SfES Newsletter 12 – May 2020

Posted on Published:

You can download the May 2020 newsletter as a PDF or read online:

Editorial: David Carter, Editor.

Soon after the distribution of the last newsletter, the coronavirus crisis hit us all, with the lockdown rapidly ensuing. This explains the first main item I have chosen for the Newsletter, a short article by Ben Aldous of Churches Together in England entitled Coronavirus: Missional and Theological Reflection, published on May 7. We are very grateful to Ben for drawing our attention to the people and issues of concern mentioned in it. Many are doing serious and creative work relevant to this difficult situation.

Just before writing this I also went into the May issue of the newsletter that Major Alan Dixon, indefatigable county ecumenical officer for Somerset, produces for the county. It lists many initiatives by ecumenical bodies and ecumenically involved individuals, such as Methodist minister, Inderjit Bhogal, with his valuable reflections relevant to the present situation.

Alvyn Pettersen, now retired in Oxford, contributes a piece he wrote for a Conference of European Churches peace conference in Paris last year. In retirement, he is doing some work for CEC as a theological consultant, so we may hope, in future, to hear more about his work. I contribute a little on the work I have been doing on the life and work of Geoffrey Wainwright, World Methodism’s leading liturgical and ecumenical scholar, who died in March, a merciful release from dementia but a titanic loss to ecumenical scholarship.

The Committee have managed to hold a Zoom meeting. It is difficult for us to formulate any very exact plans as the length of the present crisis remains uncertain but we do hope to go ahead eventually with some of the plans we had formulated earlier and also with others. In the meantime, we will try to keep you all in touch via the newsletter.

Please remember we are always happy to put items of ecumenical interest in the newsletter, together of course with your comments on them. We welcome and depend on your contributions! One of the key aims of the Society is to share information about the work and research that we are developing, individually or in collaboration with others.

Meanwhile, the ecumenical community is growing in this country, through the development of the new churches, which have a strong profile and are keen for wider links with the older established churches in mission and service. It is growing in France as well, where in addition to the ‘traditional’ partners, Roman Catholic and Eglise Reformée, there is now a considerable presence of evangelical churches, some similar to the black-led churches in England, and of Orthodox, both Byzantine and Oriental, the Armenians being much more prominent than in England. These are all things I have noted ever since kind friends in French equivalent of CTE have sent me copies regularly of their journal Unité des Chrétiens.

Quite apart from the churches themselves, there are exciting developments within the ‘new monasticism’ where communities like the Focolare and Chemin Neuf, though both of Roman Catholic origin, now admit new members from other churches. Both Focolare and Chemin Neuf are very heavily involved ecumenically.

All this means we have an expanding and, I believe, exciting oikoumene to explore. Many of you will know far more than I and some of our other members will know about the ecumenical situation in other countries and the lessons and wisdom we can learn from them. So please send us reviews or notes of interesting books relating to ecumenical developments elsewhere, accounts of interesting meetings and dialogues and short articles in which you may wish to summarise matters you are studying and hoping to write at greater length in due course.

David

As we await the potential easing of the Lockdown from the Prime Minister, there continues to be a flow of blogs, videos and reflections on the coronavirus pandemic, notably the works highlighted by Ben Aldous for Churches Together in England

Coronavirus: Missional & Theological reflections

Last updated: 14th May 2020

This page will be regularly updated, with the latest content available at the top of each subsection.

For a number of years Christians have been considering how we re-imagine church in a post-Christendom landscape. The rupture to our normal lives from the COVID pandemic has been dramatic. The way in which normal life is being changed and shut down provides an opportunity for the church to practice the two greatest commandments.

During a crisis there are both dangers and opportunities. In a national emergency we have the chance to counter fear with peace and panic with the reassurance of God’s presence and love. In the last few days new blogs, prayers and reflections have been produced that might help us in an era of social distancing and isolation to start rethinking the mission of the church in these strange new times.

