Image by Xavier Luque via Flickr
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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