Читать книгу Sex, Moral Teaching, and the Unity of the Church - Timothy F. Sedgwick - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTurbulent times over matters of morals divide Christian churches. The divisions are not narrowly between Protestants and Roman Catholics or between evangelicals and mainline Protestant denominations. The conflict is as much within individual churches—Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, Evangelical churches, and the list goes on.
Following World War II, a convenient mid-twentieth-century marker, the conflict and divisions in Christian churches in the United States began over race, continued over human sexuality, focused on women and minis-try, and turned to same-sex relationships. The civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, feminism, and gay rights are tied together by the fact that they challenged a received social order and social roles, none more dear than those of the family. Divisions reflect all that goes into what is figuratively called social location, including social class, history, generational identity, education, and religious beliefs. The broader the church, the greater the breadth of divisions.
Teaching and Governance
The response to conflict in churches, and specifically over matters of human sexuality, has focused on the question of “who’s right?” Further discussion has focused on conflicting appeals to Scripture and to differences in personal experience combined with claims from “the sciences.” The Episcopal Church has been no exception. However, in matters of the church and morals, the wrong question has been asked. The question “who’s right?” avoids the more basic question, “How should we teach and why?”
As the assumed normative order was questioned in the 1960s and ’70s and gave way to a far more diverse social order segmenting society, the question in churches was raised, “Will our children have faith?” This was raised as a question of teaching. “How is Christian faith passed on?” “How is it taught?” In the Episcopal Church the response to “How should we teach?” was shaped by the liturgical renewal movement. Reflecting the early church with its emphasis on baptism as initiation, the primary concern was formation as participation in the Christian life. Teaching turned from didactic learning of “the faith of our fathers” to experiential learning, in which through participation individuals would claim the faith as their own. In the Episcopal Church this focus on initiation and formation was given in the adoption of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer ordered around the centrality of baptism and the baptismal covenant.
At the heart of liturgical renewal and a “baptismal ecclesiology” is the understanding that Christian faith is passed on only as it is received. The outstanding challenge for churches is given in the very nature of tradition: “How should the church teach and order its life that the faith received is passed on and received by a new generation?” Teachings are taught in various ways, through worship, preaching, programs for formation and initiation or reception into the church, Bible study, educational programs, and pastoral care. This teaching is done by the ordained leadership, authorized laity of the church, and all the people of God, which is to say all those who participate in the life of the church. What becomes the teaching of the church from one generation to the next is what has been received. This has been called in Latin the consensus fidelium. Such consensus of the faithful has at its heart broad consent of members of the church, ordained and lay.
It is a mistake to narrow teaching to what is right. To do so does not insure reception and narrows faith to right belief and practice. Instead, Christian faith is fundamentally given together as a community formed by the practice of faith. Initiated in baptism, celebrated in eucharist, this faith is given in the giving up of oneself in relationship to others—listening and receiving each other as faithful pilgrims, having one’s own perceptions challenged, and having a sense of grace and new life deepened and enlarged. Christian faith is not first of all about “What’s right?” tied to a universal moral law; it is about life together in Christ. This means that Christian faith and ethics are fundamentally ecclesial. They are given in the church and depend on the way the church teaches and governs.
The Gospel Mandate to Be One
The divisions within churches and between churches over moral issues are a sin that may be as great as or greater than particular acts. The acceptance of slavery and patriarchy are surely sins again God and neighbor. Abortion and same-sex marriage are equally viewed by many as matters of sin. What is often forgotten is the gospel demand that Christians should be one, as the Father and the Son are one. This is called the ecumenical mandate as given by Jesus in the Gospel of John:
I ask not only on behalf of these [who follow me], but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (Jn 17:20–23)
The sin of a divided church is that it weakens faith and witness to the gospel. Faith is weakened as attention is turned to who is right and away from the practice of faith in the love of God and neighbor. The witness of the gospel is weakened as faith becomes narrowed to right belief while the focus and resources for evangelism and service are compromised.
The gospel mandate for full and visible unity between churches stands at the heart of the ecumenical movement. This movement arose in the context of the missionary outreach in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries seeking to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth. Formed in the mission field where many churches “competed” against each other, the Episcopal Church’s missionary bishop to the Philippines, Charles H. Brent, attended the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. Afterwards Brent proposed to the Episcopal Church a world conference on “faith and order.”
