THESE two recent books show the importance of ecumenical theology — or, more specifically, how important it is to have different, even competing, theological perspectives represented in theology departments and seminaries.
The veteran Luke Timothy Johnson, now Emeritus Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Emory, is a Roman Catholic who has taught for decades in predominantly Protestant faculties. Dr Stephen Meawad is a younger theologian, teaching at Calwell University and writing from an Eastern Orthodox perspective, while contributing to the impressive, and predominantly RC, Georgetown University Press’s Moral Traditions series. Both offer significant challenges within theological ethics, making distinctions that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Johnson uses his considerable experience to reflect on two radically different approaches to discipleship: his own traditional Catholic understanding, focused on personal piety and discipline (nurtured especially by Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ), and the understanding of many of his liberal Protestant students, focused more on social action.
He argues lucidly and at some length that both understandings are biblical and important and can fruitfully be combined as follows: “Learning to be a disciple of Jesus Christ does not come from reading a devotional book, or from attending a powerful service, or from undergoing a process of catechesis. . . Learning to be a saint — the goal of the classic understanding of discipleship — is learned first and best through imitation of the saints.”
To this effect, he offers two well-known ecumenical examples of saints for us to imitate: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Thomas Merton, one Protestant and the other Catholic. While recognising frankly that, like us, “they were flawed human beings, who experienced uncertainty, doubt, temptations and failings, fear and humiliation,” he also allows us to see “how the Holy Spirit can transform an intellectualizing Lutheran theologian and an aestheticizing Catholic monk into the image of Christ”. A stimulating and deeply ecumenical book.
In a somewhat similar manner, Meawad argues that recent Western versions of Christian ethics have tended to focus too much on abiding, even universal, virtues (as other books in the Moral Traditions series have done) rather than on ethics as a particularistic spiritual struggle and perpetual pursuit of the Trinity.
He detects such struggle in parts of the New Testament (e.g. 1 and 2 Timothy) and emphatically in St Gregory of Nyssa, and exemplified today in monastic and non-monastic forms of asceticism and the prayerful reading of scripture. Boston College’s Professor James Keenan depicts this, helpfully, on the back cover, as a “disruptive” but “refreshing” proposal.
Encouragingly, it is also self-critical, avoiding too sharp a contrast: “Virtue ethics provides a critical shift away from overemphasis upon rules, principles, and obligations and toward the transformation of people of goodness, virtue, and character. Yet virtue is to be lauded and pursued through spiritual struggle primarily as a means to communion with God, at some times, and as a result of this union, at other times.”
Their distinctions can, of course, be drawn too sharply — in technical terms, they are what sociologists term “ideal typologies” — but they might, nevertheless, be useful when handled carefully. Johnson, for example, notes that some Anglicans have successfully held a balance between personal piety and social action (19th-century socially active Evangelicals are a good example), but he argues that others have not. And Meawad avoids the sort of chauvinistic claims for Eastern Orthodox supremacy which have sometimes been made even within the World Council of Churches (Georges Florovsky, a founding father, was a disappointing example). He, too, admits that, like the rest of us, Orthodox believers do not always live up to their celestial ideals.
Much better, surely, is to set out the strengths and weaknesses of particular theological approaches, including one’s own, and then search for some kind of balance between them, while admitting our obvious limitations; and that is exactly what each of these thoughtful books does.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor Applied Theology at the University of Kent and Editor of Theology.
Imitating Christ: The disputed character of Christian discipleship
Luke Timothy Johnson
Eerdmans £24.99
(978-0-8028-8310-0)
Church Times Bookshop £22.49
Beyond Virtue Ethics: A contemporary ethic of ancient spiritual struggle
Stephen M. Meawad
Georgetown University Press £48
(978-1-64712-312-3)
Church Times Bookshop £43.20