Two weeks ago, several Anglo-Catholics, including the Anglican Bishop of Fulham Jonathan Baker and the retired Bishop of Beverly Glyn Webster, went to the Vatican for an ecumenical conference and retreat. While there, they celebrated an Anglican service in St. John Lateran Cathedral Basilica, the Pope's own cathedral and the highest-ranking church building in the Catholic faith. In response to the justified outrage at this sacrilege, the Vatican apologized and blamed communication issues for this occurrence, immediately before officially announcing that the Patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox Church, which is in schism with Rome, would be doing the same in May.
Ever since the Second Vatican Council concluded, the air in the Church has been filled with the fog of calls for deeper ecumenism. In fact, two conciliar documents, Unitatis redintegratio, and Nostra aetate, call for improved ecumenical relationships with non-Catholic Christian sects, as well as with non-Christian religions broadly speaking.
While the desire to reach out to the non-believer has been the central goal of Christianity since the Great Commission, the approach to ecumenism that we've seen since the Council seems, at times, to misunderstand the end of ecumenism, if it doesn't simply misunderstand what true ecumenism is in the first place. We can see this in Pope St. John Paul II's infamous joint Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi and in Pope Francis' more infamous Abu Dhabi Document on Human Fraternity. All of this leads to the same conclusion: post-conciliar Catholicism in particular, and contemporary Christianity in general, have been taken in by a false ecumenism, which is directly opposed to true ecumenism in both tactic and goal.
False Ecumenism
To address the issue, we first need to identify what this false ecumenism is. This is not hard to do: just ask any random pastor (excepting any traditionalist of any sect), and he'll tell you exactly what ecumenism is: ecumenism is the promotion or goal of unity among the different Christian sects and groups. The idea is that, eventually, all Christian sects will be in a kind of loose communion with one another, whether official or unofficial. We may have our own governing bodies and particular flavours of worship, and we may even disagree on some minor points of doctrine but, so long as we all agree on the major issues, we can come to some sort of common fellowship.
This idea is simply silly, and for a few reasons. Firstly, different groups of Christians disagree on a lot of significant issues. There are five basic forms of ecclesiastical government, ranging from the extremely hierarchical episcopal polity used by Catholics, Anglicans, and some Lutherans, to the extremely decentralized congregational polity used by Baptists, Restorationists, and other Lutherans. There are wide disagreements over worship: is organized, ritual liturgy how it should be done, or should we do a less organized revival-style meeting? If we do have a liturgy, should we be high church or low church?
In response to this, it is often said that Christians of all different traditions agree on much more than we disagree. Sure, we disagree over governance and worship, but we at least agree on the basics. To an extent, that is true: we agree that Jesus of Nazareth is Christ, that He atoned for our sins on the Cross, that He rose again from the dead on the third day and ascended into heaven, that He is God incarnate, and that He will come again to judge the living and the dead. Once you move past the surface level, though, disagreements start to pop up again. Do we accept Penal Substitutionary atonement or Ransom theory? Which of the myriad theories regarding eschatology and the millennium do we accept? Do we read Revelation with a futurist or preterist hermeneutic? Is the Incarnation the precise moment that Christ became the Son of God, or was Christ eternally the Son before all time? To some extent or another, a range of disagreements can be found on most of these issues among all Christian sects and traditions.
Some may object that none of these are important issues as far as salvation goes, but that statement leads to another issue: there is severe disagreement over what exactly the "important issues" are. For some, we can have our disagreements on the atonement. For many Reformed Protestants, penal substitution is a non-optional doctrine, apart from which you can make no sense of the Cross. For Catholics, while there is no dogmatic definition regarding theories of atonement, one cannot be a consistent Catholic and hold to penal substitution. Another example is baptism: if you get a Lutheran, a Restorationist, a Presbyterian, and a Baptist and ask each of them if baptism is regenerative and at what age it should be administered, none of them will agree completely. That's an extremely important question upon which a person's salvation hinges. That cannot be disregarded as unimportant.
All of this leads to the most significant reason that this view of ecumenism is supremely insufficient: the type of unity advocated here is a false unity that exists either in name only or on the basis of something outside of belief. This author once had a conversation with an Anglo-Catholic priest after an Anglican service over what Anglicans believe. The priest said something interesting: it's hard to speak about what "Anglicans believe" because Anglicans disagree on a great variety of things from beliefs to worship, with some being closer to Evangelicals, others being closer to Mainline Protestantism, and others still being closer to Catholicism. The members of the Anglican Communion essentially are united in their shared Anglican name and their shared historical lineage coming down from Henry VIII. This is a communion that cannot last and has already begun to break down, especially in the wake of the Archbishop of Canterbury's decision to allow for the blessing of homosexual partnerships.
True Ecumenism
What, then, is true ecumenism? To answer that question, we must look at the original usage of the term. The word comes from the Greek oikoumenikós, which means "pertaining to the whole world." Prior to the word being coopted in the early 1900s by the contemporary ecumenism movement, the word was most commonly associated with the Ecumenical Councils, where all the bishops of the world would gather in order to debate and define issues of Church doctrine and practice.
