The Ecumenical Movement is one of the most significant developments of modern Christian history. Its goal is full communion, the concrete realization of unity among people of faith through sharing the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, as well as the full interchange of ordained ministers and priests across denominational boundaries.
The purpose of this volume is to educate a variety of individuals dedicated to this cause: heads of denominations, officers charged with inter-Church relations, participants in inter-Church dialogues, theologians, historians and seminarians. The volume’s greatest strength is the richness of its content. At 668 pages, it is an unparalleled compendium. The six sections cover different phases of the Movement: Part I (History) gives an overview from the early nineteenth century; Part II (Traditions) reviews the ecumenical evolution of seven world families of Churches from the Orthodox to the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches; Part III (Achievements and Issues) covers progress and challenges in ten theological areas, from Christology to Ecology; Part IV (Instruments) reviews the place of institutions, such as the World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity; Part V (The Global Scene) reviews the current state of ecumenism on five continents; and Part VI (Debate and Prospects) looks to the future and assesses progress and setbacks.
The essays included within the volume are the work of 50 scholars representing two generations, as do the two editors of the volume. Geoffrey Wainwright, a Methodist, was born in the 1930s and participated in the golden age of the Ecumenical Movement from the 1960s. Wainwright died in 2020 and the Handbook is dedicated to him. Paul McPartlan, a Roman Catholic, was born in the 1950s and has represented the Catholic Church in dialogues in a more complex era. Both editors have published major books and articles on the close relationships between the liturgy and ecumenism.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the significant scholarly groundbreaking achievement of the Handbook is to make the case for the leading role of the Liturgical Movement in furthering ecumenism from the early nineteenth century and continuing its impact in the twenty-first century. The goal of the Liturgical Movement was to forward the full and active participation of all the People of God in the celebration of the Eucharist, which must be at the spiritual heart of all the denominations. Therefore it calls for the recovery of the central place of the Eucharist. In the first half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, Liturgical Movements in many denominations called for the return to ancient liturgical sources, both apostolic and medieval, in order to accomplish this. Here is only a partial listing of such movements and their leaders with similar goals discussed in the Handbook: Bavarian Lutherans (Wilhelm Löhe, 1808–72); the German Reformed Mercersburg Movement in the United States (John Williamson Nevin, 1803–86); the Oxford Movement in England (E.B. Pusey, 1833–45); the Church of Scotland Church Service Society (1865); the Church of Denmark movement advancing the centrality of the Eucharist and social justice (N.F.S. Grundtvig, 1783–1872); the Roman Catholic Liturgical Movement (Prosper Guéranger – liturgy 1805–75, and Johann Adam Möhler – an organic Roman Catholic liturgical ecclesiology that opened the way for some Anglicans and Orthodox to develop a passion for unity with Rome).
This list can be expanded into the twentieth century. Bishop Charles Henry Brent, who founded the Faith and Order Movement in the early twentieth century, was deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement, as was Archbishop Nathan Söderbloom, a leader in the Life and Work Movement in the 1920s. These two movements led on to the foundation of the World Council of Churches in 1948. Methodists in Great Britain in 1935 launched the Methodist Sacramental Fellowship, which enlivened Methodist eucharistic spirituality, and Methodists in the United States launched the Order of St Luke for similar purposes in 1949. In the 1940s the Liturgical Movement scholarship of the Anglican Benedictine monk Dom Gregory Dix (1901–52) was important in the formation of two United Churches in India, the Church of South India in 1947 and the Church of North India in 1970.
The Handbook makes the case that in the 1990s Protestant Evangelicals, along with Pentecostalists and Charismatics from Asia, Africa and South America, came to study in the Western seminaries and university divinity schools, and they took back theological concepts and liturgical texts that had been produced by the Liturgical Movement. This planted the seeds of liturgical revival and the centrality of communal worship, which expanded the international ecumenical reality into denominations that had been distant from the Ecumenical Movement.
