491 - New Geometries of Ecumenism

New Geometries of Ecumenism
By Patrick Henry

It was a day in 1975. I was typing a letter, my finger slipped, and my sense of time was forever altered. At the head of the letter, I typed, not Z just 1975, but 19756.1 sat transfixed. With a single finger stroke I had catapulted myself from the twentieth century to the 198th, and I was astonished as I realized how cramped, how squeezed, our sense of history is.

We speak of "the early church" with reference to the first century, or maybe the first four centuries. Many Christians believe that what happened in the early church is definitive for everything that comes after. But if you are looking from the vantage point not of the twentieth century but of the 198th, then we, in the twentieth century, are, in percentage terms, as early as the first century is to us-that is, within the first 5 percent of church history. If another finger had slipped, and I had accelerated out to the 1976th century, even the 198th century would be "early church." One example will make clear the implications of my expanded sense of time: From the perspective of the 198th century, women's ordination is not a challenge to the tradition of the early church but part of it.

One axis of many graphs is t for time. To get a sense of what my typewriter mistake did to my geometry, consider another kind of graph, one used to startling effect by the physicist James Trefil. In a book about the biggest and the smallest-cosmology and particle physics-he draws a graph showing the energy at which the electroweak force and the strong nuclear force are unified. The graph confirms our everyday notions of how "strong" and "weak" would look when plotted against one another. But just as soon as we think we are in familiar territory, Trefil jolts us: "We have had to compress the energy scale to make everything fit on the page. If

Patrick Henry is Executive Director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota. This article is adapted from a lecture he gave at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, New York on July 17, 1995.

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we had actually drawn the entire thing to scale, the point at which the two curves would join would be somewhere out beyond the orbit of Mars." ¹ That is like what the year 19756 did to the "time" axis on my historical graph.

I do not know many other historians of Christianity who share my sense that we are in the first sentence of the prologue instead of scene 4 of act 5. My resistance to historical claustrophobia is rather peculiar in my line of work, so what I have said so far tells you much about the geometries of ecumenism. as I see them, but very little about the scene more generally. Even if the change in geometries is not as drastic as stretching axes out beyond the orbit of Mars, however, the change is dramatic.

WHO TELLS THE STORY?

Robert S. Bilheimer has claimed that the ecumenical movement is a revolution on the order of the Reformation nearly half a millennium ago; ² and ecumenism now is as contested a term as reformation was then. A definition of reformation that would have satisfied Luther would have been challenged by Zwingli; one acceptable to Zwingli would have been denounced by Calvin; and Erasmus, who, in the famous image, "laid the egg which Luther hatched," ³ finally declared a plague on all their houses.

What we need is a description, as comprehensive and accurate as possible, of the tendencies, movements, counterpoints, broad sweeps, and fine tunings that constitute the reality Bilheimer has pointed to. And even the telling of the historical story runs the risk of a kind of sectarian bias. At a 1994 'conference called Ecumenism Among, Us, sponsored by the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, several participants complained loudly that too many of the other participants did not know "the" story: of the World Council of Churches, the Second Vatican Council, the Toronto statement, and so on. A member of the Wesleyan Holiness tradition, as true and committed an ecumenist as I know, quietly but decisively put this complaint to rest: "Yes, but that's your ecumenical story, it's not mine." ⁴

The question Who owns the ecumenical movement? is, as with so many human; activities, almost synonymous with the question Who tells the

¹ James S. Trefil, The Moment of Creation: Big Bang Physics from Before the First Millisecond to the Present Universe (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983), p. 121.
² Robert S. Bilheimer, What Must the Church Do? (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947), pp. 63-107. In a later work, Bilheimer qualifies his judgment of forty-two years earlier: "A better analogy, I think, is with the processes that led to the Councils of Nicaea (325), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451). These had provided a definitive and thus irreversible formulation of faith in God. Similarly, the emergence of the ecumenical tradition provided for the first time an irreversible formulation of the nature of the church" (Breakthrough: The Emergence of the Ecumenical Tradition [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Geneva: WCC Publications, 1989], p. 218).
³ Cited in" Richard Chenevix Trench, Lectures on Medieval Church History, 2d ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1886), p. 399.
⁴ Ecumenism Among Us: Report of a Cross-Generational Conversation about the Unity of the Church and the Renewal of Human Community, held at Saint John's University, Collegeville, MN, June 4-8, 1994 (Collegeville: Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, 1994), p. 4.

