrament. In the statement of the House of Bishops of the Church of England Bishops in Communion, episcopal oversight is set within the context of the conciliar life of the Church (in which lay people and non-episcopal clergy play a full part). This conciliar life is grounded in the koinonia that the cross and resurrection of Christ makes possible. The universal priesthood is strongly affirmed: 22 J. H. Newman, Lectures on Justification (London, 2nd edn, 1840). Discussion in P. Avis, Christians in Communion (London: Geoffrey Chapman Mowbray, 1990), ch. 7.

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

127

The ministry of Christ in his body is channelled through every member, graced with the gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12.4–12). For all who have passed from darkness to light through baptism, with its Trinitarian confession of faith, are incorporated into Christ’s messianic, Spiritbearing body (1 Corinthians 12.13) and are anointed as a prophetic, royal priesthood (1 Peter 2.5–9). The idea of representative ministry is crucial in this report: Within this universal priesthood of the baptized there is a divine economy at work: special representative ministries are given authority and grace to speak and act in a public way on behalf of Christ and the Church, as they preach and teach the word, celebrate the sacraments and provide pastoral oversight. Finally, according to Bishops in Communion, oversight is exercised in communal, collegial and personal ways. Its communal expression is located in the conciliarity of synodical government. Its collegial expression is primarily found in the episcopate. It takes personal form in the primacy of leadership at various levels of Church life.23 In the mid-twentieth century the biblical theology movement, the liturgical renewal movement and the ecumenical movement all helped the Church to return to its foundation in the gospel of God. In one of the finest expressions of this theological renewal, Michael Ramsey’s The Gospel and the Catholic Church, the future Archbishop of Canterbury looked back beyond his mentor Charles Gore and Anglo-Catholicism and the Oxford Movement itself – all of which had decisively shaped his thinking and spirituality – to the Reformation. Ramsey asserted that its themes of the Word, faith and grace were truly catholic: ‘These are Catholicism’s own themes, and out of them it was born.’24 Citing Luther’s Ninety-five Theses (that I have already quoted) – ‘The true treasure of the Church is the holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God’ – Ramsey insisted: ‘Catholicism always stands before the church door at Wittenberg to read the truth by which she is created and

23 Bishops in Communion: Collegiality in the Service of the Koinonia of the Church, An Occasional Paper of the House of Bishops (London: Church House Publishing, 1999), p. 52. 24 A. M. Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church (London: Longmans, 1936), p. 180.

128

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

by which also she is judged.’25 The burden of Ramsey’s argument is that the Church and its structures are inseparable from the gospel. ‘To understand the Catholic Church and its life and order is to see it as the utterance of the gospel of God; to understand the gospel of God is to share with all the saints in the building up of the one body of Christ.’26 The doctrine of the Church is included within the knowledge of Christ crucified.27




Episkope and episcopacy

Our starting point must surely be the general ecumenical agreement, reflected notably in Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (M23), on the necessity of pastoral oversight (episkope) in the Church. For example, the Meissen Common Statement 15(ix) says: ‘We believe that a ministry of pastoral oversight (episkope), exercised in personal, collegial and communal ways, is necessary to witness to and safeguard the unity and apostolicity of the Church.’ On the basis of this aspect of ‘agreement in faith’, the Meissen Declaration includes the following Acknowledgement: ‘We acknowledge that personal and collegial oversight (episkope) is embodied and exercised in our churches in a variety of forms, episcopal and non-episcopal, as a visible sign of the Church’s unity and continuity in apostolic life, mission and ministry.’28 Thus both churches are agreed on the principle and practice of episkope. Both have pastoral oversight in communal, collegial and personal forms. In terms of the personal form of episkope, both churches have the office of bishop. Both recognize that it is important for the episcopal office to be ordered in visible historical continuity, as part of the visible continuity of the ministry of the gospel and of the confession of the faith and both churches make provision for this in various concrete ways, including in ordination. The principle and practice of transmitted authority is not in question in either church. What we are not so far agreed on concerns the significance of episcopacy for the full visible unity of the Church. Meissen #16 says:

25 26 27 28

Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. ix. I cannot understand why the third dimension of oversight, given in BEM, the communal, is not mentioned at this point in Meissen, as its importance is acknowledged in the common statement.

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

129

Lutheran, Reformed and United Churches, though being increasingly prepared to appreciate episcopal succession ‘as a sign of the apostolicity of the life of the whole Church’, hold that this particular form of episkope should not become a necessary condition for ‘full, visible unity’. The Anglican understanding of full, visible unity includes the historic episcopate and full interchangeability of ministers. Because of this remaining difference our mutual recognition of one another’s ministries does not yet result in the full interchangeability of ministers. In order to address this difficulty, we may consider, from the point of view of a catholic ecclesiology, the role that the episcopal office plays in helping to realize the full, visible unity of the Church. That unity can only be grounded in the truth of the gospel and expressed in the ministry of word and sacrament. The visible structures of the Church – structures of oversight and of conciliarity at every level of the Church’s life – are related to that ministry. They make provision for it, oversee its exercise, and support it with pastoral care. Within this context of oversight and conciliarity, the episcopate serves the gospel and its expression in word and sacrament. Bishops are primarily ministers of the gospel, of word and sacrament, and have oversight of that ministry in their dioceses. In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed we confess in faith the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church. Of course, these attributes of the Church of Christ do not stand without the gospel and its ministry of word and sacrament. As dimensions of the Church, they are, by definition, dimensions of the ministry of the gospel. Since bishops are the most representative ministers of word and sacrament, we may say that episcopacy is related in a distinctive way to the credal dimensions of the Church – its unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity – and serves them.29 That is not to say that these credal dimensions of the Church are dependent on the episcopate. They are the inalienable attributes of the body of Christ and are, therefore, not dependent on any one form of ordained ministry. They belong to the Church of Christ, as such, whatever its outward form (though they may be manifested to varying degrees). They can be recognized wherever the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered in the context of pastoral care (cf. the Thirty-nine Articles, XIX). All Christians participate, through faith and baptism, in the unity, holiness, catholicity and

29 Cf. Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement (London: Church House Publishing, 1993), #43.

130

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

apostolicity of the Church. However, the credal attributes of the Church are particularly focused in the office of the bishop. The episcopal office has a special responsibility for seeing that they are manifested visibly. The episcopal office plays a significant role in the visible unity of the Church because episcopal ministry is the most fully representative form of Christian ministry. While all Christians represent Christ and the Church – the Spirit-bearing body in head and members – the ordained have a public representative role by virtue of the office to which they are ordained. Even among the clergy, there are degrees of representativeness, culminating in the representative ministry of the bishop. The tasks of the Church – to teach, to sanctify and to govern or lead – which together comprise its mission, appear clearly focused in the ministry of the bishop. Episcopal ministry is also related to the four credal dimensions of the Church. While all Christians are related, as members of the body of Christ, to the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church, the episcopal office is called to manifest these dimensions in a public representative way in a broad interface with the universal Church and in leading the faithful and their pastors in mission. Bishops are the chief pastors or shepherds of the local church, the diocese, and one of their roles is to unite that church representatively, through episcopal collegiality, with other local churches in space and time. Thus they are, as BEM puts it, ‘representative pastoral ministers of oversight, continuity and unity in the Church’ (BEM M29). Bishops shepherd the flock of Christ that has been entrusted to their care through their ministry of the gospel, the sacraments of the gospel and the pastoral discipline that applies the gospel. That is to say, by themselves preaching the gospel and teaching the faith and also by making provision for the ministry of proclamation within their dioceses; by performing baptism themselves as the normal minister of the sacraments and presiding at the Eucharist as the leader or president of the eucharistic community that is the local church and also by making provision for the administration of the sacraments within it; by themselves extending pastoral oversight, care and support for clergy and laity and also by ensuring that it is given by others; and, finally, by presiding in conciliar gatherings of the local church, the diocesan synod. Canon C 18 of the Church of England states these points like this: Every bishop is the chief pastor of all that are within his diocese, as well laity as clergy, and their father in God; it appertains to his office to teach and uphold sound and wholesome doctrine, and to banish and drive

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

131

away all erroneous and strange opinions . . . Every bishop has within his diocese jurisdiction as Ordinary . . . Every bishop is, within his diocese, the principal minister, and to him belongs the right . . . of celebrating the rites of ordination and confirmation . . . of being president of the diocesan synod.




Episcopacy and the mission of the Church

The locus classicus for the Church’s mission is Mt. 28.18–20 where the Risen Christ commissions the Apostles: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. This mission entails three separate tasks: teaching, baptizing and making disciples. These three tasks correspond in principle to the ministry of the Word, the ministry of the sacraments, and the ministry of pastoral oversight. Much ecumenical theology (e.g. BEM, Meissen, Porvoo) affirms that the ministry of word, sacrament and episkope is necessary to the unity and continuity of the Church. This is surely as much as to say that it is necessary to the existence, the esse of the Church. But how are these tasks related to the person and work of the Christ who sends his Apostles to fulfil them? They correspond to and derive from the messianic identity of Jesus Christ as prophet, priest and king. All ministry is the ministry of Jesus Christ. He is at work in his Church through the Holy Spirit, teaching, sanctifying and leading his people through unworthy human instruments. As his instruments, ministers are representatives of Christ and of his Body the Church.30 In episcopally ordered churches the ministry of the bishop is seen precisely in terms of this threefold mission. The Second Vatican Council expounded 30 For a fuller account see P. Avis, A Ministry Shaped by Mission (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005); T. F. O’Meara, Theology of Ministry (New York: Paulist Press, 1983).

132

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

episcopal ministry as ‘the office of teaching, sanctifying and governing’ (CD 11: Abbott, ed., p. 403; cf. LG 25–7; Abbott, ed., pp. 47–52).31 In exercising their duty of teaching, it stated, bishops should announce the gospel of Christ to their people, ‘a task which is eminent among the chief duties of bishops,’ and should ‘present Christian doctrine in a manner adapted to the needs of the times’, acknowledging the difficulties and problems that trouble people in the modern world (CD 12–13: Abbott, ed., pp. 404f). The Council understood the sanctifying office of the episcopate as a priestly ministry of the sacraments: ‘In fulfilling their duty to sanctify, bishops should be mindful that they have been taken from among men and appointed their representatives before God in order to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins’ (CD 15: Abbott, ed., p. 406). The document Christus Dominus asserts that ‘bishops are the principal dispensers of the mysteries of God’ and that they strive to enable the faithful to ‘know and live the paschal mystery more deeply through the Eucharist’. This is coupled with an exhortation to give a personal example of charity, humility and simplicity of life, so that the bishop may ‘so hallow the churches entrusted to them that the true image of Christ’s universal Church may shine forth fully in them’ (CD 15: Abbott, ed., pp. 406f). The office of governing is presented in Vatican II as that of a father, pastor and servant who ministers in the midst of his people and ministerial assistants, who knows them and is known by them and who is solicitous for their spiritual, material and intellectual welfare (CD 16: Abbott, ed., pp. 407ff). In his exposition of the teaching of Vatican II on the governing office of the bishop, Kenan B. Osborne places the emphasis on leading.32 It is important to note, before we leave Vatican II for the time being, that the Council also affirms strongly the teaching, sanctifying and governing ministry of priests and deacons who cooperate and collaborate, as the Council puts it, with the bishop and work under his authority (CD 28–30: Abbott, ed., pp. 416–19). Osborne also draws out the point, which is certainly implicit in the teaching of the Council, that the laity share, according to their calling, in this threefold task, in conjunction with the ordained. This must be so, on reflection, since all baptized believers are called to follow Jesus Christ who is prophet, priest and king, and whose messianic anointing they receive and share through baptism.

31 References in the text to the Abbott edition of the documents of the Second Vatican Council are to W. M. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966). 32 K. B. Osborne, Priesthood: A History of the Ordained Ministry in the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), ch. 11.

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

133

J. Robert Wright has developed the typology, noted by others, whereby the three aspects of bishops’ ministry can be identified with the emphases of certain Fathers.33 O

O

O

Irenaeus of Lyons (c.AD 185–200) emphasizes the role of the bishop as teacher of the apostolic faith. Irenaeus presents the bishop primarily as the link between each local church and the teaching of the Apostles. Apostolic succession is the handing on of true teaching from one bishop to another in the local community. The bishop’s cathedra is ‘the symbol of teaching’. Ignatius (c.107) and Hippolytus (c.210) emphasise the role of the bishop as provider of the sacraments and president of the Eucharist. The presence of the bishop or his representative is required for the Eucharist to be celebrated and the effective expression of the unity of the Church. As Wright puts it: ‘The church, in Ignatius’ view, is essentially eucharistic by nature: there is an organic relation between the Body of Christ understood as community, and the Body of Christ understood as sacrament.’ Wright also notes that the rediscovery and authentication of Hippolytus’ Apostolic Tradition, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, was probably the principal influence leading to the Second Vatican Council’s affirmation that ‘the episcopate is the primary order of ministry constituting the fullness of the sacrament of holy orders’. Wright adds that this position has been generally held by Anglicans since the seventeenth century. Cyprian (d. 258) emphasises the role of the bishop in the oversight, governance and leadership of the church. Without overlooking the roles of eucharistic president and teacher of the apostolic faith, Cyprian is primarily interested in the bishop as the bond of unity between the local church and the church universal. As is well known, the concept of episcopal collegiality originates in Cyprian’s De Unitate Ecclesiae.

As Wright himself points out, these three emphases are not in conflict but are complementary. I would go slightly further and underline the point that they are interconnected and mutually constituting. Both the teaching and the

33 J. R. Wright (ed.), On Being a Bishop (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1992), pp. 16–31.

134

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

sanctifying offices can be seen as expressions of episkope. It is because bishops preside, as pastors, over the Christian community that they preside over its worship.34 Because bishops have oversight of the Church, they are the ones who ordain: ordination is an expression of episkope, not of some esoteric power unrelated to their pastoral ministry. On the other hand, episkope would be nothing without the ministry of word and sacrament: it is largely constituted by that ministry. Pastoral oversight is carried out in part by the ministry of the Word, by teaching and by oversight of the liturgy and the conditions of its celebration. The ministry of word and sacrament are completely integrated in the Eucharist. Word, sacrament and oversight are an indissoluble totality. In summary, we may say that the Church’s mission, given to it by Christ, comprises three tasks: proclaiming the gospel and teaching the Word (kerygma and didache), sanctifying the people of God through the celebration of the sacraments, and leading and guiding the faithful through pastoral oversight. This mission, which is entrusted to the whole Church (originally to the Apostles as representatives of the apostolic community) is carried out by the whole Church through the leadership of a representative ministry. I now want to try to show that this triple ministry is vested in the bishop as the most fully representative office of the Church.




Episcopacy and the nature of the Church

The episcopal office is significantly related to the credal dimensions of the Church: unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. That is not to say that these credal dimensions of the Church are dependent on the episcopate. They are the inalienable attributes of the body of Christ and are, therefore, not dependent on any one form of ordained ministry. They belong to the Church of Christ, as such, whatever its outward form. They can be recognised wherever the Word is preached and the sacraments are administered in the context of pastoral care. All Christians participate, through faith and baptism, in the unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity of the Church. However, the credal attributes of the Church are particularly focused in the office of the bishop. The episcopal office has a peculiar responsibility for seeing that they are manifested visibly. 34 See P. Bradshaw in D. Holeton (ed.), Anglican Orders and Ordinations (Cambridge: Grove Books, 1997) and House of Bishops of the Church of England, Eucharistic Presidency (London: Church House Publishing, 1997).

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

135

One A bishop has a special but not exclusive responsibility for maintaining and promoting the unity of the Church – ‘the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph. 4.3). Although, as the Church of England’s Common Worship Ordinal insists, priests, as well as bishops, are called to promote unity, peace and love among all Christian people, bishops are called to this pre-eminently: ‘Will you promote peace and reconciliation in the Church and in the world; and will you strive for the visible unity of Christ’s Church?’ The episcopal office does this by linking the local Churches in faith and order through both space and time. In the exercise of episcopal collegiality, bishops work together and take counsel together so that, as far as possible in a still fragmented Church, they may act as one in teaching, sanctifying and leading the Church (see the report of the House of Bishops on collegiality Bishops in Communion).35 Through the representative office of the bishop, all in each place (the local eucharistic community) can be brought into communion with all in every place, in a conciliar fellowship of local churches primarily represented by their bishops, though involving laity and clergy also. Conciliar fellowship is, by definition, predicated on unity of faith and unity in baptism and is intrinsically eucharistic fellowship, since a holy synod of the Church is a eucharistic body and the Eucharist is the special responsibility of bishops.36

Holy A bishop has a special but not exclusive responsibility for upholding the holiness of the Church, and this is true in two ways. First, the bishop shows by his or her ministry of word, sacrament and pastoral oversight the heavenly calling of the dedicated people of God. Like the Apostle Paul, ‘the foremost among sinners’ (1 Tim. 1.15), it is as a fellow sinner that the bishop is called (as the Common Worship ordinal puts it) to nurture God’s people in the life of the Spirit and lead them in the way of holiness’. As Roman Catholic teaching puts it: a bishop ‘by virtue of his very ministry is responsible in a special way for the growth in holiness of all his faithful since he is “the principal dispenser 35 See House of Bishops of the Church of England, Bishops in Communion: Collegiality in the Service of the Koinonia of the Church (London: Church House Publishing, 2000). 36 A. Keshinian, Conciliar Fellowship: A Common Goal (Geneva: WCC, 1992).

136

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of the mysteries of God and the spiritual guide of his flock” according to the vocation proper to each one’.37 A bishop should lead his people, by teaching and example, in repentance and continual conversion (metanoia) and into paths of greater faithfulness to their divine calling. Second, it is not only through pastoral oversight, but even more importantly, through the ministry of word and sacrament that the bishop sanctifies the people of God committed to his or her care. Through word and sacrament working together, Christians are washed clean, made holy and acceptable to God through Christ (1 Pet. 1.23; 2.2; Heb. 10.22). It is the sacraments that, in conjunction with the Word of God, sanctify and transform the people of God.

Catholic A bishop also has a special but not exclusive responsibility for upholding the catholicity of the Church. Catholicity stands for the synchronic dimension of the Church − its ecclesial breadth, the universality, inclusiveness and allembracing mission to which the Church is called. As chief pastor of the local church (the diocese), the bishop is a pastor to pastors and to lay Christians. In sharing the cure of souls in fellowship and collegiality with parish clergy, the bishop represents the common calling of the ordained ministers of the Church. As the principal minister of the sacraments in the diocese, the bishop has an enlarged eucharistic presidency in the community that he or she leads and serves. Episcopal ministry helps to broaden horizons, challenging local congregations not to be parochial (in the pejorative sense of the word). Bishops unite the churches spatio-temporally in a representative manner.38 A bishop unites the local church with other local churches spatially (so to speak) through his or her communion with their bishops. This comes to focus particularly when episcopal collegiality is expressed sacramentally in the ordination of deacons and presbyters and in the participation of a number

37 Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes, ‘Bishops and Religious’, #7 (1978), citing CD 15: A. Flannery (ed.), Vatican Council II: More Post Conciliar Documents (New York: Costello, 1982), pp. 214f. 38 Episcopal Ministry: The Report of the Archbishops’ Group on The Episcopate, 1990 (London: Church House Publishing, 1990); Women Bishops in the Church of England? A Report of the House of Bishops’ Working Party on Women in the Episcopate (London: Church House Publishing, 2004); The Mission and Ministry of the Whole Church (London: Council for Christian Unity, Faith and Order Advisory Group, 2007).

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

137

of bishops (canonically, no fewer than three, of whom one shall normally be the metropolitan) in the consecration of a new bishop.