The Handbook essays raise the question of why so many movements with similar liturgical goals appeared at once, essays finding the answer in Christian responses to ‘Modernization’: political and industrial revolution, urbanization, all undercutting community, and liturgy seen as a means to rebuild Christian community and unity through the active participation of the whole people of God in worship, the centrality of the Eucharist, and a return to apostolic and medieval resources. One result of this impact of the Liturgical Movement on furthering ecumenism was the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church. The first document promulgated by the Council in 1964 was The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, calling for worship in the language of the people and other reforms that sealed the Catholic Church’s commitment to Christian unity. A parallel achievement to the documents of Vatican II was the final promulgation of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches’ document – Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (BEM) – whose origins went back to the leadership of Bishop Brent, an apostle of the liturgical ideals begun in the Oxford Movement, of the Faith and Order movement in the 1920s.
Indeed, it was one of the Handbook’s editors, Geoffrey Wainwright, who chaired the final drafting committee that produced the ultimate text of BEM at Lima in 1982 after decades of revision. For BEM, the essential building blocks of community are found in liturgy, sacraments and ministry: Baptism is both God’s gift and the human response to that gift. Christ’s real, living and active presence in the Eucharist is at the heart of Christian community. The document’s section on ministry begins with the calling of the whole people of God. The BEM text proved to be a little ecumenical miracle – 180 Churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, responded to it, and many parts of it, though not all, received the formal approval of the Churches.
The Handbook ends its monumental survey of the Ecumenical Movement, however, by making clear that the twenty-first century has been an era of challenge and stagnation. ‘Modernization’ has continued to prompt pluralism and a variety of civil rights movements in the areas of race, decolonization, gender equality, and human sexuality, and has raised fundamental and divisive questions about ordination, marriage, and full participation of all in the life of the Church.
So the Handbook closes with several possible models for the future. Professor Harding Meyer, of the Strasbourg Institute, presents ‘Unity in Reconciled Diversity’: Ecumenical unity is comprehensive enough to embrace some legitimate differences, such as with the Leuenberg Agreement of 1973 between Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Europe. By contrast, Cardinal Kurt Koch, of the Vatican Council for Promoting Christian Unity, promotes a model maintaining that the path to unity be expressed in a clear and focused way, against the strong pluralist headwinds and relativistic spirit of our post-modernist society. His model, based on the biblical image of the Church as one body, leaves no room for unity in reconciled diversity.
Not surprisingly, the Handbook closes with a model of future ecumenism that reaches back to some of the principles of the Liturgical Movement. It is Receptive Ecumenism, a form of spiritual ecumenism that encourages prayer, liturgy and Scripture reading, shared across ecumenical boundaries, to assist still-divided Christians to achieve sacramental unity. Apostolic and medieval frameworks of liturgy create a setting where Christians can ask questions and learn from one another, setting aside the divisions of the churches. Its basic principles were spelled out first in Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, ‘On Commitment to Ecumenism’, seeking an ‘exchange of gifts’ among the Churches and re-envisioning the papacy to achieve full catholicity of the Church.
The final pages of the volume explore the implications for the future if Receptive Ecumenism were more widely practised as a programme of renewal and ecumenism, in which the parish becomes the primary venue of reform, just as it was the focus of the mission of the Liturgical Movement.
This very call for a new focus reminds that the Handbook is the work of two past generations, and thus growing out of a past era. Of the fifty authors of essays, only ten are women. The volume touches only briefly on topics that are coming to the forefront of ecumenism, but whose relations with ecumenism must now be fully explored: the role of women in the Churches, white supremacy and racism, colonialism and imperialism, and commitment to a greater focus of ecumenism onto the parish churches. The Handbook is an invaluable foundation of Ecumenical Studies, but it does not sufficiently introduce the shape of things to come. Perhaps now that should become the subject of the second volume of the Handbook.
