Learning the Grammar of Ecumenical Encounter

The County Ecumenical Officer reflects on Christian encounter, and what it means to know ourselves through others

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No Christian tradition fully understands itself in isolation. Christian identity is constituted, at least in part, through faithful encounter with other Christians. In plainer terms, we discover something about what it means to be Christian, and about our own Christian tradition, by encountering Christians who are not quite like us. This belief has gradually emerged from my several years of ecumenical work across Norfolk and Waveney, and from my reflections published on this site, in which I have tried to bring philosophical thinking into contact with the lived experience of ecumenism.

When I first started in the role of County Ecumenical Officer, this belief was not something I would naturally have declared. I arrived at it slowly, and somewhat to my own surprise, through the writing itself. In this reflection, I want to ask what my writing on Christian unity as a whole has been doing.

I know from personal experience that philosophical ideas can sometimes be tough to penetrate and understand. As the saying goes, Nil sine magno labore vita dedit mortalibus – ‘Life gives nothing to mortals without great labour’ – or as my old Regimental Sergeant Major used to bellow at me many years ago: ‘Watson, no pain, no gain!’ That said, and I may not always have succeeded in this, I have tried to apply such ideas in an accessible and, hopefully, worthwhile way.

Read together, the philosophers I have drawn upon across my reflections provide conceptual resources for articulating what I have come to understand as a grammar of ecumenical encounter. This grammar, I believe, can help answer the broader question of what ecumenism might look like when it begins from experience rather than from doctrine.

The word grammar, however, needs a bit of attention before proceeding. A grammar does not tell you what to say. It describes the structures through which meaning becomes possible – the conditions under which communication, understanding, and genuine encounter can occur at all. What I mean by a grammar of ecumenical encounter is something analogous; namely, the conceptual structures through which inter-tradition encounters become intelligible, through which what is actually happening in those encounters can be named, understood, and brought into conversation with fellow Christians.

The grammar of ecumenical encounter has been built up, piece by piece, across my series of reflections. Each of the philosophers used has helped to isolate at least one structural feature of ecumenical encounter – one condition without which the encounter either does not happen at all, or happens only superficially. Put simply, the grammar I have been discovering is one of trust, reception, attention, presence, new beginnings and recognition.

For instance, Thomas Reid and Onora O’Neill, drawn on in an earlier reflection on testimony and trust, established ecumenical encounter as, among other things, an act of trust; namely, a willingness to receive the witness of another as genuine, to take seriously their testimony about their own tradition and their own experience of God, rather than immediately subjecting it to verification. Reid’s account of testimony begins from a simple but important fact: much of what we know depends upon trusting what others tell us. Applied to ecumenism, this gives the grammar its first and perhaps most fundamental rule: the other’s word must be received before it can be assessed.

Iris Murdoch, in a reflection that drew on her concept of unselfing, supplied the moral grammar of attention. The ‘fat relentless ego’ (her phrase) constantly pulls experience back towards the self’s own anxieties, categories, and need for confirmation. Genuine encounter requires the discipline of unselfing: the sustained, loving direction of attention away from the self and towards what is actually there. In the ecumenical context, unselfing names what is required when we enter another tradition’s worship, or sit across from a church leader whose theology we find genuinely puzzling, if not difficult. The encounter is not yet real until the ego has stepped aside far enough to let the other be what they actually are.

Emmanuel Levinas, in a reflection on an Orthodox priest encountered during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, supplied the ethical grammar of presence. The face of the other makes a claim before any dialogue begins – a claim that precedes assessment, agreement, and even the question of whether we share a common faith. What I received from that priest’s face as holiness was not a projection of my own expectations. It was something his presence was doing; that is, breaking through my own categories and addressing me directly. Levinas names the structure of that experience: the face speaks first; the encounter begins there, or it does not genuinely begin at all.

Hannah Arendt, drawn on in a reflection on the renewal of the Norfolk and Waveney ecumenical covenant, supplied the grammar of beginning. Her concept of natality – the human capacity to initiate something genuinely new in the shared space between distinct persons – helps us understand what is at stake in every ecumenical gathering. New beginnings arise through action between persons: plurality is not an obstacle to such beginnings but the condition that makes them possible. The meeting room that resulted in a covenant, which became a cathedral service, was not the execution of a predetermined programme. It was natality in the Arendtian sense; that is, something coming into being that none of the participants could have produced alone.

To these, I would now add the Episcopalian Rev Dr Kathryn Reinhard, whose work on recognition and ecumenical interdependence engages the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Charles Taylor, and Judith Butler. Although I have not previously drawn on Reinhard in these reflections, her account supplies what I would call the grammar of recognitive transformation. Her central claim – that ecclesial identity is not self-contained but is constituted through recognition by others – gives a name to something my reflections have been circling throughout. We do not simply meet other traditions as fully formed selves and then decide what to make of them. The encounter itself changes us. To seek recognition from a Christian in another tradition is to solicit a becoming – to be changed through the very act of asking to be seen.

