Tag Archives: ecumenism

John Zizioulas: An Ecumenical Appreciation

by Rowan Williams | Русский

It was the Cambridge philosopher of religion Donald MacKinnon who first introduced me to John Zizioulas’s work, passing to me (some time around 1978) a couple of French offprints. Donald was not someone who handed out praise readily, but he was obviously intrigued and impressed—I suspect because these essays on the eucharist and the bishop reflected an ecclesiology as far removed as you could imagine from the anxious policing of boundaries and the institutional self-inflation and self-deceit that Donald found in so much writing about the Church in the Western theology of the mid-century, both conservative and supposedly radical. If conservative theologies of the Church exalted the coercive power of hierarchs and treated the Church as a kind of political unit with ruled and rulers, liberal and radical theologies of the mid-century equally reduced the Church to an association of enthusiastic social reformers hurrying to keep up with a culture in flux. Neither exhibited much sense of what it might be for the Church to be what it claimed to be, the assembly of those transfigured by the Spirit into full (Christlike) humanity and thus into a condition of authentic communion; neither really understood that the Church’s sacramental character meant that the Church’s visible manifestation in the Eucharistic community was quite simply the embodied anticipation of creation coming into that eschatological mutuality and non-separation which it was made for. For a somewhat unconventional Anglo-Catholic like MacKinnon, this represented as strand in Anglican thinking that was already somewhat occluded by the 1970’s – the strong eschatological emphasis of the great Dom Gregory Dix in his classic Shape of the Liturgy, along with the eloquent critique of consumerized, homogenized “market man” that arose from this Eucharistic focus.

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The Ecumenism of the Pro-Life Movement

by Fr. James Martin, SJ  |  ελληνικά  |  ру́сский  |  српски

One of the most effective collaborations among the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions in the United States has been the pro-life movement, which for more than 40 years has sought to give witness to the Christian confession that all life is sacred, including life in the womb. Indeed, while some Christians in each tradition have, sadly, maligned one another in other contexts, they have largely pulled together for the cause of the what’s become known as the pro-life movement.

But if we are to take the next step in the ecumenical vision of the sanctity of all life, then we must collectively move beyond the divisions of party politics and bring the pro-life movement to its ineluctable conclusion.  This means that we must advocate for the sanctity of all life, not just life in the womb.

What Christians of all traditions are increasingly coming to understand is that to be consistently pro-life also means to be pro-social justice. Continue Reading…

The First Test for Orthodox Unity after the Holy and Great Council: The Chieti Document

by Rev. Dr. Nicolas Kazarian

September 2016, Chieti, Italy. The Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, established in 1979, gathered once again. But this meeting was crucial in many ways, and not only for Orthodox-Catholic relations. It was also the first test at a global level for inter-Orthodox unity on a topic that is far from consensual among the Orthodox Churches, namely ecumenism. Continue Reading…