Religious plurality and Christian self-understanding

The second 24 hour meeting which followed the much larger meeting on conversion was a brainstorming and ideas session about a study process on religious plurality and Christian self understanding. The first part of the process resulted in a study paper which generated very diverse reactions from extremely positive to extremely negative. You can find the paper in various languages on the WCC website. It should be there in various languages and as a pdf.

The paper uses the concept of hospitality as a way into the problem based on a verse from the letter to the Hebrews "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." Heb 13.2 - angels here meaning messangers, people who may have something to tell you. I was once again interested that language issues around the word hospitality arose - both for theological and ecumenical reasons, because of our vocabulary and studies on eucharistic hospitality - but also because hsopitality is understood rather differently in various cultures - Hermen Shastri particularly mentioned this as a problem in Malay for instance. But I realised that if you translate the word for host back into French (from whence it first came into English) you get hôte which can mean either host or guest depending on the context - there's probably a theological metaphor there if I thought a bit longer about it. Gast has similar over and undertones in German. Oddly English has taken its word for guest from old German and it's word for host from French - as the French were the gentry there are probably good contextual and cultural reasons for that.

However I am as always concerned that by using English as our lingua franca we do not always help our understanding of one another, or appreciate the complexities of issues or contexts.

Although I'm convinced that it will only be through daring to deal with controversial issues that ecumenism will attract interest, I also really understand how difficult it is to quite know where to go next with a paper that generates such opposing reactions, particularly as the WCC has recently moved to a consensus decision-making model. I wonder whether a paper more or less useful if it has gone through all the decision-making processes. Perhaps I also need to think a bit more about what place there is within consensus ecumenism for controversial ecumenism - after all controversy can be both positive - generating interest and reflection for instance - and also negative - just see some of the current problems of the Anglican communion. Perhaps we need a careful controversial ecumenism within consensus...

Anyway leaving alliteration to one side, I shall be posting some more thoughts following on from both of these meetings over the next week or so. I must also remember to stop blogging and go and catch my train at some point!