A Quick Guide to Some Ecumenical Concepts

We must have our hearts and souls in the right place to engage in ecu­menism, but that’s not quite enough. We must also devote the best of our minds to this work. Ecu­menism requires care­ful bib­li­cal exe­ge­sis, prob­ing his­tor­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tions, philo­soph­i­cal clar­ity about our terms and def­i­n­i­tions, and the­o­log­i­cal pre­ci­sion. There is a good rea­son bilat­eral dia­logues always take place in teams—lots of peo­ple, with spe­cial­ties in many dif­fer­ent areas, are needed to keep the bal­ance and make sure all impor­tant points, includ­ing the range within each denom­i­na­tional fam­ily, receive due atten­tion. In addi­tion to this spe­cial­ized work, Chris­tians not directly involved in the dia­logues are needed to study the results, reflect on them, and build on them.

To that end, ecu­menists have devel­oped cer­tain con­cepts that help them accom­plish their tasks. These con­cepts give a frame­work for how to go about their dia­logues and under­stand the var­i­ous churches bet­ter; they also help to iden­tify the dif­fi­cult areas and map out the way toward a new future together. Since these terms have a habit of com­ing up quite often in ecu­meni­cal cir­cles, it’s good to have some basic famil­iar­ity with them. All of them serve to help Chris­tians to dis­cern what is and what is not church-dividing. Iden­ti­fy­ing that line between unity and sep­a­ra­tion is essen­tial to mov­ing the churches to a new rela­tion­ship with each other that bet­ter reflects God’s will.

The first thing to fig­ure out in a dia­logue is who exactly the part­ner is. In ecu­meni­cal dia­logue, we’re talk­ing to other Chris­tians. That’s pretty straight­for­ward, though not quite as straight­for­ward as you might think. This is because dif­fer­ent churches make dif­fer­ent kinds of claims about them­selves, and that itself is one of the dif­fer­ences that must be worked out in ecumenism.

For instance, the Ortho­dox regard them­selves as being noth­ing other than the church of the apos­tles two thou­sand years later, in per­fect and unbro­ken con­ti­nu­ity; in addi­tion, they don’t believe any other churches qual­ify under this descrip­tion. Roman Catholics believe that the church that they con­fess in the Creed “sub­sists” in the Catholic Church (Lumen Gen­tium §9). “Ele­ments” of the true church may exist out­side the Catholic fold, though never with the same com­plete­ness or per­fec­tion as inside the Catholic Church (Uni­tatis Red­in­te­gra­tio §3). Var­i­ous smaller Protes­tant churches also claim to be the one true church; many of them think that the true church more or less van­ished from the early Mid­dle Ages until the Ref­or­ma­tion or even after­ward. Most Angli­can, Lutheran, and main­line Protes­tant churches do not con­sider them­selves to be the only true church, but cer­tainly a true church, and they reject other churches’ claims for exclu­siv­ity even if they don’t make such a claim for themselves.

None of this should come as a sur­prise; if it weren’t the case, we’d have no need for ecu­menism at all! But what it does imply for our dia­logues is that every church has to respect the other church’s self-description, even if it doesn’t agree with that descrip­tion. Each church is allowed to say what it thinks about itself with­out being imme­di­ately crit­i­cized. For some churches, this will mean asso­ci­at­ing with com­mu­ni­ties that don’t qual­ify as churches, in their view. For oth­ers, this will mean asso­ci­at­ing with churches that claim far too much, in their view. But it is a nec­es­sary exer­cise in respect that leads us forward.

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paul sailhamer says:
September 14, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Hence the need for “younity” and “commyounity”…trinity rather than modalism…
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