Catholicity of Oikoumene and Holiness Beyond the Church
Aloysius Pieris

I believe in the Holy Catholic Church and in the Communion of Saints...

Introduction: Equal Partners in a Common Mission

 

In the past two decades, churches in Sri Lanka have been educated by the Holy Spirit in the task of reconciliation and justice, by being drawn willy nilly into the whirlpool of conflicts which we had ourselves stirred up through our sinfulness. This experience has persuaded me that all churches can forge a fruitful fellowship across our fragmented Christianity if we make a minor change of emphasis in the accepted practice of ecumenism.

By 'minor change of emphasis' I mean a major step forward. I suggest that the present preoccupation with doctrinal reconciliation between the churches, backed by overt or covert indulgence in inter-communion, be supplemented and even superceded by an inter-ecclesial program of corporate action that is directly grounded in the twofold sending which, despite our divisions, still remains the common apostolic origin of all our churches and the common spiritual foundation of our ecumenism.

The Twofold Sending

The phrase 'twofold mission' is an allusion to the twelve Apostles, literally "The Twelve Sent Ones" [from apostellein, to send], namely those sent by Christ in the Father's name; and equally the Holy Spirit, the One Sent by the Father (John 14:26) and by the Son (John 15:26), according to the Promise.[1] For "the Holy Spirit and the Apostles are manifested jointly at Pentecost", as Cardinal Congar avers.[2] It is on the basis of this twofold sending that Christian denominations, now engaged in ecumenical dialogue, could and should call themselves "apostolic churches".

These two "Sent Ones", namely, the Twelve and the Spirit, acted as equal partners in a common mission, giving us an example of what Greek Orthodox theologians have called synergy, literally "co-operation", i.e., operating together. The Twelve adverted to one of their synergetic decisions with this bold announcement: "It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" (Acts 15:28). The Spirit and the Apostles decided and acted as two equal partners in mission. This is a precedent we must follow even today.

Synergetic Action

All our churches trace their origin to this nuclear Jesus community, the New Israel, symbolically referred to as The Twelve. It does not replace the First Israel made of Twelve Tribes but shares its hope in the Spirit that was promised by Yahweh and breathed upon us by the Risen Christ. It is by acting synergetically with the Spirit in the mission of Christ, as the Twelve did, that we incessantly re-found ourselves as the New Israel, that is to say, the Church of Christ. This, I believe, is the more profound implication of the much abused phrase, "Apostolic Succession".

If, according to a Mariology that seems less offensive to non-Roman Catholics, Mary is the first disciple of Christ and the model of the church, or more precisely, the church-before-its-own-time, then we have another precedent in synergetic action. For in the earliest creeds, the churches confessed "that the Lord Jesus was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary" (ex pneumatos hagiou kai Marias parthenou), not "by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin (de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine) as we have begun to say since perhaps the fifth century.[3]

In the more primitive formula, the church seems to have confessed that Mary, its own prototype, has acted as a synergos or co-agent with the Spirit in the conception of the redeemer. So was also the nuclear church called the Twelve, who were synergoi or co-agents with the Spirit in the continuous formation and growth of the body of Christ on earth.

Hence I first appeal to the churches of the Roman Communion to abandon the "instrumental theory" of an Aristotelico-Thomistic provenance, which makes us tools, conscious and free no doubt, nevertheless tools in the hands of the divine agent. I also appeal to the churches of the Reformed tradition to convince themselves that sola gratia means that we are so gratuitously forgiven as to be elevated into being equal-partners in the Spirit's re-creative activity. We are so forgiven, which means, we are so filled with Christ's Spirit, as to qualify (through grace alone) to be her co-agents, synergoi, in a mission which we share with her. We and the Spirit are sent together on a mission by our Maternal Father through the Son. It is "being sent together with the Spirit" that makes us the church. That is why we are co-responsible with the Spirit for this planet and its inhabitants. The Spirit's agenda is also ours.

