from breakthrough to breakthrough

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From Breakthrough to Breakthrough Patrick G. Henry Trained to make sense of the past, I am accustomed to citing sources. When I write about the future I discover that the footnote is simultaneously a straitjacket from which I am released and a safety net of which I am deprived. My reflections on the future of the ecumenical movement are, like all prophecy, more hortatory than descriptive. I will say what I would like to see happen. In so doing I implicitly encourage readers to do what they can to make the future turn out this way. In preparing to write this essay I began to list features of the current scene from which I might extrapolate to the future, and the page was filled with random scribblings that quickly spilled over onto other pages. A sampling: - What do the stunning changes in Eastern Europe mean for Christian life world- wide? We who have grown accustomed to thinking ecumenically in terms of first world and third world must now deal, not only with the ideological and linguistic problems inherent in the designations “first” and “third”, but also with the insistent reality of the “second” world. - What if. finally, there is a pan-orthodox council? The past forty years of ecumenism have been forever stamped by the revolution that happened in Rome between 1962 and 1965. An Orthodox council would have a very different dynamic from a Vatican council, but the significance for the other churches might be no less momentous. - How will Christians, both as churches and as individuals, come to terms with the moral, intellectual, and evangelistic issues posed by the spread and deepening of inter-religious dialogue? Specifically, what effect will divergent, even incompat- ible ways of dealing with other religions have on the attitudes of the churches towards each other? - There is no reason to suppose the pace of medical and scientific development will slacken. Will the churches be driven into sharper, more strident disunity by differing assessments of the new technologies that affect the beginning and ending of human life? 0 Dr Henry is executive director of the institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA. 22

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Page 1: From Breakthrough to Breakthrough

From Breakthrough to Breakthrough

Patrick G. Henry

Trained to make sense of the past, I am accustomed to citing sources. When I write about the future I discover that the footnote is simultaneously a straitjacket from which I am released and a safety net of which I am deprived. My reflections on the future of the ecumenical movement are, like all prophecy, more hortatory than descriptive. I will say what I would like to see happen. In so doing I implicitly encourage readers to do what they can to make the future turn out this way.

In preparing to write this essay I began to list features of the current scene from which I might extrapolate to the future, and the page was filled with random scribblings that quickly spilled over onto other pages. A sampling: - What do the stunning changes in Eastern Europe mean for Christian life world-

wide? We who have grown accustomed to thinking ecumenically in terms of first world and third world must now deal, not only with the ideological and linguistic problems inherent in the designations “first” and “third”, but also with the insistent reality of the “second” world.

- What if. finally, there is a pan-orthodox council? The past forty years of ecumenism have been forever stamped by the revolution that happened in Rome between 1962 and 1965. An Orthodox council would have a very different dynamic from a Vatican council, but the significance for the other churches might be no less momentous.

- How will Christians, both as churches and as individuals, come to terms with the moral, intellectual, and evangelistic issues posed by the spread and deepening of inter-religious dialogue? Specifically, what effect will divergent, even incompat- ible ways of dealing with other religions have on the attitudes of the churches towards each other?

- There is no reason to suppose the pace of medical and scientific development will slacken. Will the churches be driven into sharper, more strident disunity by differing assessments of the new technologies that affect the beginning and ending of human life?

0 Dr Henry is executive director of the institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research, Collegeville, Minnesota, USA.

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Looming over all these and dozens of equally perplexing questions are conditions to test the skills of an Amos, a Hosea, a Jeremiah: the planetary ecological crisis, the international debt crisis, the twin despairs of rampant hedonism in those parts of the world that are getting richer and abject poverty elsewhere, even on the underside of wealthy societies. Justice, peace, and the integrity of creation: by insisting they go together the World Council of Churches has spoken the word of the Lord - and has made itself vulnerable to the prophet’s experience of futility.

Breakthrough The motif I find most helpful for thinking about the future of ecumenism is one that

has helped me understand its past: Breakthrough. This, the title of a recent book by my friend and mentor, Robert S. Bilheimer,’ is an especially effective image because it links preparation and surprise. Bilheimer argues that the historical and cultural crisis of the second world war and its aftermath presented conditions in which the ecumenical preparatory work dating back to the beginning of the century could emerge into social and political consciousness. The ecumenical movement broke through to become what Archbishop William Temple called it: “the new fact of our era”.*

Those were exciting, volatile times. Theological debates were fierce, but there was enough common understanding of the substance and ground rules of theology for the participants to recognize agreements and disagreements. There was broad consensus on who mattered - if Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Barth could reach accord, one could plausibly say that agreement between Christians had been achieved. News media paid attention to World Council assemblies. Churches, and the Christians who comprised them, invested themselves in ecumenical vision, hope, activity, struggle.

“Breakthrough” is not a term frequently applied to the current state of ecumenism, at least in the United States. The more common imagery is that of holding pattern, doldrums, or even retreat. The easy thing for Americans to say would be: ecumenism has had its day. But even though fashions come and go with dizzying speed, the new fact of our era is not to be relegated so quickly to the past. Ecumenism has a future, a possibility for new breakthrough. The preparation has been done, the cultural and historical crisis is evident.

One of the peculiarities of the situation in the United States is that ecumenism has never taken deep root. There has been widespread, even sustained, interdenomination- alism, but the challenge of genuine ecumenism - to find our common calling, grounded in our common life in the body of Christ, a challenge that brings institutional prerogatives to judgment - .has been muted by the undeniable success of denomina- tions and their efforts to work together. The new fact of our era has been transformed, in the United States, into an illustration of the general, and generally laudable, American capacity for joint effort to achieve agreed-on goals.

My hopes for the ecumenical movement in general, and for the WCC in particular, are focused on what I know at first hand. How can the WCC help churches and Christians in the United States hear what the Spirit is saying to us? Our confidence that we are already ecumenically advanced, when in fact all we are really adept at is interdenominational activity, makes us especially impervious to genuine ecumenism, so the WCC must be wise as a serpent to devise means for getting through to us.

Once I have said this, though, I acknowledge that the WCC can be only a catalyst and a goad. We Christians in the United States must find our own voice and the

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strength to speak. The next forty years will be, certainly for us in our place and probably for most Christians in most places, the time when the ecumenical becomes local, when the new fact of our era comes home. What we look for, then, is not so much a WCC that is strong in itself, but a WCC skilled at strengthening local clusters of churches in the discovery of their common identity as the body of Christ and their articulation of the meaning of that identity in their own cultures. The WCC is integral to the future of the ecumenical movement - and will be successful to the extent that people, when asked “What is happening in the ecumenical movement?’ reply, not “The WCC is doing this or that,” but “We are doing it, with help from the WCC.”

Because I believe the next forty years of ecumenism will be a time of intense universalAoca1 dialectic, my hopes for the future oscillate between the WCC itself and the churches in the United States. Others in different local situations will undoubtedly look for different kinds of inspiration from Geneva. I see three broad areas in which leadership from the WCC can be of special help to us - three intersections at which breakthrough can happen: power and listening, language and images, and imagination and tradition.

Anyone familiar with the recent history of the WCC will instantly recognize a tilt or bias in the three themes I have named. I am talking more about attitudes than about actions. I am reasserting the concerns of Faith and Order that have sometimes been pushed to the periphery by the urgency of calls to do something immediately. I am urging not an abandonment of social action, but the redressing of a balance. on the grounds that action itself is most authentic and most sustainable when rooted in careful thought the churches have done together.

It is insistently clear these days that ways of thought themselves need to be critically assessed. “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” (Acts 15:28) is a formula rightly suspect, especially when the “us” are all males. But traditions of thought can be investigated without being discarded. An argument’s having a beginning, a middle, and an end is not necessarily an outward and visible sign of an inner ideological warp, nor does the fact that reason has often served the interests of patriarchy mean that reasoned discourse must be rejected for the sake of full humanity. New life for ecumenism requires that people rediscover the skills and reinvent the habit of really listening to one another. In the United States, listening too quickly gives way either to bland acceptance of whatever anyone says (“anything goes”) or to a strident insistence that all speech is manipulative (“the only real agenda is the hidden agenda”).

