Responding to Rome: Presbyterians Should Embrace Honest Ecumenism

Written by Michael R. Walker

Tuesday, 17 July 2007 00:00

As a Presbyterian passionately committed to the central insights of the Protestant Reformation, it feels a little awkward to say this: we should appreciate the recent statement on the church approved by the Vatican, and we should not embrace the highly publicized Protestant over-reactions to it.

Last week, the Vatican approved a new statement reiterating the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the primacy of the Roman Church and the lesser status of Orthodox Churches and Protestant “Christian Communities.” The statement says nothing new. Instead, it reiterates the teachings of the Church of Rome, and it provides the kind of clarity that can support, rather than curtail, effective future ecumenical dialogues. When Benedict the XVI was elected pope, I reflected on the fact that his career thus far had demonstrated his commitment to what we might call “honest ecumenism.” This new statement continues in that stream.

Presbyterians should “welcome” the new statement not because we agree with it. That should be obvious. If we believed in the primacy of the Roman Church, or that the preservation of the “integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery” through the presence of the “sacramental priesthood” was essential to being churches “in the proper sense,” we would not need to welcome the statement as Protestants. We could just become Roman Catholics.

But we can welcome the statement as Protestants because of our commitment to honest ecumenism. We seek the visible unity of the church not by setting aside our disagreements about the nature of the church. We seek ecclesial unity by engaging each other in a prayerful process characterized by clarity, integrity and Christian charity. The Vatican’s reiterative statement was clarifying, possessed integrity relative to the Roman Church’s own doctrine, and was not devoid of charity. Quoting Vatican II, the new statement says that while we “suffer from defects” (as we believe they do), our Protestant communities are not “deprived of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation,” believing that the Spirit of Christ uses us as “instruments of salvation.”

This kind of straight-talk that clarifies the status of relationships and takes the truth seriously is less welcome in some circles. There is an old tradition of seeking a sort of visible unity in the church by presuming it, followed by downplaying “truth claims” and adding a heavy dose of political rhetoric. Unfortunately, the highly publicized, vehemently negative Protestant responses to the recent Roman Catholic statement seem to fit this description.

We have said the Vatican statement said nothing new, and we should add that it was actually directed not at Protestants but at certain progressive Roman Catholic theologians whom the Roman Catholic hierarchy believes have offered “erroneous” (read “liberal”) interpretations of their Church’s teaching on the subject. Mainline Protestants to the rescue?

To be sure, the sense of unity between progressive Roman Catholic theologians and mainline Protestant leaders can be fruitful for some things. But we should be aware of what can happen when these relationships are mistaken for formal ecclesial unity. Ironies can abound. Not only can it provoke the sort of reiteration approved by the Vatican. But it can also lead the mainline Protestants who typically presume Christian unity to exercise the least Christian charity toward the Roman Catholic Church, over-stating their case, announcing their sense of woundedness before the media and so highlighting Christian division for the world. (For examples, click here and here.)

We should take a different course. As Protestants observing the internal conversations of the Roman Catholic Church, we can promote Christian unity by receiving the recent statement with a graciousness fit for the unity for which we long. We can receive it as a reminder of the genuine, continuing disagreements that exist among those who can together confess the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And we can commit ourselves to clarity, integrity and charity in our continuing pursuit of ecclesial unity. May God add to our common confession a greater understanding of how Christ seeks to visibly manifest the unity of his Body as a testimony to the world. And May He give us the grace to seek it with deeper urgency and patience.

The Notebook

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

William Abraham on the Unity of the Church

Some notes from William Abraham's article in Nicene Christianity: The Future for a New Ecumenism, where his task is to reflect on the phrase of the creed about the church as "one, holy, catholic and apostolic."

A few introductory quotes on the challenge of ecclesiology in the modern era:

"Ecclesiology is one area in theology where there is enormous temptation to think in abstract and utterly unrealistic terms. We find it difficult to think historically, concretely, and realistically" (p. 178).

"We need a theological vision of the church that does three things. It allows us to acknowledge reality as we find it empirically in teh church as it is and as we can predict it will be in the future. It provides a narrative of the divisions and chaos in the history of the church. And it acts as a norm that can deepen our experience, call us to accountability, and evoke a straining toward renewal and revitailzation at a crucial juncture in our history" (p. 179).

