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Vision of
God, Vision of Unity
The
Legacy of Carl J Peter and the Future of Ecumenism.
Inaugural Lecture of Gösta Hallonsten, Ph.D.,
Carl J. Peter Professor of Systematic Theology and
Ecumenism
The Catholic University of America
November . 12, 2002
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Gösta Hallonsten |
President, Dean, members of the Peter family, Ladies and
Gentlemen,
It is a great honor for me to have been given the opportunity
to give this inaugural lecture in my capacity as the first holder of the Carl
J. Peter Chair in Systematic Theology and Ecumenism. I am very grateful to the
donors, who have made possible the foundation of a chair in memory of the late
Carl J. Peter. I would like to express my gratitude, too, to the School of
Religion and Religious Studies for having appointed me to this position.
I never had the privilege to meet Father Peter. His
premature death in 1991 preceded my own appointment to the International
Theological Commission, on which Father Peter had served for two 5-year periods
when he died. The first time I encountered the name of Carl J. Peter was in the
middle of the 1980s, when I read the volume Justification by Faith[1]
from the U.S. American dialogue between Lutherans and Catholics. This dialogue,
as is well known, turned out to be one of the most fruitful, and as regards
published documents and background materials, most prolific dialogues
generally. The substantial document on Justification contributed much to the
progress of Lutheran-Catholic dialogue on the international level and
influenced the formulation of the Joint Declaration on Justification[2]
signed by the two churches in 1999. Father Peter was a member of the American
dialogue committee from 1972 to his death. According to Richard J. Dillon,
writing a memorial essay on the theologian Carl J. Peter, when entering the
dialogue he “undertook an earnest audition of both the Lutheran voices on the
Dialogue and their founding fathers. Most amazing to his students and friends
was the scrupulous and sympathetic study he devoted to Martin Luther himself,
whose image adorned a T-shirt given him by appreciative Lutheran seminarians at
Gettysburg.”[3] That Father
Peter conducted scrupulous and sympathetic studies, not only of the reformers
but also on their catholic opponents is clear from articles with titles like
“From Sermo to Anathema. A Dispute about the Confession of Mortal Sins,”[4]
in which he surveyed the controversy that caused the very outbreak of the
reformation. The style in which Carl J. Peter wrote was very dense, which
means, however, that in a few pages you get a wealth of information based upon
a thorough interpretation of sources. Most admirable to me in this connection
is his congenial and ecumenically constructive interpretation of documents from
the council of Trent. When I read his article “The Decree on Justification in
the Council of Trent”[5]
in the previously mentioned volume on Justification, I was deeply impressed by
his combination of ecumenical openness and fidelity to the faith of the
Catholic Church.
This double openness, towards the demands and questions of
the day and towards the tradition of the Church, characterizes much of the
writings of Carl J. Peter. Richard J. Dillon speaks of his ‘centrist’ instincts
that “kept him in an often painful struggle to keep ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of
the Church communicating with each other.”[6]
Dillon mentions further one of his graduate students, who boldly asked Father
Peter: “Are you holding the center, or straddling the fence?” – “Again”, Dillon
comments, “it was not the careerist’s guile but the faithful servant’s tender
conscience which kept him listening to both sides.”[7] This judgment can be confirmed from the many
articles and speeches that Father Peter held addressing the controversial
issues in that difficult time of the aftermath of Vatican II. I would however
like to focus more upon the originality of Father Peter’s contribution. In some
of his writings, he showed a rare ability not only to hold his position in
accordance with the faith of the Church, but also to pursue theological options
born out of a truly catholic spirit.
In this lecture I am going to comment upon some of those
theological options that belong to the legacy of Carl J. Peter and try to show
their importance and fruitfulness for the future of ecumenism.