1. Power and listening The WCC by its charter is a representative body. This means it draws into itself the

life and energy of the churches that are committed to it, but it means also that it draws into itself all the power issues that beset the churches both internally and in their relations with one another. It is inevitable in such a setting that listening will be a guarded listening: I am not only paying attention to what you are saying, but also calculating the effect of what you are saying on the interests of the church or group I represent, to whom I am accountable for what happens here. I too quickly conclude that I know what the other person means, and I too quickly defend myself against what I perceive others claiming that I mean. We have so persuaded ourselves that language

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is a tool of power that we have forgotten how to use language to explore, to be tentative, to try things out. The therapeutic model of human interaction has taught us, rightly, that slips of the tongue, what “we didn’t mean to say”, often reveal more of the truth about us than our more carefully considered statements, but ecumenical discus- sion requires a high tolerance for experimental talk, for “things not meant” that can be withdrawn and not hoarded up by the other side for later attack.

Even more important for new ecumenical vitality than revitalized listening, how- ever, is the restoration of truly mixed groups to listen to each other. I believe the WCC has fallen into the interest-group trap, in which single-issue advocacy gains a hearing, but sometimes without listening to anything else. Themes tend to be organized in a way that attracts people who think alike to the same venue. Indeed, inclusiveness of themes can lead to narrow exclusiveness of discussion. In such conditions conversa- tion may be animated, and fresh insights can occur, but on the whole positions already taken are reinforced, and the chance for breakthrough is stymied. Certain ideological stances are committed to the proposition that other viewpoints have nothing to teach them, but if one writes off others as either invincibly ignorant or invincibly prejudiced, or both, one will consider an institution like the WCC not an agent for breakthrough, but an arena for confrontation in the turf wars that one believes are the fundamental reality of church and world. It is important, even salutary, for us in the United States to be reminded in harsh terms how we look to the rest of the world, but we need the WCC to help us figure how to make a Christian witness in the midst of our wealth and our power, wealth and power that have affected the churches as every other facet of our culture. There is much wisdom in the Faith and Order constitution, which calls the churches out of isolation, not to confrontation but into consultation.

But: even more important than revitalized listening and the restoration of mixed groups is a significant broadening of types of persons involved in ecumenical discussion and action. I am well aware of the WCC’s efforts to include all sorts and conditions of persons in its activities, but there remains in the United States a widespread impression that ecumenical work is the special preserve of the clergy and of a few “ecumenical types” among laypersons. When I go to ecumenical events I always run into the same people. Such gatherings revive the spirit of those of us who are there, but we seem to feel little pressure to “evangelize for ecumenism”. The role of laity in the early years of the WCC was central; a reassertion of lay leadership would send a signal to the churches in the United States that ecumenism is a movement, not a professional specialty. There are, I believe, myriads of laypersons who are ecumenical but do not know it - including many in a group I believe the church& have scandalously disregarded as potential suppliers of tradition, not just consumers of it: children and young people.

One reason these myriads of ecumenical folk do not know they are ecumenical is that ecumenical language has become a specialized jargon without any apparent connection to the world they inhabit. And this is a misfortune, for the WCC is deeply committed to making clear the gospel’s significance for that world. WCC general secretary Emilio Castro recently stated the problem succinctly: “The tendency is to produce papers meant to be read by people who are very much like the people who write them.”’ One way to fight that tendency is to increase the numbers and variety of laypersons involved in producing those papers. Another way to fight the tendency is to pay more attention to the magic of language.

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2. Language and images I am committed professionally, intellectually, and spiritually to the ecumenical

movement; it engages my enthusiasm and my sympathy. So whenever I read an ecumenical text I am predisposed in its favour. And much ecumenical prose puts me to sleep. To some extent the problem is common in any community of discourse, which develops its own catchwords and watches speech patterns once tensile and vigorous become flabby and moribund; but familiarity breeds comfort, and the old ways of speaking survive well beyond their useful life. Ecumenical prose has the added liability of necessary compromise, and vagueness can cover a multitude of irresolvable conflicts. Further, the WCC operates in several languages, and the requirements of translatability tend to flatten out the sharp angles and jagged edges that give any particular language its special vitality. Still, the new fact of our era has for many, and even for me on occasion, been buried in words. In a quite literal sense, the letter has killed what the Spirit has tried to give life to.

The American poet and essayist Annie Dillard says that when we go into church “we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”4 The shock of the gospel requires prophetic action, to be sure, but it also requires language that will grab our attention and not let go. The language cannot be phony or artificial, or clever for the sake of cleverness; it must be grounded in firm and tenacious conviction about the gospel. But far too much Christian language falls far too short of the life and colour and energy and summons of the ecumenical calling.

