Christians vs. lions
O'Rourke, Brian
THE GRAYMOOR PRIZE WINNERS THE ECUMENICAL TASK: 1994 13 BRIAN O'ROURKE CHRISTIANS VS. LIONS ^^A Jj^L ^^V e can't go on like this. For the past hour ^^B^^^A^^V we have been bumping along in...
...The Catholic church claims to be guided till the end of time by the Holy Spirit...
...On our right, a range of mountains stretches all the way beyond Lake Natron, which is sixty kilometers (thirty-five-miles) long...
...I also teach Vatican II: To what extent does it answer the demands of the Reformers...
...But they did not enjoy the fruit of modern biblical scholarship...
...Poverty, too...
...In the second year we study the history of Christianity, that great relativisor of dogma, when seen in context...
...Because of a misinterpretation of Romans 5:12 we believe that we were born with Original Sin before committing personal sins...
...Protestants recognize the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Bible...
...Yet here we religious are still on the ground after 500 years, a force to be reckoned with, and a power on which the hierarchy can rely...
...If we stress but one pole and minimize or neglect the other, we are heretics...
...Certainly the local Catholic diocesan bishop and clergy are less than enthusiastic...
...In Malambo, it was Catholic missionaries who built the primary school and the first dispensary...
...Do I even see it...
...Christ is God and human...
...Augustine was the first to think that one up...
...We can caricature our opponents to avoid being challenged by them...
...But then how could we have gotten it so wrong in so many ways...
...This is how it was in the early church...
...I am reminded of my Dutch confreres back in the sixties who assured me that during World War II the difference between Catholic and Protestant didn't count...
...cumenism on the Masai Steppe is not all wine and roses...
...I went with an open mind, at least consciously...
...We put a board on the soft sand to jack up the Landrover and take a look at the spring...
...They will have to be accepted as pastors by their communities and so avoid all notoriety as seminarians...
...If you keep to the track—tire marks in the grass—you can get stuck in the dry dust and sand just as easily as in thick mud...
...We pile out of the car...
...I tell my colleagues I want the students to learn what Paul said, not what Martin Luther said...
...or Protestants, self-righteousness is the capital sin...
...As for the canon of Scripture, Catholics recognize the forty-six books of the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint...
...I investigated, but they had all been baptized with water at a running stream...
...This conforms closely with their traditional initiation rites from one stage of life to another...
...To our left, beyond the Rift, are the mountains, Gelai and Kitumbeine...
...That was the misunderstanding of the elder brother...
...But I am in no mood to appreciate this land of wide horizons...
...The Bible is the book of the community...
...Nurture and pastoral care are also called for, and these Catholics had not been looked after...
...That was when I accused my colleagues of being Monophysites...
...The attitude of one bishop nearby is instructive...
...This is how it should be...
...One catechist gets under and tightens two nuts...
...I myself teach the introduction to both the Old and New Testaments, and Proverbs, with its catholic (small "c") openness to "pagan" wisdom...
...Rather, faber fit fabricando: we learn by doing...
...I try very hard to be humble but I don't get very far...
...Five are now with me, both Catholic catechists and Lutheran evangelists...
...We are on our way back from Malambo, where we held a seminar for students of the Extension Seminary, all Masai...
...There are no people there, only wild animals and tourists...
...While my two companions maintained an embarrassed silence, she asked how I coped living with and working with Lutherans...
...It was his "freedom of a Christian" that put me off...
...Even with fourwheel-drive there is no traction...
...There is no difference between Catholic and Lutheran...
...After all, we Catholics claim we have been around for 2,000 years...
...For the last thirty minutes, every time I turn to the left, I can feel the tire rubbing against the mudguard...
...Immediately, she put me on the spot, excruciatingly so...
...Little traffic passes this way, just a few herd boys with their animals grazing in Edenic cohabitation with wildebeest, zebra, and gazelle...
