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    The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves
    The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves
    The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves
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    The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves

    By Norm Klassen

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    In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer asks a basic human question: How do we overcome tyranny? His answer goes to the heart of a revolutionary way of thinking about the very end of human existence and the nature of created being. His answer, declared performatively over the course of a symbolic pilgrimage, urges the view that humanity has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. In portraying this outlook, Chaucer contributes to what has been called the "palaeo-Christian" understanding of creaturely freedom. Paradoxically, genuine freedom grows out of the dependency of all things upon God.
    In imaginatively inhabiting this view of reality, Chaucer aligns himself with that other great poet-theologian of the Middle Ages, Dante. Both are true Christian humanists. They recognize in art a fragile opportunity: not to reduce reality to a set of dogmatic propositions but to participate in an ever-deepening mystery. Chaucer effectively calls all would-be members of the pilgrim fellowship that is the church to behave as artists, interpretively responding to God in the finitude of their existence together.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCascade Books
    Release dateNov 9, 2016
    ISBN9781498283694
    The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision: Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves
    Author

    Norm Klassen

    Norm Klassen is Associate Professor of English Literature at St Jerome's University in Waterloo, Canada. He is the author of Chaucer on Love, Knowledge, and Sight (1995) and coauthor of The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education (2006). He recently won an award from the Association of Catholic Publishers for excellence in theology (3rd place) Befriending Geoffrey Chaucer: A Review by Doug Sikkema

    Read more from Norm Klassen

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      The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision - Norm Klassen

      9781498283687.kindle.jpg

      The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision

      Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves

      Norm Klassen

      7585.png

      THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE BEATIFIC VISION

      Chaucer on Overcoming Tyranny and Becoming Ourselves

      Veritas 22

      Copyright ©

      2016

      Norm Klassen. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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      8

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      , Eugene, OR

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      Cascade Books

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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      paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8368-7

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8370-0

      ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8369-4

      Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Names: Klassen, Norman, 1962–.

      Title: The fellowship of the beatific vision : Chaucer on overcoming tyranny and becoming ourselves / Norm Klassen.

      Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books,

      2016

      | Series: Veritas | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers:

      isbn 978-1-4982-8368-7 (

      paperback

      ) | isbn 978-1-4982-8370-0 (

      hardcover

      ) | isbn 978-1-4982-8369-4 (

      ebook

      )

      Subjects: LCSH: 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400—Philosophy. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Religion in literature. 4. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages—Poetry. 5. Philosophy, Medieval, in literature. I. Series. II. Title.

      Classification: PR1933.K6 K58 2016

      (

      print

      ) |

      PR1933

      (

      ebook

      )

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      February 14, 2017

      Thanks to John Curran and Renascence for permission to reuse material that first appeared, in somewhat different form, in Renascence 68.2 under the article title, Mary’s Swollen Womb: What It Looks Like to Overcome Tyranny in The Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale. Thanks to Sage Publications and to Mark Eaton and Paul Contino, current and past editors respectively of Christianity and Literature, for clarifying my right to reuse material that appeared in volume 64 of that journal under the title The Coherence of Creation in the Word: The Rhetoric of Lines 1–34 of Chaucer’s General Prologue.

      My thanks also to the British Library for permission to reproduce an image that appears on folio ciiii of William Caxton’s second published edition of The Canterbury Tales in G.11586. And thanks to Art Resource for permission to reproduce the image from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Children’s Games that appears on the cover of this book as well as the detail from that painting and another from Fra’ Angelico’s painting The Last Judgement that appear inside.

      I hereby acknowledge that the twenty-line-long quotation of The Mirour of Mans Saluacioun, well within the fair use guidelines, is from the critical edition edited by Avril Henry and published in Philadelphia by University of Pennsylvania Press (1987).

      Into the Instant’s Bliss from ONCE IN THE WEST by Christian Wiman. Copyright ©

      2014

      by Christian Wiman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

      Modern quotations of the Bible are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      Cover image by Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Preface

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      Part One: Pilgrimage and the Beatific Vision

      Chapter 1: The Coherence of Creation in the Word: The Nature of Pilgrimage and the Opening Sentences of The Canterbury Tales

      Part Two: Past and Present

      Chapter 2: From Creon to Christ’s Body: Tyranny in The Knight’s Tale and the Formation of the Pilgrim Fellowship

      Chapter 3: Mary’s Swollen Womb: The Beauty of Life Together

      Part Three: Becoming Ourselves as Artists

      Chapter 4: What’s the Matter? The Artist and the Fellowship of the Beatific Vision

      Conclusion

      Bibliography

      VERITAS

      Series Introduction

      . . . the truth will set you free (John 8:32)

      In much contemporary discourse, Pilate’s question has been taken to mark the absolute boundary of human thought. Beyond this boundary, it is often suggested, is an intellectual hinterland into which we must not venture. This terrain is an agnosticism of thought: because truth cannot be possessed, it must not be spoken. Thus, it is argued that the defenders of truth in our day are often traffickers in ideology, merchants of counterfeits, or anti-liberal. They are, because it is somewhat taken for granted that Nietzsche’s word is final: truth is the domain of tyranny.

      Is this indeed the case, or might another vision of truth offer itself? The ancient Greeks named the love of wisdom as philia, or friendship. The one who would become wise, they argued, would be a friend of truth. For both philosophy and theology might be conceived as schools in the friendship of truth, as a kind of relation. For like friendship, truth is as much discovered as it is made. If truth is then so elusive, if its domain is terra incognita, perhaps this is because it arrives to us—unannounced—as gift, as a person, and not some thing.

      The aim of the Veritas book series is to publish incisive and original current scholarly work that inhabits the between and the beyond of theology and philosophy. These volumes will all share a common aspiration to transcend the institutional divorce in which these two disciplines often find themselves, and to engage questions of pressing concern to both philosophers and theologians in such a way as to reinvigorate both disciplines with a kind of interdisciplinary desire, often so absent in contemporary academe. In a word, these volumes represent collective efforts in the befriending of truth, doing so beyond the simulacra of pretend tolerance, the violent, yet insipid reasoning of liberalism that asks with Pilate, What is truth?—expecting a consensus of non-commitment; one that encourages the commodification of the mind, now sedated by the civil service of career, ministered by the frightened patrons of position.

      The series will therefore consist of two wings: (1) original monographs; and (2) essay collections on a range of topics in theology and philosophy. The latter will principally be the products of the annual conferences of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy (www.theologyphilosophycentre .co.uk).

      Conor Cunningham and Eric Austin Lee, Series editors

      For CN, an early instructor in the mystery of koinonia.

      La sete natural che mai non sazia
      se non con l’acqua onde la femminetta
      sammaritana demandò la grazia
      mi travagliava . . .

      Preface

      T

      he Fellowship of the

      Beatific Vision lays claim to three features of The Canterbury Tales for reflection in terms of contemporary theology. The first is that its author, Geoffrey Chaucer, takes for granted the Christian symbolism of pilgrimage. The second is that the pilgrim fellowship, the church, embodies the answer to a question that Chaucer poses in the first tale, which is set in pagan Greece: how does humanity overcome the problem of tyranny? (Christ the Word shines through all the interactions of redeemed humanity and is the source of its inextinguishable hope.) Finally, for Chaucer, the beauty of Christ is manifest in specific, interpretive acts of faith and obedience in response to the gospel. Looking beyond his own work, the poet encourages all members of the pilgrim church to see themselves as artists in performing such acts.

      The beatific vision unifies these commitments. It represents the culmination of symbolic pilgrimage and describes the nature of the fellowship that endures in its togetherness. Redeemed humanity has its being in going out from itself towards God, upon whom it also depends for its interactions together. For Chaucer, the life of the pilgrim fellowship provides a picture of what all of created reality is like. It has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself.