The Art of Discernment

Hence churches must relearn the ancient art of diakrisis, to use a Pauline term, i.e., the art of discerning what the Spirit tells the churches so that we may not "grieve the Spirit" (Ephesians 4:30). For we are accompanied, both as individuals and as the church, by a divine person whom the Scriptures have introduced to us not only as our internal teacher, ready to instruct us (John 16:13), and our comforter standing by and for us (John 14:16). She is also our personal secretary, so to say, reminding us as and when required of what Christ said and did, so that we might speak and act as Christ would wish us to (John 14:26; 16:12-15). What highly favoured sinners we are to have such an escort, and how unfortunate that we have lost the art of consulting her.

The re-acquisition of this pristine art of discerning the Spirit should receive top priority in our ecumenical agenda, especially today when churches, intimidated by the threat of the global market, face an unprecedented challenge which they cannot handle singly. This challenge demands corporate networking as well as active participation at the base in the matter of decision-making, policy-forming and apostolic visioning, not to mention the obligation to create more effective patterns of thought, witness and worship. This is a gigantic undertaking which truly imposes on us a spiritual, i.e., Spirit-inspired, discernment process, which the churches do not anymore resort to despite the fact that a long tradition of "discernment of Spirits", supported by centuries of accumulated experience, lies hidden in obscure monasteries waiting to be re-discovered and put at the service of churches.

The art of diakrisis is this "silent" variety of charismatic or Pentecostal renewal that can guarantee our synergetic missioning with the Spirit. For "Spirit-possession" is not synergy. The ecstasies and other altered states of consciousness are what St. Paul would have regarded as psychika (mental phenomena) or sarkika (physical phenomena), as these do not necessarily transcend the unredeemed Adam in us. What the Apostle desires to see in Christians who claim to experience the Spirit are the pneumatika, that is to say, events in which human consciousness and human will are fully operative in the Spirit. The "psychic person" (anthropos psykikos) is the natural or Adamic person who cannot discern "things of the Spirit" (the pneumatika) which, according to Paul, can only be "spiritually discerned", pneumatikos anakrinetai (1 Cor. 2: 13-14). How slavishly we imitate whatever happened in the Corinthian Church without being guided by the Apostle's cautionary instructions about such phenomena! The Pentecost we await and the charisma we desire is the gift of discernment, diakrisis, which is the sine qua non of any synergetic partnership with the Spirit.

The Spirit's Five-fold Agenda

We can now discuss the five-dimensional activity in which the Spirit and we exercise our synergetic mission within a process of a continuous discernment. These five fields of synergy have been enumerated in the Apostle's Creed as part of our faith in the Holy Spirit. In this creed, churches from very early times have proclaimed their faith not only in God who created and God's Son who redeemed, but also in God's Spirit who has resumed these same divine activities and continues them along a five-dimensional perspective. Our own commitment to these five tasks is part and parcel of the proclamation of our faith in the Holy Spirit! For the confession "I believe in the Holy Spirit" is immediately followed by five items in the Spirit's as well as our ongoing missionary agenda:

The holy catholic Church
The communion of saints
The forgiveness of sins
The resurrection of the body
And life everlasting.

My discussion will cover only the first four fields of our synergetic action. The fifth and last item, "life everlasting", is left out not because I have imposed an unfinished agenda on myself, but because "life everlasting" is the eschatological horizon within which all the other four activities take place.

In this lecture I take up the first two items in the Spirit's agenda and ours: the holy catholic church and the communion of saints. This is to focus on the holiness and catholicity of the church in terms of its obligation to commune with all holy persons, even beyond its visible boundaries. Furthermore, today's discourse is a theoretical clarification made in view of something more programmatic which I shall offer tomorrow in my second and final lecture.

Today's theme, the holy catholic church and the communion of saints, can be summed up under two overlapping captions: Part 1, Holiness in Communion of Saints as the Catholicity of the Church; and Part 2, Catholicity as the Globalized Holiness of God�s Reign of Justice.

