Historically, there’s logic to that proposition. Many of the pioneers of the ecumenical movement in the mid-twentieth century had been in the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags, where they shared their suffering with other Christians. Their clandestine worship services and prayer meetings were necessarily ecumenical, and they developed deep friendships across confessional lines. Writers at the time called it the “ecumenism of the gulags.” Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic believers witnessed the strength of faith, the spiritual nobility, of their fellow Christians in the most harrowing circumstances imaginable, and came away much more inclined to relativize older confessional rivalries.
There are three compelling reasons to believe that such an “ecumenism of the martyrs” could have a similar sort of impact today.
As Christians from outside the West begin to play a greater leadership role in church affairs, they’ll bring their cultural experience with them, and often it contains a strong ecumenical dimension. Where Christians are a minority, their instincts are generally to minimize intra-Christian differences, and often the majority tradition in the culture reinforces that instinct by lumping all Christians together. To the typical Indian Hindu, for instance, a Christian is a Christian. In China, the government scrutinizes Protestant Christianity just as it does Catholicism. Across much of the Middle East, the same dynamic is visible. In many Middle Eastern societies, Orthodox Christians and followers of Eastern Catholic churches happily worship in one another’s churches, and ordinary believers are often hard-pressed to explain the difference between the two. About the only time of year they’re conscious of the difference is usually Easter, because Orthodoxy follows the Julian calendar and thus celebrates Easter on a different date than Catholicism does. Africa is also a case in point. In Europe and the United States, mainline Protestants and Catholics may perceive themselves as quite different from one another. In many parts of Africa, however, they’re not divided by the issues of sexual morality that loom large in the West, and their focus tends to be on their commonalities vis-à-vis their Muslim and animist neighbors.
Second, the defense of persecuted Christians is itself an ecumenical undertaking. Protestants, Anglicans, Catholics, and Orthodox find themselves increasingly making common cause, both to bring humanitarian relief to those Christians most in need and to press governments around the world to take stronger action to protect people at risk. As an example, the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury and the Catholic archbishop of Westminster jointly hosted an international conference on Christianity in the Holy Land at Lambeth Palace, the headquarters of the Anglican Communion, in July 2011.
One natural by-product of such efforts is that they afford Christians a chance to come together not to talk about their theological or ecclesiastical differences but to pool resources in pursuit of a shared social and political aim. In other words, it creates a space in which Christians from the various traditions can build bonds of friendship, and once people become friends, it often takes the edge off perceived differences.
Third, the stories of the martyrs have a deep spiritual resonance, and when people are exposed to them, they often come away changed. As these stories become better known—as pastors and priests recount them from the pulpit, as they loom larger in Christian media, as an entire literature is generated lifting up the new martyrs, and so on—the result could help shape a new climate within global Christianity, one that’s both more appreciative of other Christian traditions because of the witness of their martyrs, and more inclined to focus on essentials rather than the arcana of doctrinal debates. Hearing the story of John Ian Maina, for instance, a nine-year-old Anglican in Kenya who was killed in October 2012 when Muslim radicals tossed a bomb through the window of his Nairobi Sunday school, most Catholics would likely be inclined to sympathy and solidarity, not to reflection upon Pope Leo XIII’s 1896 edict declaring Anglican ordinations “absolutely null and utterly void.”
One veteran of the press for Christian unity who has laid out a compelling vision of this “ecumenism of the martyrs” is Catholic cardinal Kurt Koch from Basel, Switzerland, who today heads the Vatican’s department for ecumenical work (formally known as the “Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity”). During a speech at an ecumenical and interreligious meeting in September 2011, Koch began his reflection with some thoughts about the special love for the poor in Christianity, and then turned to the import of today’s Christian martyrs. It’s worth quoting him at length:
Because today all the churches and ecclesial communities have their martyrs, we must talk about a real and true “ecumenism of the martyrs,” which contains within itself a beautiful promise: The drama of divisions among the churches notwithstanding, these noble witnesses of the faith have demonstrated that God himself maintains a communion of faith among all the baptized at the deepest possible level, which is witnessed with the supreme sacrifice of one’s own life. As Christians and as churches, we live on this earth in a communion that’s not yet perfect, but the martyrs in their heavenly glory are already in full and perfect communion.
Today, as Christians, we must live in the hope that the blood of the martyrs of our time will become one day the seed of the complete unity of the Body of Christ. But we must testify to this hope in a credible manner by offering effective help to the persecuted Christians of the world, publicly denouncing the situations of martyrdom and committing ourselves in favor of respect for religious liberty and human dignity. The ecumenism of the martyrs, therefore, not only constitutes the nucleus of ecumenical spirituality, which is highly necessary today, but it is also the best example of why the promotion of Christian unity and the privileged love for the poor are absolutely inseparable.
