The New Vision of the World and the Ecumenical Revolution

The New Vision of the World and the Ecumenical Revolution

By George A. Lindbeck 

Professor of Historical Theology, The Divinity School of Yale University

THE PURPOSE of this address is not to tell you what are the implications of the ecumenical revolution for religious education. You are far more competent to do that than I. Rather, my role as I understand it is to try to describe the shape and the background of the present movement towards unity in such a way that you will have a common point of reference in your later discussions — a point of reference with which you may agree or disagree, but which will, hopefully, provide some kind of focus for your own independent reflections on the nature and the implications of the contemporary ecumenical ferment.

In thinking about this topic, I find myself wondering what event most vividly symbolizes the startling ecumenical advances of our times. What comes to mind is not the Second Vatican Council, nor the Pope's meetings with the Patriarch of Constantinople or the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor the entrance of the Russian Orthodox into the World Council of Churches, but rather the demonstrations at Selma with nuns, priests, rabbis, and ministers of many denominations marching shoulder to shoulder in the Negro ranks protesting against the white power structure. Never before had the country seen such a vivid visual illustration of the increasing closeness of Catholics, Protestants and Jews and of these three groups with the humanely concerned of all religions and no religion at all This is odd because, after all, that manifestation was not directly ecumenical. For the clerics and religious who participated, it was rather an expression of a new vision and new attitude towards the world. The church, they were trying to say, must stand on the side of the poor and the oppressed, not the rich and the oppressors. It cannot confine itself to Sunday services and pious exercises, but it must participate in the struggle for a better world even when this is dangerous, and even when it involves, not leading and teaching, but playing a servant role in a movement led and directed by others.

It is, I suspect, this vision of the world and religion's place in it which is the most important factor in the contemporary ecumenical situation. It is this which makes it imperative that Christians act together, not only with each other, but also, as Pope John XXIII put it in Pacem in terris, and as the Vatican Council has repeated, with all men of good will whether Christian or non-Christian, atheists or believers. Unity is important for the sake of what the council sometimes calls "building the earthly city," [84] for the sake of effective action on behalf of the victims of injustice and the alienated and suffering in all strata of society. There are of course many other motives for ecumenism, but it seems to me that it is the beginnings of this new attitude towards the world which gives hope that present strivings for unity will have a passion and persistence which have often been lacking in the past.

Our topic, then, is not ecumenism per se, but rather that vision of the world which is helping to give it its revolutionary drive. We shall later say something of the ecumenical implications, but these will be, I trust, more or less self-evident.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

IN ORDER to understand what is happening, we must go, first of all, to history, for what is new can be understood only in contrast to that which it is replacing. We must also draw — even though we shall mention few names — on the writings of both Catholic and Protestant theologians, for the new vision is being developed as a part of a group enterprise which is itself ecumenical, embracing Christians of all confessions.

One prominent Roman Catholic theologian, the Dutch Dominican, Schillebeeckx, has proposed that the present shift in the evaluation of earthly realities is part of the greatest change in Christian thinking since Constantine 1600 years ago. Each generation is, of course, inclined to exaggerate the importance of the transition through which it is living, but if one goes this far back, one might as well go 300 years farther.

It might be suggested that the first great change began as soon as Christianity moved out of the thought-world of 1st century Judaism into that of Greek classical culture; in other words, it began while the New Testament was being written. One view of the universe was replaced by another and Biblical beliefs were reformulated in many different ways in the course of a thousand years in order to make them intelligible within the new framework.

Now we are involved in a comparable transition. The classical outlook is being replaced by pictures of the world derived from modern science. Once again Biblical beliefs are inevitably being expressed in fundamentally new patterns.

This does not mean, to be sure, that all theologies and philosophies of the past are irrelevant and doomed to disappear. The themes of the Biblical authors lived on within a Greek framework. Greek thought, in turn, retains enormous vitality even within a modern outlook, as is illustrated, for example, by the role which both Platonism and Aristotelianism play in a process philosophy such as Whitehead's. However, such perennially persistent theological and philosophical positions are radically reshaped within the context of a new world picture.

