










































Global South Theological Journal 2, no. 2 (2023):  26 

THE CHALLENGE OF AFRICAN CHURCHES IN THE ECUMENICAL DISCUSSION  
WITH SPECIAL REFERENC EOT ETHIOPIA 

 
 

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson 
(Associate Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church and the founder of Thornbush Press) 

 
 
 

Abstract: This article aims to explore the challenges faced by African churches in 
achieving ecumenism and unity amidst geographical, cultural, and confessional divisions. 
It examines the various models of Christian unity that have been proposed in the last 
century and highlights the ongoing debate surrounding the desired form of unity. The 
significance of reconciliation and forgiveness in addressing divisions rooted in sin is 
underscored, although complete reconciliation may not always be attainable. 

Drawing upon the example of Gudina Tumsa and the Ethiopian Evangelical 
Church Mekane Yesus (EECMY), this article stresses the importance of maintaining 
cultural diversity within the church while simultaneously fostering unity. It argues against 
the notion that ecumenism should eradicate individual identities or enforce a new 
confessionalism, and instead advocates for a framework that respects and encompasses 
ongoing differences and disagreements. Additionally, the article posits that the goal of 
ecumenism should not be to eliminate disagreements or impose a standardized theology, 
but rather to encourage individuals to engage with and learn from diverse theological 
traditions, leading to a more comprehensive comprehension of their own strengths and 
weaknesses. 

Furthermore, the article puts forth the concept of differentiated consensus as a 
potential strategy to facilitate ecumenical dialogue. This approach allows different 
theological traditions to manifest the same essence of the Christian faith in distinct forms. 
By engaging in thoughtful discussions, common ground can be discovered, and theological 
variances can be viewed as less significant than previously assumed. Numerous bilateral 
dialogues have successfully employed this approach, enabling a deeper understanding, 
addressing misunderstandings, and acknowledging that diverse expressions of faith can 
coexist within the parameters of acceptable Christian teaching. 

 
 
 
I would first of all like to thank Samuel for the invitation to speak at this conference, which is an honor 
and has been an opportunity for me to stretch my own theological knowledge through careful study of the 
life and works of Gudina Tumsa. Reading through the lectures from previous forums, I have become a 
little envious to realize that I am one of the few to speak on this great man who never had the chance to 
meet him in person. I am already looking forward to doing so in the heavenly kingdom! For now I must 
be content to learn through the record he left behind and the witness of others. 

I would also like to say how humbled I am to be asked to speak on such a topic as the challenge 
of African churches in ecumenism. Like many other Christians and theologians of the North Atlantic 
world, I have only gradually and recently come to recognize the vast world of Christianity outside my 
own small piece of it. I am inspired by the vitality of Christian faith in the Global South and sorrowful 
over the misdeeds past and present of those whose culture I share. I hope that this lecture can in some 
small way contribute toward rebuilding bridges of trust in the church across all kinds of divisions, 
whether they are geographical, cultural, or confessional. 

I approach this topic from my position as a Lutheran theologian who is also an ecumenist. There 
are many people who still believe that there is a fundamental tension between these two realities—
claiming for oneself the Lutheran theological tradition, wishing to foster it and continue in it, while at the 
same time being an ecumenist, desiring the unity of the church and recognizing as full and true 



Wilson, “Challenge of African Churches in the Ecumenical Discussion” 
 

 

Global South Theological Journal 2, no. 2 (2023):  27 

Christian’s others whose theological approaches are dramatically different. I spend as much time trying to 
develop Lutherans’ understanding of Luther as I do trying to understand other Christian communities and 
traditions. How can it be that these two tasks do not stand in stark contradiction to one another? 

The fact that this question must be asked, that an apparent contradiction must be resolved, 
indicates that the nature of the unity we seek is still very much up for debate. Over the past hundred years, 
since ecumenism first emerged in response to the travesties of missionary competition, many different 
models of Christian unity have been proposed. They have spanned every possibility from mere practical 
cooperation to complete organizational merger. Each proposal has its strengths but each has probably 
even more weaknesses. If anything has become clear, it is that the true unity of the church will ultimately 
be a gift of God, not an achievement of humankind. Gudina himself noted the important distinction 
between “ecumenism” understood as churches working together and the “unity” for which Jesus prayed 
for during his last evening with his disciples.1 