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story? I cannot claim that my telling of the story is devoid of prejudice or particular perspective, but it is informed by the English historian G. M. Young, who said, "the first lesson of history, and it may well be the last, is that you never know what is coming next." ⁵

The roots of the Reformation can be traced back decades into the late medieval period, but a corner was turned, history was rerouted, when Martin Luther declared, "Here I stand, I can do no other." Similarly, the roots of the ecumenical movement can be traced back decades prior to the founding of the World Council of Churches in 1948, but the word that went out in August of that year from the first assembly of the World Council of Churches, held in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw- "We intend to stay together" ⁶-marks the reversal of the tendency to come apart that followed on Luther's bold stand, a tendency that Luther himself had no idea was coming next. The ecumenical movement, in the words of one of its most articulate contemporary exponents and practitioners, the Roman Catholic theologian Margaret O'Gara, is a renewal movement in all the churches. ⁷ A renewal movement is what Luther intended. A challenge for ecumenism today is to keep renewal channeled toward unity, to incorporate new voices that come next from no one knows where.

In the half century since Amsterdam, and in the thirty years since the quite unexpected and astonishingly dramatic entry of the Roman Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement with the Second Vatican Council, the implications of "We intend to stay together" have been assessed and reassessed countless times. While the image of a superchurch, an administrative behemoth, was always a caricature, the goal of unity has become less institutional and more communal, with "communion of communions" and, more recently, koinonia, the Greek New Testament term for fellowship, mutual recognition, and support, having become expressions for the goal of ecumenism. The mandate for ecumenism is still found in John 17:21, "that they all may be one," but I find increasingly that ecumenists get their energy and enthusiasm-at least I do-from John 14:2, "in God's house there are many rooms."

"HERE WE STAND"

There are some encouraging, even thrilling, signs that intending to stay together amounts to something. First, in June 1995, at Saint Peter's in Rome, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope John Paul II, while stopping short of concelebrating the eucharist, took part jointly in the rest of the liturgy and, setting a new precedent, together blessed the assembled

⁵ Quoted in W. D. Handcock, introduction to G. M. Young, Victorian Essays (London: Oxford University Press 1962), p. 10.
⁶"The Message of the Assembly," in The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, edited by W.A. Visser 't Hooft, vol. 5 of Man's Disorder and God's Design: The Amsterdam Assembly Series (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), p. 9.
⁷ Margaret O'Gara, "The Meaning of Ecumenism," Occasional Paper no. 28, Ecumenical People, Programs, Papers (newsletter of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research), November, 1987, pp. 13-16, esp. p. 15.

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crowd. A thousand-year-old wall of enmity between Orthodox and Roman Catholics is being steadily dismantled, the tide of history reversed.

Second, despite a recent hitch in scheduling (remember: "you never know what is coming next"), Lutherans and Roman Catholics will probably declare in 1998 that the mutual condemnations of the sixteenth century are no longer applicable-not saying their ancestors were wrong but recognizing that new occasions teach new duties and indicating that the intention to stay together is more powerful than the pious clinging to divided and divisive tradition. The action, intended for 1997-the 450th anniversary of the Council of Trent-but delayed by the Lutheran World Federation for further clarification about sin, will testify to the practical consequences of scholarly work. Learned people on both sides have studied the ancient controversies and the theological positions of today and have concluded that on the central contested issue of the Reformation and Counter', Reformation, justification, the current teachings of the two traditions are compatible.

Third, , nine Protestant denominations, engaged for more than twenty years in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), have developed a plan for covenanting that, if approved by all the church bodies, will commit them to recognizing each other's communion tables and ministries. I recently attended a COCU eucharist, a kind of anticipation of the projected unity, and as I sat there it occurred to me that just as Thomas Aquinas said, "If it has been done it must be possible," ⁸ so, while we usually say about intercom union that "We don't do it because we can't," it is even more true that "We can't do it because we don't." Once something has been done, it becomes possible.

