Ecumenism is a counterproductive circumvallation of diversity, an ataxia of an atavistically distorted concept of catholicity. It is a gross miscomprehension of unity as uniformity. In its present form it is a monstrous waste of time for all except a coffle of clerics intent on creating a minutia of dots and tittles. Is that put succinctly enough?
Indulge me some reflections on scripture.
Genesis 11 Long before the towers fell in New York in an act of would-be divine judgment, another tower fell. The city was Babel. The felling was a divine judgment. The result was the diversification of human society. Language was diversified that day. All that which language encompasses was diversified. We tend to think that all humans are alike. We are not. There is a commonality at the root of us, but our geographies, our histories, and all they entail have made us very different and distinctive vessels of seeing, hearing, understanding, wanting, valuing. Language holds all those distinctivities together and transmits them from generation to generation. Language is the idiom, the medium of a society. Take away the language of a people, and you shrive them of their history, their culture, their vision, and valuation as a people. The Word of God is called the image of God, and so too it is with the words of men. Babel made us a world not just of languages, but a world of distinctive visions and expressions of the capacities of our singular humanity.
Exodus 12 In many ancient societies, as still it is today, it was the practice to celebrate the seasons and the activities of the seasons. In some places the early spring was a time of planting, a busy time of renewing depleted resources. The ancestors of the Jews had a feast of the hastily made spring bread, an unleavened cake. As with most societies, over the course of ages, this feast was overlaid with new understandings, new dimensions reflecting the evolution of the society and its history. The feast of unleavened bread became overlaid with a communal celebration of a deliverance from bondage in a foreign land. It became a feast around the slaughtering of a lamb and eating it with the hastily made bread of old now made a sign of immanent freedom. The lamb was the totem, the animal slaughtered not as offering to God but by God’s command as societal substitute. Its blood smeared over the doors of the homes of the chosen was a sign to Death to pass-over. When on the fateful night Death struck chaos upon the city, the chosen ate their totem and the bread of haste. Deliverance, exodus was at hand. Many centuries later, some of these chosen overlaid another aspect to this feast. The lamb was now a more profound substitute, the doorway was a cross, the power that passed-over something greater than death, and the deliverance was not into a promised land, but into Paradise. The first Passover generated political freedom and Judaism; this Passover generated spiritual freedom and Christianity.
Leviticus 23 There was another feast kept by the Jews. In the late spring or early summer, about seven weeks after Passover, there was kept a feast to celebrate the first fruits, the first harvest. In time it was overlaid with a celebration of another type of harvest, the gathering of the chosen at the foot of God’s mountain, the giving of the law and the making of the covenant twixt God and his people. When God came down upon his mountain to speak to his people, the earth shook, and thunder and lightning crowned the heights. So fearsome was his presence that only Moses could ascend to receive the divine word. But the word was received, and after much dalliance and delay, the chosen acquiesced to the Lord and were bonded to him in sacred oath. Many centuries later, the disciples of Jesus were sequestered in prayer in Jerusalem as this feast day approached. As is customary in most societies, many pilgrims were gathered in the holy city for the festival. There were there Jews from all over the ancient world. Suddenly in the upper room where the disciples were praying, a great wind shook the place and fire spread out over the heads of the gathered. God, who had in the Genesis narrative breathed wind into man, was re-creating men here. Fire that had topped Sinai now topped the disciples and they spoke the word of God. We are not told in which language they spoke. They spoke God’s word. And Parthians, Medes, Elamites, et al, all heard, each in his own language. There was one word, but each received it in his own medium, and they all praised God. The first day of being-church, and it was a church of sundry men and idioms.
