Ecumenical Reception: Understanding and Challenges

The Challenge of Ecumenical Reception

One of the most important ideas for understanding modern ecumenism is reception. This idea, which comes from literary theory, became popular towards the end of the 20th century as a way to describe the issues that arise when churches interact. Reception, in a good way, is when churches accept each other. This usually means that each church accepts official ecumenical documents, dialogue reports, recommendations, joint declarations, etc.

Reception becomes an issue when churches fail to receive each other. The concept of reception is important because it shows how successful ecumenism is. The purpose of ecumenism is for churches to truly accept each other, so a failure of reception means that ecumenism has not fully happened. Ecumenist William G. Rush calls reception one of the most important issues for churches in the modern ecumenical movement.

Rush believes that focusing on reception will encourage churches to work towards full visible Christian unity. Rush writes that the more genuine ecumenical reception takes place among divided churches, the more the ecumenical movement can regain its power. Ecumenical reception can only happen when basic differences are identified and successfully resolved by churches in dialogue, which removes barriers and allows churches to truly accept each other.

Unresolved ecumenical basic differences cause nonreception, which is the inability or refusal of churches to accept each other because of differences in creed, confession, worship, spirituality, and church polity. The ecumenical impulse will only be satisfied when these challenges are properly understood and addressed in dialogues.

Reception Theory in Ecumenical Perspective

First, we need to define ecumenical reception, or what the concept of reception means in the ecumenical context. Then, we will focus on two important modes of reception: Reception as Literary Theory and Receiving Texts.

Reception as Literary Theory: Receiving Texts

Reception theory became a significant method for studying texts in late 20th-century literary criticism. It developed as a response to prevailing approaches to literature that corresponded to positivist historicism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the scientific study of history was dominated by the idea that historians could objectively access facts about the past.

During this time, empiricism and historicism were also used to analyze texts. To understand a literary work, one had to accurately reconstruct the social, cultural, religious, economic, and political context in which it was created and published. This understanding of the relationship between text, history, and interpreter also influenced the study of sacred literature, especially the Christian Bible.

Reception theory offers a more nuanced approach to text and history by emphasizing the importance of readers in creating a text's meaning. Reception theory assumes that the meaning of a text is not fixed when it is written and published, but that readers play an active role in creating meaning as they engage with the work from their own perspectives. Hans Robert Jauss, a literary theorist, says that a literary work is not an object that stands by itself and offers the same view to each reader. Instead, it is like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonance among its readers, freeing the text from the material of the words and bringing it to a contemporary existence.

This dialogical character of the literary work also explains why philosophical understanding can only exist in perpetual confrontation with the text and cannot be reduced to a knowledge of facts. Joust's statements reject historical critical literary analysis and urge an openness to the text's readers, which frees the text from its physical form. Meaning and significance are carried forward from the author and original readers in an ongoing dialogue of reading and reception.

Reception and the Church's Apostolicity: Receiving the Christian Tradition

When applied to literary theory, the concept of reception highlights the fact that literary works have evolving histories of readers and that the search for meaning involves paying attention to the transmission of text over time through interpretive communities. Similarly, some scholars have identified a mode of reception as the basis of the Christian faith through history. The faith itself travels from generation to generation, changing or developing as it is received anew.

G. R. Evans says that this mode of reception, the reception of the Christian tradition, is a continuing activity. It is not enough to simply express the faith in the same words century after century because language and cultures change. There must be new sets of words because the underlying attitudes that form the context of thought and assumptions also change.

Evans describes the tension in the reception of tradition: the faith evolves, expanding and changing as it moves forward in time and is translated for new cultures, but it is also firmly anchored in the past, a settled and essentially unchanging thing. The idea of the reception of the tradition takes account of both the evolutionary and the permanent aspects of faith's development. What has already been received determines what will be received. Christianity's faith and practice are firmly rooted even while being pulled forward and received in an ever-changing context.

The ongoing task of receiving the tradition is marked by developing continuity stretching from the apostolic age to the present and into the future. This brings us to the ancient confession of the church's apostolicity: "I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church," as the Nicene Creed states. Apostolicity encompasses the entire continuity of teachings, texts, and practices that originated in nascent Christianity and continues to be received by the church in every age.