Part I:

Holiness in Communion of Saints as the Catholicity of the Church

Marks of the Church

The Apostles� Creed mentions holiness and catholicity as "marks" or distinguishing characteristics of the church. They are the imprint of the Spirit authenticating a Jesus-community. The subsequent creedal formulae such as the ones of Nicene and Constantinople have added a couple more such "marks", in response to the needs of the times. We, too, can increase the number today, following the example of Martin Luther, who had listed seven additional marks of the church over above those given in the creeds.[4]

My intention is not to multiply such signs of the church according to 'the needs of our time', but to re-interpret them according to 'the spirit of our times', i.e. according to what the Spirit says to the churches of today. It is an exercise in discernment.

Holiness (qodes in Hebrew; adjective qados, and verb qades) is strictly an exclusive attribute of God, extended in a cultic context to places, things and persons in terms of God's own holiness. The temple is holy because God who is worshipped there is holy. Each one of us is holy because we are each consecrated by God's own Holy Spirit to be her temple; the churches are holy for the same reason.

Now, it is clear that this holiness depends on God's presence. The Temple of Jerusalem was meant to be a holy place, but it was turned into "a den of thieves" in Luke (19:46) and "a business house" oikon emporiou in John (2:16) because the money-demon had usurped Yahweh's place. The Spirit consecrates and mammon desecrates. Thus, holiness is intimately connected with the renunciation of mammon, the absolutized capital. This means that evangelical poverty advocated for all disciples of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount is not an optional extra for those seeking perfection but the basic qualification to enter and serve in God's reign. Thus, a holy church is essentially a poor church that has visibly and palpably renounced mammon's rule for the sake of God's reign.

I wish to enlist the support of Jurgen Moltmann in this matter, for he is a Lutheran theologian who is as critically loyal to the Reformed churches as he is constructively critical of the Roman communion. The church is holy in its poverty, he argues, a poverty which is made manifest (a) when the church humbly and openly confesses its own sinfulness and repentance and (b) when it courageously and visibly professes its solidarity with the poor and the oppressed. [5] I shall develop this insight of his without implicating him in the many comments and complementary reflections which I offer here.

Holiness as the Poverty of Forgiven Sinners

The first kind of poverty, which serves as the sign of the church's holiness paradoxically is its sinfulness, a sinfulness that the church humbly shares with the rest of humankind. Our solidarity with the rest of sinners qualifies us to present ourselves as a people forgiven and sanctified just as the rest of sinners are. Our churches are only a sacrament of what God is doing universally. The holiness of the church, which is never complete until the end-time is the readable sign of a communion of saints that embraces potentially the whole of humankind. In other words we are not holy above others or holier than others. Rather, we are called to witness to the source of that holiness which is universally, i.e., catholically, operative. To all manifestations of holiness outside the church we say "yes" through a visibly repentant humility. This is at once our poverty and our sanctity.

Churches are holy only in the sense that they are a discernible expression of and a living witness to a universal offer of forgiveness, a visible proof of the free availability of the Spirit for all God's creatures in mysterious ways known only to Her. After all, this forgiving love of God, which has carved a date in human history in Christ crucified sub Pontio Pilato, is none other than the very Spirit of Christ "poured out on all flesh" (Joel 2:28) in view of a communion of saints cutting across and beyond ecclesiastical frontiers and, therefore, catholic in its inclusiveness.

Churches express their holiness, their being ceaselessly forgiven each time any one of them, prompted by the Spirit, acknowledges its sinfulness and asks pardon from its victims. Moltmann cites the instance of the Protestant churches in Germany after the war and the churches in the former colonial countries making a public admission of guilt in a visible spirit of repentance. A similar gesture was made by John Paul II at the end of the millennium.

