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Ecclesia of Freedom
"The shape of the new paradigm is not yet clear ... but we have intimations of what it will be like. The stress will fall more upon the public than the private, the social rather than the individual, liberation rather than liberty, equality rather than hierarchy, inquiry rather than authority, praxis rather then theory, the ecumenical rather than the provincial, the plural rather than the monolithic, the global rather than the national, the ecological rather than the anthropological."
IN recent years I have taught a course required of students in the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University, "The Nature of the Church and Its Ministries." This was an assignment I took on with considerable trepidation since the literature on the church with which I was familiar was rather dull and conventional, and the topic had never been at the center of my own agenda.
I was surprised to discover that I quickly became engaged through the teaching of this course in a number of controversial issues of importance for contemporary theology-such as the conflict between traditionalists and (post) modernists, the prospect of a rebirth of the church in the Latin American base communities, current struggles in the Catholic Church over authority and ordination, the women-church movement, the impact of religious pluralism, and current crises in ministry. I found myself attempting to work out a comprehensive theological understanding of the ecclesial community in light of these controversies-a vision of ecclesia that might function as both a critical and a productive paradigm in the life of actual churches. My lectures for the course and thoughts about these questions have led to a small book that will be published shortly.1 In this essay, I will try to capture the main thread of the argument.
I
The liberation theologians have argued that all good theology is situated. It is called forth by the needs of a particular situation; it is not
Peter C. Hodgson is Professor of Theology at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Nashville. He is the editor (with Robert H. King) of Christian Theology: An Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks (1982) and Readings in Christian Theology (1985). This present article is a summary statement of the argument of a forthcoming book to be published in 1988 by Fortress with the title, Re-visioning the Church.
1Re-visioning the Church will be published by Fortress Press in the spring of 1988. This present essay is printed with the permission of the publisher.
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simply done in a vacuum, as a kind of academic exercise. What, then, is our situation, as mostly white, middle class North American and European Christians? It is not that of the "underside" of history,2 as is the case with third world and minority theologies, but rather that of the "passage" of history-the passing of Western bourgeois culture, with its ideals of individuality, private rights, technical rationality, historical progress, capitalist economy, the absoluteness of Christianity, and so on. It feels as though we are reaching the end of a historical era since we find ourselves in the midst of cognitive, historical, political, socio-economic, and religious changes of vast importance, comparable perhaps to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that inaugurated the modern age. Can we speak, then, of a second Enlightenment, a new watershed, a new paradigm in theology?3 I think we can, and I will simply assume that we are moving into a new cultural epoch, which, for lack of a better term, we call "postmodern."
Periods of cultural transition and historical passage such as we are experiencing today are unsettling, to say the least, and I want to call attention to what I regard as two unproductive responses. The first is an effort to stop the process, to turn the clock back-indeed to turn it back to pre-Enlightenment times, to traditional bases of authority and conventional forms of religious belief. The resurgence of conservative and evangelical Christianity in recent years (at least in America) is symptomatic both of the magnitude of the experienced threat and of the deep desire to recover stable ethical and religious foundations in a topsy-turvy age. I do not intend to make light of evangelical religion as an authentic piety and vital conservative force. But its dangerous potential for idolatry and ideology must also be recognized, its tendency to over-belief in the face of the threats and insecurities of our time, a false security based on illusory absolutes, such as right doctrine, fundamentalist beliefs, nationalism, and patriotism.
The second and diametrically opposed response arises from the postmodernist sense of "irrevocable loss and incurable fault,"4 which has the possibility of issuing in a radical relativism for which nothing is known, believed, or acted upon. Again, I do not want to make light of the serious, honest, baffling intellectual questions raised by deconstructionist criticism. But the temptation here is to retreat into intellectual games and hedonistic play-a mask for despair, cynicism, nihilism. Ironically, such play assumes a stable order and has no staying power against demonic absolutes and political oppression.
Against these two responses, we must insist both that the clock cannot
2Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1983), chs. 7-8, following a suggestion of Dietrich Bonhocffer.
3See Langdon Gilkey, "The New Watershed in Theology," in Society and the Sacred: Toward a Theology of Culture in Decline (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 3-14; and "Events, Meanings and the Current Tasks of Theology," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (December, 1985), pp. 717-34.
4Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern Altheology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6.
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be turned back and that everything is not relativized or demolished in the process of passage. The paradox is that in order to preserve the heritage of the past, there comes a time when we must let it go. If we attempt to hold on to it, we will lose or destroy it. But if we are willing to let it go, then it may be able to pass over into new forms and assume a new life. The conservative religion of popular culture is unwilling to let go; the radical relativism of the intelligentsia is convinced that nothing can or even should be preserved. Against these undialectical postures, I call for a process of both annulling and preserving, of both passing over and taking up. In order for such a process to work, we must help to make it work. We must have the courage to think and to act-to think with the utmost clarity about our situation, to act on the conviction that a new cultural paradigm, a new synthesis of values, can and will emerge in the postmodern age. By thinking that it can happen and acting in accord with such conviction, we shall help to make it happen.5 The shape of the new paradigm is not yet clear in its details-it remains veiled in the mystery of temporal passage, but we have intimations of what it will be like. The stress will fall more upon the public than the private, the social rather than the individual, liberation rather than liberty, equality rather than hierarchy, inquiry rather than authority, praxis rather than theory, the ecumenical rather than the provincial, the plural rather than the monolithic, the global rather than the national, the ecological rather than the anthropological.
The new cultural paradigm calls for a new theological paradigm, a re-visioning of the entire theological agenda, including questions of method, God, history, human being, ecclesiology, eschatology, and religious pluralism. In this project, I am addressing just one of the items on this agenda, but of course all these questions are interrelated and interdependent. I propose to take up just one of the tasks of a new ecclesiology, that of identifying the main themes of a theology of the church in the new paradigm. Another important task is to describe and evaluate critically the main features of classical ecclesiology, drawing upon resources from the Bible and theological tradition down to the Reformation, seeking out those elements of enduring value and truth that can and should be integrated into a new vision. Yet another task is to consider the impact on a theology of ministry of the new paradigm.
Three major crises have occurred in the history of the Western church (following the schism between East and West). The first was the Reformation, which challenged the unity, holiness, and apostolicity of the Roman Catholic Church. The second was the Enlightenment, which challenged the supernatural, suprahistorical character of the church left
5Ernst Troeltsch stressed the necessity of having the courage to act in situations of objective and intellectual uncertainty, for action can clarify, can help to resolve things slowly, when theoretical questions remain irresolvable. He also called for the creation of a new synthesis of cultural values in the wake of the crisis of Western culture brought about by the First World War. See Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. Baron F. von Hügel (London: University of London Press, 1923), esp. pp. 69-129.
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largely intact by the Reformers, thus radicalizing and extending the critical principle of the Reformation itself. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment theology articulated the relativity and historicality of the church, associating it with human quests for freedom and community while at the same time attempting to defend and transform the church concept in the face of sectarianism, individualism, secularism, and thoroughgoing rationalism. The major ecclesial issue of our time is one bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, namely, how in light of the church's historicality and relativity we can understand it as a "spiritual community." This question has by no means been resolved by modern theology, although significant contributions have been made. The problem has only become more severe under the impact of postmodernist criticism with its questioning of the meaningfulness of any historical construction and any transcendent reference.
The third church crisis is the one we are experiencing in our own time as we make the transition to a new cultural and historical paradigm. This crisis is having the effect of shattering the monolithic character and hegemony of the Western church as a whole, Catholic and Protestant, which has been predominantly Euro-American, white, male, and bourgeois. Precisely this crisis is the condition of possibility for a rebirth of the ecclesial community, a rebirth from below and from outside the established structures-ecclesiogenesis, as Leonardo Boff calls it.6 Black religion in America, the liberation theologies of the third world, and European political theology have set forth a new vision of ecclesia as pluralistic, emancipatory, prophetic, and transformative, while feminist theology has unmasked and challenged the church's massive sexism and patriarchalism. The ecumenical movement has made us aware that Christianity is a global religion, while the encounter with other religions is deepening our awareness of the relativity of Christian faith and of the need, for the sake of human survival, of entering into genuinely reciprocal and mutually transformative dialogue with other religions.
