THE SAME AND THE DIFFERENT

There is a sense in many quarters that the ecumenical movement has become becalmed. A number of promising bilateral rapprochements has not yet resulted in the hoped-for unions. Enthusiasm can flag when great and honest effort is not visibly rewarded. But there must be two lessons in the failures, both of which are important for keeping up the spirits. The first is that mending the divisions of hundreds of years will take a great deal more time than anyone expected, though no one should really have expected anything else. The second is that these delays and setbacks are helping us to see what the problems really are.

The reformers of the sixteenth century believed that the removal of accretions which they saw as corruptions could restore primitive and therefore (they assumed) pure Christianity. But at the same time they themselves brought about a shift of emphasis in theological preoccupations towards a concern with sacramental and anthropological questions of grace and sin which had different emphases from those of the first centuries. A systematic reading-through of the contents of ecumenical journals during the last twenty-five or thirty years shows them reflecting the pervasive shifting of both attitudes and expectations which has taken place in almost all churches since the Second Vatican Council, and the ways in which these expectations may be at variance with the stated agenda.