Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in the foreword to Timothy Radcliffe’s wonderful Why Go to Church?:
It is a great delight to be able to introduce the work of one of the most lively and creative preachers of the gospel in the Roman Catholic Church today; and I hope that these pages will remind us that, whatever tensions and unfinished business still lie between the historic churches, the basic commitment is one and the same.[1]
This is a good sign. It is an acknowledgement of a common ground, a realisation that what divides us is less than what unites us. It is a good sign, but we, Christians, have to be more vigourous in our contribution. Dialogue and convergence can only be achieved through our daily effort. A long road lies in front of us, but we must walk along it and come together — because, unfortunately, the bleak portrait that Alvin Plantinga painted more than ten years ago still seems unsettlingly accurate and current:
Since the Enlightenment, we Christians have had real enemies to fight and real battles to win; why then do we expend so much time and energy despising or fighting each other? Why don’t we treat each other like the brothers and sisters in Christ we are? This is something the Christian community will have to answer for, and it is not going to be pleasant. Indeed, the whole modern apostasy in the West is due (so I think) in considerable part to the unedifying and indeed appalling spectacle of Christians at each other’s throats in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We aren’t now literally at each other’s throats, but we still have nothing to boast along those lines. Evangelicals in South and Central America claim that Catholics aren’t really Christians at all; some Catholics return the favor. Many fundamentalist Christians deeply disapprove of those Christians who accept some form of theistic evolution and propose to read them out of the whole Christian community; those on the other side return the favor by joining the secular scientific establishment in declaring those of the first part ignorant, stupid, dishonest or all of the above. Not a pretty picture.[2]
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[1] Rowan Williams, “Foreword”, in Timothy Radcliffe, Why Go to Church?: The Drama of the Eucharist (New York: Continuum, 2008), p. x.
[2] Alvin Plantinga, “A Christian Life Partly Lived”, in Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993), pp. 58-59.
