The Trinity and Ecumenical Church Thought

The Church-Event

William C. Ingle-Gillis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351880930
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Some hundred years from inception, the ecumenical movement is stagnating. William C. Ingle-Gillis argues that the problem lies in modern ecumenism's treatment of denominational Churches as provisional entities requiring reunion to be more fully Christ's Body. In a work unique both to ecumenical studies and to trinitarian theology, the author redefines ecclesial life from the premise that God's essence is personhood-in-communion and that the ultimate calling of human persons is to share as fully in the divine life as Christ himself. Concluding that the Churches are, by the Spirit's action, a tangible, dynamic event, wherein God makes visible his on-going reconciliation of the world to himself, Ingle-Gillis argues that the Churches' true life lies in coming-together, rather than being-together. This conclusion places ecumenism at the heart of Church life and witness.

Part 1
The provisionalist ecclesiology of modern ecumenism

Chapter 1
Ecumenism and ecclesiology

Introduction: the modern ecumenical challenge

Gathered at the Lambeth Conference of 1920 the diocesan bishops of the Anglican Communion issued An Appeal to All Christian People. The encyclical’s prophetic tone embodied a profound hope, not uncommon amongst modern ecumenism’s earliest advocates, that the Churches of Christ then stood at the cusp of a new era in Christian history. The twentieth century like none other before was to be an ecumenical century: one in which the bitter disputes of the past would finally give way to the reunion of all believers into one common flock united within a single fold. ‘The times’, proclaimed the bishops,

call us to a new outlook and new measure. The Faith cannot be adequately apprehended and the battle of the Kingdom cannot be worthily fought while the body is divided, and is thus unable to grow up into the fulness of the life of Christ. The time has come, we believe, for all the separated groups of Christians to agree in forgetting the things which are behind and reaching out towards the goal of a reunited Catholic Church … .

The vision which rises before us is that of a Church, genuinely Catholic, loyal to all Truth, and gathering into its fellowship all ‘who profess and call themselves Christians’, within whose visible unity all the treasures of faith and order, bequeathed as a heritage by the past to the present, shall be possessed in common, and made serviceable to the whole Body of Christ.¹

History would suggest that, despite the bishops’ belief in the novelty of their appeal, the Lambeth proposal did not so much herald a unique development as a modern expression of Christianity’s age-old struggle for unity. ‘Is Christ divided?’, demands the Apostle Paul himself to his feuding flock in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:13, AV).² ‘Was Paul crucified for you?’, he laments, this self-same Paul whose quarrels with the Judaisers of Antioch had required for resolution a full apostolic council (Acts 15, Gal. 2:1–14) – convened by the same disciples who once had bickered over seats in the coming Kingdom before Christ ended the matter on his own cryptic terms (Matt. 20:20–8, Luke 22:24–30). The contradictory realities of fractious humanity and the Gospel’s communion-imperative have plagued Christian society from its inception.

Indeed throughout the course of two Christian millennia, wherever dissension has been found the ecumenical challenge has appeared as a constant imperative. Despite generation after generation of religious war and persecution, bitterness and recrimination, anathema and propaganda, the ‘heretic’ has rarely been classified in precisely the same category as the ‘infidel’. Even in the most polemic of times separated Nicene communities have often recognized a common bond, however tenuous. Time and again the Churches have undertaken to explore the theology of that bond and to give it more visible expression.

A smattering of illustrations might include Augustine’s laborious efforts to restore communion with the Donatists, the sporadic bargains struck from the fifth to the seventeenth centuries between Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians, the short-lived restorations of Orthodox-Catholic communion at the Councils of Lyons and Florence, doctrinal bargaining amongst Lutheran and Reformed communities during the Reformation’s formative period, the nineteenth-century Oxford Movement’s overtures to Rome and Constantinople.