J. M. R. Tillard asserts that apostolic continuity includes apostolic succession, continuity of teaching of the faith, continuity of sacramental life, continuity of the inspiration of mission, continuity of the preservation of the community in the preferential option for the poor, continuity of solidarity with other churches, and continuity in the faithful transmission of what has been received from the apostles. Tillard echoes Yves Congar's definition of tradition as the communication of the entire heritage of the apostles, which is expressed in the church by such monuments of tradition as holy scripture, the conciliar decrees, the creeds, and the liturgies. Congar's point is that the apostolicity of the church tarries through time in concrete forms such as teachings, texts, and practices that can be passed along and received in every age.

Ecumenical Reception

From these insights into two common employments of the concept of reception, we can isolate its meaning in the ecumenical situation. Ecumenical reception encapsulates a church's sanction and assimilation of a dialogue's recommendations for Christian faith and action as an effort on the way toward the mutual reception of churches by each other. We will summarize these two aspects of ecumenical reception immediately below, providing further comments in the next section in our analysis of the process of reception.

Documentary Ecumenical Reception: Receiving the Word of the Dialogues

Ecumenical reception is a particular form of the literary process of the reception of texts. However, the stakes are potentially much higher than in the reception that occurs when a classic work of literature is received by its readers because certain texts are produced and hopefully received for the sake of Christian unity. Churches that recognize the ecumenical imperative will eventually enter into formal dialogue with each other, usually to address issues of theological disagreement between them.

Bilateral dialogues produce reports, joint ecumenical declarations, and official recommendations, which together constitute the textual deposit of modern ecumenism. Such texts are never ends in themselves but rather serve the unity of the church only insofar as they are officially received by the dialoguing churches. The churches serve as readers of ecumenical texts, as interpretive communities tasked with the reception of a deposit of literature.

Documentary ecumenical reception refers to the reading of ecumenical texts by the churches and to the various nexus of action churches undertake to integrate the theology and practice detailed in dialogue documents. When churches are asked to receive a document produced by a dialogue, they must test the extent to which they recognize the apostolic faith in the document's assertions and recommendations. Documentary perception then has its context within the ongoing trajectory of the reception of tradition.

Rush defines documentary reception as all phases and aspects of an ongoing process by which a church under the guidance of God's spirit makes the result of a bilateral or multilateral conversation a part of its faith and life because the results are seen in conformity with the teachings of Christ and the apostolic community, that is, the gospel as witnessed in scripture. Dialogue reports typically include concrete statements of Christian doctrine, and the governing bodies and voting members of the dialoguing churches must affirm or deny the stated theological positions by matching claims against their understanding of the apostolic faith.

The churches must also decide whether specific recommended actions correspond to the claims to doctrinal consensus. If all goes well and the churches officially ratify a document, efforts will be made to assimilate positions and recommendations into faith, practice, and polity. Often, official reports are received on a tentative basis with responding recommendations that more work must be done by the dialogue commissions, perhaps in other areas of disagreement. In other instances, the report becomes an ecumenical watershed, establishing full communion as churches officially receive it. An example of this is the Leuenberg Concord, drafted and originally ratified in 1973, which has since been the founding document of the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe.

The document consists of a brief preamble outlining the historical situation of Protestant divisions and the imperative of ecumenical fellowship and 11 summary of consensus over document doctrine and a sketch of specific practical, doxological, and church political recommendations. Since its publication, over 100 European Protestant churches have studied and ratified the agreement, receiving its theology and recommendations and entering into full communion partnerships with other CPCE churches.

Mutual Ecclesial Reception: Churches Receiving Each Other

The story of the Leuenberg Concord is an example of successful ecumenical reception because documentary reception is a means to the end of full communion. The goal of ecumenical reception is the mutual reception of the dialogue in churches. The ecumenical impulse is satisfied only when churches formally recognize each other, that is, when they acknowledge each other as churches. Mutual ecclesial reception involves the integration of theology and practice.

In the case of the Leuenberg Concord, CPCE churches participate in the mutual exchange of ministries and sharing of common worship services and practices. CPCE churches affirm a common pulpit and table fellowship despite nuanced abiding differences in the theology of preaching and in sacramental theology.

While the churches remain distinct in name and in secondary aspects of faith and practice, the agreement calls them to fully receive each other in the fellowship of the one church. As Leuenberg 34 puts it, "the participating churches are convinced that together they participate in the one church of Jesus Christ, and that the Lord frees them for and calls them to common service."

The Process of Ecumenical Reception

Ecumenical reception occurs as dialogue and churches receive ecumenical texts for the sake of receiving each other. The process of reception unfolds in several distinct phases from its origins in the ecumenical impulse to the full communion between dialogue and churches. The labor that animates the modern ecumenical movement commenced when churches, long divided by mutually exclusive confessional and theological positions and conflicts in polities, discovered the need to address the problem of historic Christian divisions for the sake of the common burden of evangelization.

Faced with the missionary imperative, the churches acknowledge each other in new ways and begin to form cooperative service and worship networks that extend across old boundaries. Formal structures of dialogue emerged for addressing church-dividing issues, newly conceived as problems that must be resolved for the sake of Christian unity. The dialogues and pan-ecumenical conciliar organizations such as Faith and Order publish the results of their labor in official reports, which in turn are passed along to governing bodies of participating churches and federations for ratification and assimilation and, where necessary, for recommendations for further dialogical work on the way to unity.

The goal of the arduous work of ecumenism is the sewing up of fractures, the healing of the divisions between Christians, that is, the full communion of the churches. Modern ecumenism is itself a phenomenon of reception, a complex ongoing development during which an idea, the ecumenical impulse, is gradually being received by the Christian churches.

While several itineraries for ecumenical reception have been proposed, scholars generally agree that the full process of reception begins when churches acknowledge the problem of Christian division and ends when two or more dialoguing churches reach full communion. Rush offers a six-phase sketch of this journey from acknowledgment to commission, which we will largely follow.

Acknowledgment of the Ecumenical Imperative

Rush employs the term "coexistence" to encapsulate the initial stirrings of ecumenical reception and the early pains in response to the scandal of disunity long before any dialogue is conceived. This occurs when the churches break out of their isolation and when a particular church begins to perceive and acknowledge that it is neither the sole bearer of Christian truth nor the only witness to Christian faith. The origins of the process of ecumenical reception lie in the recognition that the historic Christian divisions are incompatible with the message of the gospel and an affront to the faith's public witness.

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In the fourth gospel's account of the first Holy Thursday, Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane that his disciples 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." When this prayer becomes an imperative for divided churches to strive for greater unity, it is a sign that ecumenical reception has entered the commencing phase.

An example of the initial stirrings of ecumenical reception is the publication of Unitatis redintegratio (UR), Vatican II's decree on ecumenism, in 1964. Before the council, the Catholic Church was essentially disinterested in formal participation in the ecumenical movement. By mid-century, however, Catholic dispositions towards ecumenism were changing at the clerical, academic, and lay levels.

UR encapsulates the newly emerging Catholic ecumenical sensibilities, stressing the mandate of the quest for unity. UR 1 summarizes the ecumenical imperative: "Christ the Lord founded one church and one church only. However, many Christian communions present themselves to men as the true inheritors of Jesus Christ. All indeed profess to be followers of the Lord, but differ in mind and go their different ways, as if Christ himself were divided. Such division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalizes the world, and damages the holy cause of preaching the gospel to every creature."

While this call to Christian unity was not unprecedented in the Catholic tradition, the concrete and clear expression of the ecumenical mandate in a conciliar statement was a watershed moment in modern ecumenism. All trajectories of ecumenical reception involving the Catholic Church originate in UR. Cardinal Walter Kasper summarizes it: "UR formally brought the Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement and set in motion a series of ecumenical dialogues on the international level, but also on the regional and local levels." The document stands as the inception of many decades of official international ecumenical work involving Catholics, which has produced a rich and significant deposit of reports, declarations, and commendations cooperation.

Cooperation

Once dialogue in churches acknowledge the imperative to work for greater unity between them, there follows a period of structured cooperation. Typical expressions of cooperative ecumenical work orbit around the church's public responsibilities. At the origins of the modern ecumenical story are the global missionary enterprises of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Edinburgh 1910 symbolizes the recognition that the churches must address the scandal of divisions for the sake of the common missionary imperative of the Christian gospel.

The second phase of ecumenical reception usually involves joint outreach, evangelistic and social service labors, and coordinated projects aimed at establishing political and economic justice. Alongside these concrete missionary activities, this phase of reception is often marked by limited forms of common prayer and study. An incipient form of spiritual ecumenism emerges, a conversion of heart and mind to the imperative of unity that gives way for prayer, Christian unity, ecumenical bible study, grassroots dialogue over divisions, and eventually joint services of worship. When once-isolated churches are moved by the ecumenical imperative to work, serve, pray, learn, and even worship together, ecumenical reception is well underway.

Formal Dialogue

Two or more churches that recognize the need to work for greater unity between them and develop structures for cooperation will enter into formal dialogues with each other. Conversations over basic church-dividing issues will have emerged in various contexts of cooperation. Formal ecumenical dialogue takes these unofficial and often spontaneous conversations a step further.