...So our ecumenical safari continues to be bumpy, with occasional breakdowns...
...But the only one really willing to lock 14 horns with me in interdenominational combat is Aino, an ordained pastor who is the wife of my Lutheran co-worker, Pastor Yrjo Rossi...
...When we Catholic missionaries are transferred, all we take is our toothbrush...
...Then the comparison of works to the fruit of a tree is a false analogy: the good or bad tree comes before good or bad fruit...
...Pace Vincent Donovan, the author of Christianity Rediscovered (Orbis), evangelization is not enough...
...Are we not big enough to welcome the former in the una, sancta...l One day the three of us staff members for the joint program were sitting around a coffee table when Sister Angelika, a Lutheran nurse, came in...
...Dietrich Bonhoeffer would agree with me...
...The Lutherans emphasize lay leadership in small communities, and train for it...
...Comparisons are odious...
...But I respect the depth of HbI HH their theological thinking...
...I did discover how the Lutheran seminarians avoided all controversy in class...
...I always carry a full complement of tools for such an emergency...
...I must confess openly to a certain smug, patronizing attitude toward the separated sisters and brothers...
...His Toyota Hilux is a real Lutheran car...
...In contrast to the Lutherans who grow up with an easy familiarity around the family Bible, the Catholic students didn't even know the setup of the Bible, where to find what...
...We are sixty-five kilometers from the nearest service station, on the rim of the Ngorongoro crater...
...But we also do enjoy joint services together, especially on Good Friday...
...As an unreconstructed post-Tridentine Roman Catholic, I take (Continued on page 14) BRIAN O'ROURKE, C.S.Sp., a Roman Catholic priest and missionary, lives and works in Arusha, Tanzania...
...But does all this entail the structural division of the church, for which both sides are to blame...
...This is where they score...
...The students, mostly males, are mature individuals with a primary-school education...
...Then I was told that they had not been baptized with the trinitarian formula but in the name of Engai (God...
...When I challenged my Lutheran colleagues on the rebaptisms at Soit Sambu, I was first told that the Catholics had been baptized with milk...
...In her two-story house in Ngasumet there is no ladder or stairway...
...The course we are all part of takes three years, and because Catholics and Lutherans have studied together, when they return to their villages, they tend to maintain their good relationships...
...In general, it is the expatriate missionaries who are most in favor of this joint ecumenical program for the formation of church workers...
...The Reformation in Germany and England led to the emptying of the monasteries...
...and (3) two month-long residential sessions each year with a stress on lecture-style teaching...
...Half of them had already been baptized as Catholics...
...On behalf of the people of God," of course, as the constitution on the divine office states...
...I checked again, and this also was not true...
...I arrived five years ago and my two colleagues agreed that we redress the balance somewhat...
...Surely, the point of Jesus' parables of the lost son and the laborers in the vineyard is that our relationship to God is not based on legalism...
...and the anointing of the sick is not a preparation for death...
...To safeguard our faith we must hold on to both poles and maintain the tension between apparent contradictions...
...We get home to tell the tale...
...His distinction between the outer and inner man [sic] I found unacceptable...
...We cannot divorce the two...
...The ecumenical course at the Extension Seminary lasts three years...
...I teach Trent...
...Then comes the conical dormant volcano, Oldonyo Lengai (the Mountain of God...
...she uses a fire pole to get to her bedroom...
...Differences of theology are not always differences of faith...
...We are on the open grassland, on the edge of the Serengeti, in Tanzania...
...There are both faith and good works...
...Lutherans are continually being harassed here by fundamentalists, the Walokole (saved...
...If a fundamentalist approaches a Catholic, the latter responds that he or she "will ask Father...
...Another hammers the spring leaves back into place...
...Lutherans accept the Bible as a given...
...Liturgy is, literally, the work of all the people...
...After an hour's work on the Landrover, we get five centimeters leeway for the tire and limp along...
...It was only one of Paul's ten metaphors...