Apostolic Finally, a bishop has a special but not exclusive responsibility for upholding the apostolicity of the Church.39 Apostolicity stands for the Church’s diachronic dimension, its ecclesial depth, its faithfulness to the teaching and mission of the apostolic Church. The episcopate, with its special responsibility for guarding and teaching the apostolic faith, represents symbolically, when it is true to its calling, the permanence of the truth of the gospel, its unchanging continuity through history. The Porvoo Common Statement says of the ordination of a bishop in historical succession (‘that is, in intended continuity from the apostles themselves’) that it is a sign of the Church’s ‘care for continuity in the whole of its life and mission, and reinforces its determination to manifest the permanent characteristics of the Church of the apostles’.40 A bishop is, therefore, as the Common Worship Ordinal puts it, called to ‘speak in the name of God and expound the gospel of salvation’. ‘Will you teach the doctrine of Christ as the Church of England has received it, will you refute error, and will you hand on entire the faith that is entrusted to you?’ In his or her role as teacher and defender of the orthodox faith, the bishop represents continuity with the teaching of the apostles. This aspect of episcopacy links the Church of today with the Church of early Christian history. A concrete aspect of apostolicity is the continuity of the gospel, the continuity of the apostolic faith in the local church, which is the eucharistic community led by the bishop. This is perhaps the most ancient and authentic understanding of ‘apostolic succession’, as far as it concerns bishops, and the one that is still most congenial to the Orthodox Churches. The continuity of the consecration of bishops to the historic sees (which plays a part in the Porvoo Agreement) can only be significant when it is seen as an outward and visible sign of the faithful handing on of the apostolic faith, the gospel. It is the continuity of the apostolic community, the local church constituted by word and sacrament, that really matters. The historic sees are nothing without that and those episcopally ordered churches whose sees are not as ancient certainly have the vital continuity of communities of word and sacrament. 39 On apostolicity see D. Carter, ‘Some Reflections on Apostolicity’, One in Christ, 31.3 (1995), pp. 237–50. 40 Together in Mission and Ministry, #50.

138

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

But, given that continuity of the local church’s faithfulness to the gospel, manifested in word and sacrament, it is appropriate that, since the bishops are the representatives of the community, there should be continuity of consecration to the see. Above all, the connection of the episcopate to the apostolicity of the Church should be seen as essentially missiological. Apostolicity is continuity with the mission of the apostles. A bishop is called to promote the Church’s mission (which is nothing less than God’s mission) throughout the world. ‘Will you lead your people in proclaiming the glorious gospel of Christ, so that the good news of salvation may be heard in every place?’ (Common Worship Ordinal). The instruments of that mission are none other than word and sacrament, accompanied by pastoral oversight, and it is precisely for this ministry that a bishop is commissioned.




Concluding clarifications

The office and ministry of a bishop is not only grounded in the gospel and orientated from first to last to the gospel, but it also embodies, reflects and nurtures the four credal dimensions of the Church: unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity. Although there is an unbroken continuum of mission and ministry in the Church of Christ, so that episcopal ministry can never be separated from priestly or diaconal (or lay) ministry, the ministry of the bishop stands for the full integrity of the body of Christ as no other ministry can. It is the most fully ecclesial ministry, bringing to light the nature of the Church in a public, representative way. It stands for the gospel and the Church. The episcopal office is therefore the most fully representative office. It is appropriate and inevitable that it should have a key role in carrying forward the mission and unity of the Church. However, I am well aware that my argument must seem provocative to some, not least to those members of non-episcopal churches who remain wary (if not suspicious) of bishops. So I want to end with several clarifications or caveats in order to prevent misunderstandings. First, it is important to recognize that episcopacy is one particular form of episkope or pastoral oversight, though I have argued that it is the most fully representative one. Recent ecumenical theology affirms that episkope belongs inherently to all churches, since all practise some form of pastoral oversight

Episcopacy: Focus of Unity or Cause of Division?

139

of their ministers and members.41 Episkope takes diverse forms, but is always linked inseparably with the ministry of word and sacrament. An argument for episcopacy is not therefore an argument for episkope. It presupposes the reality of episkope and is an argument for a particular form of it. Second, just as episcopacy is one form of episkope, the so-called historic episcopate is one form of episcopal ministry. There are, for example, Lutheran and Methodist churches, that have episcopacy but not in the historical succession of ordinations by bishops. Some German Lutherans make it clear from time to time that the historic episcopate holds few attractions for them. As far as they are concerned, if the historic episcopate purports to provide some kind of guarantee over and above the indefectibility of the Church, which is secured by Christ’s promises attached to word and sacrament, it is a corrupt institution resting on a false theology. In discussion with such Lutheran friends and colleagues, I make it plain that in my understanding (and I believe it to be the Anglican one), bishops are primarily ministers of word and sacrament as the twin manifestations of the gospel (underpinned by pastoral care). In the last analysis they are nothing more and can be nothing more, for they are ministers of pastoral oversight in the service of word and sacrament, which are the primary forms of Christ’s presence among his people. But I hope it will be clear from my argument in this paper, that I believe that there are historically embedded structures that help to provide for the continuity of the ministry of word and sacrament. In particular, the catholicity and apostolicity of word and sacrament require visible expression. However, those historical structures are fallible and in need of continual reform and renewal under the authority precisely of word and sacrament. Episcopacy is enclosed in a virtuous circle, centred on the gospel itself. Third, though I have argued that episcopal ministry is the most fully representative ministry of the Church, both of its structures and its nature, I want to be clear that episcopal ministry does not stand without presbyteral, diaconal and indeed lay ministry. In catholic ecclesiology, with its practice of sequential ordination (rather than direct ordination to the presbyterate), a bishop is, at the same time, a priest, a deacon and a baptized believer, a member of the laos, the holy people of God. Once a deacon, always a deacon. Once a presbyter, always a presbyter. The episcopate does not supersede these ministries but includes and subsumes them. As the Swedish Lutheran Roman Catholic

41 P. C. Bouteneff and A. D. Falconer (eds), Episkopé and Episcopacy and the Quest for Visible Unity (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1999); Together in Mission and Ministry, #32k; BEM 23M.

140

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

report puts it, the ministry of the Church is ‘gathered’ in the office of bishop.42 Finally, I want to stress once again that what I say about the episcopate I say about the office and ministry, not about individual office holders. In the end I do not need to resist the claim of some anti-episcopalians that bishops may have been responsible for more disturbance and division than any other kind of Christian. There is an historical memory of prelacy that still persists – and not only among Free Church people. When Cosmo Lang, at that time Archbishop of York, complained that his official portrait by Sir William Orpen made him look ‘proud, prelatical and pompous’, Bishop Hensley Henson of Durham immediately rejoined: ‘And may I ask Your Grace to which of these epithets does Your Grace take exception?’43 Any institution has its faults and probably all models of church polity – papal, presbyteral or congregational, as well as episcopal – could be shown to have been the cause of much that is harmful and destructive in Church history. But an ecclesiology that is both catholic and reformed (as the Anglican ecclesiology intends to be) situates the bishop in synod. The bishop ministers in the council of clergy and lay people. Synodical structures at every level of the life of the Church are intended to promote this model of the bishop in synod. The faithful uphold the bishop; the bishop upholds the faithful. Personal episkope has its risks but in the end is unavoidable since, as the Swedish Lutheran – Roman Catholic report The Office of Bishop says, it stands for ‘the unfathomable notion that God himself acts in his Church through human tools’.44

42 Swedish Lutheran–Roman Catholic Dialogue, The Office of Bishop (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 1993), p. 52. 43 J. G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949), p. 290. 44 The Office of Bishop, p. 103.

8


Building and Breaking Communion1

C

hristians seem to find it hard to live and worship side by side. Christians are chronically prone to fall out with each other. Harmony is not the most obvious mark of the Church. In spite of the apostolic injunction, ‘Live in harmony with one another’ (Rom. 12.16, NRSV), it is often disharmony that prevails.2 While the second collect at Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, 1662, describes God as ‘the author of peace and lover of concord’, it is frequently discord that marks God’s Church. Whether we look at parishes and congregations or at denominations and world communions we see that they seem to exist in a continual tension of holding together and breaking apart. The opposing forces – centrifugal and centripetal – ebb and flow, now one way, now the other. The history of the Church is littered with examples of those who walked out and those who were driven out. Church history can be seen as the chequered history of efforts to preserve communion, on the one hand, and actions that breached communion, on the other. This strange phenomenon, that is typical of the Church at all times, raises certain questions. Is it ever right to break communion with our fellow

1 2

An earlier version of this chapter was given as a public lecture at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, in January 2009. [T]o auto eis allelous phronountes, literally ‘thinking the same thing toward each other’: J. Fitzmyer, Romans: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (The Anchor Bible: New York: Doubleday; London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1993), pp. 655–6. Paul repeats the sentiment in the form of a prayer in 15.5: ‘May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another [to auto phronein en allelois] in accordance with Christ Jesus.’ Cf. 1 Cor. 1.10: ‘Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose’; Phil. 2.2: ‘be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind’.

142

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Christians or with a church? Is it credible to claim (as I do in this book) that our primary obligation to our fellow Christians is to be in communion with them? These questions need to be addressed within the framework of the nature and purpose of the Church, that is to say ecclesiologically. In this paper I look first at ecclesiology and secondly at communion. Throughout the paper, these two themes interact. The order of discussion makes sense because communion theology is an important subdivision of contemporary ecclesiology and one of its most creative expressions. So let me first define what I understand by ecclesiology.




Ecclesiology

Ecclesiology is that particular branch of theology that reflects on the nature and mission of the Christian Church.3 The Church’s confession of faith (for example, in the creeds of the ecumenical councils or the historic Protestant confessions or the councils of the Roman Catholic Church) includes what it confesses about itself in the purposes of God. It may seem highly invidious for the Church to talk about itself and this invites a strong dose of the hermeneutic of suspicion. At least in the early councils, before the major divisions in the Church, it was the whole Church talking about itself, but in the case of the Protestant confessions and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, it makes better sense to say that the churches are talking about the Church. In spite of these qualifications, it is unavoidable that the Church (or churches) should confess the truth about the Church, as they have received it, because the Church is part of the gospel and the gospel is not complete unless it includes the Church, with all its means of grace. What the Church says about itself is expressed in various biblical images that have been developed into conceptual models. ‘Body of Christ’ and ‘People of God’ are perhaps the two most prominent ecclesiological images or models. Others include ‘Temple of the Spirit’, ‘Herald of the gospel’, ‘Bride of Christ’ and the Marian image or model developed by von Balthasar and Angelo Scola in the light of the treatment of Mary as Mother of the Church and exemplar of Christians by the Second Vatican Council.4 The Church as the sacrament 3 4

See further P. Avis, ‘Ecclesiology’, in A. E. McGrath (ed.), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). A. Dulles, Models of the Church (New York: Doubleday, 1974); G. Preston, Faces

Building and Breaking Communion

143

of salvation is a recent articulation or extrapolation from the biblical imagery of the Church as the channel or vehicle of God’s presence and grace. The conceptual models that are derived from biblical images are elaborated into a coherent account, which we call ecclesiology. So ecclesiology is an ecclesial activity. It is something that the Church does. It seems unlikely that unbelievers, who may study the historical, political or sociological aspects of the Christian Church, would wish to engage in reflection on the mystery of the Church. Ecclesiology naturally and properly belongs ‘within the bosom of the Church’, as Karl Rahner put it.5 Notwithstanding our earlier qualifications, it remains broadly true that because ecclesiology is carried on within the Church, it is the Church thinking about itself and about what it believes about itself. In ecclesiology the subject and object are the same.6 As a reflexive activity, ecclesiology is vulnerable to distortion motivated by self-interest, delusions of grandeur or perhaps defensiveness on the part of the Church (which in practice means that particular part of the Church that is doing ecclesiology at that time). How hard – if not impossible – it is to see ourselves as we ‘really’ or ‘truly’ are, as we are in the eyes of others and, above all, as we are in the sight of God! So ecclesiology needs to be a critical discipline and that means a self-critical discipline. So ecclesiology is the department of theology that takes the Church’s self-understanding as its object. It may be defined as the critical study of the dominant models of the Church’s self-understanding.7 Ecclesiology is interested in both the being (or nature) and the doing (or mission) of the Church. The Nature and Mission of the Church is of course the title of a recent statement from the Faith and Order Commission

5 6

7

of the Church: Meditations on a Mystery and its Images (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997); A. Scola, ‘The Theological Foundations of the Petrine Dimension of the Church: A Working Hypothesis’, Ecclesiology 4.1 (2007), pp. 12–37; LG VIII: W. M. Abbott, The Documents of Vatican II (London and Dublin: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966), pp. 85–96. K. Rahner, Theological Investigations XXI (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Crossroad, 1988), p. 101: ‘Theology is a science of faith in the bosom of the Church.’ Cf. G. Mannion and L. Mudge, editors’ introduction to The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (New York and Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2008), p. 4: ‘Ecclesiology has to do with our understanding of the community in relation to which virtually all theology is produced . . . In ecclesiological inquiry, therefore, theology is exploring the historical conditions of its own existence. Seen in those terms, ecclesiology becomes the primordial theological discipline.’ Further discussion in P. Avis, The Anglican Understanding of the Church (London: SPCK, 2000), pp. 1–7.

144

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of the World Council of Churches.8 But ‘nature and purpose’ is a catchphrase that goes back many years within the ecumenical movement and features in the report of the Third World Conference on Faith and Order at Lund in 1952.9 ‘Nature and mission’ is perhaps a little artificial, since mission is surely an integral part of the Church’s nature, not a separate matter, but it seems to get things the right way round. The Church does not exist by doing, it does not come into being through its activities. Scripture is clear that the Church is held in the mind of God from eternity as God’s elect people.10 Nevertheless, the Church would be nothing if it were not engaged in ceaseless activity, working for the Kingdom of God within the mission of God (missio dei). Its primary tasks are given particularly in the Great Commission of Matthew 28.16–end: to make disciples of every nation, to baptize new believers, and to teach all that Jesus has instructed his Apostles. I think we can say, without stretching the text, or ignoring comparable texts in the New Testament, that these three tasks equate to the mission of the Church in its threefold form: the ministry of pastoral care (‘making disciples’), the celebration of the sacraments (‘baptizing’), and the ministry of the Word (‘teaching’). When the Church is carrying out these tasks it is fulfilling its mission and being faithful to its calling.11 It cannot be the Church without them, but they are not the cause of the Church’s existence. Act and being are inseparable, but to prioritize act over being would seem to run the risk of slipping into salvation by human works. So another approach to ecclesiology is to say that it is concerned with the identity of the Church, what it is in the purposes of God and what it is called to do for God. Identity is a concept that is applied both to communities and to individuals; the analogy between the two is instructive. The identity of an individual person is not settled once for all. It belongs within an unfolding narrative quest for meaning.12 Identity is not an a priori or given all at once, but is discovered, revealed or constructed. This process takes place as the individual journeys through life, with all its circumstances – its happy surprises and its unfortunate setbacks – and even more important, 8 9

Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2005. Faith and Order: The Report of the Third World Conference at Lund, Sweden: August 15–28, 1952 (London: SCM Press, 1952), pp. 8–9. 10 For example, Jn 17; Eph. 1.3–14, 3.9–11; Col. 1.15–20, 26–7. 11 Further discussion in P. Avis, A Ministry Shaped by Mission (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005). 12 Further discussion in P. Avis, A Church Drawing Near: Spirituality and Mission in a Post-Christian Culture (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 28–44.

Building and Breaking Communion

145

with all its relationships, both helpful and harmful. So our identity as persons is worked out in relation to all that is around us, above all the people who matter to us, positively or negatively (‘significant others’). Identity is put together piecemeal over time and is a fragile construction – a bricolage. There is continuity and discontinuity: we build on what we are and yet we change and develop in relation to others and in relation to circumstances. This truth is borne out by many common sayings about personhood: ‘I’m on a journey.’ ‘Grow up!’ ‘That was where I went wrong.’ ‘You are not yourself at the moment.’ ‘Become what you are!’ ‘I’m not the man I was.’ ‘She’s my better half.’ ‘I’m lost without you.’ ‘This will be the making of you.’ ‘Be true to yourself.’ ‘He was acting out of character.’ ‘Make me a better person.’ ‘I want my family around me.’ Taken together, these sayings bring out three themes: development in personhood, interdependence with regard to others and aspiration with regard to the future. The identity of communities is also a constructed identity. The same combination of continuity and discontinuity in the midst of complex interaction is true of the identity of a defined historical community, such as a nation or a state (the two are often, but not always, synonymous). That, too, is not given in advance, but is worked out through struggle and suffering and the passing of time. Within this history of praxis certain common features can be discerned: O

O

O

A common history: all that people have been through together and have survived. Recognised boundaries, which may be tighter or looser, but which keep members in and non-members out. A set of common values: expectations with regard to behaviour (norms).

146

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology O

O

O

Various goals with regard to what is important and what is worth striving for (aims). Certain shared beliefs about the way the world is and about the nation’s place in the world. Traditional rituals – collective symbolic expressions of its identity, which reinforce that identity.

Once again we see the three themes emerging: development, interdependence and aspiration with regard to the future. A social entity with the six characteristics listed above is often called a moral community. Within a moral community, some or all of these aspects may be contested and argued over, but those arguments will take place within a continuous tradition of praxis. The conceptual fabric of that tradition is made up of the residues or deposits of chronic debate about the constitutive elements of the tradition.13 Churches are outstanding examples of moral communities: they have their history, their boundaries, their values, their goals, their beliefs and their rituals. All these express their identity, reinforce their identity, and act on their identity reflexively, so that it develops and changes, while remaining recognisably the same. Newman drew an analogy between the individual and the Church in his essay On the Development of Christian Doctrine. His subtle argument was designed to show that the Church must develop in order to remain the same. ‘Here below, to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’14 The identity of any church is a contingent construction: it has been put together, to a significant extent, by human action and could have turned out differently. There is a solidity and durability there because its values, goals and beliefs have been well winnowed through time, sifted by struggle, refined through conflict (internal as well as external).15 But there is also a certain fragility, because that particular shape was not inevitable and in the future could yet take a different turn. The boundaries have not always been in the same place. Worship, especially in the form of the sacraments, may seem constant, but even the understanding and practice of the sacraments will have changed significantly. There will have been changes in a church’s values, goals and 13 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 2nd edn, 1985); R. Gill, Moral Communities (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1992). 14 J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine [1845 edn] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 100. 15 John Bowker uses the phrase of the American psychologist Donald Campbell, ‘well-winnowed by time’ in Licensed Insanities: Religions and Belief in God in the Contemporary World (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987), pp. 6–9.

Building and Breaking Communion

147

beliefs in both theology and practice. The paradox of continuity and change is especially apparent in the sphere of ethics. Here we are particularly aware of change with regard to slavery, the place of women, the understanding of sexuality and sexual behaviour or mores generally. Churches may seem very certain about where they stand now on these ethical areas, but not so long ago some of them sang a different song. The 1930 Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion adopted a different stance on contraception to that taken by its predecessor in 1920 and Anglican teaching on the role of women in the Church has evolved markedly. It is well known that the Roman Catholic Church changed its view of the right of religious freedom at the Second Vatican Council. Slavery was tolerated by the Roman Catholic Church until the mid-nineteenth century and was not decisively repudiated in that Church’s moral doctrine until the laws of every civilized nation had outlawed it.16 These particular examples apart, it is natural for us to be impatient or even judgemental with those who are still singing from an old hymn sheet. A moral community is not the same as a virtuous community. To call a certain body ‘a moral community’ does not mean that it is a ‘highly moral’ community, a paragon, a shining example of the virtues that should pertain between the members. A moral community is a body of people that is held together and motivated by a shared recognition of certain moral imperatives – the fabric of the community consists partly of moral issues and obligations held in common – but they may not all be good and right ones, and they will be argued over within that community. A moral community may be fraught with moral tensions. As moral communities, the churches gravitate naturally towards the moral high ground; that is where they feel they belong. But there is something inauthentic, as well as distasteful, about churches – whether of the right or of the left, conservative or progressive – putting themselves forward, in ethical or other teaching, as certain or unanimous, and casting others as vacillating, compromising and inadequate. Churches are seldom as unified, as monolithic as they like to imagine. Such stances are blatantly ideological and invite suspicion: they seem to serve ends to do with bolstering identity or maintaining power and control. But sometimes such stances legitimate the passing of judgement on other churches (e.g. that they are not ‘proper’ churches and that 16 See J. T. Noonan, A Church that Can and Cannot Change: The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); M. J. Farrelly, ‘Contraception as a Test Case for the Development of Doctrine’, Heythrop Journal 49 (2008), pp. 453–72.