      Chaucer is a theologian. Poetry and story serve him as necessary forms for giving expression to Christian commitments and imagining their implications. Through indirection and defamiliarization, he invites his audience and readers to explore the strangeness of the ground of belief: that God has addressed and sustains the world through the incarnate Word. Christian writers and artists like Chaucer can help both believers and unbelievers to recognize that Christian reflection proceeds by hospitality rather than by propositions. In The Canterbury Tales, this fourteenth-century poet invites one into a world to discover there whatever there is to be discovered, and to share in the enlarging of that world. Everyone operates within a framework of beliefs and assumptions outside of which they can never entirely locate themselves all at once. The awareness of situatedness alone provides the common ground of human experience. While the universality of interpretation does not relativize all frameworks, it does entail that one can only proceed by inhabiting a given narrative, and by inviting others to come and see.

      The literary and theological tradition to which Chaucer makes his contribution results from the ongoing practice of responding to the Word. For his part, Chaucer sees the comic incongruity between what he glimpses created reality might be like in its relatedness in the Word, and what it seems to be in the experience and the limited imaginations of the pilgrims. He throws his reader into a world of interruptions, gossip, conflict, and, above all, attempts to have the last word. The pilgrims mostly demonstrate only inadvertently that they participate in the life of a Word from God. Their lasting togetherness on pilgrimage to Canterbury is all the more remarkable.

      Orientation to the beatific vision, as it unfolds in The Canterbury Tales, has implications for Chaucer’s attitude to two topics of overwhelming contemporary importance. One is the relationship between word and meaning in language. The other is the possibility of reconciling unending difference and the unity of truth, beauty, or goodness. These issues might seem to be of interest primarily to specialists: to those who work in the areas of language and literature, say, or to those concerned with the details of historical inquiry and historical perspective. Yet these questions are not really of a specialist nature at all. They impinge themselves upon all thoughtful people who grapple with the significance of culture.

      Franz Kafka, the great early-twentieth-century parabolist, tells the story of a fasting-artist who dies practising his craft. Just before his demise, he admits to the overseer of the cage in which he lives, perpetually on display but ignored, that he hasn’t accomplished any great feat. He only fasted, he says, ‘because I could never find the nourishment I liked. Had I found it, believe me, I would never have caused any stir, and would have eaten my fill just like you and everyone else.’¹ When he dies, he is replaced by a young panther, full of life and completely lacking in self-awareness: he seemed not even to miss his freedom; that noble body, furnished almost to bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom itself around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to be hidden; and the joy of life glowed so fiercely from the furnace of his throat that the onlookers could scarcely stand up against it.²

      Kafka portrays someone who does not allow himself the satisfactions of self-deception. The fasting-artist knows he has a craving for something more, something he cannot find in this world, and he does not allow himself to be assuaged by that which does not satisfy. Much treatment of these contemporary questions seems calculated to suppress the desire for satisfying answers. The questions invite metaphysical reflection. Too many representatives of contemporary intellectual culture convey the certainty that transcendence is either inaccessible or non-existent. They then speculate about language strictly as power and difference as thwarting wholeness of vision. In doing so, they behave like Kafka’s panther. The joy of life streams from their throats as they defend a humanism that excludes God or give voice to an unprincipled nihilism that scarcely conceals their confidence in their own vitality. They claim to have arrived at worldly-wise conclusions but can offer little more than indifference or hope in hope itself. They seem not even to miss their freedom.

      In reality, we are like Dante in The Divine Comedy, who describes his situation at one point this way: The natural thirst which is never quenched but with the water which the woman of Samaria begged as a boon was tormenting me . . . .³ Like the woman at the well in conversation with Christ, Dante has a natural question that demands a supernatural answer to it. The thirst represented by today’s most urgent cultural questions can similarly only be quenched by self-transcendence. This is not a matter of invoking the God of the gaps to explain what human inquiry has not yet discovered, but of imaginatively entering into the Christian understanding of the very nature of created reality.