I am led in this fashion to three sets of issues that set the agenda for a theology of the church in the new paradigm: (1) the relationship of spirituality and historicality in the church, (2) the church and the praxis of liberation, and (3) ecumenism, world Christianity, and encounter among the religions.
II
The Enlightenment forced theology to emphasize the historicality of the church as never before, recognizing it to be a finite, fallible, relative institution, sharing many of the characteristics of social groups in general. At the same time, no viable ecclesiology can surrender the conviction that the church is the continuous creative and redemptive work of God, who indwells and empowers it as Holy Spirit. The question is how the church can be both a divine gift and a human activity, both a
6See n. 14.
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spirit-filled community and a historical institution without identifying these dimensions of its being but also without separating them. This question was implicit in the Reformers' distinction between the invisible and the visible church, but it has been addressed in the context of critical historical consciousness by Protestant ecclesiology since the early nineteenth century, starting with Schleiermacher, Hegel, and F. C. Baur, continuing with that seminal thinker who bridges the two centuries, Ernst Troeltsch, and finding creative expression in the theologies of H. Richard Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. These six have been of special importance, but there are many others. The question has also been taken up in different ways by the Catholic Tübingen School, the French nouvelle théologie, several post-Vatican II Catholic theologians, and by the Anglican tradition from Coleridge to Thornton.
Leaping over this rich discussion, the question can be clarified by considering the relationship between three constitutive elements: (1) the kingdom, rule, or realm of God; (2) the spiritual essence of the church, for which I will use the terms "ecclesia ... ecclesial community," or "spiritual community"; and (3) the historical, empirical churches.
The kingdom of God, the "basileia vision"7 of Jesus, is a metaphor or symbol of God's ruling presence that utterly transforms, redeems, reconciles, liberates historical existence and human relationships as a whole, a rule that constitutes the world as "God's realm," a "realm of freedom." It is a communal or social image, which envisions a communion of love, freedom, inclusion, equality, gratuity. It transcends history yet works inner-historically as both a paradigm and a power. As a paradigm, it offers a new shape, figure, or gestalt by which the world is reconfigured, transfigured. As a power, it is not causal but rather creative, directing, shaping, luring power. While it has the status of pure ideality over against empirical states of affairs, it is a productive ideal, a principle of praxis, an ideal that is intrinsically active or effective in the very articulation of it. It is the way God acts redemptively, efficaciously in the world. The divine gestalt, the basileia-gestalt, lures, shapes, empowers, configures the world. It takes shape in a plurality of historical movements, groups, religions, cultures, works of art, ethical and intellectual systems. It does so, of course, only fragmentarily and ambiguously, and, for the most part, anonymously and latently. But the basileia itself is nonfragmentary and unambiguous-God's rule as such is whole and true.
In the ecclesial or spiritual community, the basileia assumes a determinate religio-historical form, the form of the Christian community of faith, the community that explicitly recognizes and confesses the God of Israel and Jesus Christ, the community that came to be called "ecclesia," those gathered or called together in the name of Christ. Ecclesia is an image, sign, sacrament, and foretaste of the basileia, embodied in a diversity of historical churches. As such, it discloses the
7See n. 19.
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basileia vision unambiguously but actualizes it only fragmentarily. If what it images is the "realm of freedom," then it is the "ecclesia of freedom." In it, a new kind of corporate life is being shaped that is "free" not only from sin and the alienating power of death but also from all culturally specific conditions of redemption or provincial modes of existence, whether defined by nation, ethnic group, sex, class, language, law, tradition, piety. It is free to be for and with the other and with the whole of humanity under God in a quite radical way.
The category "ecclesial community" or "spiritual community" is neither realistic nor idealistic but, as Paul Tillich has so helpfully suggested, "essentialistic"-it is "a category pointing to the power of the essential behind and within the existential."8 Its ontological status is that of power-not causal power but creative and directing power. "The spiritual community does not exist as an entity beside the churches, but it is their spiritual essence, effective in them through its power, its structure, its fight against their ambiguities." It is "the inner telos of the churches.... the source of everything which makes them churches." "Essence" is a category that unifies the ideal and the real. It is the ideal manifested in the real, and the real raised to the ideal.