Yet if the drive for reunion is not unique to modern times, the Anglican bishops’ sense of urgency, seen in retrospect, was not out of place. The twentieth century was to be marked by staggering political, social and religious turbulence which altered all Churches’ involvement with the world and with one another on the deepest levels. In the century’s first half the collapse of the ‘old world’ European empires, punctuated by two world wars, spelled the end of the political protection under which the western Churches’ missions had spread. The second half, dominated by Cold War ideological battles, saw in the West the marked rise of secularism that rapidly marginalized Christianity’s societal influence and in the East produced outright persecution of all religions under state-sponsored atheism.

The present day has brought new challenges. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse many Eastern Churches struggle, with severely limited resources, to respond to massive social changes and new religious equilibria in their homelands. In historical trouble-spots the world over the decay of Cold War alliances has revived militant nationalism, which often has co-opted religious belief into its service. In the West free-market triumphalism offers up the Cult of the Almighty Dollar for ‘all times and all places’ – even times of economic recession – with the stock market as the temple for adoration. Throughout the world increasingly sophisticated transport systems have facilitated extensive migrations of large populations, whilst advancing communication and information technology has created an ever-freer global exchange of ideas. Together these trends have fostered the growth of multi-cultural, multi-ethical societies – no bad development in itself, but nonetheless one in which the Churches often struggle to find a meaningful voice.

Few of these dramatic upheavals had transpired when the Lambeth Appeal was issued, nor could many have been accurately predicted. But significant societal transformations were already evident in seminal form, and modern ecumenism constituted a notable aspect of the Churches’ response. ‘About the ecumenical movement, there is a certain historical inevitability’; so Argue anthony and Richard Hanson.³ The familiar ‘truths’ of Victorian-era empires, philosophies and ideologies were fast fading. In fact the Hansons argue that some ‘truths’, such as the intimate Church-state bond forged during the Reformation, had actually begun to atrophy decades before.⁴ If the twentieth century yet held many a surprise in store, the Churches already had some premonition of challenges forthcoming, not least from a growing indifference to theism in Europe and the failure of traditional denominational polemics to excite in non-European societies the same passions or sense of identity that they aroused in their lands of origin.

The Churches of the early 1900s began to recognize that denominational isolationism and factional infighting were a liability to fulfilling Christ’s mandate to engage the world and make disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:19). They began to discern the need to enhance whatever recognition of common faith and ministry already existed amongst them, to overcome doctrinal disputes and excommunicate status and to look towards one another for support rather than competition. By the close of the twentieth century’s first decade, three world mission conferences – in London (1888), New York (1900) and Edinburgh (1910) – had begun to lay the foundations of a new phase of ecumenism in large part by challenging the credible witness and practical efficacy of separated, bickering faith-communities whose core proclamation was the Gospel’s healing power, the restoration of the sinner and the unity of God and humanity in the Lord Jesus Christ.⁵ ‘It can be said’, writes John Paul II,

that the ecumenical movement in a certain sense was born out of the negative experience of each one of those who, in proclaiming the one Gospel, appealed to his own Church or Ecclesial Community. This was a contradiction which could not escape those who listened to the message of salvation and found in this fact an obstacle to acceptance of the Gospel.⁶

Thus, out of a certain practical necessity was born modern ecumenism.