148

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

their ministries and sacraments are deficient).17 There is considerable irony in this, for the most rudimentary ideological enlightenment tells us that the identity of those pronouncing churches is itself a contingent construction and that the claim to certainty is sometimes a defence mechanism against insecurity, a survival technique. Joseph Butler, Bishop of Durham in the mid-eighteenth century and one of the great English moralists, taught that ‘probability is the guide of life’ and that doubt and uncertainty are always our portion in this life.18 For Butler, there were profound moral and theological reasons why the providence of God had appointed those constraints on our knowledge: our earthly life was a moral probation for eternity, and our spiritual character, and therefore our destiny, was determined by the way we responded with integrity to those limitations. For Butler and a succession of Anglican divines, certitude was incompatible with our fallen, mortal condition. That sort of chastened mentality, that theological humility, should characterize us not only as individuals but also as churches, especially in making judgements. It is not incompatible with boldness in proclaiming the gospel, with courage, and risk-taking. Indeed probability calls for the twin virtues of humility and courage. Above all it calls for faith. As a Christian moralist, Butler knew that inevitably you have to decide and to act and, therefore, you go forward in prayerful trust. Churches can still have authority – indeed it will be enhanced – if they show some humility and acknowledge that they may be wrong. In conclusion, there is a risk of deception, of false consciousness, of inauthenticity when churches articulate their identity in the form of an ecclesiology. This danger calls for intellectual and moral humility that is able to engage in effective self-criticism.




Communion

I have suggested that churches are outstanding examples of moral communities, moral communities par excellence, because they are self-consciously

17 Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus (2000) and Responses to Some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church (2007). 18 J. Butler, The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (London: Bell [Bohn Library], 1889), pp. 73, cf. 274.

Building and Breaking Communion

149

and reflexively moral communities. The words community and communion belong together. I suggest that a moral community enjoys a kind of communion within itself, through shared history, values, goals and beliefs. This experience is often articulated in time of crisis, especially in wartime. By the same token, a moral community can find a kind of communion with other moral communities, in spite of important differences, where there is a degree of sharing of history, values, goals and beliefs (e.g. the nations that make up the UK; or the transatlantic alliance between the UK and the USA that was particularly strong by the end of the Second World War). Communion (koinonia, communio) has become a key term in ecclesiological and ecumenical discourse for several reasons. O

O

O

The theology of communion offers the possibility of bypassing the historic roadblocks of ecumenism. As an inescapably spiritual and indeed mystical notion, ‘communion’ is resistant to a mainly political construction and where that is attempted (by churches that regard their political constitution and structure of governance as revealed by God) it seems artificial and unconvincing. The mystical, the institutional and the intellectual dimensions of the Church (set out by von Hügel, developing Newman’s seed thoughts) are certainly complementary, but they are not interchangeable. The mystical dimension of the Church, to which koinonia refers, remains irreducible.19 Communion transcends the experience and claims of particular churches. It speaks of a reality and an experience that belongs both to the one Church of Christ (the Church Catholic, the universal Church) and also to the local churches, whether understood as national churches or as dioceses. Communion is what holds the Church together, and as such provides an overarching framework for ecclesiology. Communion is a tensive concept. It connects where we are now (our starting point in ecumenical dialogue) with where we hope to be in the future: it is given, yet there is more to receive. We have a

19 See my comments in Chapter 1 and see further F. von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion ([1908] London: J. M. Dent, 2nd edn, 1923), vol. I, ch. 2; J. H. Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, ed. with an introduction and notes by H. D. Weidner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 24–6; discussion in P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation? Authority, Primacy and Unity in the Conciliar Tradition (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006), ch. 1.

150

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

O

foretaste, but there is an infinity beyond. It is an eschatological idea. Without communion now we could not get started on the path to unity; but without communion to come we would have nowhere to go. Because it contains an eschatological tension, communion carries an imperative: if it is a gift, it is also a task. Communion involves accountability, both to each other and to Christ. We will be judged for how we act towards the communion of the Church. We may speak of the communion we have and the communion we seek. The more we have, the more we long for it to be complete. Communion drives us forward.

Koinonia and its cognates in the Greek New Testament are translated in English Bibles as communion, fellowship, participation, sharing and partnership, according to the context. The context is sometimes profoundly mystical, speaking of our being drawn into the relationship between the Father and the Son (1 Jn 1); sometimes concretely practical, to do with material support, but without losing the mystical dimension (Phil. 1.5). The Johannine language of the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son, of the believer and Christ (as in the parable of the vine and the branches [Jn 15] and elsewhere in the Farewell Discourses), is koinonia language by any other name, as is the Pauline metaphor of being ‘in Christ’.20 It is risky to attempt to define such a multifaceted term as koinonia, when New Testament scholars are not agreed, but it does seem to me that the core meaning of koinonia in the New Testament is a shared experience of something beneficial that is greater than ourselves.21 In the ecumenical and ecclesiological deployment of koinonia it has become commonplace to say that the communion of the Church on earth reflects the divine life of the Blessed Trinity. This is default ecumenical rhetoric. However, I think we need to be quite reserved and cautious in using this kind

20 For the Pauline analogous language see E. Best, One Body in Christ (London: SPCK, 1955). 21 Building particularly on J. Y. Campbell, Three New Testament Studies (Leiden: Brill, 1965). Campbell’s interpretation is disputed: see A. Lincoln, ‘Communion: Some Pauline Foundations’, Ecclesiology 5:2 (2009), pp. 135–60. In the light of Lincoln’s argument, I am not labouring the element of participation (methexis), but I find it difficult to think of sharing without sharing in something. See also J. Reumann, ‘Koinonia in Scripture: Survey of Biblical Texts’, in T. F. Best and G. Gassmann (eds), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order (Geneva: WCC, 1994), pp. 37–69; J. D. Small, ‘What is Communion and When is it Full?’, Ecclesiology 2:1 (2005), pp. 71–87.

Building and Breaking Communion

151

of language.22 There must, of course, be a connection, certainly much more than an analogy, between the communion that the Church enjoys and the communion of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. The life of grace in the Church is, by definition, dependent on the life of God and derived from that life. But the Church does not reflect the trinitarian life in a Platonic way, as an ontological necessity, so to speak. It is not a necessary truth, but a contingent one. We cannot assume that the empirical Church will always visibly reflect or embody the life of God. Sometimes that divine life may be driven out by sin, by abuses and corruption, by serious doctrinal error. Complacency that the Church will remain transparent to God seems to me a continual danger. It was not only the Reformers, but also the Second Vatican Council that said that the Church always stands in need of renovatio and reformatio.23 Communion is created by God and given by God: it is not a human work, though we have a responsibility to receive and sustain it. What sometimes remains unspoken when koinonia language is used is the truth that the communion that we enjoy is possible only through God’s saving acts in the Incarnation, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Koinonia is the fruit of Christ’s redemption. Communion is close to the heart of the Paschal mystery; that great event has made communion with God and with each other available. Our communion was bought with a price (cf. 1 Cor. 6.20; 1 Pet. 1.18–19). I don’t hear that being said very much. The key truth of communion theology is that koinonia unites us with God the Holy Trinity and with our fellow Christians who are baptized into the Body of Christ. It is sometimes said that koiniona has a vertical dimension (Godward) and a horizontal dimension (humanward). But that seems actually unhelpful: there are not two dimensions, but one, the two aspects are inseparable. We cannot be in communion with God without being in communion with the Church, and vice versa. We cannot damage our communion with God without consequences for our communion with our fellow Christians; and our communion with God cannot remain unaffected by what happens in our relationships here. Communion is the golden thread that runs through the life of grace in the Church and links everything together. The ministries of word and 22 Cf J. Webster, ‘Ut Unum Sint: Some Cross-Bench Anglican Reflections’, in F. A. Murphy and C. Asprey (eds), Ecumenism Today: The Universal Church in the 21st Century (Aldershot, Hants, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 29–43. 23 Vatican II, UR:6: ‘Christ summons the Church, as she goes her pilgrim way, to that continual reformation of which she always has need, insofar as she is an institution of men here on earth’: Abbott (ed.), Documents of Vatican II, p. 350. On this theme see P. Avis, Beyond the Reformation?, esp. ch. 13.

152

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

sacrament, in the context of pastoral care, create and sustain communion. In our baptism we are incorporated into, brought into communion with the body of Christ; and in the Eucharist that communion is celebrated and strengthened as we receive the body and blood of Christ sacramentally. But the Church is also the community of those who hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the Scriptures – a hermeneutic community. That is true not only intra-confessionally (within each church), but trans-confessionally (in the Church as a whole). The community of the Word is not confined to each of our churches separately, but is an ecumenical community. The Church as the hermeneutical community is catholic (involving the whole Church), as well as apostolic (being faithful to the teaching of the Apostles).24 Communion (koinonia) is, therefore, the most precious of gifts: precious to receive, precious to keep. Luther said in the Ninety-five Theses (1517) that ‘the true treasure of the Church is the holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God’. That is as much as to say that the treasure is communion – a gift to cherish, to safeguard and to share. Some traditions are willing to speak of degrees of communion. Vatican II spoke of ‘a real though imperfect communion’.25 Anglicans have used the expressions ‘impaired communion’ and ‘the highest possible degree of communion’.26 Roger Haight has recently developed the notion of ‘partial communion’.27 In the Porvoo family of churches – Anglicans and Lutheran in Northern Europe – we are simply ‘in communion’, rather than ‘in full communion’. But in our experience communion can become more or less real to us. It can be impaired and it can be enhanced. Just as Bonhoeffer condemned ‘cheap grace’, we should not be satisfied with ‘cheap communion’.28 But if it is not cheap it must be costly. Our communion carries an imperative and involves obligations. The primary imperative for Christians is to strive to enter into communion with one’s fellow Christians, to continue in communion with them and, if necessary, to 24 The Church as a hermeneutic community is a theme of A Treasure in Earthen Vessels (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1999). 25 Vatican II, UR: 3: ‘For men who believe in Christ and have been properly baptized are brought into a certain, though imperfect communion with the Catholic Church’: Abbott (ed.), p. 345. 26 The Eames Commission, The Official Reports: The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Communion and Women in the Episcopate (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1994). 27 R. Haight, Christian Community in History, Vol. 3: Ecclesial Existence (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 275–81. 28 D. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller (London: SCM Press, 6th edn, 1959), pp. 35–47.

Building and Breaking Communion

153

fight to maintain communion.29 Communion should not merely ‘tick over’, but should be actively enhanced to the highest possible degree. We need to work at deepening communion and making it as visible as possible. These imperatives have practical consequences: maintaining communion is a set of activities requiring energy. When they are theologically informed, these activities become the praxis of communion, an expression of the conciliar life of the Church. Within the relationship created by communion there is, first of all, a need for communication. In Latin and in English and, I imagine, in other languages, there is a strong link between the two words communion and communication (communio and communicatio – the Latin suggests more than verbal communication; communicatio in sacris refers to sacramental inter-communion). Effective communication reduces misunderstandings, which are otherwise endemic, and creates a bond of shared perceptions, a commonwealth of meaning. One vital aspect of communication is mutual consultation on issues of shared concern. Consultation marked by theological seriousness facilitates the process of spiritual discernment that is a crucial part of the Church’s conciliar life. Where churches in communion consult with one another, seeking common discernment of the truth, but find it difficult to reach a common mind, the Christian virtues of patience and forbearance, about which the New Testament has much to say, are called for.30 There can be robust – though always courteous – disagreement, but mutual condemnation or passing judgement on others, as though we were God, are out of place. I don’t believe that God has given anyone the right to do that (short of a General Council of the Church). To our own Master we all stand or fall. If there is serious disagreement and we cannot persuade our fellow Christians or a sister church to our own way of thinking – discernment takes different routes and the Holy Spirit is active in all – restraint in our actions is called for. To act in a way that many other Christians or churches regard as shocking, outrageous and provocative is indefensible. To scandalize the conscience of one’s fellow Christians can never be justified – all other routes must be tried. It wounds the body of Christ and must grieve the Holy Spirit. Within a disagreement, both parties need to keep a sense of perspective. Not all Christian truths are equally important. It is true that they are all 29 I stand by what I said in P. Avis, Christians in Communion (London: Geoffrey Chapman Mowbray, 1990), p. 51: ‘Our primary obligation to our fellow Christians is to be in communion with them.’ 30 For example, Rom. 12.9–21; 1 Cor. 1.10; 13; Gal. 5.22–23; Phil. 2.1ff.

154

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

interconnected and that there is an internal logic to our faith. But, within the full orbit of Christian truth, there are some beliefs that are more central or more fundamental than others. I am not convinced that it is helpful to divide issues into ‘first order’ and ‘second order’, which unnecessarily limits the options: there may be many gradations of importance. But there is undoubtedly a ‘hierarchy of truths’.31 Not every error affects the essence of Christianity.32 The wisdom that probability is our guide and the need for humility in making judgements applies particularly here. Above all, communion requires charity. The ARCIC report Church as Communion (1991) said of the communion that God gives the Church: ‘It is a life of shared concern for one another in mutual forbearance, submission, gentleness and love; in the placing of the interests of others above the interests of self; in making room for each other in the body of Christ . . .’33




Breaking communion

Sometimes communion is treated as a weapon to be wielded against those with whom we disagree on important issues. Threats to ‘break communion’ are used as a protest, or even a punishment. Sometimes these threats are a knee-jerk reflex – as though to break communion were not the most momentous act a Christian could take against a fellow Christian or a church against another church. What is patently clear is that Christians and churches can never be completely out of communion with each other. We can never break communion completely with fellow Christians, however strongly we may disagree with them or deplore their actions. If we withdraw from eucharistic communion, we are still bound together by our common baptism. If we even cease to recognize baptism, we are still held together by the trinitarian faith, the baptismal confession. If we say we do not have the same confession as others, we find we are still praying the Our Father, just as they are. Communion has many layers and I find it difficult to see where there is an end to them. The Eames Commission pointed out that, where fellowship is impaired by serious disagreements, no one should ever say that they are out of communion with

31 Second Vatican Council, UR 11: Abbott (ed.), p. 354. 32 For a discussion of the essence of Christianity see S. W. Sykes, The Identity of Christianity (London: SPCK, 1984). 33 ARCIC, Church as Communion (London: SPCK/CTS, 1991), #45.

Building and Breaking Communion

155

a fellow baptized Christian.34 Not every major disagreement need threaten communion. I can believe that a sister church has made a very serious mistake; I may feel deeply upset, outraged and angry, but their action and my response need not in itself threaten communion. As Oliver O’Donovan has said of the strains within the Anglican Communion, ‘Communion should not be broken, but that does not mean that disagreement can be ignored. There are ways of addressing serious disagreements that affirm and renew communion by proven willingness and determination to resolve them. And the very attempt to reach a resolution transforms our experience of the disagreement.’35 In the New Testament, only what imperils our communion with Father, Son and Holy Spirit is a valid reason for breaking communion. Various passing disciplinary episodes are mentioned in the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles.36 Paul urges the Thessalonians to ‘have nothing to do with’ a believer who would not work because he believed that the eschatological crisis, the imminent return of Christ, made all worldly commitments pointless (2 Thess. 3.4, 6). This informal sanction is intended to shame him into changing his ways. A similar informal and temporary measure seems to be in view in Mt. 18.15–17, where ‘if your brother sins against you’ and refuses even the admonition of the church, he is to be treated ‘as a Gentile and a tax collector’. In a lost letter to Corinth, Paul had urged the Corinthians to shun (‘not even to eat with’) a Christian who ‘is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard or robber’ (1 Cor. 5.9–11). A more severe punishment is envisaged in 1 Cor. 5.1–5, where a believer who is apparently living in an incestuous relationship with his stepmother is to be delivered ‘to Satan for the destruction of the flesh’. Here we have a kind of excommunication that carries not a legal but a physical penalty. Paul clearly expects the man to die (cf. 1 Cor. 11.29–32). But this drastic remedy is for 34 The Eames Commission, The Official Reports (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1994). 35 O. O’Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy (London: SCM Press, 2009; = Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008), p. 32. 36 I draw on Avis, Christians in Communion, pp. 60–61. The next section (pp. 61–64) argues that ‘the consensus of Anglican theology permits separation only when we are compelled to participate in fundamental error against our conscience’. For these Anglican divines, it is not enough that a church has embraced certain errors – they must be fundamental errors, touching the foundation of the faith. But even then it is not enough for them to be fundamental errors – we must be compelled to subscribe to them and to participate in them. Only at that point is separation, a breach of communion, justified.

156

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

the sake of his ultimate salvation: ‘that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord’. There are, I think, only two examples of communion being decisively severed. Paul pronounces anathema on those who preach ‘another gospel’, denying the work of Christ by teaching salvation by the works of the law (Gal. 1.8). What calls forth this condemnation – the nearest thing to formal excommunication in the New Testament – is a fundamental denial of the saving work of Christ.37 In the Johannine letters, it is a gnostic-docetic denial that the Son of God ‘has come in the flesh’, which is a denial of the Father and the Son, that calls forth the condemnation ‘antichrist’ (1 Jn 3.1–2). In both passages it is the basic baptismal confession, the faith that brings salvation, that is in question. Pierre Duprey wrote: ‘It is with our brotherhood as with our sonship. Our brotherhood in its profound reality (cf. 1 Jn 3.1–2) cannot be broken except by such culpable infidelity as will strike at our filial relationship and cut us off from the communion of the Holy Spirit.’38 Things can go very badly wrong in a church before we should cease to regard it as a church with whom we ought to be in communion. The Reformers taught that we should put up with many imperfections before forsaking the communion of a church.39 The Christians of Galatia had departed far from the gospel; they had embraced ‘another gospel’. It is as though they had been ‘bewitched’ (Gal. 3.1). But Paul still addresses them as churches, reminds them that in their baptism they have clothed themselves with Christ and belong to him (3.27, 29), and blesses them with the grace of Christ at the beginning and end of his letter. The Corinthian church was beset by problems of devastating seriousness. It looks like a church that is about to self-destruct. If we track through the epistle, we come across the following critical issues: internal factions and schism, pride and exclusiveness, condoned sexual immorality, eating food offered to idols, abuse of the Lord’s Supper, oppression of the poor, chaotic charismatic worship, lack of love and, to cap it all, heresy about the resurrection.40 Was there anything right about this Christian community we may

37 Similar scenarios appear to be present in 2 Cor. 11.4–5, 13–15 and Phil. 3.2–4, 18–19, though in both these instances the breach of communion is implied and has to be inferred. I am grateful to Andrew Lincoln for referring me to these passages. 38 Duprey in G. R. Evans (ed.), Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 7–8. 39 See P. Avis, The Church in the Theology of the Reformers (London: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1981; reprinted Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002), pt 1. 40 As A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000) shows, the exact issue at stake (e.g. the

Building and Breaking Communion

157

ask. Yet Paul addresses them as a church and as those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints (1 Cor. 1.2). He goes on to give thanks for all the grace and spiritual enrichment that they have received (1.4–7). He concludes by bringing greetings from their sister churches and blesses them with the grace of Christ. These New Testament examples suggest that, where there is a need for admonition, it should be given in the context of affirmation. Where there is affirmation, it should not be uncritical. Admonition and affirmation go hand in hand in a pastoral economy. In this way, churches in communion, communicating intensively with each other, discerning God’s will for the Church together, living in conciliar fellowship, can help one another to realize their common calling in Christ. To sum up: communion (koinonia) with God the Holy Trinity and with one another in the Body of Christ is a mystical reality, inexhaustible, unfathomable in its depth of meaning and infinitely precious. No wonder that the Eames Commission of the Anglican Communion insisted that, whatever the difficulties, all Christians should give their best endeavours to attaining the highest possible degree of communion with each other. But is this what we see individual Christians doing? Is this where churches commit their energies? If only that were so!

immorality of 5.1 and the deviant views on the resurrection in 15) is not always clear to us: pp. 382ff; 1169ff.

9


Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism1

E

thics and communion make a potent combination. The ‘ethics’ in question are not generally basic ethical principles, or even the ethical content of Scripture, but the ethics (or more correctly morals) of human sexuality. On these issues of sexuality Christians and churches are divided at the present time between conservatives and progressives. Disagreement in this ethical arena is often highly emotive and passions run high. Clear, cogent arguments are at a premium. Both conservatives and progressives are likely to impute irrational motives and prejudices to each other. So to drag the ethics of human sexuality into the arena of ecumenical dialogue, whose raison d’être is the patient search for deeper ecclesial communion, is fraught with risk. But in the present circumstances it is necessary and unavoidable. It is right and proper that ecumenical dialogue should include conversation between the churches about their theology, teaching and practice in this area. Although ethics has seldom featured on the ecumenical agenda, the current tensions between the churches, as well as within them, demand that this should change and that ethics should move nearer to the top of the ecumenical agenda. However, for that to happen – and to take place in a fruitful and constructive manner – most churches need to be much better equipped in ethical reflection and moral discernment. 1

A shorter version of this chapter was given as a public lecture at The Catholic University of America in January 2009. The material was also presented at the Churches’ Theology and Unity Group of Churches Together in England in March 2009 and at the University of Exeter Department of Theology Post-Graduate Research Seminar in November 2009. I am grateful for the comments offered on those occasions and also to the Rev. Dr Angela Shier-Jones who kindly read this chapter in draft and offered useful advice.

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

159

The phrase ‘ethics and communion’ stands for an area of ecclesiology that has become increasingly important in recent years and now demands urgent attention – so much so that I suggest that it now constitutes the new frontier in ecumenism. ‘Ethics and communion’ represents the bringing of ethical concerns to the heart of our understanding of the Church and its unity. As theologians as ostensibly different as Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth have insisted, doctrine and ethics must go hand in hand; ethics cannot be separated from dogmatics.2 So it is a matter of theological integrity that ecclesiology should have an ethical dimension. But what shape that dimension should have and where reflection on it should lead is uncertain and deeply contested. Indeed, the theme ‘ethics and communion’ remains rather nebulous and needs to be teased out. I suggest that three strands within the overall problematic of ethics and communion can be identified in recent ecumenical theology.




Defining the issue of ethics and ecumenism

The first of these three strands is the ‘Ecclesiology and Ethics’ programme mounted by the WCC in the 1990s. ‘Ecclesiology and Ethics’ was concerned with the ethical complexion of the Church and with the moral formation of Christian disciples, which is required for ethical discernment and decision making.3 The reports insist that ecclesiology and ethics are inseparable because Christian ethical engagement must be an expression of our deepest convictions about the nature and purpose of the Church. And what we confess about the Church must be shaped by the way that we seek to live out the gospel in the complex moral situations that we encounter. As a moral community, the Church is a site of moral formation and discernment, but (the reports pointed out) many Christians are lamentably ill-equipped to make a moral witness,

2

3

See A. J. Torrance and M. Banner (eds), The Doctrine of God and Theological Ethics (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2006). Fergus Kerr points out that Aquinas placed the Christian moral life between the doctrine of God and creation and the doctrine of Christ and redemption, as the secunda pars (second part) of his architectonic Summa Theologiae (ibid., ch. 6). The key texts are T. F. Best and W. Granberg-Michaelson (eds), Costly Unity: Koinonia and Justice, Peace and Creation (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1993); T. F. Best and M. Robra (eds), Costly Commitment (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1994); T. F. Best and M. Robra (eds), Ecclesiology and Ethics: Ecumenical Ethical Engagement, Moral Formation and the Nature of the Church (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1997).

160

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

shaped by Christian ethics, in the society that they inhabit. Our ethical formation is rooted in our baptismal union with the death and resurrection of Christ and finds its heart in the celebration of the Eucharist where we are conformed to God’s pattern of salvation in Jesus Christ and share in the life of the Spirit. Ethical discernment and decision making needs the fullness of the Church, the project claimed: individual churches should not act in isolation, however confident they may be about their ethical resources and moral disciplines; as far as possible the churches should engage with the ethical issues of the day together, and they should do this ecumenically. The ‘Ecclesiology and Ethics’ project was in tune with the impassioned witness of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas that the churches needed to be communities of disciplined moral life, exhibiting a distinctive character, if they are to bear effective witness to Christ amid a secular world.4 But the project did not buy into Hauerwas’ trademark ‘resident aliens’ gambit and remained committed to responsible involvement and engagement with civil society across the board. Among the main protagonists of the project, Lewis Mudge is particularly resistant to the ‘resident aliens’ agenda. Mudge’s study The Church as Moral Community points out that Christian distinctiveness is highly nuanced: in our complex world, the church can never serve as the total environment of Christians. We live in multiple cultural environments and cannot abstract ourselves from them. It is not feasible to live our daily lives as though we do not belong to this world: as Robert Bellah said, we would have to jump out of our skins to do so. Mudge also points out that, if the Church is by nature a moral community, it becomes deeply vulnerable to internal moral conflict. The moral goods or values prized by a community will always be contested and argued about, at least in their application to particular practical questions: that is actually a mark of the community’s moral strength. But Mudge asks whether there is a core ecclesial reality, beyond moral dispute, that can provide a framework to hold the Church together and with this question he points to the main theme of the present paper, which we shall pick up in a moment.5 The second of the three strands that bring together ethics and communion concerns the ethical dimension of all our significant relationships. 4

5

The foundational text is S. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1985 [1975]). For an account of Yoder’s thought in this area see R. Bourne, ‘Witness, Democracy and Civil Society: Reflections on John Howard Yoder’s Exilic Ecclesiology’, Ecclesiology 3:2 (2007), pp. 195–213. L. S. Mudge, The Church as Moral Community: Ecclesiology and Ethics in Ecumenical Debate (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1998), pp. 77–9, 24.

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

161

We are constituted as persons by our relationships with others. Our relationships involve an essential ethical dimension: in relationship we come under obligation to the other, an obligation to treat them as a person, not an object. Therefore we are also constituted as persons by our ethical obligations. To say that we are the people we are by virtue of our relationships and to say that we are the people we are by virtue of our ethical obligations is to say not two things but one. The trajectory of personalist, relational ontology that includes Martin Buber, John Macmurray and John Zizioulas, a tradition of ethical personalism,6 is given a heightened intensity by Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas my responsibility to the other person is an ethical a priori. It precedes everything else that I am and is therefore constitutive of my existence. For Levinas, I am responsible ‘before’ (in an ontological rather than a temporal sense), ‘before’ I am a person and it is this responsibility to what is beyond myself that makes me a person. Every relationship is the foundation of a duty. The encounter of ‘the face to face’, as he puts it, is the relationship of the unique to the unique and creates a unique bond of mutual care and trust. Caring for another person is the most profoundly human thing we can do. This ethical responsibility is the origin of all meaning and equates to the vision of God in traditional Christian theology.7 There is a particular ecclesiological application of Levinas’ insight: through the sacraments we are brought into a relationship that is ontological – or as I would prefer to say, mystical – with every member of the Body of Christ, in a bond of inseparable unity or communion. Through baptism and Eucharist a communion of varying degrees is created; we are bound to one another because we are bound sacramentally to Jesus Christ, indeed, to the Holy Trinity. Although we acknowledge this truth in the liturgy in various ways, we often treat it in a rather casual fashion; sometimes it seems to make little difference to our priorities or to how we behave. But if we reflect that being brought face to face with Jesus Christ brings us face to face with our fellow Christians and in principle with all the faithful, a sense of obligation comes over us. St Paul said that his apostolic commission to preach the gospel to all made him ‘a debtor’ (Rom. 1.14). So what is our duty to our fellow Christians with whom we are in a degree of communion through the 6

7

M. Buber, I and Thou, trans. R. Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark; New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1937); J. Macmurray, Persons in Relation (London: Faber, 1961); J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985); J. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, P. McPartlan (ed.), foreword by R. Williams (London and New York: Continuum, 2007). See M. L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

162

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

sacraments? What is the nature of our responsibility towards them and what imperative is laid upon us? I am persuaded that our primary obligation to our fellow Christians is, first, to seek to be in communion with them – in the strong sense of ecclesial or sacramental communion – and, second, to do all in our power to preserve and enhance that communion.8 A communion ecclesiology infused with an ethical imperative is the second strand within ‘ethics and communion’. In moving on now to the third strand, I am not setting the second, any more than the first (‘Ecclesiology and Ethics’) on one side: the sense of an ethical imperative of communion shapes all I want to say in the rest of the chapter. And so we come to the third strand within the broad and, as I say, initially rather nebulous theme of ethics and communion: the remainder of the chapter will be concerned with this. The third of the three strands concerns the implications of the ethical differences between churches for their relationship, for whatever degree of communion they enjoy with each other. What are the consequences for communion, for unity, when churches take up different stances on ethical or moral questions? The Anglican Communion’s Theological and Doctrinal Commission put the issue starkly in its 2008 report Communion, Conflict and Hope. Christian teachings about moral behaviour, it insisted, are integral to maintaining communion; ‘ethical teachings are woven into the fabric of Christian doctrine’ and ‘it is a serious mistake to think that “core doctrine” does not include such teaching’.9 The Commission clearly agreed with Aquinas and Barth that doctrine and ethics are inseparable. So what are the implications of ethical differences for the particular doctrine of the unity and communion of the Church? Let us begin to approach this question by setting it in the perspective of the unfolding ecumenical movement.




The new frontier in ecumenism

In the past decade or so a new dimension has opened up in ecumenical theology. A new twist has been given to the churches’ search for ecclesial communion. For nearly a century, at least since the First International Conference

8 9

See further Chapter 8: ‘Building and Breaking Communion: Ecclesiology and Communion’. Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, Communion, Conflict and Hope (The Kuala Lumpur Report) (London: Anglican Communion Office, 2008), #76.

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

163

on Faith and Order at Lausanne in 1927, ecumenical energy has been devoted to the search for convergence in faith and order. Remarkable progress has been made in two aspects of ecumenical convergence: first, in setting out genuine common ground between the major traditions (which turns out to be much more extensive than had previously been supposed), and, second, in exposing spurious reasons for the continued separation of the churches (reasons based on contingent historical and cultural factors or on avoidable misunderstandings). Of course, real cognitive differences between the churches remain and are the subject of continuing dialogue, but the question then arises: how significant are these differences? Ecumenical reports have often concluded by proposing that certain differences between the traditions should not be regarded as church dividing.10 The recommendations of a raft of bilateral dialogues are gradually whittling down the areas that reasonably or plausibly might be regarded as church dividing. Given the overriding imperative of unity and communion in the New Testament, particularly the High Priestly prayer of Jesus that all his own may be one, as he and the Father are one, so that the world may see this unity and come to believe that the Father has sent the Son into the world – a unity that is mystical, visible and missional − (Jn 17.21), the approach that seeks to remove grounds for separation and that questions whether all that has kept churches apart in the past should continue to be allowed to do so seems right and necessary. Even though the pleas of these ecumenical reports (namely that certain issues should no longer be regarded as church dividing) have often seemed to fall on deaf ears, resulting in no perceptible change in church policy, there is no doubt that the churches are closer to one another now in both faith and order than they have been for centuries.11 There has been a perceptible shift within the historic Protestant traditions in a more ‘catholic’ direction, in terms of the sacramental nature of the Church, as embodying the saving 10 For example, Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC): The Final Report (London: CTS/SPCK, 1982), p. 16 (#12) [Eucharistic Doctrine]: ‘It is our hope that, in view of the agreement which we have reached on eucharistic faith, this doctrine will no longer constitute an obstacle to the unity we seek.’ Salvation and the Church (London: CTS/Church House Publishing, 1987), p. 26 (#32): ‘We are agreed that this is not an area where any remaining differences of theological interpretation or ecclesiological emphasis, either within or between our Communions, can justify our continuing separation.’ 11 See A. Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), ch. 8: ‘Catholic and Protestant: Contrary or Complementary’, and discussion in P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2008), pp. 45–47.

164

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

presence of God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, and the visibility of its unity and of the structures that are needed to sustain that. Roman Catholic theology has become more ‘evangelical’ in terms of the centrality of the Word of God, the participation of the laity in worship, ministry and mission, and the official acknowledgement of the ongoing need for the reform and renewal of the Church. On the other hand, aspects of the Eastern Orthodox tradition have been absorbed into both the Reformation and Roman Catholic traditions, helping them to hold theology and prayer together, to be more conscious of the Church as a mystery, and to see that the Church’s tradition is a living stream, not a legal constraint – and this creates yet more common ground. Anglican theology, I think, has continued to expand its rather eclectic sympathies, rediscovering its place in the common tradition of the West, while acknowledging its debt to the Reformation and assimilating impulses from the Eastern Churches. Progress has been made on the most intractable of ecumenical issues, the place, role and authority of the pope in the universal Church. The golden thread that links these developments together and so binds the separated churches into a greater unity is that of eucharistic ecclesiology.12 The Ravenna statement (2006), of the international Roman Catholic– Orthodox Commission for Theological Dialogue, is a case in point. The Ravenna statement proposed grounds for agreement in principle between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches on the role and status of the papacy.13 Pope Benedict has recently hailed this document as an encouraging development. The significance of the Ravenna statement for me as an Anglican ecumenical theologian is this: I am convinced that there is nothing in this statement that could not be accepted by Anglicans. Indeed, I believe that the churches of the Anglican Communion would, if they were asked, respond positively to the Ravenna proposals concerning universal primacy. Certainly, it chimes in with what ARCIC has said on that theme and with the way that the Church of England, for one, has responded to ARCIC.14 It would be interesting to hear

12 For a discussion of eucharistic ecclesiology from an Anglican perspective see P. Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism, ch. 5. For a comprehensive survey see M. Ploeger, Celebrating Church: Ecumenical Contributions to a Liturgical Ecclesiology (Netherlands Studies in Ritual and Liturgy 7, 2008). 13 Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, ‘Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority’, Ravenna, 13 October 2007 (www.vatican.va/roman _curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/ch_orthod). 14 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, The Final Report (London:

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

165

from a Methodist theologian how far the Ravenna statement accords with what has been achieved by the long-standing Methodist–Roman Catholic International Commission. I understand that neither the Anglican Communion nor the World Methodist Council had observers at the Ravenna meeting – that would be a helpful step for the future. But even if we confine ourselves to the Anglican connection, it would be salutary to ask: What are the implications of the fact that (as I believe) Anglicans could embrace the Ravenna statement? One might suppose that this process of rapprochement and convergence in both faith and order could continue until, by the grace of God, the major historic traditions came to stand side by side in their confession of the apostolic faith and had achieved sufficient convergence in matters of order also to make it possible to find ways of expressing their fellowship – in other words, a moderately high degree of visible unity. A differentiated consensus in faith would be matched by a differentiated consensus in order – with a massive area of commonality in the centre.15 The life and mission of the major Christian traditions would be extensively shared and their public witness would be given with one voice. Looking even further ahead, beyond the stage of differentiated consensus, we can say that full visible communion, on the basis of a common faith and order, between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, between the Anglican Communion and the churches of the World Methodist Council, and between the Anglican Communion and the episcopally ordered Lutheran churches of the Lutheran World Federation, is not an impossible dream. If it were, the churches concerned would not be sponsoring dialogue predicated on that basis. We are still a long way from that goal, but it is not sheer fantasizing to think that, by the grace of God, it might be attainable. Suppose, hypothetically then, that sufficient agreement in faith and order between Roman Catholic, Anglican and episcopally ordered Lutheran and Methodist churches were to be reached for them to enter into ‘full visible communion’. What might still prevent that happening? One factor that could place a roadblock in the way is ethical disagreement, disagreement on what moral life is required by the churches of their members, and in particular, far more so than any other area, disagreement over questions of human sexuality. Where faith and order might make a high degree of communion possible,

SPCK/CTS, 1982); The Gift of Authority (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre; London: CTS; New York: Church Publishing Inc., 1999). 15 For the notion of differentiated consensus in matters of order see W. G. Rusch, ‘Structures of Unity: The Next Ecumenical Challenge – A Possible Way Forward’, Ecclesiology 2.1 (2005), pp. 107–22.

166

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

ethics might hold the churches apart. We already see signs of this particular scenario. Let me illustrate.




Anglican issues

When a bishop, living in a same-sex relationship, was elected co-adjutor bishop of New Hampshire in The Episcopal Church in 2003 and at about the same time the Diocese of New Westminster in the Anglican Church of Canada took steps to provide liturgical blessings for same-sex unions, the Roman Catholic Church signalled grave concern at these developments within a close ecumenical partner, the Anglican Communion. The plenary meeting of the International Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission for Unity and Mission (IARCCUM) was put on ice (though not all its work was suspended). The Co-Chair of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, who happened to be the Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church, had to step down and the future of ARCIC was also placed in jeopardy. The Anglican Communion’s Windsor Report of 2004 and the process that has flowed from that enabled IARCCUM to complete its digest of the work of ARCIC in Growing Together in Unity and Mission, but the future of ARCIC itself remains rather unclear at the time of writing and preparatory work continues. When in 2005 the Church of Sweden’s Synod approved the ordination of persons in same-sex relationships and commissioned the preparation of church blessings for such relationships, the Porvoo Agreement (the agreement for ecclesial communion between most of the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches and the four British and Irish Anglican Churches, signed in 1996) came under strain. In May 2009 the Swedish parliament legislated for gender-neutral marriage and the indications are that the Church of Sweden’s Synod has decided to accommodate itself to this new situation by revisiting its marriage liturgy in gender-neutral terms. The Swedish developments were unacceptable to the much more conservative Baltic Lutheran Churches, who protested to the Lutheran World Federation. The Swedish proposals also clashed with the nuanced conservative position that the Church of England, conscious of the wider Anglican Communion implications, had adopted. A process of consultation – rather late in the day, but better late than never – between the Porvoo churches was set up and continues.16

16 So far this process has included: the Sigtuna Consultation, Stockholm, December 2006,

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

167

The challenge of ethics and communion is not only to the relations between churches but also to the cohesion of churches within themselves. The issue of same-sex unions can create huge pressures within churches. It has the potential to destroy them. The United Reformed Church in Great Britain had a moratorium on central debates on this issue for seven years. The Methodist Church of Great Britain has coped with tensions on this issue by means of rather ambiguous resolutions of the Conference in the early 1990s. Within the framework provided by the resolutions, the ‘Pilgrimage of Faith’ process has facilitated deeper mutual understanding. A recent Connexion-wide consultation process resulted in a decision not to revisit the resolutions. The 2009 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland avoided a divisive debate on homosexuality by setting up a commission to examine the issues. These examples suggest that, if a debate on that subject could split the church, that debate could not be allowed to take place. No good could come of pushing the issue to breaking point. There is more wisdom in allowing the discussion to continue at its own pace, rather than attempting to bring matters to the boil with damaging consequences, whichever way the vote were to go. Churches are constituted by the communion that they enjoy within themselves. The life of a church is synonymous with its experience of communion with God and its members and that communion comes to its highest expression in the Eucharist. But that eucharistic expression of communion itself depends on agreement in faith and a common ministry of word and sacrament, set within a common framework of oversight, whether episcopal or presbyteral, depending on a church’s polity. It is their communion within themselves that makes them churches. Where that communion is damaged, their existence as churches is called in question. We have long known that ecclesiological differences can damage communion. Let me give a different topical example involving my own church. For more than two decades the Anglican Communion has been experiencing a situation of impaired communion, where women bishops and those clergy whom they ordain are not transferable to churches of the Communion that do not ordain women to the episcopate. An interchangeable ordained ministry is a mark of ecclesial communion and where it does not obtain in every respect communion is impaired. The same impairment is at work in the communion of the Porvoo churches because two of the four Anglican churches a listening exercise, and the Third Porvoo Theological Conference, St Katharine’s Foundation, London, January 2008, on the implications for ecclesial communion when churches diverge in their ethical stance. A Porvoo consultation on the churches’ teachings on marriage is proposed for 2010.