The most dramatic act of reconciliation, manifesting "a poverty in spirit", is attributed to Paul VI vis-vis the Greek Orthodox Church. He did not stop at merely revoking the Bull of Excommunication on Constantinople which in 1054 Cardinal Humbert, as a Legate of Pope Leo IX (who was already dead by that time), laid on the altar of St. Sophia. Paul VI went further. In 1975, during a Eucharistic celebration commemorating the tenth anniversary of his own revocation of that excommunication, this Pope, reportedly

fell on his knees before the Metropolitan Meliton, the envoy of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and kissed his feet. With all the more reason Paul VI said, "We are beginning a new phase of our reconciliation with the common will that it may be the conclusive one".[6]

Holiness, therefore, is the opposite of Pharisaic self-righteousness. It is the "spiritual poverty of the repentant sinner", the humility of the publican who went home justified (Luke 18:10-14). We, the churches, are summoned to witness to this brand of holiness in the Spirit's agenda for ecumenism, that the world may know that we have been sent to the world escorted by the Spirit of Christ (see John 17:21) for the forgiveness of sins!

Holiness as Solidarity with the Poor

Moltmann's second observation on "holiness in poverty" can be formulated as follows. Our co-victimhood with Christ crucified, witnessed to in our solidarity with the poor of this earth (i.e., our identification with victims of injustice), is the most efficacious sign of our holiness. For the saints that the church revered, observes Moltmann, were the martyrs, "who in the visible fellowship of the crucified Jesus, testified to his invisible glory".

The friends of Jesus, who were called to discipleship and the messianic mission, left everything and became poor for the Kingdom's sake. The church in Jerusalem was called the "poor saints at Jerusalem" (Rom. 15:26). Paul collected money for them in Macedonia and Achaia. Christ himself "whom God made our sanctification" "for your sake became poor so that by his poverty you might become rich" (II Cor. 8: 9). The church is therefore sanctified where it participates in the lowliness, helplessness, poverty and suffering of Christ. Its [the church's] glory is manifested through the sign of poverty.[7]

In the light of these observations of Moltmann, let me draw your attention to the beatitudes where Jesus simply speaks of the poor as such, without sticking any label, religious or otherwise. If one is poor, one is his disciple. The reign of God is of the poor.

But there are two categories of poor mentioned in the gospels.[8] Matthew's beatitudes mention the "the poor in spirit"; Luke speaks of "the poor". They are, respectively, the detached ones and the dispossessed ones. The former have become poor voluntarily for the sake of the God's reign, by whatever name it is recognized and named; whereas the latter have been forced to be poor under mammon's rule of terror. While the detached ones seek and find God's reign, it is God's reign that seeks and finds the dispossessed ones. The first category of the poor renounce their own riches; the second denounce their own poverty. Their common struggle finds a holy alliance only in a reign of justice. It is this holy alliance for justice that constitutes the communion of saints, to which churches are called to testify in word, deed and lifestyle. In no other way can a church call itself holy.

Add to this the fact that the vast majority of the poor of both categories are non-Christians here in Asia. The Spirit that is poured out on all flesh, according to the promise, has been animating this non-Christian body of Christ. For Christ gathers both renouncers of mammon (the detached) and victims of mammon (the dispossessed) as his own corporate person, passing the end-time judgment on the nations through them (Matthew 25:36ff and parallels).

Here we face a serious dilemma between the church's claim to be the body of Christ, as declared by Paul, and Christ's claim that the victims of nations are his (you did it to me), his "person", his true body. The only solution to this dilemma is for the church to identify itself with such victims and become one body with them so that it may become one body with Christ. Indeed, the church is branded with the mark of holiness each time the Spirit groaning in the victims of mammon is heard and recognized in all that it claims to teach with Christ's authority.

The "struggle to be poor" and "the struggle for the poor" together define the holiness that the Spirit and we have pledged together to globalize into a communion of saints. It is this that we term catholicity, that other mark of the true church of Christ. Catholicity is not just any kind of "mark" of a church. It is a scar that marks a church in the eyes of mammon-worshippers, a wound borne by a church which is crucified in the process of struggling with the Spirit to globalize the holiness of God's reign of justice in response to the cry of the Poor.

