A Truer Ecumenical Movement — Who is a Christian?

Ryan Self, the publicist for Abilene Christian University Press, kindly sent me a pdf file containing the manuscript for Radical Ecumenicity: Pursuing Unity and Continuity after John Howard Yoder, a work dedicated to exploring the ecumenical thoughts of John Howard Yoder, a “celebrated Mennonite theologian” as Mr. Self properly described him in the email sent out to a some WWW bloggers drawn, I gather, from those who’ve shown some interest in the work of Professor Yoder. I’ll be writing from a Catholic viewpoint, fully accepting the items in the Nicene-Constantinople Creed and the claims of Rome that Christian churches should be united with the Pontiff of the Catholic Church, who happens as a matter of historical accident to be the Bishop of Rome, but I don’t think modern Catholics, or other modern Christians, have coherent ways to think and speak about human beings and the world we inhabit. We’ve lost contact with Creation and, hence, with the Creator.

Before going further, I’ll give three of my reasons for wanting to write some blog entries about this book and about the general subject of ecumenicism:

1. I was baptized in a Congregationalist church as an infant and later was re-baptized in a Campbell-Stone church in Atlanta in the mid-1980s. About five years later, I entered the Catholic Church. I wasn’t happy with the Catholic Church as a human institution and I’m still not happy with it as a human institution. I’m far from being a Catholic Triumphalist though I strongly believe that the Catholic Church is the core of the pilgrim Church on Earth. My reasons for becoming a Catholic are complex and form a novel rather than a sentence and I’ll not write the novel here. In any case, I wish to better understand and communicate my reasons for decisions made in my ongoing spiritual journey. I believe that God sent me on this journey for my own good but also to teach what I learn to others.

2. I respect the moral integrity of John Howard Yoder and many others from the peace churches. Professor Yoder in particular has shown the courage to witness to his belief in a radical and self-risking non-resistance. Though I support the concept of just-war, I think Yoder was right in When War is Unjust in claiming that just wars are not possible in our age.

3. I also have a great respect for those Christians who make a serious effort to study the Bible, including Mennonites and the members of the Campbell-Stone churches. All Christians, including Catholics, should work to develop the intelligence and honesty to read the Bible as a source of ever-fresh understandings of God’s own Creation and of the story of human salvation set within that Creation. At the same time, I think that Mennonites and many others too easily dismiss the revelations present in the Apostolic traditions which were developing even while Saul was still persecuting Christians and the Gospels were still being transmitted mouth to ear. I’ll also claim that Christians, as Christians, should be learning from God’s Creation. It’s not just a neutral setting, not the pagan world co-eternal with the God of Plato, but rather a very particular work which reflects some freely made decisions of the God of Jesus Christ. I would conjecture that Creation itself carries a lot of truths God wishes us to learn, not just that we might build better power-plants but that we might learn to think a little bit more like our Maker.

Since the number ’3′ is holy to Christians, I’ll also list three issues which we must honestly discuss if we’re to play our proper role in forming the Body of Christ.

Who is a Christian?

John Howard Yoder misstates the teaching of the Catholic Church in the essay reprinted as the ninth chapter of Radical Ecumenicity, The Ecumenical Movement and the Faithful Church:

Roman Catholics have no difficulty with such [ecumenical] questions, for they believe, consistently and in line with the doctrines of the church, that it is possible to be a Christian only within their own organization.

There are many Roman Catholics who think they’re the only true Christians, but that’s not the teaching of the Catholic Church. This is what the college of Catholic Bishops had to say when they gathered for the Vatican II Council:

The Church knows that she is joined in many ways to the baptized who are honored by the name of Christian, but who do not however profess the Catholic faith in its entirety or have not preserved unity or communion under the successor of Peter. [Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, Section 15 of Chapter II: "The People of God"]

The name of “Christian” honors all who have received a Trinitarian baptism — “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” using water. It is, in fact, a sacrilege for a Catholic to knowingly re-baptize someone who has received such a baptism. In cases of doubt, priests will perform what is called a conditional baptism. (“If you are not baptized, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”) So long as water — as little as a drop of spit if necessary — and the Trinitarian formula is used and the intent is proper, the baptism holds, even without faith on the part of the recipient though the graces of baptism won’t flow into the recipient until he has faith. In other words, baptism, like any Sacrament, is an objective act done for God and under His instructions and with His participation. It’s not primarily a human act of ritual convention though it necessarily becomes that as a secondary matter.

