Exploring Ecumenism

Christian Traditions as Libraries

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In this eleventh post in a sequence about ecumenical formation, I will explore how we can interpret Christian traditions as libraries.

I will start by unpacking the words I ended with last time, 'An open library has been replaced by a closed book'.  Before the printing press, the Bible was out of the reach of most people.  It was accessible, at least in Western Europe, to those who could read Latin and had access to copies in libraries or churches.  This meant primarily the ordained and religious.  However, it was open in that the Bible was accessible to a wider community of scholars.  The printing press meant the Bible was opened up to anyone who could read in their own language.  This has been enormously important to the history of the faith and to its missionary activity down to the present day.  But alongside this, the fact is a set of books bound into a single volume, in a particular order, leads to this single book becoming a defensible space.  It is harder to envisage an exchange between scholars of different scriptures, now the Bible is in everyone's hands. 

I wonder whether Christians were really people of a book before the advent of printing?  There were documents but they witnessed to experience, rather than the direct word of God.  Most Christians would experience Christianity through liturgy rather than the written word.  Perhaps fundamentalism is trying to turn the Christian faith into something its founders never intended, a people of a book.  The Bible can be inerrant only if it is the direct word of God, which it clearly is not. 

We need to understand our faith as something that exists in the debates based on scripture, rather than in the scriptures themselves.  Our faith is based not on the infallibility of the written word but in the creativity of the spoken word.

What we need to do is understand the change from library to single volume and its implications.  Perahps we need to regain a sense of each Christian tradition as a library.

Before printing, it was possible to build up a library where the Canon would be interpolated by other texts.  Each tradition would accumulate its own distinctive liturgies, theological interpretations and church law.  Together these would be a concrete record of what is often called tradition.  Some texts would be closer to the centre of the tradition and some more peripheral.  Ecumenism generates texts which are shared between traditions and might have a place in several libraries.

So, Methodists treasure the writings of the Wesleys (Charles' hymns and John's notes, diaries and sermons).  These are valued in common between all the traditions that look to the Wesleys as their point of origin.  Then each Methodist Church will value their particular expression of their church law (CPD in Britain) and certain theologians who grow out of their specific tradition.  Writers from other Methodist traditions will have a shared place too.

Other traditions have similar libraries, eg the Church of England has a special place for the Book of Common Prayer, as well as its Canons and other expressions of church law.  We largely encounter each others' libraries through our conversations, because only the scholars will have in-depth knowledge of other traditions' libraries.

This is of course, a major problem for ecumenists.  Ecumenism becomes a specialist pursuit.  It is hard to follow the debates between scholars if you are living a life. 

On the other hand, non-scholars can specialise in their own tradition.  Methodist local preachers for example learn Methodist doctrinal emphases and are encouraged to be familiar with the Wesleys.  It is fashionable to take some of this with a pinch of salt but if we're serious about ecumenism perhaps we should take our own texts a little more seriously.

As we are formed by our own tradition, we take on board, sometimes unconsciously, its doctrinal emphases.  In this sense we become living books.  It is then in encounters with Christians from other traditions, in the exchange of insights, we are encouraged to draw on the resources of our own tradition.  Our unconscious formation becomes conscious and we experience a deepening of our faith.

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• Global Digital Library for Theology and Ecumenism (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Contemporary Methodism: a discipleship movement shaped for mission (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Conversations Between Faiths (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• Libraries and Faith (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• The Ecumenical Significance of the King James Bible (ecumenicalissues.blogspot.com)
• Ecumenical Formation (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• Church of the East (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• The Political Context of Churches (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
• The Bible and Institutions (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

The Bible as a Library

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This is the tenth in a sequence about ecumenical formation.

So, what is the nature of the Bible?  People were quick to lay claim to the Bible once the printing press was invented.  It is easy claim the Catholic Church kept the texts from the people but we have to allow they did not have the technology to do anything else.  The text was inevitably out of reach, there were few copies and they would have been in Latin.  But the Church was threatened by the new access to the texts in the vernacular.

What was the Bible like before the invention of printing?  Today we glibly speak of the Bible as a library but what we forget is that is exactly what it was.  Each book in the Bible was a separate volume in a library.  So, even scholars never experienced it as a single volume with books in a particular order.

