Friday 23 January 2009

St Paul and Ecumenism

This is the title of an article from the Jesuit on-line magazine Thinking Faith, published to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The writer of the article is Bishop John Arnold, an auxiliary in Westminster Diocese.

If you do read the article, you might appreciate my questions about it:

Does the article actually tell me anything about St Paul and ecumenism? Well, no.

What does "recognising the diversity of the Early Church" mean? The article has taken about half its length to describe the situation of the different cities to which St Paul wrote letters, thereby describing the diversity of the situations in which the Church of the times lived, but is it right to describe this as "diversity of the Church"?

"(St Paul) has a personal encounter with Christ and he has to try to work out what that means. Of course, there was almost nothing to assist him. The Gospels were still unwritten. There were no guides to Christian prayer or Christian living; this new faith was discovering itself. Paul, and the first generation of Christians, had to find out for themselves what it meant to believe in Christ and to put that belief into practice in their lives". Did not the first Christians receive their faith by the preaching of those who knew Christ himself, and then from those who knew those who knew Christ, etc.? Doesn't the Acts of the Apostles, and indeed Paul's own letters, bear witness to this? Whilst one can accept that early Christians, like Christians today, were exploring the meaning of their faith, to describe it as "discovering itself" indicates a certain ideology.

There is also a reference to the "state of inter-Church relations today". While one might accept this as a use of words simply reflecting every day usage, in the context could we have expected the more careful distinction between Churches and ecclesial communities?

As I finished reading the article, I asked two questions:

What does the article actually say?

And, following on from that and given that Thinking Faith is to an extent at least an academic journal, what about the role of the editor?

PS. "Suddenly, the hundreds of laws and regulations that had shaped his childhood, adolescence and early manhood have lost their foundation". But St Paul repeatedly refers to the Jewish origins of Christian faith, and of the dialogue between Jewish and Gentile in the nature of the Church.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I haven't had a chance to read it yet but i gather you aren't overly impressed!