What is meant by “the Catholic faith in its entirety”?

There is the Catholic faith in its entirety which is professed by the members of the 20+ Catholic churches and also by the Orthodox churches and by a few independent Eastern churches. In the modern age, the Catholic Church has, in fact, re-established relationships, sometimes full communion, with some ancient churches in Asia and Africa. The entirety of the “Catholic faith” centers around the fullness of the Eucharistic Rite where a priesthood in the line of succession of the Apostles can consecrate the bread and wine produced by men so that it becomes the Body and Blood of Christ. Those priests are acting under the delegated authority of the one true Priest, Jesus Christ who gave us this commandment:

So, Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” [John 6:53(b)-54]

These are hard words? What would you expect from the incarnate Son of God? Did He come to confirm the common sense of that age or ours? Or did He come to teach us that truth is richer than any human body of common sense and we have to respond to God’s Word, to His words, and to His Creation, that we might move towards that greater truth? To move towards that greater truth is to move towards God and towards the world of the resurrected where we might share the life of God, true life.

After Jesus spoke such hard words, many of His followers went away, most certainly not because He claimed that He gave bread to symbolize His own flesh and wine to symbolize His own blood, but because He taught that His followers must eat His flesh and drink His blood. Those who wish to understand the importance of this issue can read John 6:52-71 and note the story about those who had trouble believing the words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood includes a discussion of Judas Iscariot. Christ Jesus spoke some hard words indeed.

The Catholic Church doesn’t teach that all those who refuse to accept these words as a true commandment are traitors as was Judas Iscariot. Yet, that refusal creates a difference that can’t be ignored by those churches which believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine. Even those baptized properly and honored with the name of Christian cannot share communion with Catholics or Orthodox or members of a few other Eastern Churches, churches which have maintained a priesthood which can celebrate a true Eucharistic Rite, because they would be eating unworthily. The word ‘unworthily’ in this context doesn’t refer to any moral problems but rather to a lack of faith that Jesus Christ is truly present in that consecrated bread and wine. You should have faith that Christ is truly present before consuming the Precious Body and drinking the Precious Blood of Christ. Or better, you should wish to have faith that Christ might provide that faith. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.

Why is unity so important and how can it be sought?

The Body of Christ is one and yet it is composed of many human individuals who remain fully individual just as the one God is three divine Persons, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. The Son is the link between God and man, being one of the three Persons of God in His divine nature and divine Person as He is the head of the Body of Christ in His human nature and divine Person. The Body of Christ is a multitude of individuals who are one in a real sense, as Father and Son and Holy Spirit remain individuals though united as truly one God.

We mortal men can’t simply unite ourselves to Christ the way we might join the YMCA. We can’t even realize the necessary degree of unity by gathering together for prayer services nor by consecrating ourselves to God by an effort of our human wills. The Almighty Himself has to act to bring this about and the churches which believe in the Real Presence teach that the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is the material agent of God’s act of forming us into the Body of Christ though it will be fully realized only in the world of the resurrected.

Moving On

Before we can understand promises of salvation, we need to have some shared way of talking about empirical reality that we might understand what is being saved and how it is that a mortal and finite creature might be able to even tolerate, let alone enjoy, some sort of life without end. Otherwise, whether a Christian talks to a fellow Christian from whom he’s separated by historical or doctrinal problems or whether a Christian tries to evangelize a nonbeliever, he’s merely babbling. Even if they don’t understand the intellectual issues, the children who drift away from Christianity and the nonbelievers who think us deluded, sense this hollowness and dishonesty in modern Christian claims to speak ultimate truths. We can’t even speak about men in a way that makes sense in light of modern biological and medical knowledge and yet claim to be able to speak of the nature and possible salvation of this disordered creature. We retain a pre-modern view of time and space and yet claim to be able to speak about eternity.

Any readers interested in my efforts to provide a shared Christian view of empirical reality can download a book I’ve made available for free for personal use: Four Kinds of Knowledge. My general viewpoint is a Thomistic existentialism updated to consider modern empirical knowledge about Creation. St. Thomas Aquinas, seemingly an outmoded Scholastic, has been rediscovered by some modern scientists because his way of thought deals so well with empirical reality. You can find one of the best explanations of Thomistic theories of human moral nature in How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the neuroscientist and philosopher Walter J. Freeman.