As a final note, much of what’s been said here about the ecumenical significance of the defense of persecuted Christians can also be applied to interfaith relations. In many parts of the world, Christians stand shoulder to shoulder with the followers of other religions in their exposure to persecution. As Christians mobilize to defend religious freedom, they will naturally find themselves working in coalition with members of other religious traditions, creating a space in which friendships will develop organically. Finally, as the stories of the martyrs from other religions become better known in Christian circles, they will inevitably create a deeper atmosphere of sympathy and respect.
In other words, in addition to an “ecumenism of the martyrs,” there’s an “inter-faith dialogue of the martyrs” to be developed as well.
THEOLOGY FROM BELOW
A classic distinction in Christian thought runs between an approach crafted “from above” versus one shaped “from below,” sometimes referred to as the difference between a “high” or a “low” angle of vision. A “high” Christology focuses on Jesus as the Eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, and the King who will return in messianic glory. A “low” Christology emphasizes the Jesus who was born the humble son of a carpenter, who lived as a poor itinerant preacher, and who suffered an unjust death at the hands of an occupying power. In terms of orthodoxy, both are fully legitimate, but they lead to different accents and a different spiritual response. In the course of history, a “high” Christology has been associated with a muscular and triumphal version of Christianity, while the “low” approach has tended to produce a Christianity that’s more humble, oriented to service, and keen on solidarity with the poor and oppressed.
For obvious reasons, contact with martyrdom and suffering tend to nudge the church in the direction of a theology “from below.” The great German Protestant thinker and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer presents a classic example. In 1930, Bonhoeffer traveled to the United States for postgraduate study and a teaching fellowship at New York’s famed Union Theological Seminary. Ever the German academic, he found Union not quite up to snuff; his famous quip was, “There is no theology there!” Yet Bonhoeffer’s life was profoundly changed by the experience, largely through his friendship with Frank Fisher, a black seminarian at Union w
ho introduced Bonhoeffer to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.
Bonhoeffer ended up teaching Sunday school in Harlem, and developed a deep love for African American spirituals. He saw firsthand the racial and economic oppression suffered by black Americans, he witnessed how the Christian faith of the people in Harlem sustained them in the teeth of the hardships of their lives, and he also saw how the institutional church, in his eyes, was failing to make a sufficiently strong stand against prejudice and in favor of racial justice.
Bonhoeffer would later write about his experience in Harlem: “Here one can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of God … the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision.” He would later add of those Harlem years, “I turned from phraseology to reality.” Most experts who have studied Bonhoeffer’s life believe it’s not too much to say that the path that led him to a martyr’s death at the Flossenbürg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, in some ways began in the black churches of Harlem.
Looking around, many observers of the Christian scene believe contemporary martyrs and victims of anti-Christian violence may once again be steering the church away from phraseology and toward reality. During a conference at the University of Notre Dame in September 2012, Fr. Angelo Romano of the Community of Sant’Egidio described how his community has turned the Basilica of St. Bartholomew on Rome’s Tiber Island into a shrine to the new martyrs at the urging of the late Pope John Paul II, who said, “Their witness should not be lost to the church.” Romano described the various chapels, icons, and relics present in the basilica, and then turned to what he called the “inestimable gift” of their spiritual legacy.
“In the martyrs we see a more human vision of the world, one that’s unarmed and fragile,” Romano said. “Their memory is important because those memories can build a better future.”
In his 2008 work To Share in the Body: A Theology of Martyrdom for Today’s Church, Protestant scholar Craig Hovey echoes the view that victims of anti-Christian persecution are an important source of theological wisdom. For instance, he suggests they offer a new lens for reading the Gospel of Mark, which was originally written for a martyr-church in the first century. Most basically, Hovey suggests that the martyrs can help comfortable Christians in the West recover a “proper and appropriate antagonism to the world,” meaning a sense of the countercultural thrust in Christianity and its willingness to challenge prevailing social assumptions and values.
Anglican priest Samuel Wells provides the foreword for Hovey’s book and recalls delivering a sermon in 2004 shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandals broke out that illustrates the point.
“I felt the best way to preach was not simply to denounce the horrific practices and the culture that made them imaginable,” Wells wrote. “Such was timely and appropriate but did not seem to be the stuff of a sermon. Instead I wondered aloud whether if our country were invaded by a foreign power, we—the congregation and I—would be considered enough of a threat to be worth torturing. Not a political threat, necessarily, and probably not a military threat, but a living presence of hope and truth whose continued witness would become intolerable to an invader bent on submission and destruction.”
Posing such provocative questions to the Christian conscience, Wells suggests, is what the martyrs do. He writes that the martyrs, if taken seriously by the wider body of Christians, “make God’s people a disciplined and responsive community whose witness constitutes a rival claim,” one that Hovey describes as “instrumentalism” and “the world.”
Imagine, for instance, a theology written from the perspective of Yang Caizhen, a Chinese Protestant who spent almost two years in prison after being arrested for organizing a prayer rally in September 2009. She was released on parole in May 2011 after nearly dying in detention as a result of a high fever and liver inflammation. Because Caizhen lived to tell her tale, she’s a precious resource for understanding the situation facing today’s suffering Christians. One suspects a theology informed by her experience might have very different contours and points of emphasis than a theology emerging, for example, out of the “culture wars” in the United States.