...At the beginning I was embarrassed by the abysmal ignorance of the Catholic students...
...There are mysteries and paradoxes...
...We Catholics depend on a highly educated male celibate clergy, who are necessarily thin on the ground...
...God is One and Three...
...Catholics believe Jesus committed his mandate to a community but didn't tell them to read a book...
...For the past hour ^^B^^^A^^V we have been bumping along in and out ^^^H^^^V of potholes as the twelve-year-old Land^^^V^^^V rover makes its way along the grassy ^^m ^^m plain and out of the Rift Valley...
...While there are only three permanent staff members, we are assisted by other teachers from both churches during the residential sessions...
...Water for the Masai, it is true, has none of the significance of milk...
...But in Chicago they taught me nothing about motor mechanics...
...There is one year each on the Bible, church history, and theology...
...But the evening is drawing on, and this is lion country...
...It is one way of discovering one's limitations...
...The writers of the New Testament had quoted from the Greek Bible...
...In the history course we examine how the church determined the canon of Scripture...
...It is clear from my discussions with Catholic catechists that Vatican II has not yet been understood or theologically "received" by the clergy and the faithful in this part of Africa...
...On the other hand, I found Yves Congar's Vraie et Fausse Reforme dans I 'Eglise (True and False Reform in the Church) too dismissive of a Protestant straw man...
...I agree that Protestants give witness to gospel values that have been minimized or neglected by Catholics...
...Real missionaries don't go into the Serengeti...
...It smacked more of Greek dualism than of biblical anthropology...
...Traditionally, Catholicism has been more open to the insights of non-Christian philosophies and religions...
...2) weekly or monthly meetings held at six or seven centers throughout the diocese, such as Malambo, where homework is discussed...
...Once, just as we were going into a bad spot where we had been stuck four months earlier, one of the Masai cried out, "Simbal" There, sticking above the grass, were two pairs of lions' ears...
...This is true for morality as well...
...Then there have been incidents where Lutherans have disturbed our liturgies, claiming that we Catholics have not yet heard the gospel...
...Catholics are not book-centered but peoplecentered...
...The Reformers thought that the Hebrew was closer to the Word of God...
...MM HMJ ave I succeeded in casting the beam from my ^^^^^^^H own eve...
...I told her it was no problem at all, and here's why...
...Hence indefectibility and infallibility...
...I spent a year in Chicago studying Reformation history and the Lutheran Confessions, both at the Lutheran School of Theology and at the Catholic Theological Union...
...They have given proof of leadership charisms in their communities...
...But, I challenge them, how do we know this is the Word of God...
...About twothirds are Lutheran, the rest Catholic...
...We Catholic pastors are assigned by our bishop and so can fearlessly (that is, with near impunity) confront our communities with the gospel and its demands...
...Then there is Bible and Tradition...
...For the students, this is the most attractive section...
...Besides, being declared innocent in a tribunal is too legalistic a concept...
...Because, I answer, the church says so...
...At the Extension Seminary, when it is the Catholics' turn to conduct the Service of the Word at morning prayer, the Lutherans complain that they are too shortwinded...
...Even back in Tanzania, my Lutheran colleagues are excessively polite...
...But over time these problems solve themselves...
...But a human is not a plant...
...Once stuck, everyone—it doesn't matter if you are Catholic or Lutheran—gets out of the car and everyone pushes...
...It carries no tools, and runs on faith, not good works...
...There are three elements to the course: (1) home study with written exercises...
...From the point of view of availability to students, I have become convinced of the value of celibacy...
...Blonde and wearing jeans and no veil, she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor...
...Then there was the scandal of 3,000 Masai who were baptized Lutherans at Soit Sambu in the past year...
...The first time our students came together at Oldonyo Sambu for the four-week residential sessions, there were fisticuffs in the dormitories...
...It's not as if I haven't tried to make things difficult...
...The course, which was conceived in 1974, has had a decidedly Lutheran slant...