I’ll end with two interesting quotes from St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians. [This commentary and many other writings by St. Thomas are freely available from Ave Maria University. Google for the download site if you are interested.]

[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… [Page 17]

[T]he wisdom which attains to God through the things of this world is not the wisdom of this world [in the sense used by St. Paul in his dismissal of worldly wisdom] but the wisdom of God… [Page 51]

2008-2009 Christian Liturgical Year: The Feast of the Immaculate Conception

The Church has told us that the Blessed Virgin Mary was born sinless, though I think it better to say she was born in a state of grace. The major reason is that grace is of primary importance in our relationship to our Savior. A second reason, important also, is that we’re at a time in history when we don’t have a rational understanding of sin. Indeed, we have a compromised understanding of Creation since we’ve not yet made peace with modern empirical knowledge and many of our ways of speaking of God’s revealed truths are drawn from pre-modern understandings of living creatures and of stars, understandings now known to be wrong. In particular, there’s some serious divergence between the man who is the subject of Christian theological and philosophical discussions and the man who is being revealed by modern scientists, historians, and other explorers of the empirical realm. If our ideas of man, in fact, our ideas of life and of Creation as a whole, are being revised, what chance is there that our ideas of sin remain valid? What chance is there that our beliefs provide a coherent description of God’s Creation?

But sin was never the main issue, nor was sinlessness. Grace was the main issue. “Hail Mary, full of grace.” “Hello Mary, how is it that you already share the life of God?” To emphasize sin or sinlessness is to return to the forms of Law rejected by Christ and, in greater detail, by St. Paul. Mary’s sinlessness followed from her fullness of grace. The grace didn’t come as a result of the sinlessness.

Mary was born full of grace. From her conception, she was in a special communion with God, a communion at least similar to that enjoyed by the resurrected if not exactly the same. The obsession with sin and the possibility or impossibility of sinlessness in our mortal lives can often hide God and His Creation from us rather than bringing us closer to Him. We should instead realize that we are bound to obey not only the moral laws which arise from our biological natures but also the more demanding versions of those laws given to us by Moses and by Jesus of Nazareth. We should also realize that perfect obedience of these laws doesn’t save us; it merely brings us to a more perfect state of humanity. Some Medieval Scholastics discussed limbo as a way of dealing with the supposed problem of the nature of life after death for ungodly but virtuous men. Perhaps this is an important problem but one that is a side-issue when we discuss salvation.

We are saved when God is truly with us. We speak truly when we speak along with God. We do God’s work when we act with God.

God wasn’t hidden to Mary. From conception, she had a relationship to her Creator more intimate than that enjoyed by others after a life devoted to learning the craft of sainthood. Mary gave her flesh to the Son of God and suckled Him at her breasts. She responded properly and without hesitation to God’s direct guidance in matters small or large. The rest of us often feel that guidance, or at least suspect it, but have trouble responding properly, trouble even discerning if that’s really God nudging us to eliminate a bad habit or even to explore the possibility of a religious vocation. Those who move freely with the will of God don’t have conversations with God to discuss the details nor do they get their instructions through angels. Those who wait for God to speak directly to them will waste their opportunities to serve God and His children.

Mary was already aware of the presence of Her Creator and was responsive to Her Creator without reserving any part of herself. From the moment of her otherwise normal conception, she was in that state, already saved but aware of her Lord’s presence and waiting for His guidance.

And now we should contemplate the meaning of this part of the story which the Church tells as we travel with Her through the liturgical year:

Mary bears the Son of God in her holy womb and God prepared her for this maternal task by forming her from conception to be fully aware of His presence and responsive without hesitation to His will.

Moving With the Grain of Universe: Becoming One With the Body of Christ

In this life, reality comes to us through the senses in such a way that we are distanced from that which is outside of us, our possessions and our parents as well as God Himself. Though God isn’t truly outside of us, He seems that way to us and allows us to be separate from Him in this way as we grow up. As St. John of the Cross once said: God distances Himself from us in the manner of a wise and loving mother who steps away from her child as he is learning to walk, letting that child fall occasionally. In the case of God, there is no true distancing as there is with a human mother, but He fosters an illusion of separation while we learn a proper sort of independence.

