Abstract
These two ambitious volumes, arising out of a research program led by the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose, will constitute half of the eventual series. The vision of the project, as laid out by its director Alberto Melloni in the Introduction to the first volume, is to chart a new appraisal of the ecumenical movement from a contemporary vantage point. Critically, this is not conceived of primarily as a history of a movement (that is, a focus on structures and bodies) nor of ecumenical theology, but as a history of the desire for Christian unity.
M. sets the project against the backdrop of three prior eras of ecumenical appraisal. The first he calls “The Victorious Historiography of the Prophets” (4), an era in which those who had shepherded the early movement through Edinburgh to the founding of the World Council of Churches described the aims and successes of their movement. Ruth Rouse and Stephen Charles Neill’s classic History of the Ecumenical Movement stands as the giant of this era. The second he names as a move to a more observational history with an emphasis on a scholarly historiography. Here he highlights Étienne Fouilloux’s Les catholiques et l’unité chrétienne du XIXéme au XXéme siècle. Finally, he defines a third era, once again belonging to those participating in the ecumenical movement, who “lived a different ecumenical professionalism, one shaped by the time of dialogues—a summit as well as an abyss in the passion for unity” (7). He does not provide a primary example, but instead points to many works that wrestle with the late twentieth-century movement as both a locus of major achievements and displaying a slowed momentum, the so-called “ecumenical winter.”
This new series, then, seeks to inaugurate a new era of ecumenical study, concentrating on the ecumenical desire, a “‘thing’ (res oecumenica) [that] exists, that . . . changes, and that . . . can be traced through” recent history (11). This framing primarily focuses on the people and groups that evidenced the desire for one unified church, with a consideration of their actions as responding to this desire which they often experienced as a gift of the Holy Spirit. As a contemporary work written in a post-modern world, this study considers church unity as neither a tool for proclamation (as Edinburgh did) nor as the steady stream of progress (as in the post-conciliar era). Instead, it reckons with the history of failure and retreat in the ecumenical movement, as well as the places where a desire for unity was turned against difference, as in modern fascist attempts to coopt the churches of Christ.
The first volume considers the early movements prior to the Second Vatican Council. It is primarily focused on Europe (especially Roman, German, French, and British sources), with some chapters attending to North and Latin American contributions, and one on twentieth-century Charismatic developments in Congo. There is also one chapter attending to the World Parliament of Religions and several on Slavic and Orthodox engagements with unity. The chapters are organized around three themes: “Preamble: Long Term Issues,” which considers historiographical and theological questions; “Prehistory: The Challenges of Modernity,” looking at precursors primarily in the nineteenth century; and “Beginnings: Movements Become a Movement.”
The second volume begins in the interwar period and concludes by considering early twenty-first-century achievements. It has two major sections, conceived of as “Preparation for the Unforeseen” and “Tempus Visitationis: An Ecumenical Spring.” Presumably this means that the third volume will consider the oft-diagnosed “ecumenical winter” of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a period that overlaps with this volume temporally, just as this volume overlaps in time with the first.
The choice to construct the project thematically and around the desire for unity, rather than as a purely sequential history of a movement, means that there is consistent overlap and a considerable amount of repetition. At times in reading these volumes, this reader wished that editors could have streamlined the coverage of major figures with cross references, rather than having multiple biographical introductions to the same figures, often in succeeding chapters. Realistically however, most readers will engage only with specific chapters rather than reading entire volumes, so this difficulty may be a structural necessity.
These volumes promise to be important works for both research and teaching, and for broadening the vision of ecumenical scholars. One of the limitations of contemporary ecumenical theology is the inability to resolve the tension between the need for dialogue to proceed in bilateral settings, where actual disagreements and relationships reside, and the need to contextualize these conversations within the always multilateral setting of world Christianity. It is relatively easy to become a specialist in a particular dialogue relationship—to consider, for example, Lutheran-Catholic relationships, differences, and achievements. But no scholar can be an expert on the vast expanse of ecumenical relationships writ large. Books like this, specifically as a collaborative project, have the potential to remind readers of the breadth of that scope, open up windows into other relationships and questions, and help them contextualize their specific projects within the broader sweep of Christian agreement and disagreement.
There are, of course, outsized players that consume much of the ecumenical imagination, and those players are highly represented in these texts. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches stand in a unique place within ecumenical circles as both active ecumenical participants and yet communities who withhold more recognition from other Christians than do other consistent participants, through their practices of closed communion, non-recognition of clergy, and lower likelihood of recognizing ecclesial status in others. In part, their self-presentation as churches who set the standard of what it means to be church must be dealt with ecumenically, and this often shifts engagement towards at least a passive acceptance of their role in this judgement. This allows Orthodox and Catholic voices to set the terms of ecumenical dialogue beyond their own relationships, and to act on a presumption of an “ecumenism of return” that the Catholic Church has formally foresworn but still acts as if it has not. Of course, sheer numbers also contribute to this reality, as does the habit of collapsing the widely divergent descendants of the sixteenth-century reformations into a unitary category “Protestant” which is then stood up in parallel to the more cohesive “Catholic” and “Orthodox” categories.
In these volumes, that historical pattern shows itself with a higher percentage of attention being offered to Catholic ecumenical engagements. Especially in these periods, the question of whether Catholics would be allowed to participate in the movement and the eventual turning of the Church’s position on this question at the Second Vatican Council take center stage.
The volumes do include some excellent chapters on less-studied ecumenical voices, including a chapter on the Kimbanguist Charismatic movement in Congo beginning in the 1920s, authored by Silvia Cristofori. There are several chapters on peace and transnational movements, and a chapter by R. Simangaliso Kumalo and Kisitu Davies about the ecumenical developments in Africa during and in the wake of European colonization.
A chapter in the second volume, “Historians and Ecumenism: Western Christianity between Catholic Revisions and Inter-Denominational Efforts,” adds significantly to naming these difficulties in ecumenical engagement by tracing first the history of Catholic engagements with Martin Luther and then 20th-century attempts to do Christian history ecumenically in the Ökumenische Kirchengeschichte (in which Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox historians co-wrote a church history, noting places of disagreement). 1 In this chapter, Matteo Al Kalak notes that history as a discipline cannot escape theological disagreement, much less “the juridical and hierarchical apparatuses of the churches” (817). Nor are these difficulties merely theological; they remain cultural, both in terms of particular church cultures of engagement (often mistaken for theological commitments) or merely the engagements of Christianities which, claiming to be universal, are “often too Eurocentric, legalistic, and Westernized” (817).
The scope of this project is truly impressive, and the breadth of its authors matches the patterns of the ecumenical project as a whole. I am hopeful that in the following volumes there will be increased attention to non-Euroamerican ecumenical engagement, matching the growing participation and reception of other authors and dialogue partners in contemporary ecumenism. The size and cost of the volumes will lower the chances that it will be as widely read as it deserves to be, but it should certainly be a standard reference work included in every academic library, and a number of chapters will become regular sources in my classroom.