Dale T. Irvin, Hearing Many Voices: Dialogue and Diversity in the Ecumenical Movement (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994), 208 Pps.
Irwin says the ecumenical movement of the 21st century is one of the most significant occurrences within Christianity. Virtually every church has responded to the ecumenical imperative (1). Yet, after nearly a century, there remains a lack of clarity as to what ecumenism means or what the movement is all about. This diversity of perspectives re: what it is and what it is seeking to accomplish occupies Irwin throughout this text. His main assertion is that the ecumenical movement is a multifaceted affair, encompassing different historical, political, and theological agendas which resist easy integration and synthesis (3). Also, he states that the ecumenical movement has fostered more options for diversity in the last century than it has succeeded in achieving unity in the churches
(173). In this book, he explores several of the major ecumenical trajectories of the past century, paying particular attention to the tension between unity and diversity. His thesis is that one of the major objectives of the ecumenical movement has been the search for the renewal of the project of Western Christendom (like the one achieved under Constantine in the 4th century), carried out under the joint mandate of the unity and mission of the church. Uncertainty regarding the ecumenical movement today arises from several conflicting understandings of the direction and identity of the movement itself. The praxis of ecumenism is found wherever boundaries are broken, cross-roads are reached, and Christian communities are in-transition (6). Irwin thinks that dialogue is constitutive of the vocation of ecumenism (7), and therefore is direly critical to the success of it. In fact, the ecumenical movement is an expression of the dialogical character of the Christian faith itself (10). The diversity of voices speaking to each other and even against each other holds much potential for truth derivation. In short, the ecumenical movement is a dialogical social and historical process taking place in and among the churches of the world. Incoherence as evidenced by the discontinuities, ruptures, and contradictions in the ecumenical movement, Irwin asserts, is a sign of the presence of the Spirit just as much as, if not more than, imposed unity (27). True ecumenicity is one in which differences cohere and co-inhere in mutuality and koinonia (80). If it is truly ecumenical, it is framework that is marked by genuine openness to a future that is different than the pasts that are brought to the ecumenical encounter (80), which means that the process is marked by vitality (in the sense of being vital – i.e. alive). Alterity and difference are marks of this vitality.
Unfortunately, the assumption that European cultural history and Christian faith were synonymous required another tenuous assumption that European Christianity was a homogenous social-political-cultural-religious synthesis (131). The memory of a unified Western church (i.e. Constantine, etc.) has functioned as a powerful myth in the last century, and it has obscured the actual historical diversity of European Christianity (131). Archbishop William Temple, over fifty years ago, called the ecumenical movement ‘the great new fact of our time’. The ecumenical movement is, in the richest sense, an instance of conversion, or metanoia in the midst of oikoumene (171).