Exploring Ecumenism

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

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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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Interpretation of Scripture

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I read a blog post the other day and unfortunately I've lost it!  It was by a conservative theologian who divided Christians into two groups, arguing the church is splitting across all the traditions.  It is a common temptation to split people into two groups; reality is usually more complex.

Apparently the church is splitting between those who believe the Bible is the Word of God, inspired and for all time.  The others believe it was written by people in a particular time and place.  Such people may believe parts of it are inspired.

This is nothing new.  Indeed the former group is often understood as fundamentalist and the other group are labelled nominal Christians, not really Christians at all.

There are over 2 billion Christians. Do they all fit seamlessly into one or the other of these groups?  I suspect in practice there is a lot of common ground between them.

Let us assume the first group, those who believe Scripture is the once and for all word of God, is right.  What follows from this?  My first observation is people who fit this description can be found in many traditions, definitely Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox.  Each of these traditions has its own interpretations of the Bible.  Even within a tradition there will be several different interpretations. 

It seems some people believe their interpretation is the only true interpretation.  The problem is, how do we decide who is right? 

If you believe the Bible is God's final word, why is it so difficult to believe there is more than one legitimate interpretation?  Our interpretations are not in the Bible and so cannot be considered inerrant.  Indeed, this is the nature of God's gift of the Bible; it is ours to interpret.  Not as we like; there needs to accountability.  There is no need to fear new interpretations, so long as we are free to test them.  So, the unchanging nature of the source text becomes a gift.  We can with courage explore new interpretations in the sure knowledge that we can always press the reset button.

Now, take the other view.  Perhaps it is more at ease with contextual theologies but in practice they use the reset button, returning to the original texts all the time.  Their problem is perhaps less likelihood of seeing the word of God in the scriptures.  Yet if we see the various texts within the Bible as in dialogue with each other, so that the truth emerges not from any particular interpretation but from the conversations between believers, we can see how the Spirit might be found in old texts.

We cannot escape the fact that what we believe about the status of the Bible is itself an interpretation.  But freedom of interpretation flows from the unchanging nature of Scripture. Unchanging, because the Canon is fixed not because the writings have been ordained as inerrant by God.

On Memory and Forgetting

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So, here is a summary of what I'm saying about being stuck.  This applies to ecumenical winter, the Anglican Covenant and many other issues that plague our thinking.

Being stuck is not a bad place to be, although it is a frustrating place to be.  It is hard when everything's been tried and most actions make matters worse.  Being stuck is a place where there are no manuals and no-one has any experience to offer.

Memory undermines us because all we can recall is we've tried everything.  But we need memory because we need to know what has been tried.  We also need to understand why we are where we are.  But our memory is coloured by old models and so we also need to forget.

It is imagination what enables us to step outside the old constraints, the old models and try something new.  Most likely it won't work because it isn't really new or we didn't really understand our old mindsets.  So, we try again. 

Trial and error or iteration; works where the only thing we can do is to keep trying until something works.  The idea unsticking a problem can be done in theory first, in conversations between those with theological or some other technical expertise is simply false.  Theologians will interpret whatever turns out to work, they have no foreknowledge of what will work.  The academic thinks in a different way to people on the ground.  For the academic there is something called truth and if only we can find it, we'll find a way forward.

For the person on the ground there is the ground.  Old buildings, no money, broken relationships.  Where do we go from here?  And of course they are right.  The doctrine of incarnation tells us God is found in the material world and not in our theories about it.

First, there is no need to move forward from here.  Being stuck is a good place to be.  To be stuck is to be close to God because to be unstuck we must abandon our assumptions, including the ones that we are not even aware of.  For that we need prayer.

I am sure when Christians pray together, particularly enemies, those with very different views, the chances of being unstuck increase.  As our assumptions fall away, perhaps we'll see more clearly the bars on our cages.

The aim is not to convert the other to my view but to find a way forward together that works for God's Kingdom. 

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More about Memory and Imagination

At a presentation a few weeks ago, I made a suggestion.  The presentation was about a change of approach, undertaken by PCTs (Primary Care Trusts), to their work in communities.  There is a move from a needs based approach to an assets based approach.  It's not too important for my argument what these approaches mean but to aid understanding: needs-based approaches identify and attempt to meet the needs of communities, whilst assets-based approaches focus on the assets already present in the community.

One school of thought is demonstrated in diagram A.  Here there is a simple transition from a needs-based to an assets-based approach.

The speaker suggested a more helpful approach would be diagram B.  Here both needs and assets are identified, leading to a means to map the community in terms of its needs and assets.  So, a community might be low in terms of some needs but have the means to address them because it is high in certain assets.

I'm a bit sceptical about these types of approach.  Both are assessments made by outsiders, on their terms to meet their own targets.  To understand what is going on in a given community, perhaps we need a model like diagram C.  Here the PCT might have been using the needs-based approach with (lets be generous) a degree of success.  But over time, there are diminishing returns and so it is appropriate to introduce a new assets-based approach.  Similarly, this might start out as effective but over time becomes less so.  As each approach delivers fewer returns, there will be a need to develop new approaches.

What any community will experience as projects progress through their life cycle, is a sense of stuckness.  Circumstances will improve to the extent people have the imagination to develop a next step.  To do this they need to move outside the mindset of the current models (needs, assets or what-have-you) and find a new paradigm. 

The thing is people remember.  They remember the old projects and the old models.  Any new movement will be successful to the extent to which it acknowledges past experience in the neighbourhood.  Old models can weigh heavily on a community, where the people have seen it all before.  The new worker is at a disadvantage because she does not remember, the residents are at a disadvantage because they do. 

This is the problem with any experience of stuckness.  Memory reminds us of all the things that have been tried (and failed) and so undermines imagination.  But without memory, imagination cannot grapple with the reality of this specific place and time.

But being stuck, in a community or in church relationships, is a good place to be.  It's a good place to be because it is where God is to be found.  Our mindsets are full of assumptions that have to be addressed to enable us to become unstuck.  Old methods, for example, faith and order approaches, no longer work because they have become constraints on our imagination.  We need to remember but also step outside our old assumptions.

Memory and Imagination

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It's all very well suggesting the way out of the ecumenical winter is to by-pass formal conversations.  But is it possible to be more specific?

A commonplace objection to ecumenism is, unity means uniformity.  The aim of ecumenism is to kill diversity.  Here's a typical statement from a blog post by Harriet Baber, There's no point in interfaith:

Ecumenism as practised during the latter half of the 20th century and into the new millennium was not only wasteful: it was positively pernicious. In order to "draw closer in sacred things" it promoted liturgical uniformity. And this meant less choice for laypeople.

Let me make three points:

1. Superficially, it is true this has been the ecumenical endeavour, at least for certain Protestant churches.
2. Very few ecumenists understand this type of unity to be the goal of ecumenism
3. Many non-ecumenists would agree with this statement.

The problem is a failure of memory and imagination.  We do not appreciate how deep divisions are or how valuable they are. 

There is a failure of memory.  Full visible unity has been successful but with the failure of the 1982 English Covenant, it was over as a goal.  This was recognised in the Swanwick Agreement of 1989 but the Faith and Order debate has continued as if nothing has changed.

The narrow confines of Faith and Order work may seem comfortable and safe but does it remember the roots of our divisions or the nature of the progress that has already been made?  As churches move closer, they find progress is slower.  They are repelled as they realise their distinctions are of value.

And so we also need an imaginative practice, moving outside of formal conversations, which pictures a global church, united and diverse.  In winter as the land covers in snow, it loses its distinctive features.  The ecumenical spring will sharpen the landscape and many new flowers will bloom.  For the winter we need clothing to help us, more than survive, revive out imagination.

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On Being Stuck

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In the last couple of posts, I wrote about the Anglican Covenant debate.  I could also mention the recent meeting between Olav Fyske Tveit, General Secretary of the WCC and Pope Benedict XVI.  Tveit gave the Pope a pair of gloves, as there is a need for the right equipment to address the problem of the ecumenical winter.  'The Norwegians have a saying, '"In Norway there is no such thing as bad weather just bad clothing".'

I am currently re-reading Robert M Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  In chapter 24, he writes of what happens when you need to unscrew a plate to access the insides of a motorcycle.  The screw sheers off, what do you do?  There is nothing about this problem in any manual.  The screw is a tiny cheap device which is normally taken for granted.  Once it sheers it prevents any progress whatsoever.  So, what do you do?

You could throw the motorcycle over a cliff.  Momentarily, this might feel good but really - throw away a good motorcycle for a little screw?  There has to be a better way.  The problem is that where the manuals run out of advice you need to take a wider view.  The motorcycle is part of a larger system than the one the manual deals with.

So, for example, it must happen frequently in the life of someone who mends motorcycles for a living.  Ask a mechanic and she might reply, something along the lines of ... ' well, I try something and if that doesn't work I try something else until I get the screw out'.  This might not sound satisfactory but what else is there?

Ecumenism (and the Anglican Covenant) are both intractable in their own ways.  Part of the problem is the Faith and Order approach.  Its problem is its successes.  Theologians have developed a significant body of material that has reconciled communions despite their differences. 

Sometimes there's an arrogance; all these local churches working together are not enough they argue.  We need formal conversations to move ecumenism forwards.

The problem is once you get stuck, more of the same is not enough.  The bigger picture needs to be considered and new approaches tried until the system becomes unstuck.

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The Anglican Covenant Debate

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This post needs to be read in the context of the last one.  My aim is to explain why I think the current debate about the Anglican Covenant is important to ecumenical relations and indeed to the wider community in Britain.

The Anglican Covenant derives from the worldwide Anglican Communion's (in blue on map) debate about sexuality.  Some provinces in the West have ordained gay Bishops and other provinces, primarily in Africa do not find this acceptable.  The position seems to be the former group have been excluded from conversations within the communion, whilst the latter have more or less absented themselves because they do not feel the former have been excluded enough.

So, the idea is to agree that if any province wishes to make a decision outwith the agreed criteria of what it means to be an Anglican, their decision cannot be implemented until it has the approval of the communion as a whole.  It seems there will be panel whose role will be to agree what is Anglican and whether a new proposal meets these criteria.

I cannot see how this could possibly work.  If we consider the historic compromise between the three main branches of Anglicanism in the Church of England, there has never been an overall authority to which they have to go to justify their particular doctrinal emphases.  That is how catholicity works, it cannot happen if it depends upon some formal authority.  (The Roman Catholic Church is perhaps an exception.  It is a single worldwide church.  I suspect it is the nature of Anglican catholicity that it cannot form a single worldwide communion.  The intricate balance between traditions within a single Anglican province is not robust enough to work on a global scale.)

The problems started because the General Synod made decisions in recent years that some cannot accept, primarily about the ordination of women.  When both sides threaten to take their bat home should the other win, you have a problem.  However, as far as I'm aware this isn't the real situation.  Those opposed to the ordination of women are threatening to leave, whilst I have not heard of those in favour making an equivalent threat. 

In the light of the quote from Volf, a couple of posts ago, we can see the danger.  Once the polarity of the debate becomes more important than unity, the established arrangements fall apart.

Those who support the Anglican Covenant see this and are attempting to hold the communion together with a written document.  And it is perhaps those people who need to look at how this debate has been conducted and whether their emphasis on unity has been the right one.

In some parts of the world, LGBT people are persecuted.  The attitude of the church has contributed to this persecution in some places and opposed it in others.  Attempts to hold together a communion under these differences are doomed to failure because self-evidently these concepts of justice are incompatible.  Without reconciliation there can be no progress.  A document that papers over the cracks cannot do the job.

This is a tragic situation because what was at one time a debate between two incompatible ethical understandings of what is God's justice has become a struggle over the heart of the Anglican communion.  I fear the Anglican Covenant is a much greater threat to Anglican integrity than a split in the communion would be.  

The history of the churches is a history of such splits and perhaps it would be more honest for the two sides to go their separate ways.

There is however a ray of hope.  I read somewhere that the stand against non-heterosexual sexualities is primarily amongst the Bishops.  The clergy in those provinces have other priorities, such as poverty and Aids.  Sexuality is far down their list of priorities and surely it is ultimately for all ministers a pastoral matter, rather than a political or ecclesiological one.  As always the response of people with power to a problem is to legislate.  Perhaps it would be best if the response came from people on the front line, unencumbered by the pronouncements of those who seek purity, sexual or ecclesiological.

But it is also an ecumenical issue and the Anglican Communion perhaps needs to turn to its ecumenical partners for help.  Volf writes: Other cultures are not a threat to the pristine purity of our cultural identity, but a potential source of enrichment (page 52).  The other cultures I mean here are outside the Anglican communion.  Perhaps through their ecumenical relationships, Anglicans can find new perspectives on their own communion. 

Volf goes on to write on page 53: In the battle against evil, especially against the evil in ones own culture, evangelical personality needs ecumenical community.  The church does not belong to any one faction and what I believe Volf means here is that whilst the fervour of those who believe they have the truth has value for the church, it does so only where it is tempered by understanding the faith as wider than any one faction.

What worries me is reconciliation needs to take place not only between the members of the communion but also between the communion and LGBT people.  As the fervour of ecclesiological conflict dominates the discourse, it is easy to forget those who experience practical discrimination day after day.  A church that should be on the side of the persecutor has turned persecutor.

Those who argue on behalf of the persecuted are not in a position to forgive because they are not the ones who are being persecuted.  This means the issues cannot be addressed until those who favour the persecution of people with different sexualities repent of their sin.  I am sure this will happen in time.  Whether it happens in time to save the Anglican communion is another matter.

Why The Anglican Covenant Debate is Important

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This is the example promised in my last post.  I write as a Methodist looking into a troubled sister communion.  It is time I addressed this issue because it has profound implications for English ecumenism. 

The Church of England, and indeed the worldwide Anglican communion, has made a tremendous contribution to ecumenism.  This is largely due to their catholicity.  It is hard to imagine (or at least it used to be) Anglicanism without their brand of catholicity.  For many decades, if not centuries, Anglicanism has functioned as a compromise between Catholics (outside the Roman Catholic Church), evangelicals (who can be traced back to the seventeenth century Puritans) and a liberal tradition which seems to have arisen through eighteenth century latitudinarianism, although it may go further back than that.

These traditions were held together by an ingenious system which included the Book of Common Prayer and was embedded in the structures of the church.  From time to time, groups could not be contained and, around the start of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most serious split was with the Methodists.

To me, as an outsider, the loss of this catholicity amounts to the loss of Anglicanism.  Some might respond with 'good riddance' but I think this response needs to be examined carefully.  I have written about how my own Methodist tradition contributed its organisational approach to the rising working classes from the impoverished industrial poor in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In a similar way, the Church of England, has had an immense influence on a state which has itself been a compromise between many traditions.  Secularism in England is based upon the historic Anglican compromise.  Different Christian traditions and indeed other faiths today, co-exist and their coexistence is based upon the Anglican catholic compromise.

This is what the Anglican Covenant debate is about.  If the Anglican communion were to disintegrate, the implications in Britain and all over the world would be profound.  In my next post I will write about what I understand is happening.

How do Christians Understand Justice?

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I want to take the theme of reconciliation forward, through a few posts based upon the book by Miroslav Volf (illustrated), Exclusion and Embrace.  I first mentioned this book in January 2009, in the post Distinct and Related.  At the time I said I was reading the book and would write a few more posts later.  It's taken me a long time to finish it!

This is from page 198:

The question is whether Christians who want to uphold God's universal justice can judge between cultures with divine infallibility.  The answer is that they cannot.  For one, Christians stand inside a culture, inside a tradition, inside an interest group.  Unlike God's knowledge, their knowledge is limited and distorted.  Their judgements about what is just in concrete situations are inescapably particular.  Hence Croatian Christians can disagree as much with Serbian Christians as they do with Muslims about whether a particular political stance or military action was just.  Inversely, Croatian Christians may agree more with, say, Croatian atheists on what is just than with Serbian Christians.  Second, well-meaning Christians disagree profoundly about the nature of justice.  Western Christian fundamentalists disagree with Liberation Theologians about the very notion of justice, they claim that their account of justice is true because it is God's justice notwithstanding.  And nonWestern conservative Christians may agree more with Liberation Theologians than  with Western fundamentalists.  We must therefore distinguish between our idea of God's justice and God's justice itself.

So, our knowledge of God's justice is limited and compromised.  It is our failure to grasp the nature of our compromises with the world that I understand to be sin.  All of us pick up cues, often unconsciously, from our own culture.  What is just therefore seems obvious to us and so we respond to others, from different cultures, by projecting our evil onto them.  Volf writes on page 53:

The images of communal survival and flourishing our culture feeds us all too easily blur our vision of God's new creation - America is a Christian nation, we then think for instance, and democracy the only true Christian political arrangement.  Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture.

Whilst I try to be aware of the prejudices I bring to conversations, it is entirely possible I am not conscious of the compromises I make.  This is why humility is so important.  Humility is understanding my justice is compromised; I cannot rely entirely upon my own judgement.

John Wesley in his sermon 'The Catholic Spirit', makes a similar point.  Because of sin, I know what I believe to be true will in some respects be false.  The problem is there is no way I can know for certain which beliefs are in fact false. This is a difficult truth to catch hold of if it is understood to be a form of moral relativism; it this is not to believe some or all views are equally valid.  Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to argue no views are valid. 

Perhaps the way to approach this is to examine the consequences of taking absolute positions and I will follow up with a contemporary example in my next post.

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