Assembly '97 News Home page Documents next story		Principle and substance combined Tuesday, July 8 Cato lecturer Father Gabriel Daly made a plea for the Protestant church to help the Roman Catholic church address its tendency to sacrilize its "offices and institutions" in the first of three addresses to the Assembly yesterday. Roman Catholic scholar, lecturer in systematic and historical theology at Trinity College Dublin and lecturer at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Dr Daly concentrated on ecumenism. There was a tendency, Dr Daly said, for members of churches like his own to regard ecumenism as "belonging as it were to a department of foreign affairs while the day to day business of the church belongs to home affairs". The Uniting Church however was showing how "foreign affairs can become home affairs". The name 'uniting', he said, drew attention to the fact that the quest for unity is a process, referring to the history of the Uniting Church as the coming together of three denominations rather than the usual splintering from one to another. Drawing extensively on the work of theologian Paul Tillich, Dr Daly said Christianity should embody within itself what Tillich called "Protestant principle and Catholic substance". He said that Christian churches need the presence and action of both Protestant principle and Catholic substance. "This for the sake of truth and not merely for the sake of unity. They go together and they ought always to be mutually related," he said. He said that Martin Luther's great protest was essential in the Middle Ages. The Protestant church however could forget that God approaches through the medium of symbols. "If symbols are rejected merely on the grounds that they may promote idolatry, we may be blocking off the avenue between the invisible God and ourselves who live in time and space," he said. The language of idols and idolatry is strange to Roman Catholic ears when applied to church usage, but it is a language which has to be learned. "There is no better way of learning it than from ecumenically minded Protestants," he said. There will be a dialogue with Rev Dr Robin Boyd tomorrow and the following day, questions invited from the Assembly will be directed to Dr Daly.

"The Uniting Church affirms that it belongs to the people of GOD on the way to the promised end." Basis of Union, Revised edition published 1992