Dialogue of Love

Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic Ecumenist

Echeverria

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781498271493
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The Dialogue of Love is written from the perspective of an evangelical Catholic Ecumenist. Raised Catholic, but having responded to the Gospel at L'Abri Fellowship in 1970, Eduardo J. Echeverria's journey took the paths of Reformed and then Anglo-Catholic Christianity on his way back to full communion with the Catholic Church in 1992. Engaging in ecumenical conversation as a committed Roman Catholic whose views have been shaped by, among others, Romano Guardini, John Paul II, and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), the author discusses in an articulate, bracing, and constructive manner, the positions of representative thinkers in the Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition of Reformed Christianity: Herman Bavinck, G. C. Berkouwer, and Herman Dooyeweerd. Fundamental issues of ecclesiology, meaning and truth, sacramental theology, the relation between the Church and the world, nature and grace, and issues on the relation of faith and reason are examined with the aim of achieving clarification and understanding. Readers will experience ecumenical Dialogue... not simply [as] an exchange of ideas, but also as an 'exchange of gifts', indeed, a dialogue of love (John Paul II).

1

The Church in the Gospel

“Homesickness for the una sancta [ecclesia]” is genuine and legitimate only insofar as it is a disquietude at the fact that we have lost and forgotten Christ, and with Him have lost the unity of the Church.”1

To believe in Christ means to desire unity; to desire unity means to desire the Church; to desire the Church means to desire the communion of grace which corresponds to the Father’s plan from all eternity. Such is the meaning of Christ’s prayer: “that they may all be one.”2

Visible Christian Unity, Evangelism, and Ecumenism

In the recent past, the Southern Baptist Convention put the brakes on official ecumenical talks with the Catholic Church. Rev. R. Philip Roberts, the current president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Kansas City, Missouri, was quoted as saying, “We’re not ecumenists. We’re evangelicals committed to sharing the Gospel.”3 The anti-ecumenical sentiment expressed in this statement is not unique to Southern Baptists like Roberts; one can find it expressed historically and in recent times by all sorts of Christians, Protestant, and Catholic alike. Indeed, Pope Pius XI’s 1928 encyclical Mortalium Animos (“On Religious Unity”) dismisses ecumenical initiatives in the early twentieth century because they fostered, he argued, a dangerous indifferentism and confusion about the faith.4 As Yves Congar remarks, “it might have been feared that an interest in Protestant or Orthodox thought and life could lead to disaffection with regard to the teaching and life of the Church, for dogmatic indifferentism is often the forecourt of unbelief, or at least tepidity.”5 Some twenty years later, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, known then by the name of the Holy Office, issued an Instruction “On the ‘Ecumenical Movement’, naming as one of the reasons for the Church’s early dismissal of the ecumenical movement the following: “that the purity of Catholic doctrine be impaired, or its genuine and certain meaning be obscured. . . . Or, what is worse, that in matters of dogma even the Catholic Church has not yet attained the fullness of Christ, but can still be perfected from outside.”6 This Instruction does say to those who return to the Church that “they will lose nothing of that good which by the grace of God has hitherto been implanted in them, but rather that it will be supplemented and completed by their return.”7 Yet, it cautions Catholics engaged in ecumenical initiatives against giving the impression to those “returning to the Church [that] they are bringing to it something substantial which it has hitherto lacked.”8 Absent here is any sense of reciprocity, a requirement for ecumenical dialogue, as later popes, such as Paul VI and John Paul II, were to say, not to mention the idea that such dialogue “is always an ‘exchange of gifts’, indeed, a ‘dialogue of love’” (UUS, nos. 28, 47). Nevertheless, when I read these words of Roberts, I immediately thought that he was making a division where none should exist—between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and authentic ecumenism. “Christ calls all His disciples to unity” (John 17:20–23), the late John Paul II writes in UUS. Furthermore, behind this false division is a fundamental failure to recognize the ecclesial dimensions of the Christian faith and life, ruling out that the Church is an integral part of the gospel, or better put, that the Church belongs to the gospel.9