If "spiritual community" is a category of essence, then it mediates between the divine and the human, between God and history, between basileia and churches, unifying them without identifying them. This is, in fact, the profoundest meaning of "spirit" (ruach, pneuma, spiritus), which, understood in its root sense as "animating breath," is not dualistic but rather the unification of (by "overreaching" the distinction between) the spiritual and the natural, mind and sense, "soul" and "body," subjective and intersubjective.9 The spiritual community does not "exist" apart from the empirical churches, nor is it exhaustively realized in them. What it envisions unambiguously is actualized only fragmentarily and ambiguously in them. Likewise, the basileia, God's world-transforming presence, is not exclusively signified by the ecclesial community. It takes shape in a plurality of religious and secular configurations. For these reasons, it is necessary to maintain a distinction as well as a relation between the three elements: basileia, ecclesia, and churches.
III
If the ecclesial community is centrally concerned with the occurrence of redemption, and if redemption means being set free or released from a binding power, sin, or debt, then we can say, with Hegel, that Christianity is and has always been "the religion of freedom."10 But the
8See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), chs. 2-3.
9See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. and trans. P. C. Hodgson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Vol. 1, p. 325; Vol. 3, p. 140.
10Ibid. Vol. 3, p. 65; and Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), § 482.
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temptation of Christianity has been to personalize, privatize, and transcendentalize its understanding of freedom, allowing the worldly powers of domination and control to remain untouched. The present-day struggle on the part of minorities, the poor, and women against precisely these worldly structures-which take the form of racism, classism, sexism, political and economic injustice-reminds us that freedom has another, repressed dimension, best captured by the term "liberation." This must be brought to consciousness if we are fully to understand what it means to speak of Christianity as the "religion of freedom" and of the church as the "ecclesia of freedom." The black church in North America, the Latin American base communities, and the feminist ecclesial vision are helping to recapture this repressed dimension.
(1) The Black Church. One of the ironies of American history is that the redemptive essence of Christianity was lost when the white churches allowed themselves to become part of the ideological and social structure that legitimated the enslavement of black Africans in order to civilize the new world, and then continued to sanction segregation and racism after the abolition of slavery. It is precisely the black church that recovered the essence of ecclesia from this terrible distortion, and even today it can be said that the black church is the only truly nonracist church in North America.11
The story of this recovery is profoundly important. It happened in part through what has been called the "invisible institution"12-the underground "invisible church" of the slaves that gathered secretly to sing, pray, shout, preach, and read. Reading was of course prohibited, but many slaves taught themselves to read (or were helped by sympathetic masters) and discovered in Scripture a manual of liberation. In the ecclesial gatherings held by the slaves on their own, often at night and in secret locations, there occurred what might be described as a "clearing of freedom" within the harsh domain of oppression, a clearing in which slaves were transformed into human beings, seemingly silent and docile masses into a singing, resistant, hopeful people. Theologically one can only say that the slaves experienced in a powerful way the liberating presence of the risen Christ, and indeed they gave expression to that experience in song and sermon.13
The same continued to be true in the independent black churches after the end of slavery, although not without certain ambiguities. The question we face today is whether, insofar as the black churches slowly enter the ecclesial mainstream, they will bring with them their distinctive qualities, helping to transform the whole, enabling their paradigm of what it means to be the church to become productive for all people. A
11See Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), ch. 1.
12E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1963), pp. 16ff.
13See James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (New York: Seabury, 1972); and "Sanctification, Liberation, and Black Worship," Theology Today 35 (July, 1978), pp. 139-52.
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truly integrated Christian church in North America would be something quite radically different from anything we now know. The fact is that the mainstream Protestant churches, while changing in their official policies and leadership, remain one of the strongest bastions of racial separation and prejudice, to say nothing of class and sexual division. The Catholic Church has a better record in regard to race and class, but not sex.