In order to establish the terms in which I would like to describe the reshaping of attitudes towards earthly realities, I shall trespass on your patience by recalling some of the familiar catch-words used by historians in describing the biblical, classical and modern world pictures.

1. THE NEW TESTAMENT AUTHORS, good Jews that they were, saw the world eschatologically in terms of a story with a definite beginning and end. The story starts with God's creative act and moves towards the consummation when the Messiah will return and manifestly transform this earth into God's kingdom of justice, love and peace. This transformation, so the Christians believed, had already taken place in a hidden way in the first coming of the Messiah, in Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Thus, according to this way of thinking, the great divide in the universe is not along the vertical spatial line between heaven above and earth beneath, but along the temporal horizontal line between the old age of sin and death, and the new age of righteousness and life. Heaven was part of that created order which needed to be changed, and so the New Testament authors [85] spoke of looking for a new heaven just as much as for a new earth. Similarly, the great divide within human existence was not between an immaterial soul and a physical body. Spirit and flesh in New Testament usage represent quite a different distinction which makes it possible, for example, to speak of a spiritual body and a fleshly mind. As modern biblical scholars argue, whatever lived in the power of the coming age, whether body or soul, was spirit, and whatever remained fixated in the past of loveless and defensive anxiety was flesh.

Within this context, the attitude of early Christians towards the world, that is, towards the natural order of created things, was in a sense this-worldly. The Kingdom of God for which they longed was not a matter of "pie in the sky" but was rather the final and culminating phase of this world's history. Secondly, their attitude was hope-filled and future-directed. They believed that in Christ the future had already begun and that the old age of misery and injustice would pass away. Thirdly, they were communitarian, not individualistic. Individuals were of immeasurable importance, but they were thought of as persons in community, not as isolated agents. The good life, the redeemed life, was understood by them as reconciliation, as the uniting of man with man, and indeed, of all things through Christ with God. Salvation was not a matter of simply private experiences nor of the purely interior and individual possession of God's favor or grace.

2. THE CLASSICAL PICTURE of the world was dramatically different. As is often said, it was two-storied and static. The great divide was between the upper changeless realm of immaterial being, of Platonic forms or Aristotelian unmoved movers, while beneath was the arena of becoming, of time and matter. This lower domain was one of constant flux, to be sure, but it had no history. Its duration was endless both in the past and the future, and the basic patterns of the world of motion remain eternally the same, either in the sense of Aristotle's unchanging species or in the sense of the ceaselessly repeated Stoic cycles.

The Christians who had grown up with this view were forced to modify it profoundly in order to reconcile it with the Bible. The world, they said, was not uncreated and of endless duration, but was made by God a finite time in the past and would end a finite time in the future. Occasionally, genuinely new things happened, such as the coming of Christ. But they retained much of the classical outlook. They continued to believe that the structures of material, biological, and even human existence remain fundamentally unchanged from the beginning to the end of the world. The biblical horizontal temporal contrast between the old and the new ages was replaced by the vertical contrast between an immaterial heaven and material earth. Despite some resistance from Aristotelians like St. Thomas, the Platonic dualism between soul and body also triumphed, at least on the imaginative level of popular Christian culture and devotion. Further, — and the beginnings of this are already apparent in the later books of the New Testament — this world is not to be transformed into the Kingdom of God, but it is to be almost totally annihilated with the exception of a limited number of pious escapees.

