While there have been impressive developments in the pursuit of Christian unity over the past decades, many ecumenists and theologians fear that progress in the ecumenical quest has stalled of late. The impasse, argues Timothy Lim, is often due to reasons other than theological. At the core of these nontheological factors is what he calls the problem of recognition, a concept that has come to the fore within ecumenical circles in the last few decades. Recognition has to do with the question of whether, in what ways, and to what extent church bodies accept the legitimacy and authenticity of other ecclesial communities as the church in the process of moving toward fuller communion.
In this volume Lim develops an interdisciplinary approach to attend to these nontheological factors. In chapters 2 through 4 he identifies three types of inquiry that offer insights into these external impediments to the church's unity, the first of which is a philosophy of recognition, beginning with Paul Ricoeur's analysis of Descartes, Kant, and Bergson, leading up to a “literalist reading of Hegel's the Lord-and-bondman analogy.” By itself, however, such a philosophy tends to remain rooted in the dialectic between self-identity and the other, and thus falls short of a genuine sociality. A second thread is added to this threefold cord, drawn from the field of social psychology, that examines the way recognition occurs between groups in the movement toward reciprocity. The third and final section introduces Axel Honneth's work on a recognitional paradigm in the field of political science to investigate the way that power and domination affect the struggle toward or away from church unity.
The theologian who has to date exemplified this interdisciplinary approach, writes Lim, is the French Dominican Yves Congar, who is the subject of chapter 5. The three layers of intersubjectivity—the philosophical, the social psychological, and the political—are present, though implicitly and without technical sophistication for the most part, in Congar's own ecumenical work. In many ways I found this to be the most beneficial chapter, as Congar's writings demonstrate the usefulness of an interdisciplinary approach that is embedded in its intrinsic theological milieu.
In the postscript the author briefly applies Honneth's theory of reproductive recognition (reinforcing existing relational patterns and attitudes, whether for good or ill) and productive recognition (which extends status previously withheld), first, to questions of intracommunion ecumenicity within ten Christian World Communions, and second, to relations between communions, and then finally to the theory's pastoral and ministerial implications.
The predominant worry about using these other methods, of course, is that “the tail will wag the dog,” veering into a form of sociological reduction. Lim is aware of the risk but argues that the use of these other disciplines complements and does not replace or control the main theological, liturgical, and practical components of ecumenical conversations. Much depends on the skill of the scholar using these methods in ways that do not occlude the theological content.
No monograph can cover all the bases, and that is the case also with this volume. With the exception of the chapter on Congar, Lim's approach can suffer at times from the lack of a social historical perspective. For example, the history of Protestantism in North America has from its inception posited a nearly complete identity between the church and the political experiment of liberal democracy. Many sectors of my own Baptist tradition still adhere to John Locke's exclusion of Catholics from the political sphere of toleration.
In the final analysis, this is a positive contribution to the labor of ecumenical dialogue by a promising young scholar that deserves to be read and studied closely.