Matthew 16 One day Jesus took his disciples off to a secluded place. He quizzed them. What are people saying about me? It was a trick question. We all know that when your leader asks you this you are most likely to rehearse the opinion with which you yourself identify. There followed the litany of ideas, some more impressive than others. Jesus does not refute any of them. Then Simon speaks: You are the Messiah. Jesus blesses Simon for allowing himself to be inspired not by the world, but by God himself. Jesus then lives up to the title. He does something divine, something only God does, he changes Simon’s name. Adam was told to name the animals. But God alone has power over men, God alone can name someone. Simon becomes Rock, Peter. He is not persistent in his openness to divine inspiration, for shortly thereafter he advises Jesus against his chosen course of action and has to be reprimanded. But Jesus marches on followed by his rag-tag of disciples, some following a great teacher, some a prophet, some the great prophet, some a wonder-worker, some a would-be king, some a political revolutionary, and, at least one, the messiah (howsoever he may have understood that).
Acts 1 Sometime after the death of Jesus, the disciples were summoned by Jesus to attend him on a mountain top. Suddenly the heavens open, clouds descend and engulf Jesus, angels appear. God has obviously descended and is enveloping Jesus. We have a theophany and Jesus is at the heart of it. But rather than fall down and worship, some of the disciples ask Jesus if this is the moment he is going to oust the Romans and restore the Davidic line to the throne of Israel. They have been schooled at his feet for years. They have witnessed his death and experienced his risen presence. They are literally being shadowed by the glory of God Himself. And they are still so far from being on the same page as to be in another book, in another library. Nevertheless, Jesus gives them a commission: go saturate the world with my message until it is enfolded into the very community of God’s innermost being.
Humanity is diverse. As individuals, as societies, we are complex organisms. In each of us, individually and collectively, there are competing and at times contradictory aspects. That coaptation of centrifugal and centripetal forces is the heart of being human, being a person. That complexity of being which God denied not to himself in the incarnation is denied neither to the church. To attempt to reformulate that is to revisit the tribulations of monophysitism, monothelitism and the like, anew.
We cannot read Acts, the letters of Paul, of John, without noting the absence of homogeneity in the early church. We cannot read about the church in any time or place and find an homogenous entity. There have been movements and quests to unify doctrines, practices, and structures, but those undertakings have all, at root, been political in nature, and their efforts encoded in the culture of the day. East and West have never seen eye to eye because they do not think in the same language, they do not speak in the same idioms, they do not live and breathe the same culture. Every culture and every language will see and understand and translate and celebrate within the parameters of its unique incarnate existence.
Not only has the church never been homogenous in doctrine or worship, it never will be. That which it beholds, that which beholds it, is too great to ever be enrobed in one text, in one act, in one vision. When so ever there tottered an effort to unify all word, action and vision, there, indeed, Spirit shattered the efforts to bits and pieces. Thanks be to God!
Ecumenism is not about agreement on doctrine, structure, worship. It is the gracious acknowledgement that my neighbour, my brother, my sister, each and all, have as much grace as do I to envision the incomprehensible vision, and to accordingly graciously and thankfully celebrate it. We may talk to one another about such things. We may share our meditations. We may grace one another with the fruit of our contemplation. But we cannot, must not, think that we can or ought to make another in our own likeness. Ecumenism is about loving one another, about seeing the good, the absolute worth of the other, the givenness and the vocation of other, and honouring that distinctness and distinction as from God for the glory of God. It must be an act of humbling ourselves before the Holy. We are told to love one another, to care for and sustain one another. We are told to baptize all into the triune divine, to plunge ourselves and all into the image of that most sacred community. The Trinity is a community of persons, each distinct, each interconnected in love, each with his own mission, each supporting the others in unity of vocation and care. Community is not uniformity; it is the mutual treasuring and gracious celebration of distinctions.
Catholicity means universality. And a universe in which all is alike, is not a universe, it is a singularity. Universality means a holding together of diversity, and what holds things together is vista and light, the gravity of acceptance. There is one Lord. How impoverished of spirit is it to will him only one time and place, one incarnation. The Lord bids: love one another. How impoverished of spirit to will you be like me rather than accept you as you are.
Credo in unam sanctam catholicam. We ignore the creedal confession if we think church unity is something we need create. Church unity is something we are called to believe, to acknowledge. When we stop quizzing one another about dots and tittles, when we begin celebrating that we hear, each of us in our own tongue, the wonders of God, then we shall hear also the world observe our brotherliness and be drawn into this family of Our Father.