168

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

involved (the Church in Wales and the Church of England) do not at present ordain women to the episcopate, though both are definitely moving towards doing so. It is an anomaly and a scandal that communion should be impaired through an area of ministry that is not interchangeable, but the problem arises because churches grapple with new challenges in different ways and do not all move at the same speed. Within the Anglican Communion the Eames Commission produced a series of reports on the situation created by the uneven emergence of women bishops across the Communion and proposed some ecclesiological principles that are of lasting validity. Eames pointed out that no one should ever say that they are out of communion with another Christian, for there are many layers of communion in the Body of Christ, not least the communion created by our common baptism. Eames also identified an imperative attached to communion: it insisted that all concerned should endeavour to maintain the highest possible level of communion with each other.17 But how far do these principles take us when it is ethical issues and differences of moral practice that are the causes of impaired communion?




Ecumenical dialogue on ethics

First we need to note that the exact problem is unprecedented; we are in uncharted waters. The remarkable flourishing of theological reflection that ecumenical dialogue has generated has not focused on ethical and moral matters. With one or two notable exceptions, the ethical dimension has not figured in ecumenical dialogue. Out of the many dialogues archived in the three volumes of Growth in Agreement, there seems to be only one that is devoted to personal morals: ARCIC’s report Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church of 1994.18 This unique text deserves a closer look.

17 The Eames Commission: The Official Reports (Toronto, ON: Anglican Book Centre, 1994). 18 The Methodist–Roman Catholic Conversations made a stab at the ethical dimension of unity, but failed to follow it through. The Dublin Report of 1976 touched on euthanasia (#44–46) and the Honolulu Report of 1981 made some interesting observations on ‘Christian Moral Decisions’, affirming the sacramentality of marriage and stating that there was no necessary conflict between revealed moral imperatives and an ethic based on natural law (#39–56). See H. Meyer and L. Vischer (eds), Growth in Agreement: Reports and Agreed Statements of Ecumenical Conversations on a World Level (New York: Paulist Press; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1984),

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

169

The phase of ARCIC’s work that produced Life in Christ was premised on what the co-chairs of the commission referred to as ‘the profound and true conviction that authentic Christian unity is as much a matter of life as of faith’, for ‘those who share one faith in Christ will share one life in Christ’. They went on to claim that divisions over morals seriously damage the witness of the Church: ‘In the face of the world around us, the name of God is profaned whenever those who call themselves Christians show themselves divided in their witness to the objective moral demands which arise from our life in Christ.’19 In the body of the report ARCIC restated this point clearly: ‘In the past, ecumenical dialogue has concentrated on matters of doctrine . . . However, the gospel we proclaim cannot be divorced from the life we live. Questions of doctrine and of morals are closely interconnected, and differences in the one area may reflect differences in the other’ (#2). What is significant in this report is that the commission was able to affirm shared principles, understandings and values, even where there was disagreement on particular moral issues. It made the bold claim: ‘Careful consideration has persuaded the commission that, despite existing disagreement in certain areas of practical and pastoral judgement, Anglicans and Roman Catholics derive from the scriptures and Tradition [sic] the same controlling vision of the nature and destiny of humanity and share the same fundamental moral values’ (#1). The distinction between the controlling vision and the underlying values, on the one hand, and particular practical and pastoral questions, which are a matter of judgement, on the other, bears further reflection. Could it be applied to the current tensions within the Anglican Communion? The theological framework offered by Life in Christ and which underpins its discussion of specific issues, is finely expressed. It is a vision of persons pp. 350, 379–85. More recently, Pope John Paul II and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I signed a Common Declaration on Environmental Ethics in 2002 and a Mennonite–Roman Catholic dialogue on peacemaking reported in 2003, though the latter was mostly concerned with ecclesiology. See J. Gros, T. F. Best and L. F. Fuchs (eds), Growth in Agreement III (Geneva: World Council of Churches; Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 184–86; 206–67 (ethics: 243–53). 19 Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission, Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church (London: CTS/Church House Publishing, 1994), preface. Available also in J. Gros, H. Meyer and W. G. Rusch (eds), Growth in Agreement II (Geneva: WCC; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), pp. 344–70. It is significant that the American Anglican–Roman Catholic Commission, ARC-USA, beginning a new round of conversations in 2008, took the topic ‘Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment: Common Ground and Divergences’. It started by revisiting Life in Christ. The Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has also recently started a study programme on moral discernment.

170

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

created in the image of God for communion with God and with one another, reflecting God’s character in their lives and behaviour and working for the common good. Responsiveness and interdependence are the watchwords (#7). It is a description that centres on character rather than actions: ‘The true goal of the moral life is the flourishing and fulfilment of that humanity for which all men and women have been created. The fundamental moral question, therefore, is not “What ought we to do?”, but “What kind of persons are we called to become?”’ (#6). In this respect the ARCIC report is in tune with the approach of the virtue and character ethics that comes to us from Thomas Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle and has been revived in recent years notably by Stanley Hauerwas and Alastair MacIntyre,20 and is less sympathetic to the prescriptive ‘command’ ethics of traditional Roman Catholic and Protestant theology. The moral teaching of the Christian Church, according to the commission, is both coherent and evolving; it seeks to respond to fresh circumstances: At its deepest level, the response of the church to the offer of new life in Christ possesses an unchanging identity from age to age and place to place. In its particular teachings, however, it takes account of changing circumstances and needs, and in situations of unusual ambiguity and perplexity it seeks to combine new insight and discernment with an underlying continuity and consistency (#10). Moral discernment means being in tune with the mind of Christ. A process of prayerful reflection, learning and openness to new insights in the light of circumstances is the path to discerning the mind of Christ, especially where new and complex moral and pastoral problems are concerned (#24). The report recognizes the role of the consensus fidelium in homing in on the truth. ‘The fidelity of the church to the mind of Christ involves a continuing process of listening, learning, reflecting and teaching’ in which every member of the Church has a part to play in which they must be guided by conscience. Conscience is informed by, and informs, the tradition and teaching of the community. Learning and teaching are a shared discipline, in which

20 For example, S. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1985; A. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2nd edn, 1984; London: Duckworth, 1985). See also P. Geach, The Virtues [Stanton Lectures 1973–4] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

171

the faithful seek to discover together what obedience to the gospel of grace and the law of love entails amidst the moral implications of the gospel which calls for continuing discernment, constant repentance, and ‘renewal of the mind’ (Romans 12.2) . . . (#29) The process of discerning the mind of Christ ‘unfolds through the formation of a character, individual and communal, that reflects the likeness of Christ and embodies the virtues of a true humanity’ (#31). ‘Holding in mind the teaching they have received, drawing upon their own experience, and exploring the particularities of the issue that confronts them, they have then to decide what action to take in these circumstances and on this occasion’ (#32). Where possible, the report attempts to state the positive, rather than leading on the negative. For example, this is its way of affirming heterosexual marriage: ‘The integration of sexual instincts and affections into a lifelong relationship of married love and loyalty constitutes a uniquely significant form of human flourishing and fulfilment’ (#9). Marriage and the family are ‘institutions divinely appointed for human well-being and happiness’ (#58). Life in Christ has little to say about the issue in human sexuality that is proving divisive among Anglicans and many other Christians today, that of same-sex unions, but it attempts to play down any suggestion of a major divergence between Anglican and Roman Catholic approaches. It affirms a whole series of common principles about all persons being made in the divine image, the value of friendship and companionship, lifelong marriage as the normative context for sexuality, and the non-equivalence of marriage and homosexual relations in terms of the right ordering and use of sexuality. Anglicans ‘could agree’ [sic], it suggests, with Roman Catholics that homosexual activity is disordered, but ‘there may well be differences among them in the consequent moral and pastoral advice they would think it right to offer to those seeking their counsel and direction’ (#87). Of course, there is much more to be said on that subject; the commission could hardly have said less. And much more has been said within both communions since the mid-1990s. In the Church of England, to look no further, Issues in Human Sexuality (1991) was followed by the substantial discussion Some Issues in Human Sexuality: A Guide to the Debate (2003)21 and by the pastoral guidelines produced by the House of Bishops (2006). Alongside these, there have been statements on the Christian understanding of marriage.

21 London: Church House Publishing, 2003.

172

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Cumulatively, all these documents have helped to explore the context and to nuance the arguments, while stimulating the discussion.




The words and deeds of Jesus our ultimate criterion

In approaching the difficult topic of ethics and communion we must orientate ourselves to Jesus Christ, which means to orientate our thinking to the definitive revelation of God’s nature and will in him. A Christological focus should be axiomatic for our method. As Hauerwas has finely put it: ‘To be a Christian is to have one’s character determined in accordance with God’s action in Jesus Christ.’22 We sometimes mock the popular Christian saying, ‘What would Jesus do?’, but it undoubtedly gets to the heart of the matter, for Christians are called to be imitators of Christ. To give some scholarly mileage to this question, I now propose to offer to some reflections based on various studies of the ethics of the New Testament, including Jeremias, Schillebeeckx, Borg, Dunn, Schrage, Hays, Horrell, Burridge and the authors of a recent collection on holiness and ecclesiology. I begin with Richard Burridge’s Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics.23 Burridge’s argument is built on three pillars. The first pillar is the claim, set out in his well-known published research, that the Gospels conform in certain important ways to the biographical genre of the ancient world. They are not sui generis but have many parallels in ancient biography. Like those models, they present a figure for emulation and imitation, that is to say discipleship. Second, the biographical genre is interested in the words and deeds of the subject, how he interacts with persons and situations: together these form the basis for the mimesis, the imitatio of the disciple. Third, the study of the New Testament for our purpose should begin with the person and work, the words and deeds of Jesus Christ, as this can be reconstructed from the sources. What we can glean from the New Testament literature is not simply a Pauline perspective or a Markan one, for example, but also what Jesus proclaimed and what he stood for. We can get behind the texts to postulate with sufficient confidence what helped to shape them – the impact of Jesus himself. Most accounts of the ethics of the New Testament evade the significance of Jesus himself and confine themselves to the various canonical perspectives, 22 S. Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, p. 227. 23 Richard A. Burridge, Imitating Jesus: An Inclusive Approach to New Testament Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007).

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

173

but Burridge begins with Jesus, moves on to Paul and then takes each of the Gospel writers in turn. There are, of course, major methodological implications of this order that New Testament scholars will want to debate.24 Burridge’s central thesis is that ‘the New Testament is simply not an ethical treatise or book of moral instructions’ (p. 16). ‘Neither the gospels nor the epistles contain a comprehensive treatment, or even outline, of Jesus’ ethical teaching in itself’ (p. 34). The ethical material, which is certainly not lacking, is subservient to a wider purpose. It is orientated not to ‘the good’, but to the character and will of God (p. 48). Ethics is a function of Christology, eschatology and the call to discipleship. The themes of Jesus’ ethical teaching are the imminence of the Kingdom of God, combined with a restoration eschatology – the recreation of Israel as God’s chosen nation; the call to discipleship in the form of radical renunciation of worldly goods and ties; the love command for his community, and the bringing of shalom to God’s people. His ethical injunctions were given in a prophetic mode and were marked by wild hyperbole and extreme exaggeration to make a point. Jesus’ ethical imperatives are set within the proclamation of the Kingdom, not given for their own sake, that is, for purely ethical reasons. Jesus was not a moralist. His intentional, consistent association with outcasts and excluded people seemed to undermine the moral order. The New Testament leaves us with the tension between ‘a rigorous all-demanding ethic in his teaching and an all-embracing acceptance in his pastoral practice’ (p. 81). It was above all in table fellowship that Jesus expressed his solidarity with the excluded. He made no ethical preconditions for fellowship with himself. The friend of sinners was, by the same token, the critic of the religious authorities; it was the ‘guardians of morality’ who conspired to eliminate him (p. 408). There is almost universal scholarly agreement that Paul grounds his ethics in his Christology and that in Paul the imperative follows from the indicative. The epistolary genre – the fact that Paul transmitted his teaching in the form of letters – determines that the ethical issues that are tackled are contemporary, contextual and contingent ones. There is a limit to what can be extrapolated from this raw material (pp. 89f, 105). Burridge has brief

24 R. B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament (New York: Harper Collins, 1996; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997) is cautious about starting from the historical Jesus, though he does not duck the issue (pp. 158–68). In contrast, W. Schrage, The Ethics of the New Testament (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) has a substantial discussion of the ethics of Jesus himself before turning more briefly to the Gospels.

174

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

discussions of five areas of Pauline ethics: the state, women, sexuality, slavery, household matters, all under the rubric of context and contingency. Horrell, by contrast, examines not specific moral teaching in Paul, but what he calls Paul’s ‘metanorms’, the basic paradigms that Paul derives from his Christology and his overall grasp of the gospel.25 Horrell’s two metanorms are the corporate solidarity of the Christian community and the ‘other-regarding’, selfless ethic that follows Christ’s own self-giving pattern of life. First: ‘[A] primary goal of Paul’s discourse is to engender communal solidarity, and to attempt to restore and strengthen it in the face of conflict and division.’26 Second: Paul’s ‘principal moral paradigm’ is not the actual teaching of Jesus, but his self-giving.27 (Here there is something of a resonance with Burridge, for whom it is the actions of Jesus, though not separated from his words, that form the critical benchmark for Christian ethics.) In support of the solidarity principle, Horrell draws out the corporate implications of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper in Paul and underlines the rhetoric of brotherhood (adelphoi) and of Paul’s appeals for unity. To elaborate the connections between solidarity, difference and other-regard, Horrell looks at the way that Paul deploys the construct ‘the strong and the weak’ in 1 Corinthians 8–10 and Romans 14–15: the stronger Christian is not to stand upon his rights but to give way to the weaker precisely in order to safeguard the weaker conscience (suneidesis). This is a Christ-like attitude, springing from a sacrificial regard for the interests and well-being of the other. Horrell argues that the specific moral application of these ethical metanorms, for example in the area of sexual conduct, are not immediately derived from Paul’s basic framework of God’s saving act in Christ, but are drawn from the moral assumptions that were prevalent in the ancient world, largely Jewish but also pagan.28 To return to Burridge: after Paul he moves to the Evangelists, giving a general introduction to each of the Gospels, followed by an account of their Christology, before looking at their ethics. In Mark the whole narrative account of Jesus is charged with ethical significance with regard to the call to discipleship. Matthew shows a mixed community struggling to follow Jesus, rather than a purist, separatist group. Jesus, the friend of sinners, is particularly prominent in Luke: he identifies himself with various groups of

25 D. G. Horrell, Solidarity and Difference: A Contemporary Reading of Paul’s Ethics (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005). 26 Ibid., p. 100. 27 Ibid., p. 27 and ch. 7. 28 See the seven theses in Horrell’s final chapter, especially pp. 279–80.

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

175

socially marginalized people: the poor, the blind, lame or crippled, lepers, those possessed or oppressed by unclean spirits, and women. The theme of mimesis is strongest in Luke among the Gospels. Those who are portrayed as marginalized in John, and to whom Jesus deliberately goes out of his way to relate, include women and Samaritans. The struggle against Apartheid in South Africa has been part of the provenance of Imitating Jesus. There is a substantial hermeneutical section on the lessons that can be learned from the way that Apartheid was biblically justified. Except in the case of Apartheid, and to a lesser extent, the biblically based case for slavery, modern ethical questions are not explicitly raised. However, the moral is clear: the Bible has been used and can be used in highly plausible ways to support what are now regarded as immoral practices. This is precisely the danger entailed in using the Bible to search for ‘rules for today’ (p. 368). Burridge does not see it as his job to say how ethical rules for today should be arrived at and the pointers in this direction are rather thin. (However, in an essay in Theology he has brought out some parallels between the use of the Bible to defend slavery and the use of the Bible to condemn homosexuality.)29 The thrust of this ethical interpretation of most of the New Testament (Hebrews, 1 and 2 Peter, Jude, the Johannine epistles and Revelation are not covered) amounts to this truth: that Jesus unreservedly embraced those whom the morally strict, within their theological and ritual framework, would have excluded. Nothing that Paul and the Four Evangelists may have subsequently elaborated can undermine this momentous fact. As Burridge works through the material, at each stage he reviews the scholarly debates and discusses the problems of historical reconstruction. He engages in dialogue with his peers, either to disagree or to gather support – the two most frequently engaged interlocutors probably being Richard B. Hays and Wolfgang Schrage.30 Schrage’s approach is firmly in line with that of Burridge, when he writes: Now the New Testament is certainly not a handbook or compendium of Christian ethics, with universal rules or detailed descriptions of conduct. It does not contain philosophic teaching about norms or virtues, or definitions and legitimations deriving from some kind of natural law governing justice and property, labor and society. Nowhere – or almost 29 R. Burridge, ‘Being Biblical? Slavery, Sexuality and the Inclusive Community’, Theology CXI (January–February 2008), pp. 22–31. 30 R. B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament; W. Schrage, The Ethics of the New Testament.

176

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

nowhere – do we find any interest in universal moral principles, eternally valid statements about what constitutes a just social and political order or the relationship between the sexes, or programs and handy guidelines for dealing with other ethical problems.31 The inclusive thrust of Imitating Jesus is reinforced in a recent collection of studies on Holiness and Ecclesiology in the New Testament.32 The authors are mostly Wesleyan or Nazarene academics, with a sprinkling of other broadly evangelical scholars, and include some distinguished names. The central thesis of the book, to which most contributors explicitly subscribe, is that holiness, ‘the relation of the human to the divine’ (p. 19), does not consist in moralism and legalism, or in cultic purity and separation from the world, and is not obsessed with sexuality. Holiness is enshrined in the words and deeds of Jesus and especially in the way that he reached out to God’s lost children in his ministry. Following Marcus J. Borg’s Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus,33 the authors affirm that Jesus redefined holiness as saving compassion towards those on the margins of God’s people. ‘Holiness does not withdraw, it reaches out’ (p. 38). Holiness overcomes estrangement, alienation and rejection. Such redemptive action is the content of the Kingdom of God that was at hand in the ministry of Jesus. True holiness is seen supremely in the cross of Christ, which redefines holiness for us. The holiness of Jesus himself is seen in the way he consecrates himself to God and to God’s saving purposes on the eve of the crucifixion, especially in John 17 (p. 111, Bauckham). As he does this, he also embraces all who believe or will believe in him and consecrates them also to the Father. Jesus shows no interest in ritual purity or in moralism: he neither lays down ceremonial acts nor multiplies commandments nor engages in casuistry. For Jesus, holiness was maintained ‘by the integrity of being that identified wholly and unreservedly with the purposes of God in compassion and redemption for his lost and dying world’ (p. 50, Hagner). So for the Christian, holiness or perfection is not to be equated with sinlessness, for all continue to fall short, but walking in fellowship with God and in tune with God’s gracious purpose (p. 55). Christian obedience is not to a law, but to the person of Jesus in daily discipleship. These studies remind us that it was in his consistent and deliberate

31 Scrage, ibid., p. 2. 32 Kent E. Brower and Andy Johnson (eds), Holiness and Ecclesiology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). 33 Revised edition with an introductory essay by N. T. Wright (Harrisburg: Trinity Press, 1998).