Abraham's brief sketch of such a theological vision of the church begins by describing the church as the work of the Holy Spirit in manifesting the reign of God in the world. He then focuses on what, then, is the referent in the creed's confession of "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church." What did the Holy Spirit establish at Pentecost? He stresses that it must be read as referring to "a historical people with definite institutional continuity and history from one generation to the next." This was the experience of the church in its first centuries of existence (assuming, we should note, that we do not consider the great variety of groups it is now easy to identify as heretical on the basis of the creed). Thus, he rightly finds abstract definitions of the church that allow for the variety of Christian divisions that exist today unacceptable, whether they appeal to the "invisible church" or the Reformation "marks of the church" as applied at the congregational level.

How then can we identify the church the church today? He doesn't really answer this question, for it is basically unanswerable if the creed is indeed referring to "a historical people with definite institutional continuity," given the divided condition of the church since the division of East and West and much more so since the Reformation.

In the end, Abraham's desire is to lift up the creed's descriptive phrase about the church as a norm after which we should all strive in our present divided condition. We cannot rest in our divisions or come up with clever ways to legitimize them. At the same time we can't simply say various denominations are not works of the Spirit. His solution to this is to suggest, along the lines of Ephraim Radner's proposal (in The End of the Church) that the church is in a similar situation as the divided kingdom of Israel: God was not working in and through them as he had, not in fullness, but nor had he withdrawn himself altogether. In the church today, God is "remaining faithful to his covenant and continuing to pour out his Holy Spirit," but "has withdrawn the fullness of his blessing, waiting patiently until we repent of our manifold sins and disorders" (p. 186).

Among his practical proposals for striving toward the creed's description of the church are the necessity of recovering "the full canonical heritage of the church of the first millennium before the split between East and West," and that "we must find a way to relativize our varied epistemological commitments" (that he thinks have often come as a result of confusing the canon with epistemological criterion, a misuse of the canon and an improper exaltation of epistemology in the life of the church that has catalyzed and continued to justify many Christian divisions).

Who Really Cares About Christian Unity?

In a January 2001 article in First Things, entitled "Who Really Cares About Christianity Unity?", Bruce Marshall reflects on the divided nature of the (western) Church today, in dialogue with key aspects of Ephraim Radner's argument in his The End of the Church. His overall point: the Church at this point can expect its own death, which it has asked for, mostly by persisting willfully in disunity, by not having a common eucharistic life and by preferring its own division to meaningful (eucharistic) reunion. This the Church has done for a variety of reasons, though he pins much of the blame on the convenience of separation as the result of one-upsmanship and as a catalyst for more successful sheep-stealing, clearly not laudable reasons for persisting in division.

The Church is made one and receives life through the eucharist, but when we think we're celebrating the eucharist in our persistently divided churches, our "sectarian eucharists" result in eating and drinking judgment against ourselves (1 Cor. 11:26-29). Hence, if we are united to Christ at all, we are united in his death through baptism, which is still a (truncated) source of unity across denominations. Being united in Christ's death but not in his life means together (in our disunity) we can expect death.

The Lord will bring about resurrection in the Church after its death, but what we can expect on our own horizon is demise. And no particular group can escape this judgment. Just as the remnant in divided Israel was sent into Exile along with the rest, so too will those seeking genuine Christian unity today be subject to the Church's death. And just as a remnant returned to the Land of Promise to rebuild, so too will God raise up a future generation at some point to reveal the glory of Christ's resurrection.

Both Radner and Marshall undercut the theological justification for the Reformation. While admitting the Church can also suffer death by abandoning the truth, Marshall then states that one cannot "accept disunity" to preserve the truth, because one cannot pit the Gospel against the Church, for such would be to say "we have Christ's command to dismember his own body--the same body that, as the New Testament teaches, Christ does not despise, but nourishes, care for, and loves unto death (cf. Ephesians 5:29).

Radner and Marshall ilft up Jansenism as an example of how to both pursue the truth and insist on maintaining ecclesial unity in the face of church powers that deny the truth. Of course, Jansenism was unable to survive. And so the conclusion: better to die while seeking "to commit the destiny of the Church and the cause of the gospel to God alone" than to die by dividing the Church. Of course, this whole framework seems to presume that a united body that celebrates something it calls the eucharist cannot cease to be Christ's Body, hence to divide such a body is always to divide the Body of Christ.

Marshall was Lutheran in 2001. He has since entered the Roman Catholic Church.

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