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The Church: Towards a Common Vision ONE IN CHRIST CONTENTS VOLUME 49 (2015) NUMBER 2 ARTICLES The Church: Towards a Common Vision. A Faith and Order Perspective. Mary Tanner 171 Towards the Common Good. A Church and Society Perspective on The Church: Towards a Common Vision. William Storrar 182 Catholic Perspectives on The Church: Towards A Common Vision. Catherine E. Clifford 192 Questions of Unity, Diversity and Authority in The Church: Towards a Common Vision. Advances and Tools for Ecumenical Dialogue. Kristin Colberg 204 Catholic Appropriation and Critique of The Church: Towards a Common Vision. Brian P. Flanagan 219 Communion and Communication among the Churches in the Tradition of Alexandria. Mark Sheridan OSB 235 Squaring the Circle: Anglicans and the Recognition of Holy Orders. Will Adam 254 Ecumenism: Why the Slow Progress? Gideon Goosen 270 REPORTS The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Corrymeela Community. Pádraig Ó Tuama 285 The Hurley Legacy: a personal appreciation. Paddy Kearney 294 Saint Irenaeus Joint Orthodox-Catholic Working Group. Communiqué – Halki 2015 299 A Contribution from the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada to the Anglican Church of Canada’s Commission on the Marriage Canon. 303 BOOK REVIEWS 317 170 ONE IN CHRIST VOL.49 NO.2 EDITORIAL Most of the articles in this issue are devoted to The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Faith and Order Paper 214, WCC 2013). We are pleased to publish contributions from the Catholic Theological Society of America (Clifford, Colberg, Flanagan), and papers originating in the December 2015 conference of the Joint Commission on Doctrine of the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church (Tanner, Storrar). In ‘Communion and Communication among the Churches in the Tradition of Alexandria’ (Sheridan), we see to what extent our current concerns and problematics were already present in the third century: ‘The questions of authority and communion among the churches had become inextricably combined.’ Secondly—regarding the place of lay people in the church—Alexander, bishop of Jerusalem (215-30), rejects the prohibition of laymen preaching in the presence of bishops: for ‘where there are found persons suited to help the brethren, they are also invited to preach to the people by the holy bishops.’ Thirdly—and perhaps most thought-provoking—Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria (247-64), pleads that ‘a man ought to suffer anything and everything rather than divide the Church of God, and it were not less glorious to incur martyrdom to avoid schism than to avoid idolatry.’ In addition to our systematic essays on TCTCV and other issues, and the historical study just mentioned, another genre is happily, and well represented in this issue—that of the particular narrative, or story- telling, which affords its own characteristic insights: thus Storrar, Ó Tuama and Kearney, each writing with a discernible Celtic accent. Our book reviews likewise include the witness of a remarkable individual: Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (Briskina-Müller), in a book which traces the development of her thinking on the ordination of women. The question posed—‘whether or not there is a spiritual dimension or ontological significance to gender’—is one which resonates through much of today's world, beyond the specifically ecclesial, or explicitly religious. 171 THE CHURCH: TOWARDS A COMMON VISION. A FAITH AND ORDER PERSPECTIVE Mary Tanner* This paper was presented to the Joint Commission on Doctrine of the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church at their Edinburgh conference in December, 2015: Sharing Future Church. It outlines the provenance of The Church: Towards a Common Vision, and presents it as a convergence document, cross-referencing other dialogues. Faithful to Faith and Order, each chapter represents a breakthrough in a particular area. I. A trip down memory lane The journey to The Church: Towards a Common Vision (TCTCV) began in Edinburgh in 1910 when Bishop Brent called for a world conference to explore honestly the points of agreement and of disagreement which were the original cause of separations and which continued to keep churches apart when the mission of the church demanded unity. It took another seventeen years before the First World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne, and was to set the agenda of faith, sacraments, ministry and the church—an agenda which became foundational for the World Council of Churches when it was established in 1948 and whose first function is: for churches to call one another to the goal of visible unity in one faith and one Eucharistic fellowship expressed in worship and in common life in Christ.1 * Mary Tanner has served as the President for Europe of the World Council of Churches and from 1992-8 was Moderator of the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC. She was a member of the Second Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. From 1991-8 she was the General Secretary of the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity. She has been a visiting professor at the General Seminary, New York, the Tantur Ecumenical Institute and the Angelicum in Rome. 1 WCC Constitution, see WCC web site. 172 ONE IN CHRIST VOL.49 NO.2 The Constitution of Faith and Order is almost identical. Its first aim and function is: to proclaim the oneness of the Church of Jesus Christ and to call the churches to the goal of visible unity in one faith and in one eucharistic fellowship, expressed in worship and in common life in Christ in order that the world may believe.1 It is not too much to claim that Faith and Order has been, since 1948, the conscience of the Council and of the ecumenical movement to keep churches focused on the goal of visible unity. Thus, TCTCV is directly connected to the mandate of both Faith and Order and the WCC. By the 1970s the Commission had agreed that three things were needed for visible unity: the common confession of the apostolic faith; common sacraments and a single ministry; and ways of deciding and teaching together.2 Intensive work on sacraments and ministry was well underway when I attended my first Faith and Order Commission meeting in Accra in 1973. A miraculous moment was reached with the publication of the Commission’s convergence document: Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry agreed in Lima, 1982.3 Almost as influential as the text were the questions put to the churches about the text and the intensive response process that followed, producing six volumes of responses from churches, and a response to the responses. One of the issues raised by some churches was the ecclesiological question: ‘Is there an integrated ecclesiology lying behind BEM bridging the divide between catholic and reformed understandings of the Church?’ Work on confessing the one faith followed, though never received the attention the brilliant text deserved.4 Studies on racism, the handicapped and the community of women and men in the Church were making us aware that unity also entails renewal in the human community of the Church with implications for the language we use to confess faith, the ministry we exercise, and the way we take council. 1 By-laws of Faith and Order, Called to be the One Church, ed. John Gibaut, Faith and Order Paper 212, WCC Publications, 2012, p. 236. 2 The New Delhi Report: The Third Assembly of the World Council of Churches, 1961, London: SCM, 1962, pp. 117-9. 3 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111, WCC Publications, 1982. 4 Confessing the One Faith, Faith and Order Paper 153, WCC Publications, 1991. TANNER TCTCV: A Faith & Order Perspective 173 Unity and renewal belong together. We have to be renewed into unity if the Church is to be a sign to the world of its own possibility. By the end of the 1980s the idea of a Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order was gaining support, to answer the frequently asked question: ‘Where are we, and where are we going in the ecumenical movement? What has Faith and Order to say in the light of its completed work on BEM and Apostolic Faith and Church and World?’ The theme of the Conference emerged as a preliminary answer to that question: ‘Towards koinonia in faith, life and witness’. This theme would provide an opportunity to harvest Faith and Order’s work and give a preliminary answer to the question of the goal of visible unity. The Conference in Santiago opened with a magisterial biblical exposition of koinonia; Wolfhart Pannenburg presented the work on the apostolic faith; Elizabeth Templeton spoke on communion in sacramental life and service; and Metropolitan Khodr from Lebanon on communion in witness. Perhaps the most important affirmation of the Conference came in its final message: ‘There is no turning back either from the goal of visible unity or from the single ecumenical movement that unites concerns for the unity of the Church and concern for the engagement in struggles of the world’.1 It was from this harvesting at Santiago that work on ecclesiology came to be the focus of the Commission’s work, producing first The Nature and Purpose of the Church and then The Nature and Mission of the Church, both with the modest sub title, ‘on the way to a common statement’. These two proto texts were sent to churches for response. The comments received helped to mature the text, though the responses were not as many as in the case of responses to the BEM proto text, the Accra text. Did that reveal a dwindling commitment to unity, visible unity, with the growing urgent interest in issues of justice and peace? As we engage with TCTCV there is much at stake. If the text is an answer to ‘where are we, where are we going’ then much rests on the response churches make.
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