It is often said that we are in the midst of an ecumenical winter, but I find in Curtis Freeman's Contesting Catholicity: Theology for Other Baptists a garden in bloom. I think of a theme associated with the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe: roses in December. The World Council of Churches expresses the goal of the ecumenical movement as “full, visible communion.”Footnote ²⁰ This does not mean that all traditions are expected to merge together into one organization. It means, rather, that we hope to grow in understanding and appreciation of each other such that we reach a point where we can mutually recognize in each other an authentic way of living out the Christian faith. Particular traditions will still remain, but hopefully some day we will be able to share sacraments and ministers.

This goal is still a long way off, but what we can do in the meantime is to try to live out what Vatican II called a “spiritual ecumenism.”Footnote ²¹ We are to realize that ecumenical progress means something more than simply that the other will turn into us. We all need to live our faith humbly as we acknowledge our own wrongs and are ready to forgive others. We need to accept that the Holy Spirit has been at work in various Christian communities in salvific ways. We need to concentrate on reforming our own churches and to strive to live holier lives. We need to learn about each other, dialogue with each other, and pray with each other.

In more recent years the movement of Receptive Ecumenism has arisen. Here the point of focus has been on learning from each other. Ecumenical progress is being made through an “ecclesial gift exchange.” Each tradition can strive to recognize some of the distinctive attributes of other traditions as gifts offered to the whole church. Each tradition can in turn offer some of its own distinctive attributes as ecclesial gifts to the whole church. Traditions do not have to adopt the distinctives of other traditions in order to recognize them as ecclesial gifts. We are not going to become carbon copies of each other. In many cases, though, we might examine critically some of our own distinctives and ask ourselves if we might align them more closely with the common practices of other churches.

Contesting Catholicity is a model for the practices of spiritual ecumenism and receptive ecumenism. Freeman describes his own group, which he labels “Other Baptists,” as “islands of catholicity separated from Rome” (389–90). Drawing upon William McClendon and John Yoder, he gives three definitions for the word “catholic.” “Catholic” can be a quality of congregations insofar as they are whole, typical, or ordinary in their everyday beliefs and practices; it can be a sense of catholicity as shared by all Christian churches; or it can refer to the word as used by Roman Catholics to mean one unified church.

Freeman identifies the first meaning of “catholic” as the focus of Baptist tradition, and he links to this meaning the practice of reconciling dialogue as the Baptist path toward ecumenical progress. From this standpoint he offers two ecclesial gifts that Baptists have to offer to the church catholic. First, there is the Baptist practice of adult baptism by immersion into Christian discipleship. Even if other traditions do not adopt this practice, the practice should be recognized for its witness to what it means to be a Christian. Second, there is the Baptist distinctive of identifying the present-day congregation with the eschatological communities of salvation testified to in the New Testament. McClendon articulates this distinctive as “this is that”: this present-day community is as alive today as the earliest Christian communities. All Christians can honor and learn from these distinctive traits.

For Freeman the ecclesial gift exchange travels both ways. He recommends that Baptists become more open in their own reception of the gifts of others, whether that be through recognition or even through changes of belief and practice. He urges Baptists to recognize the practice of infant baptism when it is followed at a later time by confirmation. He asks that Baptists be willing to move their understanding and practice of the Eucharist in the direction of the understandings and practices common in other traditions. He wants a willingness to recognize apostolic succession through bishops as a sign, even if not a necessary sign, of apostolicity. These three requests cover the three major areas of baptism, eucharist, and ministry. He asks further that Baptists be open to affirming the ancient creeds by which the majority of Christians have expressed their shared belief in the Incarnation and in the Trinity. He makes these requests not simply on the basis of neighborly negotiations but rather grounds his arguments in a historical study that shows that the deepest strains within the Baptist tradition have been neither anti-Trinitarian nor antisacramental nor anticatholic with a small c.

