Communion, Diversity, and Salvation: The Contribution of Jean-Marie Tillard to Systematic Ecclesiology 9780567660398, 9780567574244

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Preface The late Fr. Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, O. P. (1927–2000) was an ecumenical pioneer, a prolific theologian, a pastor who regularly shared his knowledge outside of the academy through regular lectures and talks for the people of the Church he loved, and a deeply contemplative Christian who wrestled with God and God’s plan for humanity. These accomplishments alone recommend study of his work. I never had the opportunity to meet Fr. Tillard in person in this life, and have learned at his feet primarily through his writing. But he was also, by many accounts, a man deeply in touch with the humorous in life. Every theologian and ecumenist I have met who worked with Fr. Tillard has an anecdote of an aside, a bon mot, a tension-breaking witticism in the heart of an ecumenical impasse. He was a man whose first investigations into Thomas Aquinas focused upon the concept of happiness, and who never lost his passion for proclaiming the good news of God’s desire that humanity be happy through love for God and for each other. Two questions lie at the foundation of this investigation of the thought of Jean-Marie Tillard. One relates directly to the concept which Tillard promoted as central to human happiness: what is an “ecclesiology of communion”? One of the most widely used concepts in Christian theology and ecclesiology in the past five decades, communion/koinonia language has been taken up to address issues of Trinitarian theology, theological anthropology, ecclesial structure and order, the nature of the church, all from a wide range of perspectives and with a wide variety of conclusions. Rather than attempting another study of the “visions and versions” of the concept of communion across this range of thinkers and documents,1 I have attempted in this book to look closely at one understanding of communion, one which I judge to have much to contribute to ecclesiology and to continuing conversion within and between the churches. Tillard understands communion as the happiness, the salvation, to which God calls a divided humanity to as a society or community, begun in and through the

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See Dennis M. Doyle, Communion Ecclesiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000).

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concrete reconciliation of divided, plural others in local churches gathered around the table of the Eucharist. Drawn from the Scriptures, from the history and practice of the early church, from the writings of the theologians of the first centuries of Christian life, and from his own contexts of ecumenical and ecclesial existence, Tillard’s theory of communion as the inbreaking of “thehumanity-that-God-wants” in history provides a crucial component of a fuller appreciation of the nature and mission of the church of Christ. The second question is broader than the first, yet not unrelated: how ought one study that church? Questions of methodology in ecclesiology are at the forefront of much contemporary theological reflection, and have been for some time. While recognizing the futility, even the inadvisability, of pursuing the mirage of a single, adequate systematic ecclesiology removed from context and a wider community of investigation, I argue here for the possibility and the necessity of systematic ecclesiological studies of the church, and suggest some of the methodologies that are demanded for the complex reality of the church. In particular, I suggest a need to move beyond single-metaphor attempts to capture the “essence” of the church and beyond ecclesiologies rooted primarily in scriptural and other normative and historical structures that never touch down in the complicated reality of concrete human history. Without making an artificial choice between an “ecclesiology from above” and an “ecclesiology from below,” to use the phrases of Roger Haight, I argue both for methods of constructing ecclesiologies from above more systematically, and for the need to incorporate ecclesial reality “from below” more directly and explicitly. With regard to this second question, then, the work of Jean-Marie Tillard serves as a test case of how to do ecclesiology systematically. Especially by the completion of his last major work on the ecclesiology of communion, L’Église locale, Tillard stands out among his contemporaries for the systematic stability with which he defines communion and relates that concept to other aspects of the church, salvation, and the life of grace. At the same time, one major lacuna in Tillard’s thought is the lack of a direct connection of his understanding of communion with the concrete reality of the church. Tillard’s ecclesiology—and arguably all communion ecclesiology—is a contextual theology, rooted in two contexts: the ecumenical movement that defined much of Tillard’s professional life, and the wider “secular age” of individualist late modernity, for whom the possibility of communion and connection with those who are different is real “good news.” Making clearer the rootedness of Tillard’s thought in those contexts, and exploring the reality of ecclesial communion in the concrete life of the church, has the potential to strengthen, challenge, and nuance Tillard’s project. These two questions move back and forth through the book much like the first and second themes of a piece of music, sometimes harmoniously and sometimes in creative tension. I begin in Chapter 1 by outlining the question of

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methodology in ecclesiology, presenting a summary history of ecclesiological reflection in the twentieth century, especially in Roman Catholic theology, and arguing for the kind of systematic ecclesiology presented by theologians such as Joseph Komonchak and Neil Ormerod. In Chapter 2, I introduce the second theme, the concept of communion in twentieth-century ecclesiology, discussing two major streams of communion thought, one rooted primarily in ecumenical dialogue, and one rooted in Roman Catholic concerns to identify the spiritual/ theological nature of the church in addition to traditional emphases upon the institutional church. Chapter 3 might be thought of as an interlude in which I present the life, broad theological concerns, and secondary themes of JeanMarie Tillard and his work. In Chapter 4 I detail Tillard’s conception of communion and its function in his overall project, in conversation with the theologies of communion presented in the second chapter. Finally, in Chapter 5 I return to the beginning in asking how well Tillard’s theology meets the idea of a systematic ecclesiology outlined in the first chapter, and suggesting some ways for further improvement and development of Tillard’s ideas, especially in relation to the need for greater sustained study of the phenomenon of communion in actual concrete local churches.

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Acknowledgments As I stated above, I never met Fr. Tillard in this life, and have only known him through his books and through the words and stories of others. Nevertheless, it is to Fr. Tillard that I owe a first word of gratitude. Working closely with his texts over the past decade has been a time of real if incomplete communion. My hope is that I have been faithful in representing his thought and charitable in suggesting room for further development and improvement. This book first began as a doctoral dissertation pursued in the Department of Theology at Boston College. I am grateful to my director, Professor Mary Ann Hinsdale, I. H. M., who has been a generous and supportive Doktormütter. Professors Charles C. Hefling, Jr., and Michael J. Himes improved the final product by their careful reading and review of that work. Professor Bruce T. Morrill, S. J., also of Boston College, has been a wise advisor and a dear friend through many years. Thanks are also due to my colleagues at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I taught for two years after finishing my doctorate, for their support and camaraderie. My colleagues and students at Marymount University have been at the center of my academic communion since 2009, and I continue to learn, grow, and laugh with them as a faculty member in the School of Arts and Sciences. I am grateful to the University for a Faculty Development Grant which supported the final revisions of this project, and especially to my colleagues Brian Doyle, Jacquelyn Porter, R.S.H.M., Kathleen Garces-Foley, Adam Kovach, and Michael Boylan in the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies for their companionship in these recent years. I am grateful to Thomas Kraft of T&T Clark, and the editor of Ecclesiological Investigations, Gerard Mannion, for giving me the opportunity to share my work with a wider audience, and for their assistance and patience in the editing process. Scholarship is rooted in a communion of diverse individuals, and good scholarship is in conversation with a wide range of experiences, friendships, and sometimes challenging dialogue partners. While not wanting to extend this preface to the length of the book that follows, I wish to offer thanks to all who have

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helped me and given of themselves in making me the theologian and the Christian that I am today, especially: Daniel Arrieta; Michael Attridge; John Baldovin, S.J.; Catherine Clifford; Catherine Costello; Paul Crowley, S.J.; Paula Cuozzo; Mario DeAngelis; Norah Deluhery; Laura Everett; Michael Fahey, S.J.; David Flanagan and Gabi Menges; Suzanne Hevelone; Dan and Jen JoslynSiemiatkoski; Leonard W. Johnson; John McDargh; Morgan McDonald; Maria McDowell; Silvio Menzano and Jeffrey Weisner; the Paulist Center community and Paulist Associates in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Paulist Fathers throughout North America; Julie Penndorf; Karen Reiber; Christopher Ruddy; Tracy Suzuki-Tiemeier; Chris and Regina Walton. Finally, the book is dedicated to my parents, William and Margaret Flanagan, who first made the love of Christ most directly present in my life, and to Nathan Paxton, who continues to share with me the grace of communion and otherness.

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Abbreviations CE DD EE EL EP ER

Chair de l’Eglise, Chair du Christ Don de Dieu Église d’Églises L’Église locale L’Eucharistie, Pâque de l’Église L’évêque de Rôme

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Chapter 1 Methods, Images, and Systematic Ecclesiology Two Centuries of Ecclesiological Reflection The importance of investigating method in ecclesiology is perhaps best demonstrated by the history of theological reflection on the church1 in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a history marked by a lack of consensus on how theologians ought to study the church and where such study fits in the overall project of Christian theology.2 Christian ecclesiologies after the Reformation had focused primarily upon the organization and structure of the church, usually in order to prove the biblical origins or divine institution of the structures of the

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A word is needed on my use of the term “church” in this book. Writing as a Roman Catholic theologian, and primarily with regard to another Roman Catholic theologian, I am aware, as the reader should be, that I write from a Roman Catholic Christian perspective. When using the word “church,” therefore, I cannot but use that term from within a Roman Catholic context. Nevertheless, the understanding of “the church” that Jean-Marie Tillard constructed and that I relate here intends to speak about the Christian church as a whole, and not solely the Roman Catholic Church in particular. When describing the Christian community as “the church,” therefore, I intend to outline an understanding of the church as a whole, though an understanding that is undoubtedly rooted primarily in the context of the Roman Catholic Church. 2 Ecclesiology obviously has a longer pedigree. Whether one chooses to date the beginnings of “modern” ecclesiology to the treatises De Ecclesia of the Conciliarist period, the writings of Bellarmine and other Catholic and Protestant apologists around the time of the Reformation in the West, or the work of Drey, Möhler, and the Tübingen school in the early nineteenth century, ecclesiology does not spring fully formed from the head of Sebastian Tromp in the early twentieth century. See Michael J. Himes, “The Development of Ecclesiology: Modernity to the Twentieth Century” in The Gift of the Church, ed. Peter Phan (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 45–67; Bernard Prusak, The Church Unfinished (New York: Paulist, 2004); and chapters 1–7 of Gerard Mannion and Lewis Mudge, The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (New York: Routledge, 2008).

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theologian’s Christian denomination. The questions of the visibility and invisibility of the church, the apostolicity of ecclesial teachings and practices, and discussion of historical continuity with the New Testament church were major axes of these treatments. Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican ecclesiologies in this period developed in ways too numerous and interesting to be easily summarized within this short chapter, though their contributions to ecumenical conceptions of the church will be noted below. Within Roman Catholic ecclesiology, the relatively static postTridentine consensus on the treatise De Ecclesia began to develop with the investigations of the Tübingen school in the early nineteenth century, and the pace of these new ways of studying the church accelerated into the mid-twentieth century. The ecclesiological thought of J. S. Drey and J. A. Möhler reflects a move within Roman Catholic theology to treat the church not only as a visible, legal structure (as in Bellarmine’s claim that the church is as visible as the Kingdom of France or the Republic of Venice3), but also as an object for direct theological reflection; in other words, not only as a structure of warrants for the Christian faith but as an object of that faith in its own right. The “Roman School” of late nineteenth-century Roman Catholic ecclesiology centered around the Jesuit theologians Giovanni Perrone, Carlo Passaglia, J. B. Franzelin, Clement Schrader, and M. J. Scheeben, combined the Tübingen school’s study of the church as an object of theological reflection with the prevailing postReformation Roman Catholic focus upon hierarchical and juridical structures. They retained the Tübingen scholars’ insight that reflection upon the church is not reducible to canon law or ecclesial apologetics, but combined this with an emphasis on the visible, hierarchical organization of the church as the “continuing incarnation” of Jesus Christ in the world.4 Möhler’s use of the image of the church as the “Mystical Body of Christ” was taken up by the Roman school and culminated in the theology of the Mystical Body found in Pius XII’s Mystici Corporis Christi in 1943, which showed the influence, and likely the pen, of Sebastian Tromp and his work Corpus Christi quod est Ecclesia.5 Broadly, these theologians saw that the methodology used in investigating the church since the Gregorian reforms—namely, canonical legal reflection and apologetic scriptural prooftexting—was insufficient. Robertus Bellarminus, Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereticos (Moguntiae: Sumptibus Kirchhemii, Schotti & Thielmanni, 1842–43), 2, 3, 2. 4 See Yves Congar, L’Église de Saint Augustin à l’époque moderne (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1970), 428–35; Himes, “The Development of Ecclesiology,” 54–63. See also Michael J. Himes, Ongoing Incarnation: Johann Adam Möhler and the Beginnings of Modern Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 1997). 5 Congar, L’Église de Saint Augustin, 469–72.

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Mid-twentieth-century Roman Catholic ecclesiology retained the focus on visibility and hierarchical order that had been the hallmark of the canonical tradition and Roman thought on the church since the time of the Reformation, but continued to address the theological question of how the visible, human structure of the church and the invisible, graced reality of the church were connected. The primary ecclesiological method of the twentieth century was the construction of ecclesiologies centered on a dominant metaphor or model of the church, usually drawn from Scripture. This was a reaction against ecclesiological reflection that focused upon the visible, hierarchical structure of the church to the neglect of the church’s graced, invisible, and “supernatural” reality. Thus, just as the “Mystical Body of Christ,” which was central to the thought of Pius XII and Sebastian Tromp, was retained in the metaphor “body of Christ,” so did the idea of the church as the “People of God” become dominant after the Second Vatican Council.6 The description of the church as a “Communion,” going back at least as far as Bernhard Pilgram’s work7 and promoted in the midtwentieth century by Catholic theologians such as Jérôme Hamer, in his work L’Église est une communion,8 and in the thought of Yves Congar, became a key theme in post–Vatican II Roman Catholic ecclesiology. In many ways the ascendance of the notion of “communion” can be analyzed as part of the attempt to point to the graced reality of the church through the use of a dominant metaphor. Lumen Gentium, the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, begins its reflections upon the church with the awareness that “the inner nature of the Church is now [in the time of Christ] made known to us in various images.”9 It catalogues various biblical themes that can and have been applied to the church (e.g. “a sheepfold,” “a cultivated field,” “the true vine and branches,” “the building of God,” 6

M. D. Koster, for example, prominently argued before the Council that a theology of the church as the “Body of Christ” was insufficiently open to systematic use in comparison with the idea of the church as the “People of God.” Cf. M. D. Koster, Ecclesiologie im Werden (Paderborn: Verlag der Bonifacius-Druckerei, 1940). 7 See Friedrich Pilgram, Physiologie der Kirche (Berlin, 1860). See Yves Congar, “Peut-on Définir l’Église?” in Sainte Église: Études et approches ecclésiologiques, Unam Sanctam 41 (Paris: Cerf, 1963), 21–44 for a remarkable essay in which Congar anticipates much of the substance of today’s conversation about ecclesiological methodology, as well as identifying some of the sources of the use of communion language in the work of Pilgram. 8 Jérôme Hamer, O. P., L’Église est une communion (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962). I discuss Hamer’s work in greater detail in Chapter 2 below. 9 Lumen Gentium, §6, in Austin Flannery, O. P., ed., Vatican Council II, vol. 1, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, New Revised Edition (Northport, NY: Costello; Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1996), 353. All translations from the documents of the Second Vatican Council are from this translation.

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“the holy city,” “our mother”), any one of which could conceivably be made the leitmotif of a complementary ecclesiology. The use of varying metaphors points to the difficulty of understanding both the visible, human structure of the church and the graced reality of the church to which these many images point at the same time.10 At the same time that these twentieth-century developments germinated within Roman Catholic ecclesiology, the growth of the institutional ecumenical movement had a major effect on Protestant ecclesiologies, and ecumenical reflection on the nature and purpose of the church began to converge on the importance of a notion of “communion.”11 While early statements of the World Council of Churches (WCC) on the nature and purpose of the church more frequently used the metaphor of the “body of Christ,”12 various multilateral and bilateral dialogues organized their reflections around an idea of “communion,” particularly after the first Anglican-Roman Catholic International Dialogue and after the full entrance of the Orthodox churches into the ecumenical movement. These trends culminated in the 1991 WCC Canberra Assembly’s statement “The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Gift and Calling,”13 and the 1993 Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, “Towards Koinonia in Faith, Life and Witness.”14

10 Some of these metaphors have been more dominant than others; “Body of Christ” and “People of God” have obviously remained the most commonly utilized biblical metaphors for the church, although other metaphors emphasize other aspects of the church and have been used in different contexts. The image of the church as the “bride of Christ,” in particular, has become an important ecclesial metaphor in recent years, in part due to the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar in contemporary Roman Catholic theology. See “Spouse” in Christopher O’Donnell, Ecclesia: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Church (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 427–28; and Brian P. Flanagan, “The Limits of Ecclesial Metaphors in Systematic Ecclesiology,” Horizons 35 (2008): 32–53. 11 See the important work of Nicholas Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins, and the Practice of Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 12 These documents, however, did not make such a metaphor central as was done in, for example, the encyclical Mystici corporis, with which the WCC. drafters were in direct conversation. See the “Toronto Statement” on “The Church, the Churches, and the World Council of Churches” of the WCC Central Committee, 1950, in The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices, ed. Michael Kinnamon and Brian E. Cope (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1997), 463–68. 13 In Michael Kinnamon, ed., Signs of the Spirit (Geneva: WCC Publications; Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 172–74. 14 Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann, eds., On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994).

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By the latter half of the twentieth century, across Christian ecclesiologies, including Roman Catholic ecclesiology, there was now broad consensus regarding the need to attend to both the institutional structures of the church and its “deeper,” spiritual or theological reality. But how exactly to do that remained open, particularly among Roman Catholic theologians for whom the new perspectives were both creatively liberating and profoundly underdetermined by comparison to the textbook ecclesiologies of their youth. Two methodological strategies in Roman Catholic ecclesiology became dominant, both rooted in the use of key images and metaphors. The first approach can be found in preconciliar reflection on the Mystical Body and in much postconciliar reflection on the People of God; in this pattern, one metaphor is chosen as a dominant hermeneutical key in constructing an ecclesiology. This approach sometimes had the character of an academic fad, based upon the authority of papal usage or the dominant voice of a prominent theologian. The word, phrase, or image, functioning as a center around which numerous ecclesiological questions were arrayed, provided a way of organizing and answering questions about the church’s institutional and theological realities in a relatively coherent way. Mystici Corporis and the thought of Tromp upon which it was based provide a good example of this strategy—questions about the nature of the church, its relation to God through Christ, the hierarchical organization of the church, the sacramental and canonical institutionalization of the church, the role of the Christian faithful in the church—all of these questions were asked, and answered, with the image of the Mystical Body of Christ providing a touchstone of continuity. A second strategy, anticipated by Yves Congar,15 attended to the plurality of biblical metaphors presented in Lumen Gentium and proceeded to construct an ecclesiology which balanced the relative strengths and weaknesses thought to be present in them. Within Roman Catholic circles, a primary exponent of this second strategy was Avery Dulles’s widely influential Models of the Church.16 First published in 1974 and revised and expanded in 1987, Dulles draws on the idea of “model” from the social and physical sciences in order to present a method for ecclesiological reflection in which images and abstract concepts are employed heuristically to better understand the mystery of the church.17 Dulles’s models (the church as “institution,” “mystical communion,” “sacrament,” “herald,” “servant,” and, in the revised 1987 edition, “community of disciples”) describe various aspects of the church’s visible structure and theological reality 15 See Congar, “Peut-on Définir l’Église?” 16 Avery Dulles, S. J., Models of the Church, exp. ed. (New York: Doubleday, Image Books, 1987). 17 Ibid., 22–26.

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that are designed to allow reflection upon the church without claiming full ecclesiological adequacy for any single model. This approach is rooted in a strong awareness of the gap between theological language taken from human experience and the mystery of God and God’s action in the world, and most often justifies its systematic reticence with an appeal to the enduring “mystery” of the church’s reality. Thus, Dulles argues, “because images are derived from the finite realities of experience, they are never adequate to represent the mystery of grace.”18 In his estimation a full understanding of the church would require harmonizing the understandings of the church found in these different models, something that the enduring mystery of the church makes nearly impossible.19 In the revised edition of Models of the Church, however, Dulles argues that an additional model of church, the church as a “community of disciples,” comes close to doing so. He suggests that this model might be the starting point for a “comprehensive ecclesiology,”20 though it would still fall short of “being adequate to the full reality of the Church.”21 Despite the questions this chapter will raise about the limitations of these kinds of ecclesiologies, there is an obvious value to this development in twentieth-century Roman Catholic ecclesiology, not least of which is the fact that the majority of Christian reflection upon the church has taken the shape of reflection upon biblical and liturgical ecclesial imagery in this manner. Many of the key metaphors used are directly biblical or extensions of themes first found in the Old and New Testaments. They constitute the rich tapestry of Christian reflection upon the reality of the Christian community across the centuries in the writings of the church fathers, in Christian prayer and liturgy, and in the writings of saints and mystics. Their use in twentieth-century Roman Catholic ecclesiology was especially important in counteracting a Bellarminian emphasis upon the church solely as a hierarchical institution, reducing Roman Catholic ecclesiology in particular to “hierarchology,”22 and allowing for a shared conversation between divided Christians on the nature of the church by mutual reference to a study of the church’s theological nature. The use of the metaphor of the church as the Mystical Body of Christ fruitfully critiqued an ecclesiology 18 Ibid., 32. For Dulles on “mystery”, see ibid., 17–19. 19 Ibid., 195–97. 20 This desire for a “comprehensive ecclesiology” raises questions both for singlemetaphor ecclesiologies, as well as for multiple-metaphor ecclesiologies, and, in fact, for any discussion of “systematic ecclesiology” once we have become aware of the way in which the will-o’-the-wisp of a single volume treatise De Ecclesia is not just unrealistic, but potentially dangerous. 21 Ibid., 207. 22 Joseph A. Komonchak, “History and Social Theory” in “Foundations in Ecclesiology,” ed. Fred Lawrence, Suppl. issue, Lonergan Workshop 11 (1995): 9–10.

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that, in asserting an ecclesial visibility comparable to the Republic of Venice, made ecclesiological reflection indistinguishable in method from the study of other visible, nonreligious institutions. The flexibility and breadth of meaning of these metaphors has also been useful in reaching points of agreement within the ecumenical movement, allowing various Christian churches to take the first steps toward mutual acknowledgment through a shared ecclesial imagination, rooted in a shared repository of imagery. Finally, these images and metaphors do not only belong to the past history of the church; they are also the language of the Christian community at prayer, and are part of the church’s liturgy. Their flexibility, their depth of meaning, and their intersubjective power as symbols make them far more suitable for proclaiming the church as an aspect of faith in God through Jesus Christ than a more precise, narrowly conceived definition of the church.23 But an ecclesiology that moves beyond the enumeration of ecclesial metaphors to construct a more systematic theology of the church is both possible and necessary. Such an ecclesiology requires a further step in determining more precisely the fundamental terms and relations within ecclesiology. The theologian Herwi Rikhof’s self-described “cynicism” regarding the use of metaphors in ecclesiology—“everything seems possible and everything seems permissible”24— comes from his view that the very strengths of the use of metaphors in ecclesiology, such as the creative space their ambiguity opens up, their flexibility in numerous contexts, their ability to elicit intellectual and affective responses, their apophaticism in relation to a God who is, at heart, mystery, also call into question whether ecclesial metaphors suffice as categories of a systematic ecclesiology. The fast-paced “changes in the tides of ecclesiological fashion”25 in 23 The relationship between images, metaphors, meanings, and definitions in theological reflection is obviously a major area of contemporary theological reflection. The relationship between Christian symbols and systematic theological reflection is perhaps best treated by liturgical theologians in their attempt to bring together the terms and categories of systematic theology with Christian liturgical praxis. For a brief review of some issues involved in this intersection, see Catherine Mowry LaCugna, “Can Liturgy Ever Again Become a Source for Theology?” Studia Liturgica 19 (1989): 1–13. An additional source of reflection on the use of metaphors in theology that is suspicious of any efforts that overlook the fundamentally metaphorical nature of theological language is Paul Avis, God and the Creative Imagination (New York: Routledge, 1999). 24 Herwi Rikhof, The Concept of Church: A Methodological Inquiry into the Use of Metaphors in Ecclesiology (London: Sheed and Ward; Shepherdstown, W.V.: Patmos, 1981), 1. 25 Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31.

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Roman Catholic ecclesiology over the past 50 years, as well as the identification of polarized blocs of Catholics with differing models of the church, should alert one to some of the difficulties involved in this ecclesiological method. What do I mean in using the terms “systematic,” “systematic theology,” and “systematic ecclesiology”? A full investigation of the nature of systematic theology would be unmanageable in the context of this chapter, but some understanding of my use of the terms is necessary. Broadly, when I discuss “systematic” theology or ecclesiology, I understand the kind of theological investigation described by Bernard Lonergan as the functional specialty “systematics,” namely the attempt, starting from doctrines, “to work out appropriate systems of conceptualization, to remove apparent inconsistencies, to move towards some grasp of spiritual matters both from their own inner coherence and from the analogies offered by more familiar human experience.”26 Lonergan’s understanding of systematics is taken up in ecclesiology by Joseph Komonchak and, more recently, Neil Ormerod. But while I have found Lonergan’s categorization of the functional specialties helpful in understanding what it is one is doing in doing “systematic theology,” the language of “systematics” and “systematic theology” need not be tied exclusively to Lonerganian theological and philosophical assumptions, and too stark a distinction between “systematic” theology and other kinds of theology betrays modernist assumptions that systematic discourses are the only kinds of discourses worth having. Systematic ecclesiologies, as I use the term, investigate the church methodically, critically, and constructively, in contrast to catechetical and pastoral exercises in theological communication and academic religious studies approaches to religious phenomena. Systematic ecclesiologies attempt to answer questions about the church by raising relevant questions, defining terms and the relations between those terms in relatively stable ways, and attempting to understand a reality through consistent methodological choices. They are theoretical discourses that aim at an understanding of the church by viewing the patterns, relations, and structures of the church in relative abstraction from the concrete churches themselves, with critical attention to the factors that limit one’s ability to produce an all-encompassing or complete theological system. One of the difficulties in talking about “systematic theology” in general or “systematic ecclesiology” in particular is the way in which attempts to approach the study of theology systematically often were directed toward the goal of “a systematic theology,” or “a systematic ecclesiology,” that is, a single treatise or summa encompassing all of the topics of Christian theology or ecclesiology in a single framework. Rowan Williams has criticized the historical excesses of 26 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 132.

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this attempt “to produce a map of the whole territory, displaying an ordered relation between topics.”27 One need not embrace a full-throttled hermeneutics of suspicion to realize how the pursuit of the will-o’-the-wisp of a single-volume De Ecclesia, what Avery Dulles names a “comprehensive ecclesiology,”28 is not only inadequate to the reality under study, but politically dangerous in its tendencies to assume a dominant voice and experience and to exclude, innocently or maliciously, aspects of the church that undermine its claims to comprehensiveness. In many ways systematic theology is pursued today with reference to the ideal comprehensiveness of a theological system, but is more humble with regard to the limitations on the actual production of such a system. The realities of theological specialization and the exponential availability of theological studies, attention to the historicity and particularity of one’s own viewpoint, as well as greater awareness of the political choice involved in the construction of a closed theological system, argue against attempts to produce a single systematic theology or ecclesiology. I have continued to use the term “systematic ecclesiology,” therefore, not to refer to the problematic ideal of a single-volume, single-author system that would adequately analyze all theological topics, but to the goal of an ecclesiology pursued collectively, methodically, and asymptotically through the work of a community of theologians asking questions for understanding about the Christian church from a variety of potentially interconnected avenues of research. The work of theologians in initiatives and organizations such as the Ecclesiological Investigations Network29 and the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, and the structural shift of contemporary theology, caused in part by economic realities, away from single-author monographs and toward journals and collected volumes, all contribute to an understanding of systematic ecclesiology as a collective project.

What Constitutes Systematic Ecclesiology? There are two major problems that arise in developing the criteria for systematic ecclesiology. The first problem occurs not only in ecclesiology, or even in theology, but arises in any specialized field of knowledge: namely, the need to

27 Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 18. 28 Dulles, Models of the Church, 207. 29 The Network identifies its mission as promoting “collaborative ecclesiology” through its American Academy of Religion Program Unity, additional conferences, and publications including the journal Ecclesiology under the direction of Paul Avis and the series of which this book is a part. Additional information is at www. ecclesiological.net.

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distinguish the language and the kind of meaning found in theoretical explanations from that found in other kinds of language and meaning. Personal narratives of the church, liturgical invocations of the church, a sermon preached on the church—these kinds of theological speech are different from a systematic theoretical understanding of the church. “[T]heology stands to religion as political science does to government, or economics to business and commerce. All three are specialized intellectual enterprises that aim to understand, assess, and promote activities that are already going on.”30 The kinds of ecclesiology outlined above that derive primarily from metaphors and attempt, often in single-volume treatments, to describe the entire reality of the church through the use of a key term or image, attempt to understand the church as an activity “already going on,” but often fail to do so in the methodical, self-critical way that the study of a complex reality calls for. Systematic ecclesiology cannot be content with enumerating the language the church uses to describe itself in prayer or narrative, but requires a more methodically controlled exploration of these terms in relation to each other and to other theological doctrines and questions. A second problem is similar, but is particular to ecclesiology in view of its object, the Christian church. In order to understand the church, which is a divine community in view of its origins and eschatological destiny, but also a human community existing firmly within creation, systematic ecclesiology must investigate the church as a graced human community. Systematic ecclesiology requires attention to both its divine and human elements,31 and this means that a systematic ecclesiology “cannot seek to develop a ‘theological account’ and then hope to tack on some social sciences as an afterthought.”32 With some critical attention to the assumptions and presuppositions of the modern social sciences, this will require continuing dialogue with and incorporation of social-scientific studies of concrete human communities. This understanding of systematic ecclesiology

30 Charles C. Hefling, Jr., Why Doctrines? (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1984), 74. Hefling’s statement builds upon the distinction of realms of meaning elaborated by Bernard Lonergan. Cf. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, 81–85. 31 As in Lumen Gentium, §8: “The one mediator, Christ, established and ever sustains here on earth his holy Church, the community of faith, hope and charity, as a visible organization through which he communicates truth and grace to all men. But, the society structured with hierarchical organs and the mystical body of Christ, the earthly Church and the Church endowed with heavenly riches, are not to be thought of us two realities. On the contrary, they form one complex reality which comes together from a human and a divine element. For this reason the Church is compared, in a powerful analogy, to the mystery of the incarnate Word.” 32 Neil Ormerod, “A Dialectic Engagement with the Social Sciences in an Ecclesiological Context,” Theological Studies 66 (2005): 840.

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is problematic for many of the metaphor-based ecclesiologies of the twentieth century not only because of their lack of systematic relation to other theological issues, but also because such non-systematic ecclesiological studies hinder the dialogue between ecclesiology and the social sciences. There are a number of ways of attempting to distinguish what makes a particular strategy for answering the question “What is the church?” a systematic ecclesiology. One criterion for a systematic ecclesiology seems to be the ability of the ecclesiology to answer questions about the church by means of terms and relations that have relatively stable meanings. While proponents of narrative theologies and liturgical theologians’ insistence on the “lex orandi, lex credendi” principle have helped to correct the impression that systematic theology is the only possible form of theology, there remains an important value for theological endeavors in which univocity of terms, clarity of definitions, and stability of relations between those terms are valued for their potential in understanding theological realities. Such theologies lack some of the experiential richness of a liturgy, a well-preached sermon, a scriptural parable, or a mystical experience of prayer, but by drawing upon these and other sources they provide frameworks for understanding God and God’s action in the world in coherent, methodical ways that then assist the church in its liturgies, its sermons, its reading of Scripture, and its prayer. Systematic theology is “faith seeking understanding” with the assistance of the values of clarity, consistency, theoretical judgment, argument, dialectical comparison, etc. While systematic theologians generally no longer naively assume that theologies aiming at “clear and distinct ideas” are the only legitimate modes of theologizing, they also insist that such theologies have a continuing value in the attempt to understand the church. A systematic ecclesiology, then, attempts to construct a consistent theoretical understanding of the Christian church, and to do so by asking questions about the church, by drawing upon Scripture, tradition, other theoretical discourses, and experience, by defining interdependent terms and relations that help to answer those questions, and by suggesting new questions for understanding that arise on the basis of these answers. While systematic theologians in general, and ecclesiologists in particular, are more aware than ever of the contingency of these constructs and their location in particular sociohistorical contexts, systematic theories of the church attempt to understand the church in a way that is relatively stable in relation to historical change and relatively abstracted in relation to particular contexts; postmodern questions have weakened claims for an atemporal or transcendentally valid theology, but theologians still legitimately attempt theoretical discourses that have a relative stability and a relative objectivity independent of their originating contexts. The lack of such stability, clarity, and consistency in many recent ecclesiologies, and the consequent difficulty in evaluating their use of terms and concepts,

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therefore, seem to hinder their ability to contribute to the systematic theological project. Ecclesiologies based on metaphors routinely promote one metaphor as the “most appropriate” or “most essential,” or endorse a “balancing” of the various metaphors. The metaphors themselves, however, provide no criteria for making these judgments, or for mediating disputes. There is often an explicit or implicit ecclesiology already at work in their selection or promotion, but this is based on the sometimes arbitrary or idiosyncratic selection of the ecclesiologist. Herwi Rikhof’s study The Concept of Church brings together arguments from an analytical philosophical analysis of metaphor in order to critique the dominance of single-image-based ecclesiologies for this lack of theoretical clarity.33 The heart of his argument is found in his discussion of three responses to the question of how to relate metaphor to theology: 1) narrative theology with its focus upon story, 2) a models-based theology which sees a similarity between the use of models in theology and in the natural sciences, and 3) a distinction between scriptural metaphors and conceptual analogies that Rikhof finds in Aquinas.34 Rikhof’s view of narrative theology may be a bit caricatured, but he does point to the fact that narrative theologians make distinctions in their own work between the telling of a story and the analysis and interpretation of a story. Rikhof’s concern is to secure ways of using theoretical language to evaluate narratives and to determine criteria of interpretation; thus, he maintains that [a] completely metaphorical language, and thus a completely metaphorical theological language, is not a coherent conception. [. . .] [F]or by its rejection of the level of reflection and argumentation and the corresponding language, it also rejects the possibility of answering questions about orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and disqualifies itself as ideological by so doing.35 Similarly, in the use of models, Rikhof questions the identification of “metaphors” and “models” as interchangeable, and seeks to provide for an adequate theory of metaphors and models in theology. Rikhof’s goal is to establish a way of speaking about the church with more precise, analytical theological language, in order to create an ecclesiological “basic statement” which could 33 Rikhof’s work draws heavily upon the tradition of British analytical philosophy stemming from the work on language of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Knowing this context is helpful in understanding the theological methodology from which Rikhof is working, but does not limit the value of his critiques of the use of metaphors in ecclesiology to those who completely share his philosophical assumptions. 34 Rikhof, The Concept of Church, 123–91. 35 Ibid., 191.

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then “function as an interpretation-key and coherence criterion,”36 that is, as a statement on a second level of theological reflection which could be used to evaluate metaphorical ecclesiological statements. Whether Rikhof’s proposed statement—“the church is the communio of the faithful”37—fulfills this function is open to debate. However, Rikhof’s analysis provides one argument for insisting upon systematic clarity in ecclesiology: scriptural, liturgical, and narrative theologies of the church, in their richness, do not provide criteria for their own evaluation. An encounter, for example, between two competing conceptions of the church as the “Mystical Body” calls for systematic ecclesiological statements that can distinguish between more and less adequate notions of “Mystical Body” in relation to wider questions of nature and grace, of theological anthropology, and of other issues in ecclesiology. To investigate the church systematically, there is a need not only to enumerate possible conceptions of the church, but to develop criteria for the evaluation of those conceptions and provide relatively stable definitions of the relevant terms and relations. A second and related criterion for a systematic ecclesiology seems to be the connection of the question “What is the church?” with other theoretical questions. In other words, for systematic ecclesiology, questions about the church are not independent of other theological questions about the relations of nature and grace, the nature of salvation, the role of God and more particularly of the Father, of Christ, and of the Spirit in salvation history, the nature of the human person, etc. A systematic ecclesiology asks questions about the church in critical relation to these other questions; one’s answer to ecclesiological questions about the role of authority in the Christian community, about the relation of churches across time and space, about the acceptable limits of diversity within the community—these and others, including the most basic question of why God’s salvation in Christ involves this community called the church, are always determined with reference to the questions and answers addressed more explicitly in other theological investigations. Remaining attentive to the limitations of the human ability to understand God and God’s action in the world, systematic theology still aims, asymptotically, at an understanding that is as complex and comprehensive as possible in relation to its object of study. In addition to the attention paid to the specifically theological sources as the Christian Scriptures, the tradition of the church and of Christian theology, and the contemporary experience of the Christian community, systematic ecclesiology also proceeds in continuing critical dialogue with other philosophical and social-scientific discourses that analyze and attempt to understand reality and, 36 Ibid., 229. 37 Ibid., 233.

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in the case of the church, human experience as community. These “background theories,” as Francis Schüssler Fiorenza names them,38 influence the questions theologians ask, the tools and methods they use for their investigation, and the intellectual horizons in which their theologies are pursued. Systematic ecclesiology, therefore, is never pursued in isolation from other theological and extratheological discourses. But to be methodologically sound, such ecclesiologies ought to be reflective and critically aware of how one’s ecclesiology is influenced by and connected with other theological, philosophical, and social-scientific positions. The need for this awareness has been made most clear by the arguments of feminist, liberationist, and critical theologies of the past century.39 The critique of ideology as a system of oppression points out the need to be aware of the systematic connection of one’s ecclesiology with other positions and its location in a particular context. This is particularly true of ecclesiologies that present themselves simply as the drawing forth of the implications of a particular biblical or liturgical image without attending to the other factors that influence the ecclesiologist’s use of that image. Particularly in ecclesiology, we can find numerous examples in which the appeal to a dominant metaphor is used to close off further investigation of the church, rather than to promote further questions for understanding. For example, the language of head and body has contributed to particular theologies of hierarchical domination and subordination, so that speaking of the church as the “Mystical Body,” interpreted with reference to the Pauline discussion of marriage in Ephesians, has been utilized to subordinate women both in the church and in their relationships.40 The idea of the church as a “perfect society,” 38 Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Systematic Theology: Tasks and Methods” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1, ed. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza and John P. Galvin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 7. 39 This is obviously a broad category of theologies, many of which are self-consciously opposed to such a classification. But they share much in common in their rootedness in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy’s critiques of hierarchy and class oppressions, particularly those in the work of Karl Marx and in the analysis of the Frankfurt School. Political theology in Germany, liberation theology in Latin America, critical theology in North America, and feminist, womanist, Black, Latino/a and mujerista theological movements in the northern academy and beyond have all stressed the possibility of ideological distortion and have urged “hermeneutics of suspicion” as a vital part of contemporary Christian theology. For an introduction to some of these issues, see Gregory Baum, Essays in Critical Theology (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1994), and Paul Lakeland, Theology and Critical Theory (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). 40 A focus upon such metaphors not only affects attempts at systematic ecclesiology, but also can influence the critical systematic quality of moral theology. See Susan A. Ross, “The Bridegroom and the Bride: The Theological Anthropology of John Paul II and Its Relation to the Bible and Homosexuality,” in Sexual Diversity and

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once removed from its systematic scholastic definition of “perfect,” that is, as a society which “had within it all that was necessary to achieve its ends,”41 became a post-systematic symbol for the stability, inerrancy, and immutability of the church—“perfection” in the “common sense” sense.42 Similarly, José Comblin has pointed to the use of “communion” in ecclesiology as an ideological tool to limit and close off exploration of ecclesiological use of the “People of God” metaphor to talk about the church as the church “of the people” in Latin American liberationist contexts.43 Similarly, Gerard Mannion has identified the use of communion language in what he terms the “official communion ecclesiology” promoted by some Vatican statements and dicasteries.44 In these and other cases, an ecclesial metaphor’s “obvious” meaning functioned ideologically in justifying the status quo and preventing a critical reevaluation of substantive issues. Without systematic theological criteria for the evaluation of metaphors and awareness of the theological and extratheological positions that influence one’s use of sources, an ecclesiology can become simply the expression of an individual’s or a group’s arbitrary choices. Liberationist and critical theologies alert one to the danger that ecclesiological proposals can actually conceal systems of power and dominance, and, therefore, be “ideological” in a strict sense.45

41 42

43 44 45

Catholicism: Toward the Development of Moral Theology, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung, with Joseph Andrew Coray (Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press, 2001), 39–59. See “Perfect Society” in Christopher O’Donnell, Ecclesia, 359. Bernard Lonergan has discussed the idea of “post-systematic” literature and usage in Method in Theology, 304–05; see also Komonchak, “Lonergan and the Tasks of Ecclesiology,” in “Foundations in Ecclesiology,” 50–51. The development of technical terms, categories, and relations which occurs in systematic thought eventually “trickles down” into common-sense usage; what had been a particular term or relation grounded in a larger system then is used independently, in a commonsense manner, in everyday life; e.g. the use of the Freudian terms “projection” and “subconscious” outside of their original context of systematic Freudian psychology. A classic theological example is the current use of the term “supernatural” as equivalent to the occult, which is a significant change from its development as a technical concept in scholastic reflections on nature and grace. José Comblin, People of God, ed. and trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 47–62. See Gerard Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity (Collegeville, MN.: Liturgical Press, 2007), 43–74. Here I follow Mannheim, who refers to the “particular conception of ideology” as when the ideas and representations of another “are regarded as more or less conscious disguises of the real nature of a situation, the true recognition of which would not be in accord with his interests. These distortions range all the way from conscious lies to half-conscious and unwitting disguises; from calculated attempts to dupe others to self-deception.” Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edwards Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936), 55–56.