What then can we be working toward ecumenically as the Holy Spirit forms us into one church? 
What kind of oneness are we seeking? It is all too clear that many of the divisions of the church—
possibly even most of the divisions of the church—are rooted in human sin, in failures to listen and 
failures to forgive, in self-seeking and other-hating, in competition and power struggles and prejudice. 
Some of these breaks, it seems, will never be reconciled. Other times there are glimmers of hope that 
reconciliation is possible, even centuries later. Here I am thinking of the Lutheran World Federation’s 
decision to apologize to the Mennonite community for Lutheran complicity in the execution of 
Anabaptists in the sixteenth century, which was met by a full declaration of forgiveness by the Mennonite 
World Conference.2 But such cases are unfortunately rare.3 We could easily spend our whole lives 
working toward ecclesial reconciliation where sin lies at the root. Such ecumenism addresses failures in 
love. 

But the many faces of the church are not due only to sin, and it is extremely important that we 
recognize this fact. There are also disagreements about truth. These surely are and can be driven and 
exacerbated by failures in love. But disagreement is not in itself sinful. None us of us has the God’s-eye 
view of reality. All of us are limited and struggling to understand a world, and a Lord, that are beyond our 
full comprehension. Because of this, disagreement is valuable. It is even essential. It forces us to think 
more clearly, more acutely. It forces us to expand the scope of our knowledge, to consider things outside 
our own personal experience. Genuine disagreement born of a struggle to understand, as opposed to false 
disagreement born of a failure to love, is a triumph and a blessing. I would argue that loving those with 
whom we disagree, without sacrificing our own convictions, is a mark of Christian maturity. It is also a 
mark of ecumenical progress. 

Therefore, we should not say that the goal of ecumenism is the elimination of disagreements or 
the creation of a super-theology or mono-theology that would suppress disagreements or fresh thinking 
because it claimed to solve every problem and promised to put an end to troublesome arguments. If that 
were our goal, we would ironically have to return to a strategy of competing theologies, a winner-takes-all 
approach, with the assumption that one theological tradition would ultimately win and all the others 

 
1 Gudina Tumsa, “The Responsibility of the ECMY toward Ecumenical Harmony,” in Witness and Discipleship: 

Leadership of the Church in Multi-Ethnic Ethiopia in a Time of Revolution: The Essential Writings of Gudina Tumsa,  2nd ed. 
(Hamburg: WDL-Publishers, 2007), 14. 

 
2 See Healing Memories: Reconciling in Christ: Report of the Lutheran-Mennonite International Study Commission 

(Geneva and Strasbourg: Lutheran World Federation and Mennonite World Conference, 2010), available online at 
http://www.lutheranworld.org/lwf/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Report_Lutheran-Mennonite_Study_Commission.pdf. I should 
also mention my recent discovery that Mekane Yesus helped to protect the tiny and vulnerable Mennonite church in Ethiopia 
during the Derg regime; today the partnership between the two is very strong. It is a great joy to see such a reversal of historical 
patterns! 

3 Some steps in this direction on the Roman Catholic side can be seen in Unitatis Redintegratio §7: “So we humbly beg 
pardon of God and of our separated brethren, just as we forgive them that trespass against us,” and also in “Memory and 
Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” available online at 
www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000307_memory-reconc-itc_en.html. 



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would lose, or that each church would donate one portion of its heritage but toss everything else away in 
order to make way for this new, final, silencing mono-theology. 

Such a notion may sound ridiculous, yet I think many people fear and suspect that this is exactly 
what ecumenism is all about. But such a model is as unfaithful as the notion that there is and should be 
only one true church culture. Here again I think of Gudina’s insistence that the EECMY should not be a 
monolingual, monocultural church, but rather a church that deliberately includes many languages and 
cultures—a conviction that, I suspect, was related to the bad Oromo experience with the Amharic cultural 
hegemony of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was not to make 
everybody speak and understand one language, but to make all the people there understand the gospel in 
their own language. In mission we do not seek to draw all people into one single culture that alone houses 
the gospel, but for the gospel to move out into every culture and make each culture its dwelling place. 
This means that people are entitled to remain “at home” in their own cultures, even as the gospel takes 
hold of those cultures, inhabits them, and transforms them. 

