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Where We Dwell in Common

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Roger Haight S.J.
Roger Haight S.J.
Affiliation:
Union Theological Seminary, New York
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Extract

The great surge of Christian missionary activity during the course of the nineteenth century elicited a new concern for church unity. Was this missionary activity, after all, spreading division? In 1910 representatives of Protestant churches came together to respond to that question in Edinburgh at The World Missionary Conference. The conference in its turn channeled the concern to the sending churches. Although somewhat slowed down by World War I, the ecumenical movement grew and was punctuated by landmark events in The Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work (Stockholm, 1925) and The World Conference of Faith and Order (Lausanne, 1927). The report of this second conference included a description of what the churches assembled in their representatives shared in common and the many things that distinguished and sometimes divided them. When the World Council of Churches came into existence in August of 1948, the Faith and Order movement was integrated into it as a distinct agency whose concern was the doctrinal unity of the churches. Its signal achievement thus far has been the document entitled Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, frequently referred to as the Lima document, which sketches a proposal for a common understanding of these three aspects of the church across the churches. This document is the best example of what I will call “transdenominational ecclesiology,” and the fact that it has received so much attention from the churches indicates that it plays some important role in the whole church.

Type
Editorial Essays
Information
Horizons , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Fall 2005 , pp. 332 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2005

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References

1 World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1982).Google Scholar Referred to below as BEM. Faith and Order is working on an analogous document whose draft form is The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement, Faith and Order Paper 181 (November 1998); cited as FO-181.

2 In the course of the 1980s the Christian churches of the world reacted to BEM and these reactions filled five volumes. A summary response of the Faith and Order committee of the WCC is Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry 1982–1990: Report on the Process and Responses, Faith and Order Paper 149 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1990); cited as FO-149.

3 Niebuhr, H. Richard, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Meridian, 1957, orig. 1929).Google Scholar

4 The terms “communion,” “denominations,” “churches” are not used technically in this essay but loosely and almost synonymously.

5 The ecclesiology of Schleiermacher is contained in his systematics: The Christian Faith, ed. by Mackintosh, H. R. and Stewart, J. S. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 525–695.Google Scholar (Cited in the text as CF by paragraph.) An interpretation of Schleiermacher's ecclesiology is found in Haight, Roger, Christian Community in History, II: Comparative Ecclesiology (New York: Continuum, 2005), 311–36.Google Scholar Cited below as CCH, II.

6 “Author's Preface to the Second Edition,” CF, p. xxiv.

7 I follow Edward Schillebeeckx's schematization of this basic human reaction as having three simultaneous and interacting dimensions: the first is a negative experience that something is fundamentally wrong; second, a positive background of an ideal allows the negative to appear as such; and, third, a spontaneous impulse seeks to resist or negate the negation. See Schillebeeckx, , The Church: The Human Story of God (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 5–6.Google Scholar

8 Haight, CCH, II, 370–71.

9 See, e.g., the analysis of world Christianity as proffered by Jenkins, Philip, The Next Christendom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “The Next Christianity,” The Atlantic Monthly 290 (October 2002), 53–68.

10 Edward Farley describes “ecclesial existence,” which is a foundational form of what is intended here, as related to the nineteenth-century quest for the essence of Christianity. But it is no mere abstraction or unchanging kernel in the husk. Rather it is defined both historically and theologically. In its historicity, common ecclesial existence is always changing; because it is theological, it cannot be reduced to any of its particular historical manifestations or to a particular abstract, static construction. Ecclesial existence has the quality of an ideal, but one that is always being readjusted to historical conditions. See Farley, Edward, Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy of Theological Method (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 198–205.Google Scholar

11 I have stated this process in a literal way that makes it an impossible task. Obviously there are many disciplined short cuts to the consideration of the whole range of the history of the church and its ecclesiologies. BEM, for example, was constructed by a group of theologians, representing many traditions and churches, who entered into critical conversation.

12 There are other places where one can find authoritative interpretations besides the New Testament. For example, a near universal testimony to something in the church across its history in a variety of regions offers a strong testimony to authenticity. Still other criteria can be formulated as well as candidates for loci for a commonly accepted authoritative witness.

13 See, e.g., the comparative ecclesiology of Ward, Keith in his Religion and Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).Google Scholar

14 Haight, Roger, Christian Community in History, I, Historical Ecclesiology (New York: Continuum, 2004), 63–64.Google Scholar “By functionality I mean something that gains its value from something else on which it is dependent. The dynamics of functionality are analogous to the interrelationship between means and ends: measures taken lead to certain results; and goals or projected results determine the means to be employed,” (ibid., 63).

15 Lee, Randall and Gros, Jeffrey, eds., The Church as Koinonia of Salvation: Its Structures and Ministries: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue, X (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2005).Google Scholar Cited as LCD-X by page number.

16 This statement is balanced by another statement expressing the regional side of ecclesial existence: “‘The local church is not a free-standing, self-sufficient reality. As part of a network of communion, the local church maintains its reality as church by relating to other local churches’” (LCD-X, 90, citing the “Joint Working Group of the World Council of Churches and the Roman Catholic Church,” §13).

17 The World Council of Churches' document BEM was followed by five volumes of responses by various churches, and a summary reaction to these responses is WCC, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry 1982–1990: Report on the Process and Responses (see n.2 above). Since then the Faith and Order Commission has been working on a transde-nominational document representing the church as a whole. The latest draft of this document is WCC, The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A Stage on the Way to a Common Statement (see n.1 above).

18 These five elements of organizations are inspired by Scott, W. Richard, Organizations: Rational, Natural, and Open Systems (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 13–19Google Scholar and passim.

19 Such is the finding of my study of the history of ecclesiology in Christian Community in History, especially in volume II which treats ecclesiologies comparatively from the sixteenth century forward.