Exploring Ecumenism

Realising and Discipleship

And so we come to the third stage of the U model, from bottom to top right, the stage Presence calls 'realising'.  Through the last two posts I have laid the stages alongside theological and Wesleyan concepts.  So we have had sensing, incarnation and prevenient grace.  Presencing, metanoia and justification.  Today, I line up realising with discipleship and sanctification.

For Wesley, justification was the stage at which a person knows their sins are forgiven and makes the decision to join the church, people are discipled together.  This decision is made as a result of their change of orientation from self to living for others.  For Wesley, they know they are saved but at the start of life as a Christian.  They will fall back many times but they are now a part of a People of the Way.

For Presence, realising

suggests a different stance of "cocreation" between the individual or collective and the larger world.  The self and the world are inescapably interconnected.  The self doesn't react to a reality outside, nor does it create something new in isolation - rather, like the seed of a tree, it becomes the gateway for the coming into being of a new world.  (Page 92)

So, what is this state of realising?  I see in it a parallel to the model of sanctification I have already described.  The individual is able to set aside their personal interests and live for others.  It also normally implies a commitment to working with others.  This is the thinking behind various types of intentional community in Christian praxis.

Is it legitimate to make these comparisons?  I must again emphasise I'm placing two models side by side, not attempting to combine them into one model.  It is interesting though to see the ways in which the U model mirrors the Christian model, and indeed we find this model appearing time and again in Christian history.  It is present for example in the practice of baptism, especially baptism by immersion, where the Christian descends symbolically into the water, where they die and then emerge to a new life.

I will in future posts examine in more detail what this model means for Christians and how the U model might help us understand our own traditions.  But first I need to take stock by considering exactly what the relationship of Presence is to the Christian faith and its ecumenical implications.

Presence and Metanoia

Yesterday I started to compare the U model in Presence with the hymn from Philippians 2.  I suggested that the downward motion is analogous to incarnation, or Wesley's understanding of prevenient grace.  On reflection I think the sensing part of the U model is in a way a metaphor for what the ancient hymn is saying.  Sensing is to set aside old assumptions; we have to set aside our assumptions from the past to be able to see clearly what we're called to in the future.

In Christian traditions, this goes further and involves a literal giving up, a decision to drop possessions, to choose to be where God wants us to be rather than where we want to be.  This parallels Jesus' great act of kenosis - self-emptying.  From memory the Iona hymn says it: 'Who find with hands empty that hearts can hold much'.

At the bottom of the U model, Presence has its key process, presencing.  One of the authors writes of his feelings after he lost his home in a fire:

At that moment with everything gone, I suddenly felt released and free to encounter that other part of myself, the part that drew me into the future - my future - and into a world that I might bring into reality with my life.

They go on to say it is like seeing the present from the future.  This future orientation intrigues me and from an ecumenical perspective, the idea of seeking new possibilities in the future might be a more fruitful orientation than seeking to reconcile ideas from the past.

Presencing is about repentance.  The problem of course with the word 'repentance' is that it has many associations with sin and being good and well ... sanctimonious.  I think the Greek word translated as repentance is better - metanoia.  This word literally means to turn around, to turn ones back on the old ways of seeing and to embrace the new.  This experience transforms people and hence transforms the world.

If sensing is an act of prevenient grace, in Wesley's terminology, then presencing is equivalent to justification.  I'm not saying that people who experience the U model are justified in a Christian sense but that they are parallel movements.  To experience metanoia is to enter the community of those who live for others and for the welfare of the planet.  They become co-creators with God.

But what of Jesus in the hymn?  Can I be saying he experiences metanoia?  Just as the downward movement is a movement of kenosis for Jesus, rather than awareness of sin, so his metanoia is different.  The downward motion is his doing, the upward movement is God's.  Jesus shows us the way to place our destinies in the hands of God.

Sensing and Incarnation

So, let's consider the left hand side of the eschatological rollercoaster.  Presence describes this movement, from the top left to bottom of their U model, 'sensing'.  To me the U model as a whole seems to bear some resemblance to the pastoral cycle.  They argue that 'Most change efforts ... don't move very far "down the U" because little deeper sensing occurs' (page 88). 

