No common language yet – Rowan Williams

22 December 2007 • Persistent link: iarccum.org/?p=975

by Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

The Incarnation unites us all round the crib at Bethlehem. But what kind of unity is there among Christians today? Here, the Archbishop of Canterbury looks ahead to Januarys centenary Week of Christian Unity. It raises uncomfortable questions, he says, not least about communion.

A hundred years on from the establishing of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, how much further forward are we? And what exactly are we praying for during this week of prayer? On the whole, its become a fixture for mostmainstreamdenominations, a few days when the more enthusiastic or more biddable members of the congregation turn up to someone elses church for a wellmannered but often rather lukewarm joint service or two, or perhaps for a talk by a prominent local leader.

The aspiration that we end up relating better with each other, or even that we end up more willing to engage in witness and work together is entirely worthy, and is probably widely fulfilled. But are we praying for anything more than this?

For some people, the answer is clearlyno”. To look beyond this fostering of local goodwill, they would say, is always in danger of slipping towards the yearning for some universal institution with clear central controlat worst, a Pullmanesque Magisterium, some peoples nightmare of Roman Catholicism.

And if we cant and shouldnt be looking in this direction, what we pray for is presumably more of the same. Whether or not we use the language ofreconciled diversitypopular in some circles, the message is that any higher level of organisational union than what is generated by friendship and cooperation is going to be both problematic and unrealistic.

This is actually a long way from the original vision of those who first proposed the annual Week of Prayer. And I suspect that it represents not only a certain failure of nerve but also a degree of confusion about the alternatives envisaged. One of our current problems is that we seem to be able to think only in terms of the polarity between loose associations of individuals and centralised, controlling organisations. To appeal to other kinds of unity puzzles and even sometimes offends.

Yet, when alls said and done about the pitfalls of organic metaphors for the unity of Christiansthe Body, the Vine, even the Familywe need to recover something of what they are about if we are to avoid the potentially worse pitfalls of falsely constructed oppositions. The New Testament uses the language of the Body of Christ so as to drum in a message about unity not simply as cooperation (with its implication that we all begin in isolation and then agree to work together) but as a sort of mutual creation: we constitute each other.

What I do is essential to who you are in Christ; what you do is essential to who I am in Christ; we are contributing to shaping whats possible for people well never know or meet. When the Christian community is one, it is functioning interactively, it is a process in which life is being communicated around the system, a life whose source is the free gift of Christ through his Spirit.

What I miss in the lowerkey accounts of unity is just that conviction of how we need each other so as to receive this communication of life. From the beginnings of Christian faith, Christians have seen this as literally embodied in the central act of worship, in the Eucharist. We come together to be fedfed by a reality wholly other to us yet made wholly accessible to us; fed so that we can feed one another.

The Eucharist isnt an occasion when we set out to celebrate our togetherness and to encourage each other by the degree of our warm fellowship and close agreement. It is as we meet that we are fed by Christ, and because we are fed by him that we become able to feed each other. Somehow, no account of unity that doesnt bring us to this place is going to be adequate.

And this is where the uncomfortable questions begin, the questions that lead us beyond a simple affirmation of each others good faith. To meet at the Eucharist so as to be fed by Christ means meeting in the confidence that our assembly is more than the gathering and action of one local community celebrating its sense of spiritual fellowship. It assumes that there are answers to questions about how a celebration of the Lords Supper isopennot only to the universal dimension of the Communion of Christs Body but also to the transcendent reality of Christ himself in the Spirit.

If Christians can recognise in each others celebrations the ways in which these concerns are acknowledged and met, they are recognising Christ in each othernot only that recognition of Christ in the other which may happen with any individual of good faith touched by the Spirit, but the recognition of Christ specifically at work in and as his Body.

My point is twofold: first, that sharing in the Eucharist is the right and proper goal for all ecumenical endeavour, since it is there that we see fleshed out the fundamental reality of a community in which people arefeedingeach other, communicating life to each other, because they are fed by Christ; secondly, that this inevitably entails some complex reflection and questioning about how eucharistic life in its fullness may be recognised in this or that community.

Because we are rightly wary of the mechanical and juridical categories of ministerial validity which used to accompany this sort of question, we tend to fight shy of some of these questions about how we recognise in one another the full and abundant life of Christ in the Body. But to raise these matters is really just a way of asking whether we are doing justice to the full richness of the biblical understanding of unity. When the Lima Statement (of the World Council of Churches), “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry”, appeared in 1982, there was, I think, a real feeling that we were moving forward in sketching out a common language for talking about these great themes. The same holds for the early Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (Arcic) documents, especially the one on ministry. The sadness is that some of the impetus behind texts like these has faded, so that we are in danger of losing a common conversation about the essential tools of recognitionrecognition conceived not in a legalistic framework but as a necessary aspect of how we open ourselves to the communication of life.

Along with the rest of my Anglican ecclesial family, I dont agree with the official Roman Catholic (and Orthodox) teaching which sees eucharistic communion as depending entirely on the attainment of a comprehensive agreement on doctrine. But I must also grant that this discipline at least shows that what is understood by the Eucharist (and thus, by extension, the recognised ministry of the eucharistic president) is to do with very basic aspects of faith as an activity of the Body, not of the individual.

To speak about mutual recognition is, of course, to grant implicitly that unity is not about absorption into a single megainstitution; it is about distinct and even divided communities freely consenting to be reconciled because they have recognised one life, Christs life, in each other. To keep on insisting that this is bound up with recognition of where eucharistic life is present in its fullness is not to prefer legalistic scrutiny over spiritual fellowship; it is simply to hold on to the conception of Christs Body as the organ of a unity in which everyone genuinely lives for andintothe welfare and salvation of everyone else, because all are carriers of life for one another.

In our current rather bemused or becalmed ecumenical environment, we could do worse than revisit Lima and the Arcic texts on ministry and the Church as communion, and reacquaint ourselves with the questions that we all have to confront about how we can see this or that ecclesial body as authentically more than just local and contingent. And perhaps we shall learn as we do so that the alternatives are not careless pluralism and castiron centralism. Between them lies the biblical conviction that we are responsible to each other for the faithful communication (in every sense) of the one Christ, and that we have to be in search of the structures that will properly serve that end.

So what will I be praying for in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity? For a deepened awareness of my need for Christs life received through the eucharistic communitydeep enough to make me more eager to find the visible and sustainable forms that will keep me open to this life and hold me in it, “never to be separated”. A te nunquam separari