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A third and crucial criterion for the construction of a systematic ecclesiology is the ability of ecclesiology to encompass the complexity of the church as a reality with divine and human elements, as an eschatological reality testified to in scripture and experienced in moments of grace that nevertheless proceeds ambiguously through history as a community of grace and sin, as holy and as sometimes far from holy. The twin temptations of an ecclesiology inattentive to this complexity are an idealistic reduction of the church to its “nature” or “essence” treated in isolation from the more complex empirical reality of the church in history, and an agnostic or atheistic reduction of the church to the observable human reality in isolation from the sparks of grace attended to in theology, the supposed “sociological reduction” of ecclesiology that seems to function more as a warning against any sociological engagement than as a legitimate caution against excessive dependence upon social-scientific sources. If post-Reformation Catholic ecclesiology was myopic in focusing almost exclusively on the visible institutions of the church, contemporary ecclesiology has erred more often by presenting idealistic visions of the church that never “touch down” in the reality of the church as a historical, human community. As Neil Ormerod comments, twentieth-century ecclesiologies “provide often inspiring but idealized models of church life based on profound notions of communio, perichoresis, mysterium, and diakonia. They describe a church that we would all want to belong to. But when we look at the church as an historical concrete reality we may wonder about the discrepancy between the idealized form and the historical facts.”46 James Gustafson and Joseph Komonchak both have pointed to the limitations of an ecclesiology whose terms and categories are solely theological, and argue for a greater use of social-scientific methods and research as constitutive of ecclesiology, rather than appendices added to the study of the church as an afterthought. In his work Treasure in Earthen Vessels: The Church as a Human Community,47 Gustafson critiques ecclesiology rooted in “theological reductionism,” “the exclusive use of biblical and doctrinal language in the interpretation of the Church.”48 He goes on to attempt to introduce some major lines of a “social interpretation” of the church “in the light of the function of its beliefs about God, that is, from the manward [sic] side.”49 Komonchak takes up

46 Neil Ormerod, “The Structure of a Systematic Ecclesiology,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 5. See also Ormerod’s overview of these issues and his review of their treatment by Clodovis Boff and John Milbank, “Ecclesiology and the Social Sciences” in Mannion and Mudge, Routledge Companion, 639–54. 47 James Gustafson, Treasure in Earthen Vessels: The Church as a Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). 48 Ibid., 100. 49 Ibid., 107.

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Gustafson’s critiques in a more thoroughgoing way that makes use of Lonerganian principles of method in theology, and argues for the greater use of social-theoretical categories as necessary for an ecclesiology adequate to its complex object of study. He suggests that some of the difficulties in contemporary Roman Catholic ecclesiology may stem from the absence in ecclesiology of theologians familiar with basic terms and categories common to the socialscientific study of human communities and institutions.50 Komonchak’s and Gustafson’s ideas, it should be noted, rest upon a fundamental ecclesiological assumption, itself rooted in a particular theology of nature and grace, and an awareness of the church as graced and human, as both a “natural” and a “supernatural” community. Belief in the divine nature of the church precludes treating it only in sociological categories, but an ecclesiology that revolves only around theological terms and concepts falls short of the goal to understand the church as a graced and as a human reality and results in a kind of “ecclesiological docetism.”51 When describing the church as the “Mystical Body” or the “People of God,” it can be easy to forget that the church exists in the eschatologically oriented tension between its divine reality and its existence now as a human community, composed of fallible Christians in via. This is precisely the issue at stake in the question of whether it is permissible to describe the church as “sinless,” and the potential idealism of ecclesial metaphors further clouds the discussion by glossing over the ways in which the church does not yet fully participate in its graced destiny.52 Komonchak has pointed out that for all of its weaknesses, the institutional focus of ecclesiology that predominated in Roman Catholic circles until the twentieth century had the advantage of rooting ecclesiology in an intelligible “social theory,” a set of terms and categories that made sense of the human condition. Canon law, with its relatively stable theoretical definitions of relationships between individuals and corporate bodies, was “the social theory

50 Komonchak, “History and Social Theory,” 6. 51 It should be obvious that this is not a problem unique to ecclesiology; the closely related field of theological anthropology, and the work of theologians on the questions of nature and grace, of “nature” and “supernature”, all point in similar directions toward an appreciation of the Christian experience as complex and involving different kinds of agency in relation to grace. 52 See Karl Rahner, “The Church of Sinners,” Theological Investigations 6, trans. Karl-H. and Bonfiace Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 253–69; and “The Sinful Church in the Decrees of Vatican II,” Ibid., 270–94. For a recent treatment of these issues in relation to the millennial papal apologies, see Francis A. Sullivan, S. J., “Do the Sins of Its Members Affect the Holiness of the Church?” in In God’s Hands: Essays on the Church and Ecumenism in Honour of Michael A. Fahey, S. J., ed. Jaroslav Z. Skira and Michael S. Attridge (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), 247–68.

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available at the time.”53 It provided a systematic way of understanding human society, and a framework by which an understanding of the actions of God in the world through the Son and Spirit could be connected with the concrete reality of the church. Komonchak warns that in attempting to free the church from the thin, juridically focused ecclesiologies of the post-Tridentine error, ecclesiologists are liable to limit ecclesiology further by divorcing it from reality. “The displacement of a narrowly juridical understanding of the Church by various more fully theological understandings,” he writes, “leads thus to a curiously abstract ecclesiology which neglects the concrete self-realizations of the Church in favor of an interpretation or simple reproduction of biblical or doctrinal statements.”54 Komonchak is not arguing for a return to law as the single or even a primary basis for ecclesiological reflection; he recognizes that attempts to understand human society have grown dramatically in philosophy and the social sciences. Social-theoretical methods of understanding the formation of communities, the relationships of function and power in those communities, the place of shared meaning and values in those communities, and the processes by which communities arise, develop, and decline provide better theoretical tools for explaining social reality than legal theory alone. For an ecclesiology to make the church intelligible, it has to be able to bring a theological vision of the church into conversation and relationship with these anthropological, sociological, political, and philosophical understandings of human communities. Nicholas M. Healy and Neil Ormerod have raised similar critiques with regard to the lack of connection between many contemporary ecclesiologies and the concrete reality of the church. In Church, World and the Christian Life, Healy critiques what he believes to be the dominant trend in contemporary ecclesiology: an idealist study of the church rooted in a focus on “a single word or phrase” that is identified as “the most essential characteristic of the church.”55 What Healy terms “blueprint ecclesiologies,” i.e., those that assume a particular ecclesiological ideal or vision as a foundational structure, are best analyzed, Healy argues, “as more of a rhetorical strategy, something intended to convey an ideal ‘vision’ that will spur efforts towards some concrete goal,”56 than as an attempt to understand the church from the relatively detached perspective of systematic ecclesiology. He argues that the very open-endedness and pluralism of biblical and patristic imagery establish the possibility of divergent views of what the church “should” look like, and have contributed to the instability of ecclesiological reflection in recent years. In the place of such ecclesiologies, 53 54 55 56

Komonchak, “History and Social Theory,” 9. Komonchak, “Lonergan and the Tasks of Ecclesiology,” 52–53. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life, 26. Ibid., 36.

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Healy makes the constructive proposal of a “practical-prophetic” ecclesiology that “reflects directly and theodramatically upon what modern ecclesiology often renders secondary, namely the church’s concrete, in via identity,”57 directly incorporating analysis of the concrete church in its investigations. Both Healy and Neil Ormerod differ from Komonchak and Gustafson in problematizing the relation between theology and the social sciences. Both suggest more explicitly that the introduction of social-scientific methods and conclusions into ecclesiology requires a critical assessment of the agnostic or sometimes atheist genealogy and assumptions of the modern social sciences. Healy, drawing upon the thought of John Milbank, argues that the incorporation of historical and sociological studies in ecclesiology must be done cautiously and in the pursuit of an explicitly theological sociology. “Agnostic sociology,” he writes, “should indeed be appropriated by ecclesiology, but it can be used only indirectly, since it requires theological assessment and modification before it can become part of an ecclesiological proposal.”58 He then argues for a kind of empirical social analysis internal to the discourse of theology itself, a “theological sociology” and an internal cultural anthropology that he names “ecclesiological ethnography.”59 Ormerod similarly highlights the need to encounter social-scientific discourses in a more critical manner, but attempts to steer a middle ground between what he understands as a radical critique of the social sciences derived from the work of John Milbank and an uncritical adoption of the methods of the human sciences. Drawing on an understanding of the relation of nature and grace more similar to that of Komonchak and on the theology of history proposed by Robert Doran,60 Ormerod prefers to use the language of “engagement”: “[S]uch an engagement [of theology with the human sciences] will not take the existing understandings of the human sciences simply at face value. Rather it will involve a reorientation of the human sciences, theologically motivated, but drawing on their own natural dynamism.”61 Ormerod and Healy argue that the social sciences be introduced into systematic ecclesiology only with critical attention to the potential for conflict between 57 Ibid., 154. For an example of how Healy begins to put this methodology into practice, see his analysis of authority in the contemporary church,”‘By the Working of the Holy Spirit’: The Crisis of Authority in the Christian Churches,” Anglican Theological Review 88 (2006): 5–24. 58 Healy, Church, World, and Christian Life, 166. 59 Ibid., 164–78. 60 Cf. Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 61 Ormerod, “The Structure of a Systematic Ecclesiology,” 11; Cf. idem, “A Dialectic Engagement.”

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the underlying assumptions of the disciplines. Their argument has some merit, and helps to maintain a use of social-scientific conclusions and methods by ecclesiology, rather than in place of ecclesiology. But an overly suspicious hermeneutic regarding the social sciences would ignore the advances in understanding made by social theorists and scientists, and would force ecclesiologists to reinvent the wheel in developing their own parallel methods for empirical investigation. Continuing attempts to utilize the social sciences in ecclesiology suggest that while caution is needed, there are reasons to be optimistic in appropriating nontheological methodologies. Beyond these differences on how to critically engage or appropriate socialscientific method, what Komonchak and Gustafson, Healy and Ormerod, all emphasize is the need for a systematic ecclesiology to include empirical analysis of the concrete church, of the human community of grace in via, as a constitutive part of the ecclesiological task.62 The idealism that these thinkers critique and to which much contemporary ecclesiology has been suspect can be mitigated by attempts to explore the relation of the ideal nature of the church or its eschatological fulfillment with the less than ideal, unfulfilled church experienced in history. Lurking in the background of many fears of the sort of systematic ecclesiology envisioned here—an ecclesiology concerned to understand the church by means of “clear and distinct” ideas and consistent definitions of terms, by reflectively locating one’s ecclesiology in a broader theological and philosophical context, by directly engaging social-scientific analysis of the church as a human reality—is a question about the nature and limits of theology. Are not theology in general, and theology of the church in particular, instances of a special case in which the possibility of systematic thought reaches its limits? Does not the attempt to “define” the church, to understand the church systematically, inevitably lead to a kind of reductionism, in two senses: first, the reduction of the mystery of God’s action in the world to human terms and concepts, and, second, the reduction of the church to the same level as any other human institution, especially when using terms and categories drawn from or compatible with the human sciences? Does not an awareness of the “Mystery of the Church,” as the Second Vatican Council titles the first chapter of Lumen Gentium, preclude or at least relativize the possibilities of a systematic ecclesiology with these characteristics? This appeal to mystery has been a primary argument for an ecclesiology that limits itself to carefully balancing various root ideas and metaphors. 62 Chapter 5 suggests some ways in which this kind of engagement might be carried out with regard to the work of Jean-Marie Tillard’s understanding of communion.

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Dulles expresses this understanding of mystery in explaining his move toward a model-based ecclesiology: The term mystery, applied to the Church, signifies many things. It implies that the Church is not fully intelligible to the finite mind of man, and that the reason for this lack of intelligibility is not the poverty but the richness of the Church itself. Like other supernatural mysteries, the Church is known by a kind of connaturality [. . .]. We cannot fully objectify the Church because we are involved in it; we know it through a kind of intersubjectivity. Furthermore, the Church pertains to the mystery of Christ; Christ is carrying out in the Church his plan of redemption. He is dynamically at work in the Church through his Spirit.63 The renewed appreciation for the church as mystery, for the church itself as an object of belief and not only a means to belief, led to Möhler’s and other theologians’ reevaluations of Counter-Reformation claims for the legal intelligibility of the church. In Models of the Church, Dulles preserves that awareness of the church as graced institution by maintaining the plurality of biblical and liturgical images, in the first edition, and by promoting a predominant metaphor that is contextualized by awareness that even this model is complemented by additional, nonexhaustive models, in the revised edition. Maintaining a plurality of incommensurable models prevents any one from becoming dominant, since “[m]uch harm [would occur] by imperialistically seeking to impose some one model as the definitive one.”64 And yet it is not theologically legitimate to appeal to the church’s “mystery” as the justification for failing to attempt the project of systematic study of the church. Among others, Joseph Komonchak and Karl Rahner in particular have provided strong arguments against this understanding of mystery. Karl Rahner’s theology of mystery has been an important contribution to theological method since the publication of his early lectures on “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology.”65 Rahner warned against too easy a multiplication of mysteries, and, within the context of his theological anthropology of the human being as “supernatural existential,” brought theology back to an appreciation of God as the one mystery, of the mysteria stricte dicta (the Trinity,

63 Dulles, Models of the Church, 17–18. 64 Ibid., 32. 65 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations 4 (New York: Crossroad, 1966), 36–73. Originally published as “Über der Begriff des Geheimnisses in der Katholische Theologie” in Schriften zur Theologie IV (Einsiedeln: Benzinger, 1960), 51–99.

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the hypostatic union, and the divinization of the human being) as the “articulation of the one single mystery of God” as humans have encountered this holy mystery through revelation.66 Rahner was critiquing a theology too comfortable with the language of mystery by refocusing attention upon the primary sense of mystery as the encounter with the proximate yet ever-mysterious God. Indeed his idea of grace as the fullness of God’s self-communication prevents an appeal to the mystery of God as an excuse for hesitating before the systematic theological task. He takes issue with the statement of the early Wittgenstein in the Tractatus that “what we cannot speak about, we must be silent about.” Rather, Rahner argues that it is as mistaken to treat mystery in theology as “something which is of no concern to man at all, so that he cannot deal with it or make any pronouncement on it” as it is to expect to comprehend that mystery fully through theological reflection.67 While when speaking of God “we can only stammer of him and speak of him vaguely and indirectly [. . .] we ought not to be silent about him only because we cannot speak of him properly.”68 This is particularly true with regard to the church, the place where the mystery of the human encounter with God touches down, as it were, in the collective life of grace and mission. Komonchak likewise acknowledges that the description of the church as mystery should alert the theologian to the fact that her object of study involves the excess of intelligibility that is found in God and God’s involvement in the world. “It is true, of course, that an ecclesiology which does not place the Church’s life in God at its center or which claims to have exhausted its meaning thereby disqualifies itself.”69 At the same time, Komonchak argues that to stop systematically pursuing further understanding of the church out of fear of transgressing the limits of human reason—as Dulles suggests in his argument that the “richness” of the church’s mystery prevents its intelligibility by finite theologians—is to misunderstand the relation of systematic theology to the mystery that is God.

66 Ibid., 72. 67 Karl Rahner, “Mystery” in Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, vol. 4 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 133. 68 Karl Rahner, “God is No Scientific Formula” in Grace in Freedom, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 192. It may be interesting to note that Rahner is much more interested in his time of making the “mystery” of God mysterious again, that is, of working to prevent the mysteries of the Christian experience of God from being moved about by theologians like so many pieces on a chessboard. From the standpoint of theology in our so-called postmodern era, we are likely to be too anxious about the inadequacies of our language to even begin “stammering.” 69 Komonchak, “Ecclesiology and Social Theory,” in “Foundations in Ecclesiology,” 65.

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But this [the inexhaustibility of the Mystery of God in the church] does not mean that Mystery and the systematic effort are mutually exclusive, as a reading of almost any few pages of Aquinas might make clear. In fact, it could even be argued that the systematic exigence is powered by Mystery, by the presence in Word and grace of the God towards whose inexhaustible depths one may be drawn in intellectual desire without having to suspect oneself of attempted deicide.70 “It also helps to keep in mind,” Komonchak continues, “that not all efforts to speak of Mystery are equally inadequate and that Mystery is not legitimately invoked as a reason for not exploring fundamental differences in the efforts or for not criticizing and evaluating them.”71 The mystery of God’s involvement in the church should be a warning to avoid the “reduction to institution” found in Counter-Reformation treatises De Ecclesia,72 or to overestimate the project of systematic theory in comparison to the reality of the church itself. But awareness that this mystery involves an overabundance of intelligibility rather than a lack of intelligibility demands a move toward systematic theological discourse marked by both intellectual rigor and epistemological humility. A theology marked by the three criteria enumerated above—that aims at a consistent system of defined terms and relations, that establishes the relations of ecclesiology with other theological, philosophical, and social-scientific theories, and that attends to the church experienced as a reality that is “already” graced but “not yet” full of grace—is the kind of theology that I judge to be necessary for further understanding of the church. How can one evaluate the use of the concept of communion in contemporary ecclesiology with the help of these reflections upon method and the requirements of a systematic ecclesiology? The following chapter will discuss some of the genealogy and characteristics of communion ecclesiologies in general as further preparation before the examination of communion in the theology of Jean-Marie Tillard, which will serve as a primary example of the promotion of communion as the answer to a particular question in the service of a collectively pursued systematic understanding of the church.

70 Ibid., 65. 71 Ibid., 66. 72 See, for instance, Louis (Ludovicus) Billot, De ecclesia Christi (Rome: Gregoriana, 1927).

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Chapter 2 Communion in Ecclesiology The previous chapter opened the issue of the methodological questions raised by contemporary ecclesiology, and suggested some criteria for a systematic ecclesiology. Before turning to an investigation of Jean-Marie Tillard’s ecclesiology in Chapters 3 and 4, we need to look at the second set of questions, the second theme, this book is attempting to address. This chapter examines the genesis and development of communion ecclesiologies in the twentieth century, and attempts to provide a taxonomy of recurrent features in communion ecclesiologies. As has frequently been remarked, the very strengths of the concept of communion—its breadth of meanings, its applicability to a number of different relationships, its connection with rich biblical imagery—also contribute to its greatest weakness, that of equivocation between ecclesiologies using the same term with significantly different meanings.1 The concern of Nicholas M. Healy “that ‘communion’ is just too flexible a notion to act by itself as an ecclesiological principle”2 represents an important challenge for contemporary communion ecclesiologies, a challenge that cannot even be addressed before getting the “lay of the land.” This chapter has two parts. First, it will look at the history of the use of the term “communion” in ecclesiology in the twentieth century, outlining two broad streams of communion thought that use the same term to respond to two related yet significantly distinct ecclesiological concerns. The first of these is the use of communion language within the ecumenical movement and theologians strongly influenced by that movement, in which communion is used to answer questions about Christian unity as admitting degrees of fullness. The second major stream is its use in Roman Catholic ecclesiology as a way, as in models of the church as the People of God or the Mystical Body of Christ, to point to the noninstitutional,

1

See, for instance, Thomas P. Looney, C. S. C., “Koinonia Ecclesiology: How Solid a Foundation?” One in Christ 36 (2000): 145–66. 2 Nicholas Healy, “Communion Ecclesiology: A Cautionary Note,” Pro Ecclesia 4 (1995): 449.

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“spiritual,” theological reality of the church of which its structural and visible reality is the expression and support. The second part of the chapter outlines six themes that recur in communion ecclesiologies; while not all ecclesiologies will make use of these themes, they occur frequently enough to allow an initial taxonomy of various emphases in communion ecclesiology. This chapter will not be a comprehensive study of the use of communion in ecclesiology; such an endeavor would double the length of this book and prevent moving on to the analysis of Tillard which is the heart of this study. Moreover, the collective work of analyzing and evaluating communion ecclesiology is already being carried out in a number of domains, both through monographs on communion ecclesiology as a whole,3 and through more detailed analysis of particular ecclesiologies.4 3

Two of the best short articles surveying the use of the term “communion” in ecclesiology in Roman Catholic and ecumenical circles, respectively, are those of Susan Wood. See Susan Wood, “The Church as Communion,” in The Gift of the Church, ed. Peter Phan (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000), 159–76, and, idem, “Ecclesial Koinonia in Ecumenical Dialogues,” One in Christ 30 (1994): 124–45. Other key survey texts include Thomas F. Best and Günter Gassmann, eds., On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: Official Report of the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, Faith and Order Paper no. 166 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994); Dennis M. Doyle, Communion Ecclesiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000); Lorelei F. Fuchs, S. A., Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology: From Foundations through Dialogue to Symbolic Competence for Communionality (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008); Harry B. Hayden, “Koinonia: The Basis for Universal Ecclesiology?” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1996); Bernd Jochen Hilberath, ed., Communio – Ideal oder Zerrbild von Kommunikation?, Quaestiones Disputatae 176 (Freiburg: Herder, 1999); Christopher O’Donnell, O.Carm. “Communion – Koinônia” in Ecclesia: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Church (Collegeville, MN.: The Liturgical Press, 1996), 94–98; Jean Rigal, L’ecclésiologie de communion: Son evolution historique et ses fondements (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997); Nicholas Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins, and the Practice of Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 4 These include Gaëtan Baillargeon, Perspectives orthodoxes sur l’Église-Communion: L’œuvre de Jean Zizioulas (Montréal: Éditions Paulines, 1989) 395–403; Patricia A. Fox, God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson, and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001); Elaine Catherine MacMillan, “Conciliarity in an Ecclesiology of Communion: The Contributions of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission’s ‘Final Report’ ” (PhD diss., University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 2000); John J. Markey, O. P., “Community and Communion: An Analysis of the Understanding of Community in Some ‘Communion Ecclesiologies’ in Post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Thought and a Proposal for Clarification and Further Dialogue” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 1996); John J. McDonnell, “Communion, Collegiality, Conciliarity: A Comparative Analysis of These Concepts Drawn from Certain Catholic and Orthodox

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It would be possible to argue that the use of the term “communion” to describe the Christian community is near-contemporary with the origins of the Christian community itself. The term koinonia is, after all, prominent in the New Testament5 and unsurprisingly Christian history is marked by a long and complex use of koinonia/communion language. While there have been studies of particular uses of the term, especially biblically, a thorough history of the use of communion language across Christian history remains to be undertaken.6 While this section will make reference to some of the nineteenth-century background of the term, it will focus upon what was new in twentieth-century attention to communion, namely, the increased centrality of communion to ecclesial self-understandings and the use of the term to promote certain ecclesial practices, particularly in the ecumenical movement and in Roman Catholic ecclesiology.

Theologians” (PhD diss., Pontifica Universitas Gregoriana, 1990); Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993); Marc Pelchat, L’Église mystère de communion, l’ecclesiologie dans l’œuvre de Henri de Lubac (Paris/Montréal: Médiaspaul/Paulines, 1988); Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 2006); idem, “One Church in Many Churches: The Theology of the Local Church in the Writings of Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, O. P.” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2002); Oskar Saier, «Communio» in der Lehre des Zweiten Vatikanische Konzils. Eine rechtsbegriffliche Untersuchung (München: M. Hueber, 1973); Jeffrey VanderWilt, A Church without Borders: The Eucharist and the Church in Ecumenical Perspective (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998); idem, “The Eucharist as Sacrament of Ecclesial ‘Koinonia’ with Reference to the Contribution of Jean-Marie Tillard to Ecumenical Consensus on the Eucharist” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1996). 5 See Friedrich Hauck, “κοινός . . .” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume III Θ-Κ, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 789–809; Sagovsky, Ecumenism, 116–45; John Reumann, “Koinonia in Scripture: Survey of Biblical Texts” in On the Way to Fuller Koinonia, ed. Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1994), 37–69; Andrew T. Lincoln, “Communion: Some Pauline Foundations,” Ecclesiology 5 (2009): 135–60; Pier Cesare Bori, Koinonia: L’idea della communione dell’ecclesiologia recente e nel Nuovo Testamento, Instituto per le scienze religiose di Bologna Testi e richerche di scienze religiose 7 (Brescia: Paideia, 1972); and Schuyler Brown, S. J., “Koinonia as the Basis of New Testament Ecclesiology?”, One in Christ 12 (1976): 157–67. 6 In addition to his work on the biblical usage of koinonia and cognates, Sagovsky further contextualizes the Greek use of the term by analyzing its pre-biblical use by Plato and Aristotle. Sagovsky, Ecumenism, 48–96.

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While by the last quarter of the twentieth century communion language was prominent in ecclesiological discourse across denominational, ideological, and methodological lines, the ascendance of koinonia language was complex and multifaceted. Its origins can be found in at least two distinct ecclesiological streams which intermingle, not without some choppiness, by the end of twentieth century. First, the ecumenical movement drew on Reformation conceptions of koinonia as fellowship and, later, on Orthodox understandings of koinonia in relation to the Eucharist and Trinitarian perichoresis, in order to forge a new language of ecclesial relation flexible enough to serve the worldwide ecumenical movement, and primarily concerned with questions of diversity, locality, and otherness. The second stream derived from Roman Catholic reflection upon communion in the light of the patristic “return to the sources” and Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologies of the Eucharist, and was in broad continuity with attempts, beginning in the nineteenth century, to ground treatments of the church as institution in relation to increased attention to the spiritual and theological reality of the church. Especially after the Second Vatican Council, communion became a central term in Roman Catholic ecclesiology, in part because the same flexibility of meaning that aided the ecumenical movement gave Roman Catholics language in establishing the structures of the church envisioned by the Council. Obviously these two streams of reflection upon communion did not occur in a vacuum, and by the end of the twentieth century, when most Christian theology was being pursued ecumenically, or at least in conversation with theologians outside one’s confessional community, and when prominent ecclesiologists were often involved in formal ecumenical dialogue, the interaction of various elements from these streams proved fruitful in some instances and frustratingly confusing in others. But much of the multiplicity and pluralism of communion language in contemporary ecclesiology can be traced in part to its origins in these two distinct sets of ecclesiological questions, rooted in two distinct contextual concerns. They are not opposing views of communion, since they are not asking the same question for which “communion” forms an answer. Rather, they are a bit like two parallel rivers, occasionally crossing and mixing, but often meandering off in slightly unpredictable directions.

Koinonia Language in the Ecumenical Movement Multilateral dialogues Given its biblical origins, discussion of koinonia had been a major part of the ecclesiological reflection of the Reformation churches, though more often in translation as “fellowship” (in the “English-speaking world”) or “Gemeinschaft”

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(among German speakers) than in a transliterated form of “koinonia” or the cognate “communion.” From the beginnings of the ecumenical movement among Protestant churches in the early twentieth century, the language of “fellowship” came naturally to describe the kind of unity toward which the churches found themselves called.7 Representative is the Lambeth Appeal, issued by the bishops of the Anglican Communion in 1920: “We believe that God wills fellowship. By God’s own act this fellowship was made in and through Jesus Christ, and its life is in His Spirit. We believe that it is God’s purpose to manifest this fellowship, so far as this world is concerned, in an outward, visible, and united society [. . .]. This is what we mean by the Catholic Church.”8 Further reflections on the nature of ecclesial unity provided the background for explicit reflection on ecclesial unity as “communion.” By the second half of the century, the nature of the unity sought by the ecumenical movement was increasingly discussed with reference to biblical koinonia. The important New Delhi statement of the Third Assembly of the WCC made the connection between “fellowship” and biblical “koinonia” explicit: “The word ‘fellowship’ (koinonia) has been chosen because it describes what the Church truly is. ‘Fellowship’ clearly implies that the Church is not merely an institution or organization. It is a fellowship of those who are called together by the Holy Spirit and in baptism confess Christ as Lord and Saviour.”9 In this passage one sees the crossover of the theme that will dominate Roman Catholic use of communion, the connection between the church’s visible structure and invisible bonds of charity, its human and divine dimensions. But by the last quarter of the twentieth century, the language of communion and koinonia had become central to multilateral discussions of ecumenical unity in order to address questions of the acceptable limits of ecclesial diversity. The Seventh Assembly of the WCC in Canberra in 1991 issued a statement “The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Gift and Calling,” in which the Assembly wrote, “The purpose of the church is to unite people with Christ in the power of the Spirit, to manifest communion in prayer and action and thus to point to the fullness of communion with God, humanity and the whole creation in the

For a short history of the ecumenical movement, see Thomas E. Fitzgerald, The Ecumenical Movement: An Introductory History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). For an additional analysis of ecumenical use of communion in official dialogues, see Sagovsky, Ecumenism, 18–47. 8 Lambeth Conference 1920, “An Appeal to All Christian People” in The Ecumenical Movement: An Anthology of Key Texts and Voices, ed. Michael Kinnamon and Brian E. Cope (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1997), 81. 9 Third Assembly of the WCC, New Delhi, 1961, “Report of the Section on Unity” in Kinnamon and Cope, The Ecumenical Movement, 89. 7

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glory of the kingdom.”10 Two years later, the Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order in Santiago de Compostela took as its theme “Towards Koinonia in Faith, Life and Witness,” and in its message the assembly wrote, “Koinonia has been the focus of our discussions. [. . .] This koinonia which we share is nothing less than the reconciling presence of the love of God. God wills unity for the Church, for humanity, and for creation because God is a koinonia of love, the unity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”11 These excerpts exemplify many of the common themes found in ecumenical use of communion language: communion as a relationship between Christians grounded in a relationship to God, a concern for a kind of unity marked by continuing diversity, and a reference to the Trinitarian communion of the persons of the Trinity in relation to ecclesial communion. The continuing project of the Faith and Order Commission to produce a consensus statement on the church has resulted in two major study documents, The Nature and Purpose of the Church12 (1998) and The Nature and Mission of the Church13 (2005), both of which use communion as a central term.14 In the more recent text, currently being received and responded to by the churches, the language of the church as a fellowship or communion runs throughout the document,15 and is programmatic in the sections on unity, diversity, and the local church, as well as in the accompanying “boxes” for further study and discussion of differences. The statement “Called to be the One Church,”16 adopted by the WCC Assembly at Porto Alegre in 2006, similarly draws upon communion language in its call to the churches to further discernment, recognition, and visible unity, ending with an act of trust in the Trinitarian God “whose grace transforms our struggles for unity into the fruits of communion.”17 10 Seventh Assembly of the WCC, Canberra, 1991, “The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Gift and Calling,” in Kinnamon and Cope, The Ecumencial Movement, 124. 11 Fifth World Conference on Faith and Order, Santiago de Compostela, 1991, “On the Way to Fuller Koinonia: The Message of the World Conference,” in On the way to Fuller Koinonia, 225–26. 12 Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, Faith and Order Paper 181 (Geneva: WCC, 1998). 13 Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, Faith and Order Paper 198 (Geneva: WCC, 2005). 14 See also Paul M. Collins and Michael A. Fahey, eds., Receiving ‘The Nature and Mission of the Church, Ecclesiological Investigations 1 (London: T&T Clark, 2008). 15 §§10, 11, 12, 13, 24–33, 34, 42, 49, 55, 57–58, 60–63, 64–66, 74, 79, 97, 99, 111, 116, 117. 16 Available at www.oikoumene.org. 17 §15.

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These documents, the products of committees seeking broad consensus, are often quite unspecific in their use of koinonia language. While individual theologians and speakers at these meetings presented more precise understandings of communion, often on behalf of their churches, in the common statements these groups intentionally constructed their understanding of communion as broadly as possible, in order to allow the statement to serve as a starting point for further discussion and deepening unity. Some major questions for the use of communion in ecclesiology, such as how the communion of relationship between Christians in grace is connected to the communion of relationship institutionalized in the churches, or how human ecclesial communion is or is not analogous to divine Trinitarian communion, are not addressed in these contexts. A strict definition of communion in a document created with the input of hundreds of diverse delegations and Christian churches is not to be expected; these statements reflect the use of communion language almost as a slogan to refresh ecumenical commitments than as a systematic theological term.18 Bilateral dialogues At the same time as these multilateral statements were being produced, bilateral agreements between various churches also began to make use of communion language more frequently. Here the work of Elaine MacMillan on the use of communion language underpinning conciliarity in the ARCIC dialogues,19 of Lorelei Fuchs, S.A., on the Lutheran, Anglican, and Roman Catholic dialogues,20 and of Nicholas Sagovsky on Anglican and Roman Catholic dialogues,21 are most significant in outlining how communion language has functioned in bilateral statements in recent years. While critically attentive to the dangers of assuming too much shared meaning with regard to the term communion, Fuchs finds a real strength in koinonia’s ability to be a “concept that surpasses” the faddishness of ecclesial models and she argues for its unifying potential in ecumenical dialogue.22 All point to the use of communion language in the Final Report of ARCIC-I and the Agreed Statement of ARCIC-II, Church as Communion, as 18 There is debate among ecumenical theologians with regard to the advantages and disadvantages of proceeding in this way. See Emmanuel Sullivan, “Koinonia as a Meta-Model for Future Church Unity,” Ecumenical Trends 18 (1989): 1–7, and the responses by Charles P. Price, “Koinonia: An Anglican Response to E. Sullivan,” Ecumenical Trends 18 (1989):7–8; and Darlis J. Swan, “Koinonia: A Lutheran Response to E. Sulllivan,” Ecumenical Trends 18 (1989): 9–10. See also Nicholas M. Healy, “Ecclesiology and Communion,” Perspectives in Religious Studies 31 (2004): 273–90. 19 MacMillan, “Conciliarity in an Ecclesiology of Communion.” 20 Fuchs, Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology. 21 Sagovsky, Ecumenism, 18–41. 22 Ibid., 411–18.

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primary examples of the fruitful use of communion language in contemporary bilateral dialogues. It is not insignificant, for understanding many of these documents, as well as for understanding the work of Jean Tillard, to highlight the participation of Jean-Marie Tillard in many of these dialogues. Not unique to Tillard, this is a good example of the reciprocal effect that trends in Roman Catholic and ecumenical uses of communion had upon each other in the latter decades of the twentieth century. Aspects of communion in ecumenism In summary, three aspects of the historical development of the concept of communion in the ecumenical context seem most significant. First, as used generally in the ecumenical movement, and especially in the documents of the WCC, the concept is rooted in biblical conceptions of communion as “fellowship” and is used to describe the unity of Christians in Christ, rooted in common baptism, which the church is called to better express and institutionalize. While Orthodox, and later Roman Catholic, participation underscored the connection of ecclesial fellowship with Eucharistic communion, the basic understanding of communion at the heart of early ecumenical usage understood communion as shared faith and life, with less emphasis upon the Eucharistic and liturgical senses found in Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologies of communion. Communion in this sense is closer to the use of the term to describe worldwide denominational families such as the Anglican Communion, the Lutheran world communion, etc. Second, the ecumenical movement utilized the term communion in part because it could describe the kind of unity toward which the ecumenical movement was struggling, a unity different than that currently experienced within undivided Christian denominations. Unlike discussions of church “unity” or the “oneness” of the church, ecumenical documents used the word “communion” precisely because the lack of a strong, predetermined meaning and history allowed the word to serve heuristically in describing a new kind of unity. This sort of unity, in and through the diversity of current ecclesial divisions, differed from confessional identity and pointed toward fuller unity in faith, life, and witness. Unlike the traditional creedal note of the church as “one,” the church as a “communion” allowed comparative evaluations of unity—one could be “more” in communion or “less” in communion. Michael Root, in a different context, has contrasted “binary” conceptions to unity to this “scalar” understanding of unity, a unity characterized by distinctions of “full” communion and “partial” communion.23 In the documents of the WCC and in bilateral 23 See Michael Root, “Bishops, Ministry, and the Unity of the Church in Ecumenical Dialogue: Deadlock, Breakthrough, or Both?” CTSA Proceedings 62 (2007), 32–34. This language of “full communion” is not without problems; see Joseph D. Small, ‘What is Communion and When is it Full?’ Ecclesiology 2 (2005), 71–87.

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ecumenical documents, the flexibility and openness of a “new,” yet still biblical, term for understanding unity that broke open a binary understanding of being either inside of or outside of the church proved essential in imagining a way out of the ecumenical impasse, and opened the way for concepts such as “differentiated consensus” in doctrinal matters and in practical mutual reception.24 A third important aspect of the term’s development in ecumenical usage is the fact that this shared understanding of communion arose not from the mind of a single theologian or school of theological opinion, but from the challenging and multisided context of ecumenical dialogue. The fact that the ecumenical concept of communion was not pacifically developed within the mind of a theologian or a single church, but hammered out in the midst of ecumenical dialogue explains the occasional lack of precision and the nonlinear development of the concept. The use of the term across differing denominational and theological perspectives cautions one not to expect the same theoretical precision found in theological treatments of communion by individual theologians or in the documents of particular churches.

Communion in Roman Catholic Ecclesiology Two historical phenomena in the development of contemporary Catholic ecclesiology in the twentieth century are crucial in understanding the prominence of communion language. The first was Roman Catholic ecclesiology’s reaction against an overly institutionally focused, post-Tridentine ecclesiology, which itself was a reaction against the ecclesiological claims of some Reformation theologies of the sixteenth century. The second was, and is, the continuing tensions concerning the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. In both cases, communion language served a very different function than it did in ecumenical usage—not to specifically address questions of acceptable diversity and unity, but to continue the ecclesiological trajectory outlined above of restoring the spiritual/theological nature of the church as the foundation and justification of its institutional and sacramental life. This, combined with a continuing insistence on the salvific significance of membership in the church community, led Roman Catholic understandings of communion to focus upon the importance to individuals’ salvation of membership in both the outward, institutional structure of the church and its inward, theological/spiritual nature.

24 See William G. Rusch, Ecumenical Reception (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 118–30.

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Preconciliar ecclesiology As discussed in Chapter 1, one can find the faint origins of the use of the term “communion” in Roman Catholic ecclesiology in the theology of the early Tübingen school, and in particular in the ecclesiological reflections of Drey and Möhler. Their ecclesiological thought emphasized the importance in Catholic theology of moving beyond the organizational questions of the church’s institutional structure in order to ask the theological question of the church’s significance as a moment in God’s relation to the world. Ecclesiology evolved beyond an apologetics for Roman Catholic ecclesial institutions into a theological investigation of the church’s significance for what would later be called “salvation history.” While the work of these theologians remained underappreciated in the nineteenth century, and especially in the textbook theology associated with the Thomist revival, their perspective on what kinds of questions ecclesiology ought to pursue entered the dominant Catholic ecclesiology of the Roman school through the influence of Perrone, Passaglia, and Franzelin. This later circle of theologians was far more papalist and less rooted in German Romanticism than the Tübingen theologians, but the Roman school did maintain ecclesiological reflection on the theological significance of the church as an object of faith itself. The later work of Charles Journet also moved ecclesiology beyond manualist neo-Scholasticism toward an approach more directly rooted in the Fathers and in the work of Thomas Aquinas.25 In these theologians one sees the beginnings of reflection upon the church as the “Mystical Body of Christ,” as distinct from juridico-canonical treatments of the church as a “body” familiar to theologians of the time. The culmination of this trend can be seen in Pius XII’s encyclical letter Mystici Corporis Christi of 1943, which shows the influence of Sebastian Tromp’s work Corpus Christi Quod Est Ecclesia, and was likely written with Tromp’s assistance. Tromp’s book, first published in 1937 and revised in 1946 after the publication of Mystici Corporis,26

25 For overviews of Roman Catholic ecclesiology in the twentieth century, see Nicholas M. Healy, “The Church in Modern Theology,” in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church (New York: Routledge, 2008), 106–26; Richard Lennan, “Roman Catholic Ecclesiology,” in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, 234–50; Avery Dulles, S. J., “A Half Century of Ecclesiology”, Theological Studies 50 (1989): 419–23; and Michael J. Himes, “The Development of Ecclesiology” in The Gift of the Church, 45–67. For an excellent summary of the work of Charles Journet in particular, see Dennis M. Doyle, Communion Ecclesiology, 38–46, 52–55. 26 Sebastian Tromp, Corpus Christi quod est ecclesia (Rome: Gregorian University, 1937; rev. ed., 1946). References here are to the English translation of the 1946 edition, Ann Condit, trans. (New York: Vantage Press, 1960).