Much of Baptist tradition has been anti-Catholic when spelled with a capital C, but such is obviously not the case with Curtis Freeman and Other Baptists. Freeman explores the meaning of the phrase “subsists in” as it was used in Lumen Gentium to replace the verb “is” in the statement that the Church of Christ “subsists in” the Catholic Church. He has examined carefully the debates between Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Kasper and also those between Carl Becker and Francis Sullivan. He exhibits a good grasp of the ambiguities and tensions found within the current discussion. I would say that everyone knows that Vatican II opened the door to ecumenical progress, and indeed opened it more than a small crack. How much more than a small crack has been the subject of debate, but only the most die-hard traditionalist could even imagine that the door can now be slammed shut. I hope that this point is of some consolation to Freeman, because he has shoved his foot inside the door. He is not about to cross the Tiber, as he tells us, but he is making us come to the door in order to explain what we mean when we say that we recognize that there is some type of distinction to be made between the church that Christ founded and the Catholic Church.

Freeman concludes that there is at least some room for further dialogue between Baptists and Catholics about where the church founded by Christ subsists, and I agree. Catholic versions of communion ecclesiology do hold to the necessity of episcopal structures of authority, but they also stress that the structures of communion are in the service of relationships. It is in our relationships of love with each other through Christ and the Holy Spirit that the primary form of communion exists. Seen in this light, what Freeman offers us in Contesting Catholicity is a Baptist communion ecclesiology grounded in the tenet that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt 18:20). In this way, he is able to locate Other Baptists both within Baptist tradition and within the church catholic. I read him as urging both Baptists and capital C Catholics to recognize themselves as belonging to a larger small c catholic church, yet to do so without leaving their distinctive loyalties and commitments behind.

I found only one error in this book, and I think it is likely that Freeman carried this point over from one of the many Catholic sources that have made this same error. He calls the alternative that Pope Benedict offered to a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” a “hermeneutic of continuity,” (253–54). whereas Benedict himself labeled it a “hermeneutic of reform.”Footnote ²² A “hermeneutic of reform” is one that addresses a “combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels.” The example that Pope Benedict gave is quite relevant for contemporary Baptist-Catholic dialogue. He explained that the new teaching on religious freedom expressed in Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae, that no government has the right to impose religious faith on any of its citizens, corrects some previous Catholic teaching on this subject. However, he sees this teaching in harmony with the deeper tradition of the faith. It is consistent with the teaching of Jesus as well as with the faith of the martyrs who gave witness not only to Christ but also to the freedom to profess one's faith.

Benedict summed it up: “The Second Vatican Council, with its new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity it has actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity.”Footnote ²³ I would go so far as to say that with this example Benedict was not only implicitly recognizing a Baptist distinctive, but also expressing how the Catholic Church has adopted this belief and practice as its own. Perhaps, though, religious freedom of conscience as applied to church members remains an area concerning which the Catholic Church can still learn more by listening to the experience of others.

This book has reminded me that Catholics and Baptists share some of the same problems. We have both been infiltrated by the extreme individualism that haunts our culture and that can reduce even our understanding of salvation to a personal, private affair. We are torn by conservative-liberal divisions, and few of us have attained the second naïveté that Freeman thinks can move us beyond these splits. And I am reminded that differences between Catholics and Baptists are more than differences in beliefs and practices. For all of Freeman's acknowledgments concerning the complexities surrounding charges of Constantinianism, I detect throughout that we have different viewpoints and attitudes toward church history, toward culture, and toward what we call “the world.” Such differences do not have to be church dividing, but they are things to be aware of as the dialogue moves on. Freeman notes that in the southern United States, the Baptist tradition created a culture. Can this type of Christian influence in “the world” be a good thing?

An ecclesial gift that the Catholic Church has to offer is a unity of faith. Of course there is a range of diversity among Catholics. And it is true that there are many former Catholics in the world. And in cases where one's beliefs and practices may be going wrong, unity of faith can be a problem. In a way that contrasts with other traditions that appear to be frequently dividing from each other, however, Catholics have mostly been able to stick together. Our unity of faith can be linked with the unity we have through the bishops and the pope. Freeman has already expressed an openness to recognizing in the apostolic succession of bishops a sign of apostolicity. Is this Catholic distinctive of a unity of faith something that can be recognized and valued as an ecclesial gift to the whole church, even if other traditions do not align themselves with this belief and practice? It there something to be said for having representatives who can speak authoritatively for one's tradition?

I find Contesting Catholicity to be exciting and hopeful, though of course we are still a long way off from “full, visible communion.” The book is an ecumenical tour de force that moves all of us in the right direction.