Exploring Ecumenism

Predicting the Future Church

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We cannot predict what we do not already know about.  We ignore the unknown unknowns (a concept that existed long before Donald Rumsfeld turned it into a comedy act). 

Let me put it in another way. We have no vision of the future church and cannot have one until it happens.  Why?  Because if we knew what it was going to be, we would already be there.  Taleb describes this in his book.  If I know that tomorrow I'll know my partner is cheating on me, I actually know it today.  I can no longer go on living as I did when I believed my partner to be faithful.

If we all knew where God was calling the church to go we would be there!  The problem is we have no idea and so everyone's ideas are as good as anyone else's.  Who knows whether someone has the right vision for the future?  We cannot know, without knowing what that future is going to be.

Furthermore, we have no way of knowing whether God will build a future church out of our misunderstandings of what the future church will be.

We base our ideas for the future, on how the church has been in the past but we have no way of knowing whether or not it will be that way in the future.

The one thing we can learn from this is humility.  Just as my ideas might be helpful, a building block for the future, so might anyone else's.

What about prophecy?  It is a reading of the signs of the times, it is insight beyond the superficial insights of reasonable theologians, and acknowledgement that the future church will be born from the actions of millions of Christians today, and not from academic theological papers, read only by those who can afford to purchase expensive books.

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• Limits to Reason (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

Limits to Reason

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I've been reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb and this sequence of posts (see below, beginning here, and there's one more after this) are inspired by this book.  Taleb show us the limits to reason.  The predictive power of reason is poorer than those who loudly promote reason claim. 

This is no reason to abandon reason.  The paradox is reason can show us its own limitations.  Some theologians have of course known this all along. 

So, what can't we know?  We can't know the future.  This is the nature of chaos theory, small incidents have big consequences.  It's not that we can't observe the small causes; we don't know which ones are important.  I see a butterfly flap its wings.  I know this movement could in theory cause a hurricane on the other side of the world, but how can I prove it was this particular butterfly at that particular time?  And what if the cause is the interaction between many butterflies?

We ignore non-linearities.  This bothered me for years as a scientist.  We use logarithms to turn non-linearities into linearities and so end up with a graph with a straight line.  Nothing wrong with this, except we easily forget it isn't linear. 

Ecumenical conversations are subject to the same issues.  How can we be sure the rational debates of the theologians are taking us any closer to unity?  How can we know the significant is not to be found amongst certain local churches, for example, rather than in the conversations between church leaders.  Some local partnerships might have a massive impact on the future of the churches, but which ones? 

Formal conversations can overlook the consequences of success.  If the Church of England moves closer to the Roman Catholic Church, for example, what are the implications for its relationships with the Methodist and Reformed traditions?  And of the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox, for that matter?

Christian unity is multi-factorial (just like everything else) and so cannot be approached in an entirely ordered way.  The consequences of initiatives are always unpredictable.  This is not to deny the positive achievements of formal conversations, they have established massive theological common ground.

It's the small things that keep tripping up the churches.  The barriers to unity are not theological, they are about human beings and their organisations.

Most Things Don't Work

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I suppose I approach ecumenism not so much from the perspective of an academic theologian, as that of a community development worker.  One insight I developed over many frustrating years is, 'Most things don't work'.  This is equally true of ecumenism.

The history of ecumenism is littered with initiatives that haven't worked.  Usually, they are voted down by the council of one church or another and many more never get off the drawing board.

I suspect this insight occurred to me because before community development, I was a research scientist in the field of biology.  I discovered most experiments don't work but failure is fundamental to evolution.  Evolution is based on the principle of most things not working.

Of course, a few things do work.  But it is a fallacy to believe it is the best things that survive.  I suspect many scientists have difficulty remembering this, it is easy to assume the best has been selected.  This is because Western philosophy is strongly influenced by Plato and his idea of the (platonic) ideal. 

Theologians are influenced by the same ideals and the last gasp struggle of the proponents of 'intelligent design' demonstrate Plato's ideal is far from dead.  We need to understand, in evolution as much as the church, the Spirit works through diversity and chaos. 

The problem is, as humanity has become self-aware, we tend to undermine the harmony in creation in our search for order, design and perfection.  The place to seek God is not in the illusion of order and perfection but in what appears to be random.

