The Ecumenical Vision: An Overview of World Council of Churches' Statements on Unity PDF

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The Ecumenical Vision: An Overview of World Council of Churches’ Statements on Unity The Ecumenical Movement is Balaam’s ass, who shows to churches which would take the path which God has forbidden that their retreat is barred by an angel with a drawn sword. Oliver S. Tomkins, The Church in the Purp...

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The Ecumenical Vision: An Overview of World Council of Churches’ Statements on Unity

The Ecumenical Movement is Balaam’s ass, who shows to churches which would take the path which God has forbidden that their retreat is barred by an angel with a drawn sword. Oliver S. Tomkins, The Church in the Purpose of God, 1950

The purpose of this paper is to offer an overview of statements on “visible unity” adopted by the World council of Churches (WCC) assemblies. What I call here statements on unity are texts of different origin, nature, style and scope; most of them are section reports of assemblies or sometimes isolated passages of those reports. They have come into being in different ways, very often in close association with the work of the World Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order. I will refer to them by the name of the respective assembly venue and its date like Busan-2013.

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By trying to describe in a detailed way, and in their respective contexts, unity statements produced over a period of almost seventy years, I have made this text much longer than it was meant to be. But this tedious procedure (to which I am much attached) has the precious virtue of making readers more acquainted with the original language, the rhetoric,

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I have grouped those statements into three main chronological sections that at the same time underline their content, inner affinities and immediate aim. Number of ecumenists would isolate the 1961 New Delhi Statement and take it as the “authoritative” statement on unity. As a result, they would then refer to Amsterdam-1948 and to Evanston1954 as not yet stating a vision of unity in the proper sense, and would see the post-New Delhi statements as the unfolding, the prolongation or sometimes the rather problematic prolongation… - of the New Delhi Statement. I personally see the constellation New Delhi-1961, Uppsala-1968, and Nairobi-1975 as constituting the reference description of what the WCC is called to be and to do in response to the so called “ecumenical imperative”: to make manifest the oneness God gave us in Christ through the Holy Spirit, which remains obscured by our historical divisions as churches. Taken together, those three statements not only subsume the essential of the different and conflicting understandings of Church unity gathered around the vulnerable ecumenical table, but also seek increasingly to hold together, in tension, the overcoming of what divides the churches and the overcoming of what divides humanity.

the thought patters, and the style of the documents reviewed. And that is what matters.

I. Amsterdam-1948 and Evanston-1954: “In penitence for what we are, in hope for what we shall be” The foundational experience and conviction of the early days of the modern ecumenical movement, namely that we are one in Christ amidst and despite our church divisions, is the starting point of the Amsterdam and the Evanston statements on unity. On that basis, both statements address - with “remarkable courage”, in the case of Amsterdam; with “rigour” or even “Protestant zeal”1, in the case of Evanston - the sin of persistent church divisions, and both statements see the ecumenical movement, and particularly the establishment of the World Council of Churches, as the expression of churches’ repentance and renewal whereby, in the final words of Amsterdam, they feel “responsible for one another” and, in the concluding words if Evanston, they intend “to grow together”. Amsterdam 1948 Held three years after the end of the Second World War, in an international context marked at the same time by the recent struggle against Fascism and Nazism and by the emergence of the so-called “Cold War”, the first WCC Assembly chose as its theme “Man’s Disorder and God’s Design” - a theme for which the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth had a particular dislike on the grounds that it had been formulated in the wrong order…

Cf. J. Deschner, “Amsterdam’s Vision of Church Unity Today”, The Ecumenical Review, 40(3-4), July-October 1988, 350, 353. 2 In Man’s Disorder and God’s Design – The Amsterdam Assembly Series, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1949. 1

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The study volume in preparation for Section I, “The Universal Church in God’s Design”2, offered biblical, theological and confessional perspectives on the nature and mission of the Church local and universal by Karl Barth, George Florovsky, Gustav Aulén, H. Richard Niebuhr, Edmund Schlink and others. The book closes with a Visser ‘t

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The Assembly delegates had been prepared in advance to discuss the Assembly theme and subthemes as well as the present and future work of the WCC by the publication, early in 1948, of no less than four substantial study volumes each dealing with one of the four Assembly sub-themes or sections: The Universal Church in God’s Design (I), The Church’s Witness to God’s Design (II), The Church and the Disorder of Society (III), and The Church and the International Disorder (IV).