Coming from a Lutheran background and having joined the
Roman Catholic Church as an adult, I am personally marked by the Lutheran quest
for the purity of the gospel. Characteristic to the Lutheran tradition is its
focus on the doctrine of Justification by faith alone. This insistence on
‘alone’, the well known sola fide, means primarily that works or merits
have no role to play in establishing a saving relationship with God. You are
justified through faith alone and continue to live as a Christian in total
dependence on the grace of God. As has been shown in the recent Joint
Declaration on Justification this doctrine of Justification by faith
alone might be interpreted in a perfectly catholic sense and hence should not
necessarily be a Church-dividing issue any longer. There of course still remain
questions to be solved before creating a lasting consensus, but according to
most ecumenists today those are matters of nuances. More problematic, however,
is that the Lutherans insist upon a second meaning and function of the doctrine
of Justification by faith alone. According to Lutheran tradition, ‘alone’
implies not only that works or merits of the individual Christian are excluded.
It further implies that the Church itself, its institutions and organization,
should be subject to a criterion or judgment flowing from the doctrine of
Justification by faith alone. Everything in the Church should be evaluated and
judged according to one criterion: does it promote the purity of the gospel or
not. In reformation times this led to the rejection, by the Lutherans of a
large array of teachings that the Roman Catholic Church still holds
irreformable. Among them should be mentioned the ministry of bishops in
apostolic succession, and hence the priesthood as a sacrament. Further the
understanding of the Eucharist as sacrifice, as well as confirmation, marriage
and anointing of the sick as sacraments. To this list we could of course add
the ministry of the bishop of Rome as something necessary to the being of the Church.
Even if today there is a growing consensus or convergence between Lutherans and
Catholics on many of those points, the problem is still there. Lutherans regard
Justification of faith as a doctrine of ‘unique significance.’[8]
They still argue that if you make any of the things mentioned, as e.g. the
ministry of bishops, a criterion for the existence of the Church, you add
something to the sole criterion, which is justification by faith alone. Then it
will not any longer be faith alone that rules, according to this view. Instead
you will end up with additions to Justification by faith alone, which blur the
purity of the gospel. This is the meaning of the famous Lutheran adage that
Justification by faith is the article by which the Church stands or falls (articulus
stantis et cadentis ecclesiae).
In dialogue with Lutherans, Catholic theologians of course
oppose this view. The divergence on this point, according to the Joint
Declaration on Justification, is the single most important remaining issue
between our churches. According to Catholic understanding you cannot apply the
doctrine of Justification as a criterion in this way. The institutions rejected
by the Lutherans, according to catholic faith, are institutions given by Christ
to his Church, and hence necessary for the being and well being of the Church.
We do not insist upon the sacramentality of the priesthood, apostolic
succession and the mass as sacrifice, to take only these examples, because we
would like to add anything to what Christ has done on our behalf. Rather we
believe that Christ himself has given those things as gifts to his Church. The
institutions of the Church as gifts of Christ are included in the work of
salvation accomplished by Christ himself. They are in no way to be seen as
additions to the sole mediatorship of Christ.
In this connection I would like to maintain, however, that a
great deal of the problem is the way the problem is formulated in the dialogue
between our churches. On the one hand it is quite natural in a dialogue with
Lutherans to concentrate upon the doctrine of Justification and its
implications. This leads however, on the other hand to the impression that the Lutherans
adhere to this central doctrine in a more radical and consistent way than the
Catholics. The latter seem to be saying: “Yes, but… Yes, but …” The impression
of a consensus on Justification, with the Catholics adding on some extras is
unavoidable. The Joint Declaration itself seems to give this impression.
In par. 18 it states the importance of Justification as “an indispensable
criterion which constantly serves to orient all the teaching and practice of
our churches to Christ.” It then goes on to say that “Lutherans emphasize the
unique significance of this criterion” and that “Catholics see themselves as
bound by several criteria.”[9]
To this statement of the Joint Declaration on
Justification that Catholics are bound by several criteria we could well
put the question: Is this really so? The answer again is: it looks like that,
at least if you take the Lutheran insistence on the sole criterion as your
point of departure. It could very well be maintained, however, that also
according to Catholic understanding there is precisely only one criterion. This
criterion is Christ. The Joint Declaration itself states that Justification by
faith “is an indispensable criterion which constantly serves to orient all the
teaching and practice of our churches to Christ.” I interpret this as meaning
that in reality Christ himself is the sole criterion to which the Justification
doctrine should orient us. From Christ flows everything, which is necessary for
the being and well being of the Church. Let us take the phrase: “Catholics see
themselves as bound by several criteria.”
