Fr. Neuhaus, ecumenism, and ecclesial Christianity

It took a dozen years after his conversion to Roman Catholicism for Fr. Richard John Neuhaus to publish something of his personal story. It appeared as an article in the April 2002 issue of First Things. Some converts become so zealous for their new-found faith that they are eager to anathematize others who have not seen the light as they have, especially those remaining within their former communion. Neuhaus certainly does not conform to this stereotype. In fact, ecumenism is very much a concern for him – not simply the sort of grassroots ecumenical enterprises that bring Christians together across denominational lines, although these are important. In his writings one senses a deep longing for full ecclesial union – one that would see the various ecclesial communities finally establishing full intercommunion, entailing a recognition of each other’s ministries of word and sacrament and an acknowledgement of their members as full participants in the body of Christ. It would be difficult to imagine a more irenic statement than this one directed especially at his former Lutheran co-religionists:

"To those of you with whom I have traveled in the past, know that we travel together still. In the mystery of Christ and his Church nothing is lost, and the broken will be mended. If, as I am persuaded, my communion with Christ’s Church is now the fuller, then it follows that my unity with all who are in Christ is now the stronger. We travel together still."

Nevertheless, despite Neuhaus’ hope for a genuine ecumenism, he expresses scepticism over the approach of much of the professional ecumenical establishment in the World Council of Churches and especially the National Council of Churches in the US. Much of ecumenism in these organizations has been sidetracked by overtly partisan political efforts, as exemplified by the front pages of their websites. A major reason why the ecumenical task has been diverted is that their member denominations, particularly the so-called mainline protestant churches, have lost a sense of their own confessional integrity. One of the reasons Neuhaus left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) after so short a time was his fear that it was in danger of becoming just one more liberal protestant denomination.

According to Neuhaus’ Law, which he has formulated over the years in his Public Square reflections, where confessional orthodoxy is optional it will eventually be proscribed. Where a church body has abandoned the effort to uphold its own confessional integrity, it will inevitably be forced to exclude – or at least marginalize – those who publicly maintain it. (I will not mention by name a certain denomination in this country where Neuhaus’ Law has been played out to the furthest extent, with tragic consequences for its less “with it” members.) Given that the ELCA seemed to be rushing headlong in this direction, Neuhaus had to make a decision. Sectarian protestantism was not an option for him, since the smaller “evangelical” bodies did not share his ecclesial vision of full intercommunion. This left only Rome and Constantinople. Neuhaus went to Rome.

I must admit to having some sympathy for the journey Neuhaus has undertaken. My own personal library contains a number of books recounting similar pilgrimages. Certainly the most famous of these is John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, the author’s eloquent account of his own embrace of Rome in 1845 in the face of the anti-catholicism in England of his day. Then there’s Thomas Howard’s Lead Kindly Light, and a few anthologies containing multiple accounts of conversions to either Rome or Orthodoxy. I have been reading such books since my youth, and I am always on the lookout for new such volumes. I suppose there must be a part of me that wishes I could make a similar journey, even though I’ve never come close to taking any steps in this direction.

As I’ve written before, Rome and Constantinople certainly have the ecclesiological arguments in their favour. This is what would seem to attract the converts from protestantism. Both Rome and Constantinople have sheer antiquity on their side, along with all the weight of hallowed tradition. Given that both conspicuously uphold orthodoxy as they understand it, they compare favourably to the oldline (or “sideline,” as Neuhaus puts it) protestant denominations, whose leaders tend indiscriminately to ascribe the ephemeral fashions of the larger secular culture, no matter how bizarre, to a fresh movement of the Holy Spirit.

I myself have been a member of three church denominations in the course of my life, two of which are confessional Reformed churches. All three are quite small bodies, containing at most only 279 thousand persons. Although two of these have been members of somewhat larger ecumenical bodies, that would effectively put me in communion with possibly up to half a million or more Christians. Yet that leaves close to a billion more fellow believers with whom I am apparently constrained by my church membership to deny the reality of our fellowship in Jesus Christ. This is a situation with which I have never been able to bring myself to be satisfied. Even if I love the particular body of Christians with whom I enjoy a common ecclesial home, I am grieved that there are so many more Christians who do not share in this.

Both of my Reformed denominations owe their origins to departures from a larger body deemed to have compromised the faith in some fashion. In short, their forebears believed they were making a stand for truth, even if it came at the expense of unity. I cannot conclude that they were entirely in error. Yet the reality of such denominational breakups is that the larger body of Christ is cluttered with possibly hundreds of thousands of such groups, each of which is convinced that it has a monopoly on God’s truth. Even if there is a large measure of justification for such breakups, they present us with a problem at the very least. If we are unable to acknowledge the problematic character of this circumstance, we are effectively contributing to its perpetuation.

Neuhaus would likely see me as a sectarian protestant, albeit one who has at times attended congregations affiliated with the “sideline.” I understand fully why he could not bring himself to affiliate with a similar small protestant body. He senses the same problems that I do in both mainstream ecumenism and sectarian protestantism. Yet I am unable to make the same move he eventually did in 1990. Why?

To begin with, the problem of the body of Christ being divided into myriad denominations is not only an ecclesiological problem, although it is at least that. If it were simply a matter of following a generic christian orthodoxy, or what C. S. Lewis famously described as “mere Christianity,” then the dilemma would be much easier to resolve. We would be compelled to submit to the church body where this was most obviously upheld and which had the weight of history on its side. We could ignore the issues that sparked the division between east and west in the 11th century, the Reformation of the 16th century, the revivals of the 19th century, or the Pentecostalism of the 20th century. We could pretend that the confessional differences among Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans and Anabaptists were of no consequence. We could safely ignore the differences among 19th century Princeton orthodoxy, the holiness movements, dispensationalism and the charismatic movements.

Indeed a reading of Neuhaus, as well as of other articles in First Things, would lead one to conclude that Christianity is divided into only four broad groupings:

(1) Rome,
(2) the mainline/sideline,
(3) evangelical/sectarian protestantism and, very much smaller (in North America, at any rate),
(4) Orthodoxy.

To be a genuinely ecclesial Christian, one for whom faith in Christ and faith in his church is but a single act, as Neuhaus puts it, one must embrace either Rome or Orthodoxy. Neuhaus chose Rome, at least partly because Orthodoxy is itself divided among a plethora of insular ethnic communities and thus presents an ineffective public witness. To be sure, of course, he wishes to affirm the validity of these Orthodox Churches. As he sees it, “the only thing that is lacking for full communion between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West is full communion.” If only it were that simple.

Catholics and Orthodox disagree on a host of dogmatic issues, including, most famously, the authority of the Bishop of Rome, the addition of the filioque clause in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the existence of purgatory, the immaculate conception, cataphatic versus apophatic theology, &c. To pretend that the issues dividing Rome and Constantinople are merely ecclesiological and not confessional is to ignore rather a lot. Then there are the issues dividing both Rome and Constantinople from the various Reformation churches, e.g., invocation of the saints, the authority of general councils, the extent of the Old Testament canon, the Marian doctrines and the relative authority of Scripture and tradition.

I believe that Neuhaus must genuinely have conquered whatever reservations he might once have had over submitting to Rome. He relates something of how this process occurred in the account of his pilgrimage mentioned above. Yet conspicuously absent from his narrative is a grappling with specific doctrines that have always been barriers between Rome and the Reformation. One wishes he would say something about how he came to accept, say, papal infallibility or the belief in Mary’s assumption into heaven.

Although I am firmly persuaded of Neuhaus’ standing as a fellow Christian, as he would certainly be of mine, I must admit to wondering whether his embrace of Rome was not considerably facilitated by the public witness of the current pope, John Paul II, someone likely to be remembered to history as one of the great figures of the end of the 20th century. Could the attractiveness of this one man’s witness have overshadowed the possible confessional obstacles blocking the path to Rome? In short, it is just possible that Neuhaus embraced Rome, less out of adherence to specifically Roman doctrines, and more out of respect for its institutional grandeur and the power of its public witness in the larger society.

As for myself, I am unlikely to follow his lead. I remain dissatisfied with my current ecclesial home within a fractious protestantism. I remain uncomfortable with the fact that I am out of communion with so many of God’s children. But perhaps it is good that I should feel such discomfort, recognizing, with Neuhaus and many others, that eventually “the broken will be mended,” if not in this life, then certainly in the life of the world to come.