But Pentecost also implies that we need to step outside of our home cultures, out of those places 
comfortable for us, to see what other people’s homes are like. (Note how hard it was even for the apostles 
to leave Jerusalem; the Spirit had to keep nudging them out.) This is an essential part of growth into 
Christian maturity so that we don’t make the mistake of thinking that the gospel and our home culture are 
logical equivalents. We will naturally equate the two if not pushed beyond our boundaries. The tension 
between “at home” and “away” has to be maintained, not eliminated. We are allowed to be at home 
where we are at home; we are not allowed to deny other people the right to be at home where they are at 
home. 

This cultural analogy helps us to grasp what ecumenism should and should not be. Ecumenism 
should not demand that no one feel at home anymore, leaving one theological tradition for an ecumenical 
super-theology that belongs to everybody and nobody. But ecumenism should drive people to travel 
beyond the borders of their home theology and home church to see what else is out there, which will then 
help them to be better Christians both at home and abroad. Ecumenical voyaging helps people see the 
weaknesses and failures in their home church—every church has them, for none can manage everything 
perfectly—and also to recognize their own real strengths. It should make them discover that there are real 
Christians over there—and thus that their church is also Christ’s church, which means it is also our 
church, even if in different clothing! We may legitimately critique other Christians, but we may not deny 
them the baptism that made and keeps them Christian. This approach to ecumenism should also take some 
of the burden off of “converts”—those people who find that they are more at home in a different church 
home than the one where they started. The anti-ecumenical approach means that converts from one kind 
of Christianity to another often feel the need to reject everything in their first church home and accept 
everything uncritically in their new church home. That does not contribute to the unity of the church, 
either! 

For all these reasons, I sometimes wonder if the appeals made for an “ecumenical theology” or 
“ecumenical education” aren’t a kind of softer, gentler colonialism in disguise. The new ecumenical 
consensus can become its own new confessionalism, as all-encompassing and demanding of total loyalty 
as any confessional formulation of the past. That is not a real strength but an attempt to buy unity cheaply 
without the ongoing hard work that every generation and every place must take up for itself. Efforts 
toward unity that don’t allow for ongoing difference and disagreement are really just seeking to strip 
people of their identities, even if for a supposedly good cause. This is surely not the unity that Jesus 
prayed for. 

A wiser ecumenical approach is embodied in the strategy known as differentiated (or 
differentiating) consensus. Its basic insight is that the various theological traditions may express the same 
content of the Christian faith in different forms, forms different enough that other Christians may not 
immediately recognize them as testifying to the same content. Through careful ecumenical discussion, 
two church traditions with different expressions and formulations may find that they hold a great deal 
more in common than previously believed. Most of the bilateral dialogue work done over the past fifty 
years has come to exactly this conclusion. It has allowed the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox, 



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Global South Theological Journal 2, no. 2 (2023):  29 

for instance, to declare that their break at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 was due to semantic 
misunderstandings rather than mutually exclusive conceptions of the nature of Christ; and it has allowed 
Lutherans and Roman Catholics to co-sign the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, 
addressing what seemed to be the most foundational difference between them.4 In neither case was either 
church asked to stop being itself or to abandon its own forms of expression and distinctive emphases. 
Instead, it was asked to recognize that the other church’s theology lay within the boundaries of acceptable 
Christian teaching, such that division and denial of the other’s Christianity was no longer the absolutely 
required consequence of the difference. Naturally, this method cannot solve every problem. Sometimes 
differences are not merely apparent but real. But it has been a helpful tool to discover when, in fact, the 
difference is not as great as confessional polemics, driven by failures in love, have assumed them to be. 
For this reason, Pope John XXIII often said, “What unites us is much greater than what divides us”—
which, given the history between the various church factions, is a really remarkable thing to say! 