If this is interpreted in the sense that according to the will of Christ
several things, like, e.g., the ministry of bishops, necessarily belong to the
Church, then this is the same as to say that Church doctrine and Church order
are ‘oriented’ to Christ. Even the Lutherans maintain that the sacraments of
baptism and Eucharist as such are institutions given by Christ to the Church.
They could never be subject to some sort of judgment by the criterion of
Justification by faith, because they are themselves indispensable expressions
of that Justification or channels for grace. The real difference between our
churches might therefore be found in the answer to the question, which gifts,
according to the will of Christ, necessarily belong to the Church.[10]
What I have said so far is nothing new or original. I would
like to direct your attention, however, to an article by Father Peter in the
afore mentioned volume Justification by Faith. The title of the article is
“Justification by Faith and the Need of Another Critical Principle.”[11]
Here, as well as in an earlier version of that same article, Carl J. Peter
gives a fair account of the Lutheran understanding of Justification by Faith as
the single critical principle in the Church. He further refers to the great
German-American theologian Paul Tillich who defended the principle in a
slightly different form as the protestant principle. Tillich however
underscores that this principle cannot function well without presupposing what
he calls Catholic substance. The Church’s life of faith and prayer with its
inherited corpus of tradition is the necessary context in which the protestant
principle is applied. Without that Catholic substance and with the Protestant
principle alone there would be danger of reducing or eliminating the
sacramental mediation of God’s Spirit. Father Peter takes this thesis from
Tillich and adds that perhaps Tillich did not go quite far enough.
“There is in fact”, Father Peter writes, “a very good reason
to assert the need of a critical principle distinct from both the Catholic
substance and justification by faith as principle, rule, norm, or stipulation
with regard to churchly discourse and practice. The Catholic substance is in
need of protection because it is in danger of being mutilated, be it out of
fear of demonization or of work righteousness.”[12] And he continues: “The criterion of
justification by faith alone is an imperative to keep the churches from
idolatry. But that is not the only temptation the churches face. They need
another critical principle to warn them that they may run the risk of
blasphemy. Out of a desire to avoid confusing the creaturely with the Creator
and to realize that no work of a sinful creature can win God’s forgiveness,
they may regard the sacred as something religiously indifferent or even sinful.
To fail to recognize the divine where it is in fact being mediated or embodied
because the mediating agency or embodying symbols are touched by sin may well
involve both insolence and arrogance with regard to the divine. Christian
churches need to avoid both idolatry and blasphemy in their attitudes and
stances toward the Catholic substance. Justification by faith alone helps as a
safeguard against the former; another critical principle is needed to assist in
avoiding the latter.”[13]
This other principle Father Peter formulates as follows: “Be not so prone to
expect sin and abuse that you fail to recognize God’s grace where it is at
work.”[14] Another formulation is this: “Is a desire to
trust and hope ultimately in God alone leading people to refuse
to trust or even disdain ecclesial institutions where God has promised through
Jesus Christ to be present and operative with His Spirit and grace? One ought
not to call holy profane; what God has made clean one ought not to regard as
unclean.”[15]
When listening to those words of Father Peter, the catholic
theologian might find the whole thing obvious. In the context of dialogue with
Lutherans it seems to have been bold words, however, and words, the Lutheran
participants contradicted.
