Ethics on the Joint Working Group Agenda

Ecumenical Review, The, April, 1996 by Anna Marie Aagaard

When the Joint Working Group (JWG) between the Roman Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches some years before the WCC's seventh assembly (Canberra 1991) began identifying possible priorities for its work in the post-assembly period, it was suggested that the JWG should try to foster an ecumenical conversation on personal and social ethical issues as both potential areas of common witness and causes of new divisions between and within the churches.

What was then (1987) begun became, through a long and cumulative process, the study document published in this issue of The Ecumenical Review: "The Ecumenical Dialogue on Moral Issues: Potential Sources of Common Witness or of Divisions".

A draft paper for the JWG's 1990 meeting by Thomas F. Stransky articulated and deepened the discussion on ethical issues. Already "the Stransky draft" laid the groundwork for a document in two parts: (1) a description of moral issues and the diverse ways in which churches and individual Christians arrive at their sometimes conflicting positions on them, and (2) guidelines for ecumenical dialogue on moral issues.

The JWG's sixth report, presented to the Canberra assembly and the Roman Catholic authorities, included "ethical issues" among the post-Canberra priorities. The report states explicitly that "the JWG's intention is not to examine the substance of each of the potentially or actually divisive issues, but to see how they may best be approached in dialogue", and it lists a number of guiding questions. Among these:

-- Why are some ethical questions so emotionally and intellectually divisive that mature dialogue about them is often inhibited, even avoided? -- In what ways do churches formulate ethical principles and decide on specific issues? -- In what ways do the churches understand and use their authority to decide on specific issues for all their members? -- When does an ethical issue on which Christians disagree become an obstacle to full ecclesial communion?

The WCC debate on ecclesiology and ethics

In 1992 the JWG decided to appoint a small study committee which would work on (1) ecclesiology and ethics and (2) basic guidelines "for using dialogue on ethical questions for the increase of mutual understanding and respect, and for new opportunities of common witness".

The term "ecclesiology and ethics" mirrors WCC concerns and priorities after the Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation convocation in Seoul in 1990, also reflected in the Canberra assembly statement "The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Gift and Calling", which identifies church unity as:

a koinonia given and expressed in the common confession of the apostolic

faith, a common

sacramental life... and a common mission witnessing to the gospel of God's

grace to all

people and serving the whole of creation (2.1).

The R[Phi]nde consultation in 1993, with its report Costly Unity, was an attempt to overcome "the cleft between ecumenical forces committed to visible church unity and those focused on witness, service and moral struggle". That cleft has a history as long as the modern ecumenical movement, historically begun as a Faith and Order movement and a Life and Work movement.

Costly Unity takes its cue from the section of the Canberra statement quoted above; it avoids adding to familiar "litanies" that the search for unity and the search for justice are inseparable, and it grounds its arguing for the ecclesiology-ethics linkage firmly in an understanding of church as a moral community:

Faith and discipleship are embodied in and as a community way of life. The

memory of

Jesus Christ (anamnesis), formative of the church itself, is a force shaping

of moral

existence... The church not only has, but is, a social ethic, a koinonia

ethic (para. 6).

R[Phi]nde's approach generated a constructive debate -- also at the fifth world conference on Faith and Order in August 1993. The conference report quotes Costly Unity:

Koinonia in relation to ethics does not mean in the first instance that the

Christian

community designs codes and rules; rather, it means that the church is a

place where, along

with the confession of faith and the celebration of the sacraments (and as

an inseparable part

of these), the gospel tradition is probed constantly for moral inspiration

and insight. It is

also a source which enables us to keep the issues of humanity and world ever

alive in the

light of the gospel (Section IV, para. 30).

It also recommends that Faith and Order devote time and energy to collaborate with other units of the WCC on "ethics and ecclesiology".

The commission for Programme Unit III, Justice, Peace and Creation, agreed in the fall of 1993 to a joint venture, and the intensified WCC conversations on "ecclesiology and ethics" have been documented in the publication Costly Commitment (1995). At present the WCC is receiving responses to a paper by Lewis S. Mudge which emphasizes moral formation in church and world as it seeks further to illumine the question: what might it really mean to say that "the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic"?