It is an interesting question - what is random?  How do we know something is random?  One extreme would be to argue randomness is lack of knowledge; beneath the sequence of apparently random numbers there are causes.  For example, take pseudo-random numbers.  There is no way of distinguishing a good sequence of pseudo random numbers from genuine random numbers.

Now this might be a source of rejoicing for creationists except for one minor problem.  Nature doesn't use numbers.  Reality might be nudged by God but how it responds to any nudge must be unpredictable.

The history of religion has always been the struggle between those who seek to impose order on God's creation, and those who value freedom to respond to God spontaneously.  If we insist on imposing order on our churches, then splits are inevitable.  We can choose to make our ideals absolute and split the church.  Or we can agree splits are inevitable.  This means we all have freedom to be heretics, as all spirit led people are, alongside the apparently ordered life the churches. 

There is nothing to fear from heresy because most things don't work!  There is everything to fear from orthodoxy (whatever type) because it uses force to impose order that does not exist.

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• Harmony and Control (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• Harmony in Diversity (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

Harmony and Control

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Self-awareness introduces control into creation.  This may be the significance of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Whereas evolution proceeds with great freedom, once humanity became self-aware there was temptation to control its trajectory.  This urge to control is known as sin.

And so we observe ideologies of control; people who seek to impose their understanding of perfection upon the world.  This is sometimes known as platonification, after the philosopher Plato who argued everything is a reflection of perfect forms.  We find it in the imposition of mathematical models on reality.  Those Christians who insist nature has a designer are doing the same thing.  Sadly, some formal ecumenical conversations have the same aim.

The material world self-organises and needs no designer.  Design, whether of watches or of ideal societies (including united churches) is a result of self-awareness.  It is this imposition of concepts of perfection onto the world, that we know as sin.  This is because our concepts of perfection fall short of reality, miss the mark.  Of course, imposition of perfection is in reality imposition of will, of a will to power, which can be seen in domestic abuse, warfare and all attempts to control others.

Design differs from evolution in its adherence to physical laws.  The designer knows about the laws of thermodynamics, of gravity and various other physical constraints and uses those laws to power their machine or architecture.  Life uses the same laws in different ways.  Knock over a chair and it will stay where it is.  Knock over a human being and they can get up under their own steam.  Whilst no physical laws are broken, the motivation for life is much harder to understand than the mechanical principles of a machine or bureaucracy.

Contrary to the desire for power of creationists, chance is evidence of God, not design.  Design demonstrates human intervention.  What we see in nature is complexity, the interaction of chaos and order; the dynamic and the static.  Complexity arises from matter's innate power to self-organise.

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• Harmony in Diversity (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

Harmony in Diversity

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Usually ecumenists talk of 'unity in diversity'.  I heard an interview with Jane Chittister, where she suggested 'harmony in diversity' as an alternative.  Chittister is an American theologian.  What follows are my own reflections (although I might be unconsciously influenced by what she said).

Harmony in diversity seems more dynamic than unity in diversity.  Unity in diversity implies we might arrive at a final united state for all the churches.  The contradiction in 'unity in diversity' has always bothered me.  It feels like diversity is a concession while unity is the real business.

Harmony requires diversity.  Nothing we know of creation or of God implies static finality.  Our experience of life is change. 

Some will say God is unchanging.  If God is unchanging, it is only insofar as we conceive of God as embracing the whole of space and time, 'he is the lord of all that is and all that is to be'.  But our experience of God is also of change because we encounter God in time and space.  Even if eternity is unchanging, what does this mean in practice?  If the nature of eternity is change, how can we assert it is in any sense static?

Why is change so important?  Ultimately it is about consciousness.  We can understand evolution as mindless random change but even so we see matter self-organise into stars and planets and life.  Life that in time has become self-aware.  So, there is a possibility evolution need no longer be mindless. The pooling of the small consciousness of each particle of matter (that enables it to self-organise) leads to increasing awareness through evolution.

As living creatures become more conscious they shape their environments.  Now human beings, through science and prayer, reflect upon the nature of creation and join with God in the creative act.

The implications of this for ecumenism are profound.  If we do not encourage harmony in diversity, the alternative might be the stultifying unity we have seen before in Christendom.  Self-awareness causes its own contradictions and they will be the theme for the next post in this series.

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