“And there it stood”, comments Dillon. “Peter’s principle
did not win a place in the consensual statement of the Dialogue, but he had
insisted on focusing the discussion at its nerve-center.”[16]
That nerve-center can be defined as the question about ‘the concrete ways in
which the benefits of Christ’s saving death and resurrection reach human
beings’. The merit of Father Peter was to put forward this question in a rather
straightforward way. This was, according to the title of yet another article by
Peter, ‘A Moment of Truth for Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue.’[17] And Dillon further comments: “There are
times when this kind of forthrightness with what cannot be yielded is a sounder
policy than stepping gingerly to an ecumenical minuet. ‘I suspect we are at one
of those moments today’, declared CJP, who was certainly not given to the
strategy of the preemptive strike.”[18]
In a way we still are at this point after the Joint
Declaration and the very substantial document on Church and Justification[19]
from the international Lutheran-Catholic commission in 1993. In the end, the
doctrine of justification itself is no great matter of contention. As was the
case in the 16th century, so it is now. At the Diet of Regensburg in
1541 a group of Lutherans and Catholics worked out a consensus on the doctrine
of Justification. When it came to the ministry and sacraments, however, the
divergences were too big to allow for a consensus.[20] The central tenets of Christian faith are no
problem in our ecumenical relations, but the Church and sacraments obviously
are.
So, how should we then define the problem? Fundamental to
the Lutheran understanding is a dichotomy between Christ as giver of salvation
on the one hand and on the other hand the Church as the congregation of
faithful, the receiver of salvation. The Word of God as well as Baptism and
Eucharist belong on the side of Christ. This means, according to my
understanding that the mediation of salvation or grace is at stake. The
document Church and Justification makes this very clear. Lutherans might
acknowledge that the Word of God, Baptism and Eucharist in practice have their
place within the congregation of the faithful. You will certainly not have
access to those means of grace outside the Church. In that sense, but only in
that, the Church is instrumental to the saving activity of Christ. The Church
is at one and the same time “Recipient and Mediator of Salvation.”[21]
So in a way, the Church is necessary for salvation. On the other hand, according
to Lutheran understanding, this does not make the Church itself, the
congregation of faithful an instrument of salvation in a qualified theological
sense. Salvation is mediated by the Church only in the sense that this
mediation is taking place in the Church. As a matter of fact, however,
it is Christ alone who accomplishes salvation through the means of Word and
sacraments. Therefore the Church is an instrument of salvation only in a
derivative sense, according to Lutheran understanding.[22] The human part of the mediation is always to
be seen as rather passive, as in a way, channeling grace. The human
contribution in this process is always liable to sin and this is precisely the
reason why it should continually be judged by the criterion of Justification by
faith alone, according to Lutheran understanding. It should be added that
Lutherans are especially suspicious of infallible and definitive ecclesiastical
teaching and decisions, because they seem to give to human acts an objectivity
that could only be connected to divine acts and institutions.
However, the Catholic Church, too, as is underlined in the
above-mentioned document, acknowledges the priority of Christ in working out
salvation through the sacraments in the Church. She does not however, separate
the divine and human agents in the process of mediation of grace, in the way
Lutherans do. “On the contrary”, as Vatican II maintains “they form one complex
reality which comes together from a human and a divine element.”[23]
This complex reality means that the human is unavoidably involved in the
mediation of divine grace. The fact that sin persists in the Church and that
the concrete church always needs reformation does not do away with this
mediation. And that’s why Father Peter formulated his principle in this
way: “Be not so prone to expect sin and
abuse that you fail to recognize God’s grace where it is at work.”
This difference between the Lutheran standpoint that
mistrusts ecclesial offices and decisions and the Catholic thinking, which as
the document states, “finds it hard to see why the effects of divine
decisiveness should be intrinsically open to criticism,”[24]
is characteristic even for the wider ecumenical situation of today. This can
clearly be seen from the focusing of many dialogues on questions of church and
ministry in recent years. The Faith & Order document The Nature and
Purpose of the Church[25]
is only one recent example. It should be added here that the tension between
protestant and orthodox member churches in the World Council of Churches, if
not exclusively, at least to some extent also revolves around this difference
too.[26]
Now the question is whether there could be a way out of this
impasse. I do not really think that there is a ready-made recipe for healing this
division. Yet, I would like to suggest a further reflection on the role of
criticism within the Church. It seems to me that not only within the protestant
churches to which this is a matter of principle, but also within the Roman
Catholic Church itself there exists an unhappy opposition between the role of
critique and the role of authority in preserving the integrity of the Church
and her teaching. On the one hand, you might find too unqualified a belief in
criticism as a means to restore the original purity of the Church and to bring
her back to healthy conditions. On the other hand, in order to defend what
seems to be threatened, the role of authority sometimes is overly stressed. For
the sake of clarity, let me underscore that I do not put into question the
authority of the Church and its magisterium. I shall defend the right and
obligation of the Pope and Bishops to make precisely that type of definitive
decisions that Lutherans fear of blurring the Gospel. It could well be,
however, that we might need a renewed reflection of the nature of authority and
the role of consensus in the Church.
