CENTRO PRO UNIONE N. 61 - Spring 2002 ISSN: 1122-0384 semi-annual Bulletin In this issue: Letter from the Director ...................................................p. 2 In Defense of the Body: Writings on “Being Church” in Ecumenical Conversation Anna Marie Aagaard ................................................p. 3 Lights and Shadows over Catholic Ecumenism Jared Wicks, SJ...................................................p. 11 A Bibliography of Interchurch and Interconfessional Theological Dialogues Seventeenth Supplement (2002) ......................................... p. 18 Centro Pro Unione - Via S. Maria dell'Anima, 30 - 00186 Rome, Italy A Center conducted by the Franciscan Friars of the AtonementDirector's Desk The text of the Fr. Paul Wattson/Mother Lurana White lecture: “In Defense of the Body: Writings on ‘Being Church’ in Ecumenical Conversation” given by Dr. Anna Marie Aagaard, professor emeritus of systematic theology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark appears in this issue. We are pleased to announce that Prof. Robert Taft, SJ will give this year’s lecture to be given on December 12, 2002. His theme will deal with the implications of the recent document concerning the validity of the ancient Eucharistic anaphora of Addaï and Mari. As is our custom, we continue our celebration on the following evening, with a concert offered by our good friend, Maestro Serguej Diatchenko and the Orchestra of the Academy “ART MUSIC”. In addition to the text of Dr. Aagaard, this Bulletin offers our readers the text of Prof. Jared Wicks, SJ given during the annual celebration of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in January. This year’s celebration was co-sponsored by the Lay Centre at Foyer Unitas, the Vincent Pallotti Institute and the Centro Pro Unione. An ecumenical celebration of the Word, presided over by the recently installed Pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Rev. William McCulloch with a homily preached by Bishop Richard Garrard, the new director of the Anglican Centre in Rome followed the excellent lecture of Fr. Wicks. The Centro Pro Unione began a series of lectures entitled: “Liturgical Renewal: A Way to Christian Unity”. Speakers in this series included Drs. David Holeton, Geoffrey Wainwright, Horace Allen, Teresa Berger and Canon Donald Gray. A second round will follow in the Autumn and it is our hope to publish these as part of our series “Corso Breve di Ecumenismo”. The British Ambassador to the Holy See, Mark Pellew gave an interesting presentation on the history of the relationship between the Holy See and Great Britain from Henry VIII to the present day. This lecture was co- sponsored by the “Circolo di Roma–Approdo Romano” and the Centro Pro Unione. Together with the ecumenical institutes of San Nicola di Bari and San Bernardino of Venice, the Centro Pro Unione organized a two day course for professors of ecumenism entitled “Toward Full Communion”. The animator of the course was Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. The course studied two themes: the necessary structural elements for full communion and the question of intercommunion. Over 40 professors from all over Italy participated. Two study groups led by Prof. William Henn, OFM Cap and Prof. Vladimir Zelinsky took up the two themes. An invited guest, Prof. Jörg Lauster offered observations from a Lutheran perspective on the two themes. I wish to end this issue by expressing my deepest gratitude to two members of our staff who have retired. Giovanna Maria Berardelli who has led many groups through the ancient sites of early Christian Rome has been an energizing spirit to all with whom she has come in contact. Likewise our receptionist, Olga Beal who has greeted so many students over these years with her pleasant smile and willingness to help has retired. My deepest thanks to both who have collaborated so generously in our ecumenical ministry. Lastly, we welcome on staff Barbara Giambartolomei who takes Olga’s place. Barbara is also a trained librarian and therefore looks after our periodical section as well as helping our librarian. A Pleasant Spring and Summer to all of our readers. Peace and all good! This periodical is indexed in the ATLA Religion Database, published by the American Theological Library Association, 250 S. Wacker Dr., 16 th Floor., Chicago, IL 60606 (http://www.atla.com). For more information on our activities, visit us at: http://www.prounione.urbe.it James F. Puglisi, sa DirectorN. 61 /Spring 2002Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 3 Centro Conferences CCCC In Defense of the Body Writings on “Being Church” in Ecumenical Conversation Anna Marie Aagaard Professor emeritus of systematic theology, University of Aarhus, Denmark Fourth Annual Conference in Honor of Father Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White (Conference held at the Centro Pro Unione, Thursday, 13 December 2001) Introduction It is a particular honor for me to address you this evening in the house where so much of the thinking of Vatican II was tested in extensive discussions with Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox observers. Only after the Council, in 1968, did I become familiar with this hall, and the groups which in the early years after the Council occupied the Pamphilj palace —the Ladies of Bethany and IDOC, the International Documentation Center. It was on this floor and on the floor above that IDOC struggled to keep the then new periodical “Concilium” afloat and to interpret the Council to Christians around the world. At an IDOC board meeting I first heard it said, “De jure you are broke. De facto you will make it.” Subsequent ecumenical