The report includes eight points of convergence and I thought it might be interesting to consider them one by one.
Convergence 6
“One Holy Catholic and Apostolic” is the starting point of the theological reflection on unity. The unity of the Church has to find expression in a Catholicity formed by a common confession of the Apostolic faith, common worship/liturgy, and a shared life and mission.
So, 'One Holy Catholic and Apostolic' is the starting point? A starting point, maybe a good one. But the starting point? Really?
Let's be clear, the creeds divided the church. There were disagreements before the creeds but the great schism between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions are based upon one instance of particular reading. Furthermore, the non-Chalcedon's are highly significant in Christian history, even though they were divided from the Roman Empire because of differences over the creeds.
And how on earth are they intending to enforce common worship and liturgy? Once again we're back to control and the inability to conceive of the church without entrenched leadership. It is the accumulation or centralisation of power that leads to divisions.
We need a much more careful analysis of what causes divisions and how we might order our lives as Christians so that we share our traditions rather than enforce them.
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I will start by unpacking the words I ended with last time, 'An open library has been replaced by a closed book'.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the first post in a new sequence about formation. I suppose I better start by defining terms and then explain why I have chosen this theme.
Formation is one of the main aims of any church. Different traditions will have different names for it, I suppose formation is a term favoured in the Catholic tradition but I think we all do it. It is the means by which each tradition helps its members become familiar with God. We do it by reading the Bible, by participating in worship, praying alone and together, through listening to sermons and reading texts from our tradition. Sometimes it is possible to attend courses; obligatory for those who are selected to enter into ministry.
I intend to explore formation in its widest sense and so I will not restrict what I say to ordained ministry. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue the formation of the ordained is less important than formation of lay people, although the former tends to be more formal and intentional.
For example, it was fairly recently that I realised the extent to which my faith has been formed by Methodist hymns. I can't claim to have ever particularly liked them or paid much attention to them. But I must have sung thousands of them and now I appreciate how much they formed my faith.
So, why formation? I have been involved with national ecumenism in England since 2003. During that period there have been three strands to ecumenism. Two of them I find increasingly difficult and the third underdeveloped.
Full visible unity died in 1982 with the failure of the English Covenant. In 1989 it was formally superseded by the new ecumenical instruments but persisted through institutions such as Local Ecumenical Partnerships. It is a Protestant objective and the idea was developed when ecumenism was a Protestant project in this country. Whilst we might see visible unity between a few traditions in the foreseeable future, I don't think even that limited aim is terribly likely. However, the idea of full visible unity has been extremely productive and has brought all the churches closer together. It is hard to envisage a more effective approach to grinding down ecclesiological differences.
The second strand is more recent and possibly dates back to Mission Shaped Church (or at least that report made the case most effectively). This is a pragmatic approach to ecumenism. The argument is that unity is essential if mission is to be effective. Now, I certainly believe the organisational structures we have for local collaboration help with mission and therefore this is a dimension to ecumenical work. However, it simply isn't true that unity is essential to mission. Many churches manage mission without paying any attention whatsoever to other churches. They might be arrogant but what they're doing seems to work.
The third strand is the approach agreed by all the churches in 1989. The Swanwick Agreement clearly shows ecumenism as churches acting together. It is a significant departure from full visible unity. This alternative is sometimes called reconciled diversity. The odd thing is few Protestant theologians seem to take it seriously. I have often written of the reconciliation of all things to God - but does this really mean all things are to lose their integrity?
It seems to me formation underlies the Swanwick Agreement and through this sequence of posts I will explore this further.
A few years ago, I attended a lecture about the history of Cliff College. Cliff is a Methodist college of evangelism and is about 15 miles from where I live, in the Peak District. The lecturer was a baptist scholar and the content of his story was quite surprising.
Cliff was founded just after the turn of the last century (indeed this was a centenary lecture). At the time, Methodist evangelism was Arminian in contrast with other evangelical traditions, which were Calvinist. The new college reflected the traditional Methodist emphasis on sanctification, in contrast to the Calvinist evangelical traditions. No Principle of Cliff was ever invited to attend the Keswick Convention (annual gathering of Calvinist evangelicals).
That is until the mid-seventies, when there was a subtle change. I became a Christian around that time and remember when I joined Newcastle Methsoc in about 1975. The new Chair of Methsoc, introduced sitting in a circle and singing hymns from sources other than the Methodist Hymn Book! This really was an issue at the time; today worship songs are the norm.
I think the then Principle of Cliff and these changes in the Methsocs were not unconnected and marked not only a movement towards a more Calvinist evangelicalism but also a move of evangelicals away from the mainstream life of the Methodist Church (which has always seen itself as an evangelical tradition). It seems from this time forward evangelicals and mainstream Methodists became estranged.
Conservative Evangelicals in Methodism, which later became Headway, represented a movement similar to the evangelical wing of the Church of England. However, something happened in Methodism in the mid-nineties. At the Derby Conference in, I think, 1994, the current statement about sexuality was adopted and Headway didn't like it one bit. Their opposition to what was and still is a rather safe compromise, was absolute. At the Blackpool Conference in 1996, they attempted to overturn the statement. Something happened at that Conference. They put everything into their case and were roundly knocked back. The then President made a firm request for a moratorium on the debate.
At the same time, the Decade of Evangelism (1990 - 2000) was also proving to be a disappointment and I can only surmise there was a lot of soul searching. In the last decade, there has been a move to build bridges with the mainstream church and the evangelicals have come in from the cold.
I remember a few years ago I sat in on a meeting of leading connexional evangelists. Amongst them was the late Rob Frost, a leading evangelical. He said when he heard young people saying they cannot belong to a church that condemns homosexuals, he had to listen to what they were saying. Everyone present agreed with what he said.
I think these changes within my own tradition are encouraging because they have shown evangelicals and others with different callings can work together in a constructive way. Indeed, the local evangelists I have met over the last 10 years have reminded me of the plight of many community development workers I have known during previous decades, undervalued and underpaid. Ten or fifteen years ago, I don't think I would have been able to write that I am honoured to work alongside evangelicals, today I can and that is because Methodist evangelicals have made a crucial decision to enter into conversation with their own church.
However, as I indicated in my last post, and will develop further in my next, there are still some outstanding issues.
Sometimes it is important to examine our assumptions. One such assumption is no ecumenical activity can be justified if it does not support the mission of the church. This seems to be accepted by all the traditions.
Perhaps one reason is the centenary of the the Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference. If the modern ecumenical movement started with that conference, mission and unity have always been two dimensions of the same activity. Later in the twentieth century, the Life and Work and then the Faith and Order movements started and so perhaps mission and unity had less prominence for a while.
There is a perception ecumenism and mission have become separate movements. While the celebration of Edinburgh 1910 had its official (sponsored by the World Council of Churches (WCC)) conference in Edinburgh in June (Edinburgh 2010), a much larger Cape Town 2010 conference in October, was sponsored by the Lausanne movement.
The first Lausanne Congress was in 1974 and marked a split in the ecumenical movement, or at least the Protestant part of it. The supporters of the Lausanne Covenant (formulated in 1974), founded in this country the Evangelical Alliance. This evangelical movement is an alternative ecumenical movement, open to all Christians. It operates independently of the movement supporting the World Council of Churches.
Although some churches belong to both movements, it is a significant split that is only slowly being healed. One encouraging event, is the WCC General Secretary addressed Cape Town 2010, for the first time.
We must not make the mistake of thinking these two movements are split along the lines of mission and unity. Just as the Lausanne movement is ecumenical in nature, so the Councils of Churches / Churches Together movement focuses on mission. Local Ecumenical Partnerships, which today are understood to be formal organisational structures, were a few decades ago the equivalent of today's Fresh Expressions. Indeed, it may be argued in their explicit linkage of mission and unity, they set a better example than some mission projects, where unilateral initiatives or initiatives that bypass established churches are not questioned.
In my next post I will say a bit more about evangelical ecumenism before I go on to highlight what I understand to be the weakness of the mission and unity model.
Consultancy for Mission and Ministry This should take you to details of the Consultancy for Mission and Ministry course at the York Insititute. See my post about non-directive consuultancy around 9 September 2009.
Image of Euphemia of Chalcedon by Nick in exsilio via Flickr
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