Theological Reflections

Biblical themed reflections

Isolation and Trauma

  • The issue of the Eucharist and rages on some social media feeds. Revd Alice Watson writes poignantly about the loss she feels. She writes, ‘My spirituality is centred on receiving God in the Eucharist and I feel strange and empty. Deprived even, of the guilt that comes with having willingly skipped mass. Guilt I can deal with. Gloom is harder to shift.’ Read here.
  • It’s clear that the sustained period of lockdown is both a gift to some and traumatising to others. Some have been reflecting on the idea of being isolated and at home.
  • A great post from Evangelist Canon J John is on being home alone can be found here.
  • Theologian Karen O’Donnell has blogged on doing theology from a place that hurts and is worth a read from the perspective of trauma theology. It reminds us not to rush towards resurrection.
  • Again the reflections produced by tragedy and congregations is helpful is the unfolding of trauma for larger groups like congregations, charities and other organisation.
  • The Methodist church blog on mental health is also worth checking out.
  • The Revd Inderjit Bhogal has reflected on self isolation or sanctuary.
  • The SCM blog provides continues to post in its series of theology in isolation. Florence O’Taylor offers on a view from the middle trauma theology and covid-19, another asks if the current crisis might mean the church rediscovers the importance of the local.
  • There is also thoughtful piece by Dr Sanjee Perera (Cognitive psychologist and Research fellow, of the Edward Cadbury Centre for the Public Understanding of Religion) who shares out of her own experience growing up in Sri Lanka and her Gethsemane moment.
  • There are also interesting reflections on creativity or paralysis from Grant Stewart in South Africa.
  • Emily Scott muses on how our brains don’t work as well during a time of crisis and trauma.
  • Lucy Peppiatt (Principal of Westminster Theological Centre) writes on charismatic Christians and coronavirus reminding us that ‘good habits that can become bad habits when exaggerated in a crisis.’ We shouldn’t underestimate the degree of trauma this will bring to us all.
  • Dr Grace Milton from Queens reflects on how COVID-19 reveals that, ‘many religious ceremonies and rituals have found new centres. Predominantly in two places that have in some traditions been viewed as secondary to the ‘official’ space of a religious building. These are 1) online and 2) the home. Each is finding a renewed importance during this time of crisis.’ Read more here.

Missiological and future church reflections

  • Paul Bradbury asks if this time is a catalyst to consider living more simply – Life that is truly life II – Simplicity.
  • Rachel Mann’s blog asks some simulating questions about the future of the C of E but will resonate with those from many denominations she says. ‘The church which comes out of lockdown will, I think, be digitally promising, physically smaller, more financially precarious and tentative, and potentially more flexible and interesting.’ Read more of her Where do we go from here blog.
  • Some have been working furiously to put books together. A useful free downloadable eBook has been released entitled The Distanced Church: Reflections on Doing Church online. Edited by Heidi Campbell it includes reflections by priests and pastors mostly from the global north.
  • Richard Passmore (Director of Pioneers in the diocese of Carlisle) excellent Sunday Papers blog is worth investigating. Especially his Beyond the Broadcast services to scratch the corona itch asks how participatory the proliferation of online services really are?
  • Missiologist Michael Frost provocatively asks whether coronavirus could set the church back 25 years? Frost suggests that the spike in numbers attending online services may just add to the consumer mentality many have of the church. Frost says, ‘this spike in online attendance will be as illusory as the growth of megachurches last century. It will serve to mask the reality that less and less people are devoted to a wholehearted commitment to Christ, and more and more people see church as an event, a shot in the arm, a convenient uplift that doesn’t challenge their everyday life in any way.’
  • Ruth Valerio (Tearfund) also has an excellent blog on decoding coronavirus.
  • Stephen March (Pioneer based in Leicester) has written on Thin Places and how Celtic spirituality might be a gift at this moment.
  • Jonny Baker from CMS asks that in the move to online church there might be more imagination and less control.
  • Kiwi missiologist Steve Taylor has a short vimeo clip on Reading Luke 10:1-11 in a COVID lockdown.

Being a Good Neighbour

  • Yourneighbour is an excellent website allowing people to connect with a number of resources including a helpline.
  • Another resource for churches dealing with Coronavirus, with three focuses: Prayer, Prepare and Proclaim has been produced by Hope1315.
  • The Methodist Church have launched a great social media called Love Yourself and Love Your Neighbour.
  • An excellent blog on being neighbourly during coronavirus from The Life Beyond the Breadline Research Team at Coventry University. Also a helpful page by MTAG (Mission Theology Advisory group) which includes thoughts on being a good neighbour.

COVID-19 and academic reflections

  • The first online academic conference has been announced for the 17th June led by Professor Neil Messer from the University of Winchester. Titled Christian Theology in the Midst of COVID-19 it aims to be, ‘an attempt to stimulate some initial theological reflection on the global COVID-19 pandemic.’
  • The Practical Theology Journal is also making a call for papers for an issue that will go out towards the end of the year. The deadline for abstracts of no more than 500 words by 31st May 2020. More details and contacts here.

Many thanks for this, Ben. We are all of course missing congregational worship and particularly the eucharist which, while it can be celebrated with the smallest of groups-and even, in some traditions, by a presbyter on his/her own, does call for the assembly of the local church congregation as the manifestation of the one Great Congregation across the globe in that particular time and place. It is surely a time during which, on the principle of economy to which the Orthodox sometimes resort out of pastoral concern, rules and norms are regarded as bendable. I would definitely feel that Alice should use her privilege as a presbyter and celebrate on her own in the present circumstances even if it does not feel quite the same!

Peace in our time1

Alvyn Pettersen

Every day, at morning prayer, an Anglican priest prays a prayer which begins,
Almighty God, the author of peace and lover of concord.

This prayer ends with the traditional ‘Amen’. Now, if that ‘Amen’ is allowed truly to be a ‘yes’ to the God who is the author of peace and lover of concord, anyone who prays that prayer and rounds it off with an ‘Amen’ is committing herself to drinking on ‘God’s shilling’, on the one side of which is stamped the ecumenical legend ‘faith and order’, and, on the other, ‘peace and justice’. Indeed, he is committing himself to an ecumenical task which is not an optional task, to be undertaken now but not always; and she is committing herself to a task in which ‘the author of peace and lover of concord’ is always the ‘senior partner’.
I do not wish to limit how the task of peace-making may be envisaged. I do, however, wish to suggest some ways in which we may wish to shape our task of peace-making.

Not by force

There is a mid-to-late second century letter, written we do not know by whom, to a person of the name of Diognetus. Seeking to explain the Incarnation, the coming of the Prince of Peace amongst us and for us, he wrote,

Did God send [sc. the Designer and Maker of the Universe] … to rule by tyranny, and fear and terror? Far from it. He sent him out of kindness and gentleness … He sent him to save humanity by persuasion and not by compulsion. For compulsion is not God’s way of working.2

Peace then, no matter how much God desires that ‘all may be one’3, it would appear, is to be won by kindness and persuasion, not by an iron rod in a forceful hands. In creating peace in the church and in the world today a critical choice must therefore be made.

Not trapped in the past

In 1966 the ecumenical method to be employed to further peace between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion was outlined. That method was ‘to get behind the opposed and entrenched positions of the past’. It was deliberately to avoid the ‘vocabulary of past polemics, not with the intention of evading the real difficulties that provoked them, but because the emotive associations of such language have often obscured the truth’, Then, having gone ‘behind the habit of thought and expression born and nourished in enmity and controversy’, it was to clothe [any thinking] in a language … expressive of an age which no longer glories in strife’4.