The point Presence is making is that it is easy to gather information without challenging our habitual ideas; that 'confirms preexisting assumptions'.  We will see only what we are prepared to see.  The aim is to get beyond that, to suspend our expectations and even then we might not see our own connection to what is there.

If I am right and the U model owes something to the Philippians hymn, it will be because the hymn has been present in Western culture for 2000 years.  In my last post I pointed out that in the downward movement, Jesus lets go of everything from being God, through being human, to slavery, to death, to the cross.  It is impossible to get any lower.

Why do this?  It is learning through humility, by abandoning what we hold dear we are forced to face our own responsibility for the mess we find ourselves in.  This is the path of humility, of setting aside our power and encountering the raw situation we are in.  It is embracing our own complicity in the human condition.  And Jesus did this too.  He lost everything, even God.  On the cross he hit rock bottom, there was nowhere else to go.

This is of course the doctrine of incarnation (and of course Wesley's doctrine of original sin or prevenient grace - but more of that later).  We encounter it in some teachings about prayer.  This is not the sort of prayer that asks for things, but the sort of prayer that incarnates the one who prays, in the sense that they see things as they are.

Remember high church, Tory John Wesley who was radicalised as he traveled up and down the country and saw the reality of the industrial poor for himself.  Remember, the ways in which most Christian traditions seem to find their way into the inner city.  From Catholic or Anglo-Catholic retreat houses through to small intentional communities, associated with the Urban Theology Unit in the 1970s and 80s, and with evangelical fresh expressions in the 2000s. 

You cannot see this if you are an academic theologian because theology is about the specific, as soon as you start to generalise it becomes effectively irrelevant to the majority of Christians.  This is the big problem ecumenists in formal talks face, or perhaps too often do not face.  I will write much more about this.

The Eschatological Rollercoaster

In my last post I promised to compare the passage in Philippians (2:5-11), believed to be an early hymn, with the U theory from Presence.  Before I attempt the comparison I thought it might be worth making a few points about the passage.  In the main these are from Crossan and Reed's In Search of Paul, chapter 5.  I have given the hymn my own name, the eschatological rollercoaster, (for those professional theologians who are not reading this blog, I apologise for the long words and explain that a rollercoaster is a fairground ride that goes up and down).

1. The hymn needs to be read within its context, especially verses 1 - 4 and 12 - 13.  The Philippians are invited, or commanded even, to 'be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind'.  The hymn therefore does not simply tell a story, it is intended to be normative for the Christian community.  It is meant to be a template for Christian life.
2. This is a story told in retrospect, it is a story full of interpretation.  This is I think entirely legitimate, it offers us an insight into what the earliest Christians believed about Jesus.
3. The hymn describes a U shape.  This is what made the link for me with the Presence U model.  I will in future posts explore the similarities and differences.  For all sorts of reasons the downward motion is what is notable in the hymn.  This was not understood by Paul as a random act.  Could Jesus have died of leprosy, for example?  If he had, it would have been a slow, terrible and humiliating death on the margins of society.  Clearly, leprosy would have placed a barrier between Jesus and society and made his ministry almost impossible.  But the crucial point is the cross was an official, legal and formal death.  Religious and political authorities colluded to bring about his death.  This is what religious and political authorities do.  They do it because they have vested interests and perceive themselves as under threat.
4. We cannot have the exaltation of Christ in the second half of the hymn without the downward motion.  This downward motion, from God, to human, to slave, to death, to cross is an act of kenosis, of self-emptying.  To get hold of its significance, we have to make the comparison Paul and the other early Christians would have made, even without thinking about it.  That contrast is with the Roman Emperor.  The Roman Emperor was addressed as Lord, the same as the address given to Jesus in verse 11.  The reason Jesus Christ is confessed as Lord is because of what happens in the rest of the hymn.  The Roman Emperor was Lord all his life.  There was no downward motion, the Emperor was automatically exalted upon his death.  Jesus is exalted because of his humility, unlike the Emperor.  The Lordship of Jesus has nothing to do with aggrandisement and everything to do with humility.
5. Note that in the first half of the hymn, Jesus empties himself and in the second half it is God who highly exalts Jesus.  At the bottom of the U shape, something changes around, in a sense God takes over, when Jesus can go no further.  But we must also note that in doing so God affirms Jesus' humility.  So, through Jesus' humility we see something of the character of God.  God is seen as a God of Love who is prepared to give all for the love of his creation.