Ecumenical concepts are usually much easier to understand when matched with concrete 
examples. I can think of no better example of this best kind of ecumenism than the way the EECMY 
under the leadership of Gudina Tumsa dealt with the challenge of Pentecostal and charismatic 
movements. Encounters with Pentecostal missionaries had led to a revival especially among the youth of 
Ethiopia. They encountered fierce resistance from their fellow Lutherans and were so frustrated that they 
were prepared to walk out altogether. They told Gudina that they wanted to start a new church because 
their own church was dead. Gudina’s witty but pointed response was, “Jesus died, but he was raised from 
death. Don’t build a new church, but rebuild your old church. Raise it from death.”5 Under his leadership, 
a group of forty leaders in the EECMY got together to address the charismatic challenge and make 
recommendations to the church at large, through analysis of the scriptural witness to the Holy Spirit and 
evaluation of how other churches had dealt with charismatic renewal. The result was far and away the 
most theologically rich, positive, and nuanced response to the charismatic movement that any Lutheran 
church in the world has ever produced. It was all the more remarkable for its fidelity to Lutheranism at the 
same time that it called the Lutheran church to open up to something new. The encounter with Pentecostal 
movements recalled this Lutheran church to its sola Scriptura standard of judgment, since it forced a 
more careful reading of the Bible’s words about the Holy Spirit. It also offered fresh empowerment in the 
church’s fundamental calling to evangelism. 

I see in this document and its results a distinctly African gift to world Lutheranism and the 
ecumenical movement. For example, its experience as a mission church that had decided to take 
responsibility for itself allowed it to take the words of Augsburg Confession 7 more seriously than the 
missionaries themselves ever did. As the document’s section on “The Conflict over Ways of Worship” 
reports, “There should be a possibility in the congregations to have meetings with more freedom and 
openness for the manifestation of different gifts of the Holy Spirit. Ways of worship cannot be considered 
as doctrine. ‘It is not necessary that human traditions or rites or ceremonies instituted by man should 
everywhere be the same’ (Augsburg Confession, Article 7).”6 From there the document recommends both 
that “young people [be] taught the meaning of the traditional worship service” and that the EECMY 
“develop one common liturgy for the whole Church, a liturgy with a form that fits better in our Ethiopian 
context.” Prayer for the power and gifts of the Holy Spirit and for healing are encouraged, as is speaking 
in tongues as long as interpretation is offered as well. 

One also sees in this document how Ethiopian Lutherans, living in what we may call a “Spirit-
sensitive” part of the world, were able to detect the poverty of Lutheran reflection since Luther on the 
Holy Spirit and how they sought to address the lacuna. Lutherans in all parts of the world would be well-
served by studying the first section of this document in its careful review of the Bible’s teaching on the 

 
4 Sometimes the passage of time is the only thing that can make such consensus possible. There is no doubt that a great 

deal of evolution in Catholic thought had to take place first to bring it to its agreement with Lutherans in the Joint Declaration. 
5 Paul Hoffman (ed.) “Summary of the Discussions,” in The Life and Ministry of Gudina Tumsa: Lectures and 

Discussions: First Missiological Seminar 2001, 2nd expanded ed. (Hamburg: WDL-Publishers, 2007), 143. 
6 See Kilian McDonnell (ed.) “The Work of the Holy Spirit,” in Presence, Power, Praise: Documents on the 

Charismatic Renewal, vol. II, (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1980), 150–182. 



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Holy Spirit—and if they did, perhaps they would be less startled by the kind of worship practices they 
find in the Lutheran churches of Africa, and maybe even wonder what they’re missing back home!7 
Furthermore, this document is exemplary for its serious, peaceful assessment of an ecclesial challenge. 
Perhaps because of its taking place outside the Christendom context of the West and all the historical 
bitterness that dogs those churches, the EECMY was able to consider calmly what should and should not 
divide the church instead of simply reacting and then hardening.8 It did so by making the insightful 
distinction between “necessary conflicts”—namely the conflicts between God and Satan when the latter 
wants to destroy a reawakening of faith—and “unnecessary conflicts,” such as those over authority, 
doctrine, and styles of worship, all of which can be resolved through scriptural guidance and righteous 
behavior. This distinction echoes the language of the Formula of Concord (Solid Declaration), which 
perhaps inspired it: “[W]e must steadfastly maintain the distinction between unnecessary, useless quarrels 
and disputes that are necessary.”9 

And finally, this document of the EECMY is a gift to the wider church because it strikes at the 
heart of a longstanding but unfortunate “ecumenical” slogan that claims, “service unites, doctrine divides” 
or sometimes “spirituality unites, doctrine divides.” This is, first, naïve about service and spirituality. 
Service involves ethics, and ethics has proven to be as divisive as ecclesiology! We see this especially in 
the heated discussions in Africa and elsewhere over development and the proposed moratorium on 
missionary aid.10 And it was precisely the form of spirituality in charismatic worship practice that 
threatened the unity of the EECMY. Certainly “worship wars” are an ongoing problem in churches 
everywhere. A careful and considered doctrinal evaluation of the question is what rescued the EECMY 
from a potential split, strengthened its own theological position, and set the stage for the phenomenal, 
miraculous growth in the forty years that have followed. 

