Flett Apostolicity

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9973-9
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 392 Seiten

Reihe: Missiological Engagements

What constitutes the unity of the church over time and across cultures? Can our account of the church's apostolic faith embrace the cultural diversity of world Christianity? The ecumenical movement that began in the twentieth century posed the problem of the church's apostolicity in profound new ways. In the attempt to find unity in the midst of the Protestant-Catholic schism, participants in this movement defined the church as a distinct culture-complete with its own structures, rituals, architecture and music. Apostolicity became a matter of cultivating the church's own (Western) culture. At the same time it became disconnected from mission, and more importantly, from the diverse reality of world Christianity. In this pioneering study, John Flett assesses the state of the conversation about the apostolic nature of the church. He contends that the pursuit of ecumenical unity has come at the expense of dealing responsibly with crosscultural difference. By looking out to the church beyond the West and back to the New Testament, Flett presents a bold account of an apostolicity that embraces plurality. Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

John G. Flett (PhD, Princeton Theological Seminary) lectures in intercultural theology and mission studies at Pilgrim Theological College, part of the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Witness of God: The Trinity, Missio Dei, Karl Barth and the Nature of Christian Community and is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Flett, John G.

Leseproben

2

Apostolicity Under the Horizon of Schism

The church as a whole may be compared to a system of communication, no part of which is strictly irrelevant to the conveying of coherent meaning.

The Anglican/Lutheran “Niagara” Report, 19871

2.1 The Determining Question

Polemical overtones notwithstanding, the burden of contemporary literature dealing with apostolicity serves the cause of Christian unity. Schism is the initating problem, and the proposed solutions are subject to the complex agendas of established theological traditions and ecclesial identities. Attention focuses on the historical instant of rupture, the immediate calcifying aftermath and the resulting defensive apologies. Although certain strategies have developed, such as broadening the “apostolic tradition” to include a range of ecclesial practices, the forms of ministry and especially that of episcopal order constitute the biggest hurdle to unity. Insofar as this is the case, however, the question trades on a particular evaluation of the Reformation. To quote Walter Kasper, as the early Reformers sought not to break from the order of apostolic succession, so the ecumenical concern is now “whether this Protestant position only arose out of an ongoing emergency situation or whether the emergency order developed at that time possesses a principle and constitutive character.”2 Whatever the ecumenical benefit of so construing the problem, it illustrates the assumed determinative significance of the Protestant/Catholic binary for understanding structural difference as such. The emergence of any later difference, including the burgeoning diversity of theological and institutional (and non-institutional) expression in world Christianity, appears somehow continuous with this prior schism, rehearsing the contest of visible structural continuity against the freedom of structural change.3 World Christian expressions of the faith do not themselves inform the church’s apostolic identity. Structural differentiation is not first a positive consequence of the lived appropriation of and witness to the gospel by identifiable Christian communities in different historical and cultural settings but rather the negative result of division. As this wider diversity is related to the Protestant/Catholic divide, so it is a problem to be solved at its root. The European Reformation sets the terms of reference. “Diversity” is offset with “division,” and the solution to division through the reconciliation of ministries includes the means to regulate and control diversity.

It is, of course, doubtful that ecumenical descriptions of apostolicity accord with the actual practice of the various traditions in their diverse contexts. Nevertheless, missing from the discussion is the possibility that apostolicity itself promotes a plurality in the human reception of the gospel. We can illustrate this omission in four ways. First, the ecumenical discussion progressively expunges reference to the historical and cultural origins of structures, promoting a sterilized account of a now universalized conception of office and episkopé. Second, though reference to mission increases through documentation, it refers to the primary “pastoral” mission of the church. This mission alerts the church to its being a culture and legitimizes those structures deemed basic to the particular culture the church is. Third, “diversity” becomes defined in relation to this culture as a diversity of gifts (the variety of callings within the church, including that of the ordained ministry). Cultural difference, by contrast, threatens the “unity” of the church, that is, its apostolic identity. Fourth, as received structures limit and order diversity, so they stand isolated from the hermeneutical principles applied even to the canon and the sacraments.

