Ecumenical Imperatives for the 21st Century

Ecumenical Imperatives for the 21st Century

By
George Lindbeck

Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology Yale University

Historical periods do not always correspond to the calendar. The historian, John Lukacs, for example, says that the twentieth century has already ended and the twenty-first begun.[1] We shall say more about this chronology when we look at the prospects of the twenty-first century for the world at large. Then, in the second and third parts, we shall discuss the church's prospects, and the imperatives, especially the ecumenical imperatives, which flow from them.

The future is by definition unknown, and a discussion such as this is hypothetical: if such and such developments occur, then such and such will be the shape of the challenges which Christians face. Yet hypotheses are necessary to guide action. If we risk no surmises about what the future will bring, we shall either freeze or flounder. It is better when playing blind-man's buff to guess poorly than not to guess at all.

Our thinking about the future, however, is not entirely guess-work: it inevitably draws on the past. Memory supplies the materials out of which we construct pictures of things to come. It is important, therefore, to remind ourselves of the last centuries before speculating about the next. The nineteenth century began historically even if not chronologically with the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. It proved, after a somewhat slow start, to be the most progress-oriented and optimistic period in Western civilization. It surpassed in this respect even the previous hundred years. Under the influence of evangelicals like Wilberforce, the British stopped the slave trade on the high seas through the power of their imperial fleet in the first part of the nineteenth century, and some decades later, the Americans ended slavery in their own country, once again partly under evangelical influence, after a [361] bloody civil war. Science and technology advanced by leaps and bounds, and almost all of it seemed beneficial. Educational levels and living standards rose rapidly, and democracy spread more and more widely. Much of what we now regard as bad was then seen as good. Colonialism, for example, was said to improve the lot of backward peoples, and such explanations seemed plausible even to revolutionaries like Karl Marx. Modern medicine, education, and missionary activity did, after all, improve nutrition, lengthen the life span, and speed the growth of population. Industrialization was hard on the laboring classes, but even they were optimistic: when they rebelled, it was in hope of a proletarian paradise. Whether women were better off in Victorian than pre-Victorian times is perhaps debatable, but there is no doubt that consciousness of oppression, the precondition for protest, became increasingly widespread. Not everyone, to be sure, was happy about modernity, and there were prophets of doom like Henry Adams who foresaw a woeful future. Yet most people thought progress could not be stopped. Among Christians, growing numbers supposed that the millennium was at hand. The world, among other things, was becoming peaceful. Not a single major, multi-national war occurred in a hundred years, and many thought that bloodletting among "civilized" powers on the scale of the Napoleonic conflicts had forever become impossible. Utopian dreams proliferated.

Then came the twentieth century which began, historically if not chronologically, with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. It ended after the bloodiest seventy-five years on record, according to John Lukacs, with the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of Marxist ideology, the break-up of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Yet despite this supposedly triumphant close of a desperate century, most people fear a future more dismal than the past. The Balkans are again in uproar, the world order of the Cold War period is unraveling, and no one knows what mixture of anarchy, tyranny, and (we hope) democracy will replace it.

Further, the effects of science and technology have turned vicious, and while the nuclear threat to the planet may have diminished, the ecological one grows worse day by day. The free-market democracies may have won the Cold War, but they are falling into deeper and deeper social and cultural crises. They seem to be turning into aggregates of competing special interest groups unable to collaborate for the common good or plan for future generations either financially or environmentally. Sober observers like George Kennan[2] think a society such as the United States is becoming inviable. The sense of community and the standards of behavior which make life together possible are being less and less effectively [362] transmitted. This is a problem deeper than wars' destructiveness or the collapse of political or economic systems such as has occurred in the East, for at its worst it makes reconstruction impossible. Perhaps the capitalist West, led by America, is spiraling downwards much like the late classical civilization of Greece and Rome. If so, our decline is likely to be faster than the centuries-long process which led to Rome's definitive fall.

The situation is different and diversified in the non-Western world.[3] Japan has moved to the forefront with astonishing speed since it was opened by Admiral Perry a hundred-fifty years ago. South Korea and the three little Chinese tigers of Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapore are making the same leap more rapidly, almost in a single generation. Furthermore, if the economic miracles now underway along the South China coast move inland and northwards, the world in a few decades will finally find itself confronted with the long predicted Chinese colossus. As a developed nation of more than a billion inhabitants, it cannot help but change the balance of power. Indeed, as is often noted, this balance is already shifting from the North Atlantic to the Pacific rim.

Even if the center does not shift decisively to East Asia, ours will no longer be a eurocentric globe. Haves and have-nots will still be with us, but the distinction will not be between Europeans and non-Europeans. Similarly, victims and victimizers, the oppressed and their oppressors may be as numerous or more numerous than ever, but as we already see in Bosnia and Somalia, they will not so often be distinguished by color. Many Westerners will be relieved no longer to be the main targets of criticism, but that will not automatically make matters better: non-racist brutality can be as bad as the racist variety.

