As I tell myself that I am not yet of an age for great 'retrospectives', I will concentrate in my comments on the other two dimensions of time, i.e. the present (analysis) and the future (visions).
Analysing the present: challenges
Like so many things in our turbulent times, the analysis of the present in oecumenicis is not overly optimistic at first. And when I think about the sentence, I ask myself: has it ever been any different? Probably not! In the following, I will pick out three significant developments for our time.
1. a modern-sceptical to anti-modern affect is spreading in all denominations. Its manifestations are manifold: from the (re-)strengthening of a fundamentalist biblicism, to the spread of a politically charged, religiously veneered nationalism, to the attempt to revitalise the idea of church and faith as a special, counter or super-world. But its consequences are similar: a tribalisation - one could also say bubble formation - that sometimes stretches interdenominational coexistence to the breaking point and produces a (more or less) surprising 'front' or 'camp' formation across traditional denominational (indeed sometimes religious) boundaries. In some circles, this religious anti-modernism is already becoming the trans-denominational, ecumenical guiding culture of late modernity.
The unifying basic conviction is a denunciation of the secular world and late modernity as a culture of untruth and a time of loss of faith, the lamentation of the loss of basic ethical convictions and the moral decay of 'Western', plural and open societies and - as a consequence - the thesis of the incompatibility of the 'true' Christian faith with the basic principles of this modernity, in particular freedom and democracy.
Allow me to make a small comment at this point due to current events: at the moment, one is inclined to look only at Russia in this "battle between faith and modernity" staged as a clash of cultures, as Wilhelm Damberg puts it in Die 'Lehrmeisterin des Lebens' - Kirchengeschichte und Innovation im Kontext des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils. Yes, the criticism of the Patriarch of Moscow and Rus is justified. However, we should not ignore the dynamics that exist in all denominations, nor should we forget the many attempts over the last two decades to forge (unholy) alliances between the denominations in defence of supposedly Christian values (with emotionally charged keywords such as abortion, homosexuality, 'gender mania', 'fashionable adaptation of doctrine and morals', 'compulsion to political correctness'). The explicit warning applies here: anyone who points a finger at others ...
However, there is a danger in all of this that should not be underestimated. Ultimately, this is an attempt to inscribe a fundamental contempt for freedom and democracy and the rejection of an open society based on these principles into the Christian DNA. I consider this deeply disturbing development to be the greatest ecumenical challenge at the moment. And I am certainly not the only one who, in view of the political upheavals, expects a clear commitment to democracy from my, the Roman Catholic, church and ecumenically hopes for corresponding proactive action by all Christian denominations in defence of democracy on a global political level!
2 The religious market has become more colourful, but also more ambivalent from a global perspective. Seen worldwide, a spiritually free-floating (neo-)Pentecostalism is the bestseller of Christianity par excellence. And I mean that literally! Precisely because it fulfils the economic and spiritual needs of late modernity so wonderfully, neo-Pentecostalism has developed into the world's second largest Christian denomination in recent decades. Religious "questions of truth" are "interpreted as questions of market policy profile", as Thomas Schärtl writes in his essay "Americanised Catholicism? A look back from the USA to Germany. It is published in Stimmen der Zeit 230 from 2012.
Such an economisation of the religious "means for the religions" not only the "thinning out of the religious centre. [The margins of the spectrum of religious participation are being strengthened", as Rainer Bucher puts it in his online article "Insisting on it, not succumbing to it. The Catholic Church on the religious market, but rather the social and political contexts in which neo-Pentecostal communities are booming today, simultaneously promote an extensively cultivated, group-dynamically effective mixture of exclusive, religious communalisation and exclusionary, political-economic lobbying and tribalism.
This melange ultimately produces a neoliberally constructed and economically adapted Gospel of Prosperity with its health and wealth messages, which has deeply internalised the logic of the market and extended it into the religious realm. Neo-Pentecostalism and the economisation of religion not only go hand in hand, they are mutually dependent! The dominant culture of a 'culturally hegemonic capitalism' has appropriated the field of religious convictions. Rainer Bucher names this in the above-mentioned article. Where this happens, however, a purely instrumental (or economised) reason reigns - what is good is what is useful - but this is the gravedigger of any critical theological examination.