Rush puts it, "genuine dialogue is based on separated churches in varying degrees, acknowledging one another as church, recognizing the positive contributions of one another to Christianity, and identifying specific obstacles to greater unity and understanding." Formal ecumenical dialogues seek to spell out the areas of consensus already in existence between the dialoguing churches and to articulate abiding disagreements.

Formal ecumenical dialogue finds the dialoguing churches taking stock of the history, present state, and future prospects of relations between them, all in the hope that sober reflection on such matters will eventually lead to the establishment of full communion. Formal ecumenical dialogue requires that the dialoguing churches be well represented in the various phases of discussion because ecumenical dialogues are, in fact, dialogues. Work is typically carried out by a small team consisting of competent representatives from each dialoguing church and takes place in an environment well suited to conversation.

Dialogue members usually possess academic expertise in theology and or church history as the detailed and often intense discussions of basic consensus and basic differences demand a thorough familiarity with doctrine and its developments. Dialogue participants are expected to faithfully and accurately embody the faith and practices of their respective traditions. Senior and junior members populate the group as the need for seasoned expertise and experience is balanced with the imperative of developing experts in training for the sake of future phases of ecumenical work.

Once a formal dialogue is initiated by the governing bodies of the dialogue in church and participating experts are appointed to the committee or working group, the specific discussion points are identified, and a timeframe for the dialogue is established. Dialogue meetings consist of research-generated paper presentations on the topics at hand, punctuated by intervals of formal and informal conversation. The tone is friendly, encouraging a free exchange of ideas and expressions of concerns.

Participants work to produce preliminary reports for the governing bodies of their respective churches with the goal of publishing official documentation of researched consensus and abiding disagreements once the phase of the dialogue has concluded. Formal dialogue is a significant indicator that the process of ecumenical reception is well underway because it concretizes nebulous conversations and activities that mark the incipient phases of reception by offering organized means for identifying and addressing consensus and differences.

It is critical to conceive formal dialogue as a step in the process of ecumenical reception rather than an end in itself. Dialogue has been and will continue to be a source of frustration and anxiety when its provisional character is deemphasized. Robert Jemson comments on the current frustration of ecumenical dialogue, despite the passion and great learning, the restoration of unity has only been achieved between groups whose separation was never fixed. Across the actual great divides, true Churchly fellowship has come to no nearer.

Lukas Weisser traces that disappointment back to a growing discrepancy between the far-reaching agreement which has been reached in the dialogues and the everyday situation in the churches. Angelo Maffees points to the fact that some ecumenists have urged that we reconceive formal dialogue as an ongoing process, perhaps even a penultimate end of the ecumenical impulse. Dialogue becomes a cul-de-sac of conversation made possible by the imperative of unity, in which discussions of some differences endlessly give way to new formal dialogues concerning others.

Buffice reminds us that such work alone is not able to establish full communion. Ecumenism that stalls at the level of the dialogues is not true ecumenism because it circumvents the reception process. Steps must be taken to address the question of the reception of the ecumenical consensus by untying the knot between the activities of the commissions that conduct dialogue and the exercise of the responsibility of the churches that have conferred the mandate for dialogue.

Documentation

Official dialogue reports, declarations, and recommendations play a crucial role in untying knots and serve as reminders of the preliminary character of formal dialogue. Ecumenical documentation signifies that some phase of the dialogue between churches has reached a conclusion, that certain consensus has been established, and that areas in need of future work have become transparent.

In a typical report, the Ecumenical working group or dialogue commission summarizes the history, methods, and specific findings of the dialogue and usually includes specific commentations for the governing bodies of the participating churches to consider and hopefully enact. Dialogue documents demand a nuanced agenda for hermeneutics in order to be accounted for properly. They are not binding, and we must take care not to read them in the same way as we do creeds and confessions, even though they often appear in codified form and contain summaries of the doctrines under discussion. Furthermore, any specific commendations they contain are well-founded suggestions for ecumenical next steps, and the governing bodies of participating churches may ratify, that is, receive them for their recommendations to have force.

A vivid example of the specific literary character of ecumenical documents can be found in the case of Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry or BEM, the World Council of Churches report in 1982. The document reports the findings of the Lima Commission, summarizing various consensus in the areas of sacramental theology and church polity that had emerged over the years in the context of the WCC's work and concludes with recommendations of how WCC member churches can forge new communions with one another on the basis of the new-found agreements over doctrine and practice.