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outlines his method for studying the church under its “two aspects”: “On the one hand, it is visible and originates in a visible way; on the other hand, it is spiritual and is born in a spiritual way.”27 After giving a relatively standard textbook treatise on the church in Part I, in Part II he outlines four images “parallel” to that of the mystical body of Christ (“bridegroom and bride,” “vine and branches,” “spiritual temple,” and “spiritual bread”). Parts III and IV, then, give an extended reflection upon the Body of Christ. Tromp’s main sources for these reflections are the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers, but the work is less of an extended systematic treatment of the theme than a compact florilegia of patristic reflection on the church. Another important and related preconciliar trend was the appropriation by Roman Catholic theologians of the components of a Eucharistic ecclesiology. This came in part through direct encounter with Orthodox theologians such as Khomiakov and Afanasiev, especially from the Russian diaspora, and in part through the “ressourcement” of patristic thought on the church and the Eucharist.28 Henri de Lubac’s groundbreaking study on the language of “the mystical body” called attention both to the close connection between the Eucharist and the church as the body of Christ, and to the medieval shift in language by which the language of “mystical” was transferred from the res et sacramentum, the Eucharist, to the res tantum, the Church.29 De Lubac’s assertion that “the Eucharist makes the Church” was programmatic for much twentiethcentury Roman Catholic ecclesiology.30 Ecclesiology at Vatican II Other biblical scholars and theologians further investigated other ecclesial images; M. D. Koster and Joseph Ratzinger, for example, presented further works on the church as the People of God, which would be used at the Second Vatican Council.31 Nevertheless, on the eve of the Council, the image of the church as the Body of Christ, further emphasized in Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical

27 Ibid., 9. 28 See Ruddy, The Local Church, 9–30. 29 Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: L’Eucharistie et l’Église au Moyen Âge (Paris: Aubier, 1944). Available in an excellent new English translation by Gemma Simmons, CJ, with Richard Price and Christopher Stephens (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 30 See Paul McPartlan’s study of de Lubac in conversation with John Zizioulas on these themes, The Eucharist Makes the Church. 31 See M. D. Koster, Ekklesiologie im Werden (Paderborn: Bonifacius Druckerei, 1940); Joseph Ratzinger, Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche (Munich: K. Zink, 1954). See also Congar’s summary, in “Peut-on définir l’Église?”, 22–26.

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Humani generis, was still the dominant ecclesial image, and the identification of the Mystical Body of Christ with the Roman Catholic Church had become a particular hallmark of mid-century Catholic ecclesiology.32 This Mystical Body ecclesiology also became the basis for the schema De Ecclesia, redacted in part by Tromp and presented to the council fathers by the Theological Commission as a working document. But it was quickly returned for revisions by the unsatisfied council fathers during the first session of the council.33 Many things are notable about the document which became Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, but in relation to the ecclesiological reflection which preceded and followed it, three aspects important for this project must be noted. First, the language of the “Mystical Body” has been placed in a broader context of ecclesial images. After a review of the numerous biblical images used to describe the church,34 the document spends two sections of Chapter 1, “The Mystery of the Church,” presenting a theology of the church as the Body of Christ which draws heavily upon the reflections of Mystici Corporis.35 It also asserts the connection of the juridical and spiritual aspects of the church, and their unity as one “complex reality,” comparable to the mystery of the hypostatic union, before moving on to the discussion of the church as the People of God in Chapter 2. Thus the Mystical Body image is not replaced but situated in a new context. A second important aspect of Lumen Gentium is the introduction of the theme of the church as the People of God as a complement to the Body of Christ metaphor. Rooted partly in the salvation-historical approach of ecclesiologists such as Yves Congar and in the patristic research of Ratzinger and Koster, this image was used to present a vision of the church as a spiritual, united body before moving on to treat the distinctions between ways of living out that baptismal character as ordained, lay, and religious faithful. Despite later suggestions that the People of God imagery was intended to replace the earlier metaphor, both images were concerned with the same question: how the Catholic

32 One can note that the image itself lends itself to this sort of ecclesiology; the image of a human body sets up a distinct binary relationship: one is either part of the body (and under the direction of its head), or one is not. 33 For the history of the development of the schema De Ecclesia that became Lumen Gentium, the most important source remains the relevant sections of Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak, eds., History of Vatican II (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995–2006). For a summary of this period, see Richard Gaillardetz, Church in the Making (New York: Paulist, 2006). 34 In Lumen Gentium [LG], §6. Available at www.vatican.va. See Alberigo and Komonchak, ibid., 1: 289. 35 LG, §§7–8.

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Church could be, indeed had to be, both a hierarchical, concrete institution, and at the same time a real spiritual community connected to the Risen Christ. The People of God further clarified that spiritual aspect by emphasizing the relationship of all the Christian faithful to God in Christ as primary and foundational to the subsequent distinction of the members of the church. But was Lumen Gentium the starting point of a Vatican II “ecclesiology of communion”? “Communion” is often identified as the core idea of Vatican II, by theologians, by the 1985 Synod of Catholic Bishops,36 and by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.37 It is notable, then, to remark on how little the term itself arises within the documents of the Council. Furthermore, as the reflections below on explicit use of the notion “communion” will show, the term was just coming into prominence in some Roman Catholic circles at the beginning of the Council. Statements about the ecclesiology of communion in Vatican II documents therefore invite some distinctions. If, following the thought of Congar, Hamer, and many interpretations of the Council, one understands an “ecclesiology of communion” as a theological ecclesiology, seeing the church as a spiritual, salvific reality that goes beyond a more juridical ecclesiology, then Vatican II definitely made such an ecclesiology central, strengthening and solidifying the approach of Mystici Corporis. But as I have highlighted above, this trend was already a major part of earlier developments in twentieth-century ecclesiology, and of Mystical Body ecclesiology in particular. More specifically, numerous ideas that would be linked in explicit ecclesiologies of communion produced after the council, including an emphasis upon episcopal collegiality, an affirmation of the importance and ecclesiality of the local church, and an understanding of unity as rooted in diversity rather than uniformity, are central themes of Vatican II in general and of its ecclesiological documents in particular. In this sense, “communion ecclesiology” sometimes functions as shorthand for “non-juridical ecclesiology” or “non-Ultramontane ecclesiology,” though the dominance of non-juridical ecclesiology at the Council was far from uncontested, as the sometimes schizophrenic character of Lumen Gentium and various historical studies have demonstrated.38 36 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, “A Message to the People of God and the Final Report,” Origins 441 (December 19, 1985): 441, 443–50. 37 Communionis notio, “Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion”, Origins 22 (June 25, 1992): 108–12. 38 The most important work in this regard is the oft-cited, seldom-read work by Antonio Acerbi, Due ecclesiologie: ecclesiologia giuridica ed ecclesiologie di communione nella “lumen gentium” (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1975). Acerbi traces the history of the various drafts of Lumen Gentium and the struggles, especially in questions of papal and episcopal authority, to balance the “minority” juridical view and the “majority” collegial view, the “ecclesiology of communion” view, in Acerbi’s use of the term.

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If one looks for an explicit ecclesiology of communion in the documents of Vatican II, compared to that being developed in ecumenical theology before and after the Council, however, in the sense of an ecclesiology which uses the concept of communion to rethink concepts of unity within the theology of the church, it will not be found in the documents of Vatican II. The term “communio” is used only 27 times in the body of Lumen Gentium, and only 8 times in the attached Nota praevia explicativa. While numbers alone are not sufficient to demonstrate the point, in none of these cases is communion used as key concept of a chapter, an introduction to a paragraph, or as a guideline to understanding the church. In fact, almost half of the references to communion in the document and in the Nota praevia refer not to the communion between local communities or the themes of unity-in-diversity which are central to “communion ecclesiologies” developing in and from the ecumenical movement, but to the particular, juridical relation of bishops to the pope—almost the opposite sense in which later communion ecclesiologies will use the term. Here we see the sources of what Gerard Mannion has described as the “neo-exclusivist,” “official” communion ecclesiology being deployed by some theologians and Vatican officials to reinforce a top-down model of ecclesial relations.39 This “hierarchical communion,” as it is qualified in numerous places in the conciliar documents, is the major thrust of Lumen Gentium’s (and the Council’s) explicit use of the term communion. Many of the practical proposals and themes of later Roman Catholic communion ecclesiologies are present in the conciliar documents, but the further reflection which made “communion” the central concept for organizing those proposals occurs separately from and, for the most part, subsequent to the Council.40 Roman Catholic use of communion language Explicit Roman Catholic ecclesiological reflections that make communion a central category in the twentieth century41 are first found in Roman Catholic appropriation of Protestant biblical scholarship in the middle of the twentieth century when some monographs and other studies of the term communion were published by Protestant scholars involved in the ecumenical movement.

39 See Gerard Mannion, “From the ‘Open Church’ to Neo-Exclusivism?” in Ecclesiology and Postmodernity, (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2007), 43–74. 40 One exception from the preparations for Lumen Gentium is the so-called Chilean schema for the document De ecclesia, which did make communion a central concept for its proposal. Cf. Alberigo and Komonchak, History of Vatican II, 3: 47–48, 81–82. 41 One finds a very early, and often unremarked, ecclesiology rooted in ideas of communion in the work of Friedrich Pilgram. See Friedrich Pilgram, Physiologie der Kirche (Berlin, 1860). Cited in Yves Congar, “Peut-on Définir l’Église?” 248–50.

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These appropriations, however, continue to ask the contemporary Roman Catholic question of the institutional reality/spiritual reality of the church, rather than the ecumenical and Protestant question of rethinking ecclesial unity. Studies of the concept of koinonia in the Scriptures were produced by Heinrich Seesemann, A. R. George, and J. G. Davies,42 and the Lutheran Werner Elert investigated the concept in the patristic period.43 The first major works by Catholic theologians to focus on the concept of communion were Ludwig Hertling’s study of communion and the papacy in the patristic period, Communio und Primat,44 and Marie-Joseph Le Guillou’s two-volume study of communion in relation to ecumenism, Mission et Unité. Les exigences de la communion.45 The two most important Catholic theologians who utilized communion language in their theology in the 1950s and 1960s were Jérôme Hamer, O. P. and Yves Congar, O. P.46 One of the first Roman Catholic monographs to make “communion” a central term after Pilgram, Hamer’s L’Église est une communion was published in early 1962. A Dominican from le Saulchoir, Hamer accompanied Bishop Emiel De Smedt of Bruges to the Council as a peritus, and worked with the Secretariat for Christian Unity on the documents on ecumenism and religious liberty. Hamer became an important figure in ecumenism and, at the time of the writing of L’Église had already become familiar with the ecumenical movement and non-Catholic theological scholarship. L’Église est une communion is a treatise on the church in the style of Sebastian Tromp, focused upon the idea of the church as a communion. After a review of the various images used to describe the church and an investigation of Thomas Aquinas’s theology of the Mystical Body, Hamer defines the church as “the mystical body of Christ, that is, a communion simultaneously interior and 42 Heinrich Seesemann, Der Begriff Koinônia in Neuen Testament (Giessen: Verlag von Alfred Toepelmann, 1933); Alfred Raymond, George, Communion with God in the New Testament (London: Epworth, 1953); John Gordon Davies, Members One of Another (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1958). Cited in Jérôme Hamer, O. P., L’Église est une communion, Unam Sanctam 40 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962), 173n2. 43 Werner Elert, Abendmahl und Kirchengemeinschaft in der alten Kirche hauptsächlich des Ostens (Berlin: Lutherisches Verlaghaus, 1954). Cited in Hamer, L’Église, 179n1. 44 Ludwig Hertling, S. J., “Communio und Primat” in Miscellenea Historiae Pontificiae, vol. 7 (Rome, 1943), 1–48; rev. edition in Una Sancta 17 (1962); English translation of rev. ed., Jared Wicks, S. J., trans. (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1972). 45 Marie-Joseph Le Guillou, Mission et Unité: Les exigences de la communion (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960). 46 Both French-speaking Dominicans whose influence, direct and indirect, on Jean Tillard is obvious.

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exterior, the life of union with Christ symbolized and sustained (caused) by the institutional mediation chosen by Christ.”47 He further refines this definition, by explaining that the pilgrim church on earth is “the church, the mystical body of Christ, is a communion which is both interior and exterior, an interior communion of spiritual life (of faith, of hope, and of love), signified and created through an exterior communion of the profession of faith, of discipline, and of sacramental life.”48 The connection between interior life and exterior expression that characterized Mystical Body ecclesiology is expressed here in the language of communion. As with the Roman Catholic theologians of the Mystical Body of Christ and the People of God, the heart of Hamer’s communion ecclesiology is determined by the question of how to understand the church’s spiritual reality as the foundation of its juridical/institutional reality. He suggests four ecclesiological requirements that a definition of the church would need to take into account: 1) its continuity and discontinuity with the People of God before Christ, 2) its connection with the Kingdom of God toward which the church is moving, 3) its simultaneous interior and exterior reality, and 4) its description of the relations of the members with Christ and with one another.49 Hamer focuses on the single term “communion” as the key to understanding this relationship between exterior and interior, between the members of the church, both with each other and with Christ, and, later, of the eschatological relation of the church with the Kingdom of God.50 He writes that the word will serve “to describe, to define, the Church.”51 Hamer’s exposition of communion in the concluding chapters of L’Église does suggest possibilities for the use of the concept beyond that of the link between the church as spiritual body and the church as institution; he is attempting to define the church as a “communion” in which the term corresponds to a particular form of unity unique to the church. In his conclusion, entitled “Communion, the Permanent Form of the Unity of the Church,” Hamer writes: The proper form of the unity of the Church is communion. Every social group has its particular form of unity. The sociologist determines what makes up the cohesion of the family, the team, the village, the school, the crowd, the board of directors, the workshop, the army . . . It is up to

47 48 49 50 51

Hamer, L’Église, 97. All translations my own unless otherwise noted. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 95–97. In the conclusion, ibid., 226–31. Ibid., 99.

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the theologian, in the light of faith—and certainly also in conversation with the sociologist—to show how the Church is one. The “communion” that we have described throughout this work is the structural name of catholic unity. It is the bond [le lien] of the Church.52 He goes on to elaborate the eschatological orientation of communion, arguing that because it is “the form of unity desired by Christ for all of humanity,”53 it is an anticipation of the City of God and the eternal relationship of redeemed humans with their God and with each other. While Hamer’s practical concerns are shared by other ecclesiological texts— defending a Roman Catholic visibility of the church in connection with its interior spirit and securing a healthy respect for the position of the laity in the church are two dominant concerns of the People of God theorists and of Lumen Gentium—his work opens the possibility of investigating what is special, what is graced, about the interdependent relations of Christians that distinguishes the Christian community from other human communities. Hamer is ecumenically conscious and devotes a section to the differences between his understanding and that of a congregationalist perspective (represented by Barth and Brunner) and an Orthodox perspective (represented by Afanassiev). But unlike the stream of communion-thought coming out of the ecumenical movement, his theology of communion has a more explicit context in the understanding of the church within Roman Catholic theology, and is concerned more with producing an ecclesiology of communion directly aimed at a Catholic audience more than providing a “working language” for ecumenical dialogue, or for investigating questions of unity and diversity within the church. Yves Congar is, without doubt, the Roman Catholic ecclesiological giant of the twentieth century. His development, all in difficult personal circumstances, of some of the first serious arguments for Roman Catholic participation in the twentieth-century ecumenical movement, his attention to a theology of the laity, his efforts at the Second Vatican Council, and his overall contributions to ecclesiology through numerous occasional articles and large-scale works have been documented by many commentators.54 Congar is often indicated as a

52 Ibid., 227. 53 Ibid., 231. 54 Two of the most important published surveys of Congar’s ecclesiological thought are Timothy I. MacDonald, The Ecclesiology of Yves Congar: Foundational Themes (Lanham, MD.: University Press of America, 1984), and Gabriel Flynn, Yves Congar’s Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (London: Ashgate: 2004). A more recent crucial study of Congar is Rose Beal, “In Pursuit of a ‘Total Ecclesiology’: Yves Congar’s ‘De Ecclesia’, 1931–1954” (PhD diss.: The Catholic University of America, 2009). See also the collection of essays Yves Congar: theologian of the Church, ed. Gabriel Flynn (Leuven: Peeters, 2005).

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founding voice in communion ecclesiology, but unlike Hamer did not devote an entire work to the concept of communion. MacDonald, however, identifies “The Church as a Communion” as a “Dominant Aspect in a Synthesis,”55 that is, as a major theme in the proposed “total ecclesiology” Congar makes reference to in Vraie et fausse réforme dans l’église56 and which, despite the long process and developments which Rose Beal outlines, never was completed. Two characteristics of Congar’s use of communion language are crucial in distinguishing his understanding from that of his contemporaries and from his successors, including Tillard. First, Congar takes seriously some of the possibilities communion language opens for reworking the traditional treatise De Ecclesia beyond earlier institutional and juridical frameworks. Crucial here is noticing that for Congar “communion” functions as one half of a matched pair “communion”-“institution,” which MacDonald labels “life” and “structure,” and what Flynn refers to as “community” and “institution.” At least in his proposed De Ecclesia, Congar begins using “communion-institution” language in 1948 in place of more classic “invisible-visible” language.57 While vigorously opposed to what he thought of as a “Protestant” error of separating the two in favor of the “invisible church,” Congar was just as vigorously opposed to collapsing the distinction, or undermining their mutual dependence. In this use of communion language Congar can be seen as in significant continuity with the trajectory of Catholic ecclesiology over the past century, and working with a concept of communion similar to that of contemporaries like Hamer, who were using communion language to promote Roman Catholic attention to the spiritual nature of the church. A second aspect of his thought, however, is the connection Congar makes between ecclesial communion—the relations of the believer with God in Christ and with her fellow Christians—and Trinitarian communion—the relations among the Persons of the Godhead. Communion, for Congar, is a salvific reality because in the communion of the church believers are already being brought into the life of the Trinity, into the relations of the Father, Son, and Spirit. This is a new development, as Congar is one of the first major Catholic ecclesiologists to build his notion of communion not only with reference to its Eucharistic and community resonances, but also with reference to an idea of the church as an image of the Trinitarian life. In this we can see both some of the interpenetration of Roman Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiological thought developing in this period, especially in the Francophone world, as well as the beginnings of a theme in communion ecclesiology that will become more prominent, even commonplace, in later uses of communion. 55 MacDonald, The Ecclesiology of Yves Congar, 207–10. 56 Paris: Cerf, 1950, 7n1, cited in MacDonald, 208. 57 See Beal, “In Pursuit of a ‘Total Ecclesiology,’ ” 233–34.

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A quick sketch of some of the major post-conciliar developments is offered here as a conclusion to this section. As is well known, the immediate postconciliar period was far from pacific since the Council was received in many different ways throughout the Catholic Church. While that history still remains to be written (and completed, in a very real sense), some broad trends can be discerned. One involves the recognition that, while Alberigo’s “majorityminority” historiography is helpful in understanding the actual mechanisms of the Council’s decisions, there is a danger in attributing too much agreement in theological understanding to the conciliar majority. After the Council, this became clear in the tensions between a school of thought which emphasized the Council’s call for aggiornamento, represented by theologians such as Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, those who founded the journal Concilium, and those more rooted in the Council’s “return to the sources,” such as Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, with whom the journal Communio is associated. The liberation theology movement in Latin America, incipient feminist theology in North America and Western Europe, and the growing number of Roman Catholic theologians formed within an ecumenically concerned theological environment all moved Roman Catholic ecclesiology in different directions in this period that more and more made use of the language of communion. The use of communion language in ecumenical documents, such as those of the WCC and ARCIC, in Roman Catholic ecclesiologies and in documents such as the 1985 synod statement, demonstrate that the language of communion was increasingly “in the air” during this period, presented by some as the “key concept” for ecclesiological renewal. One major text helpful in gauging the ascendancy of communion in postconciliar Roman Catholic ecclesiology is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s (CDF’s) 1992 letter Communionis notio, “Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion.” This document is useful both for the idea of communion it presents as Roman Catholic teaching, and for documenting the variant forms of communion ecclesiology it condemns. This document is also hermeneutically challenging, since many of its phrases and emphases are taken verbatim from the unofficial theological writings of the CDF’s thenprefect, Joseph Ratzinger. The document is particularly concerned with the question of the relation between the universal and local church, which is a major theme in most communion ecclesiologies. On this question, it argues against an overemphasis upon the local church it finds in some communion ecclesiologies. The document states that at times “the idea of a ‘communion of particular Churches’ is presented in such a way as to weaken the concept of the unity of the Church at the visible and institutional level. Thus it is asserted that every particular Church is a subject complete in itself, and that the universal Church

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is the result of a reciprocated recognition on the part of the particular Churches” (§8). The document refers to this as “ecclesiological unilateralism,” and in further asserting that the universal Church, “in its essential mystery [. . .] is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular Church” (§9), it attempts to challenge communion ecclesiologies which, in the Congregation’s opinion, would lead to a kind of Catholic congregationalism. This discussion of the relation of the universal and the local, and in particular the important public discussion on the question between Ratzinger and Walter Kasper, are treated in more detail in Chapter 4 below. For the history of communion ecclesiology in Roman Catholic thought, the liveliness of these controversies is a concrete reminder of both the continuing divergences in Catholic thought on communion, and the significance of the notion in contemporary ecclesiology.

Conclusions One major reason for the success of communion language in both ecumenical and Roman Catholic ecclesiologies in this period appears to be the indeterminateness of the concept, and the ability to bridge differences that this indeterminacy allowed. As a term with a long biblical and traditional heritage, it was used in Christian theology in many periods, and possessed a sense of familiarity; but as an historical term with relatively little historical baggage, it functioned as a vessel into which many contemporary ecclesiological issues and proposed solutions could be poured. In ecumenical circles, communion was able to point a way beyond divided Christian communities to a unity more open to continuing denominational and ecclesial diversity. The language of “real yet imperfect” communion, developed within ecumenical dialogues between the churches, provided a way out of binary opposition between unity and division which prevented the recognition of positive steps toward ecumenical unity which fell short of the goal of full, visible unity. In Roman Catholic ecclesiological circles, communion also provided a possible way beyond increasingly ideological readings of the ecclesial images “People of God” and “Body of Christ.” José Comblin even sees the rapid ascendance of communion language as a strategic move on the part of the Vatican to directly undercut the use of “People of God” language in Latin American liberation theology.58 Ecclesiologies whose greatest concerns were the collegiality and relations between local churches, as well as those determined to secure the

58 See Comblin, People of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 52–62.

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structures of hierarchical relations endorsed by the Council, both describe the relations thus established as relations of “communion.” The upshot of this rapid ascent of “communion” to ecclesiological prominence is that a majority of Christian theologians in the late twentieth century could be seen to endorse an “ecclesiology of communion;” nevertheless, mutually contradictory ecclesiological conclusions were drawn on the basis of differing denominational, theological, and ecclesiological contexts. For example, the Free Church ecclesiology of Miroslav Volf, rooting its notion of communion in a particular Trinitarian theology and in relation to the commitments of the radical Reformed tradition, yielded a communion ecclesiology which forbids the use of episcopal, hierarchical structures and anything more than a localized church “open” to other Christian communities. In almost direct contrast to Volf, Joseph Ratzinger outlined an ecclesiology of communion in which the papacy and a strongly united college of bishops are essential to the maintenance of that communion. How, then, shall one describe the “ecclesiologies of communion” in and to which Jean-Marie Tillard contributed his own ecclesiology? Some characteristic themes or “family resemblances” of the use of communion in ecclesiology can be outlined, for two reasons. First, the term “communion,” while flexible, is not entirely devoid of content in itself, and so the term has its own limitations of use. For example, “mutual hatred” is generally considered incompatible with communion, though the degree of “mutual love” entailed in communion varies from case to case. Second, none of these ecclesiologies of communion arose in a vacuum, and they mutually influenced each other, especially beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s when the streams of ecumenism and Roman Catholic ecclesiology cross and recross in interesting, sometimes highly creative, ways. Roman Catholic theologians working in ecumenical circles produced communion ecclesiologies more similar to their ecumenical colleagues; ecclesiologies whose notion of communion is drawn from Trinitarian theology are recognizably related to those who take a notion of communion from similar Trinitarian theologies; scholars whose understandings of communion in the local church arose from patristic studies shared a similar idea of the patristic origins of communion. To begin to make sense of these differing contemporary ideas of communion, then, the remainder of this chapter will present six characteristic themes that can be found in most communion ecclesiologies.

Six Common Themes The definition and etymology of the word “communion” set some limits on its use in ecclesiology. In its pre-Christian usage, the word koinonia referred primarily to a shared task or duty, and defined a relationship between people who

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shared something in common.59 In its Christian usage, “communion” refers, rather formally, to a particular kind of relationship that exists between Christian believers who share a relationship to God in Christ. The differences in understandings of communion begin to manifest themselves when one moves from this formal definition to specific answers to the questions of who is related (individuals, local congregations, Jesus Christ, the universal church, authorities and those subject to them?), how they are related (through Eucharistic sharing, canonical-juridical bonds, shared faith and witness?), when they are related (visibly within history, only in the eschaton, in what connection with the apostolic witness, in what connection with the historical church?), and why they are related (as a sign/icon of God’s love, as the definition of Christian salvation, as a pragmatic aid to Christian evangelization, as the inbreaking of the Reign of God?). Yet while exact agreement regarding what constitutes, or should constitute, a communion ecclesiology is lacking, there are a number of general themes and characteristics that recur in differing constellations. Beyond the use of the same term as a way of describing Christian relationships, these themes give communion ecclesiologies a broad “family resemblance.” At the same time, not every communion ecclesiology makes reference to all of these themes, nor do they emphasize them in the same way. A preliminary identification of six of these themes yields the following: 1) a concern for unity and diversity; 2) an emphasis upon the ecclesiality of the local or particular church; 3) a concern for a connection between the church as an institutional reality and as a theological reality; 4) the assertion of similarity or connection of the vertical relation of Christians and churches to God with the horizontal relation of Christians and churches to each other; 5) a Eucharistic and/or sacramental understanding of the church; 6) a connection between the communion of Christian believers and the communion of the Trinitarian persons. A taxonomy of contemporary communion ecclesiologies can be determined by identifying the particular constellations into which these themes are placed in relation with each other and with other aspects of Christian doctrine. 1. A first theme is communion ecclesiologies’ concern for unity and diversity. This is perhaps the most common feature of ecclesiologies derived from the ecumenical stream of communion thought, and in ecumenim-influenced Roman Catholic theologies appropriating this notion of unity to address their concerns 59 See F. Hauck, “κοινός . . .”, and Sagovsky, Ecumenism, 48–96. The question of whether the idea of communion involves the idea of “participation” in that which is held in common has been recently and forcefully raised by the work of Norbert Baumert and Andrew T. Lincoln. See Lincoln, “Communion: Some Pauline Foundations,” Ecclesiology 5 (2009): 135–60.

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about an overly-centralized Roman Catholic Christianity. The term “communion” allowed unity to be defined in a way which transcended a united/divided binary; “somewhat united” sounded, to theological ears, as plausible as being “somewhat pregnant”; the new usage of communion allowed for a vision of unity along a continuum of more and less perfect communion, to use the language of Lumen Gentium. Within Roman Catholic circles, this usage also allowed the beginnings of a revaluation of the particular and inculturated forms of Catholicism that had been in decline since the mid-nineteenth century. In a postcolonial Catholicism, among bishops and churches newly aware of their responsibilities to bring forth the gifts of their cultures, an ecclesiology of communion provided a theological rationale for defending their churches’ particularities. 2. Related to this concern for unity in diversity is the second theme, the ecclesiality of the local church. This theme has been particularly emphasized in communion ecclesiologies within the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches; questions of the local church have a far more developed history relatively independent of the language of communion in the Western Protestant churches. These communion ecclesiologies focus on the full ecclesiality of a local church as a Eucharistic community. At the same time, congregationalist traditions find in this understanding of communion a way of making their own positions clearer to more regionally or nationally organized churches. Under this heading, the universal church is then understood as the communion of the local churches, rather than as a “central office” with “branch offices” or “franchises” located around the globe.60 This explains a concern of some theologians to describe the church in a particular place as a “local” church, rather than as a “particular” church, that is, as an incomplete part of a whole. An emphasis upon locality, however, also has raised concerns among Roman Catholics regarding the danger of the local church shutting itself off from other churches, and the difficulty of responding to a prioritization of the universal church over the local church by simply reversing the priorities in a congregationalist or localist position.61 For Roman Catholic theologians, the use of communion language was a solution not only to ecumenical problems of understanding unity more adequately, but also to internal problems of giving local churches and their bishops their proper ecclesiality and authority. 3. Communion language also has continued to emphasize the connection of the institutional and theological realities of the church. As we have seen, this is a dominant theme of much twentieth-century Roman Catholic ecclesiology, and 60 In Komonchak, “The Local Church and the Church Catholic,” The Jurist 52 (1992): 416–47. 61 See Communionis notio, §11.

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of the use of communion language by such theologians as Yves Congar, Jérôme Hamer, and many interpreters of Vatican II. With varying degrees of success, communion ecclesiologies attempt to avoid a visible/invisible church dualism by joining the invisible, spiritual reality of Christian communion with the visible, institutional realities in which that communion comes to expression. Differing theologies of grace, of sacrament, and of the necessity of various institutions among different Christian churches have, predictably, a marked effect upon how this connection is understood; particularly in the Western Christian churches, however, this aspect of communion language has helped to modify extreme positions on the visibility and invisibility of the church arising from the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. 4. A fourth theme common to many communion ecclesiologies is the connection asserted between the vertical communion of Christians with God in Christ and the horizontal communion of Christians with each other. Furthermore, the horizontal communion is almost always presented as the result or fruit of vertical communion. Variations exist with regard to the partners in these relations: are Christians in communion with God, considered in an undifferentiated way, or with the Trinity, or with Jesus Christ, and therefore with the Triune God? Is communion with other Christians the same sort of relation as the communion Christians have with Christ? What might it mean to talk about “full” or “imperfect” communion with regard to God and/or other Christians? At its heart, though, one of the strengths of communion language in this regard is its ability to point to the theological reality of the church as the community of those in relation to God and to each other without limiting that reality a priori to particular practices or soteriologies; in other words, Christians can agree that their relation to each other is founded in their relation to God in Christ without first settling the question of how that relation to God in Christ is best expressed (through baptism, through faith, through a born-again experience of Jesus as “personal Lord and Savior,” etc.). It also points to the ecclesiality of Christian experience in asserting that relation to other Christians is a necessary consequence of relation to God in Christ, despite differences in how the relation to other Christians is expressed or institutionalized. This has strong resonances with the “baptismal ecclesiology” in the work of Paul Avis and, arguably, in the Lima statement on Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry.62 5. A fifth common theme is the connection of communion with Eucharistic and other sacramental language. For Western Christians, particularly Roman Catholics, this is clear from the common-sense usage of “communion” to refer to the bread and wine of the Eucharist. The influence of Khomiakov and 62 See, for instance, Paul Avis, “Building and Breaking Communion,” in Reshaping Ecumenical Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 141–57.

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Afanasiev on Orthodox and Roman Catholic ecclesiology is also clear in this area; de Lubac’s axiom that “the Eucharist makes the church,” is transposed from the treatment of the church as the mystical body of Christ to that of the church as communion; in many Roman Catholic and Orthodox communion ecclesiologies it is in the Eucharistic liturgy that the communion with one’s fellow Christians, grounded in mutual communion with God in Christ, is made manifest. For theologians from the non-liturgical Christian churches, or from those traditions for whom Eucharist is a less central aspect of their Christian practice, the connection of communion ecclesiology with Eucharist is obviously much more limited or even absent. 6. Finally, a sixth theme frequently found in communion ecclesiologies is an identification or connection of ecclesial communion with Trinitarian communion, that is, an assertion that the communion existing between Christians is modeled upon, an image of, or otherwise analogous to the communion existing between the persons of the Trinity. Some communion ecclesiologies take an understanding of the relations between the Trinitarian persons as determinative for the relations that exist between Christians and the Christian churches; Miroslav Volf’s exercise in dialectic, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, is an extended investigation of how different Trinitarian theologies lead to different communion ecclesiologies. Some communion ecclesiologies—notably that of Jean-Marie Tillard, as I will argue in Chapter 4 —are more reticent to draw ecclesiological conclusions from Trinitarian starting points, and affirm a foundation for communion ecclesiologies in Trinitarian communion in a more general way, arguing that ecclesial communion is dependent upon Trinitarian communion while being attentive to the limits of the analogy between Trinitarian and human persons. In these themes, therefore, one finds some starting points for approaching various communion ecclesiologies. By no means an exhaustive survey, these themes provide the starting point for an understanding of twentieth-century use of communion in ecclesiology that will be of use in locating Jean-Marie Tillard’s theology of communion within the context of these developments. As this chapter has suggested, Tillard’s understanding of communion is not entirely novel in relation to the trends in ecclesiology during the time of his career. But in the following chapter on Tillard’s general theological categories and in Chapter 4’s investigations of his understanding of communion, I will argue that, while not unique, Tillard’s use of the term communion is a distinctive contribution to contemporary ecclesiology.

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Chapter 3 Jean-Marie Tillard: Method and Themes Having suggested some methodological criteria for a systematic ecclesiology and outlined some of the genealogy and characteristic themes of communion in contemporary ecclesiologies, I can now turn specifically to the ecclesiology of Jean-Marie Tillard. There is an insight in Nicholas M. Healy’s suggestion that “it is the context in which the word [‘communion’] is used that gives it its concrete ecclesiological force.”1 Tillard’s idea of communion, the formal subject of Chapter 4, is best understood in the context of his personal history, method, and theological project. This chapter provides this necessary background by presenting four of these contexts: Tillard’s biography, his theological method, the major theological positions that condition his ecclesiology, and other ecclesiological concepts that form the context of his thought on communion. This procedure is necessary, yet necessarily rather artificial, as Tillard’s understanding of communion regularly acts as the lynchpin for his thought in ecclesiology and in his theology more generally, particularly in his understanding of salvation. This chapter will therefore make reference to the reflections on communion that will follow, just as the following chapters will refer back to the topics under discussion here.

Biography 2 Born on September 2, 1927, on the French territorial islands of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, Roger Tillard quickly demonstrated his intellectual gifts; when World 1 2

Nicholas M. Healy, “Communion Ecclesiology: A Cautionary Note,” Pro Ecclesia 4 (1995): 449–50. The major source for this biography is the substantial obituary published upon Tillard’s death in 2000 by the Collége Dominicain at Ottawa, available at http:// www.collegedominicain.ca/pdf/necrologie_jmt.pdf. A shorter biography is GillesDominique Mailhiot, “Le Professeur,” in Communion et Réunion: Mélanges J.-M. R. Tillard, ed. Gillian R. Evans and Michel Gourgues (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995), 21–30. See also the English-language summary in Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church (New York: Crossroad, 2006), 4–6.

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War II forced the closure of the college on the islands, the 17-year-old left home to study at the Collège Saint-Alexandre, near Ottawa in Québec (where he added the name “Jean-Marie” to his own in honor of the family who adopted him while a stranger in Bas-Québec). At Ottawa he discerned his call to the priesthood and to the Dominicans, and entered the novitiate in 1949. After his initial philosophy and theology studies at the Collège Dominicain in Ottawa, his superiors decided to send him for further study to Europe. From 1952 to 1953 he studied philosophy at the Angelicum in Rome, writing a doctoral thesis on “Happiness in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas.” He then studied theology from 1953 until 1957 at le Saulchoir, the house of studies in Belgium for the French Province of the Dominicans. Strongly influenced by the historical and biblical approaches of “la nouvelle théologie,” le Saulchoir was then at the center of a number of controversies between the Dominicans and the Vatican of Pius XII.3 Just after Tillard arrived at Saulchoir in the fall of 1953 came the February “raid on the Dominicans,” in which three of the “new theologians,” Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, and Henri-Marie Feret were reprimanded and “exiled” from their work in Paris and at Saulchoir.4 While they may have physically been absent for the remainder of Tillard’s studies, the historically attentive, critical appreciation of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and Thomas Aquinas initiated by these theologians remained “in the air” at Saulchoir, and served as a foundation for Tillard’s own theological method. Tillard’s biographers list professors Hyacinthe Dondaine, Jean Tonneau, and Pierre Camelot as other formative influences during his theological education.5 Another formative connection may have been Jérôme Hamer; Hamer taught at the Angelicum during the year of Tillard’s studies, and then was appointed the rector of Saulchoir during Tillard’s final year there. It is plausible that Hamer was already working on his ecclesiological text L’Église est une communion during this time.6

3

For useful historical background on this period, see Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “The New Theology and Transcendental Thomism,” in Modern Christian Thought, ed. James C. Livingston et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 2:197–232; and Joseph A. Komonchak, “Returning from Exile: Catholic Theology in the 1930s,” in The Twentieth-Century: A Theological Overview, ed. Gregory Baum (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 35–48. 4 See Thomas O’Meara, “ ‘Raid on the Dominicans’: The Repression of 1954,” America (February 5, 1994): 8–16. 5 Collège Dominicain obituary, 6–7. 6 The potential connections here are intriguing, but in the absence of additional evidence cannot be more than speculation. Further research into Tillard’s early influences is hindered by the lack of public access to Tillard’s personal papers at this time, and, at any rate, is not necessary for the arguments advanced in this book.

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In 1957, Tillard returned from France to teach at the Dominican college at Ottawa, which remained his home community and major teaching position until his death in 2000, in addition to teaching positions at the Lumen Vitae Center in Brussels and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He began by teaching courses on Trinitarian theology, Christology, and sacramental theology, and many of his earliest publications, including his first major book, L’Eucharistie, Pâque de l’Église (1964),7 anticipated in a series of articles in 1961–62 in the Nouvelle Revue Théologique, focused on questions of sacramental theology.8 He attended Vatican II as a peritus of the Canadian episcopate, and was directly involved in the drafting of the document on religious life, Perfectae caritatis. Accordingly, his published research during and after this time focuses on the purposes and the renewal of religious communities. Before becoming more directly concerned with communion as a concept in ecclesiological and ecumenical questions, Tillard began his reflections on communion in these two areas, the theology of the Eucharist9 and the theology of the religious life.10 Comparable in its influence to his Dominican formation was Tillard’s ecumenical involvement. His informal involvement in ecumenism began at the Council. Soon afterwards he was appointed an official observer to the WCC Assembly at Uppsala in 1967, where he worked with John Meyendorff and his future friend and collaborator John Zizioulas on the document on worship. In 1969 he was invited to be a member of ARCIC-I, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, as well as the Canadian Roman Catholic-Anglican dialogue. In that same year he also became a consultor for the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. In the late 1970s, he became a member of the official L’Eucharistie, Pâque de l’Église (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1964). Hereafter EP. “La triple dimension du signe sacramentel,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 83 (1961): 225–54; “L’Eucharistie, sacrement de l’espérance ecclésiale,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 83 (1961): 561–92, 673–95; “L’Eucharistie, purification de l’Église pérégrinante,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 84 (1962): 449–74, 579–97. 9 See, for example, “L’Eucharistie, purification de l’Église pérégrinante,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 84 (1962): 449–74, 579–97; “Le Dimanche, jour d’Alliance,” Sciences Ecclésiastiques 16 (1964): 225–50; “L’Eucharistie et la fraternité,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 91 (1969): 113–35; and “Eucharistie et Église” in J. Zizioulas, Tillard, and J.-J. von Allmen, L’Eucharistie, Églises en dialogue 12 (Paris: Mame, 1970), 75–135. 10 See, for example, “Concélébration et messe de communauté,” Questions Liturgiques et Paroissiales 43 (1962): 22–35; “Autorité et vie religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 88 (1966): 786–806; “La communauté religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 94 (1972): 488–519; “Aux sources de l’obéissance religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 98 (1976): 592–626, 817–37; and “La communauté religieuse, lieu de la «suite du Christ»” in Devant Dieu et pour le monde, Cogitatio Fidei 75 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1977), 197–280. Hereafter DD. 7 8

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dialogues with the Disciples of Christ and with the Orthodox Churches, and, in 1979, was elected vice president of the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC as Faith and Order was completing its work on the 1982 Lima statement Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry.11 Tillard’s ecumenical commitments had a profound effect on his theological work. In many ways they dictated the questions that he investigated. As I will argue more substantially in Chapter 4, Tillard’s experience of ecumenical dialogues was the foundation for his connection of the ecumenical question of interdenominational recognition with the innerdenominational relation of local and universal within the Roman Catholic Church. His research on the papacy, on the local church, and on the communion of churches all began in questions prompted by his ecumenical encounters. The importance of the length and the breadth of his ecumenical involvements cannot be overemphasized. The four major works of Tillard’s “ecclesiology of communion” were published between 1982 and 1995.12 L’Évêque de Rome (1982), Église d’Églises: L’ecclésiologie de communion (1987), Chair de l’Église, chair du Christ: Aux sources de l’ecclésiologie de communion (1992), and L’Église locale: Ecclésiologie de communion et catholicité (1996) are the fruits of forty years’ reflection on ecumenism, the Eucharist, the church, and salvation. In addition to these, Tillard’s influence can be seen in numerous other documents which do not bear his name, particularly the reports of ARCIC-I and -II, various documents of the WCC and the Faith and Order Commission, and Pope John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical on ecumenism Ut Unum Sint, to which Tillard contributed as a consultant and editor, and for which there is strong evidence that Tillard was a primary drafter. Tillard died on November 13, 2000, after a struggle with cancer, leaving behind an impressive body of work and a more impressive model of a life lived out of love for Christ in pursuit of the unity of Christ’s body. Appreciation of the significance of Tillard’s work began during his life and has grown in recent years. Reviewing Église d’Églises in 1993, the Jesuit ecclesiologist Francis A. Sullivan wrote, “Tillard is not the first Catholic theologian to have developed an ecclesiology based on the concept of communion [. . .] However, no one, to my knowledge, has done so with the thoroughness, the

11 Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111 (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1982). See Jean-Marie Tillard, “L’Assemblée de Vancouver: L’œcuménisme à un carrefour,” Irénikon 56 (1983): 361–70. 12 He notes in L’évêque de Rome (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1984; hereafter ER) that he began to outline the bases of an ecclesiology of communion in his book on the religious life, DD, but it is only in ER that he appears to be explicitly presenting such an ecclesiology. ER, 12.