This occurs, it is argued here, because the ecumenical discussion posits apostolic continuity first in terms of cultural continuity. As historical continuity assumes a cultural mode, so apostolic identity forms at odds with the cross-cultural transmission and appropriation of the gospel. Absent through the ecumenical discussion is even the merest acknowledgment that missionary engagement and the incorporation of new questions into the life of the church might raise questions concerning the church’s structures and ministries, and this in a way that cannot be determined a priori, the richness of the Christian tradition notwithstanding. Ironically, the more that attention is paid to world Christianity and to the place of culture in hermeneutics and theological method, the less that cultural issues have informed formal accounts of apostolicity. It is much more the case that ecumenical advances trade on a progressive elimination of cultural diversity from the definition of apostolicity. Before developing these points, however, the chapter begins with an early approach to apostolicity that understood historical continuity in terms of missionary change.

2.2 An Early Eschatological Tone: “Catholicity and Apostolicity,” 1971 (Louvain)

While it may seem hasty to chide the ecumenical discussion for a reductionist approach to cross-cultural continuity, the latitude found within its first attempts prompts such an evaluation. Though the earliest of the Faith and Order conferences recognized the challenge that different forms of ministry presented to unity, this was not initially posited in terms of apostolicity. Nor when apostolicity became a focus soon after the inception of the WCC was it bound to the issue of ministry. For Konrad Raiser, these early statements set apostolicity in relation to “foreign missions,” especially as the consequences of mission became viewed as a threat to the church’s unity.4 Relating apostolicity to mission provided some theological rationale for the missionary impetus and cautioned the churches of the West against reducing missionary concerns to a matter of ecumenical difference, and so one where established structures held the priority. More generally, these early documents shared an eschatological tone, which, in Raiser’s estimation, opened space for the question of continuity in missionary engagement. This eschatological perspective highlighted the challenge mission posed to established notions of church structure and order, but it did not direct attention to a rehearsed Protestant argument for institutional freedom against a Catholic notion of a visible structured society. It affirmed, rather, that the eschatological future rendered every present form of the Christian community provisional. This observation had a positive intention: the church is called to missionary witness. Furthermore, mission in both idea and history became viewed as a tool to help elucidate the nature of apostolic continuity in apostolic change.

Exemplary here is the 1971 study document from the Joint Working Group of the Roman Catholic Church and the WCC titled “Catholicity and Apostolicity” (Louvain).5 It begins in a way now standard in later ecumenical statements—by grounding apostolicity in mission.

The Church is apostolic because it is “sent,” constituted by the gift of the mission which the Father entrusted to His Son, which Jesus Christ accomplished once for all and which the Holy Spirit completes in the last times (cf. Jn. 20: 21f.). . . . It is therefore in virtue of its participation in the mission of Christ in the mission of the disciples that the Church is apostolic. For the Holy Spirit manifests this mission, realizes it and communicates it in a community “consecrated and sent” like Christ (cf. Jn. 17: 18f.). (Louvain, §4)

The church is apostolic insofar as it participates, being both consecrated and sent, in Christ’s mission. Whereas later statements limit this mission in a specific manner (a point to which we shall turn), Louvain links apostolic announcement to the eschatological future (Louvain, §5) while referencing the memory of the church that “embraces all the past” (Louvain, §6). Mission, in other words, sets the church within this wide temporal scope of promise and memory. Louvain notes the “great diversity of forms in the ministries accomplished in the Spirit” and the “permanent responsibility” these ministries have in transmitting “the living testimony of the apostles” (Louvain, §7). None of this minimizes the key divisions between the communions, yet this “broader view of apostolic succession” raises “new possibilities” for developing a “consensus between the Churches” (Louvain, §§8-9).

The statement is itself brief and generous in tone, and its implications for the issue of structure become evident only by reference to its seven appendices.6 These highlight fundamental questions concerning the place of proper structural diversity, the cultural origins of structures, the tension between fidelity to the tradition and missionary flexibility, and an evaluation of existing forms. One finds here, in sharp distinction to later treatments, a frank assessment of the church’s historicity: even the “traditional norms for understanding the faith—Scripture, Creed, the magisterium of bishops in the apostolic succession—have themselves undergone changes in the course of history.”7 Because of the community’s constitutive eschatological...