10 May 2004, Convocation Day, Wycliffe College Toronto, Fellowship Luncheon Lecture.

The usefulness of ecumenical agreements

I have chosen to speak to you today about the usefulness of ecumenical agreements. The most recent Lambeth Conference reaffirmed “the Anglican commitment to the full visible unity of the Church as the goal of the Ecumenical Movement”. (Lambeth, 1998, Resolution IV.1) So far as I can recall, no one seemed surprised and no one objected to this. One could assume therefore that, so long as ecumenical agreements bring us closer to that goal, they are useful. I would like to suggest that they are also very useful in other ways.

The world’s need for Salvation explains the urgency of the need for the reconciliation of the churches. Our common faith in salvation through Jesus Christ, who prayed that his disciples might be one so that the world might believe (cf. John 17.21), explains why churches have, in the power of the one Holy Spirit, to be together instruments of God’s plan for humanity. “Only a reconciled and reconciling community, faithful to its Lord, in which human divisions are being overcome, can speak with full integrity to an alienated, divided world, and so be a credible witness to God’s saving action in Christ and a foretaste of God’s Kingdom” (Salvation and the Church, 30).

I believe that the usefulness of ecumenical agreements is all to do with the message of salvation. I know that some people think that ecumenism is talk, talk, talk, interspersed with a bit of cooperation when it makes us feel good. But that is not the way I see it. We must be reconciled because it is the will of God, and necessary for the effectiveness of the mission entrusted to us.

The agreements of which I shall speak are expressed in documents called “Agreed Statements”. In recent decades there have been many bilateral and multilateral agreements, some of which are local or regional, while others are international. I shall restrict my comments to the six bilateral international Agreed Statements that I have signed.

The process of trying to remove obstacles to ecclesial communion between churches, forces those engaged in theological dialogue back to basics. The dialogue reminds us of who we are, what we believe, and what really matters. International Ecumenical Commissions are usually given a mandate from their parent bodies to discuss issues that have been perceived to be church dividing, in order to overcome these obstacles to reconciliation. Many differences of theology and practice can be found within churches as well as between them. These differences need not be not church dividing so long as they coexist within a real consensus on the essential elements of Church doctrine. The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) always attempts to reach what it describes as “substantial agreement”. By this it means that an Agreed Statement “represents not only the judgement of all its members — i.e. it is an agreement — but their unanimous agreement ‘on essential matters where it considers that doctrine admits no divergence' (Ministry, para. 17) — i.e. it is a substantial agreement. Members of the Commission are united in their conviction ‘that if there are any remaining points of disagreement they can be resolved on the principles here established' (Eucharist, para. 12).” (ARCIC, Eucharistic Doctrine Elucidation, 2, 1979). The complex process of evaluating and receiving the documents I discuss today is still underway. So I am not claiming an authoritative status at this stage for the details of what they propose. However, I want to draw attention to the assumption on which they all rest: that is that some things are essential. Quite apart from the necessity of agreement on these essential matters ecumenically, we must also have agreement on them within the Anglican Communion, globally, regionally, and locally. These are matters where our identity and integrity, personal and communal, are at stake.

Five of the agreements I shall mention come from ARCIC. But first I turn briefly to the agreement on Christology from the Anglican-Oriental Orthodox International Commission (AOOIC).

The Oriental Orthodox family of Churches includes the Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, and Syrian Orthodox Churches. Just to remind you, and oversimplifying as I do so, we have been estranged from these Christians for about 1500 years. Our histories have been largely independent and, on the fundamental question of the Person of Christ, we have regarded each other as heretics. Since the sixteenth century and particularly for Anglicans during the past century we have seen a growth in knowledge and understanding of each other. Members of the Oriental family have often suffered extreme persecution. Large numbers of them have left their homelands and now live alongside of us. We meet as neighbours. Does it matter that they are called monophysites or non-Chalcedonian Churches, while we hold firmly to belief in the two natures of Christ as set out in the Council of Chalcedon (451)? Well, yes, it does, if there really is a difference between us about the Person and divine and human natures of Christ! This is an essential matter where doctrine admits no divergence.