Notice here that, rather than unity by any means necessary, the goal of an Ecumenical Council is to put an end to dissension in the Church through the clarification and, oftentimes, dogmatic definition of issues of faith and morals. Funnily enough, rather than unifying Christians, a Council often has the opposite effect at first. By nature, when a Council defines an issue one way or the other, it necessarily excludes some from Christian communion.
Take the Council of Nicaea for example. In dogmatically defining that Christ is homousious or of the same substance with the Father, they necessarily excluded those who said that Christ is homoiousious or of a like substance with the Father. Nicaea definitively said that Arians are not Christians and that they are out of communion with Holy Church. While this led to short-term division, the long-term effect is that all true Christians the world over hold to Trinitarians, and the only people who hold to Arianism in the modern day are small sects that are recent in the history of Christianity, such as Jehovah's Witnesses and others coming out of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Notice also the prerequisite for the convening of an Ecumenical Council. A Council requires all of the bishops of the world to come together in unity. Prior to the Great Schism, these bishops were all in union under one unified Church, and the idea of bishops and clergy of different sects coming together was foreign to the Church of the first Seven Ecumenical Councils. We see here something that seems extremely counter-intuitive, at least if we assume the philosophy of the modern ecumenism movement, and that is that true ecumenism is not a product of unity, but a prerequisite for it. To be ecumenical, you must first belong to the Universal Church.
The Goal of True Ecumenism
As most people will point out when speaking of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, the implementations of the Council's disciplinary reforms have often been at variance with the actual letter of the documents themselves. Unitatis redintegratio clearly states that "Christ the Lord founded one Church and one Church only" (UR 1) and also that "[t]he [Catholic] Church, then, is God's only flock; it is like a standard lifted high for the nations to see it..." (UR 2). While the document teaches that "the Catholic Church embraces upon [those born into non-Catholic traditions] as brothers" (UR 3), this is because the sins of schism and heresy require prior knowledge and commitment to the Catholic faith that those born into non-Catholic sects simply do not have. When the Church talks about Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox as our "separated brethren" (UR 1), She does so because "men who believe in Christ and have been truly baptized are in communion with the Catholic Church even though this communion is imperfect" (UR 3). The qualified fraternity set forth by Vatican II is framed not merely by the relationship of the particular non-Catholic's relationship with Christ, but by his relationship with the Church in baptism. Ecumenism in this sense is completely based on what one's relationship is with the Catholic Church and, to underscore the point, Unitatis redintegratio ends with the statement that the goal of ecumenism is "the reconciling of all Christians in the unity of the one and only Church of Christ" (UR 24).
The perspective of the Church has been and always will be that the response to the many divisions in Christendom must not be a simple acceptance of our differences and learning to agree to disagree. However, we must actually reason together and try to settle these conflicts in doctrine and practice so that real unity based on truth may be achieved, rather than achieving a false unity of appearance only.
The opinion of many within modern Christendom is that we should strive to be ecumenical, in the sense that we all sit around the campfire for a joint prayer service, which ends in the chanting of Kumbaya M'Lord. The explicit view of the Church, even since Vatican II, has been the opposite: yes, we must meet people where they are and help them come to an understanding of the truth and gleam whatever truth we can from them as well but, ultimately, ecumenism means that everybody comes home to the One, True Church, which is the Catholic Church. Ask an honest Eastern Orthodox Christian, and he will tell you that all should be Eastern Orthodox. Ask an honest and consistent Protestant, and he will tell you that all should be Protestant (or at least agree on whatever he thinks the basic tenants of Protestantism are). The reason that this misstep on the part of the Vatican is so egregious is that it allows those in non-Catholic sects to be mistaken on what the Church teaches about Herself, about broader Christian communion, and about the necessity of the Church in the salvation of souls.
A Call to Honesty
The biggest problem with the popular false ecumenism which is being spread throughout Christendom is that it is dishonest. It is dishonest, plain and simple, to think that religions that disagree on central and distinctive points of doctrine can ever be united in official fellowship without those disagreements being resolved, even if they have relative agreements on other central issues.
Take the Eucharist for example: Catholics believe that the communion wafer, once consecrated by the priest, ceases to be bread and becomes the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ our Lord. Because of this, Catholics not only receive the Eucharist with reverence and devotion at Mass but also bow down and worship the consecrated host as the Apostles bowed down and worshipped the risen Lord at His Ascension. Among the majority of American evangelicals, the bread and wine are a mere symbolic representation of Christ's sacrifice, and a reenactment of the Last Supper. For evangelicals, to worship the communion bread as Christ's Body would be idolatry of the highest order. If the evangelicals are correct, Catholics are idolatrous pseudo-Christian pagans who cannot be rightly called a part of the Christian church. If Catholics are correct (which we are), evangelicals at best are missing out on full fellowship and communion with Christ our Lord, and at worst blaspheme Him when some of them refer to the Eucharist as a "cookie."
Instead of lying to ourselves (and God) in order to obtain the appearance of unity, let us be honest with each other, reason together, try to solve our differences in doctrine, and follow the Truth wherever He leads. Only then may we obtain true unity.
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