All three of these developments-patriarch and pope embracing, Catholics and Lutherans saying, together, "Here we stand, at last we can do no other," nine denominations saying to each other, "We recognize your ordained people as ordained for us too, your table and our table as equally the Lord's table"-are as dramatic as the tumbling of the Berlin Wall, the end of I the Cold War. But these developments are part of the original geometry of ecumenism-lines and planes-with new connections being drawn between points determined by historical developments familiar from history books: Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, and several other long-established Protestant bodies are making new arrangements, or reestablishing old ones, at the institutional level. ⁹

⁸ I owe this suggestive translation of the principle ab esse ad posse valet illatio to James P. Shannon.
⁹ For a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the many current proposals for moving ahead ecumenically, including COCU and the prospective Catholic and Lutheran declarations that the sixteenth-century condemnations are no longer applicable, see John F. Hotchkin, "From Organization through Dialogue to Decision: The Third Stage of Ecumenism," Occasional Paper no. 45, Ecumenical People, Programs, Papers (newsletter of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research), November, 1995, pp. 10-16. This is a slightly edited version of an address Hotchkin delivered to the North American Academy of Ecumenists. The text of the talk as delivered is published as "The Ecumenical Movement's Third Stage," Origins (Catholic News Service Documentary Service) 25, no. 21 (November 9, 19951, pp. 353-361.

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These solutions of long-standing, large-scale geometrical problems are laudable and give the lie to the common lament that institutional ecumenism is dead. True, the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches are. in trouble, financial and organizational, and, being councils of churches, they are struggling to discern their ongoing purpose in a time when denominations are themselves at sixes and sevens. But the World Council and National Council are not politically corrupt, as the Reader's Digest would have it; nor are they spiritually bankrupt. They are simply trying, in a world of dizzying change, to chart a course true both to prophetic vision and to faithful continuity. It is the challenge faced by every renewal movement that has ever been, and it has never been easy.

While the public, to the extent it pays any attention to ecumenism at all, learns about the trials and tribulations of large councils and their budgets, their layoffs, their almost annual restructurings, there are at least four other arenas in which ecumenical activity is flourishing. The geometries are smaller in scale:, they are three dimensional, and they are curved. The familiar plane, on which we at least knew where the points were even if we did not know how to connect them, has given way to something like what Edwin Abbott portrayed in his book Flatland over a hundred years ago. ¹⁰ A race that lives in a two-dimensional world has the most extraordinary difficulty understanding the appearance of a sphere in its midst. The individuals can experience it only as a dot that expands as a circle and then retracts to a dot and finally disappears in its transit through their world. New ecumenical realities are forcing ecumenical thinking to imagine spheres from the experience of planes. When a traditional ecumenist is challenged by someone who says, "The common ecumenical story is yours, not mine," the traditional ecumenist is being challenged as the Flatlander was: You have got to find a way to think in more dimensions.

There are dozens of grids on which the new geometries of ecumenism are plotted. I will analyze four of them: Jewish-Christian relations, local ecumenism, evangelicalism and ecumenism, and Orthodoxy and ecumenism.

JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELATIONS

In a profound sense, the original ecumenical question is How and why and when did it happen that Christians and Jews no longer thought of themselves as part of the same community? The apostle Paul, like Luther much later, did not intend "what happened next," but happen it did, with dire consequences.

The question of relations between Christianity and Judaism is a specific, and very particular, instance of the more general question of the relation of Christianity and other religions. The instance is particular, and not just specific, because the genetic relation between the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition makes the issues both more familiar and more opaque than the ones encountered when Christians meet Buddhists or Hindus or

¹⁰ A Square [Edwin A. Abbott], Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 2d rev. ed. (1884; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950).

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even Muslims. The greatest difficulty for Christians in their encounter with Jews is the need to realize that Judaism has for the past two thousand years been a religion developing a life of its own and on its own. Christians all too easily assume that the religion, theology, and piety they encounter in the Hebrew Bible bring them up to date with Judaism. There are few changes in Christian thought more dramatic than the recent development, one might say rediscovery, of a two-covenant understanding of the relation between Judaism and Christianity: rediscovery, because Paul really talks this way; development, because for much of the past two millennia, Christians have relegated Jews to the category of, at best, the outdated, the superseded, or at worst, the outcast, rejected by God.

