Editor EMILIO CASTRO

Managing Editors T. K. THOMAS MARLIN VANELDEREN

Book Review Editor THOMAS F. BEST

Editorial Assistant JOAN CAMBITSIS

The quarterly of the World Council of Churches

Editorial

When the member churches of the World Council gather in Canberra, Australia, for the Seventh Assembly of the WCC, they will, for the first time in an Assembly, worship and work around a specifically pneumatological theme: “Come, Holy Spirit - Renew the Whole Creation”.

This issue of The Ecumenical Review is meant to provide some theological resources for our deliberations on that Spirit-centred theme. Our concern here is not so much with the theme as such; it is rather with the clarification of the person and work of the Holy Spirit. In 1990 we hope to devote at least two issues of the Review to a consideration of the ecumenical and programmatic implications of the theme itself.

As two of the articles included in this issue show, discussion of the Spirit and expectations of the Spirit’s gifts have by no means been absent in the life of the Council. In an article the first general secretary of the WCC wrote in 195 1, I the World Council is described as “essentially an attempt to manifest the economy of the charismata”. That, in fact, is the rationale for our choice of a charismatic theme for the Assembly.

Perhaps that article can well serve as an introduction to this issue, and we reproduce the major part of it below.

EMILIO CASTRO

One of the most important basic documents of the ecumenical movement is the encyclical which the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople sent in 1920 to all the Christian churches “wheresoever” they be. The Spirit of that admirable statement is illustrated in the following sentence: “Love between the churches must be revived and strengthened, so that

’ W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, “The Economy of the Charismata and the Ecumenical Movement”, in Paulus- Hellas-Oikumene (an ecumenical symposium), published by the Student Christian Association of Greece ta mark the 1900th anniversary of the coming of St Paul to Greece, Athens, 1951.

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they do not look upon each other as strangers and enemies, but as relatives and friends in Christ and as fellow-heirs of the same body and partakers of his promise.. .”

By this quotation we are reminded of the fact that the ecumenical movement can have no other foundation than the teaching of St Paul concerning the body of Christ. This teaching is given in its most explicit form in the twelfth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians. The purpose of this short article is to discuss one important and fundamental truth contained in that chapter, namely the teaching concerning the “economy of the charismata”.

As the beginning of the chapter shows, St Paul desires the Christians of Corinth to understand what charismata really are and how they function. Our first impression is that these gifts represent a rather exceptional phenomenon such as might well occur in the early and enthusiastic days of the primitive church. How can we expect today to find in our churches these gifts of tongues, of prophecy, of miraculous powers, of healing? But as soon as we study the whole of the passage, we are struck by the fact that St Paul does not seem to think only of these particular gifts but of all spiritual gifts which may be given to the church. And when we turn to the closely related passage in 1 Peter 4:10, we find much less exceptional gifts mentioned, such as the gift of love and the gift of hospitality and of service. So it would be quite wrong to dismiss Paul’s teaching in Corinthians as if it had no relevance for us.

For what is a charisma or spiritual gift? It is a specific gift of God’s grace given to a person or to a community for the sake of the whole church. A gift of grace and, therefore, not merely an inherent talent or aptitude. The word talent suggests an aptitude with which we are born. But a charisma is a gift which does not belong to our first nature but to our second nature. St Paul himself provides a clear illustration. His original talent was surely not that of a great evangelist, but he became the greatest of all evangelists through a new gift of God. Pascal, the talented mathematician, becomes the Christian apologist. Schweitzer, the scholar and musician, receives the charisma of the medical missionary. The charisma is, therefore, essentially a God-given function which powerfully affects and often changes the original talents.

But it is not an individual function. It is a function for and within the whole church of Christ. That becomes clear in the verse where it is said: “Each receives his manifestation of the Spiritfor the common good.” This is confirmed by 1 Peter 4:lO: “You must serve one another each with the charisma he has received as good stewards of God’s vaned grace.” Thus a charisma is never a gift to be enjoyed or exploited in isolation. It is always a gift which by its very nature is meant for the body as a whole. It is attached to one person, but that one person is meant to pass it on to all others. That is also why there cannot possibly be any competition between the different charismata, for although the manifestations of God’s grace are varied and take different forms, all of them have their origin in the same Spirit. And all of them are harmoniously related to the total economy of Grace. Our talents may divide us, but our charismata unite us. If, therefore, a person or a community seek to discover what their peculiar spiritual gift may be, they must try to discover their God-given place and task in the total Christian fellowship. Conversely all members of the body are not only expected to be concerned about their own charismata. They are to watch attentively what gifts have been given to other members. Thus the ultimate outcome is a wonderful harmony. Each member has its special role in the total building up of the church of Christ and participates in the manifestation of the richness of God’s grace to the whole world.

In the church of God we do not only deal with individuals, but also with communities which have their specific corporate life and can, therefore, also receive common spiritual gifts. We find in the early chapters of the Revelation of St John that individual congrega- tions are addressed as corporate personalities. Similarly the Pauline epistles make it clear that the communities to whom the apostle speaks are not conceived as a mass of individuals each with his or her own separate existence, but as specific parts of the body of Christ which

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have their definite role to play in the church as a whole. And just as in the local congregation the members are to share their spiritual gifts, so the congregations have to share their specific gifts with each other. The Church Universal was in fact meant to be a clear manifestation of something quite unusual and unknown to the world, namely that bodies with very different characteristics, instead of making their differences into barriers and reasons for staying apart, conceived of these differences as contributions to the enrichment and strengthening of the one people of God.

But the inconceivable happened. The body which by its very essence was one and could only be one, did not in fact remain united. The traffic of the charismata became blocked. Whatever else the disunity of the churches has meant and however justifiable the reasons may have been why churches become separated, the result was that the charismata became imprisoned within smaller or larger segments of the church as a whole. What St Paul considered completely impossible, namely that the eye should say to the hand: “I have no need of you”, was in fact said by many churches to other churches. Is it difficult to understand that this anarchy in the economy of Grace made the message of the glory of the body of Christ singularly unconvincing for the outside world?

Now the ecumenical movement is essentially an attempt to break down the tariff barriers between the churches and to establish again that free trade between them which belongs to the very nature of the church. Even though in the present state of things the churches cannot yet arrive at full unity of faith and order, they can begin to watch for spiritual gifts which God has given to other churches and which are meant for all of them. They can break down the walls of partition and begin to receive again that wonderful enrichment which comes from conscious and receptive participation in the life of the total body. They can discover again what charisma their own church has to give to the fellowship as a whole.

When Archbishop Soderblom in 1919 proposed for the first time that an “ecumenical council” should be formed and thus became a pioneer for the World Council which was to be created thirty years later, the German printer of his article made a mistake which many printers and speakers have made since. Instead of printing “ecumenical council” he put “economic council”. That mistake was almost prophetic, for the World Council is essen- tially an attempt to manifest the economy of the charismata. Its purpose is to bring the churches in such vital spiritual relations with each other that they joyfully discover how much they have to receive from each other and humbly prepare to use their own spiritual gifts for the cause of the church in the whole world. We are only beginning to discover this truth and to learn the laws of that divine economy. But we have now at last the opportunity to enter once again upon our true heritage as members of the body ...

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Please note that in this issue of the Review we have not been able to use inclusive language consistently. Some of our contributors insisted that they did not want their language to be changed when they referred to God or the Holy Spirit. Editor

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