Dogma and Ecumenism: Vatican II and Karl Barth’s Ad Limina Apostolorum
Edited by Matthew Levering, Bruce L. McCormack, and Thomas Joseph White, OP
The Catholic University of America Press, 2019
338 pages (paperback), $34.95
“This is a book that treats Catholic-Protestant ecumenism as a subject of both fraternal encounter in Christ and rigorous doctrinal argument” (2). So Thomas Joseph White, OP, introduces the approach of Dogma and Ecumenism. Approaches to ecumenical engagement have been varied over the last century and a half. Categorizing very broadly, one observes two types of approach. The first, from a more liberal theological persuasion, seeks to emphasize shared, minimalist creedal agreements (at most) and common societal objectives. Reinhard Hütter’s article in Dogma and Ecumenism accurately captures the results of the various ecumenical endeavors of this type when he quips that though touting as a success what they called “reconciled diversity,” the reality “might more precisely [be] characterize[d] as a complacent state of ‘reconciled indifference’—the reality of a broad, amorphous, undifferentiated mutual acceptance in an overall post-doctrinal ambience” (279).
Then there have been more conservative, traditionalist approaches. One thinks, for instance, of the gathering at Rose Hill College in the spring of 1995, which produced the book Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics & Orthodox in Dialogue. The aim of the conference was “to test whether an ecumenical orthodoxy, solidly based on the classic Christian faith as expressed in the Scriptures and ecumenical councils” could lead to a kind of “traditionalist ecumenism” that refused any compromise to the integrity, including the doctrinal integrity, of the Christian faith (8–9). If the results of the former approach have been something like reconciled indifference, the results of the latter seem only to have managed a clarified impasse. As Peter Kreeft, one of the participants of that conference, so plainly put it,
The problem is simple and obvious: religions contradict each other. And contradictories cannot both be true. And unity between the true and the false is false unity. . . . What can we do to solve this problem? If we are honest, the answer is nothing. Nothing that we can see. (21–22)
An improvement on indifference, it seems to me, but hardly one that beckons the light of hope.
It is in this dim ecumenical reality that Dogma and Ecumenism searches for a ray of light. As the above quotation makes evident, Dogma and Ecumenism finds itself in that traditionalist category. True ecumenism will not simply ask how we all may get along, but will ask the “central question”: “What is really true about divine revelation?” (4). In order to pursue that question, the Barth Center at Princeton Theological Seminary and the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies gathered together scholars and theologians from various Protestant and Catholic traditions for a theological symposium. The subordinate question posed—now quite commonplace—is whether Vatican II has opened up new avenues to explore ecumenism without compromise, and whether, on the Protestant side, Barth’s appraisal of Vatican II in his Ad Limina Apostolorum (1967) helps us to explore them.
There are many insightful and enjoyable articles that nevertheless don’t offer much by way of direct answers to that central question. Matthew Levering offers a keen analysis and Roman Catholic assessment of Barth’s understanding of divine revelation. Katherine Sonderegger offers a matching Protestant assessment of Vatican II’s Dei Verbum. Lewis Ayres’s exposition of Dei Verbum is quite in keeping with what one would expect from a Roman Catholic patristic scholar. Bruce McCormack, also as one would expect, writes on Barth’s doctrine of God. In particular, McCormack addresses Barth’s concerns with Vatican II’s ambiguous—or as McCormack charitably interprets it, “generous and humble” (152)—answer to the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Each of these articles is very engaging. Each models cross-traditional dialogue, uncompromising and yet—as the late John Webster would have put it—patient with one another in their theological debate. But as to the central question of the book, each seems to skirt around its edges.
With respect to the central question, the cream of the crop are the articles from Hans Boersma and Reinhard Hütter. Boersma puts Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, under the spotlight. He notes the careful and generous way it formulates the relation of Roman Catholicism to its “separated brethren.”
