Wresting authority from the hardliners

There has been stringent criticism from Catholic clergy (Father Denis Faul, Father James McEvoy and the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell) of the President, Mrs McAleese, who received Communion with her family at an Anglican ceremony on December 7th.

I would suggest that those clergy are mistaken, and that the President acted in the truest tradition of Jesus and is to be congratulated. Insofar as the Catholic clergy, and indeed Canon Law, would wish to prevent what has occurred, it is in fact they who are in error.

Dr Connell has written (The Irish Times, December 19th): "The reality is that disunity still exists between the churches on core differences in belief, and these differences create a fundamental barrier to inter-communion . . . The Eucharist effects or brings about unity, but within a shared understanding of what is happening, within the parameters of beliefs already held."

There you have the nub of the problem. There you have the reason why these clergy and Canon Law are wrong.

The emphasis on credal formulae as the passport to "belonging" was an alien concept in the earliest years of the Christian movement. This is too often ignored by those who treat the developments of the 4th century, on which mainline or institutional Christianity depends, as fundamental.

The true foundations of Christianity, in the years (roughly) AD50-200, point in a very different direction.

In his book The Dead Sea Scrolls (1977), Prof Geza Vermes makes the significant point that Judaism in the time of Jesus was a non-dogmatic religion in terms of creed.

At that time you were born a Jew and, whether you were extreme liberal or ultra-orthodox, you remained a valid member of the single entity of believers.

Even the Sadducees, who denied as fundamental a point as the resurrection of the body, remained fully with in the ambit of Judaism and, in fact, provided many of the more influential members of the priesthood.

It can never be emphasised enough that Jesus both inherited this wideranging concept of what constituted membership of the group and put it into practice where his disciples were concerned.

The true church of the apostles was a church of many facets, where each facet, however different, was accepted and valued.

Have no doubt about it, Jesus himself was on the liberal wing of Judaism. He was a follower, if one puts the matter in rabbinical terms, of the "spirit of the law" school (Hillel) rather than the "letter of the law" school (Shammai).

Whether one thinks of the plucking and eating of the ears of corn on the Sabbath, or Jesus accepting the hospitality of "publicans and sinners", or his pardoning of the woman taken in adultery (in preference to the normal imposition of death by stoning), he inclined always to the attitudes characteristic of Hillel.

Interestingly, the "liberal Jesus" emerges in even clearer focus in ex tra-canonical scriptural texts (e.g. the Gospel of Thomas), a fact which leads to the valid deduction that the emergent "authoritarian" church did its best to play down the liberalism of Jesus and reassert an aura of traditionalism.

This trend against liberalism can be observed, most importantly, even in the canonical Gospels.

At Luke 6.5, the manuscript D contains the following, omitted in other manuscripts: "On the same day Jesus saw a man working on the Sabbath. He said to him: `Man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are accursed and a transgressor of the law'." This is certainly an original saying of Jesus, omitted no doubt because of the pro-authoritarian tendency.

To comment on a personal level, my father's family were Quakers in England from as early as the 1790s: my mother's family were Breton-speaking Roman Catholics. I was brought up as an Anglican, as a compromise, but as a student in Paris I often accompanied my maternal grandmother to Mass and went with her to receive.

For her part she came with me to receive Communion in Anglican churches. In more recent years, I have myself on occasion received Communion from Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland.

I must confess to finding trite and condescending what Dr Connell has to say about "inter-church marriages", i.e. "it is [such people] who on a weekly basis bear the pain of our disunity . . . I would say to them in encouragement that much progress has been made in the area of shared faith".

Being true to the historical position of Jesus means that concentration on dogma and belief, items which for too long have bedevilled the "official" Christian church, must take second place to shared experience in practice.

The ecumenical movement has concentrated too much on trying to formulate agreed statements on belief and dogma. The true path to ecumenism is shared experience, not shutting out those who think or interpret differently but letting each take from the shared experience what is important in personal terms.

In fact those from an inter-church background are at the cutting edge of ecumenical reality. Unlike the unilateralist hardliners, they know that truth has many facets.

They know that the question cannot be reduced to the simple "we are right/you are wrong" formula, and that each looks from different corners of a darkened room to a single truth at the centre. They also know that that truth may appear different from different angles of view.

In sum, President McAleese's decision to take Anglican Communion is a truly momentous event in ecumenical terms and one which helps, in however small a way, to wrest authority from the hardliners.

Let us hope that as many as possible, where circumstances are right, will follow the President's example. In that way cumulative pressure will build inexorably towards changes in an institutional code which, in this instance, is asssuredly of man, not of God.

Dr Martin Pulbrook is a lecturer in Ancient Classics at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth