“Challenges for Ecumenism in the 21st Century”
Massachusetts Council of Churches
May 21, 2008
The National Council of Churches was formed in 1950, but its predecessor body, the Federal Council of Churches, began in 1908, so we are celebrating a kind of centennial. One of the first actions taken by the Federal Council in 1908 was the adaption of a social creed for the churches that included, quite prophetically, a call for the abolition of child labor and protection for workers in the industrial revolution. The NCC has written a new Social Creed for the 21st Century which I urge you to check out on our website. This evening, however, I want to call our attention to another anniversary of sorts that may help us identify challenges facing the contemporary ecumenical movement.
It has now been forty years since 1968. “Seems to me,” wrote Hannah Arendt in her correspondence with Karl Jaspers, “that children of the next century will learn about the year 1968 the way we [Europeans] learned about 1848” – i.e., as a point of momentous upheaval and tension. I was a freshman at Brown University forty years ago, reading news every evening on the college radio station, and I still remember the program at year’s end when we surveyed the top stories of 1968: the Tet Offensive, Johnson’s decision not to run again and Nixon’s subsequent election, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, racial tension in U.S. cities, massive war protests around the world (including the Democratic Convention in Chicago), the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia … “1968 was a great, wonderful year,” said Abbie Hoffmann shortly before his death in 1989 (which, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was the other watershed year of the late 20th Century). “They don’t,” said Abbie, “make years like that anymore. And if it weren’t for our efforts [in 1968] we would have a president today sending troops off to exotic countries like Lebanon and Grenada and bombing cities like Tripoli”! Change the names and the irony still hits home.
I begin by recalling this “anniversary” because it seems to me that 1968 will be remembered as the symbolic moment of transition to the pluralistic world we now so clearly inhabit. It is not just that people of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds have begun to live in closer proximity, though that is certainly true. Within the lifetime of many of us, Euro-Americans will be a minority in this country; and Harvard’s Diana Eck has documented the astonishing rise in religious diversity since the change in immigration laws in the mid-1960s. And it is not just that the world is becoming more interdependent, though that is certainly true in this age of globalization. No, the real transition, I am convinced, is that 1968 helped expose (at least for many of us) the myth of US superiority (the myth of white, male, western superiority) for what it is, and, thus, opened us, or forced us, to take the claims of those who see the world through other eyes more seriously. Of course, as you well know, the current administration has been intent on reasserting that myth with a vengeance, but many Americans simply can no longer buy it - which accounts, in large part, for the depth of our present culture wars.
What is true in the culture is also true in the church. It was forty years ago, in 1968, that the Roman Catholic bishops of Latin America met in Medillin, Columbia to speak about the church’s “preferential option for the poor” – the foundational movement for liberation theology and the signal that the era dominated by the dialectic of liberal and neo-orthodox theology was at an end. (As if in confirmation, Karl Barth died in 1968.) And it was in 1968 that the World Council of Churches held its fourth assembly (Uppsala) where for the first time Christians from Africa, Asia, and Latin America began to take charge. (To make matters more complex, Uppsala was on the heels of Vatican II and, thus, was the first World Council of Churches assembly with official Roman Catholic Church participation.)
Some Christian leaders (e.g., Konrad.Raiser) identify Uppsala as the place where the World Council of Churches began to live out its calling as a gathering of the global church. Others (e.g., Geoffrey Wainwright) see this as the moment when the World Council of Churches went astray by losing its historic focus on Christian unity. But everyone agrees that this was the decisive point of transition. Within three years, the World Council of Churches would have its first General Assembly forum outside Europe or North America (Philip Potter), its first department on interfaith dialogue (in response to Asian initiative), and the first signs of a liberationist orientation (the Program to Combat Racism). The National Council of Churches was not far behind. Within a decade, demographers would tell us that, for the first time in 1000 years, the majority of Christians no longer live in countries of the North Atlantic – to the point that the center of Anglicanism is now Nigeria and the center of Presbyterianism is now South Korea.
To put it succinctly, prior to 1968 the ecumenical movement was basically an effort to unite the shards of a fragmented Christendom, to bring together a church split by European, Reformation-era theological disputes. After 1968, the fact of cultural and theological diversity began, gradually but surely, to dominate ecumenical consciousness.
I want to add to two “footnotes” that help make this point. First, Faith and Order studies through the 1960s could speak without blushing of “the primary message of the Bible” which, when commonly affirmed through dialogue, would serve as the foundation for unity across cultural and confessional boundaries. It was not until 1967 that a Faith and Order study finally acknowledged that the Bible actually canonizes diversity. This might sound obvious, but that only indicates the extent of the transition.
Second, the Massachusetts Council of Churches produced an excellent study on the goals of ecumenism, Odyssey Toward Unity, during the mid-1970s. The text already speaks of a “crisis of ecumenism” and says that “pluralism must be incorporated” in any adequate understanding of unity - but it is clear that the full significance of the transition was not yet grasped. It was still too close.
Over the past forty years, the ecumenical movement has been grappling with the implications of this transition to a more pluralistic world. A good example is the definition of Christian unity. The Plan of Union produced by the Consultation on Church Union, a plan based on theological consensus which would have resulted in one large denomination, was finalized in … 1968. But it was already dead on arrival (as the churches soon indicated) because, at least in part, it felt like a constriction of legitimate diversity.
