Ecclesiology in Faith and Order texts

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 1994 by Silke-Petra Bergjan

I. Background

The Commission on Faith and Order had its origin in the efforts towards church unity in the USA at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.(1) For example, the way for the founding of the Federal Council of Churches in the USA in 1908 was prepared by the interchurch conferences. The National Convention of Disciples of Christ met in 1910.(2) In the same year the Protestant Episcopal Church appointed a Joint Commission to arrange a world conference on Faith and Order. The various commissions, conferences and councils took similar positions on the structure for describing Christian unity or the disunity of the church: confessional identity was seen as an addition to or reduction of something defined as authentically Christian. But they differed on the issue of what this implies. The Disciples of Christ dispensed with church tradition and theological interpretations from post-New Testament times and consciously referred the church back to the New Testament. While for the Disciples the concept of the church was thus essentially determined by the idea of primitive Christianity as this prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century, the Protestant Episcopal Church appealed to the church of the first few centuries, the ancient church.

In Protestant Episcopal circles three designations of the church were discussed: its catholicity, its apostolicity and its organic external unity, that is, the episcopal ministry which guarantees church unity. With Faith and Order emerging from the Protestant Episcopal Church, these definitions became important in the ecumenical discussion of the nature of the church. Thus an ecclesiological model became operative which goes back to Huntington(3) and which was stated programmatically in the Chicago Quadrilateral of 1886:(4)

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the revealed word of God.

2. The Nicene Creed as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

3. The two sacraments -- baptism and the supper of the Lord -- ministered with unfailing

use of Christ's words of institution and of the elements ordained by him.

4. The historic episcopate.(5) Against the background of the Anglican self-understanding, a basis arose here for describing the church by four elements drawn from an ideal picture of the "undivided" church of the first few centuries. These were to be transferred to the united church which was the goal.(6)

The appeal of the Disciples on the one hand to primitive Christianity and of the Anglicans (Protestant Episcopal Church) on the other to the ancient church expressed differing critical approaches to dogma resulting in differing concepts of the church. According to the ideas of revivalism, which were still significant in the world missionary conferences, for example, the church comes into being in the conversion of individuals and in the appeal to personal responsibility. At the same time, in the period before and after the first world war, an express desire developed for community and firm forms of fellowship in which individual self-understanding had no place. Consequently, discussion on the theme of community replaced the approach centred in the individual which had emerged out of Pietism and subjectivism.(7) In this context ecclesiology became a dominant theme. Two types of emphasis on church as community can be distinguished: (a) in certain contexts -- for example, among religious socialists and the Disciples of Christ -- a concept of community developed which goes back to the idea of primitive Christianity; (b) in the episcopal tradition the church is understood as a hierarchically structured form of community. This is the context in which the themes of ministry and apostolic succession were discussed.

II. Lausanne 1927: the church as a living organism

At the first world conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927 the following themes were taken up in the report of Section III:(8) "the church as the communion of believers in Jesus Christ"; the church as "God's chosen instrument"; the marks of the church -- unity, catholicity, apostolicity, as well as the characteristics of church life and acts of worship. Although the term "living organism" does not appear in the document, it left a substantial imprint on the discussion and above all on the presentations.

II.1. The church as a living organism

The word "organism" implies the idea of development(9) or growth. Temple elaborated on this sense of the term by quoting Hegel: "An organism is what it is by always becoming what it is not."(10) Development, change, progress in the church can be demonstrated from its history. In applying the term "organism" to church history, Cadman understood the church as having first had to develop its structure, ideas and systems. Theology as a "vital science" means that "no article was so perfect in its primary stages that it required nothing in addition".(11) Cadman linked the term "organism" with the alternative between a dynamic and a static church.