(2) The Latin American Base Communities. The richest contribution to ecclesiology has come, in recent years, from Latin America, in particular from several Catholic theologians who have worked closely with the oppressed poor of their countries and have given voice to the new theology emerging from the base ecclesial communities. These communities first appeared in Brazil as lay evangelization movements among the poor due to the shortage of priests and alienation from the hierarchical upperclass church, which was part of the oppressive power structure. From the beginning, they were oriented to problems of education, illiteracy, health and child care, unemployment, and job training as well as religious life. They were total communities, which gathered in any available space, sometimes without shelter of any kind. They quickly spread throughout Brazil and other Latin American countries and have become a potent force, both political and ecclesiastical. They represent, in a term popularized by Leonardo Boff, an "ecclesiogenesis," a rebirth of the church from below, from the base.14 Three elements of this ecclesiogenesis are contributing to a theology of the church in the new paradigm.
The church viewed as sacramental and communal rather than as juridical and hierarchical. Gustavo Gutierrez calls for an "uncentering" of the church over against ecclesiocentrism, and for a sacramental rather than a juridical understanding of salvation.15 Leonardo Boff calls for the creation of a "communitarian spirit," and provides a sharply delineated comparison of the hierarchical and communal models of being church.16 The church cannot, of course, exist without organizational structure, but hierarchy must not be allowed to establish the model or pattern. In place of a vertically linear model, we should think of a circular, interactive, or triangular one. Hierarchy is in fact so deeply imbedded in Western consciousness that it is difficult for us to think of an organizational structure of any kind in nonhierarchical terms, although clearly there are alternative possibilities which the third world may disclose to us. One of the ironies of modern secularism is that in corporations, bureaucracies, and universities the graded sacred rule, the hierarchy, of the Roman church has been so thoroughly imitated.
Eucharist and human solidarity. Not only is the church sacramental,
14Leonardo Boff, Ecclesiogenesis: The Base Communities Reinvent the Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986).
15Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1973), ch. 12.
16Boff, Ecclesiogenesis, pp. 4-9, 15, 17-19, 23-33.
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but also the sacramental is conjoined with the political. The church takes place where the celebration of the Lord's Supper and the creation of human solidarity are indissolubly joined. Out of the central eucharistic experience, there must emerge both a prophetic denunciation of every dehumanizing situation and an annunciation of the gospel, not abstractly but within a commitment to liberation in concrete solidarity with people and exploited classes.17 For many Latin American theolo-gians, such as Juan Luis Segundo, this entails a commitment to a socialist transformation and democratization of Latin American society.
The preferential option for the poor.18 Such an option does not make a virtue of material poverty or grant a "hermeneutical privilege" to the oppressed. Rather, it entails a threefold recognition: that the poor have a special affinity for the gospel; that the suffering of the poor is not self-imposed and involves a much greater physical degradation than other forms of human suffering; and that the initiative in breaking the dichotomy between rich and poor and transforming the whole destructive, dehumanizing structure must lie with the poor, not the rich. Thus, the option for the poor is in fact an option for the whole of humanity.
(3) The Feminist Ecclesial Vision. Three elements are influential in forming a feminist ecclesial vision, and they also contribute significantly to a theology of the church in the new paradigm: a discovery of the egalitarian and inclusive character of many of the early Christian communities; the changing role of women in church leadership, including the emergence of the women-church movement; and the practice of inclusive language.19
One of the crucial factors in supporting the advocacy of a Christian feminist theology has been the discovery that, at its point of origin, the Christian movement was radically egalitarian and inclusive, representing a subversive reversal of prevailing social patterns in Jewish and Hellenistic culture, and that women played a role in the founding of Christianity and in early church leadership. While repatriarchalization occurred very quickly and along with it the emergence of misogynist attitudes, the "clearing of freedom" that occurred at the very beginning provides a basis for advancing theological claims concerning the essence of the ecclesial community-a transfigured, liberated, inclusive community. If it were otherwise-if it were to be found that Christianity as such, at its core, were sexist, racist, classist-then, for those committed to human liberation, Christianity would no longer be retrievable. It would have to be rejected as a false form of consciousness. The stakes here are high, and they turn primarily on historical matters and their
17Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, p. 271.
18See Gutierrez, The Power of the Poor in History, p. 126; and A Theology of Liberation, ch 13.
19The matter of inclusive language will not be taken up here. See the extensive examination of this issue in two symposia in Theology Today 41 (April, 1984) 1 and 43 (January, 1987) 4.