Buildings, like language, also can be eloquent, speaking either welcoming or hostile words. The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles where the Paris Peace Treaty of 1919 was signed is truly magnificent. Yet, in ways it still is expressive of an age which gloried in strife. On the 18th January 1871, not in Berlin but in that Hall in Paris, King Wilhelm 1st of Prussia accepted the crown of the new German Empire and so became Kaiser Wilhelm 1st. In that hall, on that January day, in response to two centuries of French aggression, to the loss of Alsace, conquered by Louis XIV, and to Prussia’s humiliation and occupation by Napoleon after the battle of Jena, it was made abundantly clear that France no longer was the supreme power in Europe. Germany was. France, the one-time victor was now the vanquished. Forty-eight years later, in 1919, in that very same hall, a hall still audibly whispering ‘the opposed and entrenched positions of past controversies’ between France and Germany, the 1919 Paris Peace Treaty, the starting point of a relatively recent Peace Conference organised by the Conference of European Churches [CEC], was settled, or, more accurately, was imposed upon Germany. The 1919 Treaty reversed the 1871 declaration. Germany, the victor of 1871 was now the vanquished; and France, the vanquished of 1871, was now the victor. The Hall of Mirrors was now the witness to the fact that in 1919 not Germany, but France was once again the dominant power in continental Europe. That building, that hall spoke of enmity, of division, of the defeat of one power and the triumph of the other. In short, that hall spoke to Germany and to France less of peace and peace-building and more of past polemics.

In contrast with the late nineteenth – early twentieth century machinations of France and Germany, turn now and reflect upon the mercy of God, as perceived through the eyes of a fourth century bishop of Alexandria. Bishop Athanasius was committed to writing of God’s mercifully making himself known to humanity.5 In summary, he wrote that God made himself known in and through what he had created. Humanity, however, Athanasius observed, chose to exchange ‘the truth about God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creation rather than the Creator’6. What then did God do? What he did not do was simply to tell humanity, more loudly than he had the first time, to pay closer attention to what God had made. Rather, recognising that humanity might learn the truth more readily from a fellow human being, God spoke to humanity through fellow human beings, through the givers of the Law and the prophets. Despite that divine accommodation, humanity, however, again failed to learn God’s truth. Even then, however, God did not wash his hands of humanity. Through a part of creation, which humanity previously had misread, through a creaturely human being, others of whom humanity had ignored, through the Word made flesh, God spoke, and humanity eventually began to listen to the Stranger in their midst.

In contrast with Germany speaking to France in 1871 and France and others speaking to Germany in 1919, when the one spoke to the other in hectoring tones and in a hall echoing with memories of past victories and past defeats, but hardly of peace, God sought and still seeks new ways and fresh contexts in which to accommodate his words of peace to us, to people hardly the most pacific, to win our peace with God. Given such, perhaps, when peace-building now, whether between the churches and ecclesial bodies, or between nations, neither our words should any longer be shaped by past polemics nor the places where we meet to converse be places where the legacy of past divisions are writ large on their walls. Then the gift of peace which God wills for all may the more readily be nurtured.

One world, made to be one by the one God

It is a longstanding and widely recognised assertion within ecumenical circles that the Church, as an earnest, a first fruit of God’s saving work, is called to be both a sign and an instrument of God’s gift of peace to the world. And not just in ecumenical circles such as CEC is this call to share in God’s pacific mission to be heard. For, day by day, Christians of all traditions throughout Europe voice that same call whenever they

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

That daily prayed-for peace-making will be concerned with people; but it should not be concerned exclusively with people. For it should also be concerned with the world in which all people dwell. Yes, it should be mindful that human beings are humans; but humans also are creatures, essentially indistinguishable in their creatureliness from all other creatures. And so, as humans, made in the image of God, it is ours to care for all other creatures; and as fellow creatures, it is ours also to appreciate and to enable the care which the rest of creation extends to us.