In this context, the Christian attitude towards the world was radically altered. This-worldliness was metamorphasized into other-worldliness. The orientation towards the future, towards the Kingdom which had come in Jesus but was not yet fully manifest, was largely replaced by a stress on the past incarnation and the Christ of present faith. Finally, communitarian emphasis gave way to individualism. This was true of Catholics as well as Protestants. Except for some sectarian movements, the church was not fundamentally a community, nor was it fundamentally the Messianic people of God. It was rather an institution supplying the means of grace by which individuals could be saved, so to speak, one by one. To be sure, the Catholics thought of [86] this institution as indispensible, and the Protestants often did not but, at least on the level of popular piety, their basic notion of the church as the institutional purveyor of the means of grace has been remarkably similar and their views of salvation equally individualistic.

However, we should not exaggerate. Christians who thought in classical patterns have often been deeply concerned about the world even in its material aspects. They could not suppress the Biblical emphasis on nature as God's good creation. They could not repudiate the world as entirely evil, as did the Gnostics, nor neglect k as somehow unreal in the fashion of some Eastern religions. Supposedly unworldly Benedictine monks were the great innovators in agricultural technology in the early middle ages. During long periods, it was the church which built the schools and hospitals. It has provided the initial impetus for innumerable movements of social reform which, to be sure, it often then opposed when they threatened the established order. Nevertheless, despite Luther's doctrine of vocation and the "inner-worldly" asceticism of the Puritans, so-called secular activities have generally been regarded during most of Christian history as second best, mere adjuncts or by-products of the real business of the devout Christian which is the salvation of individual souls, whether his own or those of others.

3. Now, HOWEVER, a third way of picturing the world is becoming pervasive. The classical outlook in both its religious and non-religious versions is disappearing. Often we are unaware of how recently this has taken place. The world views of the first period of modern science were in many respects like those of the classical period, however different in detail. For example, Newtonian science conceived the basic structures of reality as unchanging and time as an absolute of infinite duration. It is especially in the last 100 years that the fundamental revolution has begun. Technological and scientific progress, Carnot's law of entropy, Darwinian evolutionism, Einstein's theory of relativity and speculations about expanding and oscillating universes have changed even the way the man in the street visualizes the universe. He thinks of it, not as static, certainly not as two-storied, but more and more as a unified historical-evolutionary process.

Now, strangely enough, the formal structure, though not the concrete details, of this modern world picture resembles that of the first Christian century much more than it does the classical Hellenized views of later periods.

This, at least, is what many historians of ideas and theologians are suggesting. They argue that for both the first and twentieth centuries, the world is a unified whole rather than divided into two fundamentally distinct layers of the unchanging heavens and the earthly flux, or of spiritual and physical realities. For both centuries, it is at least thinkable that this universe had a definite beginning at some finite time in the past, even though first century men thought of this in terms of thousands of years and the Genesis myths, while our cosmologists, if they adhere to the theory of an expanding universe, speak of billions of years and of some unimaginable cosmic explosion. For both, this unified, temporally finite cosmos is not static, but is a process with a story, a history, in which even fundamental structures can be revolutionized. This is true, once again, even though first century Jews visualized the process in anthropomorphic terms while we speak of gaseous clouds condensing into nebulae, stars and planets, of the emergence of living beings from nonliving matter and of the slow and painful push up the evolutionary ladder to cave men and now to space men. Finally, both these world views are oriented towards the future. Most contemporary men, to be sure, do not think in first-century fashion of the cosmos as rushing towards the Kingdom of God, but they are intensely aware that mankind is hurtling forward with ever-increasing speed. Development succeeds development at an accelerating pace until now we find ourselves rocketing into [87] the future in what seems to be definite direction, but towards a goal we cannot know — towards a blindness which we fill with both terror and hope and towards which we react either by blind reactionary clutching of the familiar or an equally desperate revolt against everything which comes from the past.

