The state of the disunion

...They recognize the unity that the Holy Spirit offers through adventurous yet responsible pathfinders and pathbreakers...

...fundamentalisms prosper...

...Thereupon the more linear-minded eventually discern new configurations and lead a march that means a catching-up to such pioneers...

...Where one cannot persuade an element in the church, one coerces by authoritative or authoritarian instruments...

...Few serious theological or socio-political ventures go on with Catholics still in their figurative ghettos or Protestants in their isolation wards...

...It may well be that in this generation, ecumenical progress, reliant on the spirit more than the movement, is of the weaving sort...

...In their local expressions Christians seem to exchange something analogous to early Christian "letters of greetings" or "letters of peace...

...It may be born of a romanticism that works against good order...

...However, the story of the movement's impulse and legacy, the ecumenical achievement and spirit, proceeds apace...

...They might be full of humane and humanistic good will, but they do not act on their mutual sympathies as expressions of extant and growing Christian unity...

...The leaders of large communions and confessional or ecumenical bodies, from the pope through World Council and denominational leadership, are aware that many Christians today are reacting against over-rationalized and bureaucratized religious organization...

...In conventional accountings, the movement has slowed during the past two decades...

...In one period there will be linear, disciplined progression...

...If I turn up at Mass at St...

...Despite some promising signs, like the deservedly well-regarded World Council of Churches document, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, the movement lacks fresh thinking, new ideas, or, some say, imaginative leadership...

...But as a complement to marching, it has its own place in the esthetics and meaning of the dance...

...The choice of 1910 is plausible...

...Such a model may be the best we can do while the battle over authority, the break into tribalism, and the stasis in the ecumenical movement occur...

...Pope John Paul II, it always seems to us non-Roman Catholics, is not likely to respond...

...Pope John Paul II continues to develop openings to Orthodoxy and keeps showing friendly gestures toward Protestantism...

...The etceteras, if cited, would string on at article-length...

...Since common worship among the participants was denied them, at the end, all conferees could light a candle and say the Lord's Prayer together-so long as the press was not represented and they, or we, would not tell anyone about it...

...Because of the problematic character of it, au-thority becomes an issue in all kinds of ecumenical concerns...

...While at mid-century the grand global symbols imaged convergence, today they are divergent...

...The Christian unity of our day looks more like that which has been described as a"family of apostolic churches.'' This accents family as much as churches...

...These conversations moved beyond interfaith talks on civil issues...

...Today it is hard to recall such a moment, only a bare third of a century ago...

...To personalize it: he would have no trouble-I hope and presume - seeing Martin E. Marty as a member of the Body of Christ, the church catholic...

...How can we bring together the movement and the spirit - the stasis in one and the ease, the progress, the strivings, in connection with the other...

...Yet how one lines up in respect to them depends less on whether one is a Roman Catholic or not than on what one regards pastoral or theological leadership to be, toward what end, by what means...

...In one period it was the Trinity...

...Yet, say their elders, these members of newer generations will never know how it felt in the old, restricting, anti-ecumenical times...

...The serious ones know that bureaus are necessary, are often well-staffed, and produce good effects...

...in still another it might have been the sacraments, or the realization of grace...

...While Protestant communions continue to set their own houses in order - as mergers within Presbyterianism and Lutheranism in the United States in the 1980s make clear-there is little progress toward "The Church of Christ Uniting'' in the United States, and not much new vitality in unions like that of the United Church of Canada back in 1925...

...They do not do this always with written documents but with actions...

...Movements based on denominational, ethnic, racial, gendered, or class distinctions or in social causes, define and divide people, not least of all Christians...

...Senior Catholics regularly express amazement at how taken-for-granted younger Catholics regard life in the church after the changes effected by Vatican II...

...The fact that papal "infallibility" and Protestant biblical "inerrancy" came to be defined in the nineteenth-century and used as weapons between the parties in the twentieth-century is an indicator of their issue of authority...

...A second problem results from what I implied above: the vital differences in Christianity today transect boundaries of denominations and communions...

...On such a scene, people who once hoped for the ecumenical movement - people as distinguished and patient and perceptive as, say, United Methodist theologian Albert Outler - have found it necessary to speak of stagnation, stasis, setback...