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depth of insight, the mastery of the biblical and patristic sources, and especially with the ecumenical sensitivity, which Tillard has displayed in this work.”13, 14

Method and Sources The survey of Tillard’s educational background gives some broad indications regarding his theological method. Broadly, the “nouvelle théologie” and “ressourcement” movements around the Dominicans Chenu and Congar and the Jesuits de Lubac and Daniélou were the strongest early influences upon Tillard’s own theological style. Tillard’s work is marked by attention to historical and cultural context, close readings of texts, and a wide-ranging discursive, almost patristic style. This style attempts to convince while it explains and often envelops a deep systematic structure with a rhetorically rich, narrative prose. His texts also express a strong preference for letting the voices of his “authorities” (in the Thomist sense) speak for themselves; large portions of his works are composed of scriptural and patristic excerpts, often translated by Tillard, to further reinforce or rhetorically enhance his argument. Tillard’s ecumenical involvement had a deep impact upon his theology, both in setting the questions that prompted his research and in conditioning a style that is ecumenically aware. His work is not simply defined by this context, however, but is constructive in attempting to create a theological language that will assist the separated churches in moving past old controversies to a common, ecumenical theology. A recurring pattern in Tillard’s work is the retrieval

13 Francis A. Sullivan, “Recent Ecclesiology,” Modern Theology 9 (1993): 419. 14 Two theologians have focused particularly on Tillard’s work in their research. The first, Jeffrey Vanderwilt, focused upon the conception of the Eucharist in Tillard’s theory of communion. See Jeffrey Thomas Vanderwilt, “The Eucharist as sacrament of ecclesial ‘koinonia’ with reference to the contribution of Jean-Marie Tillard to ecumenical consensus on the Eucharist” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 1996). He has further expanded on these insights in addressing questions of Eucharistic sharing in A Church Without Borders: Eucharist Sharing in Ecumenical Context (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998); and Communion with NonCatholic Christians: Risks, Challenges and Opportunities (Collegveille, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003). The second, Christopher Ruddy, looked primarily at Tillard’s understanding of the local church. See Christopher James Ruddy, “One church in many churches: The theology of the local church in the writings of Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, O.P.” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2002). He has also expanded his work in the The Local Church: Tillard and the Future of Catholic Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 2006).

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of a “traditional” term or concept from biblical or patristic sources (e.g., communion, apostolicity, memorial, recapitulation) for use in contemporary ecclesiology. Another pattern in Tillard’s work is his use of a term in a number of related contexts that in time coalesce into a more stable understanding. In a way that is sometimes frustrating for a reader looking for clear and distinct positions, his prose strategy appears generally allergic to clear, univocal definition. One reviewer referred to his method “as a combination of the inductive and the systematic,”15 but Tillard viewed his work as an ecumenically inspired attempt to outline some foundations in ecclesiology, “providing ecclesiological studies [. . .] with their line of horizon.”16 Four of the major sources on which Tillard relied need to be examined in further detail: 1) his use of Scripture and of twentieth-century exegesis, 2) his reading of the patristic sources, 3) the strong, often silent, influence of Thomas Aquinas throughout his corpus, and 4) the more proximate Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Scripture and Exegesis From the beginning of his career, Tillard rooted his theological reflections in the Scriptures, and made thorough use of the best historical-critical scholarship of his time, written by both Catholic and Protestant exegetes. His first major work, L’Eucharistie, Pâque de l’Église, provides a good example of the approach to the Bible and to biblical exegesis that Tillard used throughout his work. In it we see the usual pattern of Tillard’s presentations of research: an analysis of the biblical texts judged relevant to the question at hand, an analysis of the teachings of various fathers of the church on the same questions, and a (usually brief) foray into Aquinas as representative of the medieval Latin tradition. Tillard chooses the questions to be investigated and then brings into a single structure texts from the scriptural and patristic tradition to support the major points he has outlined. In L’Eucharistie, the first two chapters of the work outline a Christology and Soteriology, which will be foundational to the book’s major focus. Chapter 1 presents the biblical material17 and Chapter 2 the patristic sources.18 The pattern repeats in the following chapters on the Eucharist. He proceeds chronologically,

15 E. J. Yarnold, review of Église d’Églises, by Jean-Marie Tillard, Journal of Theological Studies 39 (1988): 649. 16 Églises d’Églises: L’écclésiologie de communion, Cogitatio Fidei 143 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 10. Hereafter EE. 17 EP, 15–52. 18 Ibid., 59–105.

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moving from the Old to New Testament, and making frequent reference to the scriptural scholars on whom he has relied. In L’Eucharistie, these included Oscar Cullmann, Lucien Cerfaux, C. H. Dodd, Pierre Benoît, and Joachim Jeremias, exegetes who continue to be touchstones for Tillard’s reading of biblical texts in his later work. His theology draws upon the mainstream of Christian exegetical thought at the time, crossing ecumenical boundaries (of these authors, only Cerfaux and Benoît were Roman Catholics). Unlike some other systematic theologians of the time, Tillard has made biblical exegesis the starting point for his theological reflections, rather than a source for prooftexting a theological conclusion a posteriori. In addition to these major exegetes, Tillard demonstrates an enviable familiarity with less obvious exegetical literature of the time. His later work stays in dialogue with the field, attending to developments and new voices in scriptural research throughout his career. Ernst Käsemann, J. D. G. Dunn, J. A. T. Robinson, Markus Barth, and Raymond Brown are among the voices Tillard brings into his ecclesiological discussions in later works. Tillard also pays close attention to uses of language and to issues of translation, demonstrating a familiarity with the nuances of biblical Greek and Hebrew which contributes to the quality of the research. All theologians make selections within the scriptural data, creating their “canon within the canon,” for a variety of personal and theological reasons. Tillard is no different. Within his attention to the scriptural data, three scriptural sources become touchstones to which he returns frequently in his ecclesiology: the Johannine literature, especially Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John; the Letter to the Ephesians in the Pauline tradition; and, later in his work, the descriptions of the ecclesial community in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, especially the Pentecost scene in Chapter 2. The Gospel of John is a predominant biblical source for many of Tillard’s theological positions from a very early point in his work. Many of the themes closest to Tillard’s heart find their point of origin here: the Eucharist as Bread of Life, communion of Christians with God and with each other in Christ, salvation as reconciliation of humanity with God, unity of the church as the sacrament of that reconciliation in the world. Speaking broadly, Tillard’s Jesus is a Johannine and Pauline Christ more than a synoptic Christ. This remains a question of emphasis within an orthodox framework, but Tillard focuses less on the moral example and parables of Jesus and more on the reconciling, cosmic function of Jesus’ death and resurrection, on the Christ in whom believers are made into one body. Chapter 17 of the Gospel is important here, and particularly Jesus’ prayer that his disciples might be one as he and the Father are one. The obvious importance of this passage for the ecumenical movement is one important reason for Tillard to turn repeatedly to this part of the Gospel, but his reading of the text goes further. For Tillard, the crucial point of this prayer, and the

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larger ecclesial reality of which the ecumenical movement is a part, is the cosmic understanding of the relation of Christians to each other and to God found in John. No other texts will be as important to Tillard’s understanding of communion as the Johannine Jesus’ prayer that “they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me” (17.21). And while his later research and ecumenical involvement will increasingly bring an understanding of the Holy Spirit as the One who unites to Christ, Tillard’s understanding of communion as entry into the Trinitarian life of God will be based upon this Johannine vision of communion with the Father and with other through being in Christ. A second important biblical source for Tillard is the Letter to the Ephesians. Again, this is not a surprising choice for a theologian interested in ecumenism or ecclesiology. But in Tillard’s reading of the Scriptures, the ecumenical question of ecclesial unity is a part of the larger question of cosmic unity, of the salvation of humanity within the wider salvation of creation. In his reading of Ephesians, the reconciliation the author describes in Chapter 2 between “those who were once far off,” that is, between Jews and Gentiles, is a foundational text for Tillard’s soteriology. The bridal metaphor of Chapter 5 enters into Tillard’s understanding of the church at various points as well, but it is the reconciliation of former enemies into the single household of God to which he repeatedly returns in discussing the communion of humans, particularly formerly antagonistic groups, with God and each other, as one of the ways to begin talking of “salvation.” Finally, as Tillard’s theological interests moved from the general theological foundation for ecclesiality as a part of God’s plan for humans, to the particular practical issues of ecumenism and of innerdenominational relations in which that vision of ecclesiality seemed threatened, Tillard turned increasingly to an image of ecclesial pluralism, the Pentecost scene in the Acts of the Apostles.19 His reflections on Pentecost and the Jerusalem church, and on the Babel story of Genesis with which it is contrasted, form the basis for the first biblical investigations in both Église d’Églises and L’Église locale. His growing focus upon the presence of the universal church in and through the diverse local churches, upon the close connection between salvation, communion, and reconciliation, and upon the role of the Holy Spirit in the gathering of the church in Christ all lead him to find in the Pentecost story a source to explain the nature of Christian community and an effective way to rhetorically present his vision of the church. In all of these readings, and in the additional uses of scripture with which Tillard fills his texts, one sees how Tillard has turned to the biblical texts fully

19 See also Ruddy, The Local Church, 55–60.

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in the spirit of a “twentieth-century church father.” Like the Fathers, he begins his work with an attention to the scriptures as the norma non normata testifying to the nature of the Christian community. But unlike other authors who appear to use Scripture in similar ways, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar, Tillard is as comfortable drawing upon twentieth-century historical-critical exegesis as that of the first centuries of the church. On that count he is a good representative of the change wrought by Vatican II’s admonition that “the ‘study of the sacred page’ should be the very soul of sacred theology.”20 In what is possibly an autobiographical remark, Tillard noted in his comments on the document on worship produced at the WCC assembly at Uppsala that the original text needed to be modified to “make more evident the role of the Word of God in worship and especially in the sacraments—and, what would have once been surprising, this suggestion came from a Roman Catholic.”21

Church Fathers The writings of the Fathers are Tillard’s second major source, again demonstrating the influence of the nouvelle théologie on his work. The initiation of the Sources Chrétiennes series of translations by de Lubac and Daniélou in the late 1940s undoubtedly made Tillard’s task easier, although, as in his biblical research, Tillard demonstrates a facility with the Greek and Latin texts and frequently makes recourse to his own translations. His use of the patristic sources is significant for the role they play in Tillard’s typical methodological structure, for the scope of authors utilized, for the ecumenical significance of his patristic research, and for the use of liturgical texts from the patristic period in addition to more traditional theological writings. Methodologically, Tillard typically turns to the writings of the church fathers after outlining the scriptural data for a question. The patristic writings are a privileged commentary on the scriptures, particularly as these relate to the Christological and Trinitarian controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries. To return to L’Eucharistie again as an early example, Tillard follows his discussion of the Old and New Testament sources with a survey of church fathers: Ignatius of Antioch, Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Damascene, Ambrose of Milan, and Augustine. The survey is notable for its thoroughness and for Tillard’s presentation of long excerpts from the texts. Rather than merely summarizing the authors’ positions,

20 Dei Verbum, §24. 21 “Le Document d’Upsala sur le Culte,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 90 (1968): 822.

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he prefers to let them speak for themselves, often translating the texts so that the reader will be as struck by the beauty of the passages as Tillard was in his own reading. Again, Tillard’s method is not patristic prooftexting inserted into a predetermined text—the passages used are rarely “popular” or widely used in other contemporary theologies—but is rather a serious attempt to begin an investigation through the lens of scripture and the scriptural readings of “the Great Tradition” of the undivided church, or at least the undivided church of the Roman Empire. He attempts to not only present conclusions to the reader from his own patristic studies, but to bring the reader into the experience of studying the Scriptures “with the church.” The diversity of authors whom Tillard utilizes is also important to note, particularly for a Roman Catholic systematic theologian of his time. This is not the quick jump from the Scriptures through Augustine to Anselm and Aquinas common to the neo-Scholastic manual tradition (and to some theological reflection in the present day). Tillard has labored to present the views of the patristic authors, Eastern and Western, in their own diversity of opinions and conclusions, while drawing out some of the broad lines of agreement that recur in their thought. In his later writings Tillard becomes increasingly explicit in presenting this theological diversity not only to describe the fathers’ views accurately, but also as a model of the kind of “healthy pluralism” which his communion ecclesiology undergirds. Similarly, his attention to both the Eastern and Western church fathers becomes increasingly important to his ecumenical work, both substantially and formally. Substantially, Tillard’s knowledge of the Greek fathers and his ability to bring them into direct conversation with Latin authors greatly supported his effectiveness in the Roman Catholic-Orthodox dialogue. Formally, the diversity of the fathers’ viewpoints, both individually and in the larger church communities of which they were a part (Antioch and Alexandria, Eastern and Western, etc.), provided a model for the unity-in-diversity to which Tillard’s idea of communion points. Finally, Tillard’s attention to the patristic period extends beyond the traditional sermons and theological writings utilized by scholars. No doubt due in part to the fact that Tillard began by analyzing understandings of the Eucharist, liturgical texts from the patristic period also play a major role as a theological source in his work. This is definitely text-based liturgical theology, attentive primarily to the words of collects, anaphoras, and other prayers, rather than to ritual actions or other liturgical praxis.22 But the inclusion of these texts as witnesses to the wide liturgical diversity of the Christian church (L’Eucharistie

22 As contrasted with the use of ritual studies in liturgical theology, methodologically outlined in, for example, Kevin Irwin, Context and Text: Method in Liturgical Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994).

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includes a helpful series of charts outlining the various rites and major liturgical families in the Eastern and Western church23) and as theological sources provides another example of how Tillard’s use of patristic texts contributes not only substantially to his arguments but formally by presenting a concrete example of diverse local churches in communion.

Thomas Aquinas A third theological source whose influence should not be underestimated in the work of Jean-Marie Tillard is his Dominican brother and predecessor Thomas Aquinas. As a French Dominican, Aquinas was a presence in Tillard’s intellectual world from a very early point in his education; his doctoral thesis on “Happiness in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas” was completed in 1953 at the Angelicum in Rome, then a stronghold for traditional neo-Scholastic Thomism. During his theological studies at Saulchoir he would have learned to read Thomas with the new historical perspectives initiated by Chenu. Some of his earliest published writings on the sacraments are rooted in a rereading of Aquinas,24 and in L’Eucharistie one sees the methodological structure take hold in which Thomas will take third place after the scriptures and the fathers as a source for data on a question. Throughout his theological work, including his investigations of various ecumenical questions, Tillard will bring Thomas into his texts at critical points in the discussion.25 Just as important, and more difficult to demonstrate, is the way in which Thomas Aquinas remained an important implicit source for the structure of Tillard’s thought throughout his career. When, in 1993, Tillard wrote about “the mark of Thomas Aquinas on the ecumenical dialogue,” he made explicit the ways in which Thomas had quietly guided his own contributions to the work of ARCIC.26 Tillard’s conception of the relation of nature and grace, of creation

23 EP, 259–61. 24 For example, his 1961 article “La triple dimension du signe sacramentel” is subtitled “À propos de Sum. Theol. III, 60, 3.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 83 (1961): 225–54. 25 See, for example, his use of Thomas’ idea of the votum eucharistiae as a possible avenue for understanding the concreteness of ecclesial unity despite its current lack of full communion, beginning in “Le «votum eucharistiae»: L’Eucharistie dans la rencontre des chrétiens,” in Miscellenea Liturgica in Onore Di Sui Eminenza il Cardinale Giacomo Lercaro (Rome: Desclée, 1967), 2: 143–94. Cf. “Une ecclésiologie des «Conseils d’Églises»,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 32 (1982): 8–9. 26 “La marque de Thomas d’Aquin sur le dialogue œcuménique,” in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris, ed. Carlos-Josaphat Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires Fribourgh, 1993), 625–54.

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and redemption, in the divine economy resonates clearly with a reading of Thomas in which “that which is saved is that which was created,” and which expresses a great deal of confidence in the ability of human cultures and the “soil” of local places to receive the seed of God’s word. I will address these issues in fuller detail in the section below on Tillard’s conception of catholicity.

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Ecclesiology A fourth, more proximate influence upon Tillard’s thought on the church is found in the history of ecclesiological thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of that history was outlined in the two previous chapters, and the thought of some of the most important Roman Catholic and Orthodox theologians on the local church and the Eucharistic constitution of the church has been outlined with great sensitivity by Christopher Ruddy in his studies of Tillard on the local church.27 The work of the Orthodox theologians Alexei Khomiakov, Nikolai Afanasiev, and John Zizioulas, and of the Roman Catholics Möhler, Hamer, de Lubac, and Congar, should therefore be remembered as having raised some of the major questions of contemporary ecclesiology to which Tillard devoted his work. Particularly in their emphasis upon communion, upon the local church, and upon the Eucharistic foundations of the church to twentieth-century ecclesiology, these theologians had an important, though mainly indirect, role in providing some foundations for Tillard’s project. The connection ought not be overemphasized, however, as Tillard’s work was not simply of a rereading of Khomiakov, Zizioulas, or Congar, but rather consisted of an independent investigation of the same sources and questions to which these thinkers pointed. Tillard’s use of communion to address issues about ecumenical and innerecclesial diversity, for example, differed from that of Congar, for whom communion language was most important in discussing the relation of the institutional and theological/spiritual natures of the church.28

27 See Christopher Ruddy, The Local Church, 9–53. 28 A fifth source for Tillard’s thought, relatively minor in terms of direct influence, but important to note in passing with regard to sources outside of traditional theology, is the wide body of French Catholic novels, poetry, and drama of which Tillard was an avid reader. Tillard draws particularly upon Charles Péguy, finding in his thought a helpful literary complement to Tillard’s thought on the relation of the church to creation. See L’Église locale: Écclésiologie de communion et catholicité, Cogitatio Fidei 191 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995), 16, 56, 99, 141, 284, 290, 317. Hereafter EL.

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Other Theological Topics Outside of his direct ecclesiological work, Tillard pursued research in a number of other areas of theology. Four in particular: 1) Christology and soteriology, 2) the Eucharist and the other sacraments, 3) the theology of religious life, and 4) pneumatology—impact upon his understanding of communion in significant ways. The first three were, in many ways, the foundational studies for his later work on the understanding of communion in ecclesiology; the pneumatological questions developed over time in relation to his ecumenical commitments, and conditioned the Christocentric character found in his earlier writings. This section will look at these four topics, indicating the major lines of Tillard’s thought in each and suggesting how they influenced his ecclesiology of communion.

Christology and Soteriology The starting point for understanding Tillard’s ecclesiology is understanding that he never thought of his work primarily as ecclesiological; rather, he thought of it as a contribution to Christology.29 More specifically, he thought of it as a contribution to soteriology, to the study of Christ’s redemption of humanity. In Tillard, this inevitably leads into a consideration of the church as the receiver and as the bearer of this act of salvation, as le-peuple-que-Dieu-veut, the “people-that-God-wants,” in Tillard’s words.30 But the starting point for all reflection on the church, from global considerations of the church as a communion to practical reflections on the papacy, bishops, and other ecclesial structures, is the church as the fruit of Christ’s saving work, the church as salvation in the concrete. Tillard’s theology of communion, therefore, is located at the crossroads of soteriology, theological anthropology, and ecclesiology. Understanding a theologian’s understanding of salvation requires understanding from what or whom humanity is being saved. While this anticipates Chapter 4’s reflections upon communion, I must note here that for Tillard, salvation and communion are synonymous in many places; that from which humanity is being saved, therefore, is the brokenness of human relationship with God and with one’s fellow human beings. “Sin may be defined as a break

29 I am grateful to my colleagues who knew Tillard well who confirmed this insight, particularly Michael Attridge, Catherine Clifford, Michael Fahey, S. J., and Christopher Ruddy. 30 EP, 145–242. Cf. EE, 76–101.

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in communion,”31 Tillard repeatedly emphasizes. The root causes of this break in communion are variously identified as pride and, most frequently, as egoism. “Instead of turning towards God and towards others, the human being turns back on himself. It makes of its own being, its own person, its greatest treasure, forgetting that at the depths of its being it is an openness toward God and others. [. . .] In exalting himself, he isolates himself from communion.”32 In his description of the effects of human sinfulness, one can also see echoes of French existentialist and Marxist treatments of alienation: “The tragedy of the sinful human being consists, in effect, of a break and a separation of the human person in each of his areas of fulfillment: separation of the person from himself, from other human beings, from the exterior world, from God. It is a dissolution of the human being and of humanity.”33 Salvation, then, is the passage from this situation of radical separation to one of radical communion.34 Salvation consists of “communion with the Father, in Jesus, opening out into a fraternal communion of all people with each other.”35 This passage from separation to salvation is a passage with two moments: first, the removal of sin, that is, the removal of the obstacles of pride and egoism which are the roots of the fallenness in which humanity finds itself; and, second, invitation into a deeper relationship of love with God and with others, into a relation of communion.36 The two moments are distinct, but inseparable: “ ‘Communion of life’ breaks the barriers of egoism, throwing [projetant] the human being into the world of love which is openness to God and to others.”37 Furthermore, the two parts of communion—communion with God and communion with other human beings—are also inseparable, the first acting as foundation for the latter, and preventing a “one-on-one” relation between God and the person:

“Le Salut, Mystère de Pauvreté,” La Vie Spirituelle 111 (1964): 711. Ibid., 711. “L’Église de Dieu est une Communion,” Irénikon 53 (1980): 455. The conception of this as a “passage” relates to Tillard’s conceptions of salvation and of the Eucharist in their relation to the paschal mystery of Christ and to God’s act of salvation in the exodus, both of which are events characterized as passages. See EP, 17–18. 35 “L’Église, annonce prophétique du salut,” in La Nouvelle Image de l’Église: Bilan du Concile Vatican II, ed. Bernard Lambert (Paris: Mame, 1967), 66. 36 These two moments are the principles around which Tillard organizes his study of the two effects of the Eucharist in EP; Chapter 3 discusses “The Eucharist and the first moment [le premier temps] of the salvation of the church,” and Chapter 4 “The Eucharist and the second moment of the salvation of the church.” 37 “L’Eucharistie, purification de l’Église pérégrinante,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 84 (1962): 592. 31 32 33 34

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The fact of Salvation ought not be reduced to the forgiveness of sin, to the non-attribution of fault, nor purely to an individual adoptive divine filiation. [. . .] [John 11:52 and Eph. 2:13–17] marvelously demonstrate how “death to sin” (to use Paul’s language in Rom 6:10–11) goes beyond itself [se dépasse] into a life of communion.38 The crux, in a literal sense, for these relationships is the Crucified and Risen Christ. It was noted above when discussing his use of the scriptures that Tillard is more interested in the Christ of the Pauline letters and of the Gospel of John than in the Jesus presented in the Synoptic Gospels. Attention to Tillard’s understanding of salvation makes this clear: Jesus is important for Tillard’s theological vision not so much for the moral example he presents in his preaching and parables, as for the paschal event of his dying and being raised by the Father.39 It is through the believer’s relationship with this Risen Christ that the human being is led out of sin and death and into the life of communion. More specifically, the salvation is understood through the language of being “in Christ” of the Pauline letters and of John: Nothing in the life of a Christian escapes this hold of Christ: Christ lives in the believer, the believer lives in Christ; Christ—always understood in his union with God the Father—is the one for whom the believer lives (2 Cor 5:15; see Rom 6:11; Gal 2:19), the believer is the one for whom Christ has died. One can say that life “in Christ” (en Christô) defines Christian existence. [. . .] It [the expression “en Christô”] is the specific indicator of the communion with God established by the salvific Deathand-Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.40 Being (sacramentally) “in Christ,”“remaining” in Christ, in Johannine language,41 is the key relation on which communion with God (the Father42) and with

38 “Vers une nouvelle problématique de la «Justification»,” Irénikon 55 (1982): 190. 39 This is not to say that Tillard separates the moral life from Christian existence; but he associates the demands of Christian love primarily with the paschal event of Christ’s offering himself on the cross, and expresses the demand for imitation of that self-giving love in language drawn from the Eucharist as sacrifice, making Christ’s one sacrifice present. See “All Led Into One Sacrifice,” Chapter 3 in Chair de l’Église, chair du Christ (Paris: Cer, 1992), 99–124. Hereafter CE. 40 CE, 15. 41 See EP, 37–45. 42 The longer discussion of communion in the following chapter will look more closely at the Trinitarian dimensions of Tillard’s understanding of communion, but it is important to note here the directionality of communion in this understanding: the

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others is founded. This is why ecclesial communion’s health and, ecumenically, restoration, are not important for Tillard simply from a pragmatic desire for the church to “succeed” in its mission. According to his understanding of salvation as communion, ecclesial communion is “success,” is “salvation”—not the means to an end, but the end itself. This salvation-as-communion extends beyond the church itself; its goal is not to create “good Christians” in an individualistic way, but to reconcile all of humanity in its divisions and differences.43 Tillard frequently turns to Irenaeus’s language of “recapitulation” to emphasize the cosmic dimensions of salvation, the communion of a restored creation with its creator of which ecclesial communion is the sign and the instrument.44 Any exploration of Tillard’s ecclesiology, before turning to the particular structures, ministries, and institutionalizations of the church must first begin with this deeper appreciation of the church as the community of those being saved, and the connections of ecclesiology with soteriology and theological anthropology.

Sacraments and Eucharist From the outset, Tillard’s interest in the sacraments and the Eucharist has a distinctly ecclesiological interest, and the Eucharist remained “la certitudephare,” the “guiding light” of his theology, as Lorraine Caza has phrased it.45 he writes that L’Eucharistie is an attempt “to bring to light the origins of a traditional truth in ecclesiology and in sacramental theology: ‘the Eucharist makes the Church.’ ”46 Traditional, perhaps, but only recently rediscovered in modern Christian thought, particularly by Russian Orthodox theology under the influence of Nikolai Afanasiev and by Roman Catholic ressourcement by figures such as Henri de Lubac.47 The Eucharist plays a major role in Tillard’s understanding of communion as the sacrament that best symbolizes and makes present the communion with God and with others in Christ. Tillard’s reflection on the

43 44 45

46 47

communion into which the Christian enters by being “in Christ” is the communion of the Son in relation to the Father, not a generic “communion of persons” in the Trinity. See “Deux projets, une tâche,” Documentation Catholique 82 (1985): 892–95. See EE, 71–72, 91–92; EL, 83–88. Lorraine Caza, CND, “L’Eucharistie Fait L’Église: La Certitude-Phare de J.-M. R. Tillard, o.p.,” Science et Esprit 61 (2009): 117–35. This entire issue is dedicated to the legacy of Tillard, and includes important essays by Nicholas Lossky, Richard Gaillardetz, Thomas O’Meara, O. P., and Gilles Routhier. EP, 7. See Ruddy, The Local Church, 15–21.

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Eucharist is his point of entry into ecumenical dialogue,48 and, in the BEM document, is one of his most lasting contributions to the ecumenical movement as a whole. Four aspects of Tillard’s sacramental theology are important for his understanding of ecclesial communion: 1) the connection of Eucharist with his soteriology, 2) the descriptions of the Eucharist as meal, sacrifice, and memorial and their relation to sacraments and time, 3) the language of res and sacramentum which he uses to nuance an understanding of the limits and presence of the church, and 4) the connection of the Eucharist with the reality of the local church. Forgiveness of sins and the entry into communion of life with God and others as the two fruits of the Eucharist for Tillard. The connection of the Eucharist with the Jewish Passover and the paschal language of passage from slavery to freedom, from death to life are key to Tillard’s Eucharistic theology as for his soteriology. Forgiveness of sins and communion of life are related as the starting point of a journey is to its destination. The Eucharist “progressively erases sin by plunging each of those who participate in it into all the realism of the redeeming death of Jesus, which eliminates attachment to the world of the old Adam and makes easier the ascent of all towards the Parousia. [. . .] In each Eucharist, the Church takes a step of its Passover. It is removed a little more from slavery to the world and enters a little more into the reality of the Promise.”49 The Eucharist slowly makes the church more transparent to God’s glory. A second early aspect of Tillard’s sacramental theology is his attention to the intersection of time and eternity in the eschatological reality of the sacraments. In an early article, Tillard outlines a reading of the Summa Theologiae III.60.3, which points to a “triple dimension” of every sacramental sign.50 Each sacrament has three temporal dimensions, the past historical event, the present grace given in the sacrament, and the future, eschatological event toward which the sacrament points. As Tillard puts it, each sacrament refers “to the ‘once-and-forall’ past event of the Passover of the Lord, to the current gift of the kindness of God acting by means of this ‘once-and-for-all’, and to the final glory in which the fruit of this ‘once-and-for-all’ will spring forth in the world in all its fullness for the glory of the Father and the eternal joy of the elect.”51 One can see the 48 See his reflections on the document on worship at the WCC Uppsala Assembly, “Le Document d’Upsala sur le Culte,” and his contribution to the “Églises en Dialogue” series with Jean-Jacques von Allmen and John Zizioulas, L’Eucharistie (Paris: Mame, 1970), 75–135. 49 EP, 242. 50 “La triple dimension du signe sacramentel,” 226–54. He will return to this schema in his work with ARCIC-I. See “La marque de Thomas d’Aquin sur le dialogue œcuménique,” 627–45. 51 “La triple dimension,” 254.

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paschal overtones of Tillard’s soteriology again here: each sacrament makes present here and now both the initial act of salvation and redemption with which the ecclesial journey started, as well as the final goal of that journey in the eschatological recapitulation of creation in its creator. Prompted by his ecumenical work, Tillard continued to reflect on how to affirm both the “once-and-for-all” nature of the historical event of Christ’s death and resurrection as well as the way in which that event becomes present for believers here and now. This became especially important in attempting to hammer out a defense of the sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, as held in the Roman Catholic Church, that would be acceptable to the other Christian churches. In later writings and especially in his work with ARCIC and with the Faith and Order Commission on BEM, Tillard built on liturgical theological research on the Hebrew notion of zikkaron and the New Testament Greek idea of anamnesis to promote the description of the Eucharist as a “memorial,” seeing in the term a way out of Reformation-era debates over the nature of the Eucharist that would be acceptable to both Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians. Tillard also emphasized the distinctively eschatological dimension of the sacraments, and of the church, throughout his theology. The second “moment” of the Eucharist, that which brings the church more fully into communion of life with God, is the beginning of a process directed toward the fullness of the Reign of God, the re-creation of the “people-that-God-wants.” And just as the Eucharist is the “deposit” [arrhes], the “first-fruits” of that communion among the church in via, so the ecclesial life of the church in history is, or can be, the location of the breaking-in of the eschatological Reign of God. Tillard has sometimes been read as proposing an overly realized eschatology, and indeed his prose can become somewhat overheated when discussing the participation of the Eucharist in the Reign of God. But Tillard’s strong, Thomistically-influenced emphasis upon the goodness and the relative independence of creation maintains his understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrament of the eschaton that in no way does violence to the structures or reality of the creation. A third important element of Tillard’s Eucharistic theology is the “osmosis” between the Eucharist and the Church, the Eucharistic “Body of Christ” and the ecclesial “Body of Christ,” communion as Eucharist and as lived, ecclesial reality.52 Tillard’s understanding of the concept begins in a reading of the Body of Christ theme in the Pauline tradition with attention to the sacramental yet real

52 See “All Understood in One Body, Eucharistic Body, Ecclesial Body,” Chapter 2 in CE, 47–98.

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connection between the Eucharist and its recipients’ communion with the body of the Risen Christ.53 He frequently refers to the Augustinian instruction to catechumens that “you are the Body of Christ and his members, it is your own mystery which sits on the Table of the Lord. You respond to that which you are when you respond ‘Amen’: the Body of Christ.”54 As Ruddy puts it, for Tillard “the Eucharistic synaxis is the heart of the local church: it is not simply what the local church does, but what it is.”55 Tillard frequently makes use of the scholastic distinction of the res and sacramentum of the Eucharist, found in Saint Thomas, to discuss ecclesial communion, the reality of the church, as the res of the sacrament. This has two effects: first, it tightly links his understanding of the church to the sacramental event of the Eucharist, and, second, it opens a way to understand communion ecumenically as always Eucharistic yet not only limited to the full communion indicated by mutual reception of Eucharist. By calling attention to the real yet incomplete communion of Christians as a real sharing in the res of the sacrament, Tillard’s theology of the Church/Eucharist relation allows for a more porous understanding of ecclesial “membership” without dissociating ecclesiality from the Eucharist or the Pauline language of the Body of Christ. A final element of Tillard’s Eucharistic theology that becomes increasingly prominent in his later work and crucial for his ecclesiology is the connection of the celebration of the Eucharist with the full ecclesiality of the local church. Tillard’s contributions to the theology of the local church are well known. They begin, temporally and theologically, from the presence of the universal church in and through the local churches found in Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium.56 Tillard estimated the change from an ecclesiology starting from the universal church to an ecclesiology starting from the local church to be “the great novelty of Vatican II in comparison to Vatican I” in ecclesiology.57 And it is the Eucharistic nature of the local church which grounds this perspective: “The Eucharistic community is not a piece of the mystery of the universal church but rather the apparition—the ‘symbol’ in the full sense of the term—of this church, in communion with the Father and in fraternal 53 Relying primarily on the exegesis of Lucien Cerfaux, La théologie de l’Église suivant S. Paul (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1965); idem, Le Christ dans la théologie de S. Paul (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1954); J. A. T. Robinson, Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (London: Macmillan, 1904); Markus Barth, Ephesians 1–3 (New York: Anchor Press, 1980); and articles on the Body of Christ in Paul by Pierre Benoît collected in Exégèse et théologie (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1961). 54 From Patrologia Latina 38, pp. 1246–48, cited in CE, 56. 55 Ruddy, The Local Church, 90. 56 Lumen Gentium [LG] §§ 23, 26. Available at www.vatican.va. 57 “La juridiction de l’Évêque de Rome,” Irénikon 51 (1978): 511.

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communion, in Christ the Lord.”58 As his preferred way of speaking about the manifest presence of the Risen Christ in a particular local community, the phrase “mutual recognition of each other’s Eucharist” is the summary of the process of recognition of mutual communion maintaining the tissue of relations between local churches. The celebration of the Eucharist grounds Tillard’s understanding of the simultaneity of the local and universal church, and the relations between apostolic fidelity and catholic inculturation to be explored further below.

Religious Life The theory and practice of the religious life was one of the first areas of Tillard’s scholarly research. As a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, he contributed to Perfectae Caritatis, the document on religious life, and he was an instructor in a Dominican house of studies for most of his academic career; theoretical and practical questions about the nature of religious life are another determining context for Tillard’s understanding of communion. In numerous books and articles from the 1960s through the early 1980s, Tillard explored the meaning, organization, and evolution of religious life and the apostolic counsels.59 He later

58 “L’horizon de la «primauté» de l’évêque de Rome,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 25 (1975): 233. 59 Books: Les religieux au cœur de l’Église (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969); Religieux, aujourd’hui (Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1969); Religieuses dans l’Église d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Union des Supérieures Majeures de France, 1971); Devant Dieu et pour le monde: le projet des religieux (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974); Religieux, un chemin d’évangile (Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1975); Il y a charisme et charimse: la vie religieuse (Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1977); Appel du Christ . . . Appels du monde: les religieux relisent leur appel (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1978); Dans le monde, pas du monde: la «vie religieuse apostolique» (Brussels: Lumen Vitae, 1981). Major articles: “La vie religieuse dans le mystère de l’Église,” Sciences Ecclésiastiques 14 (1962): 89–107; “La vie religieuse, sacrement de la présence de Dieu,” La vie des communautés religieuses 22 (1964): 70–80; “La vie religieuse, sacrement de la puissance de Dieu,” La vie des communautés religieuses 22 (1964): 161–75; “L’obéissance religieuse, mystère de communion,” La vie des communautés religieuses 22 (1964): 225–46; also in Nouvelle Revue Théologique 87 (1965): 377–94; “L’exercice évangélique de l’autorité,” La vie des communautés religieuses 24 (1966): 201–12; “Autorité et vie religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 88 (1966): 786–806; numerous articles in L’Adaptation et la Rénovation de la Vie Religieuse, ed. Tillard and Y. Congar (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967); “Relations entre hiérarchie et supérieurs majeurs d’après les directives du Concile de Vatican II,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 89 (1967): 561–81; “Le témoignage des religieuses dans l’Église,” in La religieuse dans la cité (Montréal: Fides, 1968), 117–32; “Le fondement

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identified one of these books, Devant Dieu et pour le monde, as the beginning of point of his explorations of an ecclesiology of communion, and more particularly on “the role of holiness in the life of the People of God.”60 In his studies of the religious life, the strong relation of religious life with that of the wider church and the exploration of the concept of Christian fraternity are the two most important factors in contextualizing his ecclesiology of communion. The dominant theme of Tillard’s recurring studies of the religious life is the distinction and connection of religious life with the wider life of the church. Like many of his colleagues during the renewal of religious communities in the conciliar and postconciliar periods, Tillard focuses upon the religious life not as a “higher” vocation or “state of perfection,” but as a distinctive way of following Christ within the church. In Tillard’s understanding, God’s act of salvation in Christ creates two dynamic axes, one in which the church finds itself in the situation of the “already” of the paschal event’s entrance into human history and the real “first-fruits” of that event in Christian life now; the other axis attends to the “not-yet” experience of the church’s need to work in order to progressively bring the reign of God to its fullness within history. Within his understanding of nature and grace, both of these axes are mutually implicated, as the “already” occurs not in an absolutely new creation, but in a renewal of creation. Consequently, these two tendencies are not strictly divided either, but, within the diversity of charisms in the church, are a matter of emphasis and personal call. The religious life focuses upon the first experience, that of following Christ by living in the eschatological “already” of the paschal event more intensely by renouncing many of the commitments which involve other Christians more directly in the world of the “not-yet.” But this is not an experience limited to formal religious life, in two senses. First, as an emphasis and not a division, the religious life focuses more intensely upon one aspect of the experience of all the baptized; all Christians, including those in religious life, are called to live both poles of this experience. Second, the evangelical counsels of formal religious life

évangélique de la vie religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 91 (1969): 916–55; “Aspect théologique: L’option de foi dans la vie religieuse,” in Foi et Vie religieuse (Ottawa: Conférence Religieuse Canadienne, 1971), 11–34; “La communauté religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 94 (1972): 488–519; 95 (1973): 150–87; “Vie religieuse et liberté,” Lumen Vitae 29 (1974): 7–25; “Aux sources de l’obéissance religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 98 (1976): 592–626, 817–37; “L’obéissance dans la fraternité dominicaine,” Vie Consacrée 48 (1976): 147–66; “Le propos de pauvreté et l’exigence évangélique,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 100 (1978): 359–72. 60 ER, 11.

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are not, in Tillard’s view, the only way of living with a focus upon the Gospel’s presence “already”; these ways are valuable as historically tried and tested paths toward holiness, but they are not exclusive. In this Tillard attempts to promote the value of the religious life as a legitimate way of following Christ in the world, without denigrating other ways of following Christ or privileging it above other forms of discipleship.61 This distinction between religious life and other forms of Christian discipleship is the entry point for Tillard’s further reflections upon the relation between religious and the wider ecclesial community. This involves both the formal questions of relations between religious communities and the hierarchical structures of the local church, and the more general ecclesiological question of how communities of religious life serve the wider church. On the first point, Tillard firmly locates the religious life as a way of living out the movement toward God begun in baptism and sacramentalized most intensely in the Eucharist; this places the religious firmly within the structures of the local church and its Eucharist, and privileges the “normal” ecclesial structures to which all the baptized belong over the intensification of that baptismal call entailed in the religious life.62 But Tillard is aware of the tensions, unhealthy at times, which arise between religious communities and their bishops; given the prophetic role these communities play in the church, the tensions between “prophet and king,” as Tillard puts it, are part of the interplay between the religious’ eschatological radicalism and the concerns of the hierarchical church to tend to the needs of all the baptized.63 In their focus upon living out the “already” of the reign of God within the world, religious communities, in addition to their practical help in building up that reign, also function as a sign, a sacrament, to the church as a whole of the power of the new life of grace introduced by Christ. Through their lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the religious life serves as a prophetic sign and as an eschatological sign in the midst of the wider community.64 And, significantly for the next portion of this study, the communion of the members of the religious community with God and with each other is a sign the restored communion “which defines the church in its being as mystery.”65 The prophetic radicalism of the religious life is, for Tillard, the living out of the communion with God and humanity to which the entire church in via is heading; by living that life now in

61 The most extensive treatment of these issues is in the section on “Religious Life and the ‘Christian Vocation’,” in DD, 282–97. 62 See especially “Relations entre hiérarchie et supérieurs majeurs,” 565–70; and DD, 340–51. 63 DD, 344–45. 64 DD, 297–325. 65 “Autorité et vie religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 88 (1966): 790.

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the midst of the pilgrim church, religious communities are in no way separated from the “normal” church, but are as essential in making present the new creation in the world as is the work of the other baptized in the world, signifying the goodness of the first act of creation. The second way in which Tillard’s reflections upon the religious life provide insight into his understanding of communion comes from his focus upon the nature of “fraternity,” as he terms it for both men’s and women’s religious communities, in relation to ecclesial communion. Living the eschatological “already” of life in communion with God and neighbor is living the fraternity which is the very “heart of the Gospel.”66 In harmony with his reflections on salvation as communion and with his Eucharistic theology in which the res of the sacrament is entry into deeper communion with God and neighbor, Tillard sees the community of life structured by the evangelical counsels as a tested way of living out the fraternity to which all Christians are called by their baptism. These movements attempt to live out the radicalism of the early Christian community described in the Acts of the Apostles by living as a community in communion, as already reconciled as a fraternity of Christian believers.67 When discussing Tillard’s understanding of communion in the following chapters, it will be important to keep in mind that as Tillard shifts from the language of “fraternity” to more consistently talk about “communion,” his primary referent, both biographically and in many ways theoretically, of communion in concrete practice will be the religious communities who formed and conditioned his Christian life.

The Holy Spirit It should be unsurprising that a strong pneumatology would be characteristic of “the spiritual son of Père Congar.”68 But like Congar, Tillard’s attention to the Holy Spirit increases later in his career, and in direct correlation with his ecumenical work. In his earlier writings, particularly on the Eucharist, Tillard’s theology remains thoroughly Christocentric, with the usual passing references to questions of pneumatology common to much Roman Catholic theology, and Western theology more generally, in the middle of the twentieth century. Increasingly substantial references and his first major article on pneumatology in 196869

66 “Autorité et vie religieuse,” 799. 67 See “Le fondement évangélique de la vie religieuse,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 91 (1969): 916–55. 68 Henri Tincq, “Jean-Marie Tillard, un théologien œcuméniste, fils spirituel du Père Congar,” Le Monde, November 15, 2000. 69 “L’Eucharistie et le Saint-Esprit,” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 10 (1968): 363–87.

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indicate an effort to respond to the concerns of Eastern Christian dialogue partners and to the greater post-conciliar Roman Catholic attention to pneumatology more generally. In his later thought, he critiques the Western tendencies towards a theocentrism which has become “christocentrism, often Jesuscentrism,”70 a charge under which some of his earlier work on the Eucharist71 might stand condemned. Tillard’s pneumatological focus may have been prompted by ecumenical dialogue, but he does not simply import an Eastern Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit into his thought. His first point of reference is, unsurprisingly, the Scriptures and the patristic period, with the thought of Irenaeus of Lyons on the Spirit as one of the two hands of God remaining a touchstone throughout his work. But the more systematic pneumatology of Aquinas is also taken up by Tillard into his ecumenical and theological work as a faithful Western Christian understanding of the Spirit which complements, rather than challenges, the pneumatologies of the Eastern churches. The Eucharistic connections of Tillard’s pneumatology are also important. His reflections upon the Holy Spirit begin in this context, and lead to an emphasis upon the Holy Spirit’s role in bringing about the Eucharist in its res and sacramentum. Tillard emphasizes what he calls the “epicletic” dimension of ecclesial life, in reference to the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharistic prayer upon the elements and the community taken as a whole. Eucharistic communion is created by “the Spirit of the Lord—neither the Spirit alone, nor Christ alone” in the pneumatology and ecclesiology presented in Église d’Églises and L’Église locale.72

Other Ecclesiological Concepts One helpful way of contextualizing Tillard’s thought on communion is to structure his thought by means of the creedal “notes” of the church. In addition to the concept of communion (the way in which Tillard discusses the unity of the church), two other concepts form the background of Tillard’s thought on

70 “L’Esprit Saint dans la réflexion théologique contemporaine,” in Credo in Spiritum Sanctum: Atti del Congresso Teologico Internazionale di Pneumatologia (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1983), 907. 71 Particularly EP, which focuses almost entirely upon the presence of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist and on the entry of the believer into the Father-Son relationship without the significant reference to the mission of the Spirit in bringing about that relationship. 72 “L’esprit Saint dans la réflexion théologique contemporaine,” 909.

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the church. These are his understanding of the church’s apostolicity and of the church’s catholicity.73 They are the primary means by which Tillard addresses the question of how the church maintains its fidelity to the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ, proclaimed and lived by the apostolic church, while bringing the fullness of God’s reconciling work in Christ to all of humanity in every time and place.

Apostolicity As I will discuss in Chapter 4, the idea of communion for Tillard involves not only the institutional organization of the church, but also its nature as the inbreaking of the Reign of God in the world. As noted, communion with God and with all humanity is salvation in Tillard’s thought. The origin of this communion in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ gives the church a historical starting point, and the community of those who witnessed the paschal mystery and on whom the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost provides both the source and the model for the life of communion that is the Christian church. Apostolicity, for Tillard, is the key principle requiring that the Christian churches always see themselves as entering into the “once-for-all-ness” of the apostolic church: The communion of the churches works, in effect, by means of this relation to the foundation that is the Apostles. It inseparably implies the identity of the faith with theirs and the common rootedness of ministry in their historical “once-for-all.”74 Because of their direct link with Jesus Christ and the dependence of all subsequent churches on their witness to the faith, the Apostles and the apostolic church at Jerusalem described in the beginning of Acts are irreplaceable as the foundation of the church. The College of the Apostles represents, in a direct link with the will of Christ, the initial cell of the Church. Every authentically ecclesial community ought therefore be found to be related in some fashion to that which the Scriptures themselves designate as the fundamentum on which, necessarily, until the day when “Christ hands over the Reign to God his Father,” the Church is built up.75 73 A word on the fourth note of the church, holiness, comes at the end of this section. 74 EE, 241. 75 “L’Église de Dieu Est Une Communion,” 458.

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The relation of all subsequent churches to the first church, the community of the Apostles, does not follow the logic of addition, but of participation: The Churches of God or the Churches of the holy ones do not add to the Church of Jerusalem although, we would say, they are not simply an extension, an appendix, a part. They enter into its grace, its “once-for-all” (ephapax), its kairos. They are in communion with it. Moreover, there is the foundation of their necessary apostolicity. The Spirit brings them into communion (in the full sense of the term) with the fullness of grace that God brought out of his holy People (Qahal), at Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost, in the apostolic community.76 Apostolicity functions as a major principle for the continuity of the Christian Gospel across the diversity of the church in time and (historical/sociocultural) space. The variations in expression, praxis, and witness of the “apostolic faith” have their starting point and shared reference for judgment in the original witness of the church in its origins. The canonical scriptures, as the normative production of the apostolic church, are the prime location to which future communities turn in searching for the apostolic faith: When the needs of catholicity demand that one uses new language, that the words conveyed for centuries relinquish their places to those of another culture and of another context, it is still to this norm that one refers: the essential nature of the “scriptural testimony” ought not to be at all toned down.77 But the lived tradition of the church also matters; in their faith, life, and witness, the churches in their “handing over” of the apostolic faith from generation to generation also play an active role in maintaining the church’s apostolicity. The Roman Catholic Church has primarily located the guarantee for this process of “traditioning” in the ministry of the bishops, the “successors” of the apostles. But while Tillard upholds the particular charism of episkope, of magisterial “oversight,” in this process, the subject of the active apostolicity of the local church is the community as a whole. For this reason, he prefers to speak of “apostolic continuity” rather than “apostolic succession” of ministers, given the implications of individual transmission associated with the idea of “succession”:

76 EL, 40. 77 EE, 144. Cf. EE, 232.

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The pastors [of the local churches] must be in “apostolic continuity” so that, within their particular context and their own historical situation, the Churches remain within the “apostolic Tradition.” Note the expression “apostolic continuity.” “Apostolic succession” is certainly included there, but included in a wider whole: “continuity” in the teaching of the faith, “continuity” in sacramental life, “continuity” in the inspiration of mission, “continuity” in the maintenance of the community in the preferential option for the poor, “continuity” in solidarity with the other Churches, “continuity” in the faithful transmission of that “which was received from the Apostles.” In short, there must be ministers who keep a lookout (episkopein) so that the local Church remains in communion with the apostolic community.78 Those exercising episcopal ministry79 have a specific charism in the maintenance of the church’s apostolicity, but this does not occur in isolation from the concrete life of their local community, nor magically through an understanding of the sacrament of ordination considered to be the transmission of a certain “pedigree” from one individual to another. Tillard also critiques the language of apostolic succession for another reason which further distinguishes his understanding of ecclesial apostolicity. The “once-for-all” nature of the apostolic witness and its connection with the historical events of the paschal mystery lead to the conclusion that just as the apostolic church has an enduring significance as the church in which all other local churches participate, the Apostles themselves have an irreplaceable role in the Christian church: Having been with Jesus during his life and after his death remains a necessary condition [in Acts] to be made part of the apostolic group and to participate in its primary mission, that of witnessing (Acts 1:1–3; 10:41). He who was not a witness cannot be an apostle. The apostolic witness is unique, because it is rooted in the uniqueness of the event Jesus Christ. From this, the Twelve are forever, once and for all (ephapax), the foundation of the Church. No one can succeed them in this function of being a witness.80

78 EE, 240–41. 79 Primarily, but not necessarily only, bishops as established in the first century of Christian practice. See “Towards an Ecumenical Ecclesiology of Communion,” in Ecumenism: Present Realities and Future Prospects, Lawrence S. Cunningham, ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 143. 80 ER, 126.

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In strict sense of the term “succession,” there is no such thing as “apostolic succession;” rather, one can speak of bishops’ particular charism as the vicars of the apostles, those who hold their place and lead the churches in maintaining their fidelity to the irreplaceable witness of the apostles at the heart of the Christian Gospel. This is true whether one is speaking of the pope, the “vicar of Peter” in this formulation,81 or of the bishop of a local church. While this may appear to be a trivial matter, Tillard’s insistence upon precision when describing the relation of the bishops to the Apostles further emphasizes the importance of the apostolic church as the foundation and the norm for all future local churches, not simply due to its antiquity or its appearance in the scriptures, but because of the irreplaceability of the apostolic community’s testimony to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Catholicity If apostolicity involves the fidelity of the church to the original witness to Jesus Christ, the notion of catholicity revolves around the need to make God’s saving of humanity present in every time and place, an exigence which leads to change, diversity, pluralism—to the messiness of ecclesial incarnation in its various forms. Catholicity, for Tillard, is the church’s re-reception of the apostolic faith in all the particularities of human existence. Without its fidelity to the apostles, the church would have no “good news” worth bringing to the world; without its catholicity, its openness to the diversity of the creation, the church would not be able to bring its Gospel “to the multitude.” Catholicity “means nothing other than this presence of identity in diversity.”82 Tillard argues against an understanding of catholicity as simply a matter of quantitative or geographical expansion, and contests a reading of Augustine’s arguments that catholicity involves geographical extension as evidence that Augustine regarded catholicity only as geographical extension.83 The Church is not catholic simply because it is called to expand throughout all the earth or because it is established through the summation of all the communities assembled in the communion of one faith, one baptism, one Eucharist. It is catholic because within each of these communities [. . .] the totality of the faith and the whole of the means of Salvation are present.84

81 Tillard traces the history of the gradual slide from the title “Vicar of Peter” to “Successor of Peter” for the pope in ER, 122–34. 82 ER, 189. 83 Cf. EE, 20–24.

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The first aspect of catholicity is the “wholeness,” the “fullness” of the grace of God implied by the meaning of the Greek “katholou.” In this sense, Tillard shares the history of a tradition which sees “catholic” as the antonym of “heretical” or “selective,” as the opposite of communities that only partially maintain the “wholeness” of the Gospel of God. But Tillard, especially in L’Église locale, where he focuses upon the catholicity of the local church, links catholicity not only with apostolicity and the need to maintain the original grace of Christ in its completeness, but also with the diverse ways in which that faith comes to expression throughout human cultures and histories. He speaks of a “double fullness: that of the gift of grace, and that of the human reality concerned.”85 Tillard’s understanding of catholicity includes both poles of the relationship between unity and diversity in the church, though he often speaks more forcefully about the neglected aspect of diversity as a part of catholicity. Rooted in an understanding of the pluralism of human cultures and places as a good of creation, Tillard emphasizes that for a catholic church diversity is not accidental or irrelevant to the mystery of the church’s fullness, but is part of the very nature of the “fullness” of ecclesiality: Catholicity—communion of the infinite multitude of human forms in the unity of the faith—is at this point so coextensive with the Church that it appears already there where (in the Holy Spirit) the People of God expresses in its words, its signs, or its rituals the truth that God has revealed to it in his saving actions. That the Word of God, from the beginnings of Revelation, is expressed not in a single tradition but in a number of traditions is the evident expression that from the beginning it is spoken “catholicly”, that is, by embracing the human law of the diversity of human soils [terreaux] and by being spoken in this diversity. The Word of God is born “catholic.”86 Catholicity, therefore, is an aspect of Tillard’s understanding of the relationships of nature and grace, of incarnation and redemption in the church as the fulfillment and perfection of creation. God’s action in the church does not undermine the pluralism of creation, but assumes it, healing the wounds that have turned differences into divisions: Following the logic of the law of incarnation, the communion of each local Church, and of the local Churches among themselves, embraces the

84 “Corps du Christ et Esprit Saint,” 182. 85 EL, 53. 86 EE, 182–83.

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variety of the creation and the relationships of history. It is not a vague reality that makes light of the riches of the natural solidarities that constitute one of the joys of humanity. These belong to the realities that grace assumes, conserves, promotes in making them a good of catholicity. The Church is catholic in weaving together in the communion of Christ Jesus the diversities to which the creation gives rise. [. . .] The ecclesiological status of “difference” is therefore positive.87 Finally, what ultimately holds together catholicity’s concern that the fullness of the Gospel of God enters into the fullness of creation and human history is the unity of God’s action in creation and redemption. The reconciliation into communion between Jews and Greeks described in the Pauline scriptures is crucial for Tillard’s understanding of communion and for his understanding of catholicity in relation to the church as communion.88 The catholicity of the church is a direct result of the catholicity of God’s love for the world in Christ and the Spirit, God’s action that all humanity, in its numerous forms and distinct locations throughout space and time, become “the-humanity-that-God-wants”: Therefore the Church of God bursts into the places of the world because it is the reality of Salvation. For this concerns the entire work of God; it has for its object both the human person, radically inseparable from its milieu, from its culture, from its heredity, from the sociological conditions that mark its mind and its body, and the creation over which it reigns . . . 89 In its connection with salvation history, with the “ambiguous dispersion of Babel and the blessing related to the calling of Abram and of his people,”90 the church is therefore catholic in “actualizing the paschal mystery in all human situations,”91 the fullness of the Gospel meeting and recapitulating the fullness of created humanity. Though the demands that the church be both apostolic in its fidelity to the past and catholic in its openness to the future are sometimes in tension, Tillard’s understanding the church’s reality as one, as communion, emphasizes that these demands must remain in a dynamic and charitable tension. If apostolicity and catholicity refer to the community’s life and growth in faith, then communion is

87 CE, 23. Cf. EL, 52–53; and the section “Le Statut Ecclésiologique de la Différence” in “L’Universel et le Local,” Irénikon 61 (1987): 28–40. 88 Cf. EE, 362. 89 EL, 52–53. 90 EL, 388. 91 CE, 69.

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the principle by which the working out of the knowledge of faith happens in charity, in mutual love. If apostolicity and catholicity are both necessary to the church to be true to the faith, true to its apostolic roots as well as true in the new times and places in which it is replanted, then the principle of communion points both to the reality of the charity of God poured out in the hearts of believers, and to the particular ecclesial manifestation of this in the reconciled community of humanity.

Holiness A note is required here on the creedal note of holiness. Given the importance of apostolicity and catholicity to Tillard’s ecclesiology as a whole and to his reflections upon the unity of the church as communion, one might ask what role the remaining creedal “note” of the church, holiness, plays in Tillard’s thought. While particularly important in his discussions of religious life and a repeated occasional theme throughout his ecclesiological thought,92 holiness does not have a structural significance in Tillard’s work comparable to that of catholicity, apostolicity, and communion. This is not unexpected, given the fact that Tillard’s primary questions about the church are about the relationship between unity and diversity across denominational and cultural/historical lines of difference; the holiness of the local church, while a factor that comes under the judgment of mutual recognition, is not as directly connected with these questions of unity and diversity as are the other three ecclesial notes. But the absence of an extended discussion of holiness is a lacuna in Tillard’s thought that is related to the methodological issue, to be discussed most fully in Chapter 5 below, of Tillard’s lack of attention to the concrete, local churches. Tillard’s work has been critiqued as “an abstract, idealistic vision,” “a romantic return to the church of the first centuries” (a charge Tillard relates in EE, 175). I will suggest in Chapter 5 that at least one reason for taking this critique seriously is the fact that Tillard’s understanding of the church in its “nature” is taken from his reading of historical texts and from his personal experiences, rather than from a wide-ranging and critical analysis of the concrete church that draws upon studies of empirical ecclesial reality. While no one theologian can be expected to address all significant questions, the lack of attention to the dynamic of the sinfulness of the church and its holiness, and the disjuncture of the loftiness of patristic and Tillardian claims for the church from the far more messy

92 See, for instance, “L’Esprit Saint dans la réflexion théologique contemporaine,” in Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, 912–15.

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reality of a church marked by the effects of sin, suggests a need for further development. This would include both social scientific reflection upon the reality of the church’s unity, apostolicity, catholicity, and holiness, as well as theological reflection upon how the continuing reality of ecclesial division and fragmentation problematize Tillard’s theory of ecclesial communion as the locus of salvation. In this chapter, I have given some necessary background on Jean-Marie Tillard’s biography and his theological methodology. I have also suggested that one not begin to analyze his ecclesiological thought without reference to his discussions of salvation, sacramental theology, religious life, and pneumatology, nor his understanding of communion without reference to apostolicity and catholicity. Similarly, I have not been able to address these topics without looking ahead to communion as a prime component of Tillard’s thought in many of these areas. Having sketched out the basic theological context in which Tillard’s thought on communion is located, however, I can now turn directly to Tillard’s understanding of communion and its role in his soteriology, theological anthropology, and ecclesiology.

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Chapter 4 Communion and Recognition Chapter 3 gave necessary background on who Jean-Marie Tillard was, on the major sources of his theology, and on the concepts of apostolicity and catholicity that condition his ecclesiology. I can now turn directly to Tillard’s idea of communion itself. Keeping in mind the context of the other contemporary communion ecclesiologies outlined in Chapter 2, this chapter will focus upon four particularly important aspects of Tillard’s thought on ecclesial communion: 1) communion and ecclesial diversity, 2) the connection of communion and salvation, 3) the relation in Tillard’s thought of ecclesial communion and Trinitarian communion, and 4) “recognition” and “reception” as the underlying processes by which communion is made real in the life of the church. At various points in this chapter, I will contrast Tillard’s idea of communion and its ecclesiological consequences with those of John Zizioulas, Miroslav Volf, and Joseph Ratzinger, not to preempt the more formal evaluation of Tillard in Chapter 5, but to help clarify the distinctiveness of Tillard’s understanding of communion by comparison. The scope of this dissertation prevents the full investigation that the work of these thinkers ideally warrants, but the contrast of their views with those of Tillard will help to clarify Tillard’s understanding of communion in relation to that of his contemporaries.

Unity and Diversity I suggested at the end of Chapter 4 that the classical framework of the creedal notes of the church might be helpful in characterizing Tillard’s thought. The first question that should arise for all ecclesiological use of the term “communion,” therefore, must be what difference it makes to describe ecclesial oneness as “communion” rather than as union, unity, or any of the other terms by which the church’s oneness can, and has been, identified. Tillard’s vision of communion begins with the question of unity and diversity that characterized the “ecumenical stream” of communion thought detailed above. Yet Tillard roots this concept not only in the demands of ecumenical dialogue, but also within a wider,

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broadly Thomistic conception of nature and grace, and so understands communion language not only as a tool for achieving ecumenical unity, but also as a component of any discussion of the church across cultures and history. For Tillard, speaking of ecclesial communion emphasizes the importance of preserving the diversity of creation, including the diversity of human cultures in all times and places, within the unity of the Christian church. He uses communion language to prevent any understanding of Christian oneness that would undermine the goodness of created reality in all of its variety, that would flatten out the beauty of human diversity into a sterile uniformity by neglecting the balance of apostolicity and catholicity. Tillard often uses an organic analogy of humanity in its diversity as the “soil” [l’humus or le terreau] in which the grace of God is planted.1 L’humus in part determines l’homme, and the particularities of a place are not accidental or superficial, but go “all the way down,” as it were, to the categories of thought and expression which constitute the human person. The “soil” in which the church comes to be is, as created, a primary good. The “soil” of human existence in a place includes “all its human thickness, and so its poor and its poverty, its rich and its riches, its culture and its moral decline, its mix of population and its conflicts, its religion and its idols, its saints and its holiness, its sinners and its misery, its projects—in short all its social and cultural density.”2 A particular place, with all its distinctive gifts and distinctive problems, is the only place in which a truly human salvation could occur. Speaking of the unity of the church as a unity of communion points to the complexity of the church’s shared identity in and through different incarnations in different cultural and temporal “places.” The concept is not unique to Tillard’s thought, but the centrality of a respect for otherness is a distinct feature of his thought. As I noted in discussing the concept of catholicity above, his strong position on the importance of the local church is rooted in an understanding of grace perfecting nature, of redemption as the restoration of creation that highly values the reality of local places in their concreteness. Tillard writes, The double relation to God and to the earth (“the Church of God which is at Corinth, at Thessalonica, at Rome . . .”) which constitutes the Church of God requires that the earth in question not be an abstract and vague

For example, this passage from Charles Péguy’s poem Ève is the epigraph for the first part of EL, 13: Car le surnaturel est lui-même charnel Et l’arbre de la grâce est raciné profond Et plonge dans le sol et cherche jusqu’au fond Et l’arbre de la race est lui-même éternel. 2 EL, 53.

1

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place where the differences that constitute the concreteness of the human and that are part of what we call its “fleshness” are not important, taken up by an all-purpose definition. It requires that this earth be the concrete place of human life with its heaviness, its web of joys and of sorrows that are not that of a nearby place, its network of hopes and of disappointments that form its own goodness that is not portable beyond its boundaries.3 Particularly in L’Église locale, which is concerned to incorporate the church’s locality and catholicity more fully into the theory of the church as a communion of local communions proposed in Église d’Églises, Tillard presents this theological argument for Christian unity as a unity that recapitulates human diversity in a single body of Christ, rather than eradicating that diversity in the name of a spurious unity. In this context, missiological perspectives on inculturation in the past 50 years provide some of the concrete examples of the sort of ecclesial diversity that Tillard seeks to uphold by emphasizing difference as not accidental to ecclesial communion, but as the normal state-of-being of the church.4 “The ecclesiological status of ‘difference,’ ” Tillard emphasizes, “is positive.”5 While this is similar to many ecumenical investigations of unity and diversity, Tillard, through his theology of the local church, brings this discussion back into the question of church unity and diversity within his own Roman Catholic church, and among churches more generally, not only those currently divided. In Roman Catholic thought, these issues are most often raised in discussions of the relation between the local and the universal church. This issue was raised in a particularly prominent way by the published debates between Walter Kasper and Joseph Ratzinger, then the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.6 Tillard and Kasper are similar in their critique of Ratzinger’s 3 4

5 6

EL, 135. Tillard’s understanding of diversity arises from a different set of understandings and presuppositions than modern discourses of toleration. The concreteness of a place is not only a place with particular gifts and created goods, but also a place with particular needs for redemption. And in the communion of the church, there are limits to acceptable diversity, limits established by the necessity to maintain a shared relation to and understanding of God in Christ. In Tillard’s words, there is a need not simply for pluralism, but for a “healthy pluralism,” in which diversity is not so great that it undermines the single uniting reality of Christ. Tillard’s emphasis upon the good of diversity, while rooted in an optimism about the activity of God already active in a place, does not ignore the disvalue of sin, present concretely and diversely in the world. CE, 23. The most helpful reference for the English-speaking theologian is Kilian McDonnell’s masterful summary of the debate and its implications, “The Ratzinger/Kasper Debate:

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assertion, both in his theological writings7 and in the text of Communionis notio,8 of the “ontological and temporal priority of the universal church over the local church.” But since, unlike Kasper, both Ratzinger and Tillard present their positions primarily by means of the language of communion, the contrast between Ratzinger’s and Tillard’s understandings of ecclesial communion on this issue is instructive. The difference between Tillard’s and Ratzinger’s thought on the communion of the local and the universal church can best be demonstrated by comparing their readings of the opening chapter of Acts, a crucial text for each of them. In Ratzinger’s thought, the apostolic church of Pentecost described in Acts 2 is the incarnation of the universal church gathered around the Twelve; in Ratzinger’s reading, Luke’s descriptions of the gift of languages, of the twelve apostles and twelve regions plus Rome, and of the missionary effort which follows this event in the remainder of Acts all point to the apostolic church as the temporal incarnation of the universal church, the “cosmic” church present in the will of God outside of all time. Ratzinger argues this point in order to prevent understandings of the universal church as composed subsequently to the foundation of local churches, or of reducing the church to its sociological institutions by ignoring the theological significance of the church indicated by the idea of the church as “preexistent.”9 Tillard’s thought has much in common with this. As the privileged witnesses to the mystery of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, the foundation

7

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The Universal Church and Local Churches,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 227–50. In addition to the statements on the priority of the universal church in Communionis notio, the major documents are Kasper, “Zur Theologie und Praxis des bishöflichen Amtes,” in Auf neue Art Kirche Sein: Wirklichkeiten – Herausfoderungen – Wandlungen (Munich: Bernward bei Don Bosco, 1999), 32–48; Ratzinger, “On the Relation of the Universal Church and the Local Church in Vatican II,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (December 22, 2000): 46; Kasper, “Das Verhältnis von Universalkirche und Ortskirche: Freundschafliche Auseinandersetzung mit der Kritik von Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger,” Stimmen der Zeit 218 (2000): 795–804 (Eng. trans: “On the Church: A Friendly Reply to Cardinal Ratzinger,” America 184 [April 23–30, 2001]: 8–14); Ratzinger, “A Response to Walter Kasper: The Local Church and the Universal Church,” America 185 (November 19, 2001): 7–11; Kasper, “From the President of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity,” America 185 (November 26, 2001): 28–29. See Ratzinger, Called to Communion (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), 44–45; and “The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,” in Church, Ecumenism, and Politics (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 134–37. McDonnell also cites these texts, “Ratzinger/Kasper Debate,” 228. §9. Cf. Ratzinger, “Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,” 136–38.

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of the life of the church in the faith and witness of the apostles is crucial to Tillard: [The Churches of God] enter into the grace [of the Church of Jerusalem], its “once-for-all” (ephapax), its kairos. They are in communion with it. Moreover, there is the foundation of their necessary apostolicity. The Spirit brings them into communion (in the full sense of the term) with the fullness of grace that God brought out of his holy People (Qahal), at Jerusalem, on the day of Pentecost, in the apostolic community.10 Tillard is just as suspicious as Ratzinger of an ecclesiology that, by raising up the local church, would reduce the church to its sociological components, furnish the materials for a congregationalist ecclesiology, or suggest an ecclesiology that would shift from recognition of the local church’s full ecclesiality to an idea of ecclesial self-sufficiency.11 In these points, Tillard’s understanding of communion avoids the critiques raised by Ratzinger and by Communionis notio. But Tillard also maintains that one enters into communion with the apostolic church of Jerusalem not by being born from a mother church that is the brief appearance of the universal church, but from a mother church that is, for all of that, a local church, with a distinct history, culture, and set of circumstances. In the case of the church of Jerusalem, part of the local church’s distinctiveness involves its direct connection with the People of Israel,12 its membership composed of the Apostles, and its unique mission as the starting point for the mission of the church throughout the world. But, for all this, it is a local church; Tillard does not minimize the universal church, but maintains that since the Church of God comes to be in a way which respects the order of creation and the structures of human society and history, the universal church is found only in and through concrete local churches.13 Ratzinger’s statement that the Twelve “are not members of any local Church”14 is problematic, from Tillard’s perspective, because it removes the Apostles and

10 EL, 40. 11 For the necessity of the local church’s communion with the other churches, see ER, 187–95; EE, 29–30, 283–91, 327–33; EL, 57–76, 397–410. 12 EL, 31–42. For more on the relation of the church to ancient Israel, see EE, 114–25, 131–39. 13 As suggested by Lumen Gentium, §23. 14 Ratzinger, “The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,” 136. This essay is similar to “On the Relation of the Universal Church and the Local Church in Vatican II,” originally published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (December 22, 2000): 46.

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the apostolic community from the structures of history and ecclesial communion in which the life of the church takes place. In many ways, the difference is not so much between radically different theologies as between Aristotelian and Platonic ontologies.15 An evaluation of Ratzinger’s judgment of the Lucan description of the apostolic Church as “the exemplary form of the Church of all ages”16 should take his Platonic presuppositions (by way of Augustine) seriously. Tillard’s thought, however, utilizes an Aristotelian realism to remind his readers that no one, not even the Apostles, has been a member of the universal church without membership in a concrete, local church.17 In doing so, he provides counterevidence against the false binary Ratzinger proposes, in which one either asserts the ontological and temporal priority of the universal church or is condemned to seeing the universal church as the subsequent result of a confederation of local communities.18

Communion as Salvation I noted in Chapter 2 that many ecumenically rooted ecclesiologies of communion focus upon the question of ecclesial unity and diversity, and find the concept of communion helpful in breaking open the language of unity to reflect the awareness and concrete experience of a diverse historical and contemporary church. Tillard shares this focus, but his conception of also draws upon the Roman Catholic strands of communion thought in emphasizing communion not only as the result of the salvation achieved in Christ, but as the substance of that salvation. Entry into communion with the “other,” either within the local church or with other local churches, is not subsequent to Christian salvation but, for Tillard, constitutes Christian salvation. For Tillard, then, to understand

15 A point first made by Kasper. See the citations in McDonnell, Ibid., 245. See also Sagovsky’s work on the Aristotelian and Platonic ideas of communion, Sagovsky, Ecumenism, Christian Origins, and the Practice of Communion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48–96. 16 Ratzinger, “Communion: Eucharist—Fellowship—Mission,” in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 63. Bold in original. 17 The apostolic church is always the apostolic church of Jerusalem. Cf. EL, 41. 18 Ratzinger, “Response to Provincial Bishop Johannes Hanselmann,” in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 243. Contrast this with Tillard’s vision at EL, 74–6. He writes, “Comment l’Église est-elle multiple et non multipliée? [. . .] On n’est ici ni dans le monde de la logique où l’universel s’individualise, ni dans celui de la mathématique où les individus s’additionnent. One est en plein cœur de l’économie de l’Espirt eschatologique, dans la percée «une-fois-pour-toutes» (ephapax) du don eschatologique de Dieu lors du kairos de Pentecôte.” EL, 75.

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the church, one begins not with its particular institutions and structures, but with its nature as the community of salvation, as the “humanity-that-Godwants” in space and time. And beyond being simply an ecumenically productive way of discussing ecclesial unity as a matter of “more” and “less” rather than “yes” or “no,” Tillard’s idea of communion points to the negotiation of that “more” and “less” as a constituent factor of graced human social life. This means that on a “map” of systematic theology, Tillard’s theory of communion is not limited to ecclesiology, but is located at the point where soteriology, the study of the “saving work” of Christ, opens into the results of that work in theological anthropology and ecclesiology. Institutional questions are secondary to and dependent upon determinations of the church’s relation to salvation in Christ. The institutional questions of the structuring of the church remain crucially important for Tillard. In L’Évêque de Rome, Église d’Églises, and L’Église locale, his reflections on the nature of communion in the earlier sections of the book always lead to a direct consideration of the institutional structures that embody and maintain that communion. But ecclesiology cannot investigate the “hierarchical communion” of individuals with their bishops or the structure of the local churches until it first investigates the church as the community of those being saved by God in Christ.19 Early in his reflection on communion, Tillard asks, “but in what does this Salvation of the human being consist? In a communion with the Father, in Jesus, blossoming into a fraternal communion of all human beings with each other.”20 Salvation, both personal and communal, is understood as a restoration of relationship between humanity and God, and among human beings themselves, a relationship that, in this anthropology, is at the heart of what it means to be a human being. “If the concrete content of the Salvation announced in the Gospel of God, both individual and collective, had to be summarized in a single word, we would use, following many of the Fathers, ‘communion’, the word that brings together the summaries of Acts [2:42–47; 4:32–35; 5:12–16]. For biblical thought, as the first centuries understood it, Salvation’s proper name is ‘communion.’ ”21 The establishment of communion in the restoration of humanity: “Humanity is not really itself except within communion.”22 At the same time,

19 It is precisely in these questions of the practical institutions and application of Tillard’s understanding of communion to the concrete life of the churches that he is open to the critique of an ecclesiological idealism that fails to attend adequately to the empirical realities of the contemporary church. See Chapter 5 below. 20 “L’Église, annonce prophétique du salut,” in La Nouvelle Image de L’Église: Bilan du Concile Vatican II, ed. Bernard Lambert, O. P. (Paris: Mame, 1967), 66. 21 EE, 33. See also EE, 33–36; EL, 135–41. 22 EE, 27.

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there is no aspect of salvation which is not related directly, and not accidentally, to God and to others: “the relation to the other is not, for the New Testament, the object of an ethical demand superimposed on the essence of being Christian, belonging to the category of the supererogatory or of merit. It is part of the essence of being Christian itself.”23 “The life of the Body of Christ, in which the baptized were immersed and which will flourish into eternal life, is not that of a communion with Christ alone, though it comes from him and from his Spirit. It is life ‘in the Body,’ the life ‘of the Body’ of which communion is and remains the benefit par excellence.”24 As discussed in the previous chapter, this understanding of salvation is correlated with an understanding of sin as an absence of the relations of communion, of sin that “ought to be defined as a rupture of communion.”25 Tillard’s language around the dissolution of communion has much in common with existentialist and Marxist understandings of “alienation,” of the human condition as a disconnection from the world, from one’s fellow human beings, and from oneself. Tillard’s understanding of sin is of a progressive separation of the human person from all with which it should be in relation: The drama of human sin consists, in effect, of the break and the separation of the human person from his different levels of [potential] fulfillment: separation of each person from himself, from other human beings, from the exterior world, from God. It is a breaking apart [une dissolution] of the human being and of humanity. Salvation therefore cannot be found anywhere except in koinonia.26 But unlike the conception of sin and salvation in existentialist thought or more individualist Christian soteriologies, the tragedy of sin is not primarily focused upon the alienation of the human being from herself, but upon that of the human being from “others,”27 and upon the division between diverse groups

23 CE, 38. 24 CE, 63. In this context, Tillard denies the possibility of a spirituality or mysticism that would see a “one-on-one” relation to God as its goal, answering the following question with a firm negative: “N’y a-t-il pas un registre—le plus profond de l’expérience chrétienne—qui échappe à l’emprise de l’ecclésial, celui de la communion à Dieu dans le seul à seul individuel? Ne pourrait-on pas dire que tous les autres registres de la communion s’ordonnent à celui-ci, n’ont de sens que par lui, le préparent et en dérivent?” CE, 8. 25 “Le Salut, Mystère du Pauvreté,” La Vie Spirituelle 111 (1964): 711. 26 “L’Église de Dieu est une communion,” Irénikon 53 (1980): 455. Cf. “Communion and Salvation,” One in Christ 28 (1992): 1–2. 27 Tillard’s understanding of the “other” appears to bear the influence of the reflections of French personalist philosophers of the twentieth century. He occasionally

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that ought to be in relationship. “The sign of this distortion [of communion] is the division of humanity into rival groups.”28 Differences that are created good, that ought not divide, become walls of separation;29 the “other”—personal, communal, and divine—becomes a threat and a rival rather than a guest. The stories of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis, and of the reversal of Babel in the communion-constituting event of Pentecost, are key narratives for Tillard’s argument that sin is to be understood primarily as a series of distortions in relations between differences,30 and that salvation is therefore the restoration of that communion by removing the walls between two who are “other” to each other. “The great affirmation which dominates Christian faith,” Tillard writes, “is precisely that Salvation has the effect of abolishing the barriers enclosing each human being in her individuality, each human group in its specificity, each human category in its ‘difference.’ ”31 In accord with Tillard’s valuation of created diversity detailed above, the manner of this restoration of communion is through the reconciliation of differences, rather than the obliteration of those differences. The key text for this understanding of reconciliation is the Letter to the Ephesians, particularly its first two chapters.32 In Tillard’s reading, the “mystery” praised in the hymn of

28 29

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makes reference to Emmanuel Lévinas’ concept of the “face” of the other (EE 33; EL, 140) and to Martin Buber’s conception of the encounter of the “I” and the “Thou” (EE 33, 55). Though suggestive, the absence of further explicit reflection upon Buber or Lévinas limits our ability to claim any direct derivation or conversation between them and Tillard, other than the ultimately not particularly helpful affirmation that these ideas were “in the (philosophical) air” at the time Tillard was writing. “Communion and Salvation,” 2. Cf. CE, 23: “D’une part donc dans la logique de la loi d’incarnation, la communion de chaque Église locale—et celle des Églises locales entre elle—épouse ainsi la variété de la création et les attaches de l’histoire. Elle n’est pas une réalité vague, faisant fi de la richesses des solidarités naturelles qui constituent l’une des joyaux de l’humanité. Celles-ci appartiennent aux réalités que la grâce assume, conserve, promeut en en faisant un bien de la catholicité. L’Église est catholique en nouant dans la communion du Christ Jésus (qui les intègre à l’espace de Salut et de création nouvelle ouvert part la Croix) les diversités dont la création porte la source. [. . .] Le statut ecclésiologique de la «différence» est donc positif. Elle est—selon toutes ses formes – une richesse dans laquelle la catholicité prend corps.” See EE, 15–36; EL, 29–37. “L’Universel et le Local,” Irénikon 61 (1988): 28–29. Tillard reads this text primarily in the light of the following exegetical texts and commentaries: Markus Barth, Ephesians 1–3. The Anchor Bible (New York: Anchor, 1980); Pierre Benoît, “Corps, tête et plérôme dans les épîtres de la captivité,” Revue Biblique 63 (1956): 5–44; Lucien Cerfaux, Le Christ dans la théologie de saint Paul (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1954); idem, La Théologie de l’Église suivant Saint Paul (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1965); and J. A. T. Robinson, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians (London: Macmillan, 1924).