One might think it odd that in an account of the geometries of ecumenism, the interreligious arena is mentioned first. There is, however, no more frequently asked question about ecumenism than this: Is it about Christian unity or about the unity of all religions? Historically, it is about relations between Christians, though the boundaries 'suggested by the word-the Greek oikoumene means "the whole inhabited world"-are broader. There is merit in keeping the narrower meaning, at least for the present, because there is still much tough work to be done in that arena. I find it much easier to converse with some Buddhists than with some Christians. But the relation of Christian truth to the truth of other religions-a question very much alive in the second century, when Justin Martyr, with theological bravado if also historical sleight-of-hand, suggested Socrates was a Christian-is at the front of the minds of many lay Christians and will only become more insistent as our society becomes rapidly more pluralistic. ¹¹

There is a variety of terminologies in what I have just said: the relation of Judaism and Christianity, of Jewish tradition and Christian tradition, of Jews and Christians. I am increasingly suspicious of talk about relations between abstractions. People who write encyclopedia articles on Judaism or Christianity are not dishonest, but they have an impossible task. The traditions exist only as they are lived, and they are lived by people, all of whom put their own spin on what they have received. G. M. Young, quoted above to the effect that no one knows what will happen next, is also instructive about how to understand what has already happened: One should read "till you can hear people talking.") ¹² People talking-and praying and eating and singing and serving and lighting candles and bringing up children-is what the traditions really are. As a student of mine once wrote, "Ultimately it's not intellectuals who form living cultures, it's grandmothers." ¹³ The contours of Jewish-Christian relations are not what scholars or church officials say they should be but what conversations between, and life together with, Jews and Christians reveal those contours

¹¹ Justin Martyr, First Apology 46. The contemporary issues are addressed in a study document titled Confessing Christian Faith in a Pluralistic Society (Collegeville, MN: Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, 1995).
¹² Handcock, introduction to G. M. Young, Victorian Essays, p. 11.
¹³ Nancy Niemczyk, in a paper for a course at Swarthmore College, 1984.

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to be. The same, goes for relations between Christians and Buddhists, and many others.

The Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research sponsored a three-year program called "Jewish and Christian Relatedness to Scripture." What was new about this program was that it focused not on an issue between Jews and Christians (such as the messiah) but on an issue Jews and Christians have in common: making ancient texts come alive for people today. Every week, rabbis, priests, and pastors are confronted with one of the most daunting of intellectual and spiritual tasks: bridging the gap of millennia to make the word of God speak, and speak powerfully. In our conversations, we discovered we have much to teach each other from our experiences of living with Scripture.

LOCAL ECUMENISM

The geometry of local ecumenism is small in scale but large in effect. When ecumenists gather, conversation is peppered with images for local ecumenism: where the rubber hits the road, where push comes to shove, where talk becomes action, where it's put up or shut up. Such terms mislead in two directions: They minimize the practical intention of larger-scale ecumenism, including theological dialogues, and they minimize the element of thought and reflection in the local arena. Ecumenists at every level are both pragmatic and metaphysical, though of course in different proportions.

When he observed that "all politics is local," the late Tip O'Neill did not mean there were no state or national politics; but he knew that the world most real to people is the world immediately around them, and it is the immediate world that gives them energy and to which they are willing to commit their time and effort. "All ecumenism is local" is true in the same sense.

The most pervasive ecumenical reality today is the multitraditional character of many congregations. Twenty years ago, when I was teaching a Sunday School class in a Presbyterian church, the education minister gathered all the teachers for a year-opening meeting and asked how many of us had always been Presbyterians. There were forty persons in the room, and three hands went up. Such a story is probably even more common today. Denominational tradition is simply not a major part of many people's identity any more, and this is increasingly true even for Roman Catholics, who in this country are revealed by poll after poll to be making their own judgments apart from, and frequently in opposition to, official positions.

