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Councils, Conferences and Churches Together: Unity in Recognition, Unity in Via. Alan D

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Councils, Conferences and Churches Together: Unity in Recognition, Unity in Via. Alan D ONE IN CHRIST CONTENTS VOLUME 46 NUMBER 2 ARTICLES Councils, Conferences and Churches Together: Unity in recognition, unity in via. Alan D. Falconer 185 ‘Who would have thought it possible?’ Vatican II from the perspective of Yves Congar. Ruth Reardon 211 Archbishop Anastasios: ‘Mission in Christ’s Way’. Stavros S. Fotiou 233 Form and Method in the Production of Ecumenical Dialogue Statements: A Test Case. Nathan Thiel 246 An Emerging Pentecostal Perspective? Peter Hocken 264 Brother Alois, Prior of Taizé: an Interview with Martin Browne osb 279 A Passion for the Unity of the Body of Christ. Brother Alois 291 DOCUMENTS & REPORTS Tribute to Archbishop Rowan Williams. Mary Tanner 303 Monastic Virtues and Ecumenical Hopes. + Rowan Williams 306 Monks and Mission. + Rowan Williams 314 Address to the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelization. + Rowan Williams 322 Ecumenism Encounters the Religions: Societas Oecumenica Consultation, Belfast 2012. John D’Arcy May 330 Belonging together in Europe. Joint Statement by the Anglican Old Catholic International Coordinating Council. 336 BOOK REVIEWS 356 184 EDITORIAL Readers of ONE IN CHRIST will have surely shared Dame Mary Tanner's experience, related in this issue: ‘As I read through Archbishop Rowan’s addresses and sermons, I found myself often near to tears— tears of delight, “yes, that’s it!”, mixed with tears of frustration—“why can’t we all get it?”’ ... So we too express our heartfelt gratitude for Rowan Williams’ gifts to the Church, and offer him our good wishes, as he steps down from the See of Canterbury. In his final New Year's Message of 1 January 2013, the Archbishop highlighted the Robes Project, London, in which churches from a variety of denominations collaborate to provide a hot meal, bed and shelter for a group of homeless people. ‘Religion here isn’t a social problem or an old-fashioned embarrassment, it’s a wellspring of energy and a source of life-giving vision for how people should be regarded and treated.’ This life-giving vision is vitally connected to the ‘renewal of Christian anthropology’ which Rowan Williams, in addressing the Synod of Bishops in Rome, hailed as ‘one of the most important aspects of the theology of the second Vaticanum’. Here is the inspiration for the Churches’ commitment to ‘Evangelization, old or new, [which] must be rooted in a profound confidence that we have a distinctive human destiny to show and share with the world’. Every aspect of ‘being Church’ is subject to the evangelical imperative to show and to share this destiny, to which the longing for unity is integral. 185 COUNCILS, CONFERENCES AND CHURCHES TOGETHER: UNITY IN RECOGNITION, UNITY IN VIA Alan D. Falconer* This paper is a contribution to a discussion in Action of the Churches Together in Scotland (ACTS), and to reFlections on structure and raison d’etre currently being conducted in national and international ecumenical instruments. In the light oF the Gospel imperative For unity, and the various stages From conFlict to communion on the way to embody unity, the paper explores diFFerent models oF unity, and raises questions as to the precise task, character and contribution oF Councils, and Churches Together movements, as churches seek to call each other to the goal oF visible unity. This paper1 is a contribution to a discussion in Action of the Churches Together in Scotland (ACTS). It is occasioned by an ongoing discussion as to the role, character and function of the ecumenical instrument as it celebrates the 21st anniversary of its formation. However the paper also has a wider context, since many ecumenical instruments, national and international, are undertaking reviews as to their structure and raison d’être. Councils of Churches, Conferences of Churches, and Churches Together are instruments seeking to maintain and foster a vision of unity and at a time when the churches seem reluctant to place the search for unity at the heart of their life and work. Unity lies at the heart of the Gospel. After more than a century of reflection and action, through which churches have moved towards more positive relations with each other, the various reviews and * Revd Dr Alan Falconer is Convener of the Church of Scotland Ecumenical Relations Committee. On the staff of the Irish School of Ecumenics from 1974- 95, he served as director from 1989-1995. Director of the World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission from 1995-2004, he was called to be minister of the Cathedral Church of St Machar in Aberdeen. He is now retired. 