Reflections on Round XII of the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue

Reflections on Round XII of the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Ian A. McFarland Round XII of the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, published under the title Faithful Teaching,1 was my first experience in ecumenical dialogue, so—unlike many of my colleagues, including especially the round's co-chairs, the Rev. Dr. Lowell Almen and Bishop Denis Madden—I have no basis of comparison with previous rounds or other bilateral dialogues. Yet in reflecting on the history of the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogue in particular, I would like to suggest that there were two features of this round that may serve as helpful context for consideration of its results. The first of these has to do with the character of our dialogue group. Back in 1965, as the first round of the dialogue met (over a single weekend!) in the heady days of Vatican II and produced a much more concise (just one page!) document on the status of the Nicene Creed, the membership was not only entirely male, but also—with a single exception on either side (George Lindbeck for the Lutherans and James McCue for the Catholics)—all ordained clergy. Moreover, every one of those participants was, I understand, a life-long member of the communion they represented and, perhaps still more significantly, had vivid, living memories of expressions of genuine hostility between Lutherans and Catholics in the U.S. By contrast, Round XII not only had far more lay participants, but two of them—myself on the Lutheran side and Christian Washburn on the Catholic side—were baptized as adults. Speaking just for myself, having been born while Vatican II was underway, I have no experience of the sort of interconfessional hostility that my End Page 213 predecessors knew: throughout my entire adult life, ecumenism and interfaith cooperation among U.S. Lutherans and Catholics has been the norm. Moreover, over the course of its first thirty or so years Lutheran-Catholic dialogue moved from the fairly low-hanging fruit like questions of the status of the creeds to the monumental achievement of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ), achieving "a consensus in the basic truths" of the central doctrinal point of contention in the Western church since the Reformation, with agreement that the two communions' respective teachings on the topic are no longer to be judged church dividing.2 And yet our churches are still divided. Moreover, the sense of rapid forward momentum that characterized the ecumenical movement throughout much of the twentieth century has cooled. Michael Root (who, in a further example of the interesting ways in which the U.S. Lutheran-Catholic dialogue has evolved, has the distinction of having served both on the Lutheran and the Catholic sides!) has suggested, drawing on the language of Thomas Kuhn, that we have moved from an era of "revolutionary ecumenism" (as reflected in the JDDJ) to one of "normal ecumenism."3 Importantly, in Root's view this does not in any sense mean that ecumenism has failed or that further dialogue is pointless, but simply that we have to recognize that the sorts of issues that continue to divide the churches may be resistant to being overcome in the short- to medium-term and therefore require a corresponding adjustment of tactics and expectations going forward. It's in this context that I come to the second, more distinctive feature of Round XII. If you look at the previous rounds, they proceeded through a pretty standard list of theological topics: the creed, baptism, the Eucharist, papal primacy, teaching authority and infallibility, justification, scripture, eschatology. To be sure, some of these (specifically, the topics of papal primacy, infallibility, and justification) highlight areas of historical tension in Lutheran-Catholic relations, but none of them bear any particular marks of the present moment; that is, they would be natural points of conversation in any dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans—or, indeed, Catholics and any of the "magisterial" Protestant churches—since the time of the Reformation (or at least since the definition of papal infallibility at Vatican I). By contrast (and as the preface to Faithful End Page 214 Teaching points out), the topic of Round XII...