From November 5-10, 2002, the Anglican-Oriental Orthodox International Commission met in Holy Etchmiadzin, Armenia. Thanks to a great deal of preparatory work and the divine assistance, an agreement was reached. It remains to be evaluated and received by our Churches. We could not engage in ecumenical dialogue unless we already recognized a degree of communion with our partners. This communion is real although impaired. The impairment is often most evident in Eucharistic worship when full sharing is not possible or not permitted. One of the most profound and joyful moments on my ecumenical journey was in the Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin where the Eucharist has been celebrated for over seventeen centuries. Following our Christological agreement the Anglican members of the Commission were invited to share fully in the Eucharist with the Armenian congregation and other members of the Oriental Orthodox family. We were asked to receive the sacrament into our hands because this is the customary mode of reception for those who are ministers of the sacrament. Formal reception of the agreement, and other steps, will be necessary before Eucharistic sharing is free and general, but the moment itself was one of those very special foretastes of the messianic banquet that is our final goal and destiny. The agreement is a useful step on the way.

The process of reaching agreement, and the document that was produced, were for me a salutary reminder of the importance of correct understanding of Christological doctrine. It sounds so dry when we use technical language. Yet Christology is a careful attempt to articulate who Christ is. To know who Christ is, and making that known, is a matter of urgency in the life and witness of our churches in the twenty-first century. We have no reason to exist unless we are in mission. We have no mission unless we proclaim the Gospel. There is no good news to proclaim unless Christ is our Saviour. And there is no salvation unless Christ is both divine and human. This is not only a notion from the fifth century. In the 16^th century Richard Hooker emphasized the necessity of accepting the mystery of Christ who is one Person both divine and human and wrote, “one only point of Christian belief, the infinite worth of the Son of God, is the very ground of all things believed concerning life and salvation by that which Christ either did or suffered as man in our belief.” (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, Ch lii.3) Are we in danger of getting this wrong in our teaching today? Perhaps I misunderstand what I hear. But it seems to me that a lot of church members, and even preachers, appear to regard Jesus as a very exceptional human being, and that a lot of tall stories about him can be ignored so long as we retain his teaching about love. If he existed at all he was certainly human. Some try to reconcile this with notions of his divinity, but if this proves difficult or tedious, the divine nature is ignored. This is not faithful to the apostolic Tradition. There has always been a danger that Christians will emphasize either the humanity or the divinity of Christ at the expense of the other. But the hypostatic union of divine and human natures, however it is expressed, is an essential element on which doctrine admits no divergence. I know that those graduating from this college today will undoubtedly be orthodox in their Christology. I pray that they will continue to see why it is so important that their parishioners come to know Jesus as their personal saviour, fully human and fully divine. In order for humanity to be saved by God’s action in Christ, Christ has to be both fully human and fully divine. God saves us without our understanding of technical theological language. But, when we let Jesus into our lives, we are entering into communion with God, and, when we are united with Christ, we share in the divine life. When the Church is well aware of this its life and worship are filled with a sense of glory and holiness. The people we serve need to know and believe, with equal confidence, that their Lord and Saviour is as human as they are, and also fully divine. Teachers and preachers need to understand some of the historical and theological underpinnings of this teaching so that they can speak convincingly, and with conviction, about this great and saving mystery.

I now turn to The Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) which began its work in 1970. For more than a decade the Commission engaged in prayer, dialogue and research on the topics of Eucharist, Ordained Ministry, and Authority in the Church. The fruits of this showed that ARCIC did not find church dividing issues in Eucharistic doctrine or Anglican and Roman Catholic understandings of Ministry and Ordination. Furthermore, the two communions could agree on most issues of authority in the Church, although some work remained to be done, particularly with reference to the ministry of the Bishop of Rome as universal primate. The Agreed Statements produced by the Commission were published in The Final Report in 1981.