This decline in traditional identity is often decried as leading to indifference, to a bland tolerance that does not take anything very seriously. Such dismissal is unfair, for at least two reasons. First, we know that traditions die hard-indeed, they seldom really die-and at least some of the sharp controversy that is dividing many denominations can be traced to the lingering effect of expecting things to be done the way they were done back in the denomination in which one grew up. Someone brought up Baptist

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who is now a Presbyterian may bristle when a presbytery or synod thwarts a session's action, because what is "natural" is for a congregation to be autonomous; the local congregation is quite sufficient to be the people of God.

But if traditional identity is residually stronger than we sometimes think, the breakdown of that identity can be more positively powerful than we sometimes think. In a recent discussion at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, designed to plan the Institute's program for the next several years, one participant answered the question "What should we not do?" this way: "Though I consider the issue of common eucharist to be essential as a topic of discussion, I do not feel we are ready for it at this time, either here or in the whole of the church." That is surely true. Such a discussion n at this time would go nowhere.

"The people who disregard the boundaries are not just taking the easy way out; they are challenging the theology that draws such boundaries."

However, the "problem" of the eucharist is being solved millions of times every week as Christians go to each other's table, perhaps with a wince of discomfort because they know, or suspect, that it is not really permitted, but confidently, because the wince of discomfort is preferable to the pain of exclusion from a table that is Christ's. Theologians and church officials, deplore such action, because the people know not what they do; the reasons intercommunion is not permitted are good reasons, they say, and the problem, if not indifference, is ignorance. The significance of local ecumenism in this highly intractable controversy is its theological grounding. The people who disregard the boundaries are not just taking the easy way out; they are challenging the theology that draws such boundaries. Local ecumenism presents to the churches not just disciplinary problems but theological challenges. And here, as I noted earlier, I believe the mantra "We don't do it because we can't" will be gradually undermined by the recognition that "We can't do it because we don't"-and it is done, and if it has been done, it must be possible.

Local ecumenism is not only common worship but also, and especially, common action. People come together to address pressing social issues, though the old truism "doctrine divides, service unites" has in recent years been turned around. Just when new convergences are found in baptism, eucharist, and ministry, sharp controversy over public policy emerges.

The most exciting ventures in local ecumenism are ones in which theology and service are put together. One of the features of the National Workshop on Christian Unity in Albuquerque in May 1995 was a visit to the South Albuquerque Cooperative Ministry, a coalition of Presbyterian, Methodist, Mennonite, and United Church of Christ parishes in an impov-

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erished section of town. The churches cross linguistic and racial barriers, they worship together and help new immigrants together, and they do it all with little money and much prayer. Is it pragmatic, a commingling of scant resources in order to survive? Partly, no doubt. But that community exhibits an enthusiasm, a tenacity, and a joy that go much deeper than an instinct for survival. These people have tapped into a reservoir of renewal that provides sustenance more than survival, service more than self-satisfaction. The connection between liturgy on Sunday and life on Monday is the subject of volumes of talk at every ecumenical meeting. The connection between liturgy on Sunday and life on Monday is a way of life in South Albuquerque.

EVANGELICALISM AND ECUMENISM

Evangelicalism has recently added many new points to the geometries of ecumenism. Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, the largest interdenominational seminary in the country, where the World Council of Churches and National Council of Churches were for decades associated with the antichrist, now has a professor of church history and ecumenccs (the title implying that ecumenism is compatible with church history, not its antithesis), and Fuller Seminary has a president who is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research and who has stated publicly that ecumenical encounter has deepened and enriched his faith. ¹⁴

The term evangelical is as hard to pin down as "ecumenical"; outsiders use it as a label for persons who vigorously deny that it applies to them. ¹⁵ The term is unfortunately confused in the popular mind with "fundamentalist," and today it is so linked to a particular political movement and agenda that clear-headed talk about evangelicalism is hard to engage in. The scene is further complicated in relation to ecumenism by the active involvement not only of conservative Christians from the Reformed and free-church traditions but also of Wesleyan Holiness Christians and, increasingly, Pentecostals.