Implications of a changed world for the churches

Next let us look at some of the implications of a changed world for the churches. First, Christianity, like the world itself, will no longer be eurocentric.[4] A rapidly increasing proportion of church members will be African, Latin American, and East Asian (especially Korean, and, it seems likely, Chinese). To be sure, Christianity will not everywhere expand. It will perhaps almost entirely disappear from those Muslim lands from which ancient Christian minorities are now fleeing. Nor is it likely to increase to any great extent in Japan or in the Hindu and Buddhist areas of South Asia, and the decline which has long been in progress in the traditionally Christian countries of the West seems likely to continue. It is in the Far East, Africa, and Latin America that the future of the church looks statistically most promising.

Financially, however, it may well be that Christians will on the whole be poorer rather than richer in comparison to the rest of the world's population. Of the three areas in which Christianity is growing, only the East Asian gives promise of affluence. Furthermore, the newly affluent and newly Christian East Asians, as is characteristic of [363] the recently converted, tend to be more conservative theologically and more imbued with missionary zeal than their Western counterparts. Already the South Korean Presbyterians, for example, are sending more missionaries abroad in proportion to their numbers than the mainline denominations of Europe and America. Conservatism is also present in impoverished, have-not countries. The rapidly increasing Protestants (mostly Pentecostals) in Latin America tend towards the right, while the religion of both Catholics and Protestants in sub-Saharan Africa, where the greatest growth is taking place, is in many respects much more like that of earlier Western generations than of modern times. This, in turn, will react back on the West. An African pope before the end of the twenty-first century seems probable. He will almost certainly, like most non-Western Christians , be religiously more old-fashioned than many Westerners will like, and yet he will also, it may be assumed, be deeply concerned about the plight of the poor and the oppressed (as is also the present pontiff). It is not the West which will be calling the tune.

In the historically Christian countries, the prospects are not bright. In Eastern Europe, to be sure, the collapse of communism has released a great surge of religiosity, but much of this consists of the ideological misuse of religion for nationalistic purposes. It resembles what we in America think of as Ku Klux Klan Christianity: hoods, burnings and lynchings combined with crosses. Fundamentalism is not the right word for this phenomenon: the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Muslim purveyors of violence in North Ireland, Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia are not infrequently admitted atheists who care nothing about scripture or church tradition, much less literalistic interpretation. Religion is a tool they use to gain legitimacy and spur on the troops. But so powerful is this blend of religiosity and nationalism in the newly liberated lands of the East that it imperils the churches and threatens to evoke secularist reactions. We do not yet know whether Christianity will emerge genuinely strengthened from the long Marxist night.

In the West, the problems are also grave though less dramatic. As far as the United States is concerned, sociologists like Withnow and Hunter[5] tell us what most of us suspect in any case: the center is weakening, polarization is increasing, and the once main-line denominations are shrinking and moving to the left. There would be some comfort in this if the left were biblically prophetic or even communally liberationist, but instead current anti-traditionalists are often the avantgarde of a consumerist society focusing on human potential, [364] new age religiosity, and individualistic entitlements.

It seems, in other words, that the old line churches, like other parts of the American polity, are less and less able to transmit the heritage. Seminaries complain that biblical literacy declines with each entering class. The problem when LSTC and the Catholic Theological Union established themselves in Hyde Park a quarter century ago was how to make the churches effective agents of social change. The churches' survival was taken for granted, but it is precisely that which is now in question. There are, so sociologists say, fewer and fewer communities held together despite contentions by an identifiable core of shared beliefs and group loyalties. Rather, like society at large, they are becoming heterogeneous collections of special interest groups united, if at all, by bureaucratic management. Transmitting even a modicum of communal ties and creedal commitment is increasingly left to the conservatives. The center is not holding.

Ecumenical imperatives

This brings us to ecumenical imperatives. The search for unity has faltered in recent times not least because of the weakening of the center.[6] Strengthening the center is imperative for intra-Christian communication, and intra-Christian communication is necessary for ecumenism. Second, intra-Christian communication and the ecumenism which it makes possible is urgent, not only for the sake of the churches dispersed throughout the world, but for the world itself.

One characteristic of the Christian center is, to cite a phrase of the late Hans Frei, "generous orthodoxy." To be generously orthodox does not necessarily mean being "ecumenical" in a formal sense. The generously orthodox, rather, are those who in any situation, whether denominational or ecumenical, resist polarization, seek to mediate between right and left, favor reconciled diversity rather than uniformity, and work for pluralistic unity within the framework of distinctively Christian belief and practice. This, it needs to be stressed, is an intra-Christian, not interreligious task. It does not exclude interreligious dialogue (or what is sometimes called the "wider ecumenism"), but it centers on promoting Christian unity, not on relations to other religions. The touchstone for such unity is Jesus Christ, God with us, as witnessed to by scripture. He is the one, so the ecumenical center maintains, by which all religions including Christianity must be tested.

