Robert McAfee Brown PROFESSOR, UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
1Iy hopes for the emerging religious dialogue in America outbalance my misgivings, but both the hopes and the misgivings must be seen in relation to one another. 1[y immediate hope is that the give-and-take of the emerging dialogue can destroy some of the caricatures we have of one another. lf nothing more should happen than that we came to disagree about the right things, this would be clear gain. The clearing up of misunderstandings will not come about as insulated Protes,tants talk about Catholicism to one another, and vice versa. 1t will come about only as Protestants and Catholics talk to one another, and listen to one another. There are two particular stereotypes of Catholicism that exist in the Protestant mind-set. and both of them need to be laid to rest. One of these is the persistent image most Protestants l1ave of CathoHcism as monolithic. A fuller exposure of legitimate differences of opinion among Catholics will be most beneficial in any dialogue. (The whole Burry over the Puerto Rican bishops will in the long run have a beneficial impact on the Protestant image of Catholicism, for, whatever else the event showed, it indicated that Catholics were not of one mind on the wisdom of the bishops' action.) The other image is a conviction that somehow Roman Catholics clo not really believe in religious liberty. Anyone who exposes himself to Catholic literature on the subject cannot help discovering that there is a wide spectrum of opinion on it. The width of that spectrum needs to be made more apparent to Protestants, whose field of vision is still very narrow. T have a secon~l hope for the emerging dialogue. lt is a hope that there can be serious theological interchange between American Protestants and American Catholics. Protestant theology can learn a great deal from Catholicism in such areas as the meaning of tradition, the life of the early Church and the relationship of the C hurch to the world. Some Catholic theologians wilJ now concede that emphases in Protestant thought are important emphases that have been slighted in the polemically oriented Catholic apologetics of another clay. Further theological exchange may appear unspectacular to the outsider, but it can build a firm foundation for increased understanding. My main misgiving about the dialogue is that people will expect too much from it. We are now able to say: "Dialogue has begun." But we must not begin to say: "llow soon will something happen?" The minute we start pressing for tangible results, we will be throwing up needless roadblocks. Cod's time is not the same as our time, and l have a feeling that rie is going to be much more patient about these things than many of I lis activistically inclined American children. \Ve can, of course, hope and pray that dialogue will lead to a lessening of certain kinds of tensions, to the opening up of new and warm relationships, to the recognition of the treasures inherent in our total Christian witness. But we
cannot assume that the blast of our dialogical trumpets is about to reduce the Jericho of our divisions to dust and ashes. I cannot speak for Catholics in this matter, but 1 know some Protestants who will get impatient at the lack of immediate results. Some of them are already impatient. They airily refer to the dialogue as "phony," or they angrily insist that a concern for Christian unity is a "sellout" to the "monolith" conception of the Church as opposed to the "free church" conception. They are unimpressed by the deeper measures of understanding the dialogue produces, because they insist that it must produce a Catholic denial of infallibility or a Catholic admission that other churches are just as riO'ht as the Catholic Church. They are not concerned, in°other words, to enter into dialogue. All they really want to do is win a debate. It is at this point that Protestants and Catholics must refuse to let the strident voices around them deflect them from their concern for one another. We have no way of knowing where our dialogue is going to lead. W e cannot lay down conditions in advance. We simply enter into it in trust. Our hopes are greater than our misgivings, for we believe that it is the will of God that we come to know one another better. What God will do with the fact that we come to know one another better, we can safely leave to Him. But we can be sure that tl1e seed will bear fruit as He sees fit.
John Courtney Murray EDITOR, THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
There are two possible areas of dialogue. In the first area the general issue would be the bearing of religious faith on "public affairs" in the widest sense-the matters that concern the commonwealth, whether as problems in public policy or as more theoretical problems in the public philosophy. In the second area the general issue would be the analogous relationship between the religious fa iths themselves, to be discerned through direct confrontation on the properly theological level. In both areas there are grave difficulties. In the second area the major difficulty has long been known. There is not much use in arguing the question of whether Protestant and Catholic hold in common certain articles of the traditional Christian creed, at least in some analogous fashion, when both parties to the dialogue must admit that they differ radically about the meaning of the word with which the traditional creed begins, "Credo," "I believe." On this antecedent issue the two universes of theological discourse part company. each to assume its own irreducibly different style and content. At that, there would be value in having it made clear. in argument, that the two universes do thus diHer. This achievement would at least eliminate one of the possible dangers-that of a false irenicism. . For the rest, there might be some hope of rec,procally useful confrontation, if the issues on the table concerned biblical themes, to be discussed under strict regard both