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A few participants who craved more radical statements were disappointed. "They've been thinking about these things for ten years," explained Chicago Divinity School's Langdon Gilkey, one of the Protestant theologians at the congress, "and they're bored. But what is happening here is exhilarating. It's absolutely revolutionary." That may well be so. The very fact that the theologians chose to express themselves so positively, Yves Congar suggested, was revolutionary in itself.
If the resolutions of the Brussels declaration are to accomplish anything concrete in the Roman Catholic Church, there must be an answer for "the widening credibility gap" between hierarchy and theologians that Belgium's Leo-Jozef Cardinal Suenens noted during the congress. To bridge that gap may well require something as dramatic as the proposal Suenens made in his opening address to the meeting: a second Council of Jerusalem, including Orthodox and Protestant Christians as well as Roman Catholics. But it might begin, as the theologians suggest in one of their resolutions, with a recognition that "the magisterium of the church and the theologians serve one same Christian message." If that realization blooms and the hierarchy in fact listen to even a fraction of the ideas put forth at Brussels, the church and the world in which it lives will surely be different.