history has often reminded me of the sentence. Finances have been tight more than once in the ecumen- ical institutions with which I am familiar, but “de jure you are broke; de facto you will, make it” also makes an adequate summary of years of experiences in the ecumenical movement. De jure, the movement seems broke in the complacency with which most Christians remain divided. Christian unity has a hard time, and at the beginning of the new millennium most churches are preoccupied not with ecumenism, but with refining their own identity-sustaining traditions. De facto, however, the ecumenical movement will make it, but the churches’ part of making it will mean more hard work, than waiting for a miracle. The title of my presentation, “In Defense of the Body,” may seem more than a little contrived, but I found no better way of indicating both an ecclesiological topic and my assessment of the scope and the direction of the hard work currently needed. I shall first apply the phrase to the current discussions about the church and the churches within the World Council of Churches (WCC). I shall concentrate on the Council’s self-understanding and the Orthodox-Protestant divide. Then I shall use the title as a key to some current interpretations of “being church” in the Oikoumene, and, finally, I shall stick my neck out and indicate the ecumenical strategy mostly needed “in defense of the body.” The WCC and the churches A fellowship of churches The WCC is unique in bringing divided churches together from all over the globe, and the Council is unprecedented in nudging churches of both the Christian East and West towards common worship and witness. If the WCC was nothing more than a functional agency of service and socio-political advocacy, it would suffice to describe the organization in sociological terms, but the features of the Council as a living reality point to a bonding that goes beyond the nature of secular agencies. The accumulated tradition of the WCC names this bonding a “fellowship of churches”. It is further described as “a fellowship of churches which confess the Lord Jesus Christ as God and Savior according to the scriptures and therefore seeks to fulfil together their common calling to the glory of the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit” 1 . A Trinitarian faith, a confession of Christ Jesus as Lord and Savior, and, in most member churches, the rite of baptism in the name of God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit: it is difficult to overlook the significance, indeed, ecclesial signifi- cance of a bonding that in terms of faith and the gifts of Spirit is “not nothing.” But experience with the WCC in the fifty years of its existence demonstrates that the “not nothing” of the bonding may be so elusive that it amounts to nothing more than a void far too easily labeled koinonia, the New Testament word for fellow- ship or communion (2 Cor 13:13). Who is the “we”? The Basis of the WCC speaks of “a fellowship of churches which confess...”. The churches, in plural, confess; not the fellowship. The “body” disappears behind the bodies; the fellowship empties into the divided churches. The formulation cannot but raise questions. Is there at all a “we” that confesses; a 1 For the “Basis” of the WCC, cf. M. KINNAMON and B.E.COPE, eds., The Ecumenical Movement. An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices (Geneva/Grand Rapids: WCC Publications/William B. Eerdmans, 1997) 468.4 Bulletin / Centro Pro UnioneN. 61 /Spring 2002 for-real fellowship, however frail and nigh impossible to describe? or must the WCC be described as a co-existence of churches which recognize the sin of their dividedness but cannot (or will not?) find the spiritual resources to overcome a logic of division which shapes their liturgical worship and their understanding of “being church”? Who is the “we” praying and worshiping God at the WCC’s services? Christians of both Eastern and Western traditions find the subject of the ecumenical worship nebulous — to say the least. More than Orthodox member churches assume that the WCC*s worshiping “we” in reality is a conglomeration of pious individuals, but few have voiced it so clearly as the Eastern Orthodox churches, when they, a few months before the 50th anniversary of the WCC, decided to downgrade their involvement in the Harare Assembly (December 1998): “Orthodox delegates will not participate in ecumenical services, common prayers, worship and other religious ceremonies at the Assembly” 2 . The internal contradictions of conciliar ecumenism, revealed by a Basis speaking of “a fellowship of churches which confess,” have repeatedly been addressed. In line with the Toronto State- ment of 1950 3 . early attempts at defining the nature and vision of the Council have focused on articulating what the Council is not, but might become. They have denied an exclusive alternative between the Council as already “being church” and the Council as an organization with no significance beyond the pragmatic value of furthering an exchange of goods and ideas. There is something in between secularizing the Council and regarding it a manifestation of the una sancta of the creeds. Defining this “in between” has, however, proven to be difficult4. Ecclesiological significance? The most recent defense of the WCC as a body with an “ecclesiological significance comes from metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon. At a 1995 inter-Orthodox consultation he described the Council as “an event of communion” and substantiated his claim by reflecting on three marks that identify the Council as such “an event of communion”. It something to do with it stemming from faith in the Triune God and from Baptism; there is some progress towards acceptance of the Nicene Creed as the creedal basis of ecclesial unity, and there are common social and ecological activities that may indicate the adumbrations of a common vision5. To the esteemed ecumenist it follows that we cannot go on for ever and ever holding different or contradictory views of the Church. It was wise to begin with the ecclesiological. “laissez-faire” of Toronto but it would be catastrophic to end with it... In the process of ecumenical reception the “fellowship” of member Churches will have to grow into a common vision and recognition of what the true Church is... The Toronto statement will have to be stripped of its ecclesiological pluralism. I do not agree with the view that the WCC should not develop an ecclesiology. On the contrary I believe this to be a priority for it. Metropolitan John revives the old question about the relation between the WCC’s “fellowship” and the member churches. Who is the primary agent, the “we,” developing a common ecclesiology and thus growing into common recognition of the one, true church? Is the “we” the institutionalized fellowship with an evanescent “ecclesial” identity alongside or apart from the churches, or is the “we” particular churches striving to adopt a common ecclesiology and thereby manifest the unity of the body of Christ? Churches in fellowship Prolonged and often cumbersome processes resulted, in 1997, in a policy statement “Towards a Common Understanding and Vision of the World Council of Churches”6. The document affirms the nature of the WCC as a “fellowship of churches” but distinguishes between the fellowship and the organization: The essence of the Council is the relationship of the church- es to one another. The Council is the fellowship of churches on the way towards full koinonia. It has a structure and organization in order to serve as an instrument for the churches as they work towards koinonia in faith, life and witness (§3.5.2) The Policy Statement makes the member churches themselves, not the Council, the primary agent of seeking the unity of the body of Christ. An Interim Report from the “Special Commission,” established by the Harare Assembly to deal with the Orthodox criticisms of the Council, repeats (rather bluntly) 2 The Thessaloniki Statement, in T. FITZGERALD and P. BOUTENEFF, eds. Turn to God—Rejoice in Hope. Orthodox Reflections on the Way to Harare (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1998) 138. 3 The negative formulations of the Toronto Statement of 1950 (what the Council is not) have stood the test of time, while the positive formulations have been either superseded or benignly neglected, cf. “The Church, the Churches and the World Council of Churches”, in M. KINNAMON and B.E. COPE, eds., The Ecumenical Movement., ... op. cit., 463-468. 4 Already the mothers and fathers of the Toronto Statement struggled with the “ecclesiological. significance of the Council, cf. V. BOROVOY, “The Ecclesiastical Significance of the WCC: The Legacy and Promise of Toronto”, The Ecumenical Review 40, 3-4 (1988), reprinted in G. LIMOURIS, ed., Orthodox Visions of Ecumenism. Statements, Messages and Reports on the Ecumenical Movement 1902-1992 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994) 199-212. A defense of the ecclesial character of the WCC is in U. DUCHROW, Konflikt um die Ökumene: Christusbekenntnis in welcher Gestalt der ökumenischen Bewegung? (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1980) 255-300. 5 Metropolitan JOHN OF PERGAMON, “The Self-understanding of the Orthodox and Their Participation in the Ecumenical Movement” in G. LEMOPOULOS, ed., The Ecumenical Movement, the Churches and the World Council of Churches. An Orthodox Contribution to the Reflection Process on “The Common Understanding and Vision of the WCC” (Geneva: WCC Publications 1996) 42. 6 WCC, September 1997.N. 61 /Spring 2002Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 5 The member churches are the subject of the quest for visible unity, not the Council. The member churches teach and make doctrinal and ethical decisions, not the Council... The report continues by speaking about a Council that will hold churches together in an ecumenical space — where trust can be built, — where churches can test and develop their readings of the world, their own social practices, and their liturgical and doctrinal traditions while facing each other and deepening their encounter with each other” (§ 8) 7 . These more recent reflections on the Council and the churches have laid to rest the older debates about the ecclesiological significance of the Council itself. The emphasis now lies on the churches and their responsibility for making the WCC a safe ecumenical space where churches will “give account to each other of being church” (Interim Report 6.1) and participate in developing both “the sensitivities and the language that will allow them to sustain a dialogue with each other” (Interim Report 8.3). These changes in ecumenical thinking did not come as a surprise. They were shaped concomitantly with the disappearance of modernity’s old certainties about a single system of truth based on universal reason and about history as single story with a single, coherent plot. Whatever the theological responses may be to post- modernity * s lurking nihilism also ecumenical theology has shred the illusion that there is some universal viewpoint, situated in no particular tradition and inhabited by an abstract “we,” from which the questions of Christian unity can be addressed. On the contrary: “Before there can be an articulable Oikoumene there is the resonance in which diverse local communities