      Chaucer, like Kafka and Dante, draws attention to a natural human desire for the supernatural. This is what it means to be on pilgrimage. In the context of the enduring togetherness of a fellowship as it pilgrimages towards Canterbury, he offers a vision of language that affirms its meaningfulness. He also celebrates difference by grounding it in the Christian understanding of the trinitarian God. For Chaucer, these affirmations accompany what it means to have hope. Like Dante before him, he offers more than the bitter alternatives of a dead artist and a panther in a cage.

      Performatively entering with Chaucer into directedness towards the beatific vision opens us up to the comedy and the hope that mark our lives together even as doing so offers a clue to the nature of our being. Chaucer does not present a settled or static vision in The Canterbury Tales. Part of its comedy is its provisionality. The Canterbury Tales offers merely one version of what is constantly taking place in the life of the fellowship of redeemed humanity: zaniness, tension, and enduring togetherness.

      Norm Klassen

      The Feast of Christ the King, 2016

      1. Kafka, Fasting-artist, 219.

      2. Ibid.

      3. Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Sinclair, 21.1–4. (This quotation is the translation of the Italian quoted in the book’s epigraph.)

      Acknowledgements

      I

      n writing this book,

      I have incurred many debts of gratitude. Numerous people, as generous as they are expert, have shown remarkable willingness to engage my work at various stages. Thank you so much to Rowan Williams, Alison Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Hans Boersma, Jens Zimmermann, and Peter Erb. Conor Cunningham has been amazingly helpful with his feedback and very tangible support of this project. Words fail me. I am thankful too for the longstanding influence on my thinking of expert readers of Chaucer like Alcuin Blamires, Ed Craun, David Wallace, and Helen Cooper. It was a very great pleasure to make the personal acquaintance of David Williams recently and to benefit from his seasoned Christian-Platonic wisdom as a Chaucerian. May he rest in peace. My thanks also to local medievalists Ann Marie Rasmussen and Sarah Tolmie for their collegiality and the inspiration of their accomplishments. My local community of support has been invaluable to me, and been a source of wonderful critical and theological reflection and encouragement. Thanks to Deborah Bowen, David Anderson, Fr. Mark Morley, Charles Fernandes, Andrew Kaethler (local in some sense), and my colleague Chad Wriglesworth.

      I’m very grateful to Gavin Hopps for the opportunity to present work-in-progress to the research seminar of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, and to Ann Loades and David Brown for their hospitality in St. Andrews. Thanks too to the members of my graduate seminars and to the organizers of the graduate program in English at the University of Waterloo and the Master of Catholic Thought program at St. Jerome’s University for the opportunities to offer them; to David Thiessen, Matt Sleiman, Eric Wallace; and to the many students to whom I have been privileged to teach Chaucer over the years. I am also pleased to acknowledge the way St. Jerome’s University has generously supported this project with research and aid-to-publication grants at key stages along the way.

      Thanks also to the anonymous readers at Christianity and Literature and Renascence, and to Doug Sikkema and Peter Stockland at Convivium.

      Holy Trinity Brompton gave my family a wonderful worshiping home during a sabbatical year in London. Thanks to Nicky Gumbel, especially for two generous and illuminating sermons on the Virgin Mary, and to Graham Tomlin. My thanks above all to my wife, Anne, for so much that cannot be expressed and to my three sons Aidan, Conor, and Nicholas for their love, encouragement, and good humor.

      Introduction

      A

      lmost a century ago,

      Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton wrote the following about the medieval English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342–1400):

      Sometimes he is treated as the Oldest Inhabitant, partially demented and practically dead, because he was alive before anybody else in Europe to certain revolutions of the European mind. Sometimes he is treated as entirely dead; a bag of dry bones to be dissected by antiquarians, interested only in matters of detail. But in no common English ears, as yet, does his name actually sound as a thunderclap or a trumpet-peal, like the name of Dante . . . .¹

      Chesterton argued for the greatness of Chaucer. But he didn’t mean his contribution to the development of the English language or his ability to breathe new life into old stories. And he didn’t quite mean what many take to be the biggest sign of Chaucer’s importance, his humanism. Chesterton argued for the early English poet’s greatness on theological grounds, comparing him to Dante as a visionary mystic, capable of earthy humor and an eye for the incongruous detail precisely because he had a vision of the whole.