How many libraries held the entire canon of scripture?  How many other texts were interpolated or alongside?  Clearly the Canon evolved and presumably most libraries valued the complete set.  There never was complete agreement about its content.  Hence there is apocrypha and deutero-canonical scriptures.

On top of this there will have been many translations of the same scriptures.  Whilst the Roman Catholic Church maintained the Latin Vulgate as the primary source, there were always other translations into other languages, especially in the East.

Printing brought together an opportunity not only to translate scriptures into the vernacular but also to collect them into one place and into (more or less) a single coherent narrative.

This relatively recent development forms the context in which we experience formation today.  The very fact of a single volume Bible makes an immense difference in that it implies greater coherence to scripture than the old libraries ever could. 

The covers of the printed library make the content both easier and harder to share.  Easier because it means everyone can have a copy.  Harder because the covers are round a body of writing sometimes seen as under threat and so in need of protection. 

An open library has been replaced by a closed book.

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The Political Context of Churches

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This is the ninth of a series of posts about ecumenical formation.  This follows yesterday's post which introduced two authors who have recently written about the Church of the East.

Diarmaid McCulloch suggests the big difference between the Church of the East and the Western (Catholic and Orthodox) churches was not so much theological (Jenkins suggests theological differences were really fairly small) as their politics.

The two major Western Churches were both in the Roman Empire and the decisions made at the various councils (especially Chalcedon, which split the Church of the East from the west) were made for the convenience of the Empire. 

The Church of the East on the other hand was never a state religion.  It had to make its way by negotiation and making accommodation with the prevailing powers, often of other faiths.  Consequently, faith could not be imposed but had to be passed on though debate.

So, Christianity spread and maintained its presence through negotiation with other faiths.  This worked very well for hundreds of years.  (The reasons for the churches' decline are complex but seem to relate to the crusades and Islam's encounter with a very different Western Christianity.)  We need to ask ourselves how much of our determination to impose Christian faith as the one true faith is the result of the Imperial origins of Western Christianity and whether the Church of the East was a more natural way of spreading the Christian story through debate with other faiths.  In such a context formation would be vital; without it Christians would not be able to uphold their side of the debate.

I think it would be a mistake though to see the West as imposing one true faith from the start.  It took many centuries for the Roman Catholic Church to become the dominant church in Christendom.  Over that period, there were other churches (notably the Celtic Church in Britain) and ideas were debated.  Despite claims made by modern pagans, I have seen little evidence that Christianity was imposed by force.  That came later.

I found this quote in one of Clayboy's blog posts, Pope vs Pope: a different vision of Roman ecumenism .

According to the Venerable Bede, Pope St Gregory the Great gave St Augustine this advice:

You know, my brother, the custom of the Roman Church in which you remember that you were bred up. But my will is, that if you have found anything, either in the Roman, or the Gallican, or any other Church, which may be more acceptable to Almighty God, you should carefully make choice of the same, and sedulously teach the Church of the English, which as yet is new in the faith, whatsoever you can gather from the several Churches. For things are not to be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things. Choose, therefore, from every Church those things that are pious, religious, and right, and when you have, as it were, made them up into one bundle, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto.

 

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Church of the East

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This is the eighth of a sequence of posts about ecumenical formation.

Last time I wrote about the role of libraries in the growth and propagation of the world's faiths.  Perhaps one of the greatest systems of libraries were those of the Church of the East. 

The Church of the East seems to have been little known until the publication in 2009 of Diarmaid McCulloch's 'A History of Christianity', which includes a section about the Church of the East.  I also recommend The Lost History of Christianity by Philip Jenkins.  That this history is lost is somewhat alarming but Jenkins' book is a good place to start to catch up.

It is clear, reading Jenkins, that the churches' success, (it existed for many centuries longer than Protestant churches have existed in Europe) was based on its networks of communities, usually founded on a library.  When the church was destroyed in the thirteenth century, whole cities were wiped out along with almost all of its libraries.  Some survive but are little known in the West, although Kenneth Bailey draws on them in his books, eg Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. 

Two stories from Jenkins. 

Had not the Indians designed a system of nine wonderful signs that could be used to express all numbers?  Although he does not seem to know of the existence of zero, that is the first reference in the West to the revolutionary numbering system, which we know as Arabic numerals.  Though the system would not be widely publicised until the ninth century, Syriac Christians had known it long before that.  (Page 77)

Arabic numbers are so called because they came to Europe through Islamic Arabic libraries.  It  seems  they obtained their knowledge through the Church of the East.  For most of its existence the Church of the East was under Islamic political rule and there was a close scholastic exchange between the two traditions.  But the Church of the East didn't invent Arabic numbers, they obtained them from their churches in India, presumably through Hindu libraries.

The other story is of Bishop Adam in China. 

Around ... 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang'an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought with him into either Chinese or any other familiar tongue.  In such a plight, what could the hapless missionary do but seek Christian help?  He duly consulted the bishop named Adam, ...  Adam had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese, and the two probably shared a knowledge of Persian.  Together, Buddhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom.  Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical goodwill ... Scholars still speculate whether Adam infiltrated Christian concepts into the translated sutras, consciously or otherwise.  (Page 15)

Jenkins goes on to show how these texts bore fruit far beyond China, in Japan.

These two stories illustrate the close relationships between faiths centuries ago.  These relationships seem to have been natural co-operation between scholars, for mutual benefit. 

Perhaps different faiths were not seen as so different in those days, after all it was modern Western missionaries who classified the world's faiths.  We have made distinctions between faiths and in consequence we have built walls between them and now need interfaith dialogue to break them down.  Many see such dialogue as somehow unnatural.  It is hard to see how they can be, given the natural ways in which information has been exchanged in the past.

Formation was a natural outcome of exchange between faiths.  Whilst some people might have changed faith, it seems people largely found it natural to exchange ideas with people from other faith traditions.

Today some believe we must keep other traditions at arms length.  Is this wise?  Many ecumenists, me included, claim their faith has deepened as a result of sharing ecumenically and interfaith.  Usually this is built up as an intriguing discovery.  Perhaps a thousand years ago this would have been an unremarkable experience.

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• Libraries and Faith (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)
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• Ecumenical Formation (chrississons.typepad.co.uk)

Libraries and Faith

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This is the seventh in a sequence about ecumenical formation.

We do not fully appreciate the part libraries have played in the development of faiths.  When we think of buildings in connection with faiths we think of churches, temples, mosques, synagogues and perhaps we go on to think of monasteries, convents and theological colleges.

It is easy to forget the role of libraries, although most religious communities had them.  It might almost be true to say religious communities exist primarily to maintain their libraries. 

This was particularly important before the invention of the printing press.  The copying, maintenance and exchange of texts would  require the full time attention of a community.  And these communities were networked.  If you wanted to do some research, you had to travel.  Scholars would carry information between libraries.

So, we hear of Christian libraries, not only in Europe but for many centuries stretching deep into Asia and Africa.

Every synagogue is a Jewish library.  If we examine a page from the Talmud, we find the central text, surrounded by several well known commentaries and often with a space for the scholar to add their own comments. (The illustration from the Talmud sadly doesn't seem to feature such a space.)

Islamic libraries which kept the light of scholarship shining during the European dark ages.

And there were Hindu and Buddhist libraries ...

These were not isolated - during the best of times there was a community of scholarship and scholars had access to each others texts.  Perhaps we have not known similar access in modern times until the invention of the internet, although the growth of universities to some degree replaced religious libraries.

The point is, scholars were formed through exchange of information and this was the norm over hundreds if not thousands of years.  The idea of one true faith hidden behind a wall to keep out scholars of other faiths would have been bizarre 1000 years ago. 

It is sad to find in the modern world, where information is so easy to access, so many refuse to share with others.

Conversations Between Faiths

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This is the sixth in a series of posts about ecumenical formation.

I have deliberately focused this blog on ecumenism within the Christian faith.  There are a number of reasons for this but primarily my focus has been on Christianity and that is how I decided to organise my work.

However, this blog is also about conversation and in that sense it is fully inclusive of conversations between faiths.  Christians have a unique message, which is forever getting lost amongst a lot of other material, and our role is simply to tell people what it is.  It is not about conversion, although it seems to happen sometimes, or about policing people's morals.  It is simply to tell the story.

I attend a small local interfaith group and this year we have been looking at the scriptures of various faiths.  In May it was the turn of the Jains.  So, let's start there.

Something clicked when I heard the Jain scriptures started as a library in North West India.  My first thought was that I had heard this at earlier sessions about other faiths (more in later posts) and my second thought was, this library would have contained all the knowledge in the world.

That is what libraries were, collections of all the knowledge in the world.  We live in a world where access to knowledge is easy.  We can read.  We can travel to visit libraries easily and these days access masses of information on the Internet. 

What was important though was not this one library.  It was all the libraries, scattered around the world, each containing all the knowledge in the world.  Most of them are now lost.  Interfaith conversations were not a leisure pursuit for indolent westerners, but an essential exchange of ideas. 

It is this idea from the meeting about the Jains that has led to this series of posts about formation.  An understanding of faith not as a series of beliefs so much as a series of libraries, each containing all the knowledge in the world.

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Reading the Bible

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This is the fifth in the series about ecumenical formation.

Lots of people responded to Harold Camping's prediction of the rapture back in May.  Quite why he  got so much attention is beyond me.  He has his own radio station but that doesn't mean we all need to hear what he's saying.  If you need a reminder, this blog post is as good as any.  If you don't, just read the extract below from one of Camping's followers:

The middle-aged Oakland resident said he’d been listening to Camping since 1993, when he said the world would end in 1994.

That was strike one, the man said. And this is strike two. Even so, he said, that doesn’t mean the message is wrong.

“I just know he’s biblically sound,” the man said. “I’ve never been one of these guys who think everything he says is true.

This caught my eye. 'I just know he's biblically sound'.  He knows because Camping has predicted the date he will be personally raptured and been wrong twice?  These people are wrong on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin.

The ways in which Christians read the Bible is core to any Christian formation.  We can take the view that only my interpretation is sound or that all interpretations are permissible (because we can always go back to the original text). 

The first is based on ignorance.  The second is better but not much better because it assumes we cannot say anything about the Bible and all readings are neutral.

The rapture is not a neutral idea.  It is a natural ideology for consumers.  It is individualistic, focusing only on the salvation of those with access to the truth, who will leave the world behind for the rest of us to suffer in.  Why is the world in such a mess? Because of the behaviour of these very consumers who seek to save themselves.

It is a nasty mix of self-righteousness and greed.  It is also profoundly atheistic.  These people do not trust God, they build their hopes upon their own fantasies of God.  They are taken in by their own illusions.  If religion has any value at all it is in losing these illusions and learning to live for others.

One way of doing this is through encounter with those who read the text differently.  If we cannot accept that our view is one interpretation amongst many, then we will be disappointed as we struggle to stay true to what is false in our thinking. 

This 'one interpretation only' philosophy is relatively recent and I hope to show in future posts how profoundly important the encounter between interpretations is.

What is Formation?

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So, what is formation?  In this fourth in this series, I will tease out some strands.

First a few things to clear the ground.  Formation is not the sole responsibility for the ordained.  They may have a formal obligation to see to the formation of those over whose care they have some reponsibility.  However, the reponsibility is everyone's and we are all responsible for each others' formation.

Formation is something everyone experiences.  Some may be gifted and some not even know what the word means but in principle it is accessible to all.  The Methodist publication, Time to Talk of God, a few years ago, made this point.  Anyone can talk about God.

Formation is a mutual activity.  It is something people can share in.  It is not about someone who knows, pouring insights into the minds of others.  It is mutual learning.  Christian traditions are not programmes of belief to be systematically worked through; they are guides, resources, help, something to draw upon.

Consequently, sharing between Christians of different traditions makes a valuable contribution to mutual formation because it enables sharing of insights from different parts of the tradition.  This is sometimes called receptive ecumenism.

Furthermore, without mutual sharing, there is a danger that a tradition will go out on a limb.  If we are to engage with others from outside the faith, we must learn from each other something of what our faith is. 

