Oy! Koumenism
Garvey, John
army, would be abolished, and a new civilian police force, completely removed from military control, would be established to enforce the laws and maintain domestic order. It would include a...
...KOUMENISM ENUFF ALREADY _9 ishops representing the D jurisdictions that com4 p r i s e the Orthodox D Church in the United States recently voted to suspend relations with the National Council of Churches...
...The Catholic church, however, has not entered the World Council of Churches...
...Hurdles remain...
...The Christological formulas of Chalcedon could be a c c e p t e d by Orthodox, C a t h o l i c s , Lutherans, Anglicans, and Calvinists, as could the language of the Bible...
...When at the 1991 WCC meeting in Canberra a Protestant theologian can equate the Holy Spirit with the spirits of ancestors and the spirits of nature--and can be applauded for her performance--a decisive movement away from the very agreement that gave the ecumenical movement its reason for being has been made...
...What anyone who studies comparative religion notices, however, is the remarkable degree of consensus: human beings are not as they are meant to be...
...Only relatively new religious groups have any obvious unity, and it doesn't last long...
...Hinduism is full of varieties of Hinduism--more, probably, than any other religion...
...The differences between Catholics and Orthodox and Calvinists and Lutherans were all important enough to make communion impossible, but what made the dawning of ecumenism wonderful was an understanding that disagreement at least did not need to mean demonization, and that much could be learned by a patient attention to what the other had meant to say all along (and not what we, at our end of the polemic, needed them to be saying to reassure ourselves of our righteousness...
...It indicates, at least, that a new prospect has come into view...
...This purging would appear to be the indispensable minimum for E1 Salvador to reenter the company of civilized nations...
...The fact that it can't be put into words, and yet we must speak of it, is the source both of religious division and of the continuing presence of ancient religious traditions, despite their fragmentation...
...The same people who identified the spirits of the ancestors and nature with the Holy Spirit were offended that Orthodox Christians would not share Communion with them...
...As you look at the testimony of the mystics in every tradition a remarkable consensus can be found in their descriptions of what an experience of the holy is like...
...One argument was that it was impossible for Christianity to evangelize effectively as long as it presented non-Christians with an array of competing claims...
...Even after the great schism that divided East from West and the trauma of the Protestant Reformation, even after sacramental communion had been broken, the Christian consensus was in many ways remarkable...
...When the New York agreement was signed in September, UN Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar welcomed it as a breakthrough...
...and the FMLN presence in the national police force, particularly in the zones traditionally under guerrilla control, would help integrate the combatants into the power structure...
...For years people have spoken of "the scandal of a divided Christianity...
...It would include a significant FMLN presence...
...It always was this way...
...But there is another, and it is the more important one...
...The belief that the Spirit could guide the church into unity was essential, and was the basis of the church's efforts to resolve the first Christian centuries' great controversies over Christ and his relationship to the Father...
...Without getting into a theological discussion on intercommunion itself, it is hard to understand what eucharistic Communion can mean to people who are, frankly, this careless about what has been handed on to them...
...The recognition of this fact was the basis for Christian ecumenism...
...The FMLN had demanded not merely dismissals but prosecution...
...When the unity of the early, predominantly Jewish, church was threatened over divided opinion about the obligations required of Gentile converts to Christianity, a council was convened in Jerusalem, and Acts reports that it announced its decision with the words, "It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us...
...Yet because there have been no apparent pressures from the Bush White House, the Salvadoran military high command feels free to resist even dismissals, proposing instead a "self-purification" that most observers, including the UN negotiators, regard as an empty promise...
...Neither President Bush nor Secretary of State James Baker congratulated the parties on what was truly a historic achievement...
...Neither the need itself, nor the remarkably unified insights at the base of it, can be dismissed...
...The Bush administration has given at best lukewarm endorsement to the Salvadoran peace process...
...ambassador to El Salvador, is president of the Center for International Policy...
...ROBERT E. WHITE Robert E. White, former U.S...
...A lot of people have deplored this apparent weakening of an already relatively weak movement toward Christian unity...
...Some perspective is needed, however...
...The central assumption here is that the dominant secular culture has more to teach us, with all its most passionate and essentially political concerns, than the common trinitarian and biblical tradition which, many Christians thought for a while, was really shared at levels that made some degree of common understanding possible...