Or, consider what theology might develop from the experience of the predominantly Dalit and tribal Christian community in India. These Christians carry the stigma of a triple form of discrimination: ethnic, on the basis of being born into the lowest rungs of the traditional caste system (in the case of Dalits) or outside the system altogether (the tribals); economic exploitation, because they’ve been largely left outside India’s economic miracle and its exploding middle and upper classes; and religious discrimination on the basis of their Christian faith. It’s an arresting thought exercise to ponder what might result if Ph.D. students in Christian theology were required to spend a year living and working among India’s Dalit and tribal Christians before completing their degrees—what new insights might result, and how their theological approach might take on new aspects.
As the stories of the new martyrs become better known, a new wave of theological interest in martyrdom may well be formed. More doctoral theses will be written about contemporary martyrdom, more college courses will be taught on the subject, more books will be written, symposia organized, and so on. Over time, this ferment will undoubtedly have a leavening effect on Christian thought, moving it in the direction of a spirituality and a theological style “from below,” forged by the perspective of the gulags and concentration camps, by the bombed churches and terrorized Christian neighborhoods of the world.
One example of how profoundly this theological impulse can reshape conventional ways of doing business is the Greek Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. The rebirth of the university in 1994 is part of the revival of the Greek Catholic Church after the fall of the Soviet empire, when it was the largest illegal religious body in the world. The biggest of the twenty-two Eastern churches in communion with Rome, it has more than 3 million followers in Ukraine and around 5.5 million worldwide. With an enrollment today around 1,600, this is the only Catholic university in the former Soviet sphere; as they like to say, it’s the only Catholic university “between Poland and Japan.”
The bold aim in Lviv is nothing less than to “rethink” what a Christian university can be in the twenty-first century. During a reflection process on what the university should become in the early 1990s, planners identified two core challenges:
• Building on the legacy of the Ukrainian martyrs during the period of Soviet oppression, when the Greek Catholic Church was the most important source of social opposition. On a percentage basis, no country produced more martyrs in the twentieth century. The university’s ambition, according to Bishop Borys Gudziak, the rector, is to pioneer “a new social, intellectual, and theological synthesis” of that experience—a theology, so to speak, of the catacombs.
• Repairing a deficit of social trust, Gudziak said, because “the Ukrainian soul and psyche have been profoundly marked” by the Soviet period, in which “the system killed systematically.” In that milieu, he said, Ukrainians were taught from early childhood “to think one thing, say another and do a third,” and so they learned to wear masks, to hide themselves, and never to trust anyone else.
The response has been as acute as the diagnosis. With regard to the martyrs, Gudziak believes a theological synthesis of their suffering will have less to do with doctrinal theory than an “ecclesiastical style,” which he describes in terms of “humility” and “being close to the people.”
“When times are difficult, you’re stripped down and forced to look at the essentials,” he said. “You fall back on the basic Christian experiences of being together, supporting one another, praying together and being community … overcoming the negation of the gospel without any pretense or imposition.”
Gudziak believes that style is a “tangible presence” in Greek Catholicism. It allows the university, he said, to be a place where a church that prizes humility, closeness to the people, and taking the lay role seriously
becomes self-reflective.
As for the trust deficit, the response has been even more innovative. To help people learn to take off their masks, the university turned to the insights of Henri Nouwen, Jean Vanier, and L’Arche, a Catholic movement founded by Vanier that emphasizes building friendships with disabled people. (Gudziak studied under Nouwen at Harvard.) Guided by their inspiration, the university has invited mentally handicapped people to become part of their community. At the Ukrainian Catholic University, the mentally handicapped actually serve as “professors of human relations.”
“This is not some kind of handout,” Gudziak insists. “We need the gifts they have. They don’t care if you’re a rector, a doctor, or how rich you are. What they force us to confront is the most important pedagogical question of all: Can you love me?” New residences include apartments for these professors of human relations to live among the university’s students, becoming part of the daily fabric of their lives.
Has all that made the Greek Catholic University a more loving place?
“It’s as if you put a shot of rum into some chocolate chip cookies,” Gudziak said. “There’s a different flavor, and if you know what rum is, you’ll recognize it.” Similarly, he said, if you know what love is, you’ll feel it in the relationships forged at the university, shaped by the legacy of the martyrs and the imprint of the disabled.
EVANGELIZATION AND MISSION
Scholar Todd Johnson of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity likes to tell a story about his renowned predecessor and mentor, David Barrett, who died in 2011, and who pioneered the quantitative study of Christian martyrdom. As Johnson tells it, Barrett was once speaking to a group of Christian industrialists and CEOs. Being a practical group of hard-nosed business people, they got quickly to the bottom line. What, they wanted to know, is the single most effective form of evangelization? Barrett didn’t duck the question, informing them that a considerable body of empirical research suggests it’s martyrdom.
The Global War on Christians: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Anti-Christian Persecution Page 30