In this connection I have found two small articles of Carl
J. Peter very helpful. The one is called ‘Polarization, ecumenism and memories’[27]
and the other: ‘Theses on Christian memory, hope and assent: The current
theological debate about dissent.’[28]
In those two articles from the late 80’s, Father Peter addresses a situation of
division in ecumenism and within the Catholic Church. His complaint is this,
that dissent and division decreases the amount of sharing in the Church, and it
is precisely through sharing its ‘special memories and hopes’ that the Church
is empowered to witness to the presence of the risen Christ and to foster hopes
for the future.[29] And Carl Peter adds: “Viewed in this
perspective, assent to Church teaching has an importance that is often
overlooked or insufficiently stressed at present.”[30]
To my understanding, in those articles Father Peter clearly views the Church as
a consensus community. It is a community whose identity is defined as one of
sharing memories and hopes. Further, it is clearly the Church as a pilgrim
church that Father Peter has in mind here, the Church as the community led by
the Holy Spirit on a pilgrimage from the Resurrection of Christ to the
Parousia. A typical formulation is this: “The Church would suffer amnesia and
lose its identity were it not for the Spirit helping it remember Christ and
those who through his grace have embraced discipleship.”[31] But this is precisely why it is so
important, according to Peter, to assent to Church teaching. He maintains that
one of the most important functions of that teaching is to give “expression to
those memories and hopes as well as to their presuppositions and consequences.”[32] And he adds: “For many, recourse to those
memories and hopes may keep that teaching from being summarily dismissed as an
irrelevant word-game or dream metaphysics.”[33] Father Peter, in this connection, does not
look away from the fact the creeds and dogma are formulated in language
dependent on certain times and cultures. Here mention could be made of other
articles written by him, e.g., on Karl Rahner and the Chalcedonian dogma. But
the relative dependence of dogma upon language and culture does not do away with
its function in the Church. Neither do a healthy exercise of criticism and the
freedom of theologians do away with it. After having stated the case for
freedom of theologians, Carl Peter adds: “Nevertheless assent to the teaching
and discipline embodied in the Church’s everyday life both follows from and
builds up a community of faith and love based on Christian memories and hopes.”[34]
And further: “In order to foster such memories and hopes as well as to commend
them to others the Church needs, among other things, a large degree of
solidarity and assent to its teaching.”[35]
To my understanding, what Father
Peter has said in those articles is extremely fruitful. Yet his thoughts are
regrettably sketchy. Nevertheless they could function as an inspiration to renew
the sense of solidarity and consensus in the Church. Because we have the
treasure of the Gospel ‘in earthen vessels’, criticism is to be weighed out
over against the high priority of solidarity and consensus. The Church is the
community of memories and hopes. Its central act is the act of anamnesis, the
offering of bread and wine to God in remembrance of the death and resurrection
of our Lord Jesus Christ, in proclaiming his death until he comes and in the
invocation of the Holy Spirit to come and transform the community into that
which it receives. The authority of the magisterium and especially creeds and
dogmas, have the function to protect the memory of the community. Those
instances are by no means absolute in the sense Lutherans fear. Even as definite
and binding upon the faithful they are to be related to the event itself, from
which the Church flows and the memory, which she fosters. And further, they are
to be related to the future, a future that will one day make dogmas and church
structures superfluous. The necessary assent and solidarity with the teaching
of the Church should be made transparent to its real object. As human beings we
need the concreteness of language, formulations, authority in order not to lose
the sense of the very thing itself, in order to foster memories and hopes.