WE ARE NOW in a position to see why an increasing number of theologians are inclined to think that it is, so to speak, easier to baptize or Christianize this world view than the classical one. Over-simplifying drastically, one could say that the Christian is one who affirms in faith and hope, not knowledge, that the future towards which mankind and his world is heading is not a terrifying blank but is one whose shape is stamped with the lineaments of him whom the New Testament speaks of as our elder brother, as the first fruits of the New Creation, Jesus Christ. God, he says, is guiding all the processes of nature and history towards the ultimate, cosmic fulfillment in which all things and mankind as a whole will be reconciled in Christ, and through Christ with God. In short, the Hebrew Messianic element, which was so strong in primitive Christianity, is being reinforced.

This New Testament language is highly symbolic, and it is quite impossible to reduce it to a description of a rather commonplace, inner-worldly Utopia as some of the social-gospel theologians of a past generation tried to do. It is also impossible to spell out what it means in quasi-empirical, purportedly scientific terms as Teilhard de Chardin, for example, so brilliantly, but ultimately unsuccessfully attempted However, as we know, one of the characteristics of much, though by no means all, modern theology, both Catholic and Protestant, is that it takes symbols seriously, it does not try to explain them away, to reduce them to another kind of language, whether that of medieval metaphysics or of some contemporary non-symbolic mode of expression. It views symbols as the logically in-dispensible way ¡For the whole of being to be represented to man and for man to develop total responses, total attitudes towards reality. The Marxist or the humanist visions are just as symbolic as the Christian, even when they parade in literal dress. The question, then, is not whether the representational pole of one's ultimate commitments is symbolic or not, for it can't be anything else, but which set of symbols is most adequate to articulate and guide whatever fundamental human orientation it may be that is truest, that is most appropriate, to the fathomless mystery which lies at the heart of things, which encompasses the beginning and the end, the origin and the destiny, of our lives and of the world we know, and towards which we feebly point in our talk about God.

It is in some such way as this that many contemporary theologians try to take seriously within a modern context the biblical vision of the world and human history. This does not mean that they set themselves up as prophets. They are agnostic about the details of the future course of events. It may last a mere matter of minutes or it may continue for millions of years. Humanity may experience both unbelievable cataclysms in die form, for example, of atomic warfare as well as unimaginable triumphs here on this planet or in distant constellations and galaxies. About all this the Christian knows no more nor no less than anyone else. But what he does affirm in faith is that, whatever happens, the world and human history is moving towards, not simple cessation or abolition, as most theologies of the past have suggested, but transformation into the Kingdom of God.

Such an outlook, it must be emphasized, is not a simple reproduction of biblical eschatology. The New Testament authors and the early fathers understood only the history of Israel, Roman peace and, in some cases, Greek philosophy as preparation for the gospel; while within the contemporary perspective, this preparatory action of God is thought of on a vastly greater scale as extending through billions of years of cosmic and biological evolution and the hun-[88]dreds of thousands of years of human development.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CHURCH AND ITS MISSION

The implications of this for the Christian and the church's attitude towards and the relation to the world are, of course, tremendous. It leads to much greater emphases on what might be called "the secular mission" of the church, on its servant character, and through this to ecumenism.

1. The secular mission becomes important because God is seen as guiding all that happens towards the final transformation. All that is pure, honorable and of good report, whether it develops within the explicitly Christian sphere or not, whether it is overtly religious or apparently secular in character, will enter into the consummation. Human advances of all sorts, from the technological and scientific to the social, political, cultural and moral, are part of God's preparation for the coming Kingdom. These advances, of course, are radically ambiguous and can be used for evil purposes as well as good; but God wills that man actualize his potentialities to the uttermost, and whatever is good about these actualizations is eternally relevant. Thus the "building of the earthly city," as Vatican II calls it, and the worldly tasks which necessarily occupy the attention of most men most of the time are not simply a meaningless background to spiritual reality, to the New Age, but contribute to its very constitution. In promoting so-called secular advances, therefore, the church and the Christian are directly engaged in God's business, and this is true not only when they struggle for peace and justice, but also when they are concerned with the inseparably related technological, intellectual and cultural domains.