The soteriological focus of what is offered spiritually is on a personalised understanding of sin and guilt and the individualised hope of healing and redemption. In this way, the socio-political systemic question of the 'structures of sin' and (social) justice is fundamentally ignored, as Philip Jenkins puts it in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. The criticism of neoliberalism and an 'economy that kills' penned by Pope Francis in his 2013 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium should also be mentioned here.
Relationships of mutual dependence and utility are confused with God's choice of grace. Because the theological 'tone' is then also fundamentalist, supranaturalist and pre-Enlightenment, the old distorted image of 19th century Western European criticism of religion (the Marxian/Lenin thesis that religion is opium for the people arises not without reason from the criticism of unbridled capitalism of the industrial age!) becomes the blueprint for Christianity in the 21st century, according to Jenkins once again.
If we look at the whole thing from a post-colonial perspective, it quickly becomes clear that our own colonialist missionary history threatens to fall on our feet here. Here, too, the challenge is obvious: we will have to struggle to make Europe's heritage plausible anew: social justice and a universality that includes everyone are a heritage that Christianity understands as, as Johann Baptist Metz once put it, a religion "that seeks freedom and justice for all in the name of its mission" and that "from its biblical heritage develops a ... culture of recognising others in their otherness, i.e. the creative recognition of ethnic-cultural plurality". They are definitely worth translating into other world contexts.
3 I would also like to mention a third, more internal challenge. I will limit myself here to observations from my own church and the current focal points in the dialogue with the churches of the Reformation. Be it the discussions about the document Together at the Lord's Table of the ÖAK, be it the Roman comments on the study on 'Baptism and Church Communion', which was commissioned by the LWF and the 'Dicastery for the Promotion of Unity', the reactions from Rome are similar: Instead of a hermeneutic of trust (including the method of differentiating consensus), which has been practised in ecumenism for decades, a critical approach, narrowly focussed on one's own confessionalism, is now once again being used as the standard for what is theologically correct and ecumenically possible.
On the extreme horizon of this Roman contradiction, a drift towards the identitarian, denominationally exclusive is dawning, which was thought to have long been overcome in ecumenical co-operation. However, this does not simply represent a relapse into pre-conciliar, Catholic patterns of argumentation and thought from the times of a return ecumenism, although it makes extensive use of them. Rather, it is a continuation or even a reinvention of a certain profile defended as 'truly Catholic' under late-modern auspices: the tribalising, exclusive identity of the 'little flock', which has a clear answer to everything, which undercuts any intellectual ability to differentiate and even its own diverse tradition, and which lives from the extreme dynamic of 'us' against 'the others'; in short: a Catholic variant of populism.
To put it more pointedly: The Catholic culture war over the question of what it actually means to be 'Catholic' in the 21st century, which we observe everywhere, particularly in the dispute over the need for reforms in the Catholic Church, has now also arrived in ecumenism. What should be done?
However, dear ecumenical brothers and sisters, you are not simply passive spectators in the internal Catholic struggle for change, you must become protagonists if you do not want ecumenism to fall by the wayside as collateral damage of this debate. With a little more pathos: the dispute over an ecumenically open-minded, open, modern, compatible form of the Catholic Church should not be left to Catholics alone. Since the Second Vatican Council, it should be clear: The fate of my church is also in your hands.
So much for the challenges. What could an ecumenical theology contribute to overcoming them and what would be necessary to do so?
Visions for the future: A plea for an ecumenical theology with a profile
Profile 1: Contingency sensitivity
Even a rather superficial look at the history of the impact of the Western epochal break, which is associated with the keyword 'Reformation', draws attention to the decisive factor: the competition between denominations in the same geographical area (in contrast to the geographically different separation of the Eastern and Western churches) forces us to define our own exclusively, to standardise and unify it. Denominational identity becomes group identity, the church's self-image is defined as 'tribal ecclesiology', which no longer dares to allow internal differentiation. Roger Haight has explained this in detail in Christian Community in History. Particular reference should be made here to Volume II: Comparative Ecclesiology, published in New York and London in 2005.