The mandate for the next phase of ARCIC’s work included continuing study of Authority as well as issues related to Salvation, Morals, Mary and the Church. This has led to five Agreed Statements. Four have been published: Salvation and the Church (Llandaff) 1986, Church as Communion (Dublin) 1990, Life in Christ (Venice) 1993, and The Gift of Authority (Palazzola) 1998. Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ (Seattle), has been completed and will be published in the first half of next year. These five topics found there way to ARCIC’s agenda because there had been disputes surrounding them that had been divisive for the Church. Anglicans have sometimes wondered whether Catholics have a sound doctrine of justification. Catholics asked what Anglicans believe about the role of the Church in God’s plan of salvation. Some Anglicans and Roman Catholics suspected that their partners in dialogue used the same words, but believed different things about their meaning in relation to the Church. It was widely assumed that Catholics and Anglicans taught very different things in the area of morals. We knew that we had unresolved questions about the exercise of authority in the Church. We needed to know what we could say together about Mary and whether or not the Church must remain divided because of Marian belief and devotion. The agreements that came from the study of these areas will have fulfilled their obvious purpose, and therefore been useful as they were intended to be, when the Churches are reconciled and any remaining different emphases or practices are no longer seen as obstacles to full visible unity between us. That day might be a long time in coming. The agreements, however, could be very useful here and now. They do not have to sit on the bookshelves gathering dust until we decide to take the next great step forward to the reconciliation of the churches. I care passionately about ecumenism. I am also a member of the Anglican Communion and I am concerned about the spiritual well being, faithfulness and evangelical effectiveness of our Anglican churches. I believe that the ARCIC agreements can remind us of some neglected aspects of who we are, where our salvation is to be found, and what our mission is in the world.

In Newcastle, in 1981, the Anglican Consultative Council suggested that the issue of justification by faith should be taken up, because, although it had not been given to ARCIC for study in its first phase, it had been noted at ACC’s previous meeting in Canada that some Anglicans were not yet convinced that the question of justification by faith had been dealt with adequately, and for some this was an issue that might put the ARCIC agreements in question. After three years of prayer and study ARCIC completed the document Salvation and the Church, 1986, Llandaff. ARCIC decided that the doctrine of justification could be properly treated only within the wider context of the doctrine of salvation, and this led to a discussion of the role of the Church in Christ’s saving work.

The Church is in the Salvation business, and salvation should not be confused with getting people into churches for a bit of religious entertainment. We need to be reminded that all human beings need the salvation that God offers to them. “Through Christ's life, death and resurrection, the mystery of God's love is revealed, we are saved from the powers of evil, sin and death, and we receive a share in the life of God. All this is pure unmerited gift.” (SC.1) “This wholly unmerited love of God for his creatures is expressed in the language of grace, which embraces not only the once for all death and resurrection of Christ, but also God’s continuing work on our behalf.” (SC.9) “Justification and sanctification are two aspects of the same divine act (I Cor.6.11).” (SC 15) I fear that we have lowered our expectations and standards for human behaviour and character in the Church. We no longer hear much about the call to holiness of life. Yet how dare we set holiness aside? Our salvation requires that we enter a right relationship with God, and that by grace God transform us. So we are to grow into conformity with Christ, the perfect image of God. “Sanctification is that work of God which actualizes in believers the righteousness and holiness without which no one may see the Lord.” (SC.17) When we declare that our goal is to be an inclusive Church, we must also remember that the Church is called to be, and by the power of the Spirit actually is:

· “a sign of the Gospel” (SC.26),

· “an instrument for the realisation of God’s eternal design, the salvation of humanity” (SC.28),

· “a sacrament of God’s saving work” (SC.29), and

· “a foretaste of God’s Kingdom in a world still waiting its consummation” (SC.30).

Of course God’s love includes us all. I need to know that it is absolutely true that God loves me “just as I am”. But this is not the same thing as presuming that God loves the way I am. I need to be transformed. I confess that I have been saved by Christ’s death and resurrection. That is true: I am saved. But I am also being saved by the continuing work of the Holy Spirit. So the Church must challenge me to repent, and I have a right to find in the Church a hospital for the healing of sinners and a school for the growth of saints. From one perspective, within a theology of communion, relationships are correctly seen to be the key to life in communion. Justification then is a right relationship with God. But this is a right relationship with God who is righteous and holy. Only God can set us in that relationship, and we cannot earn that by our works. From another perspective, communion must also be understood in terms of participation, and, in order to participate in the righteousness and holiness of God, we must be transformed. Do you remember controversies about imparted and imputed righteousness? I do not want to go back to them, but I would love to think that we were teaching the positive and encouraging gospel truth that lay behind them. ARCIC puts it like this:

Justification and sanctification are two aspects of the same divine act (1 Cor 6:11). This does not mean that justification is a reward for faith or works: rather, when God promises the removal of our condemnation and gives us a new standing before him, this justification is indissolubly linked with his sanctifying recreation of us in grace. This transformation is being worked out in the course of our pilgrimage, despite the imperfections and ambiguities of our lives. God's grace effects what he declares: his creative word imparts what it imputes. By pronouncing us righteous, God also makes us righteous. He imparts a righteousness which is his and becomes ours[1]. (SC, 15)

