Brian Hamilton-Vise

Ecumenism and Ecclesial Continuity

Most all of Halden’s recent posts on ecumenism have seemed to afford an unassailable permanence to the Catholic Church: the true and continuous tradition, the default church, whose core ecclesiological status was never in question but only in need of some exterior polish. ‘Protestants,’ then, need continually to justify their separate existence, for we have only stepped outside the house to make some particular point–and if that point has been heard, we should go back inside. This account assumes an essential discontinuity (a discontinuity of essence) between every tradition stemming from the Reformation and the tradition that came beforehand. It also assumes particular understanding of ecclesial continuity that disallows the possibility of Catholic apostasy.

I’m not personally ready to argue that the Catholic Church is, or ever was, apostate. But the possibility is formally open, and it’s not foreign to the early reformers. I admit some ignorance on some of the reformers’ final take on the ecclesial status of the Catholic Church, but it’s certainly no novel proposition that she had fundamentally lost sight of the gospel, that she had, as it were, fallen from grace. The reformers weren’t storming out of the house in protest; they were coming to realize that the house they were in was no longer the house of God. On the contrary: popular imagery had the Catholic Church as the whore of Babylon. At least some of the reformers eventually saw themselves as rescuing the gospel from silent but steady subversion–which is part of the reason for questioning the strictly normative role of tradition.

The accusation is incredibly distasteful to us now, perhaps rightly. My only point is that there’s still a serious argument to be had here. At issue in the ecumenical conversation is not whether historical continuity is necessary or not; it is what kind of ecclesial continuity is important, or where that continuity is to be sought. Is it in the succession of bishops? Is it in a visible suffering community, as Anabaptist martyrologies traced it since the time of Christ? Is it in the recognizeable and accountable preaching of the Word? The question of continuity is indeed a crucial one–one which the Catholics and the Orthodox have attended to carefully where other traditions have not. But the question must remain open for ecumenical conversation, which entails forgoing the assumption that the Catholic Church is automatically continuous in the proper sense. Just as the Catholic Church can maintain its open invitation ‘home,’ traditions taking their cues from the reformers can maintain a criticism that calls Catholic ecclesiality into question, even on the basis of continuity itself.

4 October 2007 | Comments (0)
Tags: Ecclesiology, Ecumenism, Tradition