...Most were professed religious and so enjoyed a certain security...
...Still, witness is a gospel value...
...Frankly, I cannot ^^^H^^^H see how Lutheranism can answer any of my ^^H^^H felt spiritual needs...
...The setting is magnificent...
...15 16 Pastor Ngobei's course on Martin Luther is highly popular...
...There is Scripture reading, a homily by an evangelist, prayers, and hymns...
...Preparations for the so-called Roman synod "for" Africa, later this year, make this lacuna even more obvious...
...The Council of Trent condemned polygamy but knew nothing of the institutional polygamy of African societies...
...It's become part of our joking relationship...
...The third year is devoted to theology...
...Whenever I embark on some controversial point in faith or theology, they take evasive action...
...But they learned...
...But, if we reject Augustine, does it follow that we were conceived immaculate...
...The early heresies are important for us to understand, since the truths of our Christian profession of faith surpass our limited understanding...
...When I had to explain devotion to the Sacred Heart—that Jesus as a human needs other humans to share his enthusiasms and griefs—I was met with blank stares...
...I agree with Congar that the Bible and Tradition mutually judge and challenge one another...
...With all the jolting, the center-bolt of the spring has broken...
...This is because the basis of each group's faith is the same, the Bible...
...The early Christians had no such belief...
...Yet we now know that the scholastics sometimes got it wrong: Confirmation has nothing to do with maturity but is related to baptism...
...She works with a mobile eye clinic in South Masailand...
...When it comes to institution versus charisma, it's hardly a level playing field...
...But the Bible is a collection of oral traditions...
...And when the sun goes down behind the western hills in Malambo and night comes on swiftly with a stiff breeze from the northeast, carrying with it the smell of rain, the Lutheran faithful gather for evening prayer by a paraffin lamp outside a neighbor's mud house...
...Further up is the massif of the Ngorongoro Highlands...
...I also give classes on liturgy and the sacraments...
...But pushed by my compulsive Tridentine conscience, I sneak out of the village in the last light of day, in order to "get in" vespers from my breviary, to which I am bound as a cleric in major orders of the Latin rite church...
...I enjoy a good fight...
...First, the Bible course...
...no chances...
...Eventually we come to a stop...
...Or, metaphysically, a being perfects itself by its operations...
...Now there is no visible sign of Catholic presence, while the Lutherans are building their third church on the same site...
...Such collaboration, she said, would be unheard of back in Germany...
...The Lutheran students seem fascinated by the medieval teaching that the seven sacraments accompany the seven stages of life...
...But after two weeks I was convinced that Martin Luther had gone astray...
...Safari work here is a matter of either/or...
...Every evening at a different family's...
...Such shared experiences lead to a real bonding process, the stuff of stories for years to come...
...But in our course, everyone spends a lot of time examining the traditional beliefs of the main tribes of the Arusha region...
...What mattered was how they coped with the German occupation...
...But I hang in there: charisms are eventually institutionalized...
...Next month this safari will be the concern of my Lutheran colleague, Pastor Nathaniel Ngobei...
...The Catholic seminarians, in contrast, throve on controversy...
...He insists that the Catholic faithful hold fast to the traditions of the nineteenth-century missionaries...
...But even here the sixteenth-century Reformers didn't have the last word, as can be seen by later qualifications by Lutheran Pietists and Wesley's Arminianism...
...That should be no surprise: initially, no Catholic was willing to join the staff...
...Now it is worse, hitting even when I go straight...
...For them, baptism was the visible sign of entry into the community of believers...
...But if you go off the track to avoid getting stuck, you get tire punctures from thorns...
...Then, I cannot accept, pace John Reumann (see The Supper of the Lord, Fortress), that "justification by faith" is the primary image or analogy of our relationship to God and Christ...
...I also insist on teaching Romans...
...But how can one breathe "on behalf of someone else...
Vol. 121 • January 1994 • No. 1