Some years ago, sharply aware of my own dearth of excitement about the ecumenical texts I was reading but thinking it might just be my own problem, I discovered I was not alone. Along with other participants in a WCC consultation, I had been asked to read the report of an earlier meeting. In group discussion I said it was the sort of prose I could understand while I was reading it, but if five minutes later you asked me to tell you what it was about, I could not. Seldom has anything I said received such widespread and immediate reinforcement. Nearly everyone else in the group admitted that their experience was the same: the substance of the text, as with so many other ecumenical documents, simply evaporated as soon as they had finished reading it - not only was the prose not memorable, but they could not even remember it. And they shared my frustration. We all cared deeply, maybe even desperately, about the themes and concerns of the WCC, and we wanted texts that would fire us with further enthusiasm, not ones that would douse the enthusiasm we already had.

The remarkable success of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry in getting and holding the attention of millions of Christians all over the world is instructive. That book is loaded with theology: fifty years’ worth of high-level discussion. But its theological brilliance and rhetorical brilliance are congruent. Its centre of gravity is not in concepts or in analytical terminology, but in images, most of them drawn from the Bible. The book aims not at the laser-like precision required by ideology, but at the kaleidoscopic richness, variety and movement that are the stuff of life itself. BEM is, like the Bible, a book I keep thinking about after I have read it.

Among the gifts God has given to some Christians is the gift of language, but the gift is often withheld from those who draft documents, and persons who have the gift are seldom encouraged to put it at the service of ecumenism. The future of the

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ecumenical movement will be brighter if the WCC and other agencies make a deliberate effort to enlist in the cause good writers who happen to be Christians. I have often dreamed of getting together half a dozen Christians who are first-rate writers, handing them a particularly soporific piece of ecumenical prose, then locking them in a room and telling them I will not open the door until they have turned what that text is trying to say into language that leaps off the page and into the reader’s mind and heart.

What I am saying here may leap right into the minds and hearts of some readers and ignite fires of anger: “How can you justify reverting to a time when the ecumenical movement played games with theological language while the world was disintegrat- ing? It is distracting enough that we still have to spend so much time and resources producing documents anyway - God save us from trying to do more with words!” Talk can, of course, be a diversion from action, but action can be a diversion from thought, and exclusive attention to either perpetuates one of the most dangerous of heresies both ancient and modem, the sharp distinction between spirit and body. Neither unreflective action nor inactive thought is appropriate to an incamational faith. It can be argued that I am laying too great weight on language; that the problem of Christian rhetoric, if there is such a problem, will be corrected only when the problem of Christian conviction is solved in new and deepened commitment to the gospel and its ecumenical demands. But even if I am overstating the case, it is a case that these days needs overstating. Language and images are never “just” language and images. They shape the world in which we live, they help to set its boundaries and extend its horizons. The recent fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain has reminded us how fortunate we are that Winston Churchill respected words and knew their power, even when few other resources were at hand.

There are so many resources, so many storehouses of concept and image that can be ransacked for the refreshment of ecumenical prose. Early church writers called such raids on cultural wealth “spoiling the Egyptians,” by analogy to the Israelites’ actions at the time of the Exodus. Natural science, especially cosmology, is now a land full of terms that can revive our sense of God’s mystery. Articles I read in Scientific American sometimes seem more charged with the grandeur of God than much of what I read in theological journals. The creative arts, both the dramatic ones and the plastic ones, are to a much larger degree than in the recent past making forays into realms of spirituality, even, on occasion, God-talk. Composers are eager for commissions to create sacred works. Poets are engaged in their customary task of finding unfamiliar words to say familiar things. And the arts everywhere are gaining new energy from cross-cultural, cross-class, and cross-gender encounter. The WCC is the ideal agent for channelling the flood of new forms of beauty and meaning into the lives of Christians all over the world. There have been great ages of church patronage of the arts; the next forty years could see a new twist on an old tradition if the churches Fogether, ecumenically, act on the conviction that the muses are agents of the Holy Spirit.

