The Emergent Ecumenism
A Response to Robert P. George
by Thomas C. Oden
Six recent ecumenical gatherings set the tone for what is being called the “new ecumenism.” (1) Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) met recently in New York for preliminary drafting of a new study on the Universal Call to Holiness. (2) Earlier I had attended the Notre Dame conference on Faith and Order, which was essentially a post-National Council of Churches (NCC) planning conference. (3) Then I went to Washington, D.C., for the meeting of the Association for Church Renewal (ACR), which is in the process of creating a theological arm of the confessing movements within the mainline. (4) Then I went to Dallas to meet with the Confessing Theologians Commission with young orthodox theologians from the mainline confessing and renewing movements to draft a statement for the first grass-roots national meeting of the Association for Church Renewal. (5) Then I chaired the board meeting of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which seeks to ground in classical Christian teaching an ecumenical social witness within the mainline churches. (6) Then came this Touchstone conference on the unity we cannot as yet actualize, facing up to the forms of disunity that we must sustain.
All six conferences represent an emerging post-NCC ecumenism. Meanwhile, the NCC is in desperate financial straits, hanging by a budgetary thread, and probably will not be around much longer, except as a grandfathered ghost in the museum of dead modernity.
The Holy Spirit is forming a new configuration of movements deeply grounded in classical ecumenism. These efforts must not be viewed as anti-ecumenical, even though they have emerged out of a widespread disillusionment with the recent corruptions of bureaucratic ecumenism. These movements are quintessentially ecumenical, far more so than the modern ecumenical movement.
But in order to explain them, we need to grasp a working distinction between modern ecumenism and ancient ecumenism. Modern ecumenism began in 1948; ancient ecumenism began with the Council of Jerusalem in A.D. 46. Ancient ecumenism is defined textually by the documents of the ancient ecumenical councils, the texts of the conciliar process, and the great consensual teachers of the first millennium. Modern ecumenism is fixated on accommodating to modern consciousness, which itself is dying. Ancient ecumenism, which is patient amid historical turbulence, and confident within and beyond history, presents a penetrating critique of the very modernity to which modern ecumenism wishes to accommodate. Hence the irony: Ancient ecumenism has become the bearer of a probing examination of modern ecumenism. We stand at a nexus of history where the Holy Spirit is acting to bring together many who are realizing this, to help us learn from each other and rediscover our unity in the risen Lord.
The Notre Dame conference on Faith and Order was called by William G. Rusch, who has been for many years the ecumenical officer at the NCC in charge of Faith and Order concerns. Faith and Order is the best thing that the modern ecumenical movement did, yet it has been treated like a stepchild. The modern ecumenical bureaucracy, focused on revolutionary pretenses of enabling massive social change, has not known what to do with Faith and Order, which had almost withered on the vine. The Notre Dame conference signals unmistakably that Faith and Order is absolutely detaching itself from any identity with or traces of reference to the old ecumenical movement—the NCC and, to a lesser extent, the World Council of Churches (WCC). We heard, for example, from one of the key Pentecostal representatives at Notre Dame that they wanted to be involved in Faith and Order, but they would not be involved if there were any visible traces of the NCC’s control. This is where we are. No one would have predicted it a few years ago. This is the surprising road we are now traveling under the guidance of the Holy Spirit in our time.
Lingering Suspicions
Those expecting me to provide a searching critical review of Robert P. George’s paper may be disappointed, since I am in complete agreement with his intention and with almost all of his specific conclusions. Nonetheless, I would like to sharpen up a few nuances that flow from his important contribution.
Prof. George has provided us much wisdom in the last decade, with his careful and astute argumentation on questions of natural law, on dilemmas of legal enforcement of moral truth and value. He has helped us immensely to understand extremely difficult theological and ethical concepts, especially of the most nuanced of Catholic moral teachers, Germain Grise. We have benefited from the astute argumentation he has applied to constitutional law, to moral equivalency claims, and to the notion that every screwball idea has an absolutely equal status of respect and concern for people of good will.
Now he has turned his attention to the analysis of the new configuration of ecumenism and how that new configuration must be grounded not in negotiation or corroborated interests but in truth. Any alleged unity that is not based upon the truth, whether revealed or reasoned, is destined to collapse. We indeed are currently witnessing many familiar forms of alleged or pretended unity that are collapsing, since they have lost touch with the question of truth. One of Dr. George’s most astute observations has to do with the critique of the appearance of unity, the affectation of unity, the description of the pretense of unity not grounded in the living Body of Christ. Unity grounded in truth is neither a sentiment nor a negotiating position nor a rhetorical achievement. It is doctrinally grounded and accountable to Scripture and classical ecumenical reasoning.
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more on ecumenism from the online archives
31.4—July/August 2018
Labels & the Ecumenism of Discipleship by James M. Kushiner
more from the online archives
30.2—March/April 2017
on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
26.5—Sept/Oct 2013
The Perils of Pragmatism in Christian Attitudes Toward the Liberal Arts by Robin Phillips
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