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

177

practice of table or meal fellowship that Jesus reached out to the excluded children of God. Both Brower and Thompson have substantial discussions of Jesus’ meal fellowship in Mark and Luke respectively (Luke’s Gospel is bursting with meal scenes) and both draw on Marcus Borg, who is himself indebted to Joachim Jeremias and Norman Perrin who were among the first to perceive the momentous significance for his mission of Jesus’ table fellowship with those excluded from the privileges of Jewish religious and social life, cut off from the heart of the nation and its God-given vocation.34 The dire consequences of exclusion have been stressed by James D. G. Dunn, who points out in an essay on Jesus and holiness that in Jewish scripture and tradition the epithet ‘sinner’ was literally a damning indictment: the ‘sinner’ was excluded from the covenant and debarred from participating in the world to come.35 Jesus’ hospitality at table was an eschatological sign intended to reverse this interpretation of God’s will. We can only wonder at the intensity of prophetic conviction and passion that fortified Jesus to take on the Jewish worldview of his day, its traditions, institutions and power structures. As Dunn argues, by his words and especially his actions, Jesus refuted the holiness rules of the Pharisees, the Qumran community and ‘common Judaism’ – and, we could add, with Borg, the Temple elites.36 Jeremias’ study of the parables of Jesus, which goes back to the early 1960s, concludes with a discussion of what Jeremias calls ‘parabolic actions’. Jesus did not confine himself to spoken parables, but also performed parabolic actions. His most significant parabolic action was his extension of hospitality to the outcasts (Luke 19.5f.) and their reception into his house (Luke 15.1–2) and even into the circle of his disciples (Mark 2.14 par.; Matt. 10.3) these feasts for publicans are prophetic signs, more significant than words, silent proclamations that the Messianic Age is here, the Age of forgiveness.37

34 Borg does not list E. Schillebeeckx, Jesus an Experiment in Christology [1974], trans. H. Hoskins (London: Collins, 1979), pp. 206–13, or B. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1979), pp. 158–62, both of which predate Borg’s own study and discuss the significance of Jesus’ table fellowship with ‘sinners’. 35 J. D. G. Dunn, ‘Jesus and Holiness: The Challenge of Purity’, in S. C. Barton (ed.), Holiness Past and Present (London: T&T Clark, 2003), pp. 168–92, at p. 179. 36 Ibid., p. 186. 37 J. Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, trans. S. H. Hooke (London: SCM Press, rev. edn, 1963), p. 227. Cf. N. Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper and Row; London: SCM Press, 1967).

178

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Borg goes further: in inviting outcasts into table fellowship with himself Jesus is not only conveying the embrace of God to sinners, but also putting in place a complete alternative social-religious paradigm for the identity of Israel. He substitutes a model of compassion and inclusion for a model of purity and separation. He throws down a deliberate challenge to the regime of the Pharisees. They have missed God’s way for Israel, blind guides who have led the nation away from God’s purpose of compassion and acceptance. The way to restore Israel is not by rigorous protocols of separation based on minute purity regulations – Jesus explicitly challenges and overthrows these, whether they be hand-washing, tithing, Sabbath observance, unclean foods or unclean people – but by implementing in practice God’s loving embrace of the weak, the poor, the suffering and the rejected.38 When the Pharisees ask the disciples in Mark 2.15–16 ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’, they are expressing alarm about issues of holiness understood as moral and ritual purity. Sitting at table expresses acceptance, intimacy, fellowship and unity. Moreover, for the Jews, table fellowship was understood as fellowship before God and in the presence of God. By eating with ‘undesirables’ Jesus is blatantly endangering his character as a holy person through contact with ritual and moral contagion. Jesus’ subversive actions threaten both the internal order and coherence of Jewish religion and society and its distinctive identity over against the godless Gentiles. His fellowship with outcasts undermines the very understanding of God and of God’s will on which the reform and solidarity of Judaism, according to the Pharisees, is based. He systematically crosses the boundaries that were erected to preserve that order; he flouts them provocatively. He reaches out physically to touch the unclean lepers; he allows the haemorrhaging woman to touch his hem; he heals a man (or men) possessed by unclean spirits among the unclean tombs in an unclean land and allows the spirits to enter the unclean pigs; he ostentatiously shares food at table with the unclean. He is not contaminated by this contact: he radiates holiness as saving, healing compassion and imparts it to those who cling to him. Jesus intentionally prioritized the marginalized; his coming and his message were for them. They were magnetically attracted to him. Sometimes he sought them out, as with Levi and Zacchaeus, but mostly he did not need to, because they flocked to him. He went out of his way to eat with them and theirs. In his fellowship meals with the rejected ones of Israel, Jesus was drawing them back into the people of God. In the Last Supper he effected a

38 Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus, pp. 93–134.

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

179

definitive solidarity with them through a sacramental meal, but in doing so he once again outrageously overturned Jewish purity and holiness assumptions by invoking the image of a body given over to death. In his breaking of the bread at the end of the Emmaus walk, the risen Christ showed that he is the host when Christians gather in his name and that he is especially near to those who are dejected and in despair. In the Eucharist, sacramental sharing in a body that has been given over to death (albeit, it has been raised again) becomes the source of holiness for his people. Holiness as separation from impurity is replaced by holiness as solidarity with Christ. Table fellowship with him is fellowship before God and in God’s presence in and through him. The authors of these studies show how Paul faithfully expounds the mystery of Christ: he carries forward the incredible paradoxes of the Gospels. In Paul, it is the crucified Messiah who is the revelation of the holiness of God. Christ crucified is the image and glory of God. Paul makes us ‘rethink God’ (p. 161, Gorman). Our holiness is our participation in him, which leads to Christ-likeness. That is why Paul can say of the Corinthians, with all their abuses, that they are ‘already sanctified’ (p. 184, Winter). Holiness in Paul, as Oakes puts it (p. 177), is a bipolar concept, not a progressive one: people are either holy or not holy; it is their status rather than their state. Holiness does not condemn or exclude; holiness makes holy. Most chapters in this collection end with an attempt to apply what has been expounded to the present-day ethical dilemmas of the churches. Remarkably, homosexuality is seldom mentioned (pp. 165, 197). In one of the most expansive reflections, Troy Martin draws from his study of Galatians the lesson that the Church should not evade debates on what holiness of life consists in. Holiness cannot be preserved by ducking the issues. Galatians also shows that holiness is not maintained by blindly upholding received positions: our human apprehension of God’s unchanging intentions for the Church changes over time. Refusing to countenance divorce in physically abusive relationships and the suppression of the role of women in the Church are two areas where a rigid theological conservatism is now seen by society as actually immoral or unjust. Those entrenched positions do not commend the holiness of God to non-Christians.

180

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology




Some provisional conclusions

First and foremost, I conclude from the discussion of Jesus’ own method as reflected in the four Gospels and other New Testament writings, that our way to understand the relation of ethics and communion, particularly in relation to human sexuality, must pass directly through Jesus Christ’s words and deeds – his actions as well as his words. They cannot be bypassed or evaded. No other route should weigh with us. No sophisticated and elaborate theological argument can negate the force of the New Testament in testifying to what can only be described as the compassionate, inclusive practice of Jesus himself.39 Second, the problem posed for ecumenical convergence by the issue of ethics and communion may seem daunting, perhaps insoluble. What hope for unity is there when the irresistible force of a reforming (some would say innovating) tradition meets the immovable obstacle of a conservative institution? It seems that a new factor has entered the ecumenical equation: to convergence in faith and convergence in order, we have to add convergence in morals. And just as the concept of differentiated consensus has been shown to be relevant to questions of order as well as to questions of faith, it may be that differentiated consensus should be explored in relation to ethics. But this has barely even begun. At any rate, the defeatist response, ‘It’s too difficult to reach agreement; let’s just go our separate ways, perhaps engaging in “spiritual ecumenism” and basically living in a state of peaceful coexistence’, is neither appropriate nor responsible. In any case, a counsel of despair with regard to ecumenical dialogue could hardly be replicated with regard to the internal life of particular churches. We have seen that churches are constituted by the communion that the faithful enjoy through word and sacrament with God the Holy Trinity and with each other. Churches need a better way of maintaining their communion and unity in the face of potentially divisive issues than a policy of moratorium on divisive debates – ‘Keep it off the agenda’ – even if a moratorium seems appropriate for the time being. Third, the question of ethics and communion reminds us once again of the need for deep theological seriousness in the form of hard thinking and authentic dialogue. As Pope Paul VI showed in 1964 in the encyclical

39 Cf. J. Ashton, Understanding the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 552–53: ‘if we seek for answers only in what Jesus says we are bound to be disappointed . . . the destiny of Jesus Christ . . . is indeed the true revelation. It is indeed God’s plan for the world, but in so far as the plan is transcribed in terms of a human life it is not to be understood from words but from deeds.’

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

181

Ecclesiam Suam, God’s way of salvation with humankind is one of dialogue (colloquium salutis), a dialogue that God has initiated in Jesus Christ, with the consequence that the Church also can be seen as ‘a structured dialogical reality’.40 This cuts both ways. A liberal stance that merely celebrates diversity uncritically or advocates indiscriminate self-expression is morally threadbare. A conservative stance that buries its head in the sand and refuses to grapple with issues that are existentially crucial for many in the Church and in our society is lacking in integrity. Theological seriousness about Scripture and tradition is what I welcome in Oliver O’Donovan’s recent tract for the times A Conversation Waiting to Begin (in the USA: Church in Crisis). What incurs his wrath is simplistic sentimentality about momentous theological decisions. O’Donovan’s conclusions are certainly not illiberal, but he does not arrive at them by a liberal route.41 Aided by the WCC (whose Faith and Order Commission has instigated a programme on moral discernment), by regional ecumenical instruments such as the Conference of European Churches and by the various national instruments, the churches should come together to study ethics as such, not just controversial ethical issues – that is to say, they should work together on the Christian ethical vision and the axioms and principles that inform it, just as the ARCIC report Life in Christ did. If they did that, they would be contributing to the formation of an ethically informed and morally sensitive culture within the churches, which would help to provide the matrix for articulating moral questions in a responsible way. And on those now unavoidable moral questions the churches would do well to confer and consult together, rather than attempting to lay down the law for their members and the rest of the world. Fourth, the issue of ethics and communion raises questions about the nature of the Church and its unity, just as direct issues of doctrine or of order do: what sort of reality is the Church, what sort of human space or ‘form of life’ is it? What sort of ‘texture’ has our common life in the Body of Christ? How much ‘stretch’ can unity sustain? Is the Church meant to be a monolithic institution where uniformity is the order of the day and all must believe and behave in the same way? Or is it meant to be more like a family, where

40 A. Maffeis, Ecumenical Dialogue, trans. L. Fuchs (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2005), pp. 58–59. 41 O. O’Donovan, A Conversation Waiting to Begin: The Churches and the Gay Controversy (London: SCM Press, 2009), published in USA as Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2008).

182

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

behaviour, on the part of some of its members, that does not conform to the accepted norms can be contained and coped with? Another way of putting that is to speak about the praxis of communion: how we manage communion, how we negotiate it. If to seek to be in communion and to seek to enhance it are the primary obligations of Christians, what tools, what techniques do we have for this? How good are we at managing communion – and, that means, how good are we at managing diversity and dissent? How should we use the Church’s structures of conciliarity or synodality to address serious differences between Christians and churches – always bearing in mind, as I have stressed, that these issues are not outside our communion, grounded as it is in baptism, but within it. Speaking both within the context of the Anglican Communion and as an ecumenical theologian, I offer four apparently simple proposals about how we handle the issue of ethics and communion and the serious study, reflection and dialogue that it demands, both within and between our churches. O

O

O

First, take time to consider and to consult, it is God’s gift in situations of conflict. We need time to talk things through so that we may understand each other better. Time may not buy agreement, but haste certainly multiplies misunderstandings. To act first and explain later is irresponsible and hardly a recipe for mutual trust. Some of the great councils of the medieval Church ran for many years! Second, gather those who disagree around the Bible. Use the time for listening together for God’s Word, which may lead to collective discernment of the next steps ahead. There is no guarantee that we will reach agreement in our interpretations of Scripture – indeed, history and experience argue against any readily available consensus – because we bring our different traditions, contexts and presuppositions to that study, but the best hope of agreement is to gather around the open page of Holy Scripture, because to do that is to come the closest we can get to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Much more time and attention could be devoted to the study of the Scriptures both in our churches and in ecumenical encounter: all too often biblical material is used as window-dressing for an argument based on other grounds.42 Third, adopt a patient, charitable and humble stance and disposition

42 This point is substantiated in the essays by Joy Tetley and Paula Gooder in P. Avis (ed.), Paths to Unity: Explorations in Ecumenical Method (London: Church House Publishing, 2004).

Ethics and Communion: The New Frontier in Ecumenism

O

183

in dialogue. ‘Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ’ (Eph. 5.21). Engage with Scripture together in a posture of mutual subjection, of humble listening and respectful questioning. However passionately we disagree and deplore one another’s views, we should treat one another with courtesy as coming to the table in good faith and with integrity. That is the best posture to evoke a meeting of minds and hearts.43 Fourth, refrain from acting in a way that other Christians, whether within one’s own church or in any other church, see as unacceptable in conscience, genuinely shocking or provocative. (In the context of the Anglican Communion, such actions may refer to the unilateral liturgical endorsement of same-sex unions or to uncanonical interventions in the life of dioceses that have taken that step.) The issue of eating meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 8 is relevant here. Although the analogy is incomplete, it is clear that, for Paul, to act in a way that causes a fellow believer to stumble is to bring ‘destruction’ to one ‘for whom Christ died’; and to ‘wound the conscience’ of a fellow Christian is to ‘sin against Christ’ (vv. 11–12). The primary question is not whether the action is right in our own eyes, but whether it is scandalously wrong in the eyes of a brother of sister: their perception must govern my action.44 When is it right to scandalize the conscience of our fellow Christians? I would say, never, or almost never, because to do so clouds their walk with God and so brings us into judgement.45

43 I warm to what Anthony Thiselton says, drawing on the thought of Emilio Betti, about training the mind in the hermeneutical virtues in The Hermeneutics of Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), pp. 81–87, especially p. 87: ‘This re-formed mind set draws on qualities or virtues of character: it involves listening, tolerance, patience, respect for the other, and ultimately mutual understanding’ (italics original). Betti claims that hermeneutical training or formation inculcates the qualities that help communities to live together in mutual respect, shared understanding and harmony. 44 See the detailed discussion in A. C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; Carlisle: Paternoster, 2000), pp. 607–61). 45 I warm also to Ephraim Radner’s and Philip Turner’s prescription for the Anglican Communion (and to do that it is not necessary to buy into all the details of their diagnosis of the ills of The Episcopal Church): E. Radner and P. Turner, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). See also L. Cavanagh, By One Spirit: Reconciliation and Renewal in Anglican Life (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009). Cavanagh usefully appends Rowan Williams’ address to the 1998 Lambeth Conference, on making moral decisions.

184

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

All that adds up to a mode of relating and a pattern of behaviour that is always appropriate to each individual member of the Body of Christ and to every church corporately – the only path of life together that can provide the matrix for genuine dialogue on ethics and morals and without that dialogue there can be no deeper mutual understanding and no convergence in the truth. Whoever we are and whatever church we belong to, it is perfectly within our power to act in these four ways. If we cannot manage at least to do that, ‘the mind (phronema) of the Spirit’ (Rom. 8.27), ‘the mind (nous) of Christ’ (1 Cor. 2.16), will not be discerned. If we fall at the first hurdle, I fear we will deserve to have our lampstand removed from before the throne of God (cf. Rev. 2.5). We will not deserve to survive. ‘Take not thy Holy Spirit from us!’

10


Forging Communion in the Face of Difference1

A

s the young Francis Bernardone said his prayers before the twelfthcentury icon ‘The Christ of San Damiano’ in Assisi, he heard the command, coming as it were from the crucified one: ‘Francis, go and repair my house which, as you see, is falling into ruin.’ Taking the words literally, he set to work to repair the chapel of San Damiano where he had been praying. Soon, gathering helpers, Francis began repairing other churches and chapels in the area. Later it dawned on him that the call was not to the physical restoration of churches, but to the reform and renewal of the Catholic Church. He set about this new task through prayer, poverty, discipline and a fresh proclamation of the gospel. The renewal and reform of the Church is a vocation for all Christians and especially for pastors and theologians in any age and it must necessarily include restoring the unity of the Church. This chapter falls into five short parts. In the first, I expound the imperative of unity. In the second part I expound some aspects of Johannine ecclesiology, bringing out the mystical, visible and missional dimensions of the Church’s unity. In the third section I set out how unity has been essentially understood and described in the Faith and Order movement. In the fourth part I return for the last time to the challenge of building communion in the face

1

This chapter includes some material from my paper ‘The Reasons for Porvoo’, given at the Porvoo Young Theologians’ Research Consultation in Sweden in 2008 and published in Nordiks ekumenisk skriftsserie (2010). I adapted this chapter for my paper ‘Ecumenical Theology and the Future of Unity’, given at the Ecumenical Institute, Fribourg, Switzerland, in November 2009.

186

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

of difference, this time looking at communion and confessional difference. Finally and in brief, I pose the challenge: What price unity?




The imperative of unity: ‘Zeal for your house’

Churches not outwardly united . . . are obliged by their faith to work and to pray for the recovery of their visible unity and the deepening of their spiritual fellowship . . . Christians can never tolerate disunity. They are obliged not merely to guard and maintain, but also to promote and nurture the highest possible realization of communion between and within the churches.2 With these fine words, the Porvoo Common Statement sets out the deepest motivation for ecumenism. This forthright statement about the imperative of seeking visible unity and communion goes to the heart of the matter. I take John 2.17 as my cue: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’ The litmus test of all our ecumenical endeavours, both as individuals and as churches, is this: How important to us is the visible unity and communion of the one Church of Jesus Christ? Not everyone has a passionate concern for unity. Who among us is actually ‘consumed’ – devoured, burnt up – by a zeal for the unity of God’s Church? It is a rare burden to bear. Indeed, it seems that, at the present time, the tide is going out in our churches with regard to ecumenism. Up to a point, there are good reasons why some are sceptical about ecumenism. There are aspects of the ecumenical movement that need to be reformed and aspects of ecumenical theology that need to be rethought. In particular, I think we need to take much more seriously the diversity of expressions of Christianity – a diversity that is ever increasing and which may be said to be completely out of control – and we need to show that God’s mission in the world is at the heart of our work for unity. A programme that savours of bureaucracy and that multiplies tedious meetings will not win support. Frankly, much ecumenical activity is dreary – but that is not the fault of its theme, which is held in the grip of the imperatives of unity and mission. Those imperatives should be allowed to shape our ecumenical action. However, even 2

Together in Mission and Ministry: The Porvoo Common Statement with Essays on Church and Ministry in Northern Europe (London: Church House Publishing, 1993), p. 15 (#27).