of faith recognize and share the forming, energizing power of the Holy Spirit” 8 . Before there is “fellowship” with some features of the Pauline koinonia, there are traditioned churches in which Christians learn (if they learn it) thus to worship God and identify what they have to do in the world so that the story they tell of the great things God has done (cf. Acts 2:11) becomes the story they inhabit. A “fellowship” which confesses can only gain substance by churches acting bilaterally or multilaterally in their local contexts. Rather than the perpetuation of a concept of the WCC as a global, nebulous something apart from the churches, a fellowship of churches presupposes particular churches practicing “being church” by breaking down the barriers that hinder their mutual recognition as churches sharing one faith, one Eucharistic body and one baptism for the remission of sins (Interim Report 8.6). Current ecclesiology within both the Orthodox and the Reformation traditions understands “being church” as at once a community and a history —a community embodying and passing along a story that shapes the language as well as the practices of self-giving love and forgiveness through which people gain and sustain their identity as Christian believers. Christian faith is ecclesial. The biblical narratives are not self-referential, but received in faith they shape a community capable of being the continuation of God’s story with human beings. In short: the generating events and the community generated cannot be separated. The prophetic voice? The emphasis on the churches themselves as the subject of any ecumenical movement on the move has exposed deep-seated differences within the Council’s Protestant membership 9 . The following lines capture the problem, ...there is... a danger for the ecumenical movement to be deserted because of its absence of relevance to the issues of our time... There are many, among the laity particularly, who would wish the ecumenical movement to deal with the whole inhabited world more than with the world of the churches 10 . What is going on here? I think the lines speak to fears of silencing “the prophetic voice” of a Council able to go against the churches and speak to both the world and the churches 11 . The quote sets the world of the churches over against the whole inhabited world with its issues relevant to human persons, and it puts an emphasis on the churches equal ecclesiastical navel- gazing. Assuming such fundamental polarity between world and church presupposes secular modernity’s belief in a wider and deeper and broader human community than the community in the body of Christ and a more unified world than the world that holds together in and because of Christ. “Social groups and movements” are consequently better positioned than the churches to witness to 7 Special Commission, Interim Report. The documentation is available at http://www.wcc-coe.org/wcc/who/special-01-e.html. 8 L.S. MUDGE, The Church as Moral Community. Ecclesiology and Ethics in Ecumenical Debate (NY/Geneva: Continuum/WCC Publications, 1998) 129. 9 Naming WCC’s member churches is a daunting task. No member church can legitimately be referred to just as “non-Orthodox,” and neither the Anglican churches nor the Old Catholic church can legitimate1y be labeled “Protestants.” Here I use “Protestant” as a reference to mainline churches with an acknowledged Reformation heritage. 10 Cf. Background Material, Special Commission (Jean Fischer). 11 Cf. More recently in WCC Central Committee Minutes, Potsdam March 2001.6 Bulletin / Centro Pro UnioneN. 61 /Spring 2002 a human community with no other limits than the human race12, and most proponents of this view understand the optimal church- world relation as a grafting of Christian faith into the endeavors of social NGOs trying to mend the fabric of life. The consequences for “being church” are summed up by a Swedish theologian: “I think it is misleading to perceive the church as being able to create communities outside the general conditions of the world and of humanity” 13 . More is at work —and at stake— in this sentence than a reference to the changes of history. The World Council’s Protestant member churches might share the knowledge that it takes distinctive social environments to shape distinctive identity, but there is no agreement on which communities help create what desired form of Christian identity. Confidence in faith-generating churches with an ecumenical commitment to develop their social practices while facing each other (Interim Report 8.4) is conspicuously absent in much protestant opposition to the Council’s emerging emphasis on facilitating community in and between the churches. We have all it takes Visions of an Oikoumene with churches as the primary agents of building community run, however, into more than one set of difficulties. For all the successes of the ecumenical movement the main divisions of the Christian church remain. Ecumenical parlance refers to families of churches (Orthodox, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and Pentecostal/Evangelical), but the vocabulary only hides that churches continue to be divided 14 . Much happens ecumenically, but nothing changes, and most Christians are ecumenically indifferent. They couldn’t care less. Each attempt at doctrinal agreements and common witness, not to speak of proposals of shared liturgical calendars, activates conflicts in the churches threatening to create new splits between the churches. The de facto preference for staying divided has not been reduced by a century of ecumenical endeavors and it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise because each of the divided churches