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Ephesians 1 is the reconciliation, described in Ephesians 2, of “those who were far off” with those who were close, that is, the reconciliation of Gentiles and Jews in the one Body.33 This reconciliation of formerly divided blocks of people (and corresponding treatments of the relation between Jews and Gentiles in the rest of the Pauline corpus and in Acts) is paradigmatic for Tillard’s understanding of the ecclesial experience of communion between formerly divided peoples. And this is not simply the reconciliation of differences, but of differences that have become enmities. Those who were far apart—“in the strong sense in which the link with hatred gives this term [loin, far apart]”—have become close in Tillard’s understanding of reconciliation in Ephesians.34 The church’s importance as the place of reconciliation is not, therefore, simply a convenient location for people to return to communion with God and neighbor, but is the place where the concrete salvation of humanity is occurring through the reconciliation of a divided world. It has a cosmic significance in God’s plan, and a sacramental importance in making that plan real in history. The church participates in the cosmic mystery of creation’s reconciliation with its creator, the “recapitulation” of all things in Christ so emphasized by Irenaeus: “the Church of God appears as the realization of the mystery, that is, the accomplishment in Christ of the eternal plan which forms the drama of Revelation and which has as its object the reconnection of humanity, the reunification of the universe.”35 As the sacrament, the real and effective presence of this new way of being in relation in the midst of a divided world, the church’s communion of reconciled enemies has cosmic significance as God’s response to sin and its division; consequently, the failure of the church to live this communion, as it does in divided Christianity, is not simply a matter of practical difficulty, but is a countersign to the accomplishment of that plan.36 If the church, the “actualization of the paschal mystery in all human situations,”37 fails to be the place of salvation, then it is failing in its very reason for being. The way in which Tillard’s thought on communion emphasizes both the eternal importance of ecclesial communion while simultaneously supporting a real valuation of the goodness of creation and its diversity can be made clearer by comparison with another theologian who also understands ecclesial communion as the essence of salvation, Tillard’s ecumenical colleague John Zizioulas.38 The Metropolitan of Pergamon, Zizioulas is one of the preeminent theologians 33 34 35 36 37 38

See also EE, 66–76; 362. EE, 69–70. EE, 68. See also EL, 83–88. Cf. EE, 186–215; EL, 89–104. CE, 69. Primary works of John Zizioulas include Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997); Communion and Otherness (London: T&T Clark, 2006); L’Être ecclésial (Geneva:

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of Orthodox Christianity and served for many years with Jean-Marie Tillard on the Faith and Order Commission of the WCC and on the International Joint Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Like Tillard, Zizioulas began his understanding of communion in a reading of the church fathers, and made the notion a crucial hinge in his ecclesiology, soteriology, and theological anthropology. But while these two theologians shared a similar vocabulary and even agreed on many practical ecclesiastical proposals for Christian unity, the difference in the way they conceive the relation of redemption to creation leads to a significant difference in how they understand communion-as-salvation. For Tillard, “the ecclesiological status of ‘difference’ is positive”39 precisely because the different terreaux, the different “soils” in which human beings live and work, their histories, cultures, languages, and other gifts, are positive aspects of the diversity of God’s creation. While Zizioulas shares with Tillard and with his own Orthodox co-believers a strong valuation of the local church and the incarnation of the church in diverse times and places, the ontology of communion that he develops from his Trinitarian theology and his reading of the Cappadocian Fathers raises some significant questions, especially in how he understands the post-lapsarian goodness of creation. While others have critiqued Zizioulas more thoroughly in other settings,40 here I will only point to his understanding of “biological” and “ecclesial” hypostases as symptomatic of Labor et Fides, 1981); Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001); and numerous articles and occasional papers. Full bibliographies of his work up to 1987 and 1991, respectively, can be found in Gaëtan Baillargeon, Perspectives orthodoxes sur l’Église-Communion: L’œuvre de Jean Zizioulas (Montréal: Éditions Paulines, 1989) 395–403; and Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 310–21. In addition to the works of Baillargeon and McPartlan, the other major studies of Zizioulas’ theology to date include Patricia A. Fox, God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson, and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001); and Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), esp. 73–123. 39 CE, 23. 40 Among the more significant articles, see Ralph Del Colle, “ ‘Person’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology: Conversations with Thomas Torrance and Thomas Aquinas,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54 (2001): 70–86; Richard M. Fermer, “The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie 41 (1999): 158–86; Edward Russell, “Reconsidering Relational Anthropology: A Critical Assessment of John Zizioulas’s Theological Anthropology,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (2003): 168–86; and Lucian Turcescu, “ ‘Person’ versus ‘Individual,’ and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 527–39.

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a difficulty in his understanding of communion and demonstrative of the Thomist assumptions of Jean-Marie Tillard. In the foundational essay “Personhood and Being,”41 Zizioulas contrasts two “modes of existence” in which the human being exists, the “hypostasis of biological existence” and the “hypostasis of ecclesial existence.”42 The first, into which each human being is born, “suffers” from two “passions,” the passion of “necessity,” which limits the human being’s freedom, and the passion of “individualism” or “separation,” in which the human being, hindered by the body, is locked in itself. Both of these passions culminate in death, “the ‘natural’ development of the biological hypostasis.”43 By contrast, the “hypostasis of ecclesial existence,” the “new birth” of the human being in baptism, frees the human being from these two passions, releasing her freedom and allowing her to enter into communion with God and others. Communion, then, is the grace of ecclesial existence, the new being that frees the person from the death of the biological hypostasis. “The eternal survival of the person as a unique, unrepeatable and free ‘hypostasis,’ as loving and being loved, constitutes the quintessence of salvation, the bringing of the Gospel to man.”44 Precisely because of the prominence of Zizioulas as a promoter of communion in ecclesiology and theological anthropology, it is important to contrast this understanding of communion as salvation with that found in Jean Tillard. For Zizioulas, salvation involves new being in a radical way, such that it seems difficult to understand the point of continuity between biological and ecclesial hypostases.45 While he asserts that “the ecclesial hypostasis does not come from a denial of the world or of the biological nature of existence itself,” but rather “a denial of the biological hypostasis,”46 it is difficult not to read Zizioulas as implying that the life of communion that constitutes salvation and the church replaces the “natural” creation with a radically different new creation that lacks any connection with its previous reality. It is precisely on this point of the relation between creation and redemption that Tillard’s thought differs; both in reference to the individual person and in reference to the wider church as communion, Tillard strongly emphasizes the goodness and relative independence of the created order. In Tillard’s thought, humanity is brought into communion with God and with others through a healing of its “natural” potential for such communion.47

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

In Being as Communion, 27–65. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 49. Cf. Russell, “Reconsidering Relational Anthropology,” 173–74. Ibid., 63. E.g., Tillard’s statement that “l’humanité n’est vraiment elle-même que dans la communion.” EE, 27.

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If Zizioulas regards ecclesial existence as a new form of being as communion, Tillard maintains that ecclesial existence is the healed potential for being in communion. This has significant consequences for differences in their ecclesiologies. Tillard’s emphasis upon the goodness of diversity arising from the realities of human history gives greater coherence to his understanding of the local church’s importance than in Zizioulas’s formulation, and Tillard’s maintenance of a real ontological unity between creation and the redeemed creation maintains the church in its eschatological tension between history and a reign of God coming to be in and through that history. The healing of creation into a creation in communion, however, is found not through a renewed goodwill coming from human initiative, in Tillard’s schema, but from the initiative of God in Christ Jesus and the Spirit, in the grace of salvation. “On the cross, differences lost their power of division or separation.”48 It is to the theocentric character of reconciling communion that I now turn.

Communion, the Trinity, and the Church A third way in which Tillard’s thought on communion is distinctive is his treatment of the relation between ecclesial communion and Trinitarian communion. Unlike many of his ecclesiological and theological contemporaries, including his friend John Zizioulas, Tillard’s theology of communion does not derive ecclesial communion from an analogy to Trinitarian communion,49 but develops a theology of communion primarily from the creaturely experience of communion with God and with others. Tillard’s theology of communion is thoroughly Trinitarian in the sense that he understands communion as the result of the single action of the Triune God, distinguishable in the persons of the Father, Son, and Spirit and the different missions of the Son and Spirit. But it is does

48 “L’Universel et le Local,” 31. 49 As do John Zizioulas, Being in Communion, and Miroslav Volf, both of whom I discuss below, but also Leonardo Boff (Trinity and Society [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988] and numerous popular treatments of the church that begin their arguments for greater equality among members of the church with an assertion that the relationality of the Trinity implies a comparable relationality in the church. See also articles questioning this foundation in Bernd Jochen Hilberath, ed., Communio – Ideal oder Zerrbild von Kommunikation? Quaestiones Disputatae 176 (Freiburg: Herder, 1999), especially Bernhard Nitsche, “Die Analogie zwischen dem triniatrischen Gottesbild und der communialen Struktur von Kirche,” 81–114. See also Paul M. Collins, “Communion: God, Creation, and Church,” in Receiving ‘The Nature and Mission of the Church’, ed. Paul M. Collins and Michael Fahey, Ecclesiological Investigations 1 (London: T&T Clark, 2008), 21–41.

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not draw upon a theory of the relations between the Trinitarian persons as a theological source for the understanding of ecclesial relations. The break in communion between human beings is directly connected with the break in communion between humanity and God, and the restoration of the communion of humanity with itself is directly related to the restoration of communion of humanity with its creator. Furthermore, for Tillard the ordering of these relationships in crucial: the distortion of human relationships is the result and sign of the distortion of humanity’s broken relation to God, and the restoration of communion among human beings comes through their sharing in God’s restoration of communion between humanity and the Father in Christ Jesus. The “horizontal” relations of humanity, as distorted by sin and restored by grace, are dependent upon the “vertical” relation of humanity to God. His understanding of this relation to God is thoroughly Trinitarian in two senses. First, in a close reading of the Johannine literature, Tillard links the vertical communion of Christians with Christ to a second “vertical” communion, that of the Son with the Father. “Our ‘koinonia with each other’ is inscribed in an infinitely deeper koinonia from which it is inseparable, ‘our koinonia is with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ’ (1 John 1:3, 6–7).”50 The relationship of communion with each other and with Christ is inscribed in the circumincession of the Father and the Son. The concepts of “adoptive sonship in the Son” and of Christ as the “new Adam” are brought together here to delineate the “infinite” depth of Christian communion: communion as salvation is the inscription of humanity, individually and communally, within the relation of the Son to the Father.51 Thus, in Tillard’s understanding of John 17, the grace of salvation is that the human being is both healed from sin and also brought into new life so that human relations are made part of the circumincession of the Son and the Father. The Gospel of John’s “audacious” claim is that “the unity of the disciples corresponds to the unity existing between Jesus and the Father, which is founded on the reality of God. Even more, this unity is inscribed in the community of love uniting the Son to the Father.”52 The Holy Spirit is not absent from this relation, and so Tillard’s understanding of communion is Trinitarian in a second way. As noted in Chapter 3, Tillard’s earliest work betrays the Christocentrism of his theological formation. But due to his ecumenical engagement with the Orthodox Churches, his study of the church fathers, and the overall recovery of pneumatology in the latter half of 50 “Ecclésiologie de communion et exigence œcuménique,” Irénikon 59 (1986): 207. 51 See “L’Esprit Saint dans le réflexion théologique contemporaine,” in Credo in Spiritum Sanctum: Atti del Congresso Teologico Internazionale di Pneumatologia (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1983), 906–7. 52 EE, 199.

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the twentieth century exemplified by the work of his confrere Yves Congar,53 Tillard posited a crucial role for the Holy Spirit in the economy of salvation by the time he formulated the understanding of communion in Église d’Églises and L’Église locale. If salvation is the communion of humanity with itself that depends upon the communion of humanity with the Father in Christ, then the entry into Christ’s relation to the Father happens by the action of the Holy Spirit. While acknowledging it as an ideal, Tillard places the account of Pentecost in Acts at the heart of his pneumatology as well as his ecclesiology. It is “by the power of the Spirit” that salvation/communion (and, in consequence, the continuing community of the church) comes into being in response to the event of Christ. The continuing presence of the Spirit in the church undergirds all Tillard’s explorations of ecclesial diversity, of the structures and ministries in service of communion, and of the dynamics of reception and recognition which form the rhythm of ecclesial life. In Tillard’s thought, human communion is thoroughly charismatic in both its vertical and horizontal forms. This view of the relations between Trinity and communion differs from some of the other dominant concepts of communion in contemporary theology and ecclesiology. Because the word “communion” can be used in Christian theology to designate a number of different relations, including those between human beings and each other, those between human beings and God, and those between the Trinitarian persons, careful distinctions need to be made with regard to how one is using the term. An analogy that understands ecclesial communion by analogy to Trinitarian communion has become a commonplace of many communion ecclesiologies, most notably that of John Zizioulas. Tillard’s reluctance to center his understanding of communion upon a previous Trinitarian theology of communion is, therefore, an important and distinctive aspect of his thought on communion. A comparison with another theologian important for his use of communion in ecclesiology is helpful to clarify Tillard’s position. In his study of the relation of Trinitarian theologies and ecclesiology, Miroslav Volf looks at communion in the work of John Zizioulas and Joseph Ratzinger.54 He then presents his own understanding of communion and the structuring of communion in the church from a Free Church Reformed perspective. In doing so, he argues that one’s understanding of ecclesial communion typically corresponds to one’s understanding of Trinitarian communion, and that the perichoretic Trinitarian theology he 53 Culminating in Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit, trans. David Smith (New York: Crossroad, 2000). 54 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness, 22–23. This work began as a manuscript for Volf’s Habilitationsschrift at the University of Tübingen, under the direction of Jürgen Moltmann.

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derives from his mentor Jürgen Moltmann best finds an ecclesial image in the life and practice of the Free Churches. This is, in his estimation, a better accounting of Trinitarian and ecclesial life than the universalizing tendencies of Joseph Ratzinger, or the monarchical tendencies of John Zizioulas, as he presents the work of these authors. Volf is aware of the dangers of assuming the identity of “person” and “communion” in these two areas of theological reflection. “ ‘Person’ and ‘communion’ in ecclesiology cannot be identical with ‘person’ and ‘communion’ in the doctrine of the Trinity; they can only be understood as analogous to them.”55 The analogy between Trinitarian communion and ecclesial communion must be mediated, in Volf’s understanding, across three points of difference: an initial mediation between the Triune God and theological language attempting to express that reality, a second mediation between “person” and “communion” in the Trinity and their use in ecclesiology, and a third mediation between ecclesial communion considered eschatologically, in its ideal nature or destiny, and the reality of ecclesial communion within a history marked by the effects of sin. After these three mediations, Volf still judges the analogy to be important in understanding the nature of ecclesial communion in identifying “correspondences” between the church and the Trinity. But “it follows that the correspondences between church and Trinity can be demonstrated only after the development of anthropology, soteriology, and ecclesiology (even though both anthropology and ecclesiology must be developed in the light of trinitarian doctrine).”56 His critique of Ratzinger and Zizioulas, then, is both a critique of their corresponding notions of Trinitarian and ecclesial communion, as well as a methodological critique of their direct derivation of ecclesiology from Trinitarian theology, especially in the case of Zizioulas. Despite his methodological caution, the concept of “correspondence” still allows Volf to argue for a Free Church ecclesiology of the church as the communio fidelium, based on the action of the Holy Spirit gathering the church in Christ’s name.57 The communion ecclesiology Volf presents is one of radically equal relations between the members of the church that draws support from the correspondence of this radical equality to the perichoretic Trinitarian relations. In some ways, Tillard’s understanding of communion does a better job of doing what Volf intends to do, namely, developing an anthropology, soteriology, and ecclesiology in the light of trinitarian doctrine prior to asserting an analogy between Trinitarian communion and ecclesial communion. In his dissertation on Tillard’s theology of the local church, Christopher Ruddy addresses the simultaneity of the local and the universal churches in Tillard’s thought and 55 Ibid., 199. 56 Ibid., 200. 57 Cf. Matt 18.20, a key text for this theology.

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suggests that his position is built upon “Trinitarian communion as the origin and pattern of ecclesial communion.”58 Ruddy appears to lament the absence of a stronger statement of direct analogy, though, writing that “although Tillard does not draw an explicit parallel between the simultaneity of unity and difference in the Trinity and in the church, he nonetheless makes clear that the church’s own being-as-communion is rooted and sustained by the Trinity’s communion.”59 From some of Tillard’s few statements about ecclesial communion and the Trinity, “[i]t seems reasonable to infer [. . .] that, just as the Trinity is at once one and three, the church of the triune God is likewise simultaneously one and many.”60 A careful reading of the passages of Tillard’s corpus discussing the relations between human communion and Trinitarian communion, however, suggests that Tillard’s reluctance to emphasize the correspondence between ecclesial communion and Trinitarian communion comes from a deliberate choice to make any analogy between these two realities subsequent to and dependent upon a theology of ecclesial communion, rather than derived from a theory of Trinitarian communion. Tillard does make occasional connections between Trinitarian communion and ecclesial communion in which the characteristics of the latter are compared to those of the former. He writes that “because in his internal mystery God is communion (the Tradition has always thought of the Trinity as the communion of three Persons in a single essence), the first effect of the Gospel is to introduce the human being into this divine communion.”61 “The temptation of uniformity [. . .] is anti-ecclesial precisely because it transforms communion into a monism. It breaks the harmony between the mystery of God as the communion of a Trinity, and the mystery of the Church of God.”62 He writes that “communion (non-division) and singularity (non-absorption) together describe the nature of the being created ‘in the image and likeness’ of a God whose trinitarian nature is proclaimed by Christian faith.”63 In Église d’Églises, he states that “the relation to the communion of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit indicates its [the Church’s] rootedness even in the eternal reality of the mystery of God,”64 and that the church is a “communion of communions, united to God who reveals himself as an eternal communion of three Persons.”65

58 Ruddy, “One Church in Many Churches: The Theology of the Local Church in the Writings of Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, O. P.” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2002), 224. 59 Ibid., 224. 60 Ibid., 225. 61 “L’Église de Dieu est une communion,” 453. 62 Ibid., 457. 63 “L’Église de Dieu dans le dessein de Dieu,” 41. Cf. EE, 34. 64 EE, 48. 65 EE, 217.

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And, in the passages from L’Église locale to which Ruddy refers, Tillard writes that “the Church of God is revealed as modeled on the image of the societas of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, by the power of the Spirit. The trinitarian roots of the Church can no longer be separated from its reality as a hierarchical institution.”66 I have gathered these passages here because, in a voluminous corpus of writings, these are some of the only statements Tillard makes regarding the relation between Trinitarian communion and ecclesial communion. In contrast to Zizioulas or Volf, any comparison to inner-Trinitarian relations plays a relatively minor role in Tillard’s theology of communion, and is pursued only subsequently to the development of a theology of communion rooted in the human experience of grace, in humanity’s experience of communion with itself and with God. Trinitarian communion as such is not a starting point for significant discussion of ecclesial communion. Tillard’s major argument for ecclesial diversity and for the relations of the local church and universal church is rooted in his understanding of the apostolicity of the church (in its relation to the oncefor-all paschal mystery and the constitution of the church in the Spirit) and the catholicity of the church (its taking into Christ all of the natural, good diversities of historical space and time), rather than in a derivation of human communion from the relations of the divine persons, or an ontology of relational being constructed in analogy to divine perichoresis.67 Tillard’s approach to these correspondences is comparable to the difference I outlined between Zizioulas’s “being as communion” and Tillard’s “being in communion.”68 For Tillard, ecclesial communion with God and humanity is the healing and strengthening of a created, human potential for relationship, not the direct importation of the relations of the Trinitarian persons into created humanity. Creation and redemption are dependent upon God as Trinity, but our understanding of Trinitarian relations and communion comes from analogy to our more familiar human relations and graced communion, not the reverse. While Tillard’s theology of communion is therefore productively viewed as Trinitarian but not derived from a theory of Trinitarian perichoresis, two points for further development are opened by my analysis here. First, Tillard’s method

66 EL, 310. 67 Richard Fermer makes a persuasive, though little-known, argument for caution with regard to “trinitarian analogies” of this sort in Christian theology more generally in “The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41 (1999): 158–86. 68 See above, 148–49.

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begins with the analysis of the life and practice of the church and develops a soteriology, anthropology, and ecclesiology based upon divine revelation in Scripture and tradition. To use language increasingly common in ecclesiology, then, Tillard’s ecclesiology can be viewed as an ecclesiology “from below,”69 even if Tillard’s primary point of reference is not analysis of contemporary ecclesial experience, but the history of the church. “Starting with the church,” for Tillard, means starting with what he usually calls the “Great Tradition” of the church, the undivided church of the first millennium,70 rather than with an on-the-ground analysis of contemporary ecclesial experience. Part personal preference (Tillard was trained as a reader of texts and as a historian, not as a social scientist) and part ecumenical concern to base his theology upon the (relatively) uncontroversial shared heritage of the church, “starting from below,” for Tillard, means starting from the once-for-all experience of the apostolic church in which the Christian experience of communion is inscribed. But as I shall discuss in greater depth in the following chapter, “starting from below” in an analysis of ecclesial communion rather than Trinitarian communion would be of more benefit if Tillard had looked not only at the lived experience of the historical church available through Scripture and tradition, but also at the empirical reality of the concrete church through empirical investigations into the reality of communion as known and experienced today. Second, and more problematically from a methodological standpoint, Tillard does not explicitly justify his choice to root a theology of communion in the reality of human communion rather than Trinitarian communion. Whether as a result of his Aristotelian and Thomist presuppositions, or out of an implicit realization that one begins to contemplate Trinitarian communion through one’s awareness of ecclesial communion, and not the reverse, Tillard does not follow the direction of his contemporaries in making the Trinity not only the formal but the methodological ground for communion ecclesiology. But he did not make this choice or any arguments to justify that choice explicit in his work. Further development of Tillard’s thought, and of the possibility of a theology that grounds its understanding of communion differently than in the Trinitarian methodological assumptions that mark much communion

69 Roger Haight’s Christian Community in History, Vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 2004) is the most prominent recent attempt to produce an “ecclesiology from below.” See his description of his methodology, 1–66. 70 Though Tillard was increasingly aware of the importance of the Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox Churches which broke with the Latin and Orthodox Churches in the fifth century. See CE, 10.

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ecclesiology, will assist in making this distinction and its importance more intelligible.

Communion, Recognition, and Reception Tillard’s emphasis upon diversity and locality as perennial aspects of the Christian churches raises the important issue of the acceptable limits of variation across the different times and places in which the church exists. In both of these issues, one is faced with the problem of how to affirm a single, shared faith and praxis across different particular contexts from within one of those particular, and therefore limited, contexts. On what does the Christian church in one (temporal, geographical, cultural, sociological) place base its claim to be in communion with other Christian churches despite its particularity and its inculturated, concrete practice? The short answer for Tillard is that the church in its times and places lives under the guidance of God, and knows this by faith. But this is not much of an answer, considering the varieties of ways “faith,” “indefectibility,” or “guidance” have been understood in the history of the church. Neither is Tillard’s answer one involving a leap into blind ecclesiastical or papal faith, into a magical understanding of ecclesial authority. There are two major aspects to his answer to this question. The first is the theological understanding of apostolicity outlined in Chapter 3. The second, and more important for his understanding of communion, is his idea of the ecclesial mechanisms by which the Holy Spirit maintains the church in its relation to the apostolic witness to Christ. These mechanisms include the institutions of the church, and particularly the episcopal institutions of local bishops and the particular role of the local bishop of Rome. But underlying these institutions are the deeper structures of “recognition” and “reception,” involving individual and communal judgments of continuity, discontinuity, and fidelity to the demands of apostolicity and catholicity.71 71 The importance of Tillard’s contributions to the practical questions of ecclesiology should not be underestimated. In terms of the place these issues play in his works, large portions of his work (almost all of ER, Chapters 3 and 4 of EE, and Chapters 2 and 4 of EL) are precisely focused on the ministerial and institutional structures of the Christian church. See also Richard Gaillardetz, “The Office of the Bishop within the Communio Ecclesiarum: Insights from the Ecclesiology of Jean-Marie Tillard,” Science et Esprit 61 (2009): 175–94; and Thomas O’Meara, O.P., “A Note on Ministry in the Theology of J.-M. R. Tillard,” Science et Esprit 61 (2009): 195–202, for critical surveys of Tillard’s thought on ministry. My focus in this section and throughout this book is on the foundational theology of Christian communion that accounts for the structural proposals that are such an important aspect

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The language of “reception” has a long history in ecumenical discourse and in ecclesiology more generally.72 But the technical use of the language of “reconnaissance,” of “recognition,” which he first developed in the context of ecumenical discussions, is an important contribution to ecclesiological discourse. Though the two concepts are interrelated in Tillard’s theory of the deep structure of communion, I will be focusing in this section upon recognition as the more distinctive contribution of Tillard to an understanding of communion, and will return at the conclusion to reception as it relates to communion and recognition.

Recognition In Tillard’s theology, the term “recognition” (“reconnaissance”) is used in a technical sense. It points to the flexibility and occasional non-linearity of mutual judgments of communion, to the fragile and Spirit-dependent nature of these judgments, and to the importance of personal encounter in making judgments regarding ecclesial communion. By beginning to address the questions of ecclesial communion with this idea of recognition rather than with particular institutions or offices thought of as “guarantees,” Tillard opens a way to think about the shared faith and life of churches in communion that is flexible in its approach to diversity without ignoring the requirements of a church based on unity of differences, not toleration of differences. Recognition, for Tillard, points to the hermeneutic reality of the church as a continuing community of interpretation. A small but significant body of anecdotal evidence suggests that the word “recognition” is second only to the word “communion” as a key to understanding Tillard’s ecclesiology. He refers to the concept of recognition as “essential,” as “one of the principal categories of an ecclesiology of communion.”73 The history of the notion in the documents and methodology of the Faith and Order movement has been traced in the work of Gerard Kelly,74 work that began as a doctoral dissertation completed under the direction of Tillard at the Collège

of Tillard’s theological contribution. But it is also in these places that Tillard’s work seems most idealistic and disconnected from the reality of the contemporary church. I suggest in Chapter 5 some ways in which Tillard’s theology of communion might be strengthened and critiqued through greater attention to the concrete reality of the church. 72 See the important work of William G. Rusch, Ecumenical Reception: Its Challenge and Opportunity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007). 73 EE, 284. 74 Gerard Kelly, Recognition: Advancing Ecumenical Thinking (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).

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Dominicain in 1992. The history of the term’s use in Faith and Order documents, including BEM, which Kelly highlights, was both influenced by and an influence upon the work of Tillard in this period. But while Tillard first encountered and used the term in his ecumenical engagements, Tillard argued that, like communion, recognition was a category for ecclesiology at all levels of the church, both in ecumenical discussions and in internal relations within local churches and denominations.75 Typographically, Tillard usually italicizes the term or places it in guillemets, a practice he employs primarily for Greek and Hebrew biblical words like koinônia, diakonia, qahal, and for some key theological concepts like communion, catholicity, and recognition’s frequent partner, reception. While an awareness of the various sources for Tillard’s language of recognition is helpful in suggesting its genealogy, the importance of the concept is best understood by outlining the question “recognition” answers. Tillard came to his understanding of recognition in the very practical need to solve a theological problem that his thought on communion, catholicity, and apostolicity raises. The problem is that of accounting for how local churches are faithful to two potentially opposing demands of ecclesiality. The first is the need for ecclesial communion to be communion in the same faith and practice, the same reality of the apostolic church in which communion with God in Christ becomes manifest. At the same time, the local church needs to make this communion real in its embrace of the locality in which it is the church of God, with all of the diversity of Christian expression proper to that place. Neglect the first demand, the demand for apostolicity, and the church loses its relation to Christ known and loved in the apostolic witness, becoming “a vague ecclesiastical coming together.”76 Neglect the second, the demand for catholicity, and the church loses its real relation to time and place, becoming a museum piece at best and an imperialistic leveler of difference at worst.77 As I discussed in Chapter 3, Tillard’s theology points to both of these demands. In the concepts of apostolicity and catholicity, he describes the entire process by which the churches work out their fidelity to God in response as a process of “recognition” in order to point to the complexity of mediating both of these principles in ecclesial life. Concretely, apostolicity is maintained by the practice of the local church in attempting to remain in communion with the church of Pentecost, the church of

75 He writes, “Recognition and the ‘theological’ reception it makes possible do not belong exclusively to the realm of ecumenical activity. They do not concern only some Churches trying to achieve a mature canonical reception or to continue to live in communion. They belong to the inner life of every Church.” “Reception, Communion,” One in Christ 28 (1992): 311. 76 “Reception, Communion,” 310. 77 Cf. ER, 188–89.

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the apostles. Each local church, as the church of God in its place and time, as it prays, acts, and believes, is conscious of its responsibility to be one with the apostolic witness, and to maintain its communion with other churches that are also one with the apostolic witness. Various norms and institutions—the canon of Scriptures, structures of ministry, authority, and reception, ritual and liturgical practices, creedal statements—work together as guides for the local church in its apostolicity, and in its evaluation of other local churches. This is a conservative principle that calls the church to its memory of God’s action in a particular place and time, a kairos in which all subsequent chronoi participate.78 Tillard’s broad vision of the reconciliation of all in Christ calls for close attention that this be a single communion in Christ given by the Holy Spirit and not a society of mutual toleration. Recognition that another community or individual is similarly in communion with the apostolic faith is therefore not a matter only of good will, but of cognitive judgment. In Tillard’s schema, the reality of the Church of God in another community cannot be determined a priori, but only in and through concrete, personal encounter. At the same time, this encounter must include a real judgment, a critical, cognitive awareness, of another church’s apostolicity.79 In an ecumenical context, Tillard warns of a “volontarist conception of communion,” that is, a vision in which “unity is desired, and desired at any price,” for which “one is ready to accommodate, if necessary, even the doctrinal demands of one’s ecclesial tradition.”80 There is, in Tillard’s system, a real need for the Christian church and its members, guided by the Spirit, to act in accordance with their authentic judgment of a particular theological expression, a particular practice, or the complex unity of expression, life, and witness found in a local church, as to whether these ways of being church cohere with the church of the apostles, whether the Christ preached in or by an “other” is the same Christ one knows as Lord. One has to test carefully whether “in the difference of words and of forms, the multiplicity of responses demanded by the extreme changeability of situations, even the variety of readings and of interpretations,” one “perceives the same fidelity to the same and single Revelation.”81 Tillard calls this an “objective conception of communion,” “based on the recognition in the other Churches of the objective foundations which, of themselves, call to be welded together with that which its [a church’s] own tradition objectively bears of ecclesial truth, as 78 See “Tradition, Reception,” in The Quadrilog: Tradition and the Future of Ecumenism (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 328–42. 79 “Confesser ensemble la foi apostolique. Intervention du P. Tillard à la Commission Foi et Constitution,” Documentation Catholique 86 (1989): 969. 80 Tillard, Preface to Recognition: Advancing Ecumenical Thinking, by Gerard Kelly, xv. 81 EE, 284.

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much in the realm of doxa as of that of praxis and mission.”82 Objective, in that it is based on one’s best judgment of the ecclesiality of the church, but objective in and through concrete ecclesial encounter. One cannot force communion, and the churches cannot settle for “discounted” communion, communion “on sale” (“à bon marché”), ignoring their fidelity to truth in an attempted fidelity to the call for unity. But a second demand to which Tillard’s understanding of communion must respond is the danger of underestimating the importance of the diversity of Christian communion. Unchecked, the desire for unity might undermine the churches’ ability to find the same faith in Christ expressed in strikingly different ways by conceiving of the incarnation of the faith too statically or by idolizing the forms of the particular time or place of a local church, as the history of centralization in the Roman Catholic Church suggests. The fact that Tillard uses the language of recognition suggests an attempt to safeguard the “otherness” of the “other” with which one is in communion. The act by which an individual or church judges that another shares the same relation to Christ is always a complex act of interpretation and so must always occur with a profound openness to the possibility of communion with the other. Tillard’s language of recognition attempts to address the need for this openness by moving the judgment away from an expectation of exact correspondence or an identity conceived as uniformity of life and practice towards a hermeneutic understanding of ecclesial encounter. Openness to recognition expects sameness and otherness, valuing another person’s or community’s distinctive way of being Christian as the only possible way that the other could be Christian. It expects to find the same relation to Christ not despite the other’s otherness, but in and through the other’s very otherness. And it requires, among other things, the quite concrete encounter of two “others”; one does not recognize another only on the basis of one statement, one practice, one particular distinction. Rather, the entire complex of the other, with its strengths and its weaknesses, enters into the encounter of the two, which presupposes a primary openness to the relationship of encounter.83 It is obvious that this vision of recognition and communion is “extremely demanding,” avoiding the easier solutions of denying the reality of ecclesial diversity or of relinquishing the need for apostolic fidelity.84 Tillard most often speaks about the dynamic of recognition of communion in the context of relations between different local churches in communion in the 82 Preface to Recognition, xvi. 83 “Ecclesiological Implications of Bilateral Dialogue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23 (1986): 413. 84 EL, 91.

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Roman Catholic Church; typical examples are when “a Parisian can recognize his own Eucharist in the Sunday celebration of a Maronite community, [and] a parishioner from Warsaw can recognize his own evangelical conviction in the preaching of a Brazilian base community.”85 But he first perceived this dynamic in ecumenical encounter, and then applied the lessons of his encounters of otherness outside of the Roman Catholic Church to the inner–Roman Catholic context. In the ecumenical movement, the language of recognition was hammered out as a way of inviting the divided churches to encounter each other anew with the expectation of identical faith and life in differences of emphasis, theology, practice, or ritual. Yet this understanding also calls each community to recognize its own particularity, its own “soil,” its own distinct incarnation of the Gospel as particular, as different, as the gift to the church of the whole of its own place and time. In many ways, this is the need of the local church to balance the particularity of its witness with the unity of the church throughout space and time. At its heart, this is also an internal judgment, a maintenance of the local church’s own fidelity in relation to the tradition and to the other churches: In order for a community to be certain to confess the apostolic faith authentically and within the universal community, it ought to be assured that this apostolic faith can be recognized in that which it lives and proclaims. It ought to be able to say to the other communities, “Under this unique formula, it is the apostolic faith that I affirm; in this particular tradition, it is that faith that I make present.”86 One must not overestimate or underestimate the importance of Tillard’s contributions in this area. The questions surrounding diversity and unity are not new questions, either in the broad tradition of Christian theology or in the renewed interest in diversity and unity in the past 50 years. In the documents of Vatican II on the church,87 on ecumenism,88 on the Eastern churches,89 and especially on mission,90 the longstanding question of ecclesial diversity amid unity was raised up again as a major challenge for Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Missiological investigations of inculturation have analyzed for some time the practical and theoretical issues involved in incarnating the church in a

85 86 87 88 89 90

EE, 284. “Confesser ensemble la foi apostolique,” 969. See Lumen gentium, §§23, 26. See Unitatis redintegratio, §§4, 15–17. Available at www.vatican.va See Orientalium ecclesiarum, §§5–6. Available at www.vatican.va See Ad Gentes Divinitus, §§6, 9, 15, 19–22. Available at www.vatican.va

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particular place.91 Very few theologians would disagree, in principle, about the need to balance apostolic fidelity to the one church of God with catholic openness to God’s action in various places and times; where the difficulty lies is in the practical determinations of this process. One local community’s openness can be seen as a betrayal in another’s eyes; and that very church’s commitment to the forms of the past can be seen as an idolatry of the past which stifles the Spirit. Tillard’s concept of recognition is not an easy or mechanical solution to this problem; he does not lay down a list of criteria for ecclesiality so much as present an analysis of this recurring dynamic in the life of the local churches. But by making the process by which these twin demands are met by local churches conscious, and seeing this recurring hermeneutic structure not as accidental or subsequent to the reality of ecclesial communion, Tillard emphasizes the fundamental nature of mutual recognition to ecclesial communion. Tillard does not offer a way out of the tension or friction caused by communities incarnating the church of the apostles in strikingly different ways, but instead suggests that this recurring pattern of recognition, communion, and reception is not simply a means to salvation, but is, in a real sense, the knitting together of salvation. Three additional aspects of the notion of recognition appear to be important in further understanding Tillard’s perspective on this phenomenon. First, Tillard conceives of ecclesial recognition as a graced act of human judgment. Both aspects of this definition are important, the humanness of the judgment, and the grace involved therein. Tillard’s understanding of recognition is rooted in his theology of the relation of grace to nature, and of the way in which God’s grace strengthens the human being’s natural capacities. Recognition of the ecclesiality of another local church, therefore, does not normally come about through an ahistorical intervention or a special revelation, but through the responsible, authentic human judgment regarding the ecclesiality of another community. Tillard holds that the grace involved in ecclesial acts of recognition is the grace of a particular inspiration of the Holy Spirit which supports and guides the church in its judgment. Like communion itself, this judgment is always fragile, always requiring the fresh epiclesis of the Spirit, and always subject to the danger of sinful distortions and deviations.92 The sacramental foundation of

91 See in particular the works of Robert J. Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), and The New Catholicity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), as well as Stephen B. Bevans, Models of Contextual Theology, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), and Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004). 92 See EE, 52–66.

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these judgments in the concrete Eucharistic community helps to emphasize the eplicetic nature of ecclesial recognition. But faith in the indefectibility of the apostolic church, and in the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the church into all truth, supports and in a sense guarantees the fidelity of the church to both its Source and its mission. Without the grace of the Holy Spirit confirming churches’ acts of mutual recognition, the apostolic witness itself and its continuing incarnation in new places would be jeopardized. For Tillard, as a Roman Catholic theologian, the particular charisms of bishops and particularly of the bishop of Rome as “watchmen” or “lookouts” (“veilleurs”) of the church’s apostolicity are crucial.93 But the importance of these offices is rooted not in an individual power or ability, but in the relation of these offices to the wider ecclesial dynamics of recognition and reception. Second, and continuing from this point, Tillard outlines a theology of the role of the sensus fidei of the faithful in the recognition and reception of the faith.94 Tillard sees the dynamic relation of episcopal institutions with the local church’s sensus fidei as a whole as a kind of ideal pattern for ecclesial recognition.95 By “episcopal institutions,” Tillard thinks primarily in Roman Catholic terms of the threefold ministry, but also demonstrates openness to the ways in which episkope, “oversight,” occurs in comparable forms in Christian communities that do not possess the same ministerial structure as the Roman Catholic Church.96 In Tillard’s understanding, the sensus fidelium of a particular local church, the “instinct,” the “élan,” the knowledge of the faith in this one place and time, is a gift of the Spirit shared by the members of the community by virtue of their baptism and their mutual communion. Tillard sees in the collective sensus fidei the lived, concrete knowledge-and-practice of Christian discipleship against which other Christian communities, and movements within

93 See EE, 224–36; EL, 244–50. 94 The literature on the sensus fidelium, the “sense of the faithful,” and the sensus fidei, the “sense of the faith” that the faithful possess, is vast. An important bibliography of the concept can be found in Daniel Finucane, Sensus Fidelium: The Use of a Concept in the Post-Vatican II Era (San Francisco: International Scholars, 1996), 655–89. Ormond Rush cites this bibliography at the beginning of his article “Sensus Fidei: ‘Making Sense’ of Revelation,” Theological Studies 62 (2001): 231–61. Another introduction can be found in Richard R. Gaillardetz, “What is the Sense of the Faithful?” in By What Authority? (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2003), 107–20, and Gaillardetz, Teaching With Authority, Theology and Life 41 (Collegeville, MN: 1997), 230–35. 95 See EL, 314–23. 96 See “Towards an Ecumenical Ecclesiology of Communion,” in Ecumenism: Present Realities and Future Prospects, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 142–44.

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their own community, are compared and evaluated. Within the community, the bishop has the particular role both of incarnating that faith in relation to the other churches, but also serving as a bearer of the past and of the other churches within the local church. The episcopal task is one of preserving the apostolic memory, and of bringing other churches’ apostolic memory to confirm or to challenge the incarnation of the local church in its time and place. For Tillard, the dynamic of recognition, most often active in relation to the past or to other Christian churches, finds its model in the internal relation between episcopal teaching and ecclesial recognition.97 The healthy tension between apostolic fidelity and catholic openness most often appears in the local church as a (hopefully) healthy tension between episcopal memory and witness, and the concrete sensus fidelium. Tillard was well aware of the mixed results of this dynamic in history and in the contemporary church. But he again makes it clear that this dynamic is not accidental to the life of the church or a passing phenomenon of ecclesial existence, but is the normal “heartbeat” of communion: the ministers of oversight and teaching, rooted in the faith of the local church, attempt to make that faith explicit; this teaching is either recognized as consonant with the faith and received into practice, or not recognized, and so not received. The incarnation of the faith continues in the new situation created by this “heartbeat,” changing the sensus fidelium and, with confidence in the Spirit’s guidance of the church, making the same faith present in a changed situation. The tensions between the charisms of oversight and the church’s collective sense of the faith are not so much obstacles to be overcome, therefore, as much as the continuing labor pains of a community constantly being reborn in a moving situation. Third, an ecclesiology of communion based on mutual acts of recognition opens the door to a more fragile, less certain understanding of ecclesial communion; to use a dangerous adjective, the process appears almost “postmodern” in its resistance to an ecclesiological foundationalism which would make the repetition of a particular ecclesial form the sina qua non of ecclesial communion. But Tillard’s understanding of ecclesial recognition avoids the temptation to establish an independent security by ignoring the messy reality of apostolicity and diversity. Churches have no personal security of their apostolicity and catholicity outside of their faith in the guidance of the Holy Spirit, institutionalized in the relations between the churches. After the demanding work of ecclesial encounter with the other, no single institution, creedal formula, or liturgical ritual can serve as a “guarantee” that the judgment of recognition or non-recognition was correct.98 For Tillard, the privileging of the witness of the “undivided

97 See EL, 314–23.

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church” provides a major tool for the process of mutual recognition in the current state of ecumenical division, but fidelity to the past simply as past is not the same thing as apostolic fidelity. This understanding of recognition places great demands on the baptized of local churches to consciously realize their responsibilities as bearers of the apostolic faith. By locating recognition as the act of a local church as a whole and not only its bishop taken as an individual—even the pope’s authority is an authority based on the faith of the church of Rome— Tillard’s understanding of how churches recognize their mutual communion across times, places, and current divisions emphasizes the complexity of ecclesial communion and the dependence of the churches upon the guidance of the Spirit.

Reception Connected with his understanding of recognition is Tillard’s use of the idea of reception as the response the community makes to a recognized form of Christian faith or life. As I stated earlier, the idea of reception has a longer history of development in Roman Catholic ecclesiology in the twentieth century than recognition, but it is not necessary to reproduce that history in its entirety to explain how Tillard incorporates reception as the second moment of the church’s negotiation of diversity.99 Reception, in Tillard’s understanding, is the “logical consequence” of the judgment of recognition: Ecumenically, “theological” reception is, as a matter of fact, a response grounded in the judgement as to whether what is proposed is really coherent

98 For example, Tillard would have welcomed the recognition by the Roman Catholic Church of the Liturgy of Addai and Mari, the liturgical canon of the Assyrian Church of the East from which the institution narrative of the last supper is notably absent, which calls into question an understanding that would find in the presence or absence of a single formula a key to judging the ecclesiality of a local church or the validity of its Eucharist. See Robert F. Taft, “Mass without the Consecration?” Worship 77 (2003): 482–509. 99 A foundational text for modern theories of reception is Yves Congar, “La ‘réception’ comme réalité ecclésiologique,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 56 (1972): 369–403. For some history of the term’s use in Roman Catholic circles and ecumenically, see Rusch, Ecumenical Reception; Edward J. Kilmartin, “Reception in History: An Ecclesiological Phenomenon and Its Significance,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 21 (1984): 34–54; and Thomas P. Rausch, “Reception Past and Present,” Theological Studies 47 (1986): 497–508.

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with the conviction, the common good, the real needs of the Church hic et nunc concerned. For this Church has, in order really to receive it, to recognise in what is proposed to its acceptance an authentic expression of the apostolic faith, a faithful actualization of the mind of the gospel, a discipline in tune with the requirements of the Church’s life, a call to conversion which does not contradict the essential views of Christian tradition, a change aiming at a truly evangelical goal.100 Sometimes this may involve a more active form of reception, in which the practices or theology of another church are made part of the life of the receiving community; a primary example of this would be the reception by the Roman Catholic Church of practices from the Reformation and Eastern churches in its liturgical reform, and the subsequent reception of Roman Catholic liturgical practices by these other churches.101 In other situations, a weaker form of reception involves the recognition of a teaching or practice of another church as a legitimate incarnation of the Christian faith without making it a part of one’s own particular incarnation of the church. In both cases, however, reception (or non-reception, in some cases) is the activity, the change in ecclesial practice that is connected with the recognition of shared faith. In this sense, Tillard’s understanding of reception has much in common with something like William Rusch’s idea of “differentiated participation.”102 One final aspect of Tillard’s use of recognition and reception to note in conclusion is the question of the ordering of these two structures. While I have treated recognition first and in far more detail in order to concentrate upon the new contributions that Tillard makes to ecclesiology through the use of this term, reception is not secondary to recognition, either temporally or conceptually. Tillard’s analysis of reception opens out into a discussion of the sensus fidelium, the “sense” or “instinct” for the faith possessed by the faithful.103 Usually, in Tillard’s system, reception by the church as a whole follows upon the formal definition of a doctrine or practice as recognizably Christian by those

100 “Reception – Communion,” One in Christ 28 (1992): 310. 101 See “La Réforme Liturgique et le Rapprochement des Églises,” in Liturgia: Opera Divina e Umana, Biblioteca «Ephermerides Liturgicae» Subsidia 26, ed. Pierre Jounel et al. (Rome: Ed. Liturgiche, 1982), 215–40. Cf. “L’impact du mouvement œcuménique sur les doctrines et les institutions chrétiennes,” Studies in Religion/ Sciences Religieuses 23 (1994): 293–307. 102 Rusch, Ecumenical Reception, 130–34. 103 “Reception – Communion,” 318–22; see also “Tradition, Reception,” 335–37. See also the earlier article “À propos du «sensus fidelium»,” Proche-Orient Chrétien 25 (1975): 113–34.

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with exercising oversight in the community. I will explore further in Chapter 5 some ways in which Tillard’s thought is less able to account for situations in which marginalized voices among the faithful propose an understanding of the faith or a particular practice to be received by their leaders. In this chapter I have outlined four aspects of Tillard’s concept of communion that are important for understanding his thought on communion and for distinguishing him from some of the other major theorists of communion in ecclesiology. First, Tillard’s concept of communion highlights the importance and goodness of ecclesial diversity and of establishing ecclesial structures that nourish and support the local church both in its fidelity to the apostolic faith and in its ability to incarnate that faith in a catholic way in every place and time. Second, Tillard views the communion of diverse, formerly divided human beings and human communities not as a secondary effect of salvation, but as the concrete reality of Christian salvation in history. For Tillard, communion with God and with others is salvation, it is the inbreaking of the eschatological Reign of God. Third, I outlined the Trinitarian foundations for Tillard’s concept of communion, but showed how Tillard roots his thought in the experience of the church of God, rather than deriving an understanding of ecclesial communion by analogy to the relations of the Trinitarian persons. Finally, I looked at the recurring structures of reception and recognition that underlie the institutionalization of ecclesial communion, and at Tillard’s particular contribution of a technical understanding of “recognition” to contemporary ecclesiology. This survey does not exhaust Tillard’s concept of communion, particularly as it has focused less upon the structural ecclesiological questions of, for example, episcopacy and primacy, than upon the foundational axes that underlie Tillard’s thought on particular questions in ecclesiology. But the third chapter’s summary of Tillard’s thought more generally and this chapter’s presentation of four distinguishing features of Tillard’s thought on communion now provide the material for the evaluation of Tillard’s project in light of the concerns raised for contemporary communion ecclesiology with which I began this book.

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Chapter 5 An Evaluation of Tillard’s Theology of Communion Having completed in Chapters 3 and 4 a summary of the major themes of Tillard’s thought and of his theology of communion, I can now return to the questions raised in the first two chapters of the book and offer an evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of Tillard’s communion ecclesiology. In particular, does Tillard’s ecclesiology, and its use of communion as a major concept, contribute to the project of understanding the church from a critical, methodologically sound systematic theological perspective? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What steps might further research take to improve, strengthen, and challenge aspects of Tillard’s theology of communion? In this chapter I suggest that Tillard’s theology has contributed much to systematic study of the church, but also that one major place for further work involves the critical investigation of whether Tillard’s theory of what the church could or should be has any validity in explaining the concrete life of the Christian community.

Tillard’s Methodology Tillard’s Project as Foundational and Systematic One aspect of my critique of contemporary ecclesiologies in the first chapter was their lack of critical, systematic structure; though arguing on the bases of different assumptions, Henri Rikhof, Joseph Komonchak, and Nicholas M. Healy all argued for a use of concepts in ecclesiology that moved beyond an identification of rich biblical or liturgical themes to sets of critically correlated, mutually determined definitions and categories. And yet a frequent observation and sometimes criticism of Tillard’s work is its lack of systematic terms and argumentation. E. J. Yarnold describes Tillard’s method “as a combination of the inductive and the systematic.”1 Paul Philibert remarks that “some of Tillard’s

1

Yarnold, review of Église d’Églises by Jean-Marie Tillard, Journal of Theological Studies 39 (1988): 651.

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most vital insights are more suggested than developed.”2 Jeffrey Gros notes that Chair de l’Église addresses critics of Église d’Églises “not by systematic argumentation, but by careful biblical and patristic documentation.”3 And, finally, Dennis Doyle reviews Chair de l’Église by noting, “In style this book contains an unusually large proportion of quoted materials relative to expository text. If a graduate student had written this, I might have asked for a revision with fewer quotes and more arguments,” though Doyle nevertheless appreciates the fact that Tillard’s work “reads like a ‘show and tell’ of various treasures of the Christian tradition.”4 Given this understanding of Tillard’s methodology, it might be difficult to claim Tillard’s understanding of communion as the systematic understanding I argued for at the beginning of this book. Tillard’s methodological choices can be explained by his academic training and preferences, and particularly by the context of the ecumenical movement. In Chapter 3, I first presented Tillard’s methodology, including his patristic style of exposition and his tendency to let his sources speak for themselves through an ample use of citations. I also outlined the usual sources to which Tillard most often turned, namely, the New Testament, particularly the Gospel of John, the Letter to the Ephesians, and the Book of Revelation; the writings of the Greek and Latin church fathers; and, less explicitly, the ongoing influence of Thomas Aquinas. In all of these, Tillard shows his theological method to be heavily influenced by the ressourcement impulses of the Nouvelle Théologie.5 He is a thorough reader of texts, and his first impulse in response to a difficult question is to turn to the scriptural and patristic texts with which he was most familiar. His intent is to allow these authors, if not to speak for themselves, to sing out with their own voices within his texts. His ecumenical involvement motivates both Tillard’s style and his choice of what topics in ecclesiology to investigate. His attention to the scriptural and patristic sources arises from an attempt to develop an acceptable ecumenical theological language by privileging the theological sources held in common by the church (the “Great Tradition,” in Tillard’s words) before the major schisms of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, using an ecumenical methodology “dear”

Paul Philibert, review of Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ by Jean-Marie Tillard, Theological Studies 63 (2002): 188. 3 Jeffrey Gros, review of Chair de l’Église, chair du Christ by Jean-Marie Tillard, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 39 (1995): 315. 4 Dennis M. Doyle, review of Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ by Jean-Marie Tillard, Modern Theology 19 (2003): 433. 5 For an introduction to the themes and history of the Nouvelle Théologie, see Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “The New Theology and Transcendental Thomism,” in Modern Christian Thought, Vol. 2: The Twentieth Century, ed. James C. Livingston et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006): 197–232.

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to him.6 Tillard’s preference for the writings of the fathers does not come from a conservative idea of a temporal decline from a state of original purity. In line with his thinking on apostolicity and catholicity, there is nothing in Tillard’s theology suggesting that an older theology or practice may be considered better simply because it is older; rather, the evangelical demand to be the one church of Christ in every time and place suggests a (relatively) radical valuation of ecclesial inculturation without regard to temporal duration. A relatively new ecclesial praxis, if found in the context of a local church recognizably apostolic, may be as worthwhile in a particular setting as any other past structure or practice.7 Tillard’s own use of the patristic sources, then, derives from his estimation of their value not as ancient, but as shared, and therefore as potential routes out of the swamp of ecclesial disunity. His choice of topics of investigation also was determined in large part by this ecumenical involvement. The biographical data provides a clue with regard to the trajectory of his career beyond his early studies on the Eucharist and religious life to the more strictly ecclesiological questions of papal authority, mutual recognition of ministries, shared faith and life across divided communities and, ultimately, the question of ecclesial communion. These can be dated to his first formal involvements in the Canadian and international Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogues in 1969. Tillard did not become interested in ecumenism because he was interested in the theology of the church, but rather became interested in the theology of the church because he was passionate about ecumenism. But while Tillard’s choices of methodology and topics for exploration can be thus explained, that does not answer the question of whether the concept of communion developed in the course of his career satisfies the requirements of a systematic ecclesiology. Yarnold’s judgment that Tillard’s method is both “inductive and systematic” is an astute observation of the methodological complexity of Tillard’s work. While a systematic concept of communion correlated with ecclesiological, soteriological and theological anthropological investigations is at the heart of Tillard’s work, he was not only attempting the systematic project of understanding the nature of the church, but also the more basic foundational or rhetorical project of convincing readers of the value of this concept, to provide “ecclesiological studies [. . .] with their line of horizon.”8 With mixed

EE, 10. For a prominent example in Tillard’s own work, see his reflections on the possibilities for changes in the exercise of papal primacy that would make the ministry ecumenically acceptable: ER, 232–35; 343–55; EL, 499–552. These ideas and language are taken up in the unprecedented request of Ut Unum Sint for ecumenical assistance in re-thinking papal primacy. See esp. §§88–96. 8 EE, 10. 6 7

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success, Tillard, like his patristic models, is attempting to move the reader both intellectually and affectively; he is trying to move both her mind and her heart, and to have a direct influence upon his own church and the other Christian churches in their movement toward greater ecumenical unity. The lyricism with which Tillard outlines his understanding of communion, attempting to both explain the nature of ecclesial communion while drawing his various interlocutors into action on behalf of Christian unity, is more comparable to the styles of Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar in its approach than with that of Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, or Karl Barth. In this way, Tillard uses terms systematically and coherently, but retaining some of the affective and rhetorical features of a more patristic or narrative theology.

Systematic Elements of Tillard’s Methodology In my judgment, one cannot simply claim Tillard as a systematic theologian in the style of Rahner or Barth without further comment, but it is possible to abstract from the multilayered, multipurposed corpus of Tillard’s writing the crucial systematic elements of his understanding of communion. While such an abstraction may lack some of the textual and rhetorical richness of Tillard’s works, it has the advantage of gathering together for critical reflection the major aspects of Tillard’s thought on communion in an ordered manner. Three arguments point toward the systematic clarity of the concept of communion underpinning Tillard’s thought: 1) the connection of his understanding of communion to other theological topics, particularly to his theology of salvation; 2) the identification of communion as the answer to a particular ecclesiological question regarding the unity and diversity of the Christian church; and 3) the contextualization of communion in relation to other ecclesiological concepts (such as apostolicity, catholicity, locality, etc.) that occurs in Tillard’s later work, particularly in L’Église locale. First, Tillard’s understanding of communion can be characterized as a systematic understanding of communion because of its critical connection with other theological topics. Particularly in his location of communion at the intersection of Christology, pneumatology, theological anthropology, and ecclesiology itself, Tillard places communion in direct relation to theological understandings of individual and collective salvation. As I discussed in more depth in Chapter 4, communion for Tillard constitutes human salvation as experienced socially and historically. The reconciliation of formerly divided peoples with God and with each other is at the heart of Tillard’s definition of the church as the community of those being saved in Christ. This critical connection with an underlying theology of salvation, and with theologies of the persons and missions of Christ and the Holy Spirit, locates Tillard’s theology of communion in a wider systematic

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framework and prevents its being invoked arbitrarily or randomly without relation to the larger whole of Christian theology. Tillard’s ecclesiology as a whole, and his conception of communion in particular, are therefore located on a wider map of systematic theology that conditions the use of communion within ecclesiology. Tillard’s understanding of communion in ecclesiology is also systematic from a second perspective, that of the relation of communion as an answer to a particular ecclesiological question. In this way communion is not identified as a fundamental concept in ecclesiology simply because of its traditional use or scriptural resonances, but because it can be used in a technical sense as the answer to a particular ecclesiological question. That question, as I discussed in the first section of Chapter 4, is the question of how to understand Christian unity as a unity that includes and even values the diversity of Christian ecclesiality across time and space. Such unity is not the uniformity of identity, nor is it a radical relativism in which unity is simply a result of good will rather than a shared content of faith. In Tillard’s understanding, the language of communion points to both the practices in which the Christian church negotiates this unity in difference, and to the fact that this negotiation constitutes an important aspect of Christian salvation, of the recapitulation of all things in Christ. The language of communion, therefore, is not used simply because of its popularity in late twentieth-century theology, but because it can be used as a technical term that answers the particular question of how to understand the salvific significance of a diverse yet united church. A third reason to positively evaluate Tillard’s systematic use of the language of communion is evidenced by the development of his thought on communion from Église d’Églises to L’Église locale. Throughout this book I have referred to both of these works to provide evidence for the major lines of Tillard’s theology of communion. This choice is justified by the fact that the substance of Tillard’s thought on communion remains consistent throughout his major works. But the one major shift in Tillard’s thought on communion involves the wider context within which Tillard locates his idea of communion. In the development of his thought on communion from Église d’Églises through Chair de l’Église and L’Église locale, Tillard develops and strengthens the concept of communion by locating it within a wider ecclesiological and theological context. If one were to judge Tillard’s corpus on the basis of Église d’Églises alone,9 one might be justified in critiquing Tillard for overextending the notion of communion. Église d’Églises, which attempts to outline the foundations of the

9

As Healy does, a weakness already noted by Ruddy. See Ruddy, “One Church in Many Churches: The Theology of the Local Church in the Writings of Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, O. P.” (PhD diss., University of Notre Dame, 2002), 277–78.

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use of communion in ecclesiology, at times veers dangerously close to making communion a panacea for all ecclesial ills and an answer to every ecclesiological question. A strong but not atypical example is the particularly lyric passage on communion with which Tillard concludes the first part of Église d’Églises: It [the Church of God] is a communion enfolded in the communion of the trinitarian God, brought about by the communion of the Son with the human condition, fruit of the reconciliation of humanity in a communion of peace and of agape, sent out into the world for this universal communion, structured as a Church of Churches, each Church being a communion of communions.10 At the conclusion of the second part of Église d’Églises, Tillard makes a similarly broad statement: “There is nothing in it [the Church] that is not communion.”11 Throughout Église d’Églises and other writings of this period, the enthusiasm with which Tillard outlines a theology of the church as a “communion of communions” is unmistakable. But in his articles in the 1990s, in Chair de l’Église, and preeminently in L’Église locale, Tillard makes the deeper roots of his thought on communion clear and identifies communion as a necessary but not sufficient component of further ecclesiological reflection. As its title implies, the focus of L’Église locale is not communion per se, but the reality of the local church, and in particular the way in which the local church incarnates the church of God in both its apostolicity and its catholicity. Communion is discussed with regard to how the local church negotiates that incarnation, internally, in relation to its contemporary Christian churches, and in relation to the tradition of the past and the churches of the future. The major features of communion outlined in Église d’Églises—the idea of communion as the substantive reality of salvation, the importance of diversity and unity, the connection of communion with the Eucharist and other sacramental and institutional structures—remain the foundation of his analysis of communion in L’Église locale, which is why it was legitimate to outline this theology in Chapter 4 without sharply distinguishing Église d’Églises, Chair de l’Église, and L’Église locale. But Tillard places communion in a wider systematic context in L’Église locale, continuing to assert communion as the key to issues of unity and diversity in ecclesiology while not making it the answer to every set of issues in ecclesiology. While Tillard’s statement in Église d’Églises that “there is nothing in it [the Church] that is not communion” is not repudiated in L’Église locale, his comment at the conclusion

10 EE, 101. 11 EE, 215.

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of L’Église locale that “it is not enough to say that the Church is communion”12 evidences this development in his use of communion language.13 It is important to note how this differs from the ecclesiology of models as proposed by Avery Dulles. Dulles shares the same judgment of the inadequacy of a particular concept to capture the mystery of the church. But Dulles’s response, as I discussed in Chapter 1, was to delineate a series of ecclesiological models, none of which encapsulated the full mystery of the church, that in combination pointed toward an understanding of the church, balancing and correcting each others’ shortcomings. This is not the kind of complementarity of concepts one finds in Tillard’s use of communion. In Tillard’s ecclesiology, communion is not a metaphor among metaphors that may be utilized in some ecclesiological questions more fruitfully than, say, the church as “Body of Christ” or “People of God.” Rather, in Tillard’s understanding, ecclesial communion is a crucial aspect of the answer to any ecclesiological understanding. One cannot understand the church, its institutional structures, its role in salvation history, or its mission to the world without taking into account the graced relation of human beings to God and to each other that Tillard defines as communion. At the same time, while communion is a necessary component of further ecclesiological investigations, it is not sufficient as the only ecclesiological concept required for these investigations. Tillard was not “imperialistically seeking to impose some one model as the definitive one.”14 Tillard’s understanding of the role communion must play in ecclesiology makes it an element of every ecclesiological investigation without making it the answer to each investigation. Understood in this way, Tillard’s notion of communion does not attempt to sum up the nature of the church in a single metaphor or concept (simultaneously and “imperialistically” occluding numerous other aspects of the reality of the church even as it discloses part of that reality), but contributes to the collective project of contemporary ecclesiology by producing a systematic understanding of one aspect of the church that is of lasting value in the investigation of other aspects of the church. These three aspects of Tillard thought on communion—its correlation with other theological topics, its definition by the particular question of ecclesial

12 EE, 553. 13 A reading of Tillard that fails to take into account this development in his thought is aided by the fact that, almost two decades after its publication, EL has not yet been published in an English translation. Though a poor translation (Cf. Sullivan, “Recent Ecclesiology,” Modern Theology 9 [1993]: 419), the English translation of EE brought the idea of communion at the heart of that work into English-speaking theological circles without providing the later contextualization of communion found in EL.

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unity and diversity, and the contextualization of the language of communion in relation to other ecclesiological topics evidenced in the different use of communion in Église d’Églises and L’Église locale—are the foundations for this judgment: despite the methodological complexity of his thought and its occasional rhetorical flourishes, Tillard uses the language of communion in a technical, systematic use that contributes to the project of a systematic ecclesiology.

Communion and the Concrete Church Tillard and Idealism One criticism that remains to be addressed is the question of whether Tillard’s theology is too idealistic, too divorced from the concrete reality of the church to be of much use to the church’s self-understanding. This is both a theological and a methodological question. The theological question is how the experienced, far-from-ideal church in history is related to the church in its ideal form, and the methodological question is how to study the concrete church given this complexity. Tillard’s understanding of the church and of ecclesial communion presents, in Neil Ormerod’s words, “a church that we would all want to belong to.”15 But does it address the question of the church semper reformanda, of the church in its sinfulness and its distance from that ideal, as well as it addresses the nature of the communion toward which it is limping? It is at this point that the two aims of Tillard’s ecclesiology, to understand the reality of the church and to give to Christians concerned with ecumenism a goal toward which to strive, diverge and cause Tillard’s theology to emphasize the church’s ideal nature and underestimate its concrete reality. It first should be noted that Tillard was not personally naïve regarding the reality of the Christian church in its sinfulness and division. His longstanding experience of the ecumenical division of the church and its falling short of what the church is called to be was the most obvious countersign, for him, of the difference between the church and the Reign of God toward which is it striving.16 An entirely idealistic theologian would hardly be likely to publish a series of interviews at the end of his life entitled I Believe, Despite Everything. He had a

14 Dulles, Models of the Church, Exp. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 32. 15 Neil Ormerod, “The Structure of a Systematic Ecclesiology,” Theological Studies 63 (2002): 5. 16 For poignant evidence of this challenge to his faith, see the interviews conducted with Tillard during his last year by Francesco Strazzari, Je crois en dépit de tout: entretiens d’hiver avec Francesco Strazzari (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001).

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strong sense of the mixed character of the church, as holy and sinful, and was suspicious of attempts to disregard or forcibly divide the church in a misguided quest for purity. He quotes with dismay the comment of a young member of a new ecclesial community that “one should not confuse the house of God with a trailer park.”17 And he was aware of the charge that his work could be described as idealist, responding to the charge that it was “romanticism, tinted with gallicanism” by appealing to the utility of understanding the nature of the church not only through the study of the contemporary church, but also through the examples of the church’s history.18 If the source of Christian awareness of communion is to be not only textual, not only rooted in the scriptures or the church fathers’ idealized depictions of the church, then Tillard’s theology would benefit from greater attention to how ecclesial communion is experienced in and through the less ideal reality of the church in history. In his discussion of the tension between apostolicity and catholicity, between the demand to be faithful to the past and the demand to incarnate the church anew in each time and place, Tillard presupposes a potentially difficult, but ultimately harmonious, relationship between the various members of the church, especially between leaders and the other members of the community.19 This is surprising, given the fact of his own experience in ecumenical and ecclesial life of recurring differences of opinion and ecclesial disunity resulting from those differences. It is also surprising, given that aspects of his theory of communion (e.g. his attention to the particularity and concrete incarnation of the church in a particular place, his thought on communion as the reality of salvation, his language of “zones of communion” which allows for a more flexible interpretation of communion than that of a binary between unity and disunity) provide the starting points for a more nuanced treatment of the church’s recurrent failure to fulfill its nature within history. But Tillard’s lack of attention to ecclesial failures points to the fact that Tillard’s goal of presenting a conception of the church’s nature that could motivate Christians toward ecumenical conversion limited his attention to the analysis of the concrete church necessary for a truly systematic investigation of the church. In Chapter 1, I drew upon the work of Komonchak, Gustafson, Healy, and Ormerod to argue that an ecclesiology adequate to the complexity of the church must be able to take into account the church’s existence as both a graced and a sinful community, and that to do this in the context of a systematic ecclesiology requires the use of social-scientific methodologies and categories. While both Komonchak and Gustafson are cautious about attempts to reduce the reality of

17 CE, 9. 18 EE, 275–76. 19 Cf. “Reception – Communion,” One in Christ 28 (1992): 318–22, and EL, 302–33.

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the church to what can be known through social-scientific lenses, and Healy and Ormerod raise even more critical questions regarding the assumptions and biases of social-scientific method developed outside of the purview of theology, the overall trend of these thinkers is to suggest that an adequate theology of the church must attend to its social, institutional reality in a critical, scientific way. Jean-Marie Tillard was not a social-scientific thinker in any formal way. The primary focus of his ecclesiological reflections was the theological reality of the church, the role of ecclesial communion in salvation and the ways in which Christian communities share a common identity rooted in a shared apostolic faith. But Tillard’s understanding of ecclesial institutions in service to communion, and particularly of the role of ecclesial recognition in structuring communion, suggest there are some obvious ways in which a more critical conversation between Tillard’s ecclesiology and the contemporary social sciences might help strengthen, clarify, and further develop Tillard’s thought. This is particularly true with regard to the practical ecclesiological proposals that Tillard makes in his writings. This dissertation has focused primarily upon the theological theory of communion that is at the heart of Tillard’s work and his most lasting contribution to continuing ecclesiology. But as even a brief glance at the contents of Tillard’s major books and at the topics under discussion in his other published works shows, Tillard also spent a great deal of time analyzing practical ecclesial questions regarding episcopal and papal authority, the relations of the local and universal churches, questions regarding lay participation in the church, etc. These more practical proposals constitute almost half of the material in his texts. It is with regard to these practical ecclesiological questions, however, that Tillard’s ecclesiological investigations, arguably, are least systematically adequate. As I noted above, Tillard’s work as a whole was deeply influenced by the contexts and communities of which he was a part, and he was not naïve in realizing that his research agenda, his particular ecclesiological questions, and his suggestions for the practice of the church were not removed from that context. But in the elaboration of practical suggestions that result from his theory of the nature of the church, Tillard’s ecclesiology lacks a critical, scientific engagement with the empirical reality of the church, betraying a relatively unsophisticated idea of the interaction of ecclesial theory and ecclesial practice. A good illustration of this lacuna can be found in Tillard’s treatment of the office of bishops in the church.20 The bishop is a recurring focal point in Tillard’s theology of the local church. As the connecting point of the local church’s 20 For summaries, see Gaillardetz, “The Office of the Bishop within the Communio Ecclesiarum: Insights from the Ecclesiology of Jean-Marie Tillard,” Science et Esprit 61 (2009): 175–94 and O’Meara, “A Note on Ministry in the Theology of J.-M. R. Tillard,” Science et Esprit 61 (2009): 195–202.

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expression of its own incarnation of the faith and the wider church’s maintenance of apostolicity, the bishop is the cornerstone of Tillard’s conception of the local church.21 In the context of ecumenical discussion of the nature of the episcopate, Tillard presents a theology of the episcopate based on his reading of the first centuries of the church’s theory and practice. The bishop functions as the head of the local church, which he leads in communion with the presbyterate and laity of that church, while also sacramentalizing the communion of their church with the totality of other local churches across time and space through the persons of their bishops. Tillard’s understanding of the episcopate is very attractive; he attempts to outline a theology of the episcopate that would be acceptable to Roman Catholics faithful to both Vatican Councils, as well as to his ecumenical dialogue partners. But his understanding appears removed from the way bishops actually act and are experienced within episcopal Christian churches. While the understanding of episcopacy that Tillard presents may be recognizable to Christians in their experiences of bishops in some cases, often this is not the case, and current episcopal praxis looks very different from Tillard’s theory.22 Tillard’s theology of the church lacks any systematic engagement with the contemporary empirical context, with actual ecclesial experience of bishops in relation to their churches, to other bishops, to their priests, etc. To paraphrase Neil Ormerod, Tillard’s theology of the bishop describes a person that we might all be happy to have as our bishop, but without further investigation of bishops in concrete local churches and a systematic correlation of ecclesial theory with this experience, one is left with a fascinating theory of what a bishop is or could be without any direction as to how that theory relates to the current experience of the church. It is not my purpose here to argue for an understanding of the church derived simply from current practice or from social-scientific investigation of the majority of Christians’ views on the church. This would amount to a social-scientific reductionism that would confuse social-scientific study of the church with adequate theological study of the church and would replicate the bifurcation of

21 For a summary of these tensions, see Brian P. Flanagan, “Tillard: Communion and Synod,” in Synod and Synodality, ed. Alberto Melloni and Silvia Scatena (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2005), 61–73. 22 Investigation of the practice of Roman Catholic bishops tends to focus upon the pope and the Vatican, but some studies on the practice of bishops, either collectively or individually, has been pursued in recent year. See, for instance, Thomas J. Reese, A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1992); see also Camilla J. Kari, Public Witness: The Pastoral Letters of the American Catholic Bishops (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004).

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ideal church and real church by glossing over the relation between the church’s ideal nature and its sociohistorical reality in which the ideal and the failure to meet that ideal are mixed.23 Nevertheless, for an ecclesiology to be adequate to the church’s reality, one must somehow account for the relation between the ideal church in which Christians believe and which they experience in moments of grace, and the institutional, empirically observable church whose relation to this ideal is far more ambiguous. Furthermore, such an account must not simply be an appendix to systematic ecclesiology, but be part of ecclesiology itself. A sustained conversation and mutual critique of theoretical understandings that point to an ideal of the church “in its nature” and social-scientific investigations of the concrete institutions and the empirical reality of the church is a necessary part of a systematic theology of the church. Tillard’s theology lacks these components.

Tillard and Social Theory To some extent, Tillard himself began this conversation by rooting his theology of the church in his reading of the historical concrete practice of the Christian church. But in his lack of systematic attention to the contemporary reality of the church, Tillard seems to base his recommendations for current ecclesial institutions in a relatively naïve understanding of the relation between theory and practice in which theory exists independently of context and may simply be “applied to” a context. Tillard suggests that current ecclesial practice should be adjusted in accordance with the norms derived from his theological reading of the Scriptures and of church history, but these adjustments are made with little critical reference to the contemporary ecclesial situation to be modified. His awareness of the utility of a shared ecclesial and historical heritage for the future development of ecumenical unity shows real insight into the situation of the contemporary divided church. But without the benefit of a wider-ranging, critically appropriated reflection on the actual situation of the contemporary church, his analysis of that situation is vulnerable to the charge of being an idiosyncratic product of his own personal experiences and broader ecclesial commitments, rather than a more methodologically sound investigation of the situation of the contemporary divided church. The critical correlation of the major lines of Tillard’s theology of the church, and of his theology of communion in particular, with the concrete practice of 23 This is the charge to which the ecclesiology of Johannes A. van der Ven seems vulnerable. See van der Ven, Ecclesiology in Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996).

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the contemporary church is a needed step in the development of Tillard’s ecclesiology. Tillard’s theoretical development of the concept of communion on the basis of the scriptures and his historical studies remains an important contribution to theological understanding of how human social relations are changed by grace in the formation of the Christian church. But if the theoretical understanding of communion is to be understood as a reality of concrete Christian churches and the experience of Christians, and practical ecclesial proposals are going to be made for the contemporary church on the basis of that understanding of communion, then investigation into how communion is worked out in the concrete life of the church will be needed to complement, exemplify, challenge, nuance, and help develop Tillard’s theoretical understanding of communion contribute to an adequate systematic theology. Tillard’s systematic use of the term communion, that is, the relatively stable way in which he conceives of communion in relation to other soteriological, ecclesiological, and theological anthropological concepts, allows for a continuing engagement between ecclesiology and the social sciences in ways not open to less systematic ecclesiological schemes. While theological and social-scientific analyses of the church differ in their methodologies, the fact that Tillard’s theological analysis uses relatively stable technical meanings for such terms as “apostolicity,” “catholicity,” “recognition,” and especially “communion,” opens the possibility of relating them to comparably technical terms from social theory, such as “identity,” “institutionalization,” “function,” etc. Communion ought not be reduced to a social-scientific term, but the similar status of these two systems of technical terms allows for an analogical correlation of some of the concepts from each method of study. Given the ongoing discussion about the proper relation of theology and the social sciences prompted by John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory24 and the attitude of theologians influenced by Radical Orthodoxy to the social sciences, I want to clarify again how I envision dialogue between theology and the social sciences, especially given the differing foundational assumptions of these disciplines. Without taking up Milbank’s radical hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to social-scientific discourses that are agnostic or atheistic in method, theologians such as Nicholas M. Healy25 and Neil Ormerod both have argued

24 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, 2nd ed. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006). 25 Cf. Church, World, and the Christian Life, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 154–85.

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that ecclesiology ought to engage in dialogue with the social sciences, but that “such an engagement will not take the existing understandings of the human sciences simply at face value.”26 These authors believe that social-scientific discourses may benefit ecclesiology in its analysis of the church; however, they argue that the social sciences are by no means innocent theories that can be imported without critique or modification by the central categories of theology.27 For example, a social-scientific theory that takes conflict as a foundational given of any society and that would explicitly rule out the possibility of intersubjective human communion would be of limited use to ecclesiology. But despite the need for care in engaging with the social sciences in theological discourse, such an engagement between ecclesiology and the social sciences may be fruitful as long as it is a dialogue in which both disciplines can be mutually critical and contributive.28 Full investigation of the theological reality of communion as found in the concrete church is a project for further studies, preferably by a community of scholars drawing upon a wide range of concrete experiences. To give some sense of where such a project might lead, here are three avenues for future ecclesiological research that would bring Tillard’s theoretical reflections on communion into dialogue with social-scientific discourse. First, Tillard’s theology of communion could be further grounded by investigation into the experience of church as a place of reconciling communion with God and others. Second, Tillard’s theology of communion needs to be nuanced by investigations into more concrete understandings of culture. Third, Tillard’s theology of communion needs to consider critiques that can be made on the basis of critical social theories and critical theologies rooted (broadly) in the work of the Frankfurt school and Jürgen Habermas, and of twentieth-century liberation theologians.

26 Neil Ormerod, “The Structure of a Systematic Ecclesiology,” 11. 27 For example, Ormerod argues that a social science pursued without theological critique will be unable to deal with the unintelligible reality of sin, and will therefore mistakenly identify sin and its effects as an intelligible and constitutive element of social reality. See Ormerod, “A Dialectic Engagement with the Social Sciences in an Ecclesiological Context,” Theological Studies 66 (2005): 815–40; and Ormerod, “Ecclesiology and the Social Sciences,” in The Routledge Companion to the Christian Church, ed. Gerard Mannion and Lewis Mudge (New York: Routledge, 2008), 639–54. 28 Both Komonchak and Ormerod suggest that a truly mutual critical dialogue of the kind envisioned here will lead to ecclesiologists making direct contributions to the social sciences. Cf. Komonchak, “Ecclesiology and Social Theory,” 74–75; Ormerod, “The Structure of a Systematic Ecclesiology,” 11–12.

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Communion as a Lived Reality One place in which sustained social-scientific study of the church might be helpful in further strengthening Tillard’s theology of communion would be in empirical investigation of the experience of communion in various local church communities. Tillard’s theory suggests that a fundamental aspect of the Christian experience of church and of salvation will involve reconciliation with God and with each other in a graced form of intersubjective relationship called “communion.” The church, Tillard argues, is the community of salvation in which the eschatological reconciliation of humanity with itself and with God is becoming part of human history in fits and starts. The scriptural descriptions of the early community in Acts and in the Pauline letters, and especially the identification of the church as the reconciled people of Jews and Gentiles of Ephesians, provide a foundation for Tillard’s theory of communion. His historical studies of the working out of that communion in the early church suggest the ongoing development of that community of reconciliation. But further empirical study of communion-phenomena in the contemporary church would benefit Tillard’s theory of communion in at least two ways. First, it would help to confirm the theory as an important part of the Christian experience today, rather than remain as only a historical artifact unrelated to the contemporary Christian church. Second, it would help support Tillard’s theory of communion by demonstrating some of the modalities of communion found in particular ecclesial experiences. This would demonstrate what communion looks like “on the ground” in the contemporary Christian church, how it is experienced by Christians individually and communally, and how Tillard’s theory of communion might help in understanding and giving language to the Christian experience of reconciled unity and diversity. Concretely, this suggests a number of different avenues for potential research. A starting point for the confirmation of the validity of Tillard’s theory of communion might involve investigation into how Christians understand their relation to each other in the light of their mutual relations to God. This might include social-scientific analysis of the functions of unity and belonging among contemporary Christians, either by using polling data or by means of a more in-depth qualitative analysis which would draw upon interviews, case studies, and other forms of investigation to identify experiences and values that, from a theological perspective, could be used to identify the concrete working out of communion in particular communities. One would not necessarily expect to find a “one-size-fits-all” experience of ecclesial communion—something which is suggested by Tillard’s own theory of the particularity of different sociocultural locations. It is in the different ways of being in communion that such studies would bring to light what could be done to further improve Tillard’s communion theory. What does communion

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look like in a community that is riven by economic, class, gender, or racial/ ethnic divisions, and how might this experience of communion differ from communion in a largely homogenous community of choice? Or, what does such communion look like, if it is in fact present, in communities like that of Rwanda, El Salvador, or Mexico where divisions have been exacerbated by past or continuing situations of extreme violence? Is communion possible in such situations, and, if it does occur, what does it look like? Can one assert a family resemblance among the reality of communion in a violently fractured city or nation and that between Christians in a less radically divided place? Theological investigations of the nature of reconciliation,29 and practical experience in places like South Africa where the Christian church has taken a leading role in the efforts for reconciliation, as well as social-scientific investigations of these practices, would provide the empirical data for a theology of communion, and would help to develop and nuance Tillard’s understanding of communion in ways not entirely predictable before beginning such an investigation. This use of the social sciences would not treat ecclesial communion as an entirely hypothetical reality to be proven or disproven through the investigation of its modalities in particular concrete contexts. Tillard did not draw his own theology of communion only from scriptural passages or from patristic sources, but also from his own personal experiences of ecclesial communion, particularly within the Roman Catholic Church and in the ecumenical movement. Furthermore, the wide reception of the language of communion as a descriptive term for the nature of the Christian church by many theologians and ecclesial communities provides evidence that a theology of communion is not merely a pious hypothesis. But the further investigation of communion in wide-ranging situations and contexts that I am proposing would help to make the investigation of experiences of communion in contemporary Christianity less haphazard and more systematic, less rooted in the experiences of one individual or group of theologians, and more rooted in the experiences of a wider body of the Christian church.

Communion and Theories of Culture Another way in which contemporary social-scientific understandings might aide Tillard’s thought in analyzing communion and the complexity of “the local

29 Such as Miroslav Volf’s work on reconciliation. See Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), and idem, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).

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church” comes from developments in cultural anthropological understandings of culture.30 Tillard’s theology strongly supports projects of ecclesial inculturation. Indeed, his emphasis on “the local” functions as a denial of the ideology that an uninculturated, unproblematically “universal” Christianity exists outside of its incarnation in distinct places, times, and cultures. But Tillard’s understanding of culture betrays some of the characteristics of an earlier cultural anthropology that postmodern philosophers and social scientists have begun to critique. Among these are conceptions of cultures as internally consistent wholes, comparable to biological entities; as groupings in which a high level of mutual consensus is characteristic; as recurring structures of social order, as in functionalist sociologies; and as sharply bounded, well-defined units.31 These critics argue that earlier anthropological understandings of culture were overly rooted in the bias of academic researchers toward the discovery of self-contained, internally consistent systems about which they could theorize. In using the category of “locality,” Tillard runs the risk of positing “cultures” as “simply there” in relation to the local church, rather than as the dynamic, conflictual, systematically resistant reality in and through which the local church comes into being. Much of the best work in Christian theology which is in conversation with cultural anthropology is occurring not in theoretical systematics, but in practical/ pastoral theology and particularly in the study of mission.32 Tillard occasionally refers to earlier missiological writings in his own analysis of inculturation, but a more deliberate dialogue with contemporary missiology and cultural anthropology is needed. Since the role of communion in Tillard’s ecclesiology is distinctly concerned with the catholicity of the church, in its inculturation in all places and cultures, a continuing conversation about how cultures are defined, studied, bounded, etc., will be essential to the systematic exploration of their role in the church. Some brief questions might point out the challenge and the potential fruitfulness of such an interdisciplinary conversation. Previous anthropological models have suggested that cultures are relatively stable entities, shared widely by a group of 30 For a review of some of the major developments in postmodern discourse on culture, upon which this analysis is based, see Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997) and Robert Schreiter, Constructing Local Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), esp. 39–74, and Schreiter, The New Catholicity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), esp. 46–61. 31 Tanner, Theories of Culture, 42–56. 32 For example, see Louis J. Luzbetak, The Church and Cultures: New Perspectives in Missiological Anthropology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988) for a more classical theological account of culture, and Schreiter, The New Catholicity, for a missiological analysis that takes postmodern developments in cultural anthropology into account.

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people; but the phenomena of mass mobility caused by postcolonial globalization suggests that the homogeneity of cultures in a definite geographical space can no longer be presumed. Greater attention to the phenomena of multiple belongings and hybridity is required to understand the historical/geographical/ cultural “place” in and through which the church is.33 The determination of place in a consumer culture, where “the local” is easily co-opted as another means of consumerist self-expression, further complicates the geographical referent of “the local church.”34 Further attention to the concrete experiences of church within cultures, drawing upon and in conversation with the theories of methodologies of cultural anthropology and other disciplines, would be essential to further developing and nuancing the notion of culture within Tillard’s theory of communion.

Communion, Conflict, and Critical Theology Robert Schreiter writes that theologies which rely too exclusively upon what he calls “integrated concepts of culture,” marked by an understanding of cultures as stable and unified wholes, “will be able to deal better with issues of cultural identity than with the challenges of social change.”35 This is in fact the case with Tillard’s theology of communion. While Tillard’s theory is able to point to the reconciling potential of the Christian Gospel, greater attention to conflict as a reality within the empirical church would help be a third avenue that would develop and support Tillard’s theological project. Here the question about the potential for an idealism divorced from the concrete reality of the church, first raised as a theological question, becomes more pressing in conversation with critical social theories influenced by the

33 Another resource for further reflection would be the growing literature on conceptions of “place” and “locality” being pursued by humanist geography. Tillard’s work, in its appreciation of “place” as having social scientific, cultural, and historical reality that enters into its spatial-geographical definition, already shows some convergence with these thinkers in presenting place as more than an empty stage, “simply there” in human experience. Further thought on the construction of space in relation to identity and the power dynamics inherent in the definition of place and “the local” would help to further nuance Tillard’s understanding of place. For two of the more prominent geographers exploring these issues, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); and Edward C. Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Press, 1976). 34 See Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion (New York: Continuum, 2005). 35 Schreiter, The New Catholicity, 53.

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work of the Frankfurt School and of Jürgen Habermas. Questions about the ease with which Tillard’s theology occasionally treats the phenomenon of reconciliation, and the functionalist presuppositions of Tillard’s understanding of communion, could be raised equally well by liberationist theologians or critical social scientists. Liberationist theologians speaking from particular contexts of oppression challenge Tillard’s assumption that the processes of mutual communion and the privileging of shared tradition always lead to a fuller incarnation of the Christian Gospel. From their perspectives, there may be times when fidelity to the truth of the Gospel is a more important value than the maintenance of institutional unity, and when justice might require a firm break with the tradition of the other churches. This might particularly be the case where oppressed or marginalized peoples are speaking from within the community of the church. Feminists, lesbian, and gay Christians, marginalized members of races or ethnicities within a church community, or other dispossessed groups, can find themselves disempowered by the narratives of consensus and conservation of ecclesial union to which Tillard’s theology points. “Communion” at all costs would then be a means of silencing the marginalized other, rather than authentically bringing the voices of the oppressed into the catholicity of the church. From liberationist perspectives, the way in which Tillard conceives of the processes of recognition and reception as normally operating in the relation between a teaching episcopate and a relatively passive recognizing/receiving church is open to critique as symptomatic of a conservatism that could lead to a closing of discussion rather than the valuing of different incarnations of Christian faith found elsewhere in his ecclesiology. While Tillard argues that dialogue between leaders and non-leaders in the church provides a definite role for the church’s members to be active in the process of ecclesial traditioning, taking this interaction as the standard underestimates the ability of lay members of the community to play a more active role in proposing the faith. For example, practices of popular religion, expressions of indigenous faith experience, nonreception of magisterial teaching, etc., might be recognized as legitimate incarnations of the faith in ways that ecclesial leaders might not expect.36 Critical social theorists and theologians in conversation with them, such as Gregory Baum, José Comblin, and Paul Lakeland, would suggest that further attention be paid to the way in which a theology of communion that privileges the maintenance of unity and consensus structurally marginalizes difference

36 See, for example, Orlando Espín, The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997).

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within the community.37 From a critical theological perspective, one might ask how Tillard’s theology of communion helps to postpone or undermine the negotiation of conflict within the church. José Comblin, for example, has argued that the promotion of a notion of communion, particularly at the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, was not ideologically innocent, but was an attempt to close off the avenues of lay participation and grassroots ecclesial action in the Roman Catholic Church that had found support in Vatican II’s description of the church as the People of God.38 By promoting the use of communion language, and particularly the “official communion ecclesiology” prominent in the 1985 Synod of Bishops and the later C.D.F. statement on communion, Roman Catholic officials demonstrated that communion language, thanks to its relative flexibility, can be ideologically manipulated not only to promote a particular understanding of church, but to link the question of ecclesial unity to a re-assertion of magisterial authority. Tillard’s understanding of communion, while drawing heavily on themes from Vatican II, is obviously broader than “hierarchical communion.” But, without questioning his motivations, one can still ask the critical question of how Tillard’s social location, his ecclesiastical status as a Dominican priest, a seminary instructor, and an ecumenical negotiator, may have influenced his promotion of unity as a central ecclesiological and soteriological value. Critical theory points to the way in which a preference for “peace at all costs” or for institutional agreement often covers over the continuing presence of real divisions of power and perpetuates a system of injustice by discouraging open discussion of conflicts and maintaining a status quo in favor of those currently holding power. Even the language of “diversity” can easily be used to push less powerful groups aside within the church as being “exotic” or “interesting” contrasts to a supposed “normal,” rather than as constituent members of a complex church.39 It seems that Tillard may not have been attentive enough to his own location within structures of power in the church and, in promoting a theology of ecclesial unity, underestimated the extent to which, ironically, a theology of communion as reconciliation could be easily used to prevent attention to the conflicts and fractures within the community that call for reconciliation.

37 See Gregory Baum, “Critical Theology” in Religion and Alienation (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), 193–226. See also Paul Lakeland, Theology and Critical Theory (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990). 38 Cf. Comblin, People of God, ed. and trans. Phillip Berryman (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2004), 52–62. 39 See Carmen Nanko-Fernández, “We Are Not Your Diversity, We Are the Church!” in Theologizing in Espanglish (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 1–20.

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To some extent, the relativization of the notion of communion in Tillard’s later work sets the stage for further dialogue between ecclesiology and critical theory. Tillard’s emphasis upon the good of diversity in human experiences and his concern to maintain the plurality of local churches in the face of universalizing tendencies in the Roman Catholic Church provide starting points where his understanding of communion could enter into fruitful dialogue with other theological voices. By attending more critically to the experience of the marginalized and voiceless within the church, ecclesiology could promote an understanding of communion as a fragile and complex reality to be worked out in the life of the Christian community, rather than simply as a given which could then be used to close the negotiation of its complexity prematurely. These three brief investigations into how Tillard’s ecclesiology might be brought into fruitful conversation with the social sciences are not the conclusion to a study, but outline beginning points for further investigation, analysis, and critique of Tillard’s theology of communion. The systematic and relatively restricted understanding of communion in Tillard’s thought allows his work to be brought into critical dialogue with other theoretical discourses from the social sciences and social theory. While I expect that Tillard’s understanding of communion will find grounds for confirmation in this pursuit, his idea of communion certainly would be enriched by an analysis of the concrete practice of the church. In addition, further empirical investigation, drawing on the insights of social scientists and of critical theorists, might problematize some of the simplicity of Tillard’s understanding of communion, creating in the long term the possibility of a more complex notion of communion that better explains the reality of ecclesial unity. In summary, I have argued in this chapter, first, that Tillard’s theology of communion differs from the contemporary ecclesiologies critiqued at the beginning of this dissertation in presenting a more critically developed understanding of communion that is systematically related to other topics in Christian theology. Particularly given its development and contextualization from Église d’Églises to L’Église locale, Tillard’s conception of communion has lasting value as a necessary, but not sufficient component, of a systematic study of the church, and does so by providing a set of terms for addressing the reality of unity and diversity within the Christian church. Second, I have suggested that Tillard’s theology of communion is hindered from its full theological and social-scientific potential by the lack of attention to empirical or social-scientific investigations of the contemporary church. His theory, drawn from scriptural and patristic sources, provides an illuminating picture of the ideal form of ecclesial unity and diversity, but fuller engagement with social-scientific studies of the contemporary church could help avoid the tendencies toward a romanticized view of communion, removed from its historical reality. Third, I think it is clear that despite this

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need for further investigation, many of the concepts that are foundational to Tillard’s understanding of communion—the value of diversity, attention to the particular, a concern for the reconciliation of opposed others, and an awareness of the conditioning of communion by other ecclesiological concepts—make the further development of Tillard’s thought in conversation with these other concerns both possible and likely to be fruitful.

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Conclusion As I suggested at the outset, this book attempted two major tasks. First, it outlined a set of methodological issues in contemporary ecclesiology in general and in reference to communion ecclesiologies in particular. Second, it explored these issues by investigating the ecclesiological work of the late Dominican theologian and ecumenist Jean-Marie Tillard, O.P. Tillard was arguably the most important Roman Catholic ecclesiologist of the last third of the twentieth century, and at the end of this exploration I hope that the reader has come to realize both the important contribution Tillard made to ecclesiology and to systematic theology more generally, as well as the strengths and limitations of his concept of communion for future theological investigation. Jean-Marie Tillard’s use of the concept of communion provides an essential building block for further ecclesiological research and ecumenical and ecclesiastical practice. Tillard’s use of communion, in comparison with some singlemetaphor ecclesiologies and with some other uses of communion in ecclesiology, is systematically grounded in three ways. First, Tillard’s understanding of communion contributes to a systematic ecclesiology by rooting the ecclesiological use of communion in a wider theology of grace and salvation. Tillard does not begin his exploration of communion in ecclesiology by looking at practical ecclesiological questions regarding ministry, teaching authority, local and universal church, etc. Rather, he begins his reflection on the church by attending to the deeper question of what salvation in Christ looks like in humanity’s social reality. The reconciliation of formerly divided others in Christ constitutes the very nature of salvation for Tillard, and so in a manner similar to that of his confrere and predecessor Thomas Aquinas, ecclesiology is located on a map of systematic ecclesiology at the intersection of Christology, pneumatology, and theological anthropology. The church, and the concept of communion, is systematically defined as the community of those reconciled to God and to each other by God’s saving grace. The second way in which Tillard’s concept of communion contributes to the project of a systematic ecclesiology is his use of the concept of communion to the particular question of ecclesial unity and diversity. This question was raised

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for Tillard and for contemporary ecclesiology by the particular context of ecclesial division and by the wider questions of diversity within formally unified communities highlighted by late modern and postmodern thought. But while Tillard’s understanding of communion was developed in response to these issues, he also pointed to the communion of diverse others in a single ecclesial body as a recurring feature of the Christian church and of Christian salvation more generally. Tillard’s theory of communion analyzes the church as a community of continuing negotiation and interpretation, in which a radical relativism between differing Christian communities and an equally radical insistence upon stale uniformity of practice are both ruled out. A third and final aspect of Tillard’s contribution to the project of communion ecclesiology is the manner in which Tillard limits the notion of communion in relation to other ecclesiological topics and questions. As I pointed out at the beginning of Chapter 5, this is the one area in which my research identified significant development in Tillard’s thought over the course of his career. The dominant lines of his understanding of communion can be found as early as his work on the Eucharist and the religious life in the 1960s, and in his work in the late 1980s, especially in Église d’Églises, Tillard makes communion a central, dominating concept for his ecclesiological thought. By the end of his career in the 1990s, however, and particularly in his 1995 book L’Église locale, some of the initial enthusiasm for the concept of communion that threatened to undermine its effectiveness had abated; in L’Église locale and in his articles of this period, Tillard presents communion in a more restrained way, relativizing its centrality in relation to other ecclesiological topics and concepts. While Tillard continues to assert that communion is a necessary component of any systematic ecclesiological investigation, he no longer suggests that communion on its own is a sufficient foundation for a systematic ecclesiology. In this manner Tillard suggests a way of doing systematic ecclesiology that takes up the potential of communion language as developed by various theological authors, without overstating or overextending this language by attempting to make it the only essential ecclesiological concept. While Tillard’s understanding of communion meets many of the criteria for a theologically adequate systematic ecclesiology, Tillard’s lack of attention to the empirical contemporary church is a lacuna is his thought. Tillard’s methodology drew a conception of communion from his reading of the Scriptures and the church fathers, and attempted in this manner to present the “nature” of the church, its underlying theological reality. But the policy proposals that Tillard makes on the basis of this ecclesiology and understanding of communion seem rooted in a relatively naïve model of the relation between ecclesial theory and ecclesial practice, a model in which ecclesial practices are derived directly from ecclesiological theory. Such a model fails to take into account the ways in which

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current and historical practice also influence one’s theoretical context. Tillard obviously knew that his own theological work was rooted in a particular context, and his theory is particularly a response to questions about the way in which the Christian church is inculturated in different places and contexts. But the lack of systematic investigation of the empirical reality of the church, either through social scientific methodologies or other social-theoretical models, weakens Tillard’s theory of communion by making it seem idealistic and removed from the concrete practices of the church, and weakens his practical ecclesial proposals by not determining the relation of ecclesiological theory and possible practice more critically. I have also argued that Tillard’s conception of communion does not completely rule out further social scientific investigation. A more systematic ecclesiology of communion will investigate Tillard’s concept of communion in relation to the concrete reality of the Christian church. Given that Tillard’s conception of communion drew upon the same textual and historical sources that continue to guide the practice of the Christian church, one would not expect contemporary practice to contradict absolutely his understanding of the nature of the Christian church, but a more social scientifically determined investigation would likely critique, nuance, and further develop Tillard’s notion of communion and its practical ramifications for the life of the church. Further research will look at communion as experienced in diverse local churches and communities, at cultural anthropological studies of the concepts of culture and locality in their relation to idea of the local church, and at critical theoretical analyses of conflict and reconciliation in relation to ecclesial unity. There is much room for further research here that analyzes ecclesial communion using both theological and social scientific methodologies to strengthen, critique, and further develop Tillard’s theory of communion and the ecclesial structures that ought to be determined by that theory. In addition to this need for further development and refinement of Tillard’s concept of communion, at least three other avenues of theological research would seem to be opened by Tillard’s concept of communion. First, Tillard’s theology of communion is rooted in a particular historical and theological context in which the language of communion was widely used by a number of theologians and ecclesial bodies. This book focused upon Tillard’s theory of communion as one of the most prominent, influential, and, in my opinion, theologically attractive versions of a communion ecclesiology. In the course of my exposition of Tillard’s thought, I periodically introduced other theologians’ versions of communion ecclesiology in order to highlight the distinctiveness of Tillard’s project in relation to his conversation partners. One area for continuing investigation, therefore, already begun by Dennis Doyle, is to compare and contrast communion ecclesiologies with a depth of investigation similar to that

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with which I have analyzed that of Tillard. Further investigation of the concept of communion in such thinkers as John Zizioulas, Joseph Ratzinger, Miroslav Volf, and Leonardo Boff, as well as more detailed historical analysis of its development in Roman Catholic and ecumenical documents through the twentieth century might further assist the dialectical comparison of Tillard’s concept of communion with more and less systematically and scientifically adequate communion ecclesiologies. A second area for further investigation, suggested already by Tillard’s location of his concept of communion within an overall theory of Christian salvation, is the utilization of the concept of communion in a theology of history and ecclesial tradition. The crucial role of the concepts of apostolicity and catholicity to Tillard’s theory of communion already addresses the issue of the unity and diversity of the Christian community across time, and the role of history and historical change in the communion of the Christian church. At the same time, other theologians have been addressing these issues more explicitly under the heading of a theology of ecclesial tradition. Bringing Tillard’s thought on communion into conversation with these projects will be a fruitful way of discussing the local church’s role in the process of “traditioning” in communion with other contemporary and historical local churches. Tillard’s language of communion gives such a theology the possibility of exploring the theological basis for a continuing dynamic of identity and difference in the church’s process of inculturation in different times and places. A third area for further theological research on the basis of Tillard’s understanding of communion is in the area of interreligious dialogue and relations. While Tillard makes reference in a few places to the relation between the Christian church and other religious traditions, it was not a central aspect of his theological investigations at any point. But the contemporary question of the bases for asserting a shared faith or a shared love of neighbor between Christianity and other religious traditions, and particularly with modern Judaism, raises the question of to what extent a theory of communion rooted in shared faith can be of assistance in understanding other religious traditions from a Christian theological perspective. Further research would be necessary to determine in what ways the concept of communion, and particularly Tillard’s language of “zones of communion” between more and less united Christian churches, might be flexible enough to describe the relation between Christianity and other religious traditions, or might be tied so closely to an understanding of communion in the historical event of Jesus Christ to preclude its application in other situations. My goal in presenting this research has been that by making the guiding principles of Jean-Marie Tillard’s theology of communion clear, and by evaluating the relative significance of Tillard’s proposals to contemporary ecclesiology

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and to communion ecclesiologies in particular, his understanding of communion might continue to contribute to contemporary ecumenical and Roman Catholic ecclesiological discussions in Tillard’s absence. I never had the privilege of meeting Fr. Tillard in this life, but in the course of my research have developed a sense of spiritual and intellectual kinship with Tillard, a sense of the communion in Christ to which he dedicated his heart, mind, and life. My hope is that my work, like Tillard’s, will enable the reader to better appreciate and understand the reality of this communion. It should be clear by the end of this book that I see Tillard’s understanding of communion as truly “good news” for a contemporary world increasingly aware of its own diversity, and increasingly flummoxed in its responses to that diversity, both within and without the Christian church. Tillard’s recovery of an ancient understanding of the church of Christ as a place, even the place, where that diversity can be seen as a grace, as a gift of God to be cherished and welcomed even when the negotiation of difference requires the further assistance of the Holy Spirit. Tillard’s theology of communion turns us away from a retreat into a sterile, fearful reduction of church unity to uniformity. It also is more than the importation of an Enlightenment notion of tolerance directly into our ecclesial life. Existence in inoffensive toleration falls short of more difficult, more challenging, yet more authentic graced life of communion in difference. The more the churches, both in their internal life and in their relations with each other, recover their ability to recognize each other and to live in mutual love, the more the church will be a sign and instrument in the world of “thehumanity-that-God-wants,” a humanity God is creating through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

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Bibliography

Selected Works of Jean-Marie Tillard, O.P. Ordered Chronologically The most current full bibliography of Tillard’s corpus is the work of Pascale Watine Christory, Science et Esprit 61 (2009): 257–82.

1961 “L’Eucharistie, sacrement de l’espérance ecclésiale.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 83 (1961): 561–92, 673–95. “La vie religieuse dans le mystère de l’Église.” Sciences Ecclésiastiques 13 (1961): 225–35.

1962 L’Eucharistie, Pâque de l’Église. Unam Sanctam 44. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962. “L’Eucharistie, purification de l’Église pérégrinante.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 84 (1962): 449–74, 579–97.

1963 “Le Concile, mystère de foi.” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 33 (1963): 277–88.

1964 “Le Dimanche, jour d’Alliance.” Sciences Ecclésiastiques 16 (1964): 225–50. “Église sacerdotale ou cléricale?” Maintenant 3 (1964): 10–11. “Le mariage est une communion.” L’Anneau d’Or 20 (1964): 395–408. Le sacrement, événement de salut. Études Religieuses 765. Paris: Office Général du Livre, 1964.

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Bibliography 1965

“La communion des saints.” La Vie Spirituelle 113 (1965): 249–75. “L’Église dans le dessein de Dieu.” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 21 (1965): 244–55. En Alliance avec Dieu. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965. “Les laïcs au cœur de l’Église.” La Vie Spirituelle 113 (1965): 521–35. “Le mariage, mystère de salut.” L’Anneau d’Or 21 (1965): 88–98. “L’obéissance religieuse, mystère de communion.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 87 (1965): 377–94.

1966 “Autorité et vie religieuse.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 88 (1966): 786–806. “Le mystère de la communauté. La vie des communautés religieuses 24 (1966): 2–18.

1967 “L’Église, annonce prophétique du salut; L’Église en l’homme re-créé; L’Église, service du Père et des homes.” In La Nouvelle Image de l’Église. Bilan du Concile Vatican II, edited by B. Lambert. Paris: Mame, 1967, 65–83. “Pénitence et Eucharistie.” La Maison-Dieu 90 (1967): 103–31. “Relations entre hiérarchie et supérieurs majeurs d’après les directives du Concile de Vatican II.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 89 (1967): 561–81. “Théologie sous-jacente à la Constitution: l’Église et les valeurs terrestres.” In L’Église dans le monde de ce temps, vol. 1, Études et commentaries autour de la Constitution Pastorale Gaudium et Spes de Vatican II, edited by G. Barauna. Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1967, 273–315. “Le ‘votum eucharistiae’: l’Eucharistie dans la rencontre des Chrétiens.” In Miscellanea Liturgica in onore di S.E. il cardinale Giacomo Lercaro. Rome and Paris: Editori Pontifici and Desclée, 1967, 143–94.

1968 “À propos de l’intention du ministre et du sujet des sacrements.” Concilium 31 (1968): 101–112. “Le Document d’Uppsala sur le culte.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 90 (1968): 812–33. “L’Eucharistie et le Saint-Esprit.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 10 (1968): 363–87. “Le témoignage des religieuses dans l’Église.” La vie des communautés religieuses 26 (1968): 115–27. “La vie religieuse et Vatican II.” Échanges 86 (1968): 26–28.

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1969 “L’Eucharistie et la fraternité.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 91 (1968): 113–35. “Le fondement évangélique de la vie religieuse.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 91 (1968): 916–55. “La mission de l’Église dans les discussions d’Uppsala, ou le décret ad Gentes du conseil œcuménique des Églises.” Spiritus 10 (1968): 63–75. “Nécessité du prêtre et du religieux dans l’Église.” In La Vocation religieuse et sacerdotale. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969, 69–91. Les religieux au cœur de l’Église. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969. “Vivre l’insécurité.” Lumen Vitae 24 (1969): 229–41.

1970 “Eucharistie et Église.” In L’Eucharistie, Églises en dialogue 12. Paris: Mame, 1970, 75–135. “La pauvreté religieuse.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 92 (1970): 806–48, 906–41. “Repenser le gouvernement des Instituts.” Vie consacrée 42 (1970): 193–210.

1971 “Catholiques romains et Anglicans: L’Eucharistie.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 93 (1971): 602–56. “Le mémorial dans la vie de l’Église.” La Maison-Dieu 106 (1971): 24–45. “Le pain et la coupe de réconciliation.” Concilium 61 (1971): 35–48.

1972 “La communauté religieuse.” Pts. 1 and 2. Nouvelle Revue Théologique 94 (1972): 488–519; 95 (1983): 150–87. “L’enjeu du dialogue catholique-anglican.” Lumen Vitae 27 (1972): 57–80. “Sequela Christi.” Spiritual Life 18 (1972): 144–57.

1973 “La ‘qualité sacerdotale’ du ministère chrétien.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 95 (1973): 481–514. “Roman Catholics and Anglicans: the Eucharist.” One in Christ 9 (1973): 299–308. “What Priesthood has the Ministry?” One in Christ 9 (1973): 230–69.

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1975 “À propos du ‘sensus fidelium’.” Proche-Orient Chrétien 25 (1975): 113–34. “L’évêque et les autres ministères.” Irénikon 48 (1975): 194–200. “L’horizon de la ‘primauté’ de l’évêque de Rome.” Proche-Orient Chrétien 25 (1975): 217–44. “La présence eucharistique du Christ.” Prêtre et Pasteur 78 (1975): 209–43.

1976 “Aux sources de l’obéissance religieuse.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 98 (1976): 592–626, 817–37. “ ‘Ministère’ ordonné et ‘sacerdoce’ du Christ.” Irénikon 49 (1976): 147–66. “L’obéissance dans la fraternité dominicaine.” Vie Consacrée 48 (1976): 211–22. “Le ‘sensus fidelium’. Réflexion théologique.” In Foi populaire, Foi savante, Cogitatio Fidei 87. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1976, 9–40.

1977 “Convergences actuelles dans la recherche œcuménique.” Proche-Orient Chrétien 27 (1977): 201–11. “La primauté romaine. Déclaration anglicane catholique, Venise 1976.” Irénikon 50 (1977): 80–93. “Réflexions de théologiens orthodoxes et catholiques sur les ministères.” Proche-Orient Chrétien 27 (1977): 294–300. “Remarques générales sur le projet d’une législation canonique pour religieux.” La vie des communautés religieuses 35 (1977): 285–88.

1978 “The Bishop and the Other Ministries.” One in Christ 14 (1978): 50–54. “Le dialogue entre catholiques romains et anglicans.” Unité chrétienne 52 (1978): 36–40.

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1979 “Address to the World Council of Churches Central Committee, Kingston, Jamaica, January 1979.” One in Christ 15 (1979): 282–86. “Ecumenism after Bangalore.” One in Christ 15 (1979): 322–33. “Incorporation into the Church (Membership)”. In New Catholic Encylopedia, Supplement, vol. 17. Washington: Catholic University of America, 287–90. “The Jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome.” Theological Studies 40 (1979): 3–22. “L’œcuménisme après Bangalore. Ouverture ou confusion?” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 101 (1979): 66–79. “Towards a Common Profession of Faith.” Ecumenical Review 31 (1979): 51–59.

1980 “L’Église de Dieu est une communion.” Irénikon 53 (1980): 451–68. “L’œcuménisme, une exigence spirituelle.” Unité des Chrétiens 39 (1980): 25–30. “Préparer l’unité. Pour une pastorale œcuménique.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 102 (1980): 161–78. “Preparing for Unity – A Pastoral Approach to Ecumenism.” One in Christ 16 (1980): 2–18. “Une seule Église de Dieu: l’Église brisée.” Proche-Orient Chrétien 30 (1980): 3–13. “Vocabulaire sacrificiel et eucharistie.” Irénikon 53 (1980): 145–74.

1981 “The Church of God is a Communion: The Ecclesiological Perspective of Vatican II.” One in Christ 17 (1981): 117–31. “Fidélité de l’Église catholique romaine à ‘la foi des Pères’.” Irénikon 54 (1981): 307–18. “Sacrificial Terminology and the Eucharist.” One in Christ 17 (1981): 306–23. “Vatican II et l’après-Concile: espoirs et craintes.” In Les Églises après Vatican II. Dynamisme et prospective. Actes du Colloque International de Bologne, 1980, edited by Giuseppe Alberigo. Paris: Beauchesne, 1981, 347–60.

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1983 “À propos du baptême: deux regards différents du cardinal Bea.” In Simposio card. Agostino Bea. Roma: Libreria Editrice, 1983, 186–94. “L’Assemblée de Vancouver. L’œcuménisme à un Carrefour.” Irénikon 56 (1983): 361–70. “Comment produire une théologie œcuménique?” Lumière et Vie 32 (1983): 45–56. “An Ecclesiological Assessment of United Churches from a Roman Catholic Perspective.” In Unity in each place . . . in all places . . . United Churches and Christian World Communions, Faith and Order Papers 118, edited by Michael Kinnamon. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1983, 57–75. “Église catholique et dialogues bilatéraux.” Irénikon 56 (1983): 5–19. “L’Esprit Saint dans la réflexion théologique contemporaine.” In Credo in Spiritum Sanctum. Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Pneumatologia in occasione del 1600 anniversario del I Concilio di Constantinopoli e del 1500 anniversario del Concilio di Efeso, Roma, 22–26 marzo 1982, edited by J. Saraiva Martins. Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1983, 2: 905–19. “The Eucharist, gift of God.” In Ecumenical Perspectives on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Papers 116, edited by M. Thurian. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983, 104–18. “Liturgical Reform and Christian Unity.” One in Christ 19 (1983): 227–49. “La réconciliation: interpellation de l’Église de Dieu.” Catéchèse 91 (1983): 35–50.

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1984 “Church and Salvation: On the Sacramentality of the Church.” One in Christ 20 (1984): 290–314. “Da Vancovuver a Costantinopoli. Riflessioni su un libro capitale.” Cristianesimo nella storia 5 (1984): 367–87. “Église et salut. Sur la sacramentalité de l’Église.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 106 (1984): 658–85. “Une lecture théologique des récits de l’institution.” Communauté Chrétienne 137 (1984): 406–16. “Theological Pluralism and the Mystery of the Church.” Concilium 171 (1984): 62–73. “Tradition, Autorité et communion universelle.” Documentation Catholique 81 (1984): 862–67. “What is the Church of God?” One in Christ 20 (1984): 226–42.

1985 “Bénédiction, Sacramentalité, Éplicèse.” Concilium 198 (1985): 121–35. “Deux projets, une tâche. Intervention du P. Tillard à la réunion de ‘Foi et Constitution’ à Stavanger.” Documentation Catholique 82 (1985): 892–95. “Did We ‘Receive’ Vatican II?” One in Christ 21 (1985): 276–83. “L’Église de Dieu dans le dessein de Dieu.” Irénikon 58 (1985): 21–60. “Œcuménisme et Église catholique.” Nouvelle Revue Théologique 107 (1985): 43–67. “Qu’est-ce que l’Église de Dieu?” Proche Orient Chrétien 34 (1985): 3–20. “Recognition of Ministries: What is the Real Question?” One in Christ 21 (1985): 31–39. “A Time to Beware of False Steps.” Ecumenical Trends 14 (1985): 145–48.

1986 “The Ecclesiological Implications of Bilateral Dialogue.” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 23 (1986): 412–23. “Ecclésiologie de communion et exigence œcuménique.” Irénikon 59 (1986): 201–30. “Koinonia-Sacrement.” One in Christ 22 (1986): 104–14. “Réception.” Ecumenical Trends 15 (1986): 47–49. “Die theologischen Grundlinien der Konvergenzerklärung über die Eucharistie.” Theologisches Jahrbuch 36 (1986): 373–83. “Two Programmes – A Single Task.” In Faith and Renewal, Faith and Order Papers 131, edited by Thomas F. Best. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1986, 100–10.

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1987 Églises d’Églises. L’ecclesiologie de communion. Cogitatio Fidei 143. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987. “Fondements ecclésiologiques de la ‘réception’ œcuménique.” Toronto Journal of Theology 3 (1987): 28–40. “La justice, la paix, le respect de la Création: quel engagement pour l’Église catholique?” Irénikon 60 (1987): 5–15. “Le local et l’universel dans l’Église de Dieu.” Proche-Orient Chrétien 37 (1987): 225–35.

1988 “Bishop.” In The New Dictionary of Theology. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988, 132–38. “The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral and the Ecumenical Service of communion.” In Communion and Episcopacy, edited by Jonathan Draper. Oxford: Ripon College Cullesdon Publications, 1988, 35–46. “Commentaire sur le ‘Rapport méthodiste-catholique.’ ” Documentation Catholique 85 (1988): 123–27. “Conférences épiscopales et catholicité de l’Église.” The Jurist 48 (1988): 220–36. “The Eucharist and the Visibility of Koinonia.” Mid-Stream 27 (1988): 337–51. “The Eucharist in Apostolic Continuity.” One in Christ 24 (1988): 14–24. “Le leçon œcuménique de Lambeth 88.” Mid-Stream 61 (1988): 530–36. “La réception de Vatican II par les non-catholiques.” In Christian Authority. Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, edited by G. R. Evans. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, 20–39. “Le statut théologique des conférences épiscopales.” Les conférences épiscopales (Cogitatio Fidei, 149), edited by Hervé Legrand, Julio Manzanares, and Antonio García y García. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1988, 290–98. “L’Universel et le local. Réflexion sur l’Église universelle et les Églises locales.” Irénikon 61 (1988): 28–40.

1989 “Anglicans and Unity: Canterbury and Rome: So Near, So Far.” One in Christ 25 (1989): 139–52.

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1990 “Anglicans et Catholiques: Une espérance menacée mais tenace.” Unité des Chrétiens 79 (1990): 9–11. “Canterbury et Rome, proches et loin.” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 37 (1990): 137–53. “Les exigences de la communion.” Irénikon 63 (1990): 163–85. “Un nouvel âge de l’œcuménisme.” Lumen Vitae 200 (1990): 17–32.

1991 “Consensus fidelium; Disciples-Roman Catholic Dialogue; Infallibility/ Indefectability; Koinonia; Primacy.” In Dictionary of the Ecumenical Movement, edited by N. Lossky, J. Miguez Bonino, J. S. Pobee, and G. Wrainwright. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991, 225–226, 302, 511–513, 568–574, 822–825. “Esprit, réconciliation, Église.” In Le vent de l’Espirt, edited by E. Castro. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1991. “L’Esprit Saint était-il à Canberra?” Irénikon 65 (1991): 163–204. “Faith and Order after Canberra.” One in Christ 27 (1991): 379–82. “ ‘Konziliare Gemeinschaft’, ‘Versöhnte Verschiendenheit’, Communio-Ekklesiologie und Schwesterkirchen.” In Gemeinsamer Glaube und Strukturen der Gemeinschaft, edited by H. Meyer. Frankfurt-am-Main: Otto Lembeck, 1991, 135–56. “The Presence of Peter in the Ministry of the Bishop of Rome.” One in Christ 27 (1991): 101–20. “Rome dans la communion des Églises.” Nicolaus 18 (1991): 117–41. “La tension entre primauté du Siège romain et conciliarité.” Nicolaus 18 (1991): 275–93. “We Believe.” One in Christ 27 (1991): 3–7.

1992 Chair de l’Église, chair du Christ. Aux sources de l’ecclesiologie de communion. Cogitatio Fidei 168. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992. “Communion and Salvation.” One in Christ 28 (1992): 1–12.

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1993 “L’avenir de ‘Foi et Constitution’.” Documentation Catholique 90 (1993): 840–41. “Canberra and Holy Spirit.” One in Christ 29 (1993): 34–64. “Concrete Koinônia.” The Tablet 247 (1993): 1146–48. “Eucharistie dans un monde en détresse.” L’Église Canadienne 26 (1993): 203–10. “La marque de Thomas d’Aquin sur le dialogue œcuménique.” In Ordo sapientiae et amoris, edited by Carlos-Josaphat Pinto de Oliveira. Paris and Fribourg: Éditions du Cerf and Éditions universitaires, 1993, 625–54. “The Mission of the Councils of Churches.” The Ecumenical Review 45 (1993): 271–82.

1994 “Faith, the Believer and the Church.” One in Christ 30 (1994): 216–28. “The Future of Faith and Order.” In On the Way to Fuller Koinônia, edited by Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994, 189–95. “L’impact du mouvement œcuménique sur les doctrines et les institutions chrétiennes.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 23 (1994): 293–309. “The Primacy-Conciliarity Tension.” Theology Digest 41 (1994): 41–48. “La question du Filioque.” In Études du comité doctrinal de l’épiscopat. Paris, 1994, 29–31. “Santiago de Compostela 1993.” One in Christ 30 (1994): 262–68. “Tradition, Reception.” In The Quadrilog. Essays in Honor of George H. Tavard, edited by Kenneth Hagen. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994, 328–45. “What Happened at Santiago? Faith and Order Challenged by the Future of the Ecumenical Movement.” One in Christ 30 (1994): 292–95.

1995 “Communion et Vie religieuse.” Irénikon 68 (1995): 342–55. L’Église locale. Ecclésiologie de communion et catholicité. Cogitatio Fidei 191. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1995. “The Gospel of God and the Church of God.” One in Christ 31 (1995): 211–21. “Holy Eucharist – The Sacrament of Faith.” Ecumenism 119 (1995): 26–29. “Le ministère d’unité.” Istina 40 (1995): 202–16.

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1997 “Faire émerger la communion l’option de l’ARCIC-I.” In From Malines to ARCIC, edited by A. Denaux. Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1997, 149–70. “The Ministry of Unity.” One in Christ 33 (1997): 97–111. “The Roman Catholic Church and Ecumenism.” In Vision of Christian Unity. Indianapolis, IN: Oikoumene Publications, 1997, 179–97.

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Index

Afanasiev, Nicholas 34, 47–8, 60, 64 Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission 30–1, 59, 66 apostolicity 73–6 Aquinas, Thomas 59–60 Avis, Paul 47 Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (Faith and Order) 47, 52 Bellarmine, Robert 2 blueprint ecclesiology 18–19 Body of Christ see Mystical Body of Christ “Called to be the One Church” (WCC) 29 catholicity 76–9 Caza, Lorraine 64 Christology 61–4 church institutional 40–1, 46–7 as Mystical Body of Christ 2–3 as People of God 3, 34 Comblin, José 15, 43, 131 communion ecclesiology and diversity/unity 45–6, 81–6 in ecumenical movement 27–32 history of 26–44 and Lumen Gentium 36–7 and reception 109–11 and recognition 100–9 and salvation 61–4, 86–93 and Trinitarian theology 41, 48, 93–100 Communionis notis (CDF) 42–3, 84, 85, 131 Congar, Yves 3, 5, 40–3, 53 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 42–3, 84, 85, 131

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Corpus Christ Quod Est Ecclesia (Tromp) 2, 33–4 De Ecclesia treatise 9, 23, 33–4 de Lubac, Henri 34, 48, 53, 64 diversity / unity 45–6, 81–6 Doyle, Dennis 113 Drey, J. S. 2, 33 Dulles, Avery 5–6, 9, 21, 118 ecclesiology history of 1–9, 26–44 and social sciences 16–20, 120–33 systematic 8–23 ecumenical movement communion in 27–32 Tillard and 51–2, 59, 66, 113–14 L’Église est une communion (Hamer) 38–40 L’Église locale (Tillard), development in 77, 83, 116–18 Ephesians, Letter to the 56, 89–90 Eucharist 47–8, 64–8 L’Eucharistie (Tillard) 51, 54–5 Faith and Order Commission (WCC) 29–30, 101–2 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler 14 Fuchs, Lorelei 30 Gros, Jeffrey 111 Gustafson, James 16–17 Habermas, Jürgen 129–30 Hâmer, Jérome 3, 38–40 Healy, Nicholas M. 18–20, 24, 124–5 Hertling, Ludwig 38 holiness 79–80 Holy Spirit 71–2, 94–5, 106–7

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institutional church 40–1, 46–7 John, Gospel of 55–6, 94 Kasper, Walter 83–4 Kelly, Gerard 101–2 Khomiakov, Aleksei 34, 47–8, 60 Komonchak, Joseph 16–18, 22–3 Koster, M. D. 34 Le Guillou, Marie-Joseph 38 Lonergan, Bernard 8 Lumen Gentium (Vatican II) 3–4, 20, 35–7 MacMillan, Elaine 30 Mannion, Gerard 15, 37 Milbank, John 19, 124–5 Models of the Church (Dulles) 5–6, 21 Möhler, J. A. 2, 33 mystery, church as 20–3 Mystical Body of Christ, church as 2–3, 5–7, 33–5 Mystici Corporis Christi (Pius XII) 2, 33–4 Nature and Mission of the Church, The (Faith and Order) 29–30 Nature and Purpose of the Church, The (Faith and Order) 29–30

recognition, communion and 100–9 reconciliation 89–93 religious life 68–71 Rikhof, Herwi 7, 12–13 Root, Michael 31 Ruddy, Christopher 60, 96–7 salvation, communion as 61–4, 86–93 Schreiter, Robert 129 sensus fidelium 107–8, 110–11 social sciences, and ecclesiology 16–20, 120–33 soteriology 61–4 Sullivan, Francis A. 52–3 systematic ecclesiology 8–23, 115–19 Tillard, Jean-Marie biography of 49–53 methodology of 53–60, 112–19, 123–5 “Towards Koinonia in Faith, Life, and Witness” (WCC) 4, 29 Trinitarian theology, and communion ecclesiology 41, 48, 93–100 Tromp, Sebastian 2, 5, 33–4, 35 Tübingen school 2, 33 unity / diversity 45–6, 81–6 “The Unity of the Church as Koinonia” (WCC) 4, 28–9

Ormerod, Neil 16, 18–20, 119, 124–5 patristics 57–9 People of God, church as 3, 34, 35–6 Philibert, Paul 112–13 Pilgram, Bernhard 3 Pius XII 2, 33–4 Rahner, Karl 21–2 Ratzinger, Joseph 34, 42–3, 44, 83–6, 95–6 reception, communion and 109–11

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Vatican Council II 3–4, 35–7, 51, 68 Volf, Miroslav 44, 48, 95–6 Williams, Rowan 8–9 World Council of Churches 4–5, 28–30, 51–2 Yarnold, E. J. 112, 114 Zizioulas, John 60, 90–3, 95–6, 98

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