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Mission and Spiritual Direction

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In this third in the series about formation, I will explore the relationship between mission and formation.  I made the point a few months ago that the traditional view of mission and unity is incomplete and the third element of spiritual direction needs to be included.  In the following post, I started to explore something of the diversity of approaches to formation across the traditions.

Whatever we believe mission is, it must not be an activist pursuit.  We need a praxis of mission that includes formation.  However, ecumenists tend to focus on mission at the expense of formation.

A good evangelist will always be an excellent spiritual director.  John Wesley is respected for his spiritual direction as much as for his evangelism.  If you don't understand spirituality, how can you possibly be an evangelist?  I suppose you can frighten people with lurid images of hellfire.  But the reality is people are already exploring faith and they are looking for answers, not threats.

The forums where atheists debate with Christians can be frustrating.  Anyone taking part must be seeking faith at some level.  What do they find?  People who have answers, mostly to the wrong questions.  The person who will be most helpful is the one who listens and answers the questions being asked.  But more than that, direction is to some degree a joint exploration.  A seasoned explorer knows the terrain although not every particularity.

So, formation starts before conversion, it has something to do with the context within which mission take place.  It is in conversations where believer and unbeleiver explore the terrain together.  And continues throughout Christian life, informing the practice of everyone involved in mission.  Mission is nothing without formation.

Mission requires many skills, drawing on analysis, organising, planning and implementation of programmes.  But the effective stuff happens in the unplanned interstices, the places where the real conversations take place.  Ultimately, mission aims to increase the chance of conversations taking place.

So, if churches are to do anything together they need to get formation right.

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The Swanwick Declaration

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In this second post about formation, I take a closer look at the Swanwick Declaration.  The link takes you to the full declaration on Churches Together in England's website.  It's a good read and mercifully short, in contrast to many ecumenical statements.

The second paragraph shows who made the declaration and these particular people were only a few of the many thousands who took part in the Not Strangers but Pilgrims interchurch process.  Note also the means by which they came to agreement about the Declaration 'we met, we listened, we talked, we worshipped, we prayed, we sat in silence, deeper than words'.  They were reminded of the context, a sense that this was an essential detour from the mission of the church to a sinful world and of the views of younger people, who 'called on us to be ready to sort out our priorities so that we could travel light and concentrate on our goal.'  

Note the words of paragraph 3:

We now declare together our readiness to commit ourselves to each other under God. Our earnest desire is to become more fully, in his own time, the one Church of Christ, united in faith, communion, pastoral care and mission. Such unity is the gift of God. With gratitude we have truly experienced this gift, growing amongst us in these days. We affirm our openness to this growing unity in obedience to the Word of God, so that we may fully share, hold in common and offer to the world those gifts which we have received and still hold in separation. In the unity we seek we recognise that there will not be uniformity but legitimate diversity.

The commitment is to commit ourselves to each other under God.  This does not imply full visible unity, although it does imply accountability.  This is easily said but what happens where we disagree?  The desire is to become 'more fully' the one church of God.  Note this is not 'fully'; the process, it is implied, is about becoming; there will never be a past tense.  Unity increases and is not expected to stop growing.  So, they did not anticipate uniformity.  There has been much discussion about what is meant by 'legitimate diversity' and we can anticipate some disagreement about what is in fact legitimate.

One final comment about paragraph 4, which reads:

It is our conviction that, as a matter of policy at all levels and in all places, our churches must now move from co-operation to clear commitment to each other, in search of the unity for which Christ prayed and in common evangelism and service of the world.

Note the agreement is commitment to each other.  This is not the same as full visible unity.  It is a vision of a diverse church committed to all its parts.

Over the years, It seems this commitment has been interpreted through the medium of mission.  Perhaps this is an easy option as mission tends not to be quite so tied up in ecclesiology (although it is) but also because young people seem to have decided over the last 20 years to go it alone, presumably because the churches have decided not to travel light and have taken an awful lot of baggage with them. 

But perhaps another error has been to believe mission is the only game in town.  We have focused on mission at the expense of formation and it is the relationship between these two I will explore next.

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