It should come as no surprise to fans of Gudina Tumsa that an ecumenism which chooses one 
aspect of the Christian faith over the others—whether it is service, or spirituality, or doctrine—is going to 
falter and will lack the resources it needs to address the challenges it faces. The hallmark of Gudina’s own 
theology was the call for a wholistic witness. His deep immersion in Scripture and the Lutheran 
theological tradition enabled him to grow in unprecedented directions, not only in his embrace of 
charismatic renewal but also in his bold confrontation with the powers and principalities on behalf of the 
people of God.11 In him we see the remarkable power of a Christian faith where service, spirituality, and 

 
7 For more on this issue, see my “Spiritless Lutheranism, Fatherless Pentecostalism, and a Proposed Baptismal-

Christological Corrective,” available online at http://strasbourginstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Seminar-2011-Wilson-
Spiritless-Lutheranism-Fatherless-Pentecostalism.pdf, and Kenneth Mtata, “The Holy Spirit in the Lutheran and Reformation 
History: An African Perspective,” available online at www.ecumenical-institute.org/en/2012-summer-seminar/. 

8 Which is, essentially, what most Western mainline Protestants did in response to charismatic renewal. The American 
Lutheran Church sent a psychologist to investigate; the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod ultimately had to broker a “peace 
treaty” with the charismatic elements; and a former bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America deliberately separated 
charismatic pastors from charismatic congregations in order to suppress the movement. 

 
9 Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (eds.) The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran 

Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 530. 
10 See especially Gudina Tumsa’s essays, “The Moratorium Debate and the ECMY,” “Memorandum to Emmanuel 

Abraham,” and “Report at the Ethiopia Consultation,” in Witness and Discipleship. 
11 That said, it is unfortunate that Gudina’s stance has been tied to a rejection of the two kingdoms doctrine, in his own 

words and those of others. See, for example, Øyvind M. Eide’s report of a conversation between himself and Gudina on the topic 
of the two kingdoms, in which the latter said, “It’s impossible for an African to divide the secular from the religious, mind from 
body, faith from development. Confessio Augustana was relevant to the needs of the reformers. African churches of our time 
have to develop a ‘Confessio Africana,’ a confessional stand relevant to African social, political and ideological reality”; quoted 
in “Integral Human Development,” in The Life and Ministry of Gudina Tumsa, 37. Eide shares Gudina’s criticism, as does 
Tasgara Hirpo in the article “Rev. Gudina Tumsa’s Contribution to the Understanding of a National Church, Partnership and 
Independence in the Global Church, as Viewed in and Developed in the EECMY,” in the same volume, p. 91. I fully 
acknowledge that the two kingdoms doctrine has a complex heritage and is not unproblematic. However, it seems often in these 
essays to have been misread as a systemic isolation of the church from the world, which is not what Luther meant. In fact, 
critiques of Muslim mergers of religion and society or the religio-political dominance of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church could 
have been greatly strengthened by study of Luther on this topic, since his own context of state-church power alliances was 

http://www.ecumenical-institute.org/en/2012-summer-seminar/


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Global South Theological Journal 2, no. 2 (2023):  31 

doctrine work in concert and not in competition. Wholistic Christianity, as Gudina saw it, is equally a 
matter of service, spirituality, and doctrine. It would be a false unity that built on the first two and 
neglected the third. 

To develop further Gudina’s wholistic approach to Christianity, of maximal service to Lutherans 
engaged in their ecumenical vocation, it would be valuable to reassess what portions of Luther’s writings 
are taught and studied by seminary students and church leaders. Attention is usually, and not surprisingly, 
focused on what spawned the Reformation—where Luther differed from medieval teaching, where he 
differed from other reform movements, what his distinctive “breakthroughs” were. I certainly don’t wish 
to ignore these vital parts of the story, but the need to define Lutheranism over against every other 
theological tradition is evident in the exclusive focus on such texts. It also means that huge portions of 
Luther’s massive output are ignored. How different a theologian he would appear if equal time were 
given to his moral and social treatises, to his advocacy for diakonia and political involvement, or to his 
personal letters addressed to people in all different situations. Then we would see the wholistic Luther, 
who undoubtedly would also make much more sense to Ethiopian Lutherans and others involved in the 
development of an indigenous wholistic Christianity for their own contexts. The source of Luther’s social 
and diaconal teaching in his confession about Jesus Christ and the Holy Trinity would then be much 
clearer. 