As a commission report, BEM lacks binding force, and the WCC member churches must themselves consider BEM's codification of the REACH consensus and its recommendations for further actions toward communion. The complex process of reaction, reception in some instances, and rejection in others is documented in no fewer than six volumes of official responses to BEM. The case of BEM illustrates that official reports are best seen as milestones along the way toward full communion. Even official declarations such as the Joint Declaration of Doctrine on Justification signed in 1999 by officials of governing bodies of the dialoguing churches, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and the Lutheran World Federation, poses this nonbinding and preliminary character. All such documents indicate that significant ecumenical processes have been made in the quest for full communion, but here the process of reception is yet incomplete.

Partial or Preliminary Reception

Documentation unfolds into a distinct, highly significant, complicated phase of ecumenical reception. Once an official report is published and presented to the participating churches, the governing bodies of those churches must determine how and what ends the report and its recommendations might be ratified and assimilated.

The literature typically encapsulates this phase as partial or preliminary reception, the qualifiers of which must be explained since they could appear to indicate ecumenical failure. On the contrary, partial or preliminary reception signifies that an ecumenical endeavor has reached an advanced stage since, after all, a formal dialogue or one of its phases has run its course, and its findings documented and presented to the churches. At this stage, the dialogue has yet to establish the desired unity between the churches. Hence, at this point, reception is partial and preliminary as a necessary penultimate step leading up to communion.

Dialogue documents highlight newfound consensus and suggest possibilities for future work on the way to unity. Each church participating in the dialogue must decide how to officially respond both to the theology of the text and to its call for action. Rush puts it, "the official response of a participating church serves as a good indicator of how the process is going to proceed. On the one hand, a positive response is likely to result in efforts to put the results of a dialogue into practice. On the other, a negative or lukewarm response may delay or even prevent further ecumenical reception."

Of course, an initial negative response need not be permanent and with time and further reflection. But more often than not, negative responses to a report result from disagreements over doctrine among members of a participating church. One problem that leads to partial reception is simply that any given church's or communist theology and practices are open to interpretation of debate.

Around that time of the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification or the JDDJ, theologians of several Lutheran World Federation member churches publicly objected to the document and thus urged the churches to not receive it, on the basis that it putatively does not accurately encapsulate Lutheran teaching on justification. The dispute illustrates that Lutherans disagree among themselves on what constitutes Lutheran tradition, theology, and practice. Similarly, the publications of several key documents of the evangelicals and Catholics together commissioned set off firestorms of protest from these evangelicals who feared that the report does not present true evangelical doctrine.

At stake in such debates is, on the one hand, the nature of and development of particular streams of Christian theology, and on the other, the problem of representation and modern ecumenism. Occasionally, an internal dispute over doctrine reverberates at the level of recommended practice. For example, the Call to Common Mission Agreement established communion between the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church claims a sweeping consensus between the churches on sacramental theology and the doctrine of ministry and recommends that the churches acknowledge the legitimacy of each other's baptisms and ordinations. However, internal disputes on both sides over the sacraments and ordination resulted in particular factions of Episcopalians and Lutherans rejecting CCM's theology and refusing to participate in its call for the mutual exchange of service and ministry.

New denominations formed directly due to the negative responses to CCM, proving that ecumenical work occasionally refines old disagreements such that new Christian divisions emerge. The ecumenical imperative encompasses a winnowing process in which holdout factions excuse themselves from the work of Christian unity in due course, as the great crevices in Christianity's base work draw together, smaller cracks inevitably appear as the structure of the faith resettles. If all goes well, the negative of hesitant responses to a report give way to a positive or constructive reaction.

Sometimes, the participating churches affirm the results of a dialogue as a preliminary step on the way toward communion and char out new phases of conversation for the dialogue commission, for instance, several phases of the dialogue of the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission have been received by participating churches as milestones towards unity even though it is widely acknowledged by both parties that a difference between them over the ordination of women abides.

Similar situations marks the JDDJ, where the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation have officially affirmed the work of the dialogue by ratifying its results, even though significant differences between Catholics and Lutherans remain. Partial reception is affirmed in light of the urgency for ongoing work on abiding disagreements. Other times, once internal debates over doctrine and practice have subsided and holdout groups have transpired, the participating churches will move to put into effect the dialogue's recommendations. If full communion has been the target of the dialogue from the start, the churches will work to establish it throughout the difficult phase of partial reception.