When we describe the Gospel and salvation in the language of liberation, we need to understand the nature of the freedom God confers on fallen humanity. “This is not the natural freedom to choose between alternatives, but the freedom to do his will: ‘the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death…in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us’ (Rom. 8.2, 4).” (SC19) Christian humanism, inclusivity, and liberation, therefore, are all to be affirmed within the context of God’s work of salvation. Salvation gives us hope as well as freedom. Our destiny, because of our salvation, is to be like Christ. “Christians may never presume on their perseverance but should live their lives with a sure confidence in God’s grace. Because of what God has revealed of his ultimate purpose in Christ Jesus, living faith is inseparable from hope.” (SC.11)

After submitting its work on Salvation and the Church to the authorities of the two communions, ARCIC continued to work on ecclesiology. This stage of its work was different from the rest of its study in that it did not focus on doctrinal questions that have been historically divisive. It was necessary in order to show that there is a sound theological basis for the claim that there is a real though as yet imperfect communion that already exists both within and between us (cf. Church as Communion 2, Dublin, 1991). The theme of communion was adopted in order to explore the nature of the Church. Identifying the constitutive elements of communion enabled the Commission to reach an agreement on the nature of the Church that would be the foundation for its subsequent work on Morals and Authority in the Church. Perhaps it was because it was not particularly controversial that it did not attract a great deal of wider attention in the Church. This was a pity. The Anglican Communion has been struggling with questions about its identity and integrity. The ecclesiological approach of Church as Communion can be very useful in addressing these issues. In this broken and fragmented world, alienated from God, nature and other parts of the human family, the evangelical significance of communion is obvious. The world needs to experience reconciliation so that life in communion becomes a reality not a fantasy. To serve the fulfillment of God’s purpose of communion, the Church needs not only to celebrate the benefits of communion but also to accept the exigencies of living in communion with God and each other.

I am not going to burden you with a lot of quotations from Church as Communion. Instead, I would like to share with you an incident from a meeting at which we were working on the project. It illustrates the context in which ecumenical dialogue is conducted. In 1987 ARCIC met at Palazzola on the opposite shore of Lake Albano from Castelgondolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. The Commission is appointed and receives its mandate, strong support, and encouragement from the highest authorities in our Communions. So, on this occasion, the Pope agreed to come over to Palazzola to have lunch with us. You can imagine the enthusiasm of the Irish sisters who looked after the house where we met, when they found that they would be entertaining the Holy Father. Usually we eat from lovely ancient oak tables, but without table cloths. For this occasion the sisters borrowed beautiful white linen table cloths and napkins from the Venerable English College in Rome, promising to return them promptly in good condition and freshly laundered. The meal was a splendid Italian pranzo and the wine was good too. The Pope was in fine form. He is actually very good at fulfilling Christ’s mandate to Peter, “strengthen your brethren”. We were all greatly encouraged by his presence and words. He appeared to enjoy himself and was very animated. He even knocked his glass of wine over on the white table cloth. He stayed with us for a good part of the afternoon and then left. Some seminarians from Durham in England were spending the summer at Palazzola, helping the sisters with there hospitality. One of the students gathered up the linens and put them in plastic bags to be picked up by the laundry later that afternoon. Unfortunately the only bags they had were green garbage bags. Even more unfortunately that was pick up day for the garbage. When the laundry pick up arrived, the table cloths had gone. Never before did anyone remember that garbage truck coming early, and the laundry was quite late. The loss was not discovered until too late to do anything about it that day. After the evening meal, over a drink in the bar, the sister in charge told us what had happened. She was very shaken up but not defeated. She had a plan. That night she was going to spend extra time in prayer enlisting the divine assistance. Early the next morning, at dawn, she was going to the dump, and she would find the lost linens. Some of us were more pessimistic. Doesn’t one green garbage bag look exactly the same as every other green garbage bag? Isn’t that how the problem happened? Next morning at Mass, during the prayers of the people among the thanksgivings, we heard an Irish voice thanking our heavenly Father for all his goodness and mercy, including his attention to small domestic details. That, of course, is a typical example of Catholic piety and life. You pray hard and entrust everything to God. But you also expect to do what you can yourself about your problems. I think it has been a bit of an inspiration for me in ecumenical work ever since. Prayer is the essential element, undergirding our efforts. Of course, Unity can only come as a gift from God; but sometimes we need to rummage around in the garbage to recover what is of value. Pray hard; and refuse to allow what we value to be lost.

As I have already mentioned Church as Communion attempted to identify the constitutive elements of ecclesial communion.

In the light of all that we have said about communion it is now possible to describe what constitutes ecclesial communion. It is rooted in the confession of the one apostolic faith, revealed in the Scriptures, and set forth in the Creeds. It is founded upon one baptism. The one celebration of the eucharist is its pre-eminent expression and focus. It necessarily finds expression in shared commitment to the mission entrusted by Christ to his Church. It is a life of shared concern for one another in mutual forbearance, submission, gentleness and love; in the placing of the interests of others above the interests of self; in making room for each other in the body of Christ; in solidarity with the poor and the powerless; and in the sharing of gifts both material and spiritual (cf. Acts 2:44). Also constitutive of life in communion is acceptance of the same basic moral values, the sharing of the same vision of humanity created in the image of God and recreated in Christ and the common confession of the one hope in the final consummation of the Kingdom of God. (SC. 45)

This part of paragraph 45 does not provide a complete summary of what the agreement says about the elements of communion. I quote it simply to show the importance it attaches to the “acceptance of the same basic moral values, the sharing of the same vision of humanity created in the image of God and recreated in Christ”. Because of that importance, after completing Church as Communion, ARCIC then focused its attention on moral teaching. The result was the publication of Life in Christ: Morals, Communion and the Church, which addressed the popular and widespread belief that the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church are divided most sharply by their moral teaching.

Ten years after the publication of Life in Christ, the Anglican Communion is in danger of being torn apart, and our relations with the Catholic Church are severely strained, by conflict over issues treated in that document. I do not want to mislead you. ARCIC only dealt with homosexual behaviour briefly, and deliberately did not focus exclusively on sexual questions. The Commission’s view was that: “The crisis of the modern world is more than a crisis of sexual ethics. At stake is our humanity itself.” The fundamental questions which a Christian morality engages are such as:

— What are persons called to be, as individuals and as members one of another in the human family?

— What constitutes human dignity, and what are the social as well as the individual dimensions of human dignity and responsibility?

— How does divine forgiveness and grace engage with human finitude, fragility and sin in the realization of human happiness?

— How are the conditions and structures of human life related to the goal of human fulfilment?

— What are the implications of the creatureliness which human beings share with the rest of the natural world?
 (LC. 11)

A small reference to homosexuality reads:

Both our Communions affirm the importance and significance of human friendship and affection among men and women, whether married or single. Both affirm that all persons, including those of homosexual orientation, are made in the divine image and share the full dignity of human creatureliness. Both affirm that a faithful and lifelong marriage between a man and a woman provides the normative context for a fully sexual relationship. Both appeal to Scripture and the natural order as the sources of their teaching on this issue. Both reject, therefore, the claim, sometimes made that homosexual relationships and married relationships are morally equivalent, and equally capable of expressing the right ordering and use of the sexual drive. Such ordering and use, we believe, are an essential aspect of life in Christ. Here again our different approaches to the formulation of law are relevant (cf. § 52). Roman Catholic teaching holds that homosexual activity is "intrinsically disordered", and concludes that it is always objectively wrong. This affects the kind of pastoral advice that is given to homosexual persons. Anglicans could agree that such activity is disordered; but there may well be differences among them in the consequent moral and pastoral advice they would think it right to offer to those seeking their counsel and direction. (LC.87)

In retrospect, I regret that we did not try to say more. However, I remain convinced that the way forward for us, as we seek to be faithful in Anglican moral teaching, will be found by attending to the traditional principles and insights used by Life in Christ, not by ignoring them.

The Gift of Authority, completed in 1998 and published in 1999, is regarded by many as ARCIC’s boldest and most controversial statement. It is equally challenging for both Anglicans and Roman Catholics. I promised myself that I would never attempt to summarize the document but simply encourage people read it and to engage with it beginning at its beginning. If it helps us to receive authority in the Church as a gift from the author of life, inseparable from our response to the Gospel and the baptismal covenant it is useful.

