Karl Barth and Vatican II

Reading an interesting piece in Etudes Théologiques & Religieuses about Karl Barth's take on Vatican II. In the piece, "L'ombre de Karl Barth à Vatican II", Gilles Routhier of the Université Laval in Québec argues that Barth, unlike his Calvinist confreres - W. A. Visser 't Hooft and Lukas Vischer - was less interested in the significance of Vatican II for ecumenical relations than what it said about the renewal of the Catholic Church, and whether the churches within the World Council of Churches were not also being challenged to engage in a similar process of renewal. Though ill health prevented him from accepting an invitation from the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity to be present at the Council, he visited Rome after the event and shortly before his death. For Barth, the place given to the Scriptures at the centre of Vatican II represented a new concern with the Word of God, even though he questioned the Roman "and" ... the Scriptures "and" Tradition ... Barth, writes Rothier, frequently compared what he found in Vatican II and in the World Council of Churches. For example, he praised the strongly Christological address by Paul VI at the opening of the second session. "Solches hat man weder in Amsterdam, noch in Evanston, noch in New Delhi gehört," he wrote, referring to the first three assemblies of the WCC.

The globalisation of the World Council of Churches

Following its third assembly in 1961 in New Delhi, the World Council of Churches developed from being a body with a mainly North American/European orientation to one with a global scope.The integration of the WCC and the International Missionary Council opened the council to the churches of Africa and Asia.  At the same time, the broader Orthodox participation that followed New Delhi meant a greater role for churches from Eastern Europe. In Latin America, the movement for liberation theology was emerging, charted by Protestants as well as Roman Catholics. The holding of the Second Vatican Council created a new openness in the Roman Catholic Church offering cooperation with the WCC not only in Faith and Order issues - but in the second half of the 1960s, at least, also on issues relating to society, development and peace. The civil rights movement in the United States and the student protest movements in North America and Western Europe impacted on the churches, and were reflected in the World Conference on Church and Society in Geneva in 1966 and the WCC's fourth assembly two years later in Uppsala.

An international conference from 4 to 6 March 2011 at the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey organized under the auspices of the  research project,  “On the Road to a Global Christendom: European Protestant Ecumenism and the ‘Discovery’ of the ‘Third World’”, is to examine this these changes from a global historical and ecumenical perspective. It will be of particular importance to analyze the historical, sociopolitical and theological developments in the 1960s and 1970s which contributed to this change (decolonization, liberation movements, revolutions, human rights, the Second Vatican Council, the rise of contextual theologies and so on.).

A call for papers has been addressed to researchers working on areas concerning the WCC since the 1960s, from a historical or theological perspective, or those researching the “getting global” of churches during the 1960s and 1970s from other angles.More details here (scroll down for English).

Poetic ecumenism

In his first sermon as general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Olav Fykse Tveit spoke of the need to enter into the depths of this world and its suffering and divisions - and together, to be the voice calling to newness of life. But he also quoted a poem by a Norwegian poet, Olav H. Hauge, expressing the dream of love, love for the life we have, love for the world we live in, today and tomorrow:

Remembering Lesslie Newbigin

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lesslie Newbigin, an English Presbyterian missionary to India who went on in 1947 to become one of the founders and a bishop of the (United) Church of South India, and subsequently general secretary of the International Missionary Council and associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Coincidentally, the Times newspaper on 5 December published an account of Newbigin's passage to India in which he recounts that as soon as the ship reached Suez on the voyage out all the Europeans aboard ship donned topees (pith helmets) and insisted that he go ashore to buy one: “Literally you were a cad if you didn’t wear a topee,” he recalled, years later. “It wasn’t just that you were silly, you were definitely, you know, you had gone native ... it was rather like having taken to meths drinking or something.”