I do, however, sometimes worry that Christians in the rest of the world look to Africa to be 
progressive on matters of service and spirituality, to take the lead on diakonia, but to leave doctrine aside. 
The apparent assumption is that there are so many pressing issues that require solutions right now, such as 
HIV/AIDS, the abuse of women, human trafficking, political crises, and so forth, that Africans can’t be 
expected to make serious contributions in the area of doctrine. As if doctrine were a kind of luxury for 
people to engage in during their spare time, but service and spirituality were the real business of the 
Christian life! This is a deadly division of what needs to be a seamless whole. In our world today, so 
interconnected through global media, we all, not just Africans, can be condemned to a state of continually 
reacting to current events, staggering from one crisis to the next. Gudina speaks to this problematic as 
well; in his “Memorandum on Some Issues,” he writes: “Theology is a relative statement on the central 
message of the Christian Gospel, in an attempt to translate that message to the people in the process of 
revolutionary changes in this country of ours. Lack of a sound theological reflection in the present 
Ethiopian situation has, in my opinion, affected our work in a negative way, which if allowed to continue 
uncorrected will be very harmful to the life of this church to which we have committed ourselves for 
service.”12 For the sake of both church and world, we need to insist on time for quiet, calm, study, 
reflection, and preparation. Gudina’s friends testified to his lifelong habit of quiet prayer, theological 
reading, and meditation on Scripture. Doctrine is not a bonus activity for a church at peace; it is the daily 
confession that God is this way, that God’s creation is this way—so, therefore, we pray this way, we 
preach this way, we act this way, and not that way. Service and spirituality lose their power and get 
sucked into the sinful systems of the world if not anchored in the basic confession of God’s own being 
and mighty acts. 

Let me put these concepts again into a more concrete form. A wholistic ministry needs to be 
founded not only on a wholistic anthropology but also on a wholistic christology. Human physical and 
spiritual needs are deeply interconnected, but they can only be addressed with the necessary compassion 
and strength by a savior who exists for both and in both, who in his incarnation shares their physical and 
spiritual needs, and who in his death and resurrection fulfills both sets of needs, integrating them, holding 
together what sin and death wish to tear asunder. There are outstanding resources for such a christology in 
Luther’s writings, and also in his far-off theological ancestor, Cyril of Alexandria—who, of course, was 
one of the great African theologians of the early church. I’d like to outline here briefly some profitable 

 
actually quite similar to the Ethiopian situation. Misgana Mathewos gives a more accurate reading in “Gudina Tumsa’s 
Hermeneutical Interpretation of the Bible from Global and Ethiopian/African Perspectives,” Swedish Missiological Themes 98/2 
(2010): 207–8. 

12 Gudina Tumsa, “Memorandum on Some Issues,” in Witness and Discipleship, 57. 



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lines to explore in their writings for the sake of appropriating a wholistic christology that will in turn 
undergird a wholistic ministry for the whole church. 

First, I want to dip into one of Luther’s most important treatises, his Confession Concerning 
Christ’s Supper. Though its ostensible purpose is to refute Zwingli13 on the nature of Christ’s presence in 
the Lord’s Supper, it is also an essential source for Luther’s wholistic christology and its soteriological 
implications. One of Luther’s firmest convictions is of the unity of the person of Christ. There are two 
natures, divine and human, but in Christ they are so united as to make one single person, one agent, one 
actor, who is the incarnate Son of God named Jesus, the Messiah. Luther will have nothing to do with 
christologies that have each nature “do its own thing”; for him, salvation depends on both the human and 
the divine being fully involved in every action of Jesus’. Thus Luther writes: “Wherever this person is, it 
is the single, indivisible person, and if you can say, ‘Here is God,’ then you must also say, ‘Christ the man 
is present too.’ And if you could show me one place where God is and not the man, then the person is 
already divided and I could at once say truthfully, ‘Here is God who is not man and has never become 
man.’ But no God like that for me!”14 

