"In One Body through the Cross" - Book Review

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 2003 by Ann K. Riggs

This compact volume makes available a statement by a group of individual theologians and ecumenists directed "To the Churches of North America, Judiciaries, Ecumenical Agencies, Ecumenical Officers, Laity and Clergy" (p.5). The text is based in a conviction that there is a "wide consensus that both the ecumenical movement and the churches' commitment to it [are] stalled in place" (p.6). It seeks to inform and counsel me, the director of the Faith and Order Commission and associate general secretary for Faith and Order at the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, about, for instance, central matters of my work and responsibility. It is then, one may suppose, an intention of the editors and authors that I be among those who respond to their work.

Those involved in the project include major figures of late 20th- and early 21st-century theological ecumenism. Among them are women and men to whom all concerned in the work of fostering the unity of Christians owe a debt of gratitude; among them are my own mentors, colleagues and friends.

The activities of individuals meeting for informal, but serious and committed, ecumenical reflection are often extremely valuable to the ecumenical movement as a whole. The kind of dialogical enterprise that the Centre for Catholic and Evangelical Theology has hosted, and which has been shared with readers in this text edited by Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson (who serve as primarily officers for the Centre), is to be commended and encouraged.

And yet I cannot share the vision, or affirm the pessimism, of the present moment offered in In One Body through the Cross, or assent to the ecumenical path laid before us by these my colleagues and friends.

In the text of the Princeton Proposal, an introductory paragraph locates the source of its title, In One Body through the Cross, in Ephesians 2:16. There follow seven sections: the unity we have and the unity we seek; a brief history of the ecumenical movement; unity and mission; the division of our churches and their competence to teach the truth; accepting the ecumenical challenge; our ecumenical responsibilities; one body through the cross. The central paradigm presented is a call to reappropriation of; and recommitment to, the vision of Christian unity articulated at the third assembly of the World Council of Churches at New Delhi in 1961: a unity of Christians "made visible as all in each place who are baptized into Jesus Christ ... are brought by the Holy Spirit into one fully committed fellowship, holding the one apostolic faith, preaching the one gospel, breaking the one bread ..." ([section] 1).

Much of what the text presents can be readily affirmed, and is usual and familiar in the ecumenical movement. Some more innovative suggestions for promoting the unity of Christians appear in the section "Accepting the Ecumenical Challenge". Here, among other things, it is suggested that:

   God may call lay and ordained members of one church to sustained
   participation in the life and ministry of separated churches, even
   if sacramental communion is not possible for a time. Such vocations
   do not deny real theological differences or disrespect canonical
   order but rather are a call to endure separation as a discipline
   which sharpens passion for unity. ([section] 55)

A Protestant myself, I enjoyed the privilege of working for five and a half years in the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Inter-religious Affairs of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and can strongly affirm the benefits of the group's proposal.

It is in ways that the Princeton Proposal's suggested path forward differs radically from the path of dialogue, thought and commitment on which such groups as the Faith and Order commission of the NCCCUSA are now embarked that it seems to me questionable and wrong. Some of the difficulties of the text may be identified already in the epistolary preface. Here I find errors of fact, and unsupported innovative judgments that situate the text awkwardly within the ecumenical movement it is intended to engage and critique:

   The bilateral dialogues have created a remarkable body of creative
   and ecumenically shared theology; particularly the "communion
   ecclesiology" is influential in many churches' thinking. Baptism,
   Eucharist and Ministry, produced by the Faith and Order commission
   of the World Council, achieved unheard-of consensus by rooting
   itself in the apostolic tradition, and has been widely studied. The
   signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by
   the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation
   "consigned to oblivion" the mutual condemnations of the Reformation
   era. (p.7)

Historically, "communion ecclesiology" first emerged in multilateral work and is, indeed, already evident in the word "fellowship" found in the quotation from New Delhi upon which the Princeton Project focuses. Communion ecclesiology has been inherent in a variety of churches' self-understandings, both historically and currently. It is rooted in scripture in such passages as 1 John 1:3 and 7, and in the trinitarian nature of God. It is generally understood to have made its entrance-into bilateral discussion from these other locations, rather than moving outward from the bilaterals into the churches' self-consciousness.