maintains that, in principle, if not always in lived fact, it has all it takes to be truly the body of Christ in history. In a review article American theologian Bruce Marshall comments on the state we’re in ecumenically: Churches take the integrity of their own particular ecclesial tradition for granted, as to both the absence of qualitative defects and the sufficiency for Christ-formed communal living. Bruce Marshall continues, (Each church) is convinced that it has all it needs, doctrinally and otherwise, to be Christ’s faithful people. It has no defects which cuts to the heart, and certainly none which might be made good by coming to share a common Eucharistic life with another church. Convinced of our own self-sufficiency, we sense as divided churches no use for any goods we might receive from each other, and so in the end no need for each other 15 . Churches may not agree on what is sufficient, doctrinally, liturgically or ethically, for “being church” with an ecclesial Christ-formed life, but each church perceives what it has as being self-supporting of the one holy church. Changes in ecclesial practice can consequently only be thought of as “our” corporate growth in holiness, and not as “our” corporate repentance and extension of mutual forgiveness. Konrad Raiser, the General Secretary of the WCC, formulates the ensuing problem for the WCC by asking: “In what sense can we continue to speak of a “fellowship of churches” as long as the ecclesial quality of the separated communities is uncertain?” The affirmation of the fellowship remains weak, Konrad Raiser claims, as long as it is not sustained by member churches’ commitment to one another in the center of their ecclesial identity, and, he continues, precisely at this point we encounter the greatest challenges to the WCC and other conciliar bodies 16 . If “being church” in conciliar fellowship means commitment to one another in the center of ecclesial identity, how can “a fellowship of churches” come into existence, when some member churches regard other member churches as essentially incomplete? Being church in a fellowship of churches An exchange between two Danish bishops points to the theological center of the problem. Responding to a Danish Lutheran bishop’s argument with Dominus Iesus, the Roman Catholic bishop of Copenhagen suggested that the dialogue be continued in respect for each other’s ecclesiological self- 12 I am convinced (but I cannot verify the claim) that “independent groups under the roof of the church” during the last decade of the Communist regime in the former DDR helped, decisively, to shape the thinking on “groups and movements” within the WCC. On the situation in the former DDR, cf. D. STEELE, “At the Front Lines of the Revolution: East Germany’s Churches Give Sanctuary and Succor to the Purveyors of Change”, in D. JOHNSTON and C. SAMPSON, eds., Religion, The Missing Link of Statecraft (NY: Oxford University Press, 1994) 119-152, esp. 141: “In the case of the independent groups under the roof of the church,... the themes of “peace,” “justice,” and “integrity of creation” taken directly from the church’s conciliar process) became sacred, transcendent ideas... these groups had a very definite religious function that was largely informed by the Lutheran tradition, despite the fact that many of the participants did not attend church. The power of the vision of the “alternate culture that is, the one which had grown up under the safe haven and influence of the church, would have been enough to mobilize the crowd and incline it to conform with the behavior implied in the themes of peace, justice, and integrity of creation”. 13 E. GERLE, “Contemporary Globalization and Its Ethical Challenges” The Ecumenical Review 52, 2 (2000) 163. 14 Cf. U. KÖRTNER, Herder Korrespondenz 54, 11 (2000) 562: “...die ökumenische Lage har sich seit den achtziger Jahren stark gewandelt. Nicht erst seit Dominus Iesus liegt offen zutage, dass sich die ökumenische Bewegund in der Krise findet. Von Aufbruchstimmung ist kaum etwas zu bemerken” (my italics). 15 B. MARSHALL, “Review Essay: The Divided Church and Its Theology” Modern Theology 16, 3 (2000) 163. 16 Cf. Report of the General Secretary, WCC, Central Committee 2001, available on http://www.wcc coe.org/wcc/who/cc200l/gs2- e.htmlN. 61 /Spring 2002Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 7 understanding. To which the Lutheran bishop replied, “Does it mean that we must respect that the Roman Catholic Church does not respect us as a church?... I will accept that the attitude exists in the Roman Catholic Church... but nothing can shake (the Lutheran bishops’) understanding that our Lutheran church is a church”17. I have no intention of re-opening the discussion on Dominus Iesus but I do wish to question the wisdom of having a conciliar fellowship of churches entertain ecclesiological neutrality to the extent that some members of a Council of Churches regard other member churches as not being church. Let me begin to sketch an argument by suggesting an answer to the question: Why does the de-churchifying of what Vatican II names ecclesial communities make these churches react so vehemently to Dominus Iesus? What’s new? Ever since Vatican II and the entry of the Orthodox churches into the WCC (1961) the ecumenical movement has confronted Anglican and Protestant churches with a vocabulary that makes “church” a word carrying analogical meanings. It may mean one thing when applied to own church and own family of churches and an incomplete or deficient ecclesial entity when applied to other churches. The more unexamined the own ecclesiology has been, the less attention have churches within the Reformation traditions paid