Part 2:

Catholicity as the Globalized Holiness of God's Reign of Justice

"Catholicity" is the most elusive of the marks attributed to the church. The word has a strange history. In Greek, the meaning of katholikos ranges from "complete" through "all-embracing" ("common to all") to "that which is right and proper". This last mentioned usage began to dominate from the third century onwards and, consequently, catholicity became synonymous with "truth" or "orthodoxy". As a result, the ecclesia catholica, which was guaranteed state protection by the Imperial Edict of 380, came to be recognized as the one, true, lawful church of the empire. Here the expression "catholic" has ceased to mean "universal" or "all-embracing" and has acquired a restrictive confessionalist connotation, as Christine Lienemann-Perrin laments.[9]

Catholicity as Pentecost

I wish to draw your critical attention to the growing tendency among churches to associate catholicity with the imperative need for inculturation. This is an understandable reaction to confessionalism.[10] I do not underestimate the importance of this trend at this time in history, nor do I doubt the validity of the criticism, which Reformed Christians have leveled against the Roman Catholic Church's un-catholic imposition of its romanitas and latinitas on the churches of Western Europe, in stark contrast with the Orthodox tradition in Eastern Europe. As member of that same church which calls itself Roman Catholic, I appreciate and fully endorse the charge that its policy of Romanization and Latinization even outside Europe amounts to a "confessionalism" that negates its catholicity. [11] Though in full agreement with this position, I wish, nevertheless, to suggest that today our zeal for restoring catholicity to our churches, or regenerating it, must be kindled by the same fire of love that descended like tongues on the Apostles (Acts 2:.3).

When Pope John XXIII invoked the theme of Pentecost for the Great Ecumenical Council of our era, Vatican II, the agenda he envisaged for the Council was a response to the "signs of the times", a phrase by which he meant a response to "what the Spirit is saying to the churches". In the light of a commentary offered by Gustavo Gutierrez on this papal program,[12] I can boldly say and even demonstrate that the Pope was offering churches a new understanding of catholicity. The three items in the agenda of the Pope seemed to imply the criticism that the Roman Church had been distanced from (a) contemporary history, (b) other churches, and finally from (c) the poor. The Pentecost he prayed and hoped for the church consisted of bridging the distance in each of these three areas.

The bridging of the church with the modern world was what the Pope called aggiornamento. It was his summons to recover a long lost catholicity, a call to update the obsolete language in which the church has been communicating (or rather, not communicating) for centuries in the areas of doctrine, lifestyle and worship. The church must leave the ghetto and learn to speak a language which each nation, each culture, each religion, each generation and each gender in the world today can understand. Catholicity is the gift of tongues, not shouting out unintelligible things but communicating an understandable Word, as the Scriptures counsel us (I Cor. 14:1-19)! It amounts to the globalization of a communication system whereby the language of love which God speaks through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and his co-victims, is universally taught by the Spirit of Christ.

As for bridging the Roman Church with other churches, the Council made an ecumenical leap across several centuries of separation. The descent of the Spirit, synergetically accompanied by arduous human labour of the Council Fathers, accounts for catholicity that emerged when the Roman Church minimized the language barrier that divided it from other churches on several important issues, such as the ministry in the church and the priesthood of the faithful, the delicate question of scripture and tradition, the centrality of the word of God in the church's liturgy and life, the place of Mary in the economy of salvation, to name only the major ones. These irreversible changes heralded the dawn of a catholicity to be shared by an ecclesia ecclesiarum, an oikoumene that will tolerate neither Roman absorption of other churches nor fruit-salad Christianity that would equally destroy historical identities of churches. Catholicity is oneness which is so prolifically creative in the Spirit as to purge churches of homogeneity and uniformity as a violation of their holiness.

Catholicity and the World's Poor

The third and last item in the Pope's agenda harboured the most explosive notion of catholicity, a kind of ecclesiological bombshell which John XXIII dropped on the Council, significantly on 11^th September 1962. The full import of this radical stance can be missed even by this audience, as it certainly was then, if we do not take into account his strong appeal for social justice that prefaced this far-reaching ecclesiological statement. He began by insisting first on the equality of all people in the exercise of their rights and duties, then on the inviolability of the family, and finally on the obligation to replace individualism with social responsibility. Then he added these words:

... confronted with the underdeveloped countries, the church presents itself as what she is and wants to be: as the church of all, and particularly, the church of the poor. [13]

The Church of ALL, and particularly of the Poor, in the face of global poverty. This is the definition of catholicity we proposed a while ago when we observed that the church becomes catholic only when the contradiction between its claim (to be the body of Christ) and Christ's claim (that the victims of injustice are his body) is reconciled by the church becoming co-extensive with the two categories of the poor, who are covenanted with God in Christ.[14] Thus the church has to stretch itself beyond ecclesiastical frontiers to embrace the holiness, which God and the poor, covenanted as the Christ, offer her. The church of all [not merely a church for all], particularly of the poor [not merely for the poor] is truly a catholic church. All as all, and the poor as poor. There is no religious label attached. The church is called to embrace all in order to embrace Christ.

Gutierrez adds a postscript. The council fathers were enthusiastic about the first two items of the papal agenda, aggiornamento and ecumenism. But the Pope's reference to the poor, prefaced by his insistence on equality of all humans and on social responsibilities that bind all persons towards the poor, did not leave an ostensible impact in the conciliar documents. I am forced to observe that the churches were not yet disposed to receive the marks of holiness and catholicity from the world's poor!

Providentially, the Christians of poor countries, especially in Latin America, took up the Pope's challenge. Little churches of the poor, called base communities, began to mushroom. Through the Medellin meeting, the world church began to hear of the art of renewing the church from below, from Basic Christian Communities of the poor. Their impact was clearly registered in the Roman Synod of 1971, where a growing conviction in the churches of poor countries bringing justice to the poor was a constitutive dimension of preaching the gospel to the poor.

By this time, quite independently of Catholic movements, Asian Protestants had come out with minjung theology in Korea and Dalit theology in India. At the same time, Asian theologies of liberation, initially inspired by their Latin American precedents, started gathering momentum. EATWOT (the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians) became the ecumenical rallying point of all these movements in which increasing groups of Christians took their stand with God among the poor, making God's standpoint their own viewpoint in all their God-talk. Asian women have now joined hands with other women's movements in the Third World, combining the struggle to depatriarchalize civil society with the sacred ambition to purge churches of their androcracy.

But alas! All this is a drop in the ocean, a scratch on the surface, a storm in a teacup. Our churches are big bodies, are they not? And a big body, like the hippopotamus, moves very slowly. This inertia has evoked despondency among the activists, disappointment among the poor and disdain among secular advocates of social justice.

We know the reason. The Spirit is estranged from the churches, and all synergetic action seems to have grinded to a halt. For there is an attractive beast around, as it used to be in the first century of the first millennium. At that time, the attractive beast was Rome's imperial splendour which thrived on a cruel economic system - its massive highways and chariots, its colossal arenas of violent entertainment exhibiting mass hedonism were all maintained by the ruthless machine of slavery. So attractive was this Roman beast that Jesus' warning against its pomp and purple, "it shall not be so among you" (see Luke 22:25-27), had become an outdated counsel. No wonder the later writings of the New Testament show the churches to be less uncomfortable with patriarchy and slavery, two indices of Roman imperialism.

What the Spirit said to the churches then seems equally familiar today to those who have ears to hear: Salvation comes, not from the attractive beast, but from the lamb that is slain. Not from the money-demon that devours even the churches, but from the dispossessed on whose graves its diabolical altar stands. Not from the global market, but from its human merchandise. Not from the high priests of mammon's temple, but from the victims they sacrifice in it. Not from the production machine of the capital, but from the human waste that issues from it.

 

This is the Spirit's call to globalize our faith and hope in the communion of saints -- saints martyred by this ubiquitous anti-God. As the recent history in Mexico, tribal India, Pakistan and in many other places has illustrated, only the churches that are stained by the blood of the slain lamb and scarred by the claws of the attractive beast, bear the authenticating marks of the Spirit: holiness and catholicity.