Development and characteristics of modern ecumenism

From these pragmatic beginnings the process of rapprochement, although by no means complete, has been remarkably swift, given the depth of Christianity’s divisions. The initial flurry of letters and encyclicals such as the Lambeth Appeal, meant both to test the ecumenical waters and to propose terms of engagement, were quickly followed by resolutions committing Churches to ecumenical work, preliminary theological investigations, prototypical intercommunion proposals and a handful of actual agreements amongst like-minded Churches.⁷ With the advent of the international Missionary Council (IMC) in 1921, the first Life and Work Conference (L&W) in 1925 and the Faith and Order Conference (F&o) of 1927, modern ecumenism gained its first permanent institutions which, given the participation not only of the major Protestant denominations and Anglicans but also of Orthodox and Old Catholics, began to assume universal proportions, incorporating as it did elements of all major Christian traditions, although not yet the Church of Rome itself. By 1948 the latter two structures had coalesced into the World Council of Churches (WCC), which at its Delhi Assembly of 1961 would incorporate the IMC as well. Finally in the mid-1960s the Second Vatican Council committed Rome ‘irrevocably’, in John Paul’s words, to the ecumenical project and culminated in the December 1965 retraction of the excommunications in force since 1054 between Catholicism and eastern orthodoxy.⁸ These developments together with increasing local involvement in ecumenical projects have helped to establish amongst mainstream Christianity the goal of reunion and the imperative of common mission as critical fixtures of modern Church life.

Today the WCC remains the most visible and central institutional expression of the ecumenical project. Counting its denominational membership at around 340, it includes many Churches from the mainstream Protestant traditions, a majority of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches, a growing number of conservative evangelicals and pentecostals, many of the ‘new’ Churches now exploding out of Africa and of course the ‘United and uniting’ Churches, the movement’s most conspicuous fruit.⁹ (Notably, many in the last two categories arose in the same missionary venues in which church division had proven a hindrance.) Although the Roman Catholic Church has never formally sought membership, it too has become critical to Council policy, programmes and studies through its Joint Working Group and full, lively membership in the Faith and Order Commission. Statistics aside, the ecumenical spirit has come far from the days in 1920 when the Lambeth bishops could see their vision only far in the distance. Today the ecumenical proclamations are much more confident, as F&O’s Fifth World Conference message illustrates: ‘We say to the churches: there is no turning back, either from the goal of visible unity or from the single ecumenical movement that unites concern for the unity of the Church and concern for engagement in the struggles of the world’.¹⁰

However heartening such signs of hope may be, wisdom would counsel against drawing conclusions too rapidly, for more than eight decades after the Lambeth Appeal’s unambiguous cry for transformation in the Churches’ manner of coexistence the transformation is incomplete. In the final analysis tenacity cannot by itself suffice to reunite the world’s diverse Christian populations – nor can mere containment efforts in response to secular challenges. The ‘new outlook’ to which the bishops refer demands the creation of a clean heart and renewal of a right spirit (Ps. 51:10) that goes well beyond interdependence based mainly on damage control. The ‘new measure’ underscores the Churches’ need to treat division and unity not simply by reacting to the problems of a new age, but by embarking on a theological and pastoral journey of much further-reaching and longer-lasting consequence. Ultimately the Appeal reminds us that any successful ecumenism must embrace theological expression and pastoral dynamics that surpass not only the historical causes of division, but historical reunion efforts too, insofar as those efforts have not finally borne fruit.

The beginning of the twenty-first century, roughly a hundred years removed from the earliest chapters of modern ecumenism, provides a suitable moment to reflect on the movement’s impact on the Churches of Christ; to evaluate its success in meeting its aims and facing its challenges; and, through an exploration of its theological basis, to offer suggestions for its long-term viability and direction in the years to come. Ultimately successful ecumenism must involve sustainable convergence in communion amongst the Christian peoples. Were modern ecumenism’s early proponents truly justified in proclaiming the advent of a new era in ecclesial life, and have their successors lived up to the task of forging the convergence envisioned? At the end of the twentieth century, conclusions were mixed.

On the one hand, Aram I, Armenian Orthodox Catholicos of Cilicia and Moderator of the WCC’s Eighth World Assembly in Harare, points to a consensus developed in the last decade that the ecumenical movement has arrived at a crossroads: ‘Some refer to the present period as one of “transition”; others speak of “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART 1 The provisionalist ecclesiology of modern ecumenism
• PART 2 Trinitarian ontology: the ecclesiological cornerstone
• PART 3 Event-ecclesiology and -ecumenism
• Bibliography
• Index