Those of us who have inherited our Christianity from the Western, Latin history of the church are predisposed to speech, and to a particular obsession with analytical argument. In one way or another we acknowledge the ideal of clarity classically set forth in the arguments of Thomas Aquinas. But even Thomas wrote hymns to express the truths that lay outside of and beyond his system. He believed, and so do I, that enlightenment comes through careful, ordered, step-by-step attention to detail and

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connection, but he would have recognized, too, the significance of the title of a recent book by Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Icon.5

The religious and theological knowing, the illumination, that comes to the Orthodox when in the presence of icons, remains, even after decades of ecumenical discussion, virtually incomprehensible to most Western Christians, partly because we Westerners keep trying to understand that knowing in terms of our own habits of knowing. If Ugolnik’s message really gets through to us, we will find ourselves disoriented by the combined shock of traditional icon worship and the piety of contemporary second-world Christians, but I believe such a shock will do wonders for our language and our spirit. If the last forty years have seen the rediscovery of each other by the Catholic and Protestant traditions of the West, the next forty years can be the rediscovery of each other by West and East.

3. Imagination and tradition A turning point in the past forty years of ecumenism was the development of the

distinction between Tradition and traditions. Of course there was never unanimity on just what constituted the capital-T “Tradition”, but there was sufficient agreement about the nature of historical development to make the concept itself an aid to discussion. These days there is grave suspicion of the notion of capital-T Tradition. Various critiques, pre-eminently feminist but also liberationist and deconstructionist, have alerted everyone to the suppressions, repressions, enforced silences, distortions that characterize all our cultural, religious, and social traditions, so that much is missing even from “Tradition” conceived very broadly. The careful work of biblical and historical scholars may eventually unearth enough sounds from the hitherto unheard voices so that we can speak meaningfully of the “Tradition of Abraham and Sarah, of Paul and Phoebe, of Bernard and Hildegard, of Tillich and Thurman”, but for now and the next forty years, talk of “Tradition” as a foil for “traditions” will probably hinder rather than help discussion.

And this is not all loss. There has been in ecumenism, as in virtually every feature of contemporary life, an enormous inflation of themes and of rhetoric, so that something that can claim only to be a fact hardly merits our attention. Italics, exclamation points, superlatives tend to become the norm rather than the exception. There is attributed to a great twentieth-century architect (I cannot even let him be just an architect; I have to single him out as “great”), Mies van der Rohe, a theological observation we would do well to heed: “God is in the details.” God is in the big picture, too, but ecumenical talk has concentrated so much on the big picture that laypersons, whose life is mostly in details, have doubted the significance or the weight of their own experience of God in the details. I suspect that if the intensity of ecumenical claims were lowered, there would be a corresponding increase in the seriousness with which they are taken. Perhaps it is time to take a breather from the quest for Tradition and simply look together at traditions. I have been in many ecumenical discussions in the United States in which encouraging people to talk about God in the details of their lives releases them from the bondage of “ecumenical thoughts are too high for me, I cannot attain to them”.

This suggestion/hope for the future really circles back to the first theme of listening, and of listening without a hidden agenda. If we are too quickly concerned to detect the Tradition in the variety of voices we are hearing, we may miss the chance to imagine something new. And imagining something new does not require a break with

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everything that has been. Indeed, such imagining can be helped by renewed attention to the past, as Jewish thought has demonstrated over and over again.

During my years of teaching religion courses to undergraduates I saw how richly the Jewish students’ sense of their religious past endowed them with resources for dealing with the present and imagining the future. Apart from the occasional smattering of familiarity with parts of the Bible, the Christian students had no access to a comparable treasure. Their sense of the Christian past was a blank, so they figured they had to invent Christianity from scratch. Moreover, because they suspected the entire weight of the faith rested on them, the Christian students tended to be rather solemn about religious matters, while the Jews, well aware how many slips, false starts, turnabouts there have been in their tradition, could on occasion be lighthearted and humorous about it. Most Christian ecumenical texts I read are singularly lacking in the saving grace of humour. I hope that in the coming decades we will laugh at ourselves more.

One of the richest potentials for the intersection of imagination and traditions is in a new burst of saints’ lives. It would of course be wonderful if many new saints appeared among us, but that is only to be hoped for, not predicted. What I refer to is biographical accounts of persons who have lived the faith in exemplary ways. The trick is to make sanctity interesting. Many saints’ lives from previous centuries are formulaic, and give the impression of goodness so intense as to be intolerably dull. But there are many saints’ lives that are rounded, and there is plenty of challenge to our best writers in a project of lives of saints, both those who lived long ago and those who are among us now.

