Responding to Rome: Presbyterians Should Embrace Honest Ecumenism

Written by Michael R. Walker

Monday, 16 July 2007 18:00

As a Presbyterian passionately committed to the central insights of the Protestant Reformation, it feels a little awkward to say this: we should appreciate the recent statement on the church approved by the Vatican, and we should not embrace the highly publicized Protestant over-reactions to it.

Last week, the Vatican approved a new statement reiterating the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching on the primacy of the Roman Church and the lesser status of Orthodox Churches and Protestant “Christian Communities.” The statement says nothing new. Instead, it reiterates the teachings of the Church of Rome, and it provides the kind of clarity that can support, rather than curtail, effective future ecumenical dialogues. When Benedict the XVI was elected pope, I reflected on the fact that his career thus far had demonstrated his commitment to what we might call “honest ecumenism.” This new statement continues in that stream.

Presbyterians should “welcome” the new statement not because we agree with it. That should be obvious. If we believed in the primacy of the Roman Church, or that the preservation of the “integral substance of the Eucharistic mystery” through the presence of the “sacramental priesthood” was essential to being churches “in the proper sense,” we would not need to welcome the statement as Protestants. We could just become Roman Catholics.

But we can welcome the statement as Protestants because of our commitment to honest ecumenism. We seek the visible unity of the church not by setting aside our disagreements about the nature of the church. We seek ecclesial unity by engaging each other in a prayerful process characterized by clarity, integrity and Christian charity. The Vatican’s reiterative statement was clarifying, possessed integrity relative to the Roman Church’s own doctrine, and was not devoid of charity. Quoting Vatican II, the new statement says that while we “suffer from defects” (as we believe they do), our Protestant communities are not “deprived of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation,” believing that the Spirit of Christ uses us as “instruments of salvation.”

This kind of straight-talk that clarifies the status of relationships and takes the truth seriously is less welcome in some circles. There is an old tradition of seeking a sort of visible unity in the church by presuming it, followed by downplaying “truth claims” and adding a heavy dose of political rhetoric. Unfortunately, the highly publicized, vehemently negative Protestant responses to the recent Roman Catholic statement seem to fit this description.

We have said the Vatican statement said nothing new, and we should add that it was actually directed not at Protestants but at certain progressive Roman Catholic theologians whom the Roman Catholic hierarchy believes have offered “erroneous” (read “liberal”) interpretations of their Church’s teaching on the subject. Mainline Protestants to the rescue?

To be sure, the sense of unity between progressive Roman Catholic theologians and mainline Protestant leaders can be fruitful for some things. But we should be aware of what can happen when these relationships are mistaken for formal ecclesial unity. Ironies can abound. Not only can it provoke the sort of reiteration approved by the Vatican. But it can also lead the mainline Protestants who typically presume Christian unity to exercise the least Christian charity toward the Roman Catholic Church, over-stating their case, announcing their sense of woundedness before the media and so highlighting Christian division for the world. (For examples, click here and here.)

We should take a different course. As Protestants observing the internal conversations of the Roman Catholic Church, we can promote Christian unity by receiving the recent statement with a graciousness fit for the unity for which we long. We can receive it as a reminder of the genuine, continuing disagreements that exist among those who can together confess the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And we can commit ourselves to clarity, integrity and charity in our continuing pursuit of ecclesial unity. May God add to our common confession a greater understanding of how Christ seeks to visibly manifest the unity of his Body as a testimony to the world. And May He give us the grace to seek it with deeper urgency and patience.

The Notebook

Calvin quotes

Here are a few quotes from Calvin's Institutes that I selected for inclusion in a church magazine to reflect the basic posture of Calvin's piety, oriented as it is toward magnifying the glory of God and subordinating self-concern. Unfortunately these don't convey the Christological centered-ness of his piety, but they convey where Christ leads us by the Spirit:

"We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory."

"We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God's: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal."

"We ought to we seek not the things that are ours but those which are of the Lord's will and will serve to advance his glory. This is also evidence of great progress: that, almost forgetful of ourselves, surely subordinating our self-concern, we try faithfully to devote our zeal to God and his commandments. For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God's decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him. For he who has learned to look to God in all things that he must do, at the same time avoids all vain thoughts. This, then, is that denial of self which Christ enjoins with such great earnestness upon his disciples at the outset of their service."

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

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