      For Chesterton, this largeness of vision is nowhere more evident than when the author of The Canterbury Tales is poking fun at himself. When Chaucer takes a turn at telling a story on the pilgrimage, the Host complains about how bad a poet he is:

      ²

      Chesterton comments on the irony of this situation, in which a created character can speak back to its creator. For him, it draws attention to Chaucer’s elemental ideas connected with the very nature of creation and reality.³ The joke, he tells us, has in it all the mystery of the relation of the maker with things made.⁴ By implication, Chaucer has something to teach us about the relation between God and creation.

      Chaucer considers this issue further in the way he responds to the Host’s suggestion that he tell a different tale—in prose. He talks about how difference of expression and unity of meaning go together in the Gospels and can do so in other writings too, like his own proposed retelling of a well-known story. In a carefully wrought passage, Chaucer rhetorically displays how the Gospels speak of one and the same subject matter, yet in different ways. He both declares a counterintuitive Christian affirmation and participates in it, in what the Evangelists achieve more intensively:

      Like all good artists, Chaucer shows more than he tells. He shuttles between expressions of diversity and unity, drawing them together: "Every Evaungelist (943) tells of the peyne of Jhesu Crist (944). The Gospel writers do not say everything the same (945), but their sentence (that is, the overall meaning of what they are saying) (946) is one; their sentence" is one (947), even though there are differences in the telling (948).⁵ The last two couplets in the excerpt (945–48) go from difference to sentence, then sentence to difference, making a chiasm that further binds together the seeming opposites expressed in each of the rhyming units. Finally, Chaucer’s mischievous rhyming of sentence with difference encapsulates this strange affirmation. The poetry reveals unity and diversity together.

      In this way, Chaucer raises the issue of whether the sacramental presence of the wholeness of truth, beauty, or goodness can unfold in unique historical moments, in the contingency of embodiment, in retellings. This possibility does not only concern biblical inspiration, as important as that is. It is also a question about the very nature of reality. It is another form of the question of the relationship between the divine maker and his creation. At issue is the mystery of the incarnation. That doctrine proclaims both the fullness of God himself in history and redeemed humanity’s destiny of participation in the divine life, the beatific vision. The two realities belong together, for as the church father Athanasius wrote in On the Incarnation, For He was made man that we might be made God.⁶ Both have implications for the Christian understanding of the relationship between the maker and the thing made, its imagining of the very nature of created reality. Chaucer inhabits this paradox performatively, his poetry an object lesson on and participation in the incarnation.

      Neither historicists nor formalists can accept the mystery of this paradox as it applies to the incarnation, the writing of the Gospels, or the proposed retelling of a story. Commenting on these lines, and assuming that the poet cannot be articulating a position that he himself takes seriously, one critic gives voice to secular impatience: This amounts to a blind, unqualified assertion that the teller can never affect his tale significantly . . . . [It] only calls attention to the changes in ‘sentence’ that issue from any retelling.⁷ In other words, there can be no continuity of truth or tradition; particularities become a prison, and experience meaningless. The question is, are there alternatives to such unimpeachable logic?

      Deconstruction or post-structurally rich historicism offers one, but it culminates in the assertion of power, wistfulness over evanescence, and the privileging of subjectivity. Another is to find in Chaucer’s poetic an enduring hope arising from a commitment to the Word: the incarnate Word, the Word who has returned to the Father, the church that bears the Word within it, and our creative acts of participation in the Word that issue from being part of the church. Christ the Word declares and makes possible a meaningful relation between maker and thing made, one that in humans enables creaturely freedom. To put it another way, not only does turd literally rhyme with word, for Chaucer all of our words and all creaturely realities, even a turd, find their meaning in rhyming with the Word.