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proper interpretation. It is to the credit of feminist theologians such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza that they have had the courage to investigate these matters openly and to challenge established views.
Schussler Fiorenza's "feminist reconstruction of Christian origins" focuses on three major elements: the Jesus movement, the early Christian missionary movement, and the Pauline theology.20 Central to the first, she argues, is the "basileia vision of inclusive wholeness," which was enunciated in Jesus' parables and practiced in his ministry. With respect to the second, she discovers that women played an important role in the Hellenistic Jewish-Christian missionary movement and its house churches, which included all as equals without regard to status and may have been the original Sitz im Leben of the famous proclamation of Gal. 3:28, "neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, all are one in Christ Jesus." Paul, finally, adopted this radical vision, giving it theological depth and substance, but at the same time introduced certain qualifications which opened the door to the reintroduction of patriarchal values and sexual dualities.
As to the second issue, the future role of women in church leadership remains uncertain. On the surface, things have much improved, at least in the mainline American Protestant denominations. Clearly a ferment is at work among both Catholic and Protestant women that could have a profound impact. But the mere numerical increase of women in ministry will not have the needed effect unless basic attitudes and patterns are challenged. The churches are for the most part still quite massively patriarchal institutions, unlikely to change until they are forced to change. Both church and ministry must be fundamentally re-visioned if women are to participate in them on the basis of equality. This re-visioning must occur not only in the Catholic Church, where it is clear that the hierarchy is organizing for a protracted struggle against the ordination of women, but also in the Protestant churches, where tokenism dulls the cutting edge of change and encourages accommodationism. It is here that the women-church movement is of considerable importance. As Rosemary Ruether points out, "autonomous bases" are needed in order to enable women to "collectivize their own experience and form a critical counterculture to patriarchy."21 Without the consciousness-raising, nurturing, liturgical celebration, and mutual support provided by such communities, it will be difficult for women to sustain themselves in the struggle. The separation represented by these groups is not an end in itself but a necessary stage in a dialectical process of transformation-a process whose end is no longer "women-church" but
20Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983), chs. 4-6.
21Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), Introduction and Part 1; and Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), pp.201-206.
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simply "church," the "authentic community of exodus from oppression" in all of its forms and for all people.
IV
In order to get at the complex of issues associated with ecumenism and religious pluralism, I offer ten theses, formulated briefly and rather polemically.
There is widespread complacency today about the divided state of the Christian churches. Most Protestants accept their denominations as something normative and sacrosanct. The Roman Catholic hierarchy has an ambivalent attitude' toward genuine ecumenical relations with other Christian communions. The Orthodox churches are suspicious and on the defensive against modernity.
The Protestant Reformation had negative as well as positive consequences.22 These include the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which divided Europe, denominational and sectarian rivalries, and the growth of modern secularism. There are, of course, many causes of secularism, but a contributing factor has been the division among the Christian churches. When Christianity could no longer provide a basis for communal unity and identity, new bases were found in regional, national, cultural, and ethnic ideologies. In its divided state, Christianity has tended to lose credibility and to waste its resources, economic and intellectual.
The exigency for unity does not reside in scriptural or doctrinal proofs, but in thefundamental logic of Christian faith which is oriented to a single central figure and event, and which is intrinsically nonprovincial in character (no divisions or exclusions legitimated on the basis of race, sex, creed, nationality, locale).
The basis for Christian unity is simply the confession of faith in Jesus as the Christ, not unity of creed, doctrine, or polity. Creeds and theologies are attempts at understanding what the confession of faith in Christ means under different historical circumstances and in relation to specific issues. As such, they are relative and partial.
The precondition of Christian unity is the recognition and acceptance of diversity, plurality, and difference. The ecumenical goal is unity in diversity, not uniformity. In as complex a human activity as religion, there can be no unity on any other terms. Those who cannot tolerate diversity (of creed, interpretation, practice, structure, etc.) must insist on separation in order to preserve a rigid identity. Then between the separated branches mutual suspicion and hostility reigns. True identity is achieved not by adherence to rigid formulae but through the conflict and interplay of interpretations.