Different as these thinkers are, the pattern that emerges from them is clear. Trust, reception, attention, presence, beginning and recognition all require the same movement: away from the illusion that the self is sufficient unto itself. Each, in different ways and from different starting points, dismantles the idea of an autonomous self that exists fully formed prior to its relations with others and encounters them from a position of self-sufficient completeness.

Reid shows that knowledge itself is socially dependent: much of what we know comes to us through others. O'Neill tells us that relationships must be based on trust but to achieve that we must be practice trustworthiness. Murdoch shows that moral perception requires the ego to relinquish its demand for self-confirmation. Levinas shows that responsibility arises through the encounter with another before we choose it. Arendt shows that genuinely new beginnings arise between persons rather than from isolated selves. And Reinhard brings these insights explicitly into the ecclesial realm: Christian identity itself is formed through relationships of recognition, and failures of recognition damage both the one unrecognised and the one who cannot recognise.

Applied to ecumenism, this convergence produces a claim that is more demanding than it first appears. It is not simply that Christians understand one another better when they meet – though that is true and important. It is that the Church itself comes to understand what it is through faithful encounter with other Christians. Difference is not an obstacle to Christian identity and self-knowledge – it is in fact one of its conditions. Ecumenical encounter is, therefore, not simply something we offer to other Christians; it is something we need if we are to see ourselves more truthfully.

I want to be precise, however, about what this claim does and does not say, because it could too easily be misread. It does not say that doctrinal differences are unimportant, or that the divided state of the Church is acceptable. The theological distances between the many traditions represented across Norfolk and Waveney are real. For example, the inability to share the Eucharist across those distances is a wound, not a merely administrative inconvenience. The grammar of ecumenical encounter is, therefore, not a grammar of indifferentism.

What it says is something more specific: that encounter with other traditions is not an external activity added onto the Church’s life, something undertaken after the Church has fully understood itself through its own internal resources. Encounter belongs to the Church’s ordinary way of coming to understand itself more fully.

This view is consistent with Vatican II’s recognition that elements of sanctification and truth are found beyond the visible structure of the Catholic tradition, and with Unitatis Redintegratio’s insistence that the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using the separated churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation. The grammar of ecumenical encounter is, in the end, a grammar of attentiveness to the work of the Holy Spirit. What philosophy helps us to do is name some of the structures through which that work becomes visible.
 
As my reflections have developed, I have also realised that they echo a question that occupied me years earlier in doctoral research in moral philosophy: how deep attachment to a particular community might be strengthened rather than threatened by genuine openness to others. I was then thinking about belonging, obligation, moral partiality and human flourishing rather than ecumenism. Increasingly, however, I have come to believe that the connection between those two inquiries is structural rather than accidental.

Unlike the other thinkers I have drawn upon, Reinhard writes explicitly within the ecumenical field. What is clear to me is that her account of recognition helps bring into focus a pattern that had already begun to emerge through thinkers writing in quite different contexts. Those other thinkers bring conceptual resources from moral philosophy, ethics, political thought and epistemology that help us see afresh what is happening in the ecumenical meeting room, the local Churches Together Group, or an encounter between Christians of different traditions.

Reinhard, approaching the question from within ecumenism itself, helps draw those insights together around the question of ecclesial identity and recognition. What emerges is not a ready-made ecumenical theology, but a set of conceptual ideas precise enough to help us understand experiences that theology alone has sometimes struggled to describe.

That, I think, is what philosophy is for in ecumenical writing. Not to replace theological argument but to build on the standard arguments for Church unity in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising. It allows us to name structures of experience towards which doctrine may point but which it does not always describe.

Of course, the grammar does not generate the encounter. The encounter generates the grammar. And the grammar, once named, makes it possible to ask more searching questions about what the encounter means, what it requires of those who participate in it, and what it reveals about the Church that is still, haltingly and hopefully, learning to speak its own language.

For those of us engaged in ecumenism, the practical question is, therefore, whether our encounters are marked by these habits; namely, whether we trust enough to listen, attend enough to see, remain present enough to be addressed, risk enough to begin something new, and recognise enough to allow ourselves to be changed.

Learning the grammar of ecumenical encounter is only the beginning.

References

• Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press.
• Coady, C.A.J. (1992) Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (Original work published 1961).
• Murdoch, I. (1970) The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• O’Neill, O. (2002) A Question of Trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Reid, T. (1983) Inquiry and Essays. Edited by R.E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. (Original works published 1764 and 1788).
• Reinhard, K.L. (2022) ‘Recognition and Ecumenical Interdependence: Relationship beyond Division’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies, 57(3), pp. 348–362.
• Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another. Translated by K. Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Second Vatican Council (1964) Unitatis Redintegratio: Decree on Ecumenism. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
• Taylor, C. (1994) ‘The Politics of Recognition’. In: A. Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73.
• Weil, S. (1951) Waiting on God. Translated by E. Craufurd. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Concept and article by Dr Ian Watson, whose lay views are his alone. He serves as County Ecumenical Officer with responsibilities to promote, support, and provide guidance on Christian Unity throughout Norfolk and Waveney. The purpose of Ian’s regular reflections is to build on the standard arguments for Church unity in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising.

Image created with the help of OpenAI.
 

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