Ecumenical Jihad: ecumenism and the culture war.

Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War,

San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1996, pages

REVIEWED BY JOHN MUGGERIDGE

Father Edward Jackman, who left the United Church of Canada in the mid-sixties to become a Dominican, has had what he calls "a reconversion to Protestantism." It took place after his recent retirement as historian of the Toronto Archdiocese. "I found," he told Vic Report, a journal for graduates from his alma mater, Victoria University, "that the United Church tradition was very strong in me, especially in worshipping." Not strong enough, however, to curb his liturgical wanderlust. "I enjoy worshipping in the United Church very much," he admits. "But I also like to move about from church to church to see what is new, what is happening." What is happening, in his opinion, is the end of denominationalism. "A universal theology has to come," he insists. "My final project will be a study of how to be truly ecumenical. I want a broader Christianity, a Catholicism that will embrace Protestantism, an orthodoxy that will be changed through Protestantism."

A fresh approach

Media parsons and religion page editors have been bombarding us for so long with such United Church ecubabble that nowadays the very mention of ecumenism makes average Mass-going Catholics feel their eyelids drooping. This is unfortunate. Christian unity is a noble and important cause. One has to be grateful, therefore, to Peter Kreeft for at least having thought up a fresh approach to the subject.

Kreeft, a Catholic convert who has stayed converted, does not anticipate the dawn of a new universal theology. He already subscribes to an old one: Catholicism. Nor does he even feel the need to vindicate Catholicism's claim to universality. His latest book, Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War, insists that history is vindicating it for him. Or rather, God is. For no Catholic teaching is more important to Kreeft's argument than the one which states that Christ is lord of history as well as of the cosmos.

According to Kreeft, what has happened to the Church parallels what happened to humanity at large. God created her, punished her when she disobeyed Him, and today is in process of redeeming her. Creation coincides with the first thousand years of Church history, which Kreeft calls "the millennium of Christian unity"; then, in 1054, Constantinople broke with Rome, and there followed "the millennium of Christian disunity," during which so many holes appeared in Christ's seamless garment that, as Kreeft puts it, "The Body of Christ seemed to the world to be dying." But, being Christ's body, "it rises from its graves," so that today, "in the wonderful plotting of divine providence" we can look forward to a third millennium "of the resurrection of unity. . ."

Heading for reunion

What is it in "the wonderful plotting of divine providence" (i.e., history) that tells Kreeft we are indeed headed towards Christian reunion? The mess we are in. Kreeft uses the triumph of paganism and the institution of immorality in our world to prove that we are on the threshold of a new dark age, blacker even than the one St. Augustine faced in the fifth century. Kreeft identifies it as "the age of the Antichrist." He wants us to wake up to the fact that history has reached a turning point. Armageddon approaches. "This is not fantasy or mythology," he warns. "The spiritual war is literal. It is fully as real as any physical war." Meanwhile, as Saint Augustine's City of God and City of the World do battle along an ever-broadening front, our side continues to be "riddled with division and dismessage Christ is using current history to convey to us is a clear and incontrovertible one: Unite or perish!

And because Christ wills it, we are uniting--on anti-abortion picket lines, even at international population conferences. The fact that defenders of the family managed to keep all references to abortion and contraception from appearing in the final document agreed upon at Cairo Kreeft calls "a greater victory with Islam than the Battle of Lepanto was against it." The only thing, of course, that makes Kreeft able to be so insouciant about the Battle of Lepanto is the fact that we won it. But his concern is not with how the past produced the present, but how the present implies the future. Turning points that have already turned don't interest him. Like all millenarians he reads history forwards.

Reading history forward

This is a most dangerous occupation. Anyone claiming to see the future in the present will sooner or later surrender to fantasy. The past existed. Historians may distort it, but at least we can check their findings against the documents that have come down to us from it. Indeed, it is those very documents and the way in which scholars interpret them which lend reality to the present. But the future is what anyone chooses to say it will be.

In 1967, Paul Ehrlich predicted that by the 1980's North Americans would have had to resort to cannibalism. How do we know that Kreeft's talk of Armageddon and ecumenical jihads is not just as fanciful? Granted that rampant secularism has inspired Catholics and Protestants, as well as Christians and some Moslems, to pursue certain common political objectives. Such collaboration, however praiseworthy in itself, hardly entitles Kreeft to assert that "we seem to see . . . beginning to take place under our eyes not only a newly unified anti-Church world, but also . . . a newly unified anti-world Church."

An ecumenical Jihad?

But has the world ever been anything else but an "anti-Church" one? Our Lord Himself took for granted Satan's claim to have "all the kingdoms of the world" in his gift. And thirty years later, Saint Paul was surely working from the same assumption when he warned the Ephesians that ". . . we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Yet neither Our Blessed Saviour nor Saint Paul preached an ecumenical jihad.

And things were every bit as bad then as they are now. According to Saint Paul, it was common knowledge that Corinthian Christians went in for "such fornication that is not so much as named among the gentiles." Nor was it just a matter of some of the brethren falling into sexual sin. Those Corinthian converts, bemoans Saint Paul, were so "puffed up" that they had even stopped regarding incest as a violation of God's law. Clearly the curse of moral relativism among Christians is older than we think.

What, then, does the Church recommend as an appropriate Christian response to spiritual wickedness in high places? Watching and praying, keeping enough oil in one's lamp for when the Bridegroom returns, holding fast to that which seems good. Think how often in both Old and New Testaments loyalty over the long haul gets rewarded.

What we mustn't do is ask for signs. There's certainly going to be an Armageddon, but when or where is not our concern. Our best bet is to take as role models the Japanese martyrs. They kept Catholicism alive during nearly four hundred years of ruthless persecution. Nowhere does Scripture or Tradition require us to act on the sort of pentecostal utterances that Peter Kreeft goes in for. Nor, for that matter, need we waste time on Father Jackman's doctrinal hybridizing.

"Catholics in their ecumenical work," says Vatican II's Decree on Ecumenism, "must assuredly be concerned for their separated brethren, praying for them, keeping them informed about the Church, making the first approaches toward them." But our primary duty, according to that same Church document, "is to make a careful and honest appraisal of whatever needs to be done or renewed in the Catholic household itself, in order that its life may bear witness more clearly and faithfully to the teachings and institutions which have come to it from Christ through the Apostles."

Father Jackman's "reconversion to Protestantism" is not the right way to reunion. Nor, it seems to me, is Peter Kreeft's ecumenical jihad.