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

187

those of us who seek to keep faith with the ecumenical movement and believe, as William Temple affirmed, that it is a great new work of the Holy Spirit, tend to be more clear in our minds that unity is a goal to be worked for than we are about what unity entails and what it would look like. This is the question that we are attempting to wrestle with in this final chapter. At any rate, to work for visible unity today is to try to swim against the tide. Ecumenism is not hugely in fashion or in favour at the present time. Not everyone sees the point of working for unity. Some even regard it as a luxury that churches that have many pressing calls on their budget could get by without. Ecclesiastical pragmatism will not have much time for unity, unless it results in saving money. But there are theological challenges, too. Unity work is being challenged theologically mainly from two directions. Christians from evangelical or pietistic traditions tend to emphasize that the unity of the Church is a gift of grace that we receive in Christ; therefore, it cannot be the result of human effort. Indeed, to actively work for visible unity is to engage in a human work and in that area there is always the danger of merit creeping in. Others, notably in the Roman Catholic Church, while believing in the visible expression of the Church’s unity, propose that in today’s ecumenical climate unity is best pursued by what is referred to as ‘spiritual ecumenism’. This formula seems to imply that we should not expect any significant change in the structural relationships between the churches or in their theology and teaching, for these are God-given and unchangeable (irreformable). Instead, we should maximize opportunities for joint prayer and study and for public witness where this is possible; we should orientate ourselves to the deep mystical roots of our unity in Christ. But – so ‘spiritual ecumenism’ seems to assume – the churches should continue their separate existence, even if it means not being able to offer one another sacramental fellowship at the altar. Both of these points of view – at opposite ends of the spectrum of approaches to the question of unity – contain an element of truth. To take the first: unity is indeed a gift; it is given to us in Christ; we cannot manufacture unity; only God can create it. But that does not mean that we do not have any responsibility in relation to unity. If you are given a gift, you should make good use of it, not hide it away to gather dust. The more we are given, the more we are accountable for. The ecumenical movement has typically described unity as ‘both gift and task’. To turn now to the second point of view, ‘spiritual ecumenism’: all ecumenical work must of course take place in the spiritual realm, which means precisely in and through the Holy Spirit. Can there be any ecumenism that is not ‘spiritual ecumenism’ in this sense? Are not the ministry, the sacraments and the ways that pastoral oversight is exercised

188

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

equally ‘spiritual’ matters? If so, they cannot be bracketed out. But if they are included, all the old faith and order issues come flooding back, and rightly so. It would be a misuse of the word ‘spiritual’ to use it as an alternative to ‘visible’. Shared prayer and study is vital and it is true that we grow together when we work together. But to stop there would be to fall far short of the unity that the New Testament describes, which is clearly incarnational, sacramental and visible to the world, as well as spiritual and mystical (cf. Jn 17.21–3). The fellowship, communion and shared life that the New Testament describes in its varied use of the words koinonia and koinonein is both profoundly spiritual and robustly practical. It is a communion with the Father and the Son and with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ (1 John 1). It is a communion with the Apostles and their teaching, related to the breaking of bread and the prayers (Acts 2.42). It is a partnership in making the gospel known through tangible mutual support (Phil. 1.5). It is a communion in the sufferings of Christ by becoming like him in his death (Phil. 3.10). Most pointedly perhaps, in relation to the idea of ‘spiritual communion’, it is a communion in his body and blood through participating in the bread and the cup (1 Cor. 10.16–17), so any expression or degree of communion that does not arrive eventually at this happy event falls far short of what the gospel intends for us. My conviction is that what we are called to in the Church, our primary obligation to our fellow Christians is to seek to be and remain in communion with them. George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement (now The Society of Friends) said: ‘Sound deep to that of God in everyone.’ Let me slightly adapt this potent phrase. To build communion is to seek to become united to ‘that of Christ’ in all his people. By the same token, to injure or even break communion, or to treat it carelessly and in a cavalier manner, is to turn away from the Christ in our fellow Christians. It is a theological necessity, because it is an imperative of the Holy Spirit, the Unifier, that the Christ in us should be one with the Christ in them. This unity or communion requires to be manifested and embodied in the sacramental life of the Church, especially in baptism and the Eucharist, because these are precisely the sacraments of the Body of Christ that make us one. In baptism we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection and begin our initiation into the life of grace in the Church. In the Eucharist our unity with him is both declared and strengthened. ‘Holy Communion’ is an entirely apt name for what happens in this part of the Eucharist (though it does not cover the whole of the eucharistic action or event). It is not only the communion between Christians and God that is holy, but also the communion between Christians themselves. And the Body of Christ that we receive in the sacrament is not simply the body of an

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

189

individual person, Jesus Christ, but the Christ who (as Bonhoeffer said) ‘exists as the Church’.3 It is not straining matters to say that, in Holy Communion, in receiving Christ we receive the Body of Christ, that is to say the Church, and are united with it. This is the sacramental logic of Augustine’s often-quoted saying in Sermon 272 that in the Eucharist we receive what we are: What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the Body of Christ and the chalice the Blood of Christ. . . . How is the bread His Body? And the chalice, or what is in the chalice, how is it His Blood? Those elements, brethren, are called Sacraments, because in them one thing is seen, but another is understood. What is seen is the corporeal species, but what is understood is the spiritual fruit . . . ‘You, however, are the Body of Christ and His members.’ If, therefore, you are the Body of Christ and His members, your mystery is presented at the table of the Lord, you receive your mystery. To that which you are, you answer: ‘Amen’; and by answering, you subscribe to it. For you hear: ‘The Body of Christ!’ and you answer: ‘Amen!’ Be a member of Christ’s Body, so that your ‘Amen’ may be the truth.4




Unity and mission in the Fourth Gospel

There is an indissoluble biblical connection between unity and mission, mission and unity. The connection is made particularly strongly and profoundly in the Fourth Gospel. We begin by looking at one aspect of the discourse on the Good Shepherd in John 10. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep . . . I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. (Jn 10.11, 14–16) 3 4

D. Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio (London: Collins, 1963). http://heritage.villanova.edu/vu/mission/Eucharist/augustine.htm (I am grateful to Dr Martin Davie for providing this quotation.)

190

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Let me try to draw out several points. Christ will sacrifice his life for his own. They are those who hear his voice and follow his call (v. 3). Between them and him there is a relationship of mutual knowledge, that is to say, in biblical terms, a deep and intimate bond of trust and devotion. They ‘know’ each other as the Father knows the Son and the Son knows the Father (vv. 14–15). But besides those gathered around him in his earthly mission, there are ‘other sheep that do not belong to this fold’ (v. 16). The good shepherd will seek to bring them also and they will respond as they recognize his voice. What he wants is to have all the sheep together in one flock, enclosed in one sheepfold: ‘they shall become one flock’. The Authorized/King James Version, following the Vulgate, has ‘one fold (unum ouile)’ instead of ‘one flock’. C. K. Barrett comments that this mistranslation is not entirely misleading: ‘there is nothing to suggest that John thought of one flock lodged in a number of different folds’.5 There is one gate (vv. 2, 7, 9), one flock and one shepherd: without that singularity the analogy breaks down. And for all this he will lay down his life. He will die to gather the sheep. The purpose of his death will not be completely fulfilled until they are one. The shepherd’s mission is to unite. A comparable text is John 11.50–2: Caiaphas cynically proposes that it is better for one man to die for the people than for the whole nation to be destroyed. The Fourth Evangelist adds: ‘He did not say this on his own, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God’ (or, as the Authorized/King James version put it: ‘that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad’). John has already alluded to the gathering together of the Gentiles in ch. 6 where the fragments of the miraculous loaves at the feeding of the five thousand are collected. As Lindars points out, the link between that passage and the present text is found in the Didache (9.4): ‘As this broken bread [or grain] was scattered on the hills and was gathered up and became one, so may thy Church be gathered up from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom.’6 Christ would die ‘to gather into one’. He would go to the cross for unity. Just as in John 10 the good shepherd would ‘bring’ the other sheep and form one flock, one fold, so here Jesus would ‘gather’ God’s scattered children from the four corners of the earth into one. His mission was unity. But what sort of unity? How is it characterized? What are its essential 5 6

C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text (London: SPCK, 1955), p. 313. B. Lindars, The Gospel of John (New Century Bible Commentary, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans; London: Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1972), pp. 408, 243.

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

191

features? Before asking how the ecumenical movement has answered this question, we turn again to the Fourth Gospel and to Jesus’ prayer at the end of the ‘Farewell Discourses’. Barnabas Lindars asserts that unity is ‘a burning issue for John’.7 In Jn 17.20–23 Jesus prays to the Father for the unity of his disciples. They are his ‘own’, those whom the Father has given him, those whom he has sent into the world. Just as in John 10 the good shepherd has a concern for his ‘other sheep’, and just as in John 11 Christ is said to die to gather together the scattered children of God, so here Jesus prays ‘not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one (Jn 17.20–21). As Hoskyns puts it: ‘He extends his prayer to embrace the whole body of the faithful.’8 The unity for which Jesus prays is first a mystical unity. It is grounded in the mutual indwelling or ‘abiding’ of the Father and the Son and of believers with the Father and the Son. The unity of Christians participates in and reflects that mutual indwelling that enfolds Father, Son and disciples in one. To abide in Christ is to abide in his word and in his love: his person, his words and his love are synonymous, three ways of expressing the same reality. But love is the key to all that Jesus speaks of here. The union of which this prayer speaks is a union of love, whether it be the love of Father and Son, or the love they bear towards humankind, or the love that disciples have for one another. As Hoskyns writes, for John: ‘the perfection of charity is the consummation of unity’ and ‘upon this perfection of charity the efficacy of the Church’s mission to the world rests’. But this ‘end’ of the Church lies with God, since ‘believers are wrought into one concrete organic union of charity by an act of God, since to perfect is an almost technical term for a mighty act of the Father or the Son’.9 Christ’s prayer is for a mystical work of God: ‘I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one’ (teleioun, ‘may be perfected into one’: so Hoskyns; Vulgate: consummatio in unium). Loving a person is not primarily a matter of feelings or passions, least of all of sentiment. If you really love someone you seek their well-being above all. You will pay any price to prevent them suffering harm. You want them to be happy. To seek the well-being of a person towards whom you have the disposition of love is to see them flourish and blossom as God intended in their unique created individuality. It is the antithesis of attempting to make them like yourself. Love finds complementarity and completion in the beloved. 7 8 9

Ibid., p. 529: ‘unity is a burning issue for John . . . disunity is a denial of the faith’. E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, in F. N. Davey (ed.), (London: Faber and Faber, 1947), p. 505. Ibid.

192

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

Therefore love respects difference. Love must glory in the experience of diversity within the relationship. The desire to impose sameness, uniformity, is not love, but the craving to control. But, having said that, love also longs to be close to the beloved. The embrace is the typical gesture of love. The deepest and strongest impulse of love is the desire for union with the beloved. The desire to be united is not opposed to seeking the well-being of the beloved but is taken up into it as precisely an expression of it. That is why Jesus’ prayer is not simply that the disciples may love one another – love cannot stop at love – but specifically that they may be one. The ground and paradigm of this oneness is the unsullied fellowship between the Father and the Son, a fellowship expressed in sacrificial obedience on the part of the Son and in the giving of authority, eternal life, his ‘name’, a people and everlasting glory on the part of the Father (Jn 17.1–5, 11, etc.). Here love is expressed and fulfilled in communion. Let me expand this point a little. Agape (caritas) is indeed the ‘greatest’ of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love (1 Corinthians 13). We are unquestionably called to love and it is love that is laid upon us above all. The love ethic, the love command, is reiterated in the New Testament in season and out of season. It is not confined to love of Christian brothers and sisters, but extends to all whom we encounter: ‘And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you’ (1 Thess. 3.12). If to love is to have an intention regarding the well-being of the other, to seek their good, not our own, this too applies to the Church and to those beyond: ‘always seek to do good to one another and to all’ (1 Thess. 5.15). That intention with regard to the well-being and good of another is not a purely interior disposition – least of all a sentimental feeling – but takes the form of action. The author of 1 John follows his exhortation, ‘This is the message you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another’, by earthing it in practical ways: ‘Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.’ This is the ground of our humble confidence when we stand before God (1 Jn 3.11, 18–22).10 I contend that to seek to be and to remain in communion with our fellow Christians is a primary and principal expression of the love we should have towards them. Love is shown in practice in many ways, but in the context of the Church love takes the form of communion – it cannot be less than communion. To do

10 For a full exposition see V. P. Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1973).

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

193

all we can to realize and to maintain communion is an expression of Christian love. St Paul urges the Christians in Rome: ‘Owe no one anything, except to love one another’ (Rom. 13.8). In the same letter he declares: ‘I am a debtor [to all]’ (Rom. 1.14) and it was that overwhelming sense of being indebted, of owing a debt of love to all, that motivated him to proclaim the gospel throughout the known world. Love desires to make Christ known. Love longs that all may know him. Love cannot bear that there should not be communion through Christ with one another. Love suffers pain when communion is injured or broken. In my book, to break communion is the very last thing on earth that we should ever do. If the unity of the Church is not fundamentally a mystical unity in precisely this Johannine sense, it is not the unity for which Christ prayed. The unity for which Jesus prays in John 17 is, second, a visible unity: ‘that the world may believe that you have sent me’; ‘so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (vv. 21, 23). When the Church remains in union with the Father and the Son it manifests his glory to the world. It is a world-facing unity as well as a God-facing unity. The unity that God wants for the Church has its face turned towards the world. The unity that Christ desires for his Church is nothing if it is not unambiguously visible to the world in such a way as to convince the world of the truth of his mission (cf. Jn 16.8–11). If our unity does not hit people between the eyes it is not the unity for which Christ prayed. The unity for which he prays in John is, third, a missional or missionary unity. To have a mission is to be sent with a purpose. Both Jesus and his disciples are sent: ‘As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world’ (v. 18). This sentence is sandwiched between two statements that together speak of both Jesus and the disciples being made holy in God’s truth: ‘Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth . . . for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth’ (vv. 17, 19). Now in the Fourth Gospel it is said again and again that the purpose for which Jesus came into the world is to ‘bear witness to the truth’. Before Pilate, Jesus solemnly avers: ‘For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.’ And in an echo of the discourse on the Good Shepherd in John 10, he adds: ‘Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice’ (Jn 18.37). ‘The truth’ in John, as elsewhere in the New Testament, refers to God’s revelation made known in Jesus Christ – in his coming, life, teaching, actions, death and resurrection. The incarnate one is ‘full of grace and truth’,

194

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

for ‘grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (1.14, 18).11 If our unity does not eventuate in missionary outreach to the world, and specifically in evangelization through giving public testimony to the truth of God’s revelation and saving action in Jesus Christ, it is not the unity for which Christ prayed. The indissoluble biblical connection between unity and mission is revealed particularly clearly in the Fourth Gospel. There Jesus is portrayed as coming to unite and as dying to make one. Mission and unity are the twin imperatives for the Church also. Indeed, they are two sides of a coin. Unity and mission should never be divorced, but should always be held together, just as ecclesiology and missiology are simply two complementary ways of looking at the one reality of the Church. And just as what is needed in theological reflection on the Church today is a missiological ecclesiology, so in the practice of the Church – effected wherever possible and as much as possible ecumenically – what is needed is unity in mission, acting as one body, the Body of Christ, in carrying out Christ’s command, to ‘go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature’.12 We might ask ourselves: how is Christ’s prayer for unity – a unity that is mystical, visible and missional – being prayed in and through us and in and through our church; and how is Christ’s prayer for unity being answered in us and in our church?




‘Full visible unity’?

The goal of the ecumenical movement, and particularly of the faith and order component within it, is agreed to be the full visible unity (or full visible communion) of the whole Church, the one Church of Jesus Christ. The major impetus for this vision came from the mission field where the demand for a united witness and proclamation in the face of other faiths was irresistible. The Church’s proclamation is made not only in word – in preaching and teaching – but also through the sacraments and the provision of pastoral care 11 Barrett, The Gospel According to St John, p. 426; C. H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 170–78. 12 ‘Unity in mission’ is used particularly in the context of Anglican–Methodist relations, both internationally, in the setting up of AMICUM in 2008 (Anglican–Methodist International Commission for Unity in Mission), and, nationally, in the 2003 Covenant between the Methodist Church of Great Britain and the Church of England. Both those churches use the phrase ‘unity in mission’ to describe the work of staff active in the implementation of the Covenant.

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

195

and oversight. These are all facets of the total presence of the Church to the world, its comprehensive communication of the gospel, because the Church’s message is conveyed in actions as well as words. So questions of ministry and ordination, sacramental theology and sacramental efficacy and pastoral authority and structures of oversight cannot be kept out of initiatives for a united witness. The imperative of a visibly united testimony to the world in evangelization has remained the guiding thread of the ecumenical movement, from its formal beginnings in the Edinburgh International Missionary Conference of 1910 to the message of the Ninth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2006. The conjunction of mission and unity is pivotal for a reconstructed ecumenical theology. One of the first significant statements of this vision of visible unity was the ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ of the 1920 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops from around the world. Addressing all baptized persons within the universal Church, the Appeal declared: We believe that God wills fellowship. By God’s own act this fellowship was made in and through Jesus Christ, and its life is in his Spirit. We believe that it is God’s purpose to manifest this fellowship, so far as this world is concerned, in an outward, visible and united society, holding one faith, having its own recognised officers, using God-given means of grace, and inspiring all its members to the world-wide service of the Kingdom of God. This is what we mean by the Catholic Church.13 The Appeal pointed out that this visibly united fellowship was not yet present in the world. The Church was divided: on the one hand were the ancient episcopal communions of East and West, to which, the Appeal noted, ‘ours is bound by many ties of faith and tradition’. On the other hand, there were the ‘great non-episcopal Communions, standing for rich elements of truth, liberty and life which might otherwise have been obscured or neglected’. With these communions, the Lambeth bishops added, ‘we are closely linked by many affinities, racial, historical and spiritual’. Then we have the heart of the Lambeth Appeal:

13 This and the following quotations from the Appeal are from M. Kinnamon and B. E. Cope (eds), The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices (Geneva: World Council of Churches; Grand Rapids, MI: Eeerdmans, 1997), pp. 81–83.

196

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

The vision which rises before us is that of a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all Truth, and gathering into its fellowship all ‘who profess and call themselves Christians’, within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common, and be made serviceable to the whole Body of Christ. The Appeal went on to restate the ‘Lambeth Quadrilateral’ of 1888, which was derived from the ‘Chicago Quadrilateral’ of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA, itself shaped by the writings of William Reed Huntington. The ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ affirmed that the visible unity of the Church would involve the ‘wholehearted acceptance’ of four elements: 1. 2.

3. 4.

‘The Holy Scriptures . . . as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.’ The ‘Nicene’ (i.e. Niceno-Constantinopolitan) Creed as ‘the sufficient statement of the Christian faith’ and either it or the Apostles Creed as the baptismal confession. ‘The divinely instituted sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion.’ ‘A ministry acknowledged by every part of the Church as possessing not only the inward call of the Spirit, but also the commission of Christ and the authority of the whole body.’

Let me highlight a few points from this remarkable ‘Appeal to All Christian People’. O

O

O

O

O

O

The universal Church consists of all the baptised. It is this community that is the Body of Christ. The Holy Spirit is inspiring penitence for division and the longing for unity. Fellowship (koinonia) is grounded in the life of God and is the will of God. God’s will is for a visibly united society on earth, which is the Church Catholic. God’s will for the Church has not yet been fully realised: this visibly united fellowship is not apparent. Only when the Church is united will we understand our faith as we should and be able to carry forward God’s Kingdom.

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference O

O

197

The visibly united Church should be diverse and comprehensive, hospitable to all the spiritual treasures of the participating traditions. The essential marks of the visibly united Church are few (the Scriptures, the creeds, the dominical sacraments and a universally recognised ordained ministry – the only viable candidate for this being an episcopally ordained ministry).

Continuing in the same trajectory, and cutting a long story short, the Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in New Delhi in 1961, articulated a vision of unity that has not been superseded or surpassed: We believe that the unity which is both God’s will and his gift to the Church is being made visible as all in each place who are baptised into Jesus Christ and confess him as Lord and Saviour are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith, preaching the one Gospel, breaking the one bread, joining in common prayer, and having a corporate life reaching out in witness and service to all and who at the same time are united with the whole Christian fellowship in all places and all ages in such wise that ministry and members are accepted by all, and that all can act and speak together as occasion requires for the tasks to which God calls his people.14 Thirty years later, in 1991, the Canberra Assembly of the World Council of Churches also enumerated the marks of what it called ‘full communion’. These were: the common confession of the apostolic faith; a common sacramental life entered by the one baptism and celebrated together in one eucharistic fellowship; a common life in which members and ministries are mutually recognised and reconciled; and a common mission witnessing to the gospel of God’s grace to all people and serving the whole of creation. The Canberra statement went on to say that the goal of full communion would be realized when all the churches were able ‘to recognise in one another the one holy, catholic and apostolic church in its fullness’. It further specified that

14 Report of the Section on Unity, Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches: Kinnamon and Cope (eds), p. 88.

