Fr Ronald Rolheiser
I teach Spirituality at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. Fifteen years ago, we began offering a PhD in Spirituality. In the fifteen years since we have had doctoral students from many different Christian denominations – Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals, Episcopalians/Anglicans, and Roman Catholics. During those fifteen years we have not had a single conversion of someone from one denomination to another. Rather, every student has left here with a deeper commitment to his or her own denomination and a deeper understanding of every other Christian denomination. We take a healthy pride in that. That’s one of the aims of our program.
Suspicion
Since the Protestant Reformation, Christians have lived through five hundred years of misunderstanding and mutual suspicion. Each of us tended to work from the assumption that we belonged to the one true (or at least the purest) expression of Christianity and we looked for conversions, namely, having someone leave his or her denomination and join ours. Happily, things are changing, even while the old claims of being the one true expression of Christianity and the old defensiveness regarding denominational boundaries are still being clung to by many. A new vision is taking hold and we are beginning to see each other in a different light.
We are beginning to realise that the path to unity does not lie in saying, ‘You are wrong, and we are right’, even as we remain conscious of the issues that separate us. Rather we are looking at what we share in common as Christians and human beings and are seeing that what we share in common dwarfs what separates us.
What do we share in common that dwarfs any dogma, ecclesiology, authority structure, or historical misunderstanding that separates us?
We are to judge another religion or another Christian denomination not by its aberrations or its worst expressions, but by its best expressions, by its saints”
We share this in common: one beginning, one nature, one earth, one sky, one law of gravity, one fragility, one earthly mortality, one desire, one aim, one destiny, one road, one God, one Jesus, one Christ, one Holy Spirit. And that brings with it both an invitation and an imperative: love your own church and love your neighbour’s church as well.
Protest
But, one might protest, what about all that’s wrong in my neighbour’s church? Admittedly that’s an issue. However, admittedly, there are also things wrong in our own church, no matter our denomination. Moreover, as the renowned scholar of religion Huston Smith, affirms, we are to judge another religion or another Christian denomination not by its aberrations or its worst expressions, but by its best expressions, by its saints.
If this is true, then all of us can look to other churches, their saints, and their particular riches to enrich our own discipleship in Christ. In an insightful new book To Love Your Neighbor’s Church as Your Own, Peter Halldorf, a Swedish/Evangelical/Orthodox Christian, asks the question: “What does it mean to love my neighbor’s church as well as my own? Can a Pentecostal see a Roman Catholic as someone who may enrich his or her own faith experience? Can the Roman Catholic see a Pentecostal in this same light?”
We are all still journeying, hopefully in all sincerity of heart, toward the full truth, toward a fuller discipleship, and toward giving a fuller expression to the Body of Christ on this earth”
If we are honest, we need to admit that we have much to learn from each other. Thus, we should no longer distance ourselves from each other and more and more begin to speak of ‘convergence’ rather than ‘converting’. The Spirit is inviting us to come together in respect and in a shared humility, without attitudes of suspicion or triumphalism. In that place, mistrust can be overcome.
How can we come together in that way? Already a generation ago, the renowned theologian, Avery Dulles suggested that the path to ecumenism is not by way of conversion. Unity among Christian churches is not going to happen by all the various denominations converting and joining one existing Christian denomination. That, Dulles submits, is not just unrealistic, it is not the ideal because no one Christian denomination possesses the full truth. Rather we are all still journeying, hopefully in all sincerity of heart, toward the full truth, toward a fuller discipleship, and toward giving a fuller expression to the Body of Christ on this earth. All of us are still journeying toward that.
Ecumenism
Hence, the path to ecumenism, to oneness as a Christian church, to oneness at a Eucharistic table, lies in each of us, each denomination, converting more from within, in growing more faithful within our own discipleship, in giving a truer expression to the Body of Christ, so that as each of us grows more faithful to Christ we will find ourselves progressively coming together, converging, growing more and more together into one family.
Kenneth Cragg once suggested something similar vis-à-vis the question of interfaith among world religions. After working as a Christian missionary among the Muslims, he suggested that “it will take all religions of the world to give full expression to the whole Christ.”
It’s time to move beyond five hundred years of misunderstanding and embrace each other again as fellow pilgrims, struggling together on a common journey.