Hooft’s essay on the World Council of Churches3 that can be seen as the second draft of the future WCC 1950 Central Committee “Toronto Statement” on the ecclesiological self-understanding of the World Council of Churches. It also includes the first draft of the future Section I Report, which addressed Christian unity. At the 1948 Assembly, the work of Section I was moderated by Hans Lilje, then the Lutheran Bishop of Hannover, Germany. It is the report of the Section I that constitutes the first statement on unity – or perhaps I should say in this particular case the first statement on “disunity” - by a WCC Assembly. Let us look at its essential argumentation in six steps. The first step is the affirmation that God has given us unity in Christ through the Holy Spirit “notwithstanding our divisions” as well as our condition of “sinful men” and “heirs to the sins of our fathers”4 (sic). It is our common concern for Christ’s Body that “draws us together” and leads us to “discover our unity” in relation to the Lord and Head of the Church. The experience and recognition of our given oneness in Christ allow us to take a second step by facing what the Amsterdam Statement calls “our deepest difference” in a clear reference to an ancient European debate on the ultimate theological principle that determines a wide range of significant disagreements separating “Catholicism” and “Protestantism” taken as faith systems.

W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, “The Significance of the World Council of Churches”, Man’s Disorder and God’s Design – The Amsterdam Assembly Series, op. cit., 177-195. For the “first draft” of the Toronto Statement see W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, “The World Council of Churches, its Nature and its Limits”, Christendom, Summer/Fall 1946. 4 For what follows cf. “Report of Section I The Universal Church in God’s Design”, W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft (ed.) The First Assembly of the World Council of Churches, London, SCM Press, 1949, 51.

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The essence of our situation, says the Statement, is that “from each side of the division, we see the Christian faith and life as a self-consistent whole, but our two conceptions of the whole are inconsistent with each other”. According to the Statement our “deepest difference” is made clear in two conflicting types or models of describing the nature and mission of the Church called precisely “Catholic” and “Protestant”. Each type constitutes “a whole corporate tradition”. The Catholic type contains “a primary insistence upon the visible continuity of the Church in the apostolic succession of the episcopate”, while the Protestant type “primarily emphasizes the initiative of the Word of God and the response of faith…” Even when the conversation is between “those who deeply trust and understand each other” there remains “a hard core of disagreement”. As a result, “we have not been able to present to each other the wholeness of our belief in ways that are mutually acceptable”.

The Statement then takes a third, even longer step in order to show how, as a result of the “deepest difference”, our elementary agreements about the nature and mission of the Church give room to disagreements when they are submitted to a “closer examination”. Reaching its fourth step, the Statement describes the existing ecumenical situation as a whole in three layers: (1) as we gather to talk about unity, we are faced by “stubborn problems”; (2) we then realize that our disagreements are to be traced back to our deepest difference, “our different ways of understanding the whole”; and finally, (3) beneath our deepest difference, “we find again an agreement in a unity which drew us together and will not let us go”. The fifth step, called “The Glory of the Church and the shame of the Churches”, is dedicated to the Church in via. While praising God “for many signs of awakened life in the churches in many lands”, the text insists that “within our divided churches, there is much which we confess with penitence”. Pride, self-will and lovelessness “have played their part” in existing divisions. Because of our sin “the evils of the world have so deeply penetrated our churches”. There are churches segregated by class division, race and colour, which is “a scandal in the Body of Christ”. In this context – and here the Amsterdam-1948 Statement takes its final step – the World Council of Churches has come into existence “because we have already recognised a responsibility to one another’s churches in Our Lord Jesus Christ. We embark upon our work in the WCC “in penitence for what we are, in hope for what we shall be”.

Wand, the Bishop of London, also thinks that the “Catholic” and “Protestant” typology is “hard on the Anglican churches and the Church of Sweden” because they claim to be “both Catholic and Protestant”. Douglas Horton agrees with Wand but for very different 5

For what follows cf. The First Assembly, 57-63.

