Stagnating Friendliness, and a Walk to Rome

“I’m walking from Erfurt, Germany, where an earnest young Augustinian friar named Martin Luther tried to get right with God, to Rome—500 years after said friar made the same journey himself,” writes the Lutheran scholar and pastor, and former First Things fellow, Sarah Hinlicky Wilson in today’s second “On the Square” article, Here I Walk, I Cannot Do Otherwise . In what she calls “an ecumenical stunt,” she and her husband are bringing attention to the achievements and the continuing challenges of ecumenical discussions by retracing Luther’s steps and blogging on the way. It needs the attention, she thinks:

If there’s any stagnation going on, it’s probably because ecumenism has become a victim of its own success. The bitter polemics and mutual distrust that were common on both official and local levels a century ago are all but gone . . . .

But this friendliness has also reduced the urgency once felt in divided Christendom. And a Western culture increasingly relativistic and fairly well obsessed with tolerance has a hard time seeing what, exactly, the point of faith-and-order type discussions could possibly be.