Nevertheless, it is not these acts in themselves that are the object of our
obedience and trust. The famous utterance of St. Thomas might be quoted here:
“The act of believing does not find its goal in the formulation but in the
thing itself.”[36] And so, the
necessary assent to church teaching, the necessary solidarity within the Church,
should be made transparent to its object: the memory of the death and
resurrection of Christ and the hope for his second coming.
The well-known Lutheran ecumenist Harding Meyer in an
analysis of the dialogue between the Orthodox and the Catholic churches treats
of the problem of the sacramentality of the Church and hence mediation from a
Lutheran point of view. He recognizes that the consensus between orthodox and
Catholics on this point distances them from Lutherans and makes an approach of
the latter to the orthodox difficult. Yet, Meyer underlines that the
catholic-orthodox dialogue in its stress on the narrow connection between the
mystery of the Church and Christ or the Holy Trinity at the same time preserves
the distance. It is Christ who acts in and through the Church and its ministry.
“But most important in this dialogue,” Meyer maintains, “is the continual and
characteristic emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit… The Spirit accomplishes and defends the transparency of ecclesial acts to
the saving activity of the Triune God”.[37]
When reading the writings of Carl J. Peter, you seldom come across
references to the Church Fathers, and so far as I know, never to the eastern
tradition. And yet, the affinity between the eastern orthodox approach to the Church
and the appeal of Father Peter to assent and solidarity in view of the memories
of hopes of the Church is striking. I am sure that Father Peter would have
readily subscribed to this statement from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in its
answer to the so called Lima report: “For the Orthodox Church, faith is a
pathway traced by teaching (doctrine) and ecclesiastical traditions leading to
salvation and deification.”[38]
This way is certainly the way that Father Peter imagined when he engaged in the
quest for Christian unity.
The title of this lecture is “Vision of God, Vision of
Unity.” I am deeply convinced that Carl J. Peter had a vision of Christian
unity, a vision that was instrumental in his ecumenical work. I have tried to
give some hints of what this vision was and how it could contribute to the
future of ecumenism. The vision of unity was, however, connected in the
thinking of Carl J. Peter to the vision of God. This was partly what he had in
mind when referring to ‘memories and hopes’. In fact there is a continual
stress on eschatology in the writings of Father Peter. This can be seen in many
articles with titles like this one: “Why Catholic Theology needs Future-talk
today”,[39]
to mention only one example. In 1972 Peter writes: “In my opinion perhaps the
single most important role of the theologian today is to ask the right
questions with regard to man’s hope; hence the crucial character of
eschatology.”[40] The same
year, in his presidential address to the Catholic Theological Society of
America, Peter develops the theme: “… if eternal life and death are ignored or
treated as side issues, the future is not given its rightful place in Christian
thought, life and worship. To break that relative silence about the future of
the individual after death, I submit there is a need for a theology less
concerned that in so doing, its practitioners may be dismissed as unscientific
and pre-modern.”[41] That this
stress on eschatology has repercussions on the topics I have discussed earlier
in this lecture is obvious and has already been hinted at. In relation to
assent to church teaching, the following commentary is clearly relevant:
“Eschatology can help theological hermeneutics… in this sense. It can call
attention to the fact that any formula with the claim of abiding truth can only
be understood in relation to world history and that means to its own future.
Because of its power and incalculability notwithstanding its trustworthiness,
because in short it is God’s and God, that future makes the present
questionable and scientific views in the present likewise. Those defending the
adequacy of dogmatic formulae forget this too readily. So often also do others
who argue against the ability of those same formulae to serve as guides that
cannot prove fundamentally false in the future or need to be contradicted for
the sake of the Gospel.”[42] Further, commenting upon the relation of the
Church to the Kingdom of God, Father Peter, clearly votes for the necessary
nexus between the two. And yet, it is not a question of identity: “The need for
a distinct Sabbath and a distinct Church will remain as long as the Kingdom of
God calls for man’s recognition of the provisionality of the present order...
Far from failing to take into account the sinfulness and infidelity of the
Church in its leaders and other members, this position with its eschatological
perspective implies or brings with it a sense of urgency to overcome
complacency with present defects. But the defects assume an importance only
because of the nexus between Church and Kingdom. And that nexus is a reality of
faith rather than evident reflection of facts.”[43]
The ‘eschatological reservation’, that all theology and
church life are conditioned by eschatology, as a matter of fact runs through
the writings of Carl J Peter from his two dissertations on St. Thomas to his
last contribution to the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue in the posthumously
published “The Communion of Saints in the Final Days of the Council of Trent”.[44]
His dissertation in theology - he wrote one in philosophy, too – bears the
title: “Participated Eternity in the Vision of God. A Study of the Opinion of
Thomas Aquinas and his Commentators on the Duration of the Acts of Glory,”[45]
published in 1964. Later on Carl Peter himself commented upon the choice of
theme for his dissertation as being not in accordance with the ‘mood of the
hour’. The time was, he says, “somewhat bleak in terms of prospects for Roman
Catholic theologians, choosing topics related to the thought of Aquinas.”[46] Today, we might remark, that the time is no
longer bleak with regard to studies on Aquinas. Yet the very topic of Carl
Peter’s dissertation seems not to stir up today’s spirits. Nevertheless it
seems to me, that the fact that Carl J Peter dedicated many of his years in
Rome to this topic has left a mark on his theology, which turns out to be one
of the most fruitful strains of his legacy.
In one sense, however, the topic of participated eternity
could be said to be relevant and of substantial importance in today’s
ecumenical theology. There is, especially, a growing awareness and discussion
among both catholic and Lutheran theologians on the importance of the Eastern
doctrine of deification or theosis. This doctrine has the advantage of
being somewhat beyond the Western opposition between protestant and catholic
understanding of faith and works. In their dialogue with orthodox
theologians, Lutherans most often have to realize that the synergism between
God’s grace and human efforts, defended by the orthodox is not exactly the same
as the synergism rejected by Protestantism. This has among others things led to
the renewal of research into the theology of Martin Luther in Finland and to
the thesis that Luther himself taught a doctrine of deification not totally
foreign to the orthodox one.[47] Further, a point where this new interest in
the doctrine of deification has a connection to Carl Peter’s dissertation topic
is precisely in the topic of participation. In one way it could be said that
Peter’s discussion of the beatific vision in St Thomas treats of the goal of
deification, namely participation in the life of God. That St Thomas from time
to time uses the metaphor of deification is as clear as that Luther also does
so. What is more, St Thomas has a concept of participation that makes the study
of his theology fruitful in connection with a dialogue with the Orthodox
Church.
That such a dialogue also has to overcome huge obstacles is
well known. Based upon the doctrine of the 14th century saint and
theologian Gregory Palamas, the Orthodox Church has developed a quite different
concept of participation, based upon its distinction between the essence and
energies of God. I shall not discuss that complicated matter now. It is however
worth mentioning that Anna N. Williams in a recent book, The Ground of
Union. Deification in Aquinas and Palamas,[48]
has made an effort to bring St Thomas and Gregory Palamas together. I am not
quite sure that she has succeeded in showing the affinity or compatibility of
those two important thinkers of East and West. I am mentioning it here only to
point to the ecumenical importance of such an undertaking and to its connection
with the dissertation topic of Father Peter.
Vision of God, Vision of Unity - The vision that was instrumental in the theology of Carl J. Peter was certainly one of unity. That is a unity within the Catholic Church, not least among dissenting parties, a unity among all Christians on their pilgrimage through history sharing the same memories and hopes, and a unity in the common destiny of the world and humankind. Above all else, however, the theological vision of Carl J. Peter has to do with the Vision of God, a theme with which he began his career as a theologian, a theme that in one sense or another runs through all of his theology and casts its light on the many different topics he discusses, and a reality to which we hope that he has finally attained. If this is the legacy of Carl J. Peter, the future of ecumenism in this perspective is a case of the ‘already now, but not yet’. It has the urgency of ‘an accounting for the hope that is in you’ in view of the salvation of the world. But at the same time it shares in the eschatological reservation: we might not be able to attain full unity through our own strivings here and now. After all, the striving for Christian unity is based upon the prayer of Jesus. Only his Father can answer that prayer.
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Revised: December 6, 2002
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