In the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus himself prayed to his Father, at the hour of his passion, “that all of them may be one” (17:21). What is the nature of this unity? The Church, which is Christ’s body, is neither a collection of individuals, nor a sociological subject, for example, a voluntary association of like-minded individuals sharing a belief in Christ and who by virtue of human agreement wants to give corporate expression to that belief. Hence, the unity of Christ’s disciples is not that of a mere gathering of people “who first became believers apart from the church and subsequently united themselves.”10 Rather, the Church is the divinely created communion of persons, the reborn (i.e., new) humanity in Christ, who is the New Adam, the religious root of the human race, profoundly described by the Apostle Paul as the “Body of Christ” (in Ephesians and Colossians), with her Head and individual members. The Church is then the religious bond of unity of the reborn human race sharing in the life of God. As the former Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, puts it, “For the believer . . . the Church is . . . a truly new subject called into being by the Word and in the Holy Spirit; and precisely for that reason, the Church herself overcomes the seemingly insurmountable confines of human subjectivity by putting man in contact with the ground of reality which is prior to him.”11 The ground of reality that is prior to man is Trinitarian communion, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the “faithful are one because, in the Spirit, they are in communion with the Son and, in him, share in his communion with the Father.” In other words, adds John Paul II, “For the Catholic Church, then, the communion of Christians is none other than the manifestation in them of the grace by which God makes them sharers in his own communion, which is his eternal life” (UUS, no. 9).

Furthermore, the Church’s unity is not simply a goal or ideal to be sought, or a mere spiritual or invisible unity, contrasted, as Karl Barth put it, with “the multiplicity of the churches as a necessary mark of the visible and empirical.” “This entire distinction,” adds Barth, “is foreign to the New Testament . . . the Church of Jesus Christ is but one.”12 The fundamental unity of the Church is a gift of God’s grace: the grace of communion with the Father through Christ and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Father Neuhaus understands this well: “Our purpose is not to create a unity among Christians that does not already exist. Indeed, we cannot create Christian unity at all. Unity is God’s gift, not our creation. . . . In the Catholic view, the problem posed by the division between Catholics and Evangelicals is not that we are not united. The problem, indeed the scandal, is that we are united but live as though we are not.”13 The Protestant Reformer John Calvin also understood this point well when he wrote, “there could not be two or three churches without Christ himself being torn apart, and that is impossible.”14 In other words, the Church’s unity is a gift of God—visible, historical, temporal, institutional, in short, bodily—belonging to the Church herself, and “this gift needs to be received and developed ever more profoundly.”15 Thus, unity is both a gift and a task.16 Furthermore, this unity is not a purely spiritual, invisible reality, as if Christ’s Church exists nowhere on earth, but rather is concretely embodied. Nor is Christ’s Church a confederation of Christian communities, which taken together form the one Church of Christ. On the contrary, as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger then put it, “The Church of Christ is not something intangible, hidden under the variety of human constructions.” Alternatively, says Barth, the multiplicity of the churches cannot be explained “as an unfolding of the wealth of that grace which is given to mankind in Jesus Christ, divinely purposed and therefore normal . . . as branches of the one and the self-same tree.” Rather, the Church’s unity has a recognizable delineation, truly existing as a bodily Church: “She is one in [the confession of] faith, one in the celebration of the sacraments, one in apostolic succession, and one in ecclesial governance.”17 This unity is a present reality bestowed by the Holy Spirit on Christ’s body, and Christ cannot be divided. “There is one body and one Spirit,” St. Paul states in his Letter to the Ephesians, “just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:4–7). Given the God-given unity of the Church—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Spirit, we can easily understand why Herman Bavinck also says that schisms and discord among Christians “is a sin against God, in conflict with Christ’s [high-priestly] prayer [for unity], and caused by the darkness of our minds and the lovelessness of our hearts.”18

In this connection, Catholic theologian Bruce Marshall remarks, “In baptism the Holy Spirit makes us members of the Church by joining us in love to Christ and, equally, to one another. Paul does not implore the Ephesians to seek by the Spirit’s power a unity they presently lack, but to ‘maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace’ (Eph 4:3), the very bond that holds together the one body of Christ.”19 In short, just as there is only one God and one Lord, so there is also one Church, one ark, one temple, one house of God, which is the only Bride of Christ, the single Body of Christ.

Moreover, as the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium and the Decree Unitatis Redintegratio, as well as the more recent UUS (1995) and Dominus Iesus (2000), fundamentally affirm, the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church.20 The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council teaches the historical continuity between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church. The Church of Jesus Christ exists bodily. Christ himself has willed the Church’s existence; and the Holy Spirit has continually renewed her since Pentecost, ecclesia semper reformanda, preserving her in her essential identity, which belongs to the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Church in the Gospel
• Chapter 2: The One Church of Jesus Christ
• Chapter 3: The Church and the World
• Chapter 4: “The Spirit of Truth”
• Chapter 5: The God of Philosophy and of the Holy Scriptures
• Afterword
• Selected Bibliography