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John W.C. Wand, the Anglican Bishop of London, England, thinks that the Statement puts more emphasis on divisions than on “the tremendous progress” towards “a new unity”. This is also the view of H.G. Apkarian, of the Union of the Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Near East, who notes that the title of the Statement, “The Universal Church in God’s Design”, really sounds like “man’s disorder in the Church of God”.

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Three topics dominate the plenary discussion on the Amsterdam Statement on Unity5: its strong emphasis on Christian division; the relevance and limits of the description of the deepest difference in terms of a Catholic and a Protestant ecclesiology; and finally the relative irrelevance of the Statement for the so called “Younger Churches”, particularly in Asia.

reasons. A Congregationalist from the USA, he does not believe that the description of the Protestant understanding of the Church is a good one because it does not make reference to the community of believers. He suggests the inclusion of a third type of church, the “gathered” church, “the church of the Covenant, the church of the Holy Spirit”. Dun Angus, a bishop from the Episcopal Church in the USA, agrees with Horton that there are three ways of apprehending the Church”. Archbishop Germanos, of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, misses in the Statement, “the eschatological conception of the invisible and the visible Church” which “would contribute very much to the reconciliation of different conceptions of the Church”, while his colleague George Florovsky would have preferred to describe the Catholic versus Protestant typology in more radical terms as an opposition between the Church of the apostolic succession and the gathered Church mentioned by Horton: “These two are radically opposite”. Between Catholic and Evangelical “there was more than a dialectic – they were two completely different blocs of belief, which could be reconciled only by a compromise”. Some representatives of what we call today the global South find it difficult to recognise their ecumenical situation in the main content of the Statement. According to V.E. Devadutt, a Consultant from the Baptist Church in India, Christian leaders who are labouring in church union in his country “would consider the document as falling far short of the stage which they had reached”. Although the Statement draws attention to “some stubborn difficulties”, it does not contribute “to that visible unity which was the will of God”. For D.T. Niles, a Methodist from Sri Lanka, the Statement’s emphasis on divisions shows that the Older Churches are discussing “the reasons and circumstances that have led them to their earlier divorce” whereas the Younger Churches are “just getting married”. In his response, Hans Lilje, the Chairperson of Section I, comes close to admitting that indeed the Statement is Eurocentric as it reflects almost exclusively the ecumenical problem of post-Constantinian European Christianity: “The Younger Churches looked at the problems in a different way”, he notes; and he goes on to conclude: “If one thought of the actual situation, the Report seemed to be an adequate description of our present situation...”

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The story of the Evanston 1954 Statement on Unity begins in 1951. Meeting in Rolle, Switzerland, that year, the WCC Central Committee adopts the resolution that the Faith and Order Commission be asked to consider as the topic of its contribution to the 1954 WCC Assembly “The Unity which we have in Christ and the Disunity of our Churches”. One year later, addressing the participants in the Third World Conference on Faith and Order, held in Lund, Sweden, in 1952, the first WCC General Secretary, Visser ‘t Hooft, clarifies the nature and

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Evanston 1954

the ecumenical context of the task assigned to Faith and Order to work on a new statement on unity. He starts by announcing that the focus of the upcoming Evanston Assembly will be “The Christian Hope”, and goes on listing three important developments related to visible unity that have taken place since the first Assembly6. Firstly, in the Amsterdam-1948 Assembly, the churches entered “a covenant, a fellowship of a permanent character” thus echoing “the absolute fundamental conviction” that it is because we believe and make the experience that we are one in Christ that we are pursuing visible unity in the ecumenical movement7, or, in the words of William Temple’s sermon at the opening of the Second World Conference on Faith and Order, “we could not seek union if we did not already possess unity”8. Secondly, the Churches have explained to each other the theological meaning of this covenant relationship expressed in the establishment of the World Council of Churches as neither ecclesiastical relativism nor enforcement into compromises around unity: the WCC exists “to prepare the way for manifest, tangible unity”. Finally, it has been explicit that seeking for unity cannot mean churchcentredness: it is rather “an indispensable part of the accomplishment of the witnessing task of the Church in and to the world”. The present ecumenical situation is therefore “apparently contradictory”. There is unity in Christ and yet the Churches are divided. Our task, Visser ‘t Hooft concludes, is then “to speak adequately about that intermediate situation”, “to give adequate expression to the spiritual reality which exists in the ecumenical movement”. We need “a theology of the abnormal situation in which we are today”, one which is able “to clarify the relation of the calling of the Church to unity with the Christian hope” because eschatology is “the indispensable perspective in which we must see our whole existence in this world”. The Lund Conference Committee in charge of the Faith and Order theme for Evanston was placed under the leadership of Angus Dun and D.T. Niles. Members of the Committee included George Florovsky, J. Hromádka, Pierre Maury, M. Niemöller, A.M. Ramsey, E. Schlink, and T.F. Torrance9. The Committee produced a Statement on Unity that deals successively with the following themes: our oneness in Christ, our

