One Body in Christ

Ecumenical Snapshots

Cummings

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781498202169
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Many feel that work for Christian unity or ecumenism is not especially urgent or important in the complexities of our contemporary world. So many different issues demand the attention of committed Christians--for example, responding to global crises in which people are suffering, developing strong moral stands on a variety of moral problems and challenges, etc. Such issues must remain of major importance to Christians. However, Christians form the one Body of Christ. If that Body continues to remain divided and fragmented, lacking in unity, concord, and harmony, then Christian witness will be singularly diminished. This book attempts to demonstrate the importance of Christian unity/ecumenism by looking at important contributions of individual theologians and important texts/events, mainly of the twentieth century. The use of this book may help theologians and pastors urge forward the practice of ecumenism so that in God's time divided Christians may all be one.

1

John Wesley’s Letter to a Roman Catholic

If we cannot as yet think alike in all things, at least we may love alike. Herein we cannot possibly do amiss. For of one point none can doubt a moment: God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him.

John Wesley.1

Introduction

The Irish Jesuit theologian and ecumenist Michael Hurley was an “accredited visitor” to the World Methodist Conference in London in 1966. Over the years Hurley was to develop a great love for the Methodist tradition, but it was at this conference that it began. In the course of the proceedings he heard reference made by Stanley Worrall, an Irish delegate to the conference, to John Wesley’s “Letter to a Roman Catholic,” written from Dublin in 1749. Stanley Worrall, at the time living and working in Belfast in Northern Ireland, was no naïve ecumenist. Worrall wrote a propos of this conference in 1966: “The love for Rome is not so great everywhere as it appears to be in this chamber. I do not share the prejudice, but it exists in many places in the world and among many of our own people, who still believe that the Roman Catholic Church is not part of the Christian body, but is an insidious conspiracy of the devil.”2

Returning home after this experience, Hurley sought out a copy of Wesley’s letter to which reference had been made by Worrall. He published a new edition of the letter accompanied by his own introduction. As a result of editing John Wesley’s letter, Hurley was appointed to the World Methodist Council/Roman Catholic Church Joint Commission. Hurley writes of his experience: “Membership of the Commission broadened our horizons not only geographically but also spiritually. One thing became immediately obvious: neither side was a monolith.”3

Hurley’s reason for writing an introduction to John Wesley’s letter was to provide readers who were not Methodists with some basic information about Wesley and some background to the letter. Immediately, Hurley recognized the differences between John Wesley himself and today’s Methodists. “They differ from him chiefly because, whereas he was and always remained a practicing member of the Church of England—an Anglican as we would say—they are not. Unlike him they are members of a distinct and separate world-wide communion in one or other of its many independent Churches with their own system of Church order and government, their own ordained clergy to administer the sacraments, their own more or less different outlook in matters of worship and doctrine.”4 Nonetheless, Hurley quite rightly points out that not only are contemporary Methodists attached historically and devotionally to John Wesley, but also they recognize as important Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament as well as the first four volumes of his Sermons. Hurley goes on to make a singularly important point. In view of the fact that Wesley wished to establish a religious society within the church, and not something alongside the church or outside the church in some fashion, his religious society bears a strong family resemblance to the religious orders within the Catholic Church—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits, etc. The evangelizing projects of these societies within the church were intended to make the church at large better what it was called to be. And so with John Wesley. He set out to make the church of his time better what it was called to be. He did not wish to be ecclesiologically a separatist. His movement was to be a reforming, missionary, and revivalist movement within the church. “Wesley certainly provided a reforming and missionary agency by means of which a deep and widespread religious revival took place in Great Britain and Ireland, and in America such a rapid expansion of Christianity as ‘had not been equaled in Christendom since the Apostolic Era.’”5 Behind Wesley’s Methodism lay a high spirituality with an evangelical simplicity. Central to this high spirituality and to Wesley’s revivalism was a strong sacramental and eucharistic focus. His desire was that his disciples attend their own Anglican parish churches to celebrate the Eucharist.6

Sometimes Wesley is judged to be indifferent to doctrine and theology. The great American Methodist theologian Albert Outler regarded this judgment as “mildly outrageous.”7 Something of that judgment has stuck, however, and it may have to do with Wesley’s time. He was more interested in what today might be called “spirituality” rather than in the so many forms of controversial theology that were current. Wesley was far from indifferent to orthodox theology and Christianity, but he saw these as serving holiness of life.

John Wesley’s Letter to a Roman Catholic

The Letter to a Roman Catholic was written from Dublin, Ireland on July 18, 1749. Wesley had arrived in Ireland in April of that year and had been busy evangelizing and preaching throughout the country. He arrived in Dublin in July and spent two weeks both preaching and writing. He writes well of the Irish, “For natural sweetness of temper, for courtesy and hospitality, I have never seen any people like the Irish,” but he also had at times a decidedly negative and hostile attitude to Irish Catholics: “I was surprised to find how little the Irish Papists are changed in a hundred years. Most of them retain the same bitterness, yea, and thirst for blood, as ever, and would as freely now cut the throats of all the Protestants as they did in the last century.”8 Undoubtedly, such sentiments reflect the hostile response he encountered in various parts of the country, especially in Cork, but it is important to recognize also that the times were different and the hostility may not have been particularly religious as much as it was political. In respect of the violence to which Wesley refers Michael Hurley reminds us: “We must remember that cruelty and brutality were common in the everyday life of this period and in particular that violence was a general feature of the age, its perpetrators as well as its victims belonging to no one class or creed.”9

While Hurley seems right in regarding Wesley’s Letter as an open letter and not addressed to any one particular individual, he also surmises that it may have been influenced by a booklet published in 1749 by George Berkeley, Anglican Bishop of Cloyne and a philosopher. Berkeley’s booklet had three editions and was entitled A Word to the Wise: Or, An Exhortation by a Member of the Established Church to the Roman Catholic Clergy of Ireland. The booklet begins with the following words, words reminiscent of the irenic attitude of Wesley in his Letter: “Be not startled, Reverend Sirs, to find yourselves addressed by one of a different Communion. We are indeed (to our shame be it spoken) more inclined to hate for those articles wherein we differ, than to love one another for those wherein we agree. But, if we cannot extinguish, let us at least suspend our animosities, and, forgetting our religious feuds, consider ourselves in the amiable light of countrymen and neighbors. . . . Why, then, should we not conspire in one and the same design—to promote the common good of our country.”10 It now appears to be the case that Berkeley’s book was not published until October 1749, months after Wesley’s Letter.11 There is, therefore, no possible influence of Berkeley on Wesley in this regard. But what is surely interesting, perhaps even more interesting, is the irenic tone of both texts. George Berkeley and John Wesley were not only not pouring vitriol on Irish Roman Catholics, but they were also looking to their good, both temporal and spiritual.

Now we come to the letter itself. Wesley begins by acknowledging the hurt and anger on both sides, Catholic and Protestant. “We are on both sides less willing to help one another, and more ready to hurt each other. Hence brotherly love is utterly destroyed; and each side, looking on the other as monsters, gives way to anger, hatred, malice, to every unkind affection, which have frequently broke ou...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: John Wesley’s Letter to a Roman Catholic
• Chapter 2: Bishop Lesslie Newbigin’s The Household of God
• Chapter 3: Vatican II, Decree on Ecumenism
• Chapter 4: Ecumenical Pioneer, Michael Hurley, SJ (1923–2011)
• Chapter 5: John Macquarrie, Church, and Ecumenism
• Chapter 6: Avery Dulles, SJ, Models of the Church
• Chapter 7: Frances M. Young on Theology, Mary, and Prayer
• Chapter 8: Eucharist, Ecumenism, and George Hunsinger
• Conclusion
• Bibliography