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forms of exploitation which accompanied the expansion of the modem West to the whole world - are still very much with us.

The emerging third trend in the life of the WCC will certainly continue to face these three main concerns as parts of a global and universal challenge to the common future of the whole created world and its habitants, both human and non-human.

The church is present within the emerging post-modern world as a sign and a witness to the hope of a common future, which anticipates the new heaven and the new earth where justice will reign.

The programme for justice, peace and integrity of creation can perhaps be seen as a harbinger of this third trend in the life of the WCC.

Spears into Pruning Hooks

J . K . S . Reid

The title of my paper is a fitting summary of the immense achievement by the WCC during its forty years since Amsterdam. One general mood or attitude has been replaced by another. H. Kung’ speaks of “the polemic orientation of dogma”. The phrase designates a historical fact. The theological principles of the Reformation, for example, were formulated with manifest reference to positions occupied by the Roman Church, and the theological formulae were hammered out on the anvil of hostility towards that unreformed body. The same must be said of much that transpired at the Council of Trent. While overtly concerned to underline, or at least restate, the past declarations and present practices of the Roman Catholic Church, the Council formulated its agenda and passed uctu with clear and explicit reference to the Protestant revolution: e.g., the decree of Session VI on Justification and Merit struck at the root of the Reformation understanding of the faith. To respond to a real situation and to deploy statements in view of it is in neither case erroneous. Doctrine is not a voluntary, and so in the last resort redundant, activity. Its chief motive (non sponfe sed nctu) is obligatory response to a given situation that is either false or new. The tragic element in the situation is the perpetuation of the mood beyond a particular time of explicit avowals, inevitably hostile in character, into future relationships; and even, as feelings cool, their replacement by indifference, suspicion, and a persisting plain ignorance. One side of the divide does not know what the other is saying and doing and meaning. Long after the historical causes of a church-divisive situation have been forgotten, this is the climate that persists.

The ecclesiastical age thus characterized is passing. Robert Runcie2 aptly designates the past as an “ice-age’’ which is breaking up. “In the theological ice-age each church had its cherished verbal formulas which it sought to impose on other churches. This

’ Structures of the Church, New York, Nelson & Sons, 1964, p.392. ’Their Lord and Ours, London, SPCK, 1982, p.ix.

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was understandable, since truth does not change. But recently we have become acutely aware that our description of truth must always be subject to scrutiny.. . Spring comes to the frozen wastes of ecclesiastical confrontation.” To this may be added the testimony of another Anglican. H. Montefiore’ declares that today we stand in the aftermath of a “miracle of convergence”. This miracle Montefiore attributes to Vatican 11’s Decree on Ecumenism, “that produced a sea-change”. But of course both the event and the decrees of Vatican I1 are influenced and based on the atmosphere generated by the ecumenical movement.

Perhaps the most obvious fruit of this new springtime is the emergence of dialogue. It is by this means chiefly that the baleful consequence of alienation between the churches and the persistence of ignorance on the part of one church of other churches are being overcome. The web of dialogue carried on at all levels and in multiple permutations can surely leave no one who is at all interested in ecumenism unin- volved. The Centro Pro Unione, the Franciscan ecumenical agency in Rome, has recently (January 1988) issued a “third supplement” to A Bibliography of Znter-church and Znter-confessional Theological Dialogues. It is a 47-page double-columned document listing dialogic activity conducted between 18 named confessional families and churches.

Innumerable other consequences of the new mood could be cited. Here are one or two examples. P. Kelly4 observes that “on various points some must be right and some wrong, when the confrontation is clearly defined and the contradication flat. But mostly the ultimate question is not who is right and who wrong ... The present controversies ..., lacking the old animosity and the desire to score points ... have already led to a deeper knowledge of Christianity” and afortiori of other churches. He cites as signal example of increasing theological rapprochement between churches the now not-quite-so-recent The Common Catechism.

Similarly A. Dulles in his Catholicity of the Church6 discerns the concept of complementarity taking its place alongside, or even displacing, the quite different notion of contrariety.

But the most significant change the new spring has sponsored is the revelation (it is not less than that) that churches are after all not enemies, not even rivals, but rather allies bound together in a common enterprise to establish the truth and to formulate it appropriately. So Runcie: “Spring comes to the frozen wastes of ecclesiastical confrontation as we look, in company with fellow Christians (my emphasis), at the divine action and the events which give rise to our faith and seek to give their significance full value in terms of our contemporary language.” Such an insight offers limitless glimpses of the new mood. The churches are then so placed that they can effectively borrow from one another, view the heritage offered by another church as an enrichment of the whole fellowship of churches, and realize that individual churches have so mined the seas of truth that all may benefit. But above all it endorses the fundamental evangelical truth that we all, individuals and churches alike, are subject to and beneficiaries of the abounding grace of God in Christ.