There are other ways of making this christological and ultimately trinitarian affirmation; but however stated, it seems the indispensable condition for effective dialogue between the major Asian, African, American, and European manifestations of the Christian movement. Faith and Order and the World Council of Churches have again and again discovered that they risk losing most of their constituency if they drop trinitarian communal profession as a condition of membership. Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Reformation Protestants, and Pentecostals from all five continents are able to develop ecumenical openness to each other on the basis of tacit or explicit adherence to the Nicene faith, but not otherwise; and the demographics of Christian growth which we earlier noted [365] suggest that this will be even more true in the future. It is commitment to the finality of Jesus Christ which enables these fantastically different groups to become part of a global network of communication, a single domain of discourse and cooperation.

Furthermore, in the second place, the importance of this global network and domain of discourse in the fragmented and disintegrating twenty-first century seems undeniable. World-wide Christian ecumenism in its bilateral and multilateral multiplicity has no secular counterparts, and nothing anywhere near as extensive exists in any other religion. Divided Jewish groups, to be sure, exercise mutual helpfulness better than Christian ones, but their communicative network is much smaller. Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism may have potentialities for their own internal ecumenism, but these are as yet underdeveloped. Not that this underdevelopment should be a cause of Christian satisfaction. We need to be open to the possibility that it is in part for the sake of others that Christians have become in this century, not only the largest but the dialogically most practiced community or family of communities, whether religious or non-religious, on earth. (The communicative networks maintained, for example, by scientists are more extensive and more intensively used than those of religious folk, but they are functions of professional groupings, not communities.) Perhaps God wants the Christian example to help other communal traditions actualize their own world-wide networks of discourse. To the extent these webs of communication develop and intertwine, their contribution to saving humanity from itself in the coming century might be immense. Christians have learned from as well as taught much to others in the past, and scripture gives them reason to believe that God wills this process of interaction to continue to the eschaton.

In conclusion, let me mention four points which should be kept in mind. First, the twenty-first century needs global communities of communication. Second, Christians are potentially and to some extent actually such a community to an unparalleled extent. Third (to mention a theme I have only implied rather than developed), this communicative community lives by interconfessional and intercontinental argument—or, if you prefer, ecumenical dialogue—over what it means to be faithfully Christian in deed and word. Fourth, Jesus Christ is the center, touchstone, matrix— that is, womb—of these discussions.

The last point, needless to say, is fundamental for piety. It reminds me of something I heard shortly before giving this talk from a black woman who is a committed feminist:

We turn to Jesus not because we need a man to rescue us; we turn to Jesus because he understands! Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be gifted and have those gifts rejected by his own people. Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be scorned and abandoned by those closest to him. Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be misunderstood and silenced by those [366] in power. Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be scared. Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be an outcast and to suffer. Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be betrayed.... Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it means to be beaten and mocked and stereotyped. Jesus is not a Black woman, but he knows what it is to be resurrected! Sisters . . . God sends one who knows what we feel and what we experience to raise us up over and over again.[7]

I have heard prayers which paraphrase these words—they are, after all, Bible-based—in every Christian group with which I have worshipped from Swedish Pentecostals to Tanzanian Lutherans, and from Rome and Moscow to Beijing. Not all those who pray in this fashion are ecumenical, but without this prayer, ecumenism is impotent. It is in turning together to Christ because he was tempted even as we are yet without sin (Heb 4:15) that blacks and whites, men and women are united in Christian fellowship. We cannot know whether this common turning to the common center will draw the churches throughout the world further together in the coming century, but we can know that unless we knit the bonds of global Christianity more tightly, the future of humankind will be even dimmer than it seems. Christ prays that his disciples be one, not only for their sake, but for the world's sake (John 17). Never has the ecumenical imperative been more urgent.

Source: Currents in Theology and Mission, 20 no 5 O 1993, p 360-366.

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[1] John Lukacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993).

[2] See his Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: W. Norton, 1993).

[3] Data supporting the picture presented in this paragraph is widely available, but perhaps most fully (though at times with idiosyncratic interpretations which I have avoided) in Paul Kennedy, Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993).

[4] The most complete compilation of statistics on Christian growth (and decline) are to be found in David Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1982), and in his "Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission" published each year since 1989 in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

[5] Robert Withnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), and James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1991).

[6] Robert S. Bilheimer, Breakthrough: The Emergence of the Ecumenical Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), describes and notes the dependence of ecumenism on "the church of the center" (212, 214-23).

[7] The Reverend Barbara Essex in a speech at a Conference on Womanist Theology at Hartford Seminary, February 6, 1993.