Imitating the God who is the author of peace and lover of concord cannot therefore be concerned only with people. Nor can it be concerned with people and creation, but concerned for creation only for the sake of people’s future. For creation is God’s handiwork, to be valued and cherished for that very reason, and not just because it is and will be useful to us and to future generations. Creation is a gift, not simply an utility. Those then who pray, ‘Your kingdom come’, should therefore be concerned with the flourishing of all that ‘Our Father in heaven’ has made and will therefore be concerned with environmental issues.
A peace-maker who does not take God, Creator, Redeemer and Life-Giver, seriously, it therefore would seem, is not worth taking seriously.

© Alvyn Pettersen, Oxford.

1 This paper is an edited version of a paper given at the Conference of European Churches’ Paris Peace Conference 2019.
2 To Diognetus 5.3-4.
3 See John 17:21.
4 ARCIC, Authority in the Church.1.25
5 De Incarnatione
6 Romans 1.25

Editorial conclusions

David Carter

Finally, I will say just a little about two subjects on which I was writing during April. One was a revised article on Pope Francis, into which I have inserted some new material, principally on the 2018 report of the (Roman Catholic) International Theological Commission on Synodality in the Church. As you know, the need to establish truly synodical reflection at all levels of the Church, including the laity, is a key aim of the present pontificate and the Commission have produced an interesting document surveying the historical and theological issues involved. Anglicans will note with gladness the commendation of the Anglican balance in synodality between episcopal leadership and full consultation with clergy and laity (para 36). The report is under the list of reports of the International Theological Commission n the Vatican website.

The other subject was the career and achievement of the Rev. Dr Geoffrey Wainwright, world Methodism’s leading liturgist and ecumenist, who died in March, aged 79. Geoffrey, despite spending just over half his life in the USA, was and remained a minister of the British Connexion. A man of towering scholarly achievement, with already almost two hundred publications to his credit by the time of his receiving a festschrift in 2000, he was one of the leading ecumenists of his time, so much so that when the Faith and Order commission of the WCC needed a small group to analyse all the responses to the Baptism, Ministry, Eucharist document of 1982, the three chosen for the task were Geoffrey, Jean-Marie Tillard and John Zizioulas. Geoffrey had a long and distinguished career at Duke, one of American Methodism’s finest universities.

He was one of the most even handed ecumenists ever, deeply loyal to the Wesleyan theological tradition, whilst always urging his fellow Methodists to learn from others. He was disappointed when efforts he made in co-operation with Bishop Kallistos Ware to initiate a Methodist-Orthodox dialogue met with objections from some Orthodox. He believed strongly that Methodism needed that dialogue and had much it ought to learn from the Orthodox tradition.

Geoffrey played a particularly key role in the international Methodist-Roman Catholic dialogue of which he was a member for twenty-eight years, twenty-five as co-chair. His last two quinquennia saw particular progress in ecclesiology and sacramental theology. Geoffrey paid high tribute to the quality of his Roman Catholic colleagues, particularly to the late Bishop Michael Evans, who shared with Geoffrey the qualities of academic rigour and deep commitment to mutual ecumenical learning.

Geoffrey’s reputation was early established in his doctoral thesis, Eucharist and Eschatology (1971) , very much written in the spirit of the dictum of Maximus the Confessor that, in the eucharist, ‘we make the memorial of the things to come’, as well, of course, of the whole paschal mystery. In 1978, he published his Doxology, a systematic theology based on the worshipping experience of the Church.

As a Methodist ecumenist, a man writing in the spirit of the 1820 call of the Wesleyan Conference to the Methodist people ‘to ever maintain the kind and catholic spirit of primitive Methodism towards all denominations of Christians holding the Head’, Geoffrey ranks with William Shrewsbury, Benjamin Gregory, J.H. Oldham and John Scott Lidgett. As a liturgist, he ranks with Dom Lambert Beauduin, Dom Gregory Dix, Alexander Schmemann and John-Jacques von Allmen. Amongst his immediate mentors, he had a great regard for Raymond George, Nikos Nissiotis and F. J. Leenhardt. He received a rich tradition, which he then enriched further.

I will happily share an electronic copy of my article with any member of the society who would like to read it. E-mail me.

David

Leave a Reply