2. In the second place, however, this Christian concern for the world cannot take the form, which was common in the classical, two-story view, of a desire to dominate and direct society. This was natural in that context simply because the church thought of God as saving, not the world, but individual souls out of this world. Its interest in society, therefore, was simply that of providing a favorable environment for the specifically religious activities of preaching, worship, and Christian nurture. Not only Catholics, but also many Protestants, were quite willing, for example, to violate religious liberty in order to prevent simple souls from being led astray. Even when they didn't go that far, their interest was frequently the negative one of passing blue laws to remove temptation rather than the positive one of building for the future. However, when God is seen as redemptively guiding all the processes of nature and history towards the consummation, then the church no longer has a monopoly of saving activity. The church is called upon to cooperate with what God is doing outside the explicitly Christian realm. It must do this even when its role is subsidiary, even when it does not lead to any growth of power or influence for itself, even when it does not result in an increase in membership. Its role must be that of a servant of mankind, not a master.

Indeed, one must go farther. The sole business of the Christian community is to concentrate on faithful witness in action as well as word to the Lord who was a servant of human need and who fought against evil even when, to put it mildly, it was inexpedient to do so. The Church, therefore, need not feel troubled if it fails to convert large numbers to Christianity. It can cheerfully leave the question of visible success to God, knowing that He wills to use its witness in apparent defeat as in apparent victory. Its task is not necessarily to Christianize the world, but to serve it by reminding it in all that it is and does of where it is heading, of what God's purposes are. It does this, not only by the words and individual lives of its members, but more fundamentally by being a communion of faith, love, and service, by being a concrete sign and witness, however imperfect, of the Kingdom which has begun and is to come.

3. Thirdly, the ecumenical importance of these emphases is obvious. Within the [89] traditional two-story outlook there was no overwhelmingly evident reason why Christians should act together in order to carry out their mission. That mission was thought of, as we have said, primarily in terms of the explicitly religious task of mediating God's saving grace to individuals. The Catholic, to be sure, has conceived of the communication of this grace more in terms of right doctrinal belief, sacramental causality and institutional membership while the Protestant has spoken mostly of the Word of God, living faith or religious experience, but in both cases it was not of central importance that Christians and churches act together in order to carry out their function of saving souls one by one. This was particularly true on the Protestant side, but even Catholics admit, as has now become clear from the council's Decree on Ecumenism, that the grace of God can be mediated more or less fully to individuals through ecclesial communities and churches which are not in communion with Rome. Thus there is room for being laissez fake about the divisions among Christians. To be sure, there can be a variety of reasons even in this outlook for taking unity with the utmost seriousness, but it is not built into the very concept of the mission of the church.

Within the new perspective, in contrast, it becomes immediately evident that Christians must be reconciled among themselves and, by their communal action, reconcilers in the world if they are to be credible witnesses to God's reconciling action. Further, united action is required for effective service of human need when this is understood not only in terms of the traditional religious activities, but also as a secular mission which embraces all dimensions of human existence whether private or public, whether material, cultural or political. This makes ecumenism central to the purpose of the church. It makes dear that even preliminary steps towards unity are important. While the goal may be the full unity of the churches, it would be a serious error to wait until that is accomplished (as was often done in the past) before beginning to work together, and think together and worship together to the degree that this is possible. Everything which can be done to increase communication and cooperation among Christians and all men is fundamental to what Vatican II affirms is the church's nature as sign and source of unity in the divided world.

The concrete applications of this outlook are beginning to be seen everywhere, not only in such matters as the demonstrations at Selma, which we have already mentioned, but in common concern for ¡the Vietnam war, in joint Catholic-Protestant parishes in inner city areas in St. Louis and here in Chicago, in the trend towards thinking about the problems of education cooperatively rather than competitively and in many similar developments in many areas. It is evident that when the churches are most deeply involved in standing on the side of the poor and oppressed, and in serving human needs of every kind, that they are forced to think, act and live together. This does not decrease, but increases concern for doctrinal and ecclesiastical divisions, because these become urgent problems only when the necessity for a life of common action and prayer is vividly apprehended.