Learning from the Future

The question according to Presence is how we avoid applying old frameworks to new realities (page 84).  Their approach is through learning from a certain type of conversation. 

Wesley's theology of The New Creation, is based on a cosmology of the future.  He contrasted the Calvinist emphasis on creation in the past, where God created the universe just so and we are called to uphold God's standards, with his own emphasis where God has planned a new creation through transformation.

Presence describes a type of learning where we learn from the future.  Here we discover our part in bringing the future to pass.  Learning from the past is helpful where the past is a guide to the future.  But issues such as climate change and the recent credit crunch have no precedents (page 86).  'New wine, new wineskins'. 

At this point Presence introduces its U theory.  I haven't been able to find the diagram on the net, so imagine a U shape.  There are three stages as we move through sensing in the top left, presencing in the bottom and realising in the top right.  I will explore these in the next few posts using the ancient hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2:5-11.

Living with Uncertainty

Just under a month ago I posted an article about Separation.  At the end of that article, I took leave for a period of the book Presence.  Today, I return to that book and start where I left off with the theme of separation.

Over the last month or so I have explored Wesley's doctrine of sanctification and I hope shown it is a doctrine that seeks reconciliation between the Christian and non-Christian worlds.  There is a sense in which the separation Christian traditions experience, is a subset of the separation we experience from the wider world.  This wider separation might be understood as the alienation of modern people from the cosmos.  The sense in which we can live our lives cut off from one another, from the natural world or even the physical reality of the night sky.

In Presence the authors write:

... we tend to get stuck in a single story that we accept without thinking.  And it seems to me that's exactly our larger predicament in the world today: we're stuck in a story of who we are on this earth as human beings, and something in us wants to break free of it.  (Page 72)

Whilst this passage refers to the assumptions or world views all people live with, it can be applied to the experience of Christians within their traditions (or even narrower takes on the faith in local churches). 

But as the authors go on to say, We have no idea the cost we pay for living this story of separation.  Indeed, when we look at the history of persecutions, warfare and rivalries between Christians of different traditions, each convinced they are right to the exclusion of others, it is hard to imagine what we have lost. 

The opportunity ecumenism offers to all Christians is to learn how to belong to a tradition whilst being challenged by the others.  This is why the imposition of full visible unity is so problematic; is it at root the old Christendom approach to the faith?  Somehow we have to learn how to live with uncertainty, our certainty about salvation must grow from our humility; faith in a God who is essentially unknowable.  We must free ourselves from the tyranny of being right.  Our commitment to ecumenism (or even oikoumene) might help us in this journey towards certain uncertainty.

Future Plans for 'Exploring Ecumenism'

A few days ago I summarised where I have got to over the last few months.  Today I am going to outline my plans for this blog.  They have developed over the weeks since I started and I suppose they will continue to develop.

I intend to do some work on the layout of the blog so that it will be possible to visit pages to explore certain themes.  I have already worked on themes around conversations, systems theory, reception, diversity and sanctification.  The first two will require a substantial amount of additional attention, the last three less so. 

The idea is these pages, and a few new ones, will in time form an archive of my explorations of ecumenical theory.  I will also from time to time contribute posts that relate to immediate themes, as they come up in the news or in my experience.  These will tend to be shorter and link to longer posts in the archive pages.

So, what about future themes?  The first of the bullets below is an overarching theme, relating to all three dimensions of ecumenical work.  The other bullets all relate to transformative reception.

• A lot more about conversations and participative approaches to ecumenism.  This will form an overarching theme and I hope a more practical one.
• The relationships between the Christian traditions and modern science.  In particular, to explore modern cosmologies, as understood through quantum mechanics and complexity theory.
• Darwinism as a case study about the relationships between the traditions and science.
• Socio-economic challenges to the traditions, especially climate change, racism and debt / the credit crunch.
• I am also considering some work on violence and atheism although these are less central to my overall plan.