One can now try to console oneself for this internal denominational impoverishment by 'externalising' the necessary plurality: the diversity of denominations 'replaces' the lost 'breadth' of one's own identity. This kind of 'praise of diversity' seems to me - if I may say so - to be the 'typically Protestant' way of dealing with the problem: to differentiate oneself. But on closer inspection, this 'consolation' proves to be an illusion: while recognising a plural diversity within one's own denomination draws attention to the fact that one's own identity is always a constructed one, but therefore also a changeable one, because it has emerged from sometimes very contingent selection processes, an outward-looking plurality tends to perceive every alternative only as a questioning of what is one's own.
Whether the 'lung wing ecumenism' between East and West is hermeneutically better positioned here, I will leave open for the moment. It is not suitable for critically questioning the contingency of one's own confessional identity constructions, which must also be assumed here, because it ultimately immunises itself against a self-critical analysis of this identity through the statement of ought implied in the metaphor used (who likes to breathe with one lung ... so it has to be two).
However, the ecumenical acid test of the plea for diversity can only be passed if one takes the contingency of certain selection and construction processes for one's own denominational identity seriously. In this perspective, denominational identities are not the fixed, unquestionable, final point of orientation, but can, indeed must, "not only be relativised, but also transformed", as UIrich H. J. Körtner puts it in Where is ecumenism heading?
This is where the ecumenical work of the Kärrnerians begins. It begins with the 'memory of having become'; and makes it clear that "identity only exists in the way of historical transformations", writes Joseph Ratzinger in The Problem of the History of Dogma from the Point of View of Catholic Theology. This can be read on page 19f of the book published by Westdeutscher Verlag in 1966. Anyone who uncovers the contingency/temporality of certain decisions made, reconstructs their historicity, reveals a 'certain', 'always the same' confessional identity as a 'construct' on the one hand and, on the other, also makes visible what is often labelled as 'tradition' as 'constructed continuity'.
Precisely because there is always a historical, perhaps even a consciously suppressed alternative to what actually exists, one's own denominational identity must be taken seriously in its changeability and development. On the other hand, however, this work as a warrior also includes the willingness to allow this 'memory(s)' of what has become to become a potential for renewal, according to Damberg again; in other words, to understand its content as a 'dangerous memory' in the sense of a "contribution to the ambiguity and thus innovation tolerance" of one's own identity and to make it ecumenically fruitful. This is how Georg Essen puts it in Die Geschichte, die aus der Wahrheit kommt. Reflections on an inner-church culture of innovation tolerance. This is the only way to maintain awareness of the alternatives available in the history of theology, to expand the spectrum of possibilities and to open up paths of self-criticism and self-correction.
Profile 2: (Self-)criticism
In the ecumenical dialogues of recent decades, we have painstakingly learned to perceive differences as a 'gain' and therefore not as an 'obstacle to unity', but rather as a good that must be preserved, because it cannot be given up. The tolerance of alterity associated with this accepts the other person's different response and does not force them to give their own, because it recognises that their place, their time and their situation are not their own. It recognises the situational, historical, linguistic and also mental differences as factors, because these are each unique and can therefore never be copied or repeated. The ecumenical hermeneutics of difference developed from this determines the differences not from the opposites, but from the common basis. An ecumenical methodology has then developed from this, which makes different forms of thought fruitful in the sense of complementarity. You can read about this in detail in Wolfgang Klausnitzer's book Kirche, Kirchen, Ökumene, published in Regensburg in 2010.
The ecumenical acid test of this hermeneutic can now be summarised with the following question: But have we already achieved the goal of ecumenism if we are no longer Christians against each other or next to each other, but simply with each other? That would indeed be too simplistic. Genuine ecumenical togetherness is "the result of a confrontation with an alternity of the denominational other ... that is not unbrokenly absorbed in one's own terms and concepts." Gregor Maria Hoff summarised this idea in Ökumenische Passagen - zwischen Identität und Differenz. Fundamentaltheologische Überlegungen zum Stand des Gesprächs zwischen römisch-katholischer und evangelisch-lutherischer Kirche. (Published in Innsbruck in 2005.)
This results in the actual imposition of engaging with this other in such a way that one's own can also be seen differently, can become different. Togetherness is therefore a togetherness of differences that needs to be actively shaped, which puts one's own in limbo and constantly challenges it. However, where difference and alterity are trivialised in terms of identity strategy ("I am good, you are good, we are good"), i.e. where one cannot/will no longer learn anything from the other, a hermeneutic of difference tends to serve the old denominational profiling and identity trap and thus silences the potential for change in ecumenism. To be honest, however, this is precisely what has fascinated me about ecumenism from the very beginning: the hope that my own church will change in the face of others. What could be done to revitalise this old idea of ecumenism?
Profile 3: Contentiousness
No, we do not have to become 'the others' in order to get out of our denominational identity discourses, but neither should we pretend that we can remain the same if we take ecumenism seriously.
There is also something of a litmus test for this: it is based on an observation by my Tübingen colleague Ottmar Fuchs: If it is the case that "to religious identity in ... interconfessional ...dialogue", according to Fuchs, "is that it does not insularly assert the truth core of itself and only seeks consensus at its edges, but that it also productively enters into contrast with other faith realities with its difference" (i.e. develops an alterity competence), - if ecumenical dialogue discussions and ecumenical cooperation are really about 'getting down to business' - then it is inevitable "that the connotation also creeps into the experiences of mutual otherness ...that one's own is in part or as a whole the truer and better". He writes this in Dialogue in the 'martyrdom' of truth, in: HThKVatII Vol. 5 The documents of the Second Vatican Council: theological synopsis and perspectives.
Without the claim to represent the 'better', 'true', 'more correct' itself, which then sets in motion the necessary dispute about the better solution, "the concept of difference ... is also meaningless [better: inconsequential]", according to Ottmar Fuchs again. Logical! Before every reconciliation, even before 'reconciled diversity', there is always a dispute! Question for us ecumenically interested and committed people: Are we actually still arguing? Or is there not a widespread, benevolent lack of interest?
A few years ago, my Swiss colleague Eva-Maria Faber rightly noted in an article on 'Repentance and willingness to change as constitutive elements of the ecumenical path' that the dialogue commissions seemed to have lost their momentum. In the meantime, they are only repeating what is already being thought and practised in the respective churches anyway. In view of this latent tendency towards conformism, they have lost sight of their actual mission of breaking new ground, opening up new horizons and venturing into uncharted territory. To summarise once again: there is too little arguing in the ecumenical movement. Those who don't want to/can't argue about anything seem to be indifferent to everything. Only serious dispute makes ecumenical theology a transnational, innovative discipline that is truly capable of debate and accountability. No ecumenism without controversy! So as not to be misunderstood: This necessary dispute is always an argumentative (!) dispute. Without open, argumentative debate, there can be no honest dispute about the truth; and pure 'tradition arguments' (because they confuse 'to be' with 'ought') are always unsuitable arguments for the question of truth.
Sometimes Pope Francis really does surprise us. That also applies here. In a letter to the Grand Chancellor of the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina, for example, he urges people not to avoid theology, dispute and conflict. Only here can a genuine 'culture of debate' develop in the open exchange of arguments, in mutual questioning, which takes the dispute over the 'better solution' seriously and also realises it constructively and productively for the question of plurality and alterity.
Theologians must therefore be prepared, the Pope said, "to suffer the conflict, to resolve it and to make it the starting point of a new process" in a way that allows "history to be written in a living environment where the conflicts, tensions and opposites can lead to a multifaceted unity that gives rise to new life. It is not a question of advocating syncretism, nor of absorbing one into the other, but of finding a solution at a higher level that retains the valuable inherent possibilities and polarities in the conflict".
I think there is no better way to describe the profile and goal of an ecumenical theology of the future. And so I would like to thank the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, also on behalf of the Institute for Ecumenical and Interreligious Research at the University of Tübingen, for so generously supporting further work on a high-profile ecumenical theology with this prize and the associated prize money.