198

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

full communion would be expressed on the local and the universal levels of the Church through councils and synods.15 It is significant that the Canberra statement immediately went on to address the vexed question of diversity in unity. It stated that ‘diversities which are rooted in theological traditions, various cultural, ethnic or historical contexts are integral to the nature of communion.’ But it went on to point out that there must be limits to diversity. Diversity would be illegitimate if it made impossible the common confession of Jesus Christ as God and Saviour, the same yesterday, today and forever’ (cf. Heb. 13.8) and if it impeded the Church’s confession, faithful to Scripture and the apostolic preaching, of an inclusive salvation, embracing the whole of humanity. Within these limits diversity could exist in harmony, contributing to the richness and fullness of communion.16 Building on these classic texts, numerous ecumenical dialogues have looked for four components of unity: a common confession of the apostolic faith, grounded in Scripture and set forth in the historic creeds; a common baptism and a single Eucharist; a common, interchangeable ministry of word and sacrament and a common ministry of oversight.17 Where these four elements are found, we have, in a particular situation, the essential components of full visible unity. They meet the criteria laid down by the Lambeth Conference in 1920 and followed in general outline by the major statements of WCC Assemblies. This is obviously not a blueprint for unity, but a sketch or portrait. In that portrait these four elements must be present, but their concrete form will vary from one situation to another. What is vital is that the texture of communion will show that the Church is visibly one in the sight of the world, even though communion will remain diverse in terms of the cultural expressions of belief, worship and various areas of practice. Several features of the way that the four elements are portrayed in the faith and order tradition, from Lambeth 1920 to Canberra 1991, are worth pointing out. O

First, the four elements are all visible, manifested in time and space. Although the life of the Church remains a mystery, hidden in God, it comes to visible expression in the world.

15 Ibid., p. 124 (#2.1). 16 Ibid., p. 125 (#2.2). 17 For example, An Anglican-Methodist Covenant (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House; London: Church House Publishing, 2001), #101–102.

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference O

O

O

O

199

Second, the marks of full visible unity do not imply any particular organizational structure. Although unity must find an institutional expression, no single model is assumed in the ecumenical tradition. Third, the vision of full visible unity, guided by the four key components, make a rich diversity possible. There are no connotations here of uniformity of worship or organization, quite the reverse. The distinctive features of the various church traditions, which have been shaped by all sorts of non-theological factors over time, make up their essential identity and must be respected and preserved. Fourth, we cannot claim full visible unity for anything but the unity of the whole Church. It would not be right to predicate it of a bilateral agreement, such as the Anglican–Methodist Covenant, or even of multilateral agreements like Porvoo. But what is ‘the whole Church’ in a situation where new churches are being formed almost every day? The difficulty of answering that question without being arbitrary or exclusive suggests that full visible unity functions as a goal or vision, an intentional horizon, and that all our ecumenical endeavours should continue to take it as their goal, but without the expectation that anyone will be able to say at any given point: we now have full visible unity! Fifth, the fact that the responsibility remains with every church to take whatever steps it can, with its partner churches, wherever they are, towards the full visible unity of the Church of Christ, suggests that another formula is needed, not to replace ‘full visible unity’, but to point to what can be achieved between individual churches on the way to full visible unity. The term ‘full visible communion’ has been used in recent Anglican–Roman Catholic relations and has been adopted by the Joint Implementation Commission operating under the Anglican–Methodist Covenant.18 The advantage of this formula is that is seems to allow space for the distinct traditions, to accommodate difference, and at the same time it is resistant to any implications of large churches taking over small ones and absorbing

18 Cf. the Mississauga Statement 2000, which led to the setting up of the International Anglican–Roman Catholic Commission on Unity and Mission; the Common Declaration by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams and Pope Benedict XVI in 2006; Embracing the Covenant: Quinquennial Report of the Joint Implementation Commission under the Covenant between the Methodist Church of Great Britain and the Church of England (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 2008), pp. 24–36, especially p. 32.

200

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

them. A second key phrase ‘united not absorbed’ was deployed in the Malines Conversations in Belgium between Anglicans and Roman Catholics, presided over by Cardinal Mercier, from 1921 to 1925. The two formulae ‘full visible communion’ and ‘united not absorbed’ can serve as watchwords for a reformed ecumenical method and the theology that underpins it.




Forging communion in the face of confessional difference

In recent years a number of Anglican and Lutheran churches, on both sides of the Atlantic, have entered into (ecclesial) communion through the Porvoo, Waterloo and ‘Called to Common Mission’ agreements. This is a source of much thanksgiving and a great achievement by the grace of God. The language of these agreements differs somewhat. The North American texts speak of ‘full communion’. The Porvoo Agreement does not claim ‘full communion’, because there is much more to receive and to discover (as the North American Anglicans and Lutherans would surely agree). Neither branch claims that what has been achieved is ‘full visible unity’, because that description is more appropriate to the unity of the whole of Christ’s Church than to the relationship of two or more churches. So ‘Called to Common Mission’, Waterloo and Porvoo mark an important start on the road to unity. But what are we aiming for? What is our goal as far as unity and communion are concerned? The expression ‘full visible communion’ implies that there is a depth of communion still to be reached, but it also suggests that communion does not mean that one church could absorb another, or that one church should become exactly like another; it allows some space where the distinctive identity of each church is preserved. It honours the fact that churches are the product of a long history and exist in their own special context. Their history and context make each church unique. Any expression of unity must honour that uniqueness. Unity would be meaningless if it meant that the uniting churches lost what makes them what they are, or if it resulted in a monochrome uniformity. To work for unity means forging communion in the face of difference. The beauty of Porvoo (for example) is that it does precisely that. The difference, the distinctiveness, does not lie in the sociological profile of the churches involved, for they are almost all national churches with a territorial ministry and several are established by law to one degree or another. It does not lie in their basic theology, for (as the Porvoo Common Statement shows)

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

201

we are able to confess the apostolic faith together. It does not rest particularly in the churches’ structures of ordained ministry, for a common ministry is one of the elements that bind us together. The difference does not even lie in the social and cultural context, for the socio-cultural context of late modernity applies to us all. Of course, a number of different languages are spoken within the Communion of Porvoo Churches and each church is located in its own territory. That is a different situation to that of the Lutheran and Anglican/ Episcopal churches in North America, who not only share a common language, but also share the same territory. And we should not overlook the fact that there are differences of ethos within the Anglican Porvoo family and the Lutheran Porvoo family, respectively. The four British and Irish Anglican Churches each have their own identity – and the Celtic churches have a sense of kinship that defines them over against the Church of England. Among the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran Churches there are not only differences of national identity, but also of cultural and theological ethos, the Church of Sweden being the most hospitable or responsive to late modern cultural trends, and the Baltic Churches being more conservative theologically. However, what is remarkable about Porvoo (and the same is true of the North American Anglican–Lutheran agreements, ‘Called to Common Mission’ and Waterloo) is that it is a transconfessional agreement. It joins Anglicans and Lutherans in a bond of unity that, generally speaking, Anglicans expect to have with Anglicans and Lutherans expect to have with Lutherans. What does a transconfessional agreement for communion involve? The first thing to say at this point is that Anglicanism is not a confessional faith in the way that Lutheranism is.19 The Anglican ‘formularies’ (and they vary a little from one Anglican Church to another) do not play the same role or have the same significance as the Book of Concord and its component documents do for Lutherans. Anglicans are defined more by their liturgies than by their doctrinal statements. Anglicans typically define themselves as catholic and reformed. So in this case, a transconfessional agreement means an agreement between a tradition that is not confessional and one that is. The important thing is that both traditions are able to confess Christ together, to confess the faith of the Church. Allowing for the fact that historic formularies do not have quite the same function in the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, a transconfessional agreement must mean an agreement in which difference is acknowledged and

19 See further Chapter 6: ‘Confessionalism or a Confessing Church?’

202

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

respected. We are not the same in every respect. Although we both affirm the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, this doctrine does not play the same role in the Anglican self-understanding as it does for Lutherans, for whom it is the touchstone of all doctrine. Although we have an interchangeable ordained ministry, it is significant that we do not all put the same theological evaluation on episcopacy and episcopal ordination. Moreover, we do not yet have a fully interchangeable diaconate, though the Porvoo Agreement commits us to work together on this challenge: Anglicans can receive only deacons who are intentionally ordained to a ministry of word and sacrament (albeit an assisting or non-presiding ministry). Lutherans practise direct ordination to the presbyterate, while Anglicans practise sequential ordination: deacon– priest–bishop, so that a bishop is also a priest and a deacon and so on. To take a different example, although we both affirm the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, our eucharistic theologies are not the same. No doubt, other examples could be found. My essential point is that Anglicans and Lutherans are not the same, but this fact does not prevent us entering into communion. Indeed, it is the reality of difference, of non-identity, that makes communion an imperative. The transconfessional nature of these Anglican–Lutheran agreements poses a question concerning the degree of convergence that we expect to see in an agreement to enter into communion. It seems to me that it is neither realistic nor appropriate to look for an identity of belief and practice between participating churches. There will always be aspects of the other churches that are strange to us or that make us uncomfortable. When certain things are said, we may well feel, ‘I wouldn’t put it like that’. When certain things are done, we feel, ‘We definitely would not do that’. As I have said, the challenge to the churches is to forge communion in the face of difference. Of course, hypothetically, there might be some differences that reflect serious doctrinal disagreement. But in that case, would the churches concerned still be seeking a relationship? Would they not rather feel that they had to stand apart? The point of an ecumenical agreement is that it acknowledges difference while throwing a bridge from one side to the other, so that the differences are spanned by a common narrative, as it were. Part of the commitment that we make when we enter into such an agreement is a commitment to consult with one another (e.g. over the diaconate), to share our experience and insights; in other words to continue in dialogue, so that further convergence in faith and order may become a reality. The conversation that led to the agreement does not cease when the ink is dry on the document; it enters a new phase and, if anything, it becomes more intense. To be in communion means to remain in

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

203

a conversation, but this is not a conversation where you can ‘take it or leave it’. It is a conversation that demands trust, commitment and mutual support in word and deed, as we seek to overcome the remaining obstacles to the full expression of our unity in Christ.




‘Impaired communion’

Even in the communion of Porvoo Churches we do not yet have perfect communion, even in terms of the interchangeability of ordained ministers. I have already mentioned some problems with the diaconate. There is also the issue that the Church of England (the same is true of the Church in Wales) does not currently make canonical provision for women bishops to exercise an episcopal ministry, nor is it possible for clergy ordained by women bishops to be part of the interchangeable arrangements that are central to Porvoo, as far as the Church of England is concerned. This discipline is not intended to pass any judgement on other churches that already ordain women to the episcopate; it simply means that there is no current provision in the Church of England that would allow us to open our church doors to women bishops. Our colleagues in the Nordic and Baltic Churches have been very understanding about this and have not pressed as much as they might have done. The result is that many Anglicans have little awareness of the fact that the current impairment is difficult for Lutherans to accept. The problem may prove to be temporary, because the General Synod of the Church of England has taken a decision in principle to admit women to the episcopate and a legislative process is well under way. There is a major area of tension within the Porvoo family of churches, concerning the issue of same-sex unions. The positions of the churches – and of the states that they relate to – can be plotted on a sliding scale from conservative to progressive. The tension is not simply cross-confessional, with the Church of England representing the more conservative wing of British and Irish Anglicanism, but also intra-confessional, because the Baltic Lutheran churches were as unhappy with the decisions taken by the synod of the Church of Sweden a few years ago as the Church of England was. What do we owe each other, as churches in communion, when it comes to controversial matters? Who will dare to say that we do not owe each other anything? As we saw earlier, St Paul suggests that we can never fully repay the debt of love. How might the debt of love, which we owe to those with whom

204

Reshaping Ecumenical Theology

we are in communion as churches, be paid? First, I believe that we are duty bound to consult with each other, to explain, to listen and to consider. To take another example from within the Porvoo family, there was an opportunity to do this at the consultation at Sigtuna in December 2006, when each church gave a report on its policy and practice with regard to same-sex relationships and responded to questions in this area. This was deliberately designed as a listening exercise. Second, I think we need to have regard to the implications for our communion of the fact that actions taken by a member church can cause consternation and dismay among other churches. We are familiar with this sort of tension (crisis?) in the Anglican Communion, but the same issue can arise in a transconfessional communion like Porvoo (where some aspects of our communion, in relation to the churches’ stance on same-sex unions, were explored at the Third Porvoo Theological Conference, in January 2008 at the St Katharine’s Foundation, London). Third, I believe that our relationship of communion imposes an obligation to exercise restraint in our decisions and actions. We do not live unto ourselves. Our actions impact on the wider church, the whole oecumene, like ripples spreading outwards from a stone dropped into a pond. With further developments in the area of same-sex unions expected both in some Anglican provinces and in certain Nordic churches, it is important that we keep the conversation going. What should be the next step? Perhaps – and this is something we have not done before – we should meet to study together the work that churches have done on the substantive questions of human sexuality and the Christian doctrine of marriage, to share our research and our insights and to reflect on the responses that the material evokes in our partners. I don’t believe that the Anglican Communion has done this and it would be a new step for Porvoo, too. What could be more appropriate for churches in communion than some serious, reflective study together of a central but divisive question?




‘Transitivity’

I have already raised the matter of the possible enlargement of Porvoo in particular, but the question of transitivity takes enlargement to a new ecumenical level. Transitivity concerns the potential universalizability of ecumenical relationships, especially relationships of communion. Anglicans in Britain and Ireland are in communion with Lutherans in Northern Europe, but not with

Forging Communion in the Face of Difference

205

Lutherans in North America (the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada), who themselves are in communion with The Episcopal Church and with the Anglican Church of Canada through ‘Called to Common Mission’ and the Waterloo Agreement, respectively. I think we can be confident that there is basic consistency between these various agreements, even though their methods are not the same and they are very context-specific. Could they not be unified, or perhaps subsumed in a more embracing agreement? It is a serious ecclesiological anomaly – in fact I would say that it is a scandal – that this is not currently the case. From the Anglican perspective, transitivity is the question: how can Lutheran churches that are in communion with certain churches of the Anglican Communion be invited to enter into communion with the whole Communion, assuming that they would wish to do so? Someone else can perhaps tell me what the question looks like from a Lutheran perspective. If we are motivated by the imperative of visible unity we should pursue the issue of transitivity. Ground-breaking ecumenical agreements, such as ‘Called to Common Mission’ or the Porvoo Agreement may have the potential to be adapted as a tool to bring other partner churches into communion. We should not rest on our laurels, but continually seek to broaden the sphere of fellowship. My final word in this book is the challenge: ‘What price unity?’ This question means: how much damage to the credibility of the Christian gospel can be sustained, and how much must the integrity of the Church suffer, and how long must we grieve the Holy Spirit, the Unifier, before unity, in its mystical, visible and missional expressions, becomes a key priority for the churches? As I put it earlier in this chapter, when we were reflecting on the High-Priestly prayer of Jesus in John 17: How is Christ’s prayer for unity being prayed through us and through our church? And how is Christ’s prayer for unity being answered through us and through our church?

This page intentionally left blank

Index of Names




Acton, J. E. L. D. Lord 97 Adorno, Theodor W. 78 Alfred the Great King 19 Ambrose Bishop, Saint 125 Andrewes, Lancelot Bishop 123–4 Aquinas, Thomas Saint 159, 162, 170 Aristotle 170 Athanasius Bishop, Saint 5, 125 Augustine of Canterbury Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint 19 Augustine of Hippo Bishop, Saint 5, 189 Aulén, Gustav Bishop 102 Barrett, C. K. 190 Barth, Karl 35, 41, 65, 84, 90, 102, 108, 159, 162 Bauckham, Richard 176 Bell, G. K. A. Bishop 35, 100 Bellah, Robert 160 Bellarmine, Robert Saint 15 Berlin, Isaiah 29 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 100, 112, 152, 189 Borg, Marcus J. 172, 176–8 Bradford, John 123 Brower, Kent E. 177 Buber, Martin 161 Bucer, Martin 103 Burke, Edmund 31 Burridge, Richard 172–5 Butler, Joseph Bishop 31, 148 Calvin, John 102–5, 110–11 Chadwick, Henry 84 Charles I King 19 Clements, Keith 100 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 74 Constantine Emperor 15, 103 Cranmer, Thomas Archbishop of Canterbury 19, 101 Cyprian Bishop, Saint 4, 133

Dalferth, Ingolf 53 Dilthey, Wilhelm 75–6 Downhame, George Bishop 123 Dunn, J. D. G. 172, 177 Duprey, Pierre 156 Durkheim, Émile 16 Elert, Werner 119 Elizabeth I Queen 19, 101 Fiddes, Paul 36 Fox, George 188 Francis of Assisi Saint 185 Freud, Sigmund 16 Froude, Richard Hurrell 125 Gadamer, H.-G. 62, 75 Gassmann, Gunter 80 Gladstone, William Ewart Prime Minister 31 Gore, Charles Bishop 127 Gorman, Michael J. 179 Haight, Roger S. J. 152 Hammond, Henry 124 Hauerwas, Stanley 160, 170, 172 Hays, Richard B. 172, 175 Henry VIII King 19, 101, 123 Henson, Herbert Hensley Bishop 102, 105, 140 Hippolytus Saint 133 Hooker, Richard 19, 31, 101, 123–4 Hooper, John Bishop 123 Horkheimer, Max 78 Horrell, David 172, 174 Hoskyns, Sir Edwyn 111, 191 Huntington, William Reed 196 Hus, Jan 1 Ignatius Bishop, Saint 133 Irenaeus Bishop, Saint 133

208

Index of Names

James VI and I King 123 Jeremias, Joachim 172, 177 Jewel, John Bishop 101 John Paul II Pope 32, 84 Julian of Norwich 19 Jung, Carl Gustav 16, 77 Kant, Immanuel 120 Käsemann, Ernst 110 Keble, John 31 Kierkegaard, Søren 27 Lang, Cosmo Archbishop of Canterbury 140 Laud, William Archbishop of Canterbury 19, 124 Lehmann, Karl Archbishop 73 Leo XIII Pope 90 Levinas, Emmanuel 161 Lindars, Barnabas SSF 190–1 Locke, John 31 Lonergan, Bernard 42 Luther, Martin 6, 19, 101–3, 105, 111–12, 117–23, 127, 152 MacIntyre, Alastair 170 Macmurray, John 161 Martin, Troy W. 179 Mary, the Blessed Virgin Saint 142 Mary Tudor Queen 101 Marx, Karl 16 Melanchthon, Philip 120 Mercier, Désiré Joseph Cardinal 200 Meyer, Harding 28 Mitchell, Basil 31 Moberly, R. C. 112 Mott, John R. 34 Mudge, Lewis 160 Newman, John Henry viii, 2, 16–18, 23, 61, 102, 125–6, 146, 149 O’Donovan, Oliver 155, 181 Oakes, Peter 179 Osborne, Kenan B. 132 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 41–2 Paul VI Pope 180 Perrin, Norman 177

Peter Saint 17 Polanyi, Michael 73–4 Rahner, Karl 41–2, 65, 84, 90, 143 Ramsey, Arthur Michael Archbishop of Canterbury 127–8 Richardson, Alan 36 Rusch, William G. 68 Sagovsky, Nicholas 95–6 Schaff, Philip 103 Schillebeeckx, Edward 112, 172 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 74–5, 77 Schrage, Wolfgang 172, 175 Scola, Angelo Patriarch 142 Shakespeare, William 76 Stout, Jeffrey 41 Strohl, Henri 103 Stubbs, William Bishop 105 Sykes, Stephen Whitefield 103, 106 Taylor, A. E. 31 Temple, William Archbishop of Canterbury vii, 187 Tertullian 4 Thomas à Becket Saint 19 Thompson, Richard P. 177 Thorndike, Herbert 124 Tillard, J. M. R. 82 Tillich, Paul 42 Torrance, Thomas F. 41 Troeltsch, Ernst 8 Vico, Giambattista (G.B.) 75–6 Vincent of Lérins Saint 14 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 142 von Hügel, Friedrich Baron 2, 149 Ward, Keith 19–20 Ward, William George 125 Weber, Max 8 Webster, John 109, 114 Wesley, Charles 19, 84 Wesley, John 19, 101 Willebrands, Johannes Cardinal 107 Williams, Raymond 24 Winter, Bruce W. 179

Index of Names Wright, J. Robert 133 Yoder, John Howard 160

209

Zizioulas, John Metropolitan 70, 96, 161 Zwingli, Ulrich 103