For what follows cf. W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft, “Faith and Order and the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches”, in O.S. Tomkins (ed.), The Third World Conference on Faith and Order, London, SCM, 1953, 128-138. 7 Early ecumenical literature abounds in reference to this “fundamental conviction”. 8 Cf. L. Hodgson (ed.), The Second World Conference on Faith and Order, London, SCM, 1938, 21. 9 O.S. Tomkins (ed.), The Third World Conference on Faith and Order, London, SCM, 1953, 350-351.

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disunity as Churches, and the action of faith in response to that10. At the 1954 Evanston Assembly, Section I, in charge of the Statement on Unity, is chaired by the Swedish Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala Yngve Brilioth, assisted by the Faith and Order Director Oliver S. Tomkins. The first section is a New Testament based reflection on Christ’s unifying work and the oneness of the Church in via, which is only “partly realised”. According to the New Testament, the essential reality of the unity of the Church lies “in Christ Himself and in His indissoluble unity with His people”. They are united in him as one body, as his bride, the new temple, the vine and the branches, the shepherd and the flock. The one life of the Church derives from “the whole person and work of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord”. The Church’s unity “is grounded in His taking our nature upon him”. In His resurrection “He manifested the new man unto whom we all grow (Eph. 4:11ff), in whom all human divisions are done away…” Through the Spirit, the unity of the Church even now “is a foretaste of the fullness that is to be because it already is”.

For what follows cf. “Faith and Order: Our Oneness in Christ and Our Disunity as Churches”, in The Evanston Report, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1954, 82-92. 10

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The second section, “Our Disunity as Churches” starts by distinguishing between diversity and division. It is only in the light of the Church’s oneness in Christ that “we understand the difference between diversity and division in the Church, and their relation to sin”. When diversity disrupts “the manifest unity of the body”, then “it

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But the Church “in its earthly pilgrimage” has never realized the fullness of its unity in Christ. Its oneness is thus “a growth from its unity, as given, to its unity, as fully manifested”. For its growth “from unity to unity”, Christ has given the Church in the Spirit the gifts it needs. Thus the fellowship (koinonia) in which the members of the Church share is first of all “fellowship with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit and fellowship with the saints, in the Church triumphant”. However, the gift of unity and the gifts that help its manifestation “are not for the sake of the Church as an historical society, but for the sake of the world”. Some of those gifts assure us “that the undivided Christ is present amongst us”. We all wait upon one Father, read the Holy Scriptures and proclaim the gospel, receive His gift of Baptism, celebrate the sacrament of the Eucharist, receive a ministry of the Word and the Sacraments, are called to be imitators of Christ. The fact of our common use of these gifts “is a powerful evidence of our unity in Christ”. This unity is a present reality “both in the World Council of Churches and in relation to other Christians whose fellowship we do not as yet fully enjoy”. It is the basis for approaching the Churches’ disunity.

changes its quality and becomes sinful division”, which is sinful because it denies the gospel of reconciliation in the lives of those who proclaim it”.

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Which is “The Action of Faith” that that the churches should take in light of the paradox of their situation of oneness in Christ and division as churches? We all ought to be united “in thinking of our divisions with repentance”, in admitting that our understandings of God’s will for God...