Ecumenism

Ecumenism is the movement for unity among Christian churches. The word derives from the Greek oikoumene, the inhabited world, and it should be distinguished from interfaith or interreligious dialogue, which concerns relations between different religions, a distinction frequently blurred in ordinary usage and worth keeping.

The modern movement is generally dated from the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910, where the practical difficulty of competing missions working the same ground made division a problem that could no longer be deferred. Its institutional outcome was the World Council of Churches, formed in 1948, which now includes most Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant bodies. The Roman Catholic Church is not a member but participates in the Faith and Order Commission and in extensive bilateral dialogues.

The Catholic position changed decisively at the Second Vatican Council. The decree Unitatis Redintegratio (1964) committed the church to the search for unity, acknowledged fault on both sides of the historic divisions, and described other Christians as being in real if imperfect communion. In 1965 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras jointly lifted the mutual excommunications of 1054, a symbolic act that did not restore communion but removed an obstacle to discussing it.

Concrete achievements have been substantial. The Faith and Order text on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982) identified extensive agreement on the most divisive questions. Christological agreements with the Oriental Orthodox and the Assyrian Church of the East have stated that the ancient condemnations rested largely on terminology. The Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (1999), later joined by Methodist, Anglican and Reformed bodies, declared a consensus sufficient to lift the sixteenth-century mutual condemnations on that doctrine. Several organic unions have occurred, the Church of South India, the United Church of Canada, the Uniting Church in Australia, and various communion agreements are in force.

The remaining obstacles are real and have proved resistant. Ministry and orders, and above all the mutual recognition of ordinations, are unresolved. Papal primacy is the standing difficulty with Orthodoxy, which John Paul II acknowledged in Ut Unum Sint (1995) by inviting other churches to help him consider how the office might be exercised differently. And newer disagreements over the ordination of women and over sexuality have opened divisions cutting across the older ones, in several cases slowing or reversing progress that had been made. Some evangelical and some Orthodox critics regard the whole enterprise as trading truth for institutional accommodation, and the movement's momentum has been notably lower since the 1990s than in the decades before.

The main entry's brief mention of christological agreements with the Oriental Orthodox understates how remarkable this achievement is, since it addresses a division, over Chalcedon's christological formula of 451, that had stood as one of Christianity's oldest and most fundamental splits.

The Oriental Orthodox churches, including the Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches, rejected Chalcedon's definition that Christ exists "in two natures," holding instead a miaphysite christology, that Christ's divine and human natures are united in one nature without confusion or division, a position their critics historically, and inaccurately per most modern scholars, characterized as "monophysite," collapsing his humanity into his divinity. Beginning with academic conversations from the 1960s and continuing through official joint commissions, Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox theologians produced joint christological statements, including agreements in 1989 and 1990, concluding that the two families hold the same christological faith expressed in different technical vocabularies shaped by different Greek and Syriac traditions, and that the historical condemnations rested substantially on terminological misunderstanding rather than genuine doctrinal disagreement.

These agreements have not produced full restored communion, since practical and historical-memory obstacles remain considerable after fifteen centuries of separate development and, in several periods, real persecution between the communities, but the finding itself is treated by ecumenical theologians as one of the most substantive achievements of the modern ecumenical movement, resolving, at the level of theological content, one of Christianity's oldest and most consequential fractures.