...Why the juxtaposition of styles and modes...

...In folk dancing, for a time the parties "march" linearly and make one kind of progress...

...Couple this with the fact that agendas set by women, or "third-world" interests, by political left and right, by Hispanic or Native American or Chilean or Korean or American black elements, are more vivid and vital to most partisans than are nuances of Presbyterian, Disciples of Christ, or Armenian Orthodox-bounded or commissioned theological statements...

...This brings me to the most urgent one...

...In the other time, they will "weave," becoming webbed, knotted, repositioned, freed from old patterns, ready for new ones...

...This results from a different set of needs and expectations on com-munionwide and local levels...

...Protestants make use of Catholic bishops' pastoral letters on controversial issues as if these were their own, and the drafters of those letters draw on non-Catholic sources with ease...

...Authority-minded leadership and followership have to be nervous about such spontaneous and local-regulated activity...

...Christians who are sac-ramentally-minded, for whom eucharistic participation and fellowship are the most profound experiences and expressions of Christians unity (indeed, of Christian life), are bewildered, frustrated, or depressed by the inability of leadership across communion lines to effect eucharistic sharing...

...But again and again Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran groups, for starters, come to agreements on the nature of the eucharistic Presence and activity...

...But there is little hope of eu-charistic fellowship during the present pontificate...

...Before the Second Vatican Council, as I heard it told then and recall it - I will welcome word of other instances - keepers of the green trees of hopes for Christian unity at St...

...Yet that kind of outlook is a first fact about church life which, if unaddressed or shunned, leaves many of the faithful poised to go shopping for para-church agencies that will be responsive, or to turn passive or even to drop out...

...Centrifugal-ity reigns again...

...On these grounds Catholic theological argument would be ended, say members of the Catholic Right...

...ToMARTIN E. MARTY is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago, senior editor of The Christian Century, and author most recently of Modern American Religion: Volume One (Chicago) and Religion and Republic: The American Circumstance (Beacon...

...They are not likely to be for generations to come, despite advances signaled by Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry and other breakthrough documents...

...Where Catholics, mainstream Protestants, Quakers, theistic Unitarians, fundamentalists, evangelicals, Orthodox, and pehtecostals have profound differences, they know it and show it...

...Paradoxically, it awakens in some a search for more authority...

...On these grounds Protestant factions divide their denominations...

...Tribalism never had it so good...

...They are selective...

...Their members may not sit still for "living-room dialogues" packaged at headquarters...

...While there are holdouts, exceptions, and complicators, in tens of thousands of parishes Protestant and Catholic clergy participate together in weddings...

...1965" or at some date between then and now...

...During such moments it is difficult to trace and follow all the action...

...Modernity erodes old lines of authority...

...Such a reactive outlook may produce many problems...

...I remember reading somewhere, back when, an image by Stephen Toulmin of advances of disciplines being compared to folk dancing...

...in another, Christology, and the two natures of Christ...

...Because issues relating to authority, auspices, the apostolicity of the priestly orders, and the like have not been settled...

...In another, it will be more apparently erratic, spontaneous, and complex...

...That issue is approached differently in local and individual Christian life than on the highest levels...

...Peter's, it would not be likely that he would deny me the bread...

...The ecumenically-minded church bodies, even in their independence, wane, while aggressive, belligerently stand-offish competitors prosper...

...Chronicling the path of a spirit is more difficult than pointing to a movement that marks its gains with documents, mergers, councils, and charters, Such chronicling is necessary, however, for Christians to interpret signs that the divine mandates and promises concerning the nature and motion of the church are recognizable, and to find clues to future directions...

...Here is where what looks like mild anarchy but may be local-based order is evident, where it advances ecumenism on other grounds...

...Theological conversations continue...

...One reason for this may well be that they already have"across the backyard fence" conversations that find their own tracks...

...He seems to have great difficulty seeing the Lutheran church, of which I am a part, as an integral, corporate part of that Body...

...such institutions do not last long...

...As they resolve themselves, one gets the design again, and sees advance...

...Some of the young have pseudo-nostalgia for the Old Catholicism they never experienced, and can be reached by cultural and scholastic conservatives...