to the many meanings of “church.” That picture has, however, changed dramatically, because the last decade has seen most mainline churches with Reformation heritage concentrate on ecclesiology and “being church” in a radically changing world. Having gained a sense of the story of faith as an ecclesial story and the concrete, traditioned church as a peculiar community nurturing a peculiar people, it becomes a serious matter to be de-churchified. As long as the fellowship of the WCC was some nebulous universal supposed to be in the process of becoming a concrete, embodied koinonia, it didn’t matter what member churches thought about each other, provided all churches put in some efforts to sustain the Council itself. The meaning of a conciliar fellowship of churches struggling to become together the eucharistia they celebrate evaporates however, if the Council’s member churches de-churchify each other. If “joining a council of churches means accepting the challenge to give account to each other of being church and to articulate what is meant by the visible unity of the church” (Interim Report 6.1) the churches in the Orthodox families cannot avoid the sharp question now being asked by the Special Commission: “Is there a space for other “churches” in Orthodox ecclesiology? How would this space and its limits be described?” (Interim Report 6.2). The Jubilee Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church addresses the question in a declaration on “Basic Principles of the Attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church toward the other Christian Confessions” (August 2000)18. The declaration begins, The Orthodox Church is the true Church of Christ established by our Lord and Savior Himself, the Church confirmed and sustained by the Holy Spirit, the Church about which the Savior Himself has said: “I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). She is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, the keeper and provider of the Holy Sacraments throughout the world, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15). The Jubilee Council does not make any new or exceptional ecclesiological claims. It repeats the Orthodox position that the communion of Orthodox churches is the One, true Church of Christ in history: The Orthodox Church is the true Church in which the Holy Tradition and the fullness of God’s saving grace are preserved intact. She has preserved the heritage of the apostles and holy fathers in its integrity and purity. She is aware that her teaching, liturgical structures and spiritual practice are the same as those of the apostolic proclamation and the Tradition of the Early Church (1,18). It is an integral part of this Orthodox position that “communities which have fallen away from Orthodoxy have never been viewed as fully deprived of the grace of God... (In) spite of the rupture of unity, there remains a certain incomplete fellowship which serves as a pledge of a return to unity in the Church, to catholic fullness and oneness” (1,15). Various rites of reception (through baptism, through chrismation, through repentance) reveal the Orthodox Church’s graduated relations to the “non-Orthodox confessions” (1,17). There is, indeed, a space for the WCC’s non-Orthodox churches in Orthodox ecclesiology. It is a space of separation from the one, true Church. It is a space of “division or schism” which always “implies a certain measure of falling away from the plenitude of the Church” (1,14). It is possible to argue that any ecumenical movement with the Orthodox churches ends at this point. By explicitly asking the Orthodox member churches to situate other churches in Orthodox ecclesiology the WCC’s Old Catholic, Anglican and Protestant churches can only expect to hear about schism. The WCC’s emphasis on “being church in fellowship” may precipitate an ending— a “point of no return” in more than one sense of the phrase. The WCC’s current ecclesiological debate cuts both ways, however. Orthodox refusal to acquiesce in the ever growing number of Protestant member churches makes it imperative for Protestants to answer the question: how does your affirmation of the one, catholic church affect your “being church in fellowship”? (Interim Report 6.3). The first answer to the question must admit that the faith affirmation has limited impact on the understanding of the fellowship of churches. None of the recent doctrinal agreements between churches of the Reformation tradition has prompted these churches to question their denominational autonomy and 17 Cf.Kristeligt Dagblad, Dec. 21, 2000 (in Danish). 18 Available at http://www.russian-orthodox church.org. ru/s2000e13. htm8 Bulletin / Centro Pro UnioneN. 61 /Spring 2002 confessional self-sufficiency. The unity of the body of Christ disappeared long ago into the defense of theological systems with convenient assumptions of a disembodied, invisible church. The one, catholic church of the baptismal Creeds disappeared into the abstracts of philosophical traditions where universals live a life of their own. Drawing upon recent studies with emphasis on an ecclesial mediation of Christian faith, Michael Kinnamon focuses his attempt at an answer on the catholicity of the church 19 . Kinnamon asks the Reformation and Free churches, now in dialogue with the Orthodox, how they can think of themselves as “catholic,” when most lack concrete forms of communion with other churches and a good many have no connection to the Body of Christ across time through an apostolic succession in ministry”? The WCC’s Uppsala Assembly (1968) understands catholicity to be “the quality by which the church expresses the fullness, the integrity, and the totality of its life in Christ”. Most Protestant members of the WCC will link catholicity with an emphasis on each gathered community of baptized believers as the catholic church in which the whole Christ is present, through faith, in human time and history. This combination of fullness and local community means that only in the eschatological consummation will the church of Christ be realized fully and completely as catholic. Meanwhile, the church must exist as the ever reforming church —a church that avoids to identify divine character with specific historic expressions of the church. Ministries, offices, structures are contingent on Christ, the Word, and connectional structures are supposed to help keeping the legitimate diversity within the bonds of biblical faith and the acknowledged authority of the ecumenical creeds. The second half of Kinnamon’s essay deals with “a council of churches (conseil)— locally, nationally, regionally, and globally” that will challenge “the temptation toward confessional or denominational autonomy” and add “a crucial dimension to the understanding and expression of catholicity...” If councils have ecclesiological significance (cf. John of Pergamon), because, through them, the church can be built up and its catholicity more fully expressed, we are back at the question: why the lack of concrete forms of communion with other church- es? A textbook reply would be: a conciliar existence may be a desideratum, but a conciliar existence does not belong to the esse of the church. There is no “divine character” (no necessity) linked with conciliarity or with other provisional representation of the Kingdom. The “extra-calvinisticum” (God’s freedom vis-à-vis the mediation of grace) still applies. But Kinnamon’s paper opens up for a more constructive reply to the questions about Protestant preference for autonomy and denominationalism. Kinnamon writes: “The church in history always fails to express the full character of Christ...this means that catholicity involves repentance...”. The politics of pardon It is premature to prophesy about the future of the Orthodox- Protestant encounter within the WCC. Unless one harbors the illusion that the present crisis will evaporate quietly and leave the Council unscathed, there is, however, no way around beginning the practice of “being church together” in a fellowship of churches. The question is: what would it take that the divided churches have not already tried with so little effect? In the current Orthodox-Protestant debate metropolitan Genna- dios of Sassima has suggested, Christians have to begin to know the truth, the “aletheia” of the Good News, to believe and to love the Ecclesia, the Church of Christ, to embrace it even in difficult circumstances and painful moments of its history, to suffer, witness and confess it, to defend it even if martyrdom be the cost. This is the Christian way of worshiping... 20 . I understand metropolitan Gennadios to say: What about beginning to love the church? not just some abstract idea of one, holy church behind or beyond the concrete assemblies of the faithful, but the living and suffering church of living and suffering believers who cannot but in a confession of sins give up every idea of successful performance of a Christ-formed living. What about putting a stop to separating the holiness of the church from holiness in the church? what about learning from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that “the only profitable relationship to others... is one of love, that is the will to hold fellowship with them? 21 The pastoral and ecumenical consequences of beginning to be churches together by practicing ecclesial love are far-reaching. It would imply — with Bonhoeffer— to give priority to the love of the other in God and situating the knowledge of another within the bonding of love. Beginning with the will to hold fellowship with “the other” will, in turn, situate the problem of divisions not in conceptual divergences, but in the lack of ecclesial love. In his erudite, difficult, and deeply disturbing book The End of the Church Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner argues that from the will to divide and the practice of living apart emerged that “separative logic” which buttressed the divisions in the Western Church. The theological divides were not the cause of the splits, but the results of the cooling of love. Reflecting on medieval theology’s decoupling of the Eucharist from the church’s corporality Radner writes particularly of late, there has grown an increased appreciation of the subordination of such conceptual divergences to social realities, which themselves embody theological commitments far more pointedly than does their 19 Prof. Michael Kinnamon is a former Executive Secretary of the WCC*s Faith and Order Commission. His paper was discussed at the Special Commission meeting in Berekfürdör, Hungary, Nov 15-20, 2001. 20 Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the World Council of Churches, Documents from the Meeting of Sub- Committee II, WCC 2000. 21 D. BONHOEFFER, “Ten Years After” in Letters and Papers from Prison (London: Fontana Press, 1959. English original SCM Press, 1953) 141.N. 61 /Spring 2002Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 9 verbal articulation. And these are the realities that ecclesial division contradicts in a basic fashion, acting as a ground to theological development, and not merely as its response. In other words, it is possible that the contradiction of ecclesial love in the sixteenth century in and of itself altered the significance of a theological terminology that before that time... was bounded by a realm of meaning wholly divergent from its postdivisional articulation 22 . But what would it look like, if divided churches began approaching “being churches together in fellowship” by practicing ecclesial love? Some would say that it is a moot question, because any living and lived communal confession of the one, holy church cannot be divorced from the inherited theological systems. The “we versus them exclusions” have been built into the oppositional systems of habits and institutions in which every ecclesial community is deeply convinced that it has all it takes for successfully performing the body of Christ. Ecclesial love between divided churches does not make sense. Exactly because the unity of the church must begin with the concrete historical realities it seems futile to assume that Christians should be capable of unlearning the logic and the practices or division. And yet? And yet there is a way to act in the “always already destructive structures of ecclesial unrelatedness” which assumes that they can be broken. This way is called “forgiveness.” Shortly after World War II Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher, turned to the predicament of human action. In The Human Condition (1951) she argues that there is a redemption, as she names it, from the irreversibility of all human action, namely forgiveness. If women and men could not forgive and receive forgiveness for the consequences of what was done, we would be confined to one single deed, from which we would never recover. We would remain forever its victims. Forgiveness is, according to Hannah Arendt, a human faculty. But nobody can forgive himself or herself. Forgiveness thus belongs to the social conditions of being human, and it can never be predicted: (Forgiveness) is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven (241). Hannah Arendt’s seminal analyses moved “forgiveness” from the religious/Christian context into the political context. Forgiveness became a secular possibility — in international law; in criminal law and in psychology. All-pervasive evils like the Holocaust, the apartheid regime and ethnic cleansings demanded new politics, and new politics can only emerge from a change of practices. It is in this context that the efforts to devise a politics of pardon are situated. I am convinced that the current theological interest in forgiveness has been prompted by political philosophy and new social practices. Nothing indicates that churches practicing forgiveness of each other have provided secular societies with tested practices able to break the irreversibility of past actions. Neither a particular church nor an existing ecumenical community appears in recent literature as the “we” of Jesus’s prayer: Forgive us the wrong we have done, as we have forgiven those who wronged us. Prayers for God’s forgiveness abound in current theological reflection and liturgical material, even prayers of God’s forgiveness of sins committed in the cast by individual believers in one church against sisters and brothers in another church. But an ecclesial public does not appear as the “we” extending and receiving forgiveness in relation to another ecclesial public. Sins, also social sins, remain the sins of an individual. That churches begin to forgive each other for wounding the body and keeping it divided may not be an impossible, but in the state we’re in, a very improbable scenario. It has not yet dawned upon the divided churches that forgiveness may be the only action that can break the irreversibilities of our sinful divisions. The secular states are beginning to learn it 23 . But there is in more recent ecumenical history evidence of at least one occasion, where divided churches turned to an act of forgiveness. Walter Kasper is aware of its ecumenical significance. In an 1987 article Kasper revisits the lifting of the mutual excommunication of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople 24 . Kasper quotes Orthodox metropolitan Meliton who at the time (at the very end of Vatican II) insisted that the act did not imply any changes in “dogmatic thinking, canonical order, divine worship, and Church life generally.” What happened in St. Peter’s on Dec. 7, 1965 was an encounter “conducive to the restoration of charity, to obliterate the grievous acts of the past which then banished charity between the two churches, helped to break their links, and in time became symbolic of their divisions” 25 . The act of lifting the mutual excommunication was an act of ecclesial love allowing for the purification of memories, The “Common Declaration” of Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras identifies this act of love as “expressive of justice and mutual forgiveness” opening up “in a spirit of trust, esteem, 22 E. RADNER, The End of the Church. A Pneumatology of Christian Division in the West (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans, 1998) 230. Bruce Marshall*s review article (note 15) refers to Radner*s book. 23 Cf. R,G.HELMICK and R.L. PETERSEN eds., Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy and Conflict Transformation (London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001). 24 W. KASPER, “Lehrverurteilungen kirchentrennenf? Überlegunqen zu der Studie des Ökumenischen Arbeitskreises” in K. ALAND und S. MEURER, eds., Wissenschaft und Kirche. Festschrift für Eduard Lohse, Texte und Arbeiten zur Bibel, 4 (Bielefeld: Luther Verlag, 1989) esp. 200-201. 25 Cf. E.J. STORMON, ed. and transl., Towards the Healing of Schism. The Sees of Rome and Constantinople. Public Statements and Correspondence between the Holy See and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 1958-1984, Ecumenical Documents, 3 (NY: Paulist Press, 1987) 118-119. Next >