Under Brent’s leadership, in 1927 in Lausanne, Switzerland, delegates from 109 churches met at what was to be the first World Conference on Faith and Order. From this beginning the Faith and Order Commission was formed and has continued to meet, incorporating with the “Life and Work Movement” to form the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948. Similarly, at the national level, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC) was founded in 1950 and incorporated a Faith and Order Commission. The churches of the WCC and NCC joined together in consultations or dialogues about faith and order. The “multilateral” dialogues extended beyond the largely Protestant membership of Faith and Order to include the Roman Catholic Church and churches from other traditions, such as Evangelical and Pentecostal. At the same time, separate churches entered into “bilateral dialogues” about faith and order. Together these dialogues form a rich body of work on the nature of Christian faith and the church.
Ecumenical dialogues have from their beginnings sought to identify what churches share in common, especially in areas where differences seem apparent. For example, differences that have divided the church have included theological confessions of faith, understandings of baptism and eucharist, differences in liturgical practices, understandings of ministry and the nature and role of bishops, and matters of church order and governance relating local congregations to the church as universal. However, beneath these differences are also shared convictions on faith and order.
Understandings shared by the churches in ecumenical dialogue were drawn together in two convergence texts adopted by the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC. The first text, titled simply Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry, was adopted at the Faith and Order Commission’s plenary meeting in 1982 in Lima, Peru. It is the most broadly read document of the ecumenical movement. Full and visible unity between churches is understood in terms of recognition of baptism, participation in eucharist, and shared ministry. The second convergence text, titled The Church: Towards a Common Vision, draws together the subsequent work of thirty years. The Faith and Order Commission adopted this second convergence text in 2012 at its meeting in Penang, Malaysia. That document identifies a shared understanding of the church as koinonia, as a fellowship given in participating and sharing together in the life of the church and its mission as God’s mission, missio dei. Ecumenically, together these two convergence texts articulate a shared understanding of Christian faith as given in the church in and through the gathering of the people of God and in sending the people of God into the world in mission.
Recognition of baptism has been most widely achieved among churches. When churches receive persons into their church, they don’t rebaptize those who have already been baptized in another church. Sharing in the eucharist has likewise been widely accepted, except between those churches for whom the eucharist is a sign of specific beliefs and ministry that need to be held in common in order for the eucharist to be a sacrament of unity. Such is the case, for example, for the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox churches, and some Lutheran churches. Agreement about the nature of ordained ministry and the structuring of authority for teaching is the remaining and most difficult matter in effecting full and visible unity between churches. In other words, the greatest impediment for full and visible unity among churches is a matter of teaching—not narrowly a matter of what is taught, but how churches teach.
Teaching for the Sake of Communion
Ordained ministry is an ordering of authority for teaching Christian faith. This is determined by the understanding of the church and how Christian faith is “passed on.” As the word “ecclesial” means in the Greek, the church is the assembly, the gathering, of the people of God. This is distinct from the church as a building in a particular place, which is what the English word “church” has too often come to mean (derived from the German die Kirche, meaning the physical building). As the assembly, in the local church people participate and are formed in the larger identity and mission of God. This larger life is variously expressed, for example, as witness and participation in the Kingdom of God, as joined in the body of Christ, as participation in the divine life, as a matter of obedience to God’s command, and as a life of faith active in love.
Ecumenically, this understanding of the relationship between the local church or assembly and the church as universal is expressed by the biblical understanding of the church as communion. As conveyed by the Greek word koinonia, communion connotes the complementary meanings of sharing in common, participation together, and fellowship. Such participation is given in worship and mission. Shared in common, a people are gathered together in fellowship and formed as one body, as one in Christ.
In terms of teaching, this means that the church must pass on the faith in such a way that the local church gathering in a particular time and place is united to the church as universal, sharing in a mission of reconciliation that is universal and not identified simply with a local church. In the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ, we know that the faith given to us cannot be simply local. As Paul says, “We have this treasure in clay jars [in earthen vessels], so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor 4:7).
Teaching in the church is a matter of formation. Faith is not a body of knowledge but a way of life given together in relationship with God. This is expressed in the understanding of baptism as a rite of initiation, as breaking the bonds of sin and being raised into new life in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Formation in this new life is marked as beginning in baptism and deepened in the study of Scripture, in the celebration of the eucharist and more generally in prayer and worship, and in a life lived in love of God and neighbor.
In the Episcopal Church entering into this new life is referred to as the “baptismal covenant.” As detailed in The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) in the service of baptism, God’s grace as reconciliation and redemption is given as the new Christian is joined in the community of faith and commits her- or himself to life in Christ. The vows are to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, in prayers, in resisting evil, in the repentance of sin, in proclaiming in word and example the Good News of God in Christ, in seeking and serving Christ in all persons, in striving for justice and peace among all people, and in respecting the dignity of every human being (BCP, 304–5).
Entering this life in Christ as given in the life of the church is a matter of the community of faith as a whole. Having said that, ordained ministry is understood as having oversight in the teaching of Christian faith in which the local church is in communion with and so participates in the universal church. In this sense, ordained ministry, along with baptism and eucharist, is a central mark of the church, integral to the identity of the church as church. Understood as a gift of the Holy Spirit, ordained ministry is understood as sacramental in the sense that the ordained represent and effect the community of faith as local and universal. Central to this ministry is teaching, presiding at the celebration of the eucharist, and pastoral oversight over the community. As a matter of teaching, this ministry is understood by the church as that of episcopus, the Greek New Testament word denoting one exercising authority for teaching and oversight. To be the church there must be means of teaching and oversight, what may be termed episcopé, by which the local church is joined in communion with the church universal.
The structure of episcopé in the churches—Oriental and Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, those of the Protestant Reformation, Anabaptist, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and other free church traditions—is varied. The structure of episcopé may be identified as conciliar, synodical, and magisterial.
In order to pass on the faith received and shared together, local churches have met together in council to pray and worship together and to share and learn from each other. This includes individual congregations meeting together as a diocese or other judicatories such as a Methodist Conference or a Presbyterian presbytery. It also includes dioceses or judicatories meeting together as a national church or a church covering a specific physical region. Most broadly, it includes national churches or regional churches gathering together as a communion of churches. Examples of national or regional churches gathering together in council would include the Ecumenical Councils of the early church, the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church, meetings of the Lutheran World Federation, meetings of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, the Lambeth Conference where the churches of the Anglican Communion gather together, and the international assemblies of the World Council of Churches.
Votes may be taken as churches gather in councils. As councils, votes express the consensus over particular matters about belief and practice. At the least, they express a majority judgment of members. Such resolutions provide counsel to churches; however, they aren’t legislation to be enforced as criteria for membership and participation unless independently adopted by a participating church and applied given the church’s own governance structure. Given a consensus among those gathered over some particular matter, some churches may absent themselves from future gatherings, but the purpose of councils is to gather to counsel one another and not to legislate.
Churches gathered as dioceses and judicatories, as regional and national churches, or as forming a larger, international church may also share in a common structure of authority for teaching and discipline. In that case, representatives exercise episcopé as legislative bodies. Who are representatives varies from church to church, from exclusively bishops to ordained clergy and lay members, to largely lay members. In making binding decisions for each particular church, the form of governance may be designated as synodical. The nature of the meeting is more than counsel. It is legislative. This requires enforcement through membership and participation in the life of the church. Central to insuring conformity is the selection, the appointment, and, when necessary, the removal and replacement of the ordained who exercise authority for teaching and discipline. Discipline also includes the possibility of the exclusion of regional and national churches or dioceses and judicatories from decision-making or participation in future synods.
Beyond synods, authority for teaching and oversight has in some churches been assumed by a particular office. Most notably, in the Roman Catholic Church this is the teaching magisterium centered in the College of Bishops over which the bishop of Rome, the pope, presides. Presiding over bishops who exercise specific authority in the church, the pope exercises an extraordinary magisterium over the whole church. As the word “magistrate” denotes, particular persons rule. They make judgments about teaching and enforce teaching through membership, appointments, and removal from office.
Whatever the form of episcopé—conciliar, synodical, or magisterial—all agree teaching requires reception and hence multiple ways in which teachings of Christian faith are passed on in order that they are received. Different forms of teaching and different ways of structuring teaching authority reflect differences in the history and context of churches. Churches may learn from one another why authority for teaching and oversight is structured differently. They may also come to agree that they share a common sense of ministry as episcopé. Given the gospel mandate for Christians to be one as a matter of life in God and as a matter of witness to the world, one question remains, “Can churches share a full and visible unity while ordering and exercising episcopé differently?” The answer to this question returns to the question of teaching and how teaching is understood.
Anglicanism as Case in Point
While matters of morals have divided Christians within churches and between churches, little work has addressed the church and moral teach ing. Until the 2014 agreed statement of the Anglican Roman Catholic Theological Consultation in the U.S.A. (ARC-USA), Ecclesiology and Moral Discernment, the only significant study was the 1993 agreed statement by the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) titled Life in Christ. As with most ecumenical dialogues, the intent of these agreed statements is to understand the faith that different churches share in common.
As a matter of Christian formation, there is broad agreement among Anglicans and Roman Catholics that morally the need is for the church to form conscience in truth and to respect the consciences of those it teaches. At the least, different churches see formation as happening through worship, preaching, programs for initiation or reception into the church, Bible study, educational programs, and pastoral care. At the same time, different churches draw different moral judgments from the sources that inform the processes of formation. The importance of moral norms and normative teaching is also understood differently. This is reflected in the way in which teaching authority is structured. Again, churches differ in matters of governance, what they authorize as normative, as binding on all, and what they accept and even support as differences of conscience. Ecclesially, the question this poses is, “Given differences in the teaching of moral judgments, are those differences church-dividing?”
