Being Human, East and West: The Buffalo Statement, 2015
THE RECENT publication of a fourth agreed statement by the International Commission for Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue, indicates that this particular instrument of East-West theological dialogue is growing increasingly con dent in addressing specific disputed topics. The Buffalo Statement is concerned with theological anthropology, i.e. with understandings of the possibilities and limitations of the human person, and it claims to exhibit a high level of agreement. The co-chairs write that the Commission reached “broad agreement on all points”. Since East and West have been antagonistically disconnected for more than a thousand years, this is a truly remarkable claim. Symbolically in a state of mutual schism since 1054, the Latin West and Orthodox East have long de ed attempts at reconciliation. Yet two major texts of the nascent ecumenical movement originated in 1920 from these historically opposed directions of the Christian compass. From Orthodoxy in the East came a Patriarchal and Synodical Encyclical, and from Anglicanism in the West came the ‘Appeal to All Christian People’ from the Lambeth Conference of Bishops. In these texts one catches echoes of at least three major issues from the 1920s that remain live for us. First, from the post-World War I global context: far-sighted Christian leaders had challenged the colonial policies of the Western ‘Christian’ empires and their fatal race for military supremacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This concern with the pursuit of peace, combined with a sharply critical attitude to the compromised missiological presence of European missionaries outside of Europe, characterised the prophetic outlook of many in the first generation of ecumenical thinkers and activists. Second, these texts assumed that a constructive cosmopolitanism would assist in countering narrowly nationalist and/or imperialist self-interest as a driving force in international relations. The League of Nations and its attempts to provide an ethical structure for international engagement, ran parallel to the growth of ecumenical ecclesiological thinking. This concern would be evident again after World War II in the creation of both the World Council of Churches and the United Nations.
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Andrew Pierce
is Head of School of the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin.