Celebrating church: Ecumenical contributions to a liturgical ecclesiology

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation into the concept of ‘church’, taking the liturgical gathering as its paradigm. It is a work at the crossroads of systematic theology, ecumenical theology, ecclesiology and ‘liturgical theology’. The main question is: How is one’s ecclesiology affected, when the liturgy—particularly the Sunday gathering around Baptism, the Word and the Eucharist—is regarded as the beating heart of the church, from which all other elements of ecclesial identity and living flow? The largest part of the book investigates the relationship between church and liturgy in the work of some 25 twentieth-century theologians from several countries and ecclesial traditions. In the Orthodox chapter, N. Afanasiev is presented as the father of ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’ and J. Zizioulas as a contemporary interpreter and transformer of this school of thought. The Roman Catholic chapter includes H. de Lubac and J. Ratzinger (currently the Bishop of Rome), who both approach the church from a eucharistic perspective. In the same chapter, L. Boff contributes a critical and J. Tillard an ecumenical voice. Because of the author’s own ecclesiastical allegiance, the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht receive attention in a separate chapter, in which eucharistic-ecclesiological thought is discovered in A. Rinkel, U. Kry, W. Kppers, K. Stalder, J. Visser, H. Aldenhoven and U. von Arx. The Anglican chapter reveals that leading divines such as G. Hebert, G. Dix and M. Ramsey based their ecclesiological thought on an intimate relationship between liturgy (eucharist) and the church, whereas the influential theologians P. Avis, R. Williams (currently the Archbishop of Canterbury) and C. Pickstock continue the same line of thought in present-day circumstances. That a liturgical approach to the church is not foreign to Protestantism is showed by reference to the works of G. van der Leeuw, O. Noordmans, J.-J. von Allmen, G. Wainwright, G. Lathrop (from whom the phrase ‘liturgical ecclesiology’ is borrowed) and A. and J. Ploeger. This part of the book is concluded by a chapter on ecumenical convergence texts from Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982) to The Nature and Mission of the Church (2005). An extensive final chapter synthesises the findings into a coherent ecclesiological approach. First, some fundamental theological themes are investigated: Koinonia as an overarching concept of both theological depth and concrete tangibility; the interdependence of christology, pneumatology and ecclesiology; and the relationship between ‘people of God’, ‘body of Christ’ and ‘temple of the Spirit’. Then follows the specifically ‘liturgical-ecclesiological’ question: How is the centrality of baptism, the eucharist and other elements of the liturgy related to the theology and life of the church? Finally, three important sub-questions are treated: the consequences of a liturgical view on the church for the meaning of the ordained ministry (including an ecumenical approach to the ministry of the bishop), the dialectic between the local and the universal church (including an ecumenical discourse on the primacy of the Bishop of Rome), and the ‘more than ritual’ meaning of Christian liturgy, which overflows into doxology, ethics and mission. The study understands itself as a contribution to ecumenical convergence on these central themes.