One of the services the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research has offered to the ecumenical movement is the provision of safe space, space without preconditions or hidden agendas, for persons from these traditions to come together and sort out, quietly, unhurriedly, their own feelings and attitudes about ecumenism. Some of the implications of those discussions are available in the book Regathering: The Church from "They" to "We, " by Esther Bruland. ¹⁶ She, whose spiritual journey began with Carl McIntire's radio railings against the World Council of Churches

¹⁴ Richard J. Mouw, "Humility, Hope and the Divine Slowness," The Christian Century 107 (April 11, 1990;, pp. 364-368, esp. pp. 366-367.
¹⁵ See, e.g., Donald W. Dayton, " `Evangelical': More Puzzling Than You Think," Occasional Paper no. 29, Ecumenical People, Programs, Papers (newsletter of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research), May, 1988, pp. 5-8.
¹⁶ Esther Bruland, Regathering: The Church from "They" to "We" (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

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as the Great Satan, has taken materials generated by five summers of Institute discussions and woven them into a compelling narrative of discovery and friendship.

Esther Bruland's experience points to the leading characteristic of this evangelical/holiness/Pentecostal entry into ecumenism, the main source of the energy it provides to the movement. On the way to her first Ecumenical Institute consultation, she asked God to forgive her for participating in such an event, but what she found was people making testimonies, people from traditionally ecumenical traditions who were speaking from the heart about their faith. For her, a Baptist, testimonies were fundamental and familiar. Evangelical, holiness, and Pentecostal Christians have been, and are, F constitutionally suspicious of big institutions, of structures standing between them and God.

What people like Esther Bruland have discovered, and are discovering in increasing numbers, is that "ecumenical" is an adjective describing not some giant beast that will swallow the personal but a kind of spirituality-to use a term that is the title of a book by Robert S. Bilheimer, "a spirituality for the long haul." ¹⁷ It is about discovery, not imposition; about depth, not bigness; about reveling in the diversity of God's creation, not in some monochrome uniformity. In short, ecumenism is about the many rooms in God's house.

There is a particular gift brought to ecumenism by Pentecostals. At the 1994 Ecumenism Among Us conference, one of the Pentecostal participants stated that gift succinctly. She noted that the ecumenical movement and the Pentecostal movement began about the same time: the start of the twentieth century. "While the ecumenical movement drafted documents," she wrote, we prayed down fire from heaven and experienced wondrous moments of community. " ¹⁸ She knows perfectly well that ecumenists prayed a lot and Pentecostals wrote at least some, but she highlights a variety of emphasis, a difference in center of gravity, that can be revolutionary for ecumenism.

At a threatening sticky point in the conference, with controversy threatening to end in stalemate, another Pentecostal asked, "Why is it that every time we have come to an impasse we have tried to sort it out by more
and more discussion? When that happens with us, we break into prayer." Soon after her plea, another Pentecostal started singing a prayer, most others in the conference joined in, and nearly everybody would attest that we experienced a "wondrous moment of community." ¹⁹ Pentecostals bring to traditional ecumenists-who pray but who think the tough problems have to be worked out on our own-a vivid, passionate reminder that prayer is at least coequal. They restore a balance expressed in the early days of ecumenism by the great lay leader John R. Mott: "Organize as if there is no prayer; pray as if there is no organization. ²⁰

¹⁷ Robert S. Bilheimer, A Spirituality for the Long Haul: Biblical Risk and Moral Stand (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).
¹⁸ Ecumenism Among Us, p. 5.
¹⁹ See the account in Ecumenism Among Us, pp. 33-35.
²⁰ Quoted in Bilheimer, Breakthrough, p. 4.

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ORTHODOXY AND ECUMENISM

The story has been central, and it has been stormy. Orthodox were members of the World Council of Churches from the beginning, but within two years, their unease, along with that of others, generated a conference that produced a statement detailing primarily what the World Council of Churches is not: the "Toronto Statement" of 1950. ²¹ The Orthodox wanted to be sure that no one could mistake their membership in the Council as in any sense a retreat from their convictions about their own necessity and sufficiency as church. Periodically during the past half century, Orthodox have stirred the ecumenical waters, both internationally and nationally, and have given their points urgency by withdrawals or threats of withdrawal.

I admit to a great deal of personal bafflement by the Orthodox. Their tradition has been the subject of much of my professional scholarly study. Their theology, with its cosmic scope, so spacious when contrasted with the cramped historical quarters of much of Protestant speculation (Orthodox friends cannot quite understand why I make so much of my 198th century experience; "What's so odd about that?" they seem to say); their anthropology, so much more sensitive to and hopeful about human possibility than our Western pessimism; their glorying in the material world and in beauty, grounded in their conviction about icons as windows on the world of the spirit; their contribution of at least three of the greatest ecumenical visionaries to the movement: Georges Florovsky, Alexander Schmemann, and John Meyendorff-all these features of Orthodoxy are, in my judgment, a foundation on which to build prophecy, not retrenchment; openness, not suspicion.

I acknowledge the importance for any movement of those who keep it honest, who remind it of its roots, of tradition that deserves respect, and the Orthodox certainly provide this service to ecumenism. It saddens me, however, that the theological and anthropological and aesthetic breadth and brilliance that Orthodoxy can offer the rest of us are so often barricaded behind walls of protection. There are, to be sure, imperialisms in ecumenism, especially in American ecumenism, and Orthodox have good reason to object to the ignorance, and even more the ignoring, of their concerns. I do not know how to get beyond this impasse, but I care mightily about the missed opportunities, the surprising ecumenical breakthroughs that could happen when Orthodoxy as a fundamental theological alternative, not just an unfamiliar ecclesiastical structure, becomes apparent to us in the West.

The geometry of Orthodoxy and ecumenism, if it truly becomes new, can be genuinely revolutionary. One Orthodox theologian has noted her discovery that her closest spiritual affinities are not where traditional ecumenical scholarship has found them, between Orthodox and Anglican, but between Orthodox and black Pentecostal; in other words, real closeness is not only

²¹ See the article in Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: WCC Publications; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), pp. 1008-1009.

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in liturgy and prayer book and admiration for the early church Fathers, but also in the experience of the Spirit's active presence. ²²

"YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT IS COMING NEXT"

There is another subject that might have been expected to appear in this catalogue of new geometries: feminism and ecumenism. Its omission is not due to its lack of importance. On the contrary, its significance goes deeper than the geometrical, to the seismic. It is a fact of history that the Reformation occurred more or less simultaneously with the Copernican revolution-Copernicus treatise on the revolution of the heavenly bodies was published three years before Luther died, and Calvin died the year Galileo was born. A fundamental shift in the way people think about space, the world, creation, and themselves was set in motion at the same time that Luther took his stand. The feminist revolution-generating a fundamental shift in the way people think, relate, understand-is occurring at the same time as We intend to stay together" has become the rallying cry for the churches. Churches resisted the implications of the scientific revolution for a few generations, and some resist even today, but on the whole, the ground shift has been complete. "You never know what is coming next," but it is highly likely that future historians will say the same about the feminist revolution.

Edwin Abbott's Flatland, that fascinating exploration of the boundedness of our thinking and experience, contains several pages devoted to the dogged but often frustrated attempt of the Sphere to explain to the Flatlander what a "third dimension" is. The breakthrough finally comes when the Sphere begins to fashion an analogy, but even then a mystery persist 's: "The one Square produces a Something-which-you-do-not-as-yetknow-a-name-for-but-which-we-call-a- Cube." ²³ Ecumenism today has many features for which we do not yet know names.

The movement has always been complex, but there was a time when it was more feasible than it is now to tell a single story. Robert S. Bilheimer's Breakthrough: The Emergence of the Ecumenical Tradition is a comprehensive account of the early years of the movement, touching on nearly all the significant facets. There may come a time when things are sorted out enough so a single person can tell the subsequent story, but that time is not now. One is reminded of the final sentence of Henry Chadwick's The Early Church: "Thereafter [following Gregory the Great and John of Damascus] it is much more difficult to write the history of both Eastern and Western Christendom as if it were a single story." ²⁴

²² Ecumenism Among Us, p. 13.
²³ Abbott, Flatland, p. 75.
²⁴ Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 289.