It may not go unmentioned that the council fathers speak both generously and truthfully when they maintain that for the separation of the church often “both sides were to blame,” so the council fathers “beg pardon of God and of our separated brethren.” (249)
He notes the careful way the fathers talked about Catholic unity and the separated brethren, most famously in Lumen Gentium, where it is stated in paragraph 8 that “this Church [big “C” Church], constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church,” and that councils intentionally used the Latin sustinere (to subsist) rather than esse (is), presumably to avoid an exact identity of the Church and the Roman Catholic Church. He notes the use of a “hierarchy of truths” in Unitatis Redintegratio to indicate that “not all doctrines have equal weight,” which enables ecumenical dialogue to hone in on differences that concern the center versus differences that concern issues more peripheral (254). All of these, Boersma says, have led many Protestants to believe their ecumenical dialogue with Rome is set for much progress in the near future. For Boersma, the matter is not so clear: “Still, for all these gains . . . I am less confident that an ecumenical breakthrough is just around the corner” (260). The reason for this can be seen in the key question that Boersma, citing Charles Morerod, OP, raises: “Since all Christian communities are divided, should we not say that the Catholic Church is also not blessed with ‘that unity which Jesus Christ wished to bestow’?” Morerod follows Pope Paul VI and Pope John II with his answer: “Catholic theologians must deal with a paradox: All Christians are divided, and Catholics are in this situation of division, but the Catholic Church alone has never lost full unity” (264–65).
Why are Catholics, who are in a state of division, also simultaneously considered by the council as unified Catholics, while Protestants, who are likewise in a state of division, are not simultaneously considered as unified Catholics but “separated brethren”? The reason, argues Boersma, is that the unity of the Catholic Church is inextricably bound with the Catholic magisterium and the “strictly irreformable character of Catholic teaching” (265). And thus, for Catholics, true unity still means unity in Roman Catholic teaching. This is “why the language of subsistere, the use of a set of concentric circles, and the notion of a hierarchy of truths all fail to bring us to the point of unity” (265–66).
This interpretation is further born out in the article by Reinhard Hütter. According to Hütter,
From the Catholic point of view, it is quite obvious that Unitatis Redintegratio appeals to a principle since the days of the apostles . . . that the ecumenical commitment of the Catholic church is irrevocable . . . but that the continual reform rather unfolds concretely under the guidance of the magisterium and in the framework of a developing tradition. (273)
Hütter does think that documents such as the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification represent a “complementarity of theological formulation” between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and that this represents a movement even on the side of Catholics (278). But this movement is not a movement away from Catholic teaching of the past but a movement toward the full realization precisely of that past teaching. It is a movement characterized as a developmental unfolding. Looking at Vatican II through the lens of Newman’s theory of doctrinal development, Hütter affirms that the council fathers “engaged in an authentic development of doctrine, as part of the journey toward the fullest possible expression and realization of the Church’s catholicity in unity, but not uniformity” (299). For Hütter, “true ecumenism will be committed to one principle and one principle only, a principle in which genuine unity is already inchoately present,” by which he means present in the Roman communion (310). The Roman Catholic view, then, is that the eschatological unity of the church will be achieved not by compromise between Rome and the separated brethren, nor by achieving something including but external to the various Christian traditions. It will be achieved along a historical movement whereby the truth and unity already within the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church is unfolded, eventually enfolding all other traditions along the way.
So, to the question of whether Vatican II and Karl Barth have opened up and explored new avenues for ecumenism, beyond the impasse, the answer of Dogma and Ecumenism is not really, or not yet, anyhow. It certainly does seem that we are no longer in an ecumenical dead of night. But dawn still feels a great way off. And yet, perhaps it is this itself that beckons hope. Or rather, the knowledge that gives hope to those who languish in the wee morning hours that the sun will rise is the same knowledge that gives hope to those who long for ecclesial wholeness amid a dispersed and divided people: The Lord God reigns. In Reclaiming the Great Tradition (38), Peter Kreeft admits that we seem to be able to do nothing to bring about unity. But he concludes, “Let him do it, and you will see.”
Joshua Schendel is the executive editor of Modern Reformation.
