Here I Walk on First Things

Our spon­sor First Things is fea­tur­ing an arti­cle on our pil­grim­age on the web­site today, “Here I Walk, I Can­not Do Oth­er­wise.” Click over and take a look!

Allan Stanford says:
August 20, 2010 at 4:34 am
Saw your arti­cle in the WSJ. God bless you on your journey.
Reply
Wolf Paul says:
August 20, 2010 at 11:11 am
In your First Things arti­cle you write,
But this same quarter-century has seen, in the Lutheran domain alone, the growth of altar-and-pulpit fel­low­ship in the Com­mu­nity of Protes­tant Churches in Europe through the Leuen­berg Agree­ment, the sign­ing of the Joint Dec­la­ra­tion on the Doc­trine of Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion with the Catholic Church, and the apol­ogy of Luther­ans for six­teenth cen­tury per­se­cu­tions of Anabap­tists, met with a full dec­la­ra­tion of for­give­ness from the Men­non­ite community.
This same quar­ter cen­tury also has seen the whole­sale aban­don­ment of key aspects of the Chris­t­ian faith by some of these same churches, to where many of these churches in Europe no longer talk of sin and the need for sal­va­tion, there is debate in the German-speaking coun­tries and prob­a­bly else­where about whether the sub­sti­tu­tion­ary death of Christ is really a Chris­t­ian doc­trine but rather a cruel and loath­somely prim­i­tive notion that should be aban­doned, and there is increas­ing accep­tance in the churches of sex­ual mores which are con­trary to the tra­di­tion of the church and to Holy Scripture.
We may have removed some of the obsta­cles to unity from the 15th cen­tury, but new ones, even more insur­mount­able, are crop­ping up almost every day.
You write further,
If there’s any stag­na­tion going on, it’s prob­a­bly because ecu­menism has become a vic­tim of its own suc­cess. The bit­ter polemics and mutual dis­trust that were com­mon on both offi­cial and local lev­els a cen­tury ago are all but gone. Two “Chris­t­ian civil wars” (as the two World Wars are some­times called), fresh encoun­ters in the mis­sion field, and joint ser­vice projects have made friends of Chris­tians across all kinds of boundaries.
But now we have an increas­ingly bit­ter civil war over whether homo­sex­u­al­ity is a dis­or­der or a legit­i­mate vari­ant of the cre­ated order high­light­ing the fact that large and influ­en­tial sec­tions of the churches no longer feel bound by the evi­dent mean­ing of Scrip­ture, pro­duc­ing such gems as Epis­co­pal Bishop Bennison’s state­ment that “the church cre­ated the Bible, the church can change the Bible” — which, while not often expressed with such clar­ity, is a view shared by many in the Protes­tant churches.
We are now at a point where Evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tants like myself share more the­o­log­i­cal con­vic­tions with Rome than with lib­eral Protestants.
I am not sur­prised that the Ecu­meni­cal Move­ment is stag­nat­ing; the Roman Catholic Mag­is­terium would have to betray its own iden­tity if it went ahead at full steam in the face of the cur­rent realities.
So while I wish you a very good pil­grim­age to Rome I am not hope­ful that it will do any­thing to re-start the ecu­meni­cal movement.
Wolf Paul
Reply
Tim Cooper says:
August 22, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Sarah–
From read­ing your writ­ings I think you have the per­fect under­stand­ing of true ecu­menism. True ecu­menism isn’t about water­ing down the dif­fer­ences in our faith tra­di­tions or com­pro­mis­ing the truths we have become con­vinced based on our own study of his­tory and scripture.
True ecu­menism should be con­cerned about two issues:
First, is to dis­cover the truths that we can agree on. As an evan­gel­i­cal Protes­tant (includ­ing a strong pro­po­nent for all of Luther’s “solas”) for 46 years, and now as an ortho­dox Catholic for 6 plus years, I was amazed to learn all that the essen­tials of the faith we share… “the writ­ten word of God; the life of grace; faith, hope and char­ity, with the other inte­rior gifts of the Holy Spirit, and vis­i­ble ele­ments too. All of these, which come from Christ and lead back to Christ, belong by right to the one Church of Christ.” [Vat­i­can II’s Decree on Ecumenism].
We need to rec­og­nize the work­ing of the Holy Spirit in all those who claim Jesus as our Lord and Sav­ior. All Chris­tians can agree with one of my favorite lines in the Cat­e­chism of the Catholic Church—“The cross is the only lad­der to heaven”.
Sec­ond, after dis­cov­er­ing the truths we share we should work on prop­erly iden­ti­fy­ing our dif­fer­ences and pro­vid­ing clar­ity. For most of my life, I had a very poor under­stand­ing of how Catholics view scrip­ture and grace. One major prob­lem is our vocab­u­lary is a stum­bling block. For exam­ple, “Pray­ing to the saints” trans­lates to “wor­ship” for Protes­tants, but for Catholics only means ask­ing for inter­ces­sory prayers. Our under­stand­ing of “merit” is dif­fer­ent. For Protes­tants, “merit” means “earn­ing” our sal­va­tion. For Catholics, “merit” means being “rewarded for being faith­ful” to Christ in our words and deeds. These are just 2 examples.
I also rec­og­nize there are so many luke­warm, even “worldly” Catholics and I can’t blame Protes­tants for not being par­tic­u­larly impressed. How­ever, the tri­umphal­ism of the past by both sides of the Tiber has not served either side well. Jesus prayed for our unity. We owe it to Jesus to achieve what­ever unity is pos­si­ble. We can always pray for each other. We can always achieve unity in love if not form.
Reply