The Episcopal Church and the other churches forming the Anglican Communion have differences in understanding moral teaching and differences in ordering authority for teaching. This makes the present “crisis in moral teaching and governance” in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion a case study for the larger ecumenical movement.
As one of the churches in the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church has ordered episcopé in matters of morals in ways that have allowed and at best respected and supported differences in specific moral judgments. This is certainly the case in addressing same-sex relations over the last fifty years. This has enabled broad engagement with the Christian tradition and with the changing experience of persons inside and outside the church. In this process moral teaching has happened, at least as persons have come to understand themselves as sexual in terms of what that means in living a holy life as a matter of life in Christ.
Other churches, including Oriental and Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and some Protestant, Anabaptist, Evangelical, and Pentecostal churches, as well as some other churches in the Anglican Communion, have taught matters of morals in ways that differ from the Episcopal Church. This has included differences in who teaches and what is taught, and thus how differences in understanding and action are addressed. However teaching is done, this has led to divisions within churches and between churches. As one person whom I worked with said over a matter of institutional differences and conflict, “The question is, ‘Who decides?’ ” In the same sense, teaching and the ordering of moral authority are tied together and determine where conflict rests and divisions rise.
Different ways of moral teaching and the ordering of episcopé carry with them strengths and weaknesses. As matters of deepening Christian faith, they all seek to inform conscience in truth and so to deepen life in Christ as koinonia, as participating and sharing together in that life as given in Scripture, celebrated in worship, and lived in love of neighbor, friend, and stranger. Some or many may wish and propose for the Episcopal Church a different way of teaching and exercising authority over teaching in order to have right teaching. But in itself, this only leads to division and the breaking of the unity to which Christians are called. First, as a matter of charity and faithfulness to the gospel call that we should be one that all might believe, the need is to understand the ways churches teach and why. Then it is possible to see more clearly what stands at the heart of teaching as a matter of deepening new life in Christ, and whether differences may be honored, and even embraced, and when they may be cause for division.
NOTES
The problem of “will our children have faith” is posed as the problem of secularization, given that church affiliation is a matter of choice. As the liturgical movement saw in the twentieth century, this is a challenge and opportunity for the church to be clear about the nature of Christian faith as given in and through the church. In the Anglican tradition, see the first work introducing liturgical renewal as celebrating and effecting a way of life: A. G. Hebert, SSM, Liturgy and Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), e.g., 132, 191–95. Hebert’s understanding of liturgy and society is grounded theologically in F. D. Maurice. See The Kingdom of Christ, 2 vols., ed. Alec R. Vidler (London: SCM Press, 1958, based on the second edition of 1842), 1:227–57, on the nature of spiritual constitution and 1:258–88 on baptism. For my own account of this for ethics, see Sacramental Ethics: Paschal Identity and the Christian Life (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986, republished 2008). On the history of the liturgical renewal movement, see Keith F. Pecklers and Bryan D. Spinks, The New Westminster Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, ed. Paul Bradshaw (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 283–89.
John Westerhoff brought the questions of formation in faith in a secular age to a focus with his question, “Will our children have faith?” See John H. Westerhoff, Will Our Children Have Faith?, 3rd ed. (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2012), first published in 1976. For a recent discussion of these matters, see Ruth Meyers and Paul Gibson, eds., Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation and the People of God (New York: Morehouse, 2010).
Forming and passing on Christian faith from one generation to the next is a matter of the nature of tradition. The nature of tradition is a central question in classical sociology but has received scant attention beyond studies within particular fields of study. However, see Karl Man nheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Paul, 1952); Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986).
On the history of the ecumenical movement, see Lorelei F. Fuchs, SA, “A Brief History of Faith and Order: Times, Places, People, and Issues behind an Ecumenical Theological Movement,” in The National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA Faith and Order Commission Handbook, comp. Lorelei F. Fuchs, SA; ed. Ann K. Riggs and R. Keelan Downton (New York: Graymoor Ecumenical and Interreligious Institute, NCC Faith and Order Office, 2005), 3–11. For a broader account, see Ruth Rouse and Stephen C. Neill, eds., A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, vol. 1 (Geneva: WCC, 1993). The classic history of the WCC was written by its first secretary general, W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, who served from 1948 to 1966. See The Genesis and Formation of the World Council of Churches (Geneva: WCC, 1982). For a history and anthology of major texts, especially focused on the World Council of Churches, see Michael Kinnamon and Brian E. Cope, eds., The Ecumenical Movement (Geneva: WCC, 1997).