...Justin Martyr and some other early Christian apologists saw this at work 742: Commonweal in Plato as well as in the Old Testament...
...There was great encouragement at the dawn of the ecumenical movement, when Protestants, previously fragmented and suspicious of one another, were able to unite, and were joined by the Orthodox...
...Judaism is divided into Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative branches, and those are just the largest ones...
...and the baptisms performed by heretics (did they count...
...There is a point to be made here, but it needs to be seen in the light of a phenomenon that is interesting and ought to give us pause before deploring it: every one of the great religious traditions is divided...
...but they also apparently assume that this language is determined entirely by its culture, that the Judaism of Jesus is somehow accidental, that his unique reference to God as Father is mere patriarchal conditioning...
...Christianity is not alone...
...This is a movement back to a place somewhere before Chalcedon, a regression...
...It remains an observer, friendly but not part of the institution, participaring on WCC commissions without joining it as a member...
...A crucial provision of the UN peace framework requires that the army be cleansed of human rights violators...
...The Orthodox always made it clear that they considered themselves the apostolic church...
...When biblical language itself (a reference to God as Father, for example) becomes problematic, and the baptismal forms that are part of the Gospels are changed accordingly, it is easy to see why some people--not only the Orthodox--are uneasy...
...In Central America, as elsewhere, democracy and militarism are incompatible...
...Looking at this fragmentation, it is easy to see why rationalists can argue against any religion on the grounds that all claim to be true---but there are so many of them, saying so many different things...
...something (illusion, the Fall) separates us from truth...
...I I 20 December 1991:743...
...Beyond the major Islamic Sunni and Shia branches, there are many Muslim subgroups...
...What has happened here is significant and may mark a mm in the whole of the ecumenical movement...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey OY...
...The problem is that within mainstream Protestantism there has been a movement away from what can only be called Protestant orthodoxy...
...Christians love to generalize about the kind of Judaism to which Christ came, but it would be better to speak of"Judaisms": there was at least as great a difference between the beliefs of the Sadducees and the Pharisees (a party with which Jesus' teaching in fact had much in common) as there is between today's Reform and Orthodox Judaism...
...In the face of fragmentation Jesus prayed "that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you...
...The timing is certainly graceless: the suspension was announced during the tenure of the Reverend Leonid Kishkovsky, the first Orthodox president of the NCC...
...As a result, the army would no longer have a pretext to persecute its enemies...
...Though there has not been a formal or final break, continued relations between the Orthodox and the NCC are being studied by Orthodox theologians...
...It can be argued that there is something that draws all human beings, and our efforts to describe it have been inadequate precisely because what draws us can't be put into words...
...With Vatican II, Catholics entered the ecumenical atmosphere, and for the first time since the schism between East and West a certain cordiality became the norm, not the exception, in almost all forms of Christian dialogue...
...ordinary understanding needs enlightening...
...Mormonism already has splintered into many branches, and even within the largest branch (the Salt lake Citybased Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) there are serious divisions...
...Forms of monastic asceticism are remarkably similar in religions as different as Buddhism and Catholicism...
...You can only discover those things you have in common once, and then the thrill wears off: this is one reason the ecumenical movement seems to have lost its steam...
...The people who feel comfortable about moving away from the traditional language assume that it is so culturally determined that it may be changed for what seem to be good moral and cultural reasons...
...there was also the Essene faction, which may have influenced John the Baptist and John the Evangelist...
...Christianity makes the claim that in Jesus Christ this yearning has been answered: God's life has been shared with us, and because human communion with God, the source of life, has been restored, death itself is overthrown, and its power can no longer govern us...
...As new democratic forces in E1 Salvador seek to untangle competing demands and needs, the White House should join Congress and send a clear message to E1 Salvador's military leaders that we expect them to stand down from their position as arbitrator of political power, and to abide by the agreements reached by the elected civilian government and the FMLN...
...Christianity itself was almost instantly challenged by gnosticism, and soon had to deal with Marcion's denial of the real continuity between the Old and New Testaments, Montanist claims of prophetic inspiration, and a series of schisms over church discipline in areas involving such questions as the reconciliation of lapsed Christians (could anyone, after baptism, be restored to Communion after serious sin...
...but the recognition of common Christian ground was sufficient reason for working together...
Vol. 118 • December 1991 • No. 22