From there Luther draws an analogy between the unity of the human person, body and soul, to the 
divine-human union in Christ: “The humanity is more closely united with God than our skin with our 
flesh—yes, more closely than body and soul. Now as long as a man lives and remains in health, his skin 
and flesh, body and soul are so completely one being, one person, that they cannot be separated; on the 
contrary, wherever the soul is, there must the body be also, and wherever the flesh is, there must the skin 
be also. You cannot indicate a special place or space where the soul is present alone without the body, 
like a kernel without the shell… Thus you cannot shell the divinity from the humanity and lay it aside at 
some place away from the humanity.”15 Note that this argument comes in the context of a dispute over the 
Lord’s Supper. The question is not only about where the risen Lord Jesus can be present, but also what of 
himself he offers in the sacrament, and what of us he heals and renews with it. The Supper is for both 
body and soul, not for one or the other. It intends to forgive and heal all that makes us us, because it is all 
of Christ present for us.16 You see the connections here: a wholistic christology serves a wholistic 
anthropology with a wholistic sacramentology. Gudina surely would have approved! 

 We hear the same themes in Cyril of Alexandria, whose works Luther probably never 
read, as they weren’t available in western Europe at the time, but because of their common wholistic 
approach to the unity of Christ they drew the same conclusions. In a strongly worded letter to Nestorius, 
Cyril defends the title “Theotokos,” Mother of God, for Mary on the grounds of the unity of the person of 
Christ. As he says, “…Jesus Christ is considered as One, the Only-begotten Son, to be honoured with one 
adoration together with his own flesh. We confess that he is the Son, begotten of God the Father, and 

 
13 I am persuaded by Luther’s Christological argument in this treatise. At the same time, I find his deliberately 

offensive mockery of Zwingli to be a real failure. Certainly, it was part of the rhetoric of the time, and certainly Luther realized 
how much was at stake for us and for our salvation. Nevertheless, if he had really hoped to draw Zwingli to the truth, could he 
have expected to do so with such disrespectful attacks on Zwingli’s person, thought, and even his Swiss German language? 
Luther’s style closed down any possibility of growth in understanding on Zwingli’s part instead of fostering it. Even though we 
can accept Luther’s arguments today, we should definitely reject his insulting strategies of (non)communication. 

 
14 Martin Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper,” in Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols., eds. J. 

Pelikan and H. Lehmann (St. Louis and Philadelphia: Concordia and Fortress, 1955ff.) [hereafter cited as LW], 37:218–19. 
15 LW 37:219. 
16 An excellent resource for those looking to develop wholistic christology-anthropology-sacramentology further is 

Regin Prenter’s classic work Spiritus Creator, trans. John M. Jensen (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2001 [1946]), an account of 
Luther’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit. This quotation gives a sampling of Prenter’s argument: “The teaching about a bodily fruit of 
celebrating the Supper is a protection against the spiritualistic interpretation of the fruit of the Supper, an interpretation which 
might be very natural because of the strong emphasis on the forgiveness of sin in the words of institution. Because Luther does 
not know a Christ who is not the bodily incarnate God, a purely ‘spiritual’ Christ, therefore he does not know a mode of receiving 
Christ, which is only spiritual without simultaneously being bodily. He does not know of any reception of forgiveness of sin 
which is not simultaneously a hope about the resurrection of the body. If it is really the incarnate Christ we receive, then we 
receive a whole (spiritual-bodily) Christ as whole (spiritual-bodily) human beings… a celebration of the Supper which does not 
contain the assurance and hope of a bodily fruit is not a spiritual celebration at all” (276–77). Prenter’s italics. 