We have said enough, perhaps, to indicate why the new picture of the world as a God-directed eschatological process enhances concern for "building the earthly city" and therefore also for unity. It is time now to pause and ref lea what chances there are that this will significantly influence the attitudes and behavior of the men and women who call themselves Christians and of the institutions called churches.

PROSPECTS FOR GREATER UNITY

IT IS EASY to be skeptical. To be sure, the words of official ecclesiastical documents have been affected by the new outlook as is evident in the pronouncements of Vatican II, the World Council of Churches and many Protestant denominations. It is also clear that the new vision provides some inspiration and a kind of [90] theological rationalization for a new emphasis on the secular mission of the church. However, can we really expect that more than a few words and a few actions will be changed? Isn't it totally unrealistic to suppose that the masses of the devout can be weaned from their preoccupation with their own soul's salvation or with a religiously induced peace of mind, or that the church's institutional self-interest and preoccupation with numbers and finances can be substantially diminished? Can one really expect any large number of people to have their imaginations captivated, faith stirred and energies mobilized by what sometimes seems a kind of theological science-fiction fantasy? Is it really believable from the point of view of either Christianity or modernity that building the earthly city is part of God's way of preparing for the final unveiling of the Messianic Kingdom?

The empirical evidence relevant to such questions is inconclusive. Christianity and, in a different way, Judaism survived astonishingly difficult transitions in the past, and perhaps they will do it again. Or perhaps they will suffer shipwreck. The Christian, to be sure, affirms that the community of believers in God's Messiah, however large or small it may become, will have a role to play in God's plans for the world until the end of time, but that is an affirmation of faith, not knowledge.

However, of two things, it seems to me, both believers and non-believers can be fairly sure. First, if the Christian community endures as a vital force, it will do so, first of all, only because it maintains the outrageous grandeur of its original claims that the self-giving of God in Jesus Christ is central for humanity, and indeed, for the universe. Otherwise, with the increasing disappearance of sociological and cultural reasons for belonging to the church, there would be no point in being a Christian. Secondly, however, it will have to learn to think, and feel and experience these claims in terms of the modern picture of the world.

It will have to view the vast panorama of cosmic and human history, not as a meaningless backdrop for so-called spiritual or purely existential realities, but as part of the very substance of God's plan for the world. It will learn to affirm earthly realities and the concrete stuff of human development as a painful and everlastingly ambiguous but still essential part of God's preparation for the coming Kingdom.

IMPLICATIONS FOR RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

AS I SAID at the beginning, the implications of this for religious education is something for you to consider. If there is any merit in the general approach to ecumenicism which we have sketched, three theses in particular would seem to deserve attention. First, the ecumenical aspect of religious education cannot consist simply or primarily of supplying fair and sympathetic information about other religious bodies. Rather, it must be related to the need to work with other Christians, with Jews, and indeed all men of good will, in the service of human needs and of reconciliation in a divided world. Secondly, this ecumenism in action needs to be nourished by the search for greater unity — which does not mean uniformity — in prayer, worship and expressions of faith (i.e., "doctrine"). The so-called "secular" and "religious" dimensions of ecumenism cannot be separated. Thirdly, all our teaching should be informed by a sense of history and of change so that we present our respective traditions as developing and never completely adequate expressions of the fullness of the Christian reality. These often do not contradict, but rather supplement each other, and need to grow together in mutual enrichment. It is only thus that deep rootage in the concreteness of Christian life, that is, loyalty and love to a particular church, can be combined with genuine openness and ecumenical passion.

Address in the General Sessions of the National Convention of the Religious Education Association, Chicago, Ill., November 20-22, 1966.

Source: Religious Education, 62 no 2 Mr-Ap 1967, p 83-90.