I posted this quote last year on my old blog, but it is something I find worth repeating. In fact, it is one of the wisest quotes I’ve read in years. It comes from my systematic theology professor Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, in his book An Introduction to Ecclesiology: Ecumenical, Historical & Global Perspectives (2002):

If one is not simply ready to discount the ecclesiality of Free churches and other nontraditional church forms, it poses the question of the conditions of being a church. Of course, the approach of traditional theology has too often been to impose its own often quite-limited definition of churchhood on its younger counterparts. Naturally, those churches that define what ecclesiality means usually themselves fulfill the requirements of their own definitions! But ecumenically, it does not further the discussion. For older churches, just to discard the enormous potential and force of nontraditional churches by classifying them as something less than a church is both dangerous and useless. Younger churches have shown their vitality in their lives, and now it is left to theology to catch up with these developments. This has always been the main task of theology: to reflect on and make sense of what is happening in Christian life and churches….

There is no denying the value of ecclesiological traditions in classical theology. It simply is the fact that most ecclesiological thinking and even experimenting has taken place within the confines of classical Christendom up until the expansion of the modern missionary movement. And even then, almost until our day, theologies were still Western. Even though today in any meaningful teaching and study of theology full hearing has to be given to voices from outside the West, it is only naïve and harmful to imagine that two thousand years of theological tradition could be easily discarded. (9)

I find that Kärkkäinen’s critical program isn’t true of just ecclesiology, but helpful in nearly any arena of life.

On that note, this quote also reminds me of something Miroslav Volf writes in (what else?) Exclusion and Embrace (1996):

[W]e enlarge our thinking by letting the voices and perspectives of others, especially those with whom we may be in conflict, resonate within ourselves, by allowing them to help us see them, as well as ourselves, from their perspective, and if needed, readjust our perspectives as we take into account their perspectives. Nothing can guarantee in advance that the perspectives will ultimately merge and agreement be reached. We may find that we must reject the perspective of the other. Yet we should seek to see things from their perspective in the hope that competing justices may become converging justices and eventually issue agreement.

Reversing perspectives may lead us not only to learn something from the other, but also to look afresh at our own traditions and rediscover their neglected or even forgotten resources. Consider the role the encounter with socialist tradition and its appropriation in Liberation Theology has played in the larger Christian debate about justice. It has forced us to readjust our reading of the biblical message: to know God means to do justice (whatever else knowing God might mean); justice is justice for the poor; God’s justice includes God’s compassion on those who suffer… We see what we have not seen before because, in the encounter with the other, we have made space within ourselves not only for the perspective of the other but with the help of the other also for silenced voices from our own tradition. (213)

Oddly enough Kärkkäinen filled the vacancy Volf left at Fuller when he moved onto Yale Divinity School.