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BOOK REVIEWS
Braaten, Carl E. My Ecumenical Journey: Ecumenical Experiences and Perspectives of an Evangelical Theologian. Dehli, NY: ALPB Books, 2018.
Last fall the Lutheran tradition lost one of its great ones, the Rev. Dr. Carl E. Braaten. And so, I thought it fitting that our book review for this issue should cover his semiautobiographical work, My Ecumenical Journey.
But before I begin, I need to offer a brief disclosure. I became acquainted with Carl during meetings of what was called the “Younger Theologians Colloquy,” what is today called “Lutheran Theologians for the Church.” Essentially, it is a discussion group of egghead PhDs who work to further Lutheran scholarship. The group was founded by Dr. Braaten and Dr. Bob Benne, emeritus professor of ethics at Roanoke College. The joke was that if you were younger than Braaten you were considered a “younger theologian.” But now that I am almost sixty, perhaps my days in this august body are numbered.
The discussions over the years have been wonderful. In that forum, Braaten spoke of his goal to promote “Evangelical Catholicism,” an effort to unite Christianity’s various traditions by embracing our shared liturgical and theological history. He also shared about his upbringing as a Norwegian-American missionary kid in Madagascar, and his belief in a holistic approach to missions. He was also very excited about the plan to launch SIMUL and was one of the first to request a subscription. Perhaps this effort brought back memories of those heady days when he and Robert Jenson started the journal Dialog, and then later, after being disgracefully ejected by its board, launched another fine journal, Pro Ecclesia.
Perhaps the most entertaining part of the book is his reminiscences of his long career as a Lutheran ecumenist, and it all starts at Harvard Divinity School where he studied with such theologically diverse notables as Krister Stendahl, Paul Tillich, and Richard Niebuhr.
But after moving on to teach at Luther School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC), he began to understand the possible pitfalls of irenic efforts. Braaten was asked to deliver an address for a synod conference on the success, or lack thereof, of Vatican II from a Lutheran perspective. It was published in The Record, the journal of LSTC, under the evocative title “The Tragedy of the Reformation and the Return to Catholicity.” A deeply redacted version of the article was then published in Una Sancta, a now-defunct Lutheran liturgical journal, where John Richard Neuhaus served as editor.
Neuhaus then sent the article to the Religion News Service and soon Braaten’s talk was being published in newspapers across the country with titles like “Return to Rome Urged by Lutheran Theologian.” The article was also lambasted in the pages of the Christian Century. In this book, Braaten includes many of the letters from outraged readers that he received. One, from a Lutheran woman in Milwaukee states, “You have shocked me…how would you like to sit with beads and pray to Mother Mary…heaven forbid that we should obey the Pope, who tells us when to eat meat or fish.”
But what Braaten was arguing for was instead a reunion with rather than a return to Rome. Braaten sought “a new self-understanding of the Roman Catholic Church, one which sets aside a superiority attitude that assumes it is at the center of the universe of churches.”1 Braaten then offered this thought, “Does it bother you, as it does me, when any given church proclaims itself to be the one and only church of Jesus Christ? …This reminds me of kids on the playground bragging that my dad can beat up your dad.”2
So Braaten’s wasn’t calling for a return to Rome, but nevertheless, some of his positions were decidedly catholic, at least with a small “c.” For instance, he did believe that a reunification would retain the papal and episcopal offices, and he saw no conflict between such a union and the tenets of the Lutheran Confessions.
Much of the rest of the book attempts to answer an obvious question, “What exactly happened to Evangelical Catholicism?”
Where did halcyon days of the 1960s and 1970s go, when it appeared that many of the issues that divided Christianity would be overcome? Well, according to Braaten, those days ended because the Barthian neo-orthodox consensus that characterized that era was replaced by “a plurality of liberal theologies under the aegis of various special interest groups.”3 These groups included Latin American, Black and feminist liberation theologians, not to mention the so-called “open theists,” who together, according to Braaten, have changed the true identity of Jesus to serve their own political agendas.
Braaten points to five hot-button issues that divide us into progressive or traditionalist camps: 1) the naming of God in masculine terms, 2) the uniqueness of Jesus in the salvation of the world, 3) the authority of the Bible, 4) the role of the Church and its creed, and finally, 5) matters of sexual morality. And while I could agree that liberal groups have made some decisions, such as the affirmation of gay marriage, that may have shut the door for ecumenical dialog, I believe that much of the fault must be shared with those on the orthodox side who, for their own purposes, have tightly shackled the doors of their own ghettos.
Starting in 1990, Braaten and a group of likeminded editors organized a series of “Call to Faithfulness” conferences (beginning at St. Olaf College) to argue against these five hot-button trends. But Braaten admits that “at these conferences we named the demons but failed to exorcize them.”4 Finally, discouraged by the direction of the ELCA, Braaten resigned his position at LSTC and with Jenson created the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology (CCET), where he could more effectively engage the church universal. Today, the CCET continues its work, holding annual conferences, publishing the aforementioned ProEcclesia journal, printing scholarly monographs, among other efforts to educate Christian ministers.
Braaten and Jenson also made clear that their view of ecumenism was decidedly different from that of the World Council of Churches, which had moved away from efforts to unite Christians, turning instead “to matters of social justice, the care for the planet, and inter-religious dialogue.”5 Instead, Braaten committed the CCET to “the ecumenical goal of full visible unity of the one church of Jesus Christ.”6
But Braaten was also realistic about the tangible results of years of ecumenical efforts. A Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification was signed between Catholics and Lutherans in 1999, but many have rejected the statement. Furthermore, there have been eleven published dialogues between Catholics and Lutherans since 1965, but we are still far from consensus on a shared Eucharistic fellowship.7 He also explains that the “Called to Common Mission” agreement, which he felt was watered down from its original form, was in his mind, sadly rejected by those who left the ELCA to create Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC).
In conclusion, Braaten used the 500th anniversary of the Reformation to once again call for renewed efforts to heal the separation it created. But since he sees the doctrine of papal infallibility as obstacle qua non for future unity, he calls on the Pope himself to take the initiative in relieving concerns that prevent Christ’s vision that the Church be as one (John 17). But he also calls us all to Edmund Schlink’s ‘“Copernican Revolution,’ that all churches take Christ as their starting point, for He is the Sun
Rev. Dr. Dennis Di Mauro is the pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Warrenton, VA. He teaches at St. Paul Lutheran Seminary and is the editor of SIMUL.
Footnotes:
1Carl E. Braaten, My Ecumenical Journey: Ecumenical Experiences and Perspectives of an Evangelical Theologian (Dehli, NY: ALPB Books, 2018), 49.
2Ibid., 88.
3Ibid., 17.
4Ibid., 61.
5Ibid., 73.
6Ibid., 75.
7Ibid., 95
