ABSTRACT
A significant breakthrough towards constructive ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and other Christians regarding the Church came in the early 1960s, when the World Council of Churches adopted a new formula for membership that was explicitly Trinitarian1 and when, on the Catholic side, Vatican II quoted Cyprian’s Trinitarian statement that the Church is ‘a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ (Lumen gentium, 4). Until then, both sides had been content to relate the Church to Christ, as his Body, but now they both went deeper and said that the communion life that Christ brings into this world and enables us to share as his Body has its origin from all eternity in the God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So, the Trinity is the ultimate source of the Church’s life.2 Yves Congar was one of the greatest pioneers of Catholic ecumenism, and it is
notable that he already consecrated a section of his decisive study, Chrétiens désunis in 1937, to Ecclesia de trinitate, and actually quoted the words of Cyprian that Lumen gentium used nearly 30 years later.3 In 1986, I was speaking to him at Les Invalides in Paris and discussing my own research on Henri de Lubac and the Orthodox theologian, John Zizioulas, whom Congar once memorably called ‘one of the most original and most profound theologians of our age’4 and I was able to tell him that Zizioulas had just become a bishop. ‘Bishop of where?’, Congar asked, and I said ‘of Pergamon, he is Metropolitan of Pergamon’, which of course is one of the seven churches to the angels of which the Lord writes at the start of the Book of Revelation. To my amazement, Congar’s eyes filled with tears and I wondered with horror what I had said to upset him. It turned out to be simply the mention of Pergamon. Congar explained that, in
1936, 50 years earlier, he had attended a lecture by the scripture scholar, Erik Peterson, in Berlin. At that time, in Berlin, Hitler was hosting the Olympic Games and the great ceremonial backdrop to this event was a massive classical edifice, called the Altar of Pergamon, which was in fact a pagan temple, that Bismarck had brought to Berlin from Pergamon in modern Turkey after the Franco-Prussian War late in the nineteenth century. Peterson had apparently galvanized the assembly by saying how appropriate it now seemed that the Altar of Pergamon was to be found in Berlin, because Pergamon is spoken of in the Book of Revelation as ‘the place where Satan is enthroned’ (Rev. 2:13). The memory stayed vividly with Yves Congar: 50 years later, the mention of Pergamon could still bring tears to his eyes. Those, of course, were horrendous days in Germany. The Nazi regime was trying
to incorporate the Church into the state machine and the Protestant
‘German-Christian’ Church movement, sponsored by the Nazis (1933-45), tried to synthesize Nazism and Christianity. The Old Testament would be eliminated, of course, because of its Jewish reference, St Paul, too, because he was a rabbi; Germany would be the Promised Land and Hitler the embodiment of the law of God. There were, thank God, German Evangelical Christians who vigorously opposed this manipulation of the gospel and of the Church and they swiftly moved to set up the famous ‘Confessing Church’, which issued its manifesto, the so-called Barmen Declaration, in 1934. Let us hear again some of its ringing, defiant phrases:
One of those who signed the Barmen Declaration was the Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945). He was head of a seminary of the Confessing Church but was banned by the Nazis in 1936; the seminary was closed down in 1937. He was in the USA on a lecture tour when the Second World War broke out, but felt that it was his duty to return. He was arrested in 1943 and hanged by the Gestapo in 1945. Bonhoeffer was greatly influenced by the outstanding Protestant theologian who
largely composed the Barmen Declaration, Karl Barth (1886-1968). He was a professor in Bonn at the time but, being Swiss, he enjoyed more freedom of speech than the Germans themselves. Nevertheless, he was deprived of his chair straight after the Declaration and became a professor at Basle in Switzerland in 1935, where he stayed for more than 25 years. His belief that the Church must be fundamentally detached from the state was amply reflected in the Declaration. Barth wanted radically to renew the principles of Reformation theology. He
believed that, utterly corrupted by sin and the Fall, human reason and its achievements in science, art and culture were worthless. Natural theology was impossible. God’s sole revelation was in his Son, Jesus Christ, and the Word of God was his sole means of communication with us – no indwelling of Christ in the Christian, no mysticism, no divinization and no imagery. Barth developed these ideas in his massive Church Dogmatics, which appeared over the course of 35 years until his death in 1968, but they are briefly expressed in his Dogmatics in Outline (1949), a series of lectures that he gave on the Apostles’ Creed after the war to students who gathered amid the rubble of the old university in Bonn at 7 o’clock in the morning, before the workmen arrived an hour later. Barth thought that the true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is ‘God in the highest’, utterly other. Yet he has
descended into the utter depths and given himself up for us.6 By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can belong still today to Jesus Christ. Barth considered the Spirit not spread widely but focused on those special people who belong ‘in a special way’ to Jesus Christ.
