Spirals Not Cycles: Towards an Analytic Approach to the Sources and Stages of Ecumenism

Abstract

Ecumenism is the result of five interrelated but distinct sources: Christianity's mythic structure, Christian theology, social ethics, modern secular pluralism and administrative rationality. The role of each of these sources is dependent on social and historical forces, and thus the strength of ecumenism will vary. The "folk " ecumenism functional for modern societies is a necessary condition for principled ecumenism but severely limits its further development. Although the meanings of ecumenism vary within Christianity, the history of Protestant ecumenism suggests that only a renewed social ethics will promote further ecumenical energies. Since these efforts directed at social justice will go counter to "folk" ecumenism and cause disputes that give rise to the continued need for "internal ecumenism, " another stage of hesitancy where questions of identity and boundary predominate will follow. To deal with these cycles of ecumenical advance and stabilization ecumenists have developed the term "reception " and have come to view ecumenism as "process " and in this way have transformed ecumenism into the "necessary utopianism " evoked by Christian symbols of human solidarity. Ecumenism should be of some interest to sociologists concerned about the paradoxical relationships between the particularistic roots of identity and the universalistic aspiration to a noncoercive world order. Early Christianity was characterized by a number of church forms and theologies. While there was always some question of the authentic following of Jesus, contemporary commentators note that plurality, while it caused considerable conflict, finally did not seem in that decentralized and localized lifeworld to impede a sense of Christian unity. In the pre-modern era questions of unity were especially likely to arise in tandem with the needs for political mobilization. In Christianity the Emperor Constantine's edict of Milan (313) making Christianity first a tolerated religion and then, in effect, the civil religion of the Roman Empire created, in terms of political legitimation, new requirements of internal unity for Christianity and thus new possibilities of counterreactions from resistant centers elsewhere. The schism of 1054 between Roman and Eastern Orthodox Christianity reflected not merely theological and liturgical differences, which were significant, but also the political animosities between Rome and Byzantine. None of the religiously inspired efforts made at the Council of Lyons in 1274 or Florence in 1439 could overcome the massive political and cultural differences separating these branches of Christianity. The divisions arising after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century similarly combined a subtle interplay among authentic theological issues and political and cultural forces. The German princes were at least as interested in keeping their wealth out of Rome as they were in the doctrine of justification.