...Whenever Christians think in global terms, the ecumenical reality comes easily...

...Now that, for the first time, the Christian majority is in the Southern hemisphere, northerly Christians are quite ecumenical in their appropriation of causes for prayer and support, or of leaders from whom they would learn...

...The Spirit and the spirit of ecumenism can work with such a model, and seem to be busy doing so these days...

...Thus in South Africa, Anglican Desmond Tutu, Catholic Denis Hurley, Reformed Alan Boesak, Dutch Reformed Church dissidents, mainstream Protestant witnesses, African indigenous church members in wild efflorescence - these all belong to the common Christian consciousness...

...Each presumably settles as if by fiat, by its merely being asserted or exercised on an issue at hand...

...On local levels, Christians in congregations and parishes both live with this situation and they do not live with it...

...Heirs of a revolution who did not personally experience a "before" often have difficulty internalizing its results...

...To cite one more barrier to the movement as presently conceived: the modern church is increasingly preoccupied with the question of authority...

...Back then, the United Nations, United World Federalism, the World Council of Churches, or, soon after, images such as "global village," "spaceship earth," or "racial integration" moved many...

...What happens to Archbishop Hunthausen or Professor Curran, to take two recently celebrated instances, is in a direct ecclesiastical sense "none of your business" to those non-Catholics who sympathize with them...

...But what catches the imagination are patterns of church life where individuals or members of small or local groups find structures malleable, capable of hearing and producing change that has immediate effect...

...day the effective symbols are particularist...

...In our time it is authority...

...Absent majority Catholic-Orthodox interests, the Protestant movement has certainly slowed...

...In a world of impersonal structures, believers look for personal, charismatic, pastoral, and responsive leadership...

...Two World Wars set back that effort, but the birth of the World Council of Churches in 1948, with Protestant and Orthodox participants, brought great hopes to the world wide movement...

...It is in these up-close gatherings that most Christians judge progress and change...

...Yet the history of ecumenical endeavor for centuries reveals gains made by individuals who did not wait for a new regulation from Rome or Constantinople or Geneva or New York...

...Roman Catholic gestures made during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) changed the entire complex of ecumenism and furthered those hopes...

...Where Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, or any number of other kinds of Christians find reasons to come together - to help an economy survive, to protest against apartheid in their land, to see the liberation of women, better to interpret a New Testament text, to hold a blood-donor drive, or whatever-it is hard to keep them from common action and, increasingly, common theological probing...

...While there had been some unitive efforts after the East-West Schism of the eleventh century and still others after the sixteenth-century partings in the West, endeavors to bring Christians together "took off'' after a great missionary conference at Edinburgh in 1910...

...That there is an achievement is most obvious to those who lived through earlier stages of the ecumenical revolution...

...So it goes with the century's ecumenical movement...

...The Christian church seems to have one great thing on its mind in each epoch...

...Thus to people of a certain mentality - Catholic intransigents of these two centuries, and Protestant fundamentalists - one cannot get too much "infallibility" or "inerrancy...

...I believe that to keep sanity, to be responsible in responding to the churchly unity mandate and promises, Christians will, at least through this generation, have to be willing to live with considerable local experiment, situational improvisation, ad hoc ecumenical adaptation, and what to the neat and orderly, committee-and-charter-minded leaders must look like formlessness, perhaps mild anarchy...

...Yet celebrating the Presence intercommunionly is prohibited...

...If my church as church "shows up," there would be difficulties...

...The ecumenical movement that concentrates on the boundaries of denominations misses the real lines of both hostility and coalition or breakthrough...

...Every week, five new denominations spring up, adding to some 22,190 separate ones estimated in 1985...

...I do not mean by this image to suggest that weaving in isolation is an end in itself...

...John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, and the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, pioneered in holding truly theological conversations between Catholic and Protestant partners...

...As individuals, or in groups, they act out their part in a drama...

...Where understandings of the basic sacramental reality differ significantly, of course, other issues come to the fore...

...And that regarding usually has no "Anglican" or "Roman" or "Lutheran" label on it...

...What went on where the dry trees languished, one can not imagine, or can well imagine: virtually nothing...