This could be of immense ecumenical significance, for it could alert us to each other’s saints. If I know your doctrines and your practices, I know a lot, but if I do not know who your saints are and why their stories stir you to your depths, I may have missed the most important thing I need to know about you if my faith is to be upbuilt by yours. Mistaking interdenominationalism for ecumenism, we in the United States have been singularly uninterested in receiving these rich gifts from one another. If I start receiving these gifts, I must be hesitant to measure your saints against the criteria of sanctity that are portrayed in my saints. Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “Revela- tion”, in which the riffraff, much to Mrs Turpin’s surprise, horror and chagrin, enter heaven before she and her kind do, is an instructive ecumenical text - and one that, incidentally, is memorable.

Without imagination there is no breakthrough. The “Principle of the Dangerous Precedent”, formulated decades ago by F.M. Cornford, is a description of the way we human beings function: “Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.”* The ecumenical future is bright to the extent that the Christian imagination is set free from shackles of convention. Convention is not the same thing as tradition; imagination needs tradition as substance and guide, but there must be the possibility of doing something for the first time.

My strongest hope for the next forty years of ecumenism is that the Christian imagination will accomplish what the ecumenical pioneers have not lived to see: Christians coming together to the table of the Lord. There are, I know, profound theological arguments for delaying eucharistic sharing until other elements of division are worked out. But with a few bold acts of imagination those arguments could appear

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- what they are already in the considered judgment of millions of committed and thoughtful Christian laypersons - antiquated. On eucharistic hospitality church officials and theologians could learn from a phrase often seen on T-shirts: “I am their leader, and I must run to catch up with them.”

Surprise The seventh assembly of the WCC, which inaugurates the second forty years, offers in

its theme a prayer to the Holy Spirit and, tacitly, a strong assertion of the Trinitarian foundation of the Council’s life. All divine actions are those of all the Persons, but the Spirit has a special claim on surprise. I can acknowledge the inspiration of Acts 15:28 - “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us” - and at the same time think the inspiration we in the United States need is more often in the form, “while it has not seemed good to us, the Holy Spirit thinks otherwise.” We cannot create surprise; by definition it catches us off-guard. But we can be ready for it. We can make our own the motto of John R. Mott, who did more than anyone else to prepare the way for the founding of the WCC: “Organize as if there is no prayer; pray as if there is no organi~ation.”~

Breakthrough has happened, and can happen again. We Christians in the United States must find our own way and our own voice, but thank God the WCC stands with us and over against us to challenge and help us. There are millions of Christians who are speaking ecumenism but do not know it, like Molikre’s bourgeois gentilhomme, M. Jourdain, who thought prose some esoteric preserve of the learned, and was astonished to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life. By fresh initiatives of listening and real belief in the power of servanthood, with new, more concrete language and images, and with imagination put to work on tradition for the sake of present and future, we whose vocation is ecumenism can signal to others whose vocation is still hidden that there is a movement and it isfor them. They will then know the surprise of the Spirit, and when they bring their gifts into the movement, we, who believe God is a God of surprises, will be reminded, as was the generation that first witnessed the new fact of our era, that God truly is doing a new thing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.

NOTES

’ Robert S. Bilheimer, Breakthrough: T%e Emergence of the Ecumenical Tradition, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, and Geneva, WCC, 1989.

’From Temple’s sermon at his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1942; cited in Bilheimer, Breakthrough, p.8. “Looking back, looking ahead...”, in And So Set Up Signs ... The World Council of Churches’ First 40 Years, Geneva, WCC, 1988, p.72. Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole’’, in her Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounrers, New York, Harper & Row, 1982) p.40. ’ Anthony Ugolnik, The Illuminating Iron, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1989.

6Like many aphorisms, this one has an elusive history. Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1985), p.281, writes as follows: “The aphorism, ‘God is in the details’, has been endlessly attributed to Mies, though 1 have found no one who ever heard him say it. In Meaning in rhe Visual Arts (New York, 1955, p.5). Erwin Panofsky quotes Flaubert: ’Le bon Dieu est dans le detail.’ Mies may have read Panofsky - or even Flaubert - but there is no proof of that either.” ’ Flannery O’Connor, “Revelation”, in The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972, pp.488-509.

* F M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Arademica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician, Cambridge, Bowes & Bowes, 1908, p.15. Cited in Bilheimer, Breakthrough. p.4.

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