1 The phrase in the title ‘unity in recognition, unity in via’ comes from the pen of the distinguished Roman Catholic ecumenist, the late Fr Jean-Marie Tillard in his ‘An ecclesiology of Councils of Churches’ in Mid-Stream 22(1983): 189. 186 ONE IN CHRIST VOL. 46 NO. 2 celebrations offer the opportunity to recover the vision and impulse of and for unity. Unity: the impulse of the Bible The New Testament scholar, Paul Minear discerned some eighty-five images of the unity of the church in the New Testament writings.1 Undoubtedly some of these images are more prominent than others —e.g. the Body of Christ, the pilgrim people of God. While these images emphasise the importance of the concern for unity, the prayer of Jesus in John 17 and the Ephesian hymn provide a theological basis for the imperative of unity. Not surprisingly these passages became the loci classici for the ecumenical movement, and appear in the Constitution of Ecumenical Instruments and in the elaboration of the unity we seek, evident in successive statements on unity from World Council of Churches. The prayer of Jesus calls for the embodiment of unity so that the world might believe. Ernst Käsemann called the prayer the last testament of Jesus—to be considered as expressing the most important last wishes of Jesus, just as we receive the last will and testament of family and friends.2 Raymond Brown makes a similar point when he sees parallels between the prayer and the last speech of Moses to the People of Israel before they move to the Promised Land.3 In both cases they are emphasising that the prayer implores that the community around Jesus might be as they are called to be—thus challenging, being a counterwitness, to the divisions and exclusions of surrounding societies and cultures. The prayer calls the community of the disciples to be one as the Father and the Son are one. Mark Appold4 has noted that in this 1 See Paul S. Minear, Images oF the Church in the New Testament (Westminster, 1960). I have suggested a further image: the Church as Poem, based on Ephesians 2:10. See ‘The Church—God’s gift to the world’, International Review oF Mission, 90/4 (2001): 389-400. 2 Ernst Käsemann, Jesus Means Freedom (London: SCM, 1969). 3 Raymond Brown, The Gospel according to St John, vol. 2, Anchor Bible (Yale University Press, 1970). See also Rudolf Bultmann in The Gospel of John (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1971) who characterizes the prayer as ‘The Farewell Speech of Jesus’. 4 Mark Appold, The Oneness MotiF in the Fourth Gospel (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1976). FALCONER Councils, ConFerences and Churches Together 187 prayer, as in other books of the New Testament, the word ‘as’ has causative as well as similitude character.1 Because the Father and the Son are one, therefore the disciples are drawn up into that oneness, and are to embody that oneness. Such a oneness is to be embodied.2 In his comprehensive study, Appold notes that on only one occasion in the Gospel of John is the noun form heis employed, suggesting a numerical—maybe even metaphysical—oneness. On every other occasion in St John’s writing, as in St Paul’s, one/oneness is not a static entity or state of being that is being described, but always relations and events. What is to be embodied through the Spirit is that oneness of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This oneness is both a gift and a task, as Jesus Himself saw. The prayer arises out of consciousness of the divisiveness of human beings—the disciples themselves exhibiting such a tendency.3 Unity was central to the Gospel of Jesus. It was such an understanding of unity which lay at the heart of the famous 1920 Appeal to All Christian People from the Lambeth Conference in 1920 : It (unity) is in God, who is the perfection of unity, the one Father, the one Lord, the one Spirit, who gives life to the one Body. Again, the one Body exists. It needs not to be made or remade but to become organic and visible. We have only to discover it , and to set free its activities.4 The 1920 Appeal could well have been a summary statement of the hymn which heralds the beginning of the Letter to the Ephesians.5 Crafted as one sentence the hymn focuses on the activity of God, 1 Kathos, hos and hosper appear in, amongst other texts, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ephesian Hymn. 2 John Robinson in The Body : A study in Pauline Theology (London: SCM, 1952) emphasised that in the New Testament there is no separation between ‘body’ and ‘spirit’. The body requires the animation of the Spirit, and the Spirit is enfleshed, embodies. 3 The statement on unity adopted by the WCC Assembly at Canberra takes ‘gift and task’ as its framework. Such an understanding is also evident at the World Conference on Faith and Order in Santiago de Compostela: see T. Best and G. Gassmann, On the Way to Fuller Koinonia (Geneva: WCC, 1994).
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