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Only-begotten God; and although according to his own nature he was not subject to suffering, yet he 
suffered for us in the flesh according to the Scriptures, and although impassible, yet in his Crucified Body 
he made his own the sufferings of his own flesh; and by the grace of God he tasted death for all: he gave 
his own Body thereto, although he was by nature himself the life and the resurrection, in order that, 
having trodden down death by his unspeakable power, first in his own flesh, he might become the first 
born from the dead, and the first-fruits of them that slept.”17 You hear in this passage how important the 
union of the two natures is: Jesus Christ is really God, the eternal and unchangeable, Who is not naturally 
subject to death, but out of His compassion He took human flesh from the body of His mother to become 
fully and completely human, which means subject to change and death. Only those two opposites 
perfectly united in one Person do justice to the wonder of salvation. Cyril has little use for other theories 
that sort of loosely combine the two natures but don’t actually unite them in one Person. Christ is not just 
a “God-bearing man,” and God is not in Him the same way God is present in the saints, for example. The 
Son of God “made his indwelling [in the flesh] in such a way, as we may say that the soul of man does in 
his own body.”18 

And, just like for Luther, the unity of Christ’s person in order to save all the human body and soul 
alike means that we need a sacrament that offers the whole Christ to the whole person. Therefore, Cyril 
writes, “we offer the Unbloody Sacrifice in the churches, and so go on to the mystical thanksgivings, and 
are sanctified, having received his Holy Flesh and the Precious Blood of Christ the Saviour of us all. And 
not as common flesh do we receive it; God forbid: nor as of a man sanctified and associated with the 
Word according to the unity of worth, or as having a divine indwelling, but as truly the Life-giving and 
very flesh of the Word himself. For he is the Life according to his nature as God, and when he became 
united to his Flesh, he made it also to be Life-giving…”19 This is, indeed, a wholistic christology for the 
wholistic ministry of the whole church. 

I’d also like to suggest that the remarkably similar christologies of Luther and Cyril could form a 
solid foundation for an EECMY-Ethiopian Orthodox dialogue, since Ethiopians, like other Oriental 
Orthodox, were the loyal followers of Cyril in the split that followed the Council of Chalcedon. In fact, 
you could say that Luther retrieved the insights of the Oriental Orthodox over against the christology 
espoused in the Tome of Leo, also approved at Chalcedon, which came to dominate Western theology and 
in Luther’s mind reached its unfortunate apex in Zwingli. 

I should now conclude this wide-ranging commentary on ecumenism and its challenges for 
Lutherans today with my specific charge to speak about Africa and its place in today’s ecumenical 
discussion. Although I do not want to be so presumptuous as to speak for or to an entire continent and its 
Christians, it is my opinion that Africans generally, and Ethiopian Lutherans particularly, could do little 
better than to follow the lead of Gudina Tumsa in insisting on the wholistic nature of the ecumenical task. 
I would like to see the Truth and Reconciliation work done in South Africa provide a model for a more 
honest assessment of the bad history between Christians. I would like to see more of the interweaving of 
service and doctrine as exemplified in the recent Anglican-Lutheran dialogue on diakonia entitled To 
Love and Serve the Lord.20 This study took its shape during a bilateral meeting in Moshi, Tanzania, in 
2006, when three African bishops (Sebastian Bakare and Musonda Mwamba on the Anglican side, N. P. 
Phaswana on the Lutheran side) suggested a study of how diakonia could concretely enable Anglican-
Lutheran ecumenical cooperation. I would also like to see the emergence of more African scholars of the 
early church and the Reformation, whose cultural distance from later European history, especially post-

 
17 Philip Schaff (ed.) “The Epistle of Cyril to Nestorius with the XII. Anathematisms,” in The Seven Ecumenical 

Councils, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 14 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 203; available online at 
www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf214.x.viii.html. Although it is strongly worded, it is not as insulting as Luther’s to Zwingli. Cyril, 
however, was one of the most notoriously unpleasant of the early church fathers. Once again, we should emulate the theology but 
reject the strategy. 

 
18 Ibid., 202–3. 
19 Ibid., 203. 
20 “To Love and Serve the Lord: Diakonia in the Life of the Church,” The Jerusalem Report of the Anglican–Lutheran 

International Commission (ALIC III), 2012. PDF available from the Lutheran World Federation by email request. 



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Enlightenment and post-industrial revolution, could shed fresh light on these theologians. And I look 
forward to all the surprises that African theology will offer that I cannot even imagine at this moment, the 
distinct gifts that it will present to the whole body of Christ. Though I am not “at home” in Africa the way 
I am in the North Atlantic world, I have been greatly blessed by my visits there, whether in person or by 
books or through friends. May our visits with one another strengthen the conviction that we are truly all 
members of one church, and that this church belongs to Christ, to whom be the glory now and 
forevermore. 