      The notion of the beatific vision is integral to this outlook. In the symbolism of the pilgrimage motif, it is no less important to Chaucer than to Dante in The Divine Comedy. His theological commitment to the beatific vision makes possible his sense of the vitality of this world. That sense consists in the understanding that nature has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. There is no such thing as a pure nature. Rather, humanity has an intrinsic natural desire for God: it is only truly itself in going out from itself to meet God in encounter. In so doing we become more ourselves, more free. The whole of creation aligns with this divine plan centered on the human. Our responsiveness to our desire for the Creator elevates the rest of creation as well.

      For some, Chaucer is thought to portray a commitment very different from Dante’s in his conception of The Canterbury Tales. One contemporary commentator writes, "The Canterbury journey does not end with a grand consummation like the beatific vision that the Dante pilgrim experiences at the end of his journey through the otherworld. . . . Though Chaucer, like Dante, provides an eschatological backdrop for the Tales, he focuses on the changing, conflictive, problematic world of everyday life."⁸ Another is equally blunt in contrasting the notions of the beatific vision and a more earthly focus: Let others describe the raptures of the Beatific Vision. . . . Chaucer stares at the ground. He listens to the company.⁹ A third puts this supposed opposition in terms of the sacred and the secular: "In the Canterbury Tales, the manifest ‘sacred’ functions of pilgrimage pale before the ‘secular’ concerns of the pilgrims. It is precisely the secularity of Chaucer’s account that gives it literary immortality."¹⁰ For these writers, if there is any relation between God and creation, it is one of opposition.

      This present volume invites readers into the view that all of reality participates in the greater reality of God, with which it is suffused, so that orientation to the beatific vision and an interest in specificities belong together. For Chaucer, this conception of reality, which has been called a sacramental or participatory ontology, invites the comic. The incongruous is a site for recognition both of the potentiality of things, and of the depth of encounter always already ongoing. As we shall see, dialogue manifests participation in a greater reality especially well. The outrageous interactions of many of the pilgrims affirm the messiness of their situation and the uniqueness of the participants. At the same time, their ongoing capacity to respond to one another points to a resource at once within and beyond language enabling the development of personhood and of redeemed humanity. The enduring fellowship provides a poignant social image of what being directed towards the beatific vision, or sacramental ontology, looks like.

      The relationship between the heavenly and the earthly, the sacred and the secular, the realms of grace and of nature, is at issue in this book as it was for Chesterton. The English apologist knew that good theology is a matter of time and place. He argued that Chaucer had contributed to a vision of a people around which others could gather, a nation-forming outlook that included the flourishing of the secular within a framework of the sacred. He was not afraid to call Chaucer’s outlook humanistic, though he meant something more full-blooded than what Charles Taylor in A Secular Age calls exclusive or purely self-sufficient humanism.¹¹ Indebted to Christian thought, it was a vision that was fading by the early twentieth century. Chesterton wanted to recall people to an appreciation of key theological commitments and practices that have informed English society, not least its literary and aesthetic culture.¹²

      In our own time, gesturing to national literatures and national identities is more fraught than it was perceived to be almost a century ago. Chesterton himself appreciated a moreness that shines through all such concepts. Hence his theological interest in Chaucer’s humanism and in the primal and elemental ideas connected with the very nature of creation and reality. Still, today it seems more appropriate to claim Chaucer not for a national literature but for a theological humanism articulated in the context of the life of the church. Chesterton recognized that the author of The Canterbury Tales contributed to the development of this humanism. This present study recontextualizes the apologist’s claim, applying to Chaucer insights from the tremendous theological work that has been done in recent years. Ironically enough, some of this work is itself indebted to Chesterton.¹³

      The contemporary church is bursting with the recovery of a sacramental ontology and the possibilities for a theologically responsible ecumenism or unity. The church is also experiencing a renewed awareness of the importance of what

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