22See Hans Kung, The Church (New York: Image Books, 1976), pp. 361-364; and Wolfhart Pannenberg, The Church (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983), ch. 6.
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The ultimate goal of Christian unity is some kind of structural union.23 It seems clear that the structure of any united or uniting church must be democratic, participatory, and federal. What is required is solidarity and reciprocity among equals, with no unilateral, hierarchical exercise of authority. A genuine union is not a matter of one separated group being merged into another, but of a wholly new church being born-an ecclesiogenesis-giving up what is merely parochial from the old churches but preserving all that is worth saving. This is a quite radical demand, and perhaps it explains why the ecumenical movement today is on hard times. The old parochialisms enthrall us by offering false security.
Not only the ecumenical but the global character of Christianity must be recognized. Christianity is a world religion, transcending denominations, confessions, regions, nations, and continents. Clearly, Christianity is growing most rapidly in the third world and among non-white indigenous groups. The center of the Christian world is shifting from the West to the South. Most of the growth is Catholic. The Protestant and Anglican churches are declining as a percentage of world population to about seven percent in the year 2000.24
The world as a whole is becoming less Western, less Christian, less religious. The challenge of secularism in the postmodern period suggests that the survival of Christianity, and perhaps the survival of humanity as such, may depend upon, among other things, a serious encounter among the religions of the world. Only Islam is increasing its numbers in proportion to world population growth. Demographically speaking, the category of the nonreligious and atheists was virtually nonexistent in 1900, but by 2000 will be above twenty-one percent. In the light of these facts, it would seem to make sense to create a global religious consciousness and a partnership in the struggle against common threats to humanity. If the religions are to survive and be strengthened, they will have to learn from each other, being mutually transformed and enriched through creative encounters.
The precondition of genuine encounter is the acceptance of religious pluralism. This means the recognition that the great world religions have equally valid claims and that each is culturally relative. There is no universal world court or absolute value system in which rival truth claims can be adjudicated.
Pluralism may be intellectually honest, but it has profound implications
23I am drawing at this point upon recent publications of the Consultation on Church Union, especially The COCU Consensus: In Quest of a Church of Christ Uniting, ed. Gerald F. Moede (Princeton, 1985), as well as upon conversations with my colleague Peggy Way.
24See Walbert Bhlmann, The Coming of the Third Church: An Analysis of the Present and Future of the Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1978); and The Church of the Future: A Model for the Year 2000 (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986). This statistic and the information in the next paragraph are from the World Christian Encyclopedia, ed. David B. Barrett (London: Oxford University Press, 1982); see esp. the table on p. 6.
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for the self-understanding of the Christian church. This leads to a final thesis: a deeper understanding of the nature of the ecclesial community can be gained through an encounter with other religions. An acknowledgment of religious pluralism and cultural relativity by no means entails solipsism, relativism, or syncretism. It is, in fact, possible to maintain a fundamental loyalty to a relative religion, knowing that what is truth for us is not truth for all, finding that the more deeply we trust what we believe to be true, the more open we are able to become to wisdom from any source.
An example of this, which bears specifically on our quest for new ecclesial paradigms, comes from the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism. John Cobb points out that Buddhism achieves a detachment, a freedom from things more radical than anything we know in the West. It is both a total emptiness and a total fullness.25 What Buddhism calls detachment, Christianity calls grace. Living by grace is a complete letting go, not a holding fast, an openness to what presents itself, a gaining of life by losing it, an emptiness that is also a fullness.
Such liberating grace appears to be the basic condition and constitutive reality of the ecclesial community, which is a community of reciprocity, solidarity, mutuality of recognition, intending the other for the sake of the other, mediating grace for others without preconditions or expectations. But such a community is almost a utopian ideal in our consumer-oriented, materialist, individualist culture. Perhaps Buddhism can help the Christian church to be a community of grace in a graceless culture by showing what it means to have faith without attachment, to find fulfillment in utter emptiness, to become a communal self by giving up private selfhood. The church might be helped then to become, in a fragmentary way, a gathering of those who are free, an ecclesia of freedom.
25John B. Cobb, Jr., Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), chs. 4, 5; see esp. pp. 47-52, 141-43.