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«Only Connect» Ecumenism Encounters the Religions John D’Arcy May

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«Only Connect» Ecumenism Encounters the Religions John D’Arcy May «Only Connect» Ecumenism Encounters the Religions John D’Arcy May E.M. Forster’s famous motto does indeed transfer easily from literature to ecumenism, which could almost be defined as the art of forging connections between disparate Christian confessions and religious traditions where none had appeared possible. Konrad Raiser has scrutinised the terms ‹ecumenism› and ‹the religions› and the ways in which they are perhaps too much taken for granted, and this needs to be kept in mind as we explore connections within and between them. To the extent that ecumenism retrieves the ancient concept of the oikoumene, the whole inhabited earth as it was conceived in the Hellenistic world and appears in the New Testament, it involves more than just churches, and its modern revival was led by missionary, not just ecclesiastical, concerns. The comparative study of religions using modern historical and philological scholarship inevitably raises the question posed by Schleiermacher and put before us again by Hans-Peter Großhans: in what sense is Christianity one of the religions, and is there a universal concept of religion that covers them all? For organisational reasons I was asked not only to contribute a reflection on the consultation at the closing session, but also a review of ecumenical developments for the opening panel. Because of the short notice it was agreed that I should do this in a semi-autobiographical format, as I am of an age to have experienced some of these developments at first hand in their particularly dramatic effect on my own Roman Catholic tradition. In the event, this provided the opportunity to survey the road that has led us to the present juncture (I) and to look ahead, drawing on the contributions made at the consultation, to future developments which are already beginning to take shape (II), and this will be the structure of the following unabashedly personal reflections. I. Towards an Integral Ecumenism The Second Vatican Council irrupted into my seminary studies of Catholic philosophy and theology in far-off Canberra and Melbourne with an impact that in Only Connect many ways became life-defining for my generation. Our curricula were so exclusively Catholic that we were not even allowed to read Protestant books, and every significant work of the European Enlightenment was on the Index of Prohibited Books. Yet in a missionary order the foreign missions, as they were then called, were kept before us: we were aware of the work of evangelisation in northern Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan, and some of us eventually started reading about the cultures and social problems of Aboriginal Australia, the Asia- Pacific and Latin America. But any formal study of the religions of these peoples was not even on the horizon. This intellectual ghetto was created by the policies of successive popes determined to ward off the corroding influence of secularism, indifferentism, relativism and other modern evils. Two events worked as powerful catalysts to begin transforming our awareness: the granting of the right to vote to Australia’s indigenous inhabitants by an amendment to the constitution in 1967 (without however formally recognising their status as original inhabitants of the land and at a time when the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents, unbeknown to us, was still going on) and Australia’s participation in the war in Vietnam. Quite apart from issues of human rights and pacifism, and in the context of mounting anti-American protests, these two events marked the dawning of my wider theological awareness. The writings of the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner showed beyond doubt, albeit in the face of scepticism in his own scholarly circles, that Aboriginal culture was profoundly spiritual and in some sense religious, irrespective of its contact with Christian missionaries; and those who were most determinedly but peacefully protesting about the actions of all sides in the Vietnam war – even to the point of self-immolation – were Buddhists. The theology we were learning was in no way capable of dealing with either of these realities. In 1967 I was sent – very much against my will, though I cannot deny a frisson of excitement at the prospect of leaving Australia for Europe – to complete a Licentiate of Theology at the Gregorian University in Rome. I later reflected ruefully that this was something like sending a communist to Moscow at the time when Gorbachev was introducing perestroika and glasnost: the atmosphere was one of uncertainty and even instability in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II. How was Roman theology to react to the ferment unleashed by the Council’s opening to ecumenism, the non-Christian religions and the modern world? The professor of 2 Only Connect ecumenism, the affable Jesuit Jan Witte, was allowed to attend the Uppsala Assembly of the WCC in 1968 and I was free to start reading Bonhoeffer, Barth and Bultmann; I was even permitted to write my thesis on the secular in the novels of Samuel Beckett! Though this awakened my interest in the ecumenical movement and its bold initiatives in pursuing dialogue not only among Christians but between the churches and the cultures and sciences, as in its Geneva conference of 1966 and in Paul VI’s encyclical Ecclesiam Suam in 1964, it also made me aware that the equally bold initiatives undertaken in documents such as Lumen Gentium on the church, Unitatis Redintegratio on ecumenism, Nostra Aetate on the religions, Dignitatis Humane on religious liberty and Gaudium et Spes on the church confronting modernity were in many cases ill-defined and vulnerable to manipulation. As if to confirm this, what Catholics ever since have referred to simply as ‹the encyclical› – Humanae Vitae on the morality of artificial contraception, 1968 – signalled a drawing back from the brink of actually changing church teaching to adapt to modern conditions. To my complete surprise I was accepted for doctoral studies by Walter Kasper in Münster, and to my even greater surprise I was allowed by my order to pursue them. He proposed church unity as my topic, which I began to investigate without great enthusiasm, but when he accepted the call to Tübingen a year later I transferred to Peter Lengsfeld at the Catholic Ecumenical Institute, who suggested that I take up the theme of the unity of humankind, which had played such a part in the Uppsala Assembly and in Gaudium et Spes. In those adventurous times the Institute was preparing itself for a linguistic and sociological analysis of ecumenical relations. It concentrated mainly on the ecumenical stagnation of the German churches, at least as far as practical measures to change things such as religious instruction in schools or inter-church marriages were concerned. The result was a research project which has recently been rediscovered but was virtually ignored at the time.1 Over and above this, however, it was the high point of progressive theology in Münster, witnessing the last semesters of Karl Rahner’s teaching career, the apogee of Johann Baptist Metz’s brilliance, and the exegetical originality of Joachim Gnilka and Erich Zenger. But for me the most stimulating environment was the Mittelbau of rising academics such as Helmut Peukert, Norbert Mette, Hubert Frankemöller and my comrade in arms and lifelong friend Heinz-Günther Stobbe. Adèle-Théodore 1 PETER LENGSFELD, ed., Ökumenische Theologie. Ein Arbeitsbuch, Stuttgart 1980. 3 Only Connect Khoury was already doing sterling work in introducing German Christians to Islam, my fellow doctoral student Hans Hermann Henrix was at the start of what was to be an internationally recognised role in promoting Jewish-Christian relations (he invited me to participate in my first such dialogue). For my part I was taking first steps to understanding Buddhism, learning Sanskrit and Pāli and attending seminars at the Department of Indology. I was also in touch with an Irish Jesuit named Michael Hurley about his conception of what he called ‹ecumenics›, which seemed to resonate with what we were doing in appropriating the methods of the human and social sciences for ecumenical theology. It was this concept that seemed to open up the prospect of bringing all my disparate interests together under one head, as the realisation grew that the various methods and themes we were experimenting with needed to be integrated in order to identify and focus on ecumenical problems; but that time was still some way off. As if to make perfectly clear that it was not I who was writing the script for this particular curriculum vitae, I was approached by Theodor Ahrens, later professor for Missiology and Ecumenics at the University of Hamburg, on the way back from a conference at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey, about working with the Melanesian Council of Churches in Papua New Guinea. He was at that time the North Elbian Lutheran Church mission secretary for India and PNG, and he was aware that the Council of Churches and ecumenical relations generally were in a state of rapid decline in the latter country, which had become independent in 1975. It was typical of his hands-on approach that he managed to persuade his counterpart mission agency in the Bavarian Lutheran Church (Neuendettelsau) to sponsor a Catholic theologian and his family for a three-year contract to do ecumenical work in what my colleague Garry Trompf described as «the most exciting country on earth». With its 830 languages, its Council of Churches embracing Catholics and Anglicans as well as Baptists and the Salvation Army, and numberless Pentecostal, Evangelical and Adventists churches besides, PNG certainly provided an ecumenical challenge, not to mention the grave social problems in areas such as health, education and development.
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