’So Near and Yet so Far, 1986, p.4. 4Searching for Truth, London, Collins, 1978, p.152. ’By J. Feiner and L. Vischer, London, Search Press, 1975, translated from the German of 1973. 6See Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 41, p.129.

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Runcie notes various factors in the “break-up of the theological ice-age”. First he notes “the historically conditioned character of our descriptions of the truth”. This is one of the important and significant factors at work in present-day theology, and so of course also in ecumenical theology. In Roman Catholic thought, the idea of dogmatics as timeless, unalterable, irreversible is, I will not say being replaced, but certainly being supplemented by a different understanding. Since God is ultimately mysteiy, what we can think or say about God can be only provisional and partial. The continuum of faith over the years is invested with verbal statements that are partial, time-conditioned, and, in a literal sense, temporal. Each and every statement is a “concretization” (K. Rahner), a “formulation” (H. Kiing), a “historically conditioned account” (E. Schillebeeckx). And from another province, B. Hebblethwaite’ declares that “Jesus the Jew is the human face of God”, even though, as A. Farrer says, he is not other than a “Galilean carpenter turned free-lance rabbi”. If the incarnation itself is thus limited, prescribed, and time-conditioned, how is it possible to pretend that the statements and formula designed for its proclamation can be other than circumscribed by the same conditions?

The consequences of this concept are multiple and are only gradually being worked out. In no area are they more radical and pervasive than in ecumenical relationships. What lies on the table before all churches are (quoting Rahner) “different historical realizations of the common faith”. The situation demands penetrating scrutiny and radical examination of these various realizations, regardless of the church, body or community in which they originate. One church accustomed to its own formulations may then begin to appreciate that another church having a different “realization” may be offering an insight that is welcome and enriching, rather than alien and repugnant. Churches become allies instead of foes.

Under this influence Rahner himself feels obliged to follow another line of enquiry. What, he asks, is the “indispensable, indisposable, necessary core”8 round which different “concretizations” assemble? The enquiry is linked up with another important interest. Rahner tries to “listen to the people”, and in so doing detects a discrepancy between the full formal doctrine of the church and “the de facto catechism by which believers live today” - which “is far from containing everything presented as the content of the faith”. Hence he embarked on the attempt to work out a “basic course in the faith”.g Here Vatican 11’s “hierarchy of truths” finds its place. It need hardly be said that this search for “the essential and indispensable” in the Christian faith, though it is a helpful clarification of the situation, offers no easy solution: wide differences emerge as the churches together explore what is rightly to be included in such a summary. But recognition of such a core, despite divergences about its contents, is a notable unifying factor.

After some experience in ecumenical affairs, I venture to outline certain guiding principles. a) Churches should abjure the “enemy syndrome”. Other denominations are not

enemies, but common members of the single body of Christ, having diverse understandings of how best to advance the kingdom.

’“The Jewishness of Jesus”. Scottish Journal of Theolonv, Vol. 41, p.9. -_ ‘See Vorgrimler, p.131.

See Grundkurs des Glaubens, 1976, in English, Foundarions of Christian Faith, London, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1978.

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b) Truth is to be understood as both aim and impetus in all thought and acts. Prejudice is to be resolutely discarded.

c) The different understandings of truth entertained by the different churches, together with the verbal expressions in which they are conveyed, are to be examined dispassionately. The aim is to conserve the divine insights historically inparted by the Holy Spirit to the churches in separation, for the enrichment of all churches.

d) It is not necessary to have consensus about everything. Of course differences must be noted. But differences differ. Some must be resolved before union is possible. Others can be left for solution in a church already united. Yet others are not to be resolved at all, but may be left concomitantly existing side by side.

e) what the churches must seek is a sufficient basic agreement. As J.M.R. Tillard says: “not less than is required, not more than is sufficient” (id quod requiritur el suficit). On this basis churches can take steps to make visible their unity, and to confront other contentious issues as they arise.

f ) Churches should, in anticipation of the eventual united church, accept the greatest degree of diversity consonant with unity of faith. As Rahner has said, “differences that are not contradictory are prima facie capable of accommodation within the united church”. And this Y. Congar corroborates: “As great diversity is to be permitted as full communion can admit.”

g) It is always to be remembered that the area of the permissible (following from point f above) is much wider than the mandatory. In other words, what is permissible may be practised in one sector of the church while other sectors may not care, and certainly will not be obliged, to adopt it.

The Imperative of Justice: the Rise of Contextual Theologies

Lois M. Wilson

The two most significant trends in Christidecumenical history since Amsterdam for me have been: 1) the attempt to make visible, in programmes and church structures, the gospel

2) the contextual theology being articulated by the victims of oppression, who are imperative of justice;

doing theology out of their particular context of suffering and struggle.

The gospel imperative of justice “The World Council’s concern for the creation of a truly responsible society and for

justice and peace in the realm of international and inter-racial relations is ... not a product of the 1960s or 1970s, but belongs to its heritage from the period of the founders.” So claims Visser ’t Hooft in his book The Genesis and Formation of the

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