Even with our relationships with Creation, those with our tools and those with our loved ones, there also is no true separation. As Michael Polanyi, surgeon and scientist and philosopher, pointed out in various writings, including Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, our tools become extensions of our bodies as our brains adjust to treat them as such. You can see this in the fluid movements of surgeon or carpenter or cook. That scalpel or file or spatula is an extension of the human arm and their brain is aware of its possibilities and its dimensions in a way very similar to the brain’s awareness of that arm’s possibilities and dimensions.

Those who wish for friendship with Jesus Christ have an analogical relationship to the Body of Christ though we mortal men be more like the tool than the arm or the brain. Yet, each and every human being who willingly belongs to Christ is a living and self-aware extension of the Body of Christ. The resurrected can be more perfectly a part of the Body of Christ even as they are more perfectly human beings.

The relationship of a friend of Christ to the Body of Christ isn’t a matter of an over-excited religious imagination but rather a very real relationship as is the relationship that great mathematicians and metaphysicians have to abstract — but real — domains of truths. As is necessary in such a case, I speak analogically but it’s not wholly analogical. There’s a relationship that we can’t speak of directly in words or grammatical structures available to us and which won’t exist until we stretch and try to describe greater truths which seem so out of focus no matter how we squint the eyes of our minds. (See Abstract Mathematics and the Real Presence for a closely related discussion.)

A modern Christian has a strong tendency to shout out news of his personal salvation while talking as if the reality of salvation is but a dream with no connection to reality. My salvation is real when that claim helps me feel better but salvation is a pious illusion when that claim threatens to get in the way of my effectiveness in this real world which has no seeming connection to any real Heaven. (See A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism for a short discussion of the schizophrenic nature of much modern thought.)

As I’ve stated before, pre-modern Christians had a view of Heaven, of the next life, which was consistent with beliefs about the cosmos, the earth and all that encircled it. On the other side of the moon’s orbit lay ethereal stuff, pure stuff and not the dirt and flesh and blood of the earth. Hell, the place of damnation, lay below the surface of the earth. When modern empirical knowledge took this relatively simple view of the cosmos-universe from us, we Christians simply etherealized Heaven, giving up our ability to speak of Heaven or the resurrection or salvation in concrete terms. Heaven and the resurrection and salvation have become dream-like and unreal to many in the modern world, including many children raised as Christians.

In any case, we Christians need to pull ourselves together, to learn to think of Creation — all of Creation — as a unity though having different phases. We need to develop words and concepts to help us think of Heaven in concrete terms that make sense as speculations of a Creation in which this universe is but a phase. When we do so, then we can begin to see that the Body of Christ was first conceived in this universe and still grows in this universe even as that Body has reached a mature stage in Heaven, that is, the world of the resurrected. That Body is mature in Heaven but not yet complete Membership remains open to all who wish to share true life, the life of God Himself.

What Happens to Unbaptized Infants?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know why so many seem to believe it to be unfair if unbaptized infants were not to go to Heaven and I can only guess it’s some sort of squeamishness. More to the point, what makes us so certain all infants will be resurrected? What makes us so certain that all human adults will be resurrected? We’re squeamish partly because we have human traditions that have added much to the few promises of Jesus Christ and we can no longer distinguish our traditions from the Lord’s promises.

Life is a gift and God has not granted life to all possible human beings. Look at the huge number of human ova and sperm that never produce a human being. Look at the large number of spontaneous miscarriages.

Life in Heaven is a gift also, that is, life without end as a companion to the Lord Jesus Christ. Is it a gift that could possibly be enjoyed by those who don’t love God with all their hearts?

Christian history speaks of periods when harsh views of salvation were united to a theological emphasis on God as a dispenser of justice. Now we have squeamish views of salvation united to blame-free views of mercy. The biases are too clear. We modern Christians prefer the therapist and the condescending preacher to the Biblical prophet.

We shouldn’t allow our squeamishness and our sentimental attachments to shape our ideas of God’s promises as Creator and Savior nor should we give free scope to our most righteous angers. If we’re to speculate on salvation, we should do so in a disciplined manner that keeps us from intertwining inextricably our speculations and our understandings of empirical knowledge with revealed truths.

Pray for the salvation of all those you love. If you can, pray for the salvation of all men. Don’t pretend to be able to know who God will save.