The agreement about the Scriptures as unique, normative, and belonging to what has been given once for all, should fill Anglican hearts with joy. However, our Roman Catholic partners are now challenging us about it. Are Anglicans in peril of abandoning adherence to the authority of Scripture? How firmly is contemporary Anglicanism attached to the Scriptures? When we officially evaluate The Gift of Authority, will we affirm paragraph 23?

The meaning of the revealed Gospel of God is fully understood only within the Church. God’s revelation has been entrusted to a community. The Church cannot properly be described as an aggregate of individual believers, nor can its faith be considered the sum of the beliefs held by individuals. Believers are together the people of faith because they are incorporated by baptism into a community which receives the canonical Scriptures as the authentic Word of God; they receive faith within this community. The faith of the community precedes the faith of the individual. So, though one person’s journey of faith may begin with individual reading of Scripture, it cannot remain there. Individualistic interpretation of the Scriptures is not attuned to the reading of the text within the life of the Church and is incompatible with the nature of the authority of the revealed Word of God (cf. 2 Pet 1.20-21). Word of God and Church of God cannot be put asunder. (GA.23)

ARCIC’s earlier statements on Authority in the Church, together with The Gift rest on the understanding of the Church as communion. In our particular western context the theology of communion is radically counter cultural. It contradicts contemporary relativism and subjectivism and challenges the permissive and individualistic attitudes that are commonly taken to be virtues rather than vices. If we are to live out the Gospel we have to accept that its demands include living in a relationship of justice and love with our neighbours. We are required to contribute to the common good as well as receive from it. The call to follow Christ’s example of self-giving love is sometimes a call to renounce what is rightfully ours in order to respond to a greater need of others in the human community.

When General Synod meets later this month will secular culture dominate when it discusses proposals for “the local option”? Or will it holds to the kind of ecclesiology that is found, for example, in passages from The Gift of Authority such as:

• In each local church all the faithful are called to walk together in Christ. The term synodality (derived from syn-hodos meaning ‘common way’) indicates the manner in which believers and churches are held together in communion as they do this. (GA.34)
• The mutual interdependence of all the churches is integral to the reality of the Church as God wills it to be. No local church that participates in the living Tradition can regard itself as self-sufficient. Forms of synodality, then, are needed to manifest the communion of the local churches and to sustain each of them in fidelity to the Gospel. (GA.37)
• The maintenance of communion requires that at every level there is a capacity to take decisions appropriate to that level. When those decisions raise serious questions for the wider communion of churches, synodality must find a wider expression. (GA.37)

I cannot quote from ARCIC’s most recent agreement because it will not be made public until next year. The determinative English version has been signed but there are independent commentaries and translations still to be prepared. It may come as a surprise, perhaps even a shock for some. I am sure that it will be useful, even for those who cannot identify with all that it says. The title gives us a good indication of the agreement’s direction. It is Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ. I have found Grace and Hope in Christ as I have worked on all six of these Agreed Statements. I would like to think that seminaries, synods, parishes, clergy and the faithful would all also benefit from turning to ecumenical agreements in order to renew their faith and thus find fresh Grace and Hope in Christ.

I have been speaking at a difficult time for the Anglican Church. All of the documents to which I have referred were written to advance reconciliation. Please believe that I am not intending to provide fuel for conflict. I do not wish to cause any one to dismiss sisters and brothers in Christ as liberals or conservatives, hardliners or progressives, orthodox or relativist. My aim is to encourage confident commitment and enthusiastic witness to what God reveals to us in Christ. The kind of witness that the world has the right to receive from all members of the believing community is expressed in the hymn by John Henry Newman Hymn:

Firmly I believe and truly

God is Three and God is One;

And I next acknowledge duly

Manhood taken by the Son.

And I trust and hope most fully

In that Manhood crucified;

And each thought and deed unruly

Do to death as he has died.

Simply to his grace and wholly

Light and life and strength belong,

And I love supremely, solely,

Him the Holy, him the Strong.

Ecumenical agreements do not only help all those who love Christ to be reconciled to each other. They can also help those who are entrusted with teaching and preaching to nurture simple faith, lively hope and deep, committed, costly love of Christ. God bless you all in your part of that ministry.

John Baycroft,

Ottawa,

2004-05-05

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[1] For Richard Hooker, "we participate Christ partly by imputation, as when those things which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partly by habitual and real infusion, as when grace is inwardly bestowed while we are on earth, and afterwards more fully both our souls and bodies made like unto his in glory" Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V. lvi. 11).