Another footnote: The structural union of Christian Congregationalists and Evangelical and Reformed churches to form the United Church of Christ still made sense in 1957 because denominations were still the carriers of that identity. As Robert Wuthnow and other sociologists have noted, however, by the late 1960s mainline denominations were already beginning to lose their hold – which is why creating a new big one made less and less sense. The real divisions were now within the churches rather than between them; and the new liberal-conservative split within them had to do precisely with how Christians respond to pluralism. Can people of other faiths be saved apart from confession of Jesus Christ? Liberal Lutherans will likely agree with liberal Methodists on an answer, but neither will agree with conservative members of their own tribe. My own denomination, the Disciples of Christ, had the bad luck to restructure our church in … 1968 - which means that we have a structure wonderfully appropriate for the 1950s, one that takes inadequate account of diversity. It is always hard to see a transition when you are in the middle of it.
The favored term in ecumenical dialogues since the late 1960s is not unity (which has overtures of institutional merging and a reduction of diversity) but koinonia, a biblical word that focuses more on relationships than structures. And, as Konrad Raiser puts it, the chief concern of Paul’s use of koinonia “is to identify the constitutive relatedness of those who differ from one another.” Our goal, says Raiser, is community, and community is not enhanced by sameness but by the relationship of those who are not the same. You can hear how the new experience of pluralism (the new affirmation of diversity) has changed the very vocabulary of ecumenism.
We have covered a lot of ground, but most of it, I suspect, is pretty familiar to most of you, though I hope it has helped to provide a kind of overview. Over the past four decades, the ecumenical movement has been greatly challenged by its encounter with genuine plurality. But now, if I’m not mistaken, there is a pushback, and it poses a new set of challenges for the years ahead. Another watershed year (along with 1968 and 1989) was, of course, 2001. Since 9-11, fear of those who are different has once more been made respectable and has found its way into public policy. But, once again, my focus is the church.
One indication of pushback against the affirmation of diversity is Pope Benedict’s frontal assault on relativism, which he calls “the central problem for the faith at the present time” and which he defines as the denial that there is such a thing as objective, universal truth. The harshest critique in the Pope’s homily at the prayer service for ecumenical guests, last month in New York City, was leveled at the “relativistic approach to Christian doctrine” which leads to the notion that “one need but follow his or her own conscience and choose a community that best suits his or her individual tastes.” You hear in this a concern for diversity run amuk, and it is increasingly echoed by responsible voices. In the December 2007 issue of Atlantic Monthly, Curtis White scathingly attacked NPR’s “This I Believe” series for reducing faith to pure individualism. “Where everyone is free to believe whatever she likes,” he writes, “there is no real shared conviction at all, and hence no church and certainly no community.”
And, I would add, little ability to stand firmly against injustice. If one belief is really as good as the next, then how do we say No! to Nazis and racists with sufficient force and clarity. There is a real tension here. Most Protestants, I suspect, experience Pope Benedict as overly coercive and hierarchical – giving too much weight to the tradition from corporate teachings and not enough to the dictates of conscience and the insights of contemporary experience. Thus, I understand Catholic reformers when they say they are working to free the individual from the tyranny of the church. But surely there is also merit in the Pope’s call to free the church from the tyranny of the individual. This will be an important area of dialogue for years to come.
Let me offer another example of rethinking previous affirmations of diversity. The ecumenical movement, as I have already noted, has pressed us to recognize the global diversity of the church; but that diversity has turned out to be so great that it often seems to undermine the very possibility of dialogue. Philip Jenkins observes, in his widely-ready book, The Next Christendom, that the cultural, theological gap between Christians in the West and Christians in the South is now so wide that we have more in common with U.S. secularists than with the majority of our co-religionists in other part of the world. Just ask Episcopalians who face an almost unbearable tension between their commitment to justice for gay and lesbian neighbors and their commitment to be in communion with global followers of Christ.
There are many other examples I could give of this pushback to pluralism. Interfaith dialogue, for example, was a major item on the agenda of the World Council of Churches 2006 assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil – but the real issue at the assembly was how to pursue better interfaith relations while also strengthening Christian identity. Time prevents further elaboration, but I hope that my basic point is clear: Over the past forty years, the ecumenical movement has been reshaped by a new appreciation for diversity. New voices at the table have led to new priorities, interfaith relations is now a major part of the agenda, and even the meaning of Christian unity has been recast. But the challenge of the coming years may be the tension created by the reaction to pluralism – and not just from conservative sisters and brothers. Yes to theological diversity, but with limits, lest we find ourselves unable to speak prophetically to the world’s idolatries. Yes to cultural diversity, but with limits stemming from our justice commitments. Yes to religious diversity, but without sacrificing the particularity of Christian identity.
I want to end with a brief word about councils of churches. Councils of churches could be – should be – places where we explore the most difficult issues together, where the tension between unity and diversity is explored – together. But this can only be the case if bodies like the National Council of Churches and the Massachusetts Council of Churches are truly seen as councils of the churches. The tendency (whether here or not, you can tell me) is for churches to see councils as program agencies that can be “defunded” when “the church” faces tough times, to see councils as something we join, rather than something we are.
Your Odyssey Toward Unity document names this problem very directly when it says that “a council of churches is its members.” The essence of the council, in other words, is the relationship of the churches to one another, not to an office in Boston or New York or Geneva. A council, according to your document, “represents the commitment of the member churches to give visible expression to the unity they now experience and to prepare for the unity which is to come” – however we understand it. Which means that councils are not permanent but provisional. Your ultimate goal is to be that place where the churches, through their life together, become more fully the church. Otherwise, we actually hinder the renewal of the church by allowing the denominations to feel good about their division.
May the MCC be a place where our deepest tensions are trustfully explored! May you be a place where the churches grow in unity and witness – to the glory of God!
Michael Kinnamon
General Secretary, National Council of Churches