CHAPTER 1: ECUMENICAL PROGRESS AND STAGNATION 11 initiatives surely involves challenges when considering ecumenical priorities and ecumenical methodology today.9 Nonetheless, with Christians belonging to this category, too, a dialogue has been taking place since the 1970s, with its own methodologies and goals.10 Given the western context of the ecumenical communities studied in this research, the current study focuses (although not exclusively) on Kasper’s second category, namely, the ecumenical process of the Roman Catholic Church and the churches and ecclesial communities in the West.11 Since the Council did not differentiate between the communities stemming from the Reformation era – that is, between Lutherans, Reformed, Old Catholics, and Anglicans on the one hand, and the Evangelical and Pentecostal communities on the other – much of what the Council states applies to the latter category as well. Moreover, since this study aims at contributing to the theological debate behind the regulations, the outcomes can contribute to the debate on Eucharistic sharing involving all categories. The ecumenical movement In response to the divisions, the modern ecumenical movement (starting in the early twentieth century) tries to bring churches closer together. The prayer of Jesus can be considered the creed of the ecumenical movement: “May they all be one, just as, Father, you are in me and I am in you, so that they also may be in us, so that the worldmay believe it was you who sent me.”12 It is the testament 9 Jelle Creemers, “Ecumenical Recongnition and Reception in Free Church Perspective,” in Just Do It?! Recognition and Reception in Ecumenical Relations/Anerkennung und Rezeption im ökumenischen Miteinander, ed. Dagmar Heller and Minna Hietamäki, Beihefte zur ökumenischen Rundschau (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2018), 64. 10 Creemers addresses the difficulties of this particular dialogue in comparison with traditional Roman Catholic/Protestant dialogues, cf. e.g., the Pentecostal-Roman Catholic Dialogue IRCCPD as analyzed in Jelle Creemers, Theological Dialogue with Classical Pentecostals: Challenges and Opportunities, Ecclesiological Investigations (London/New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2015), https://doi.org/10.5040/9780567665201. 11 Because of a different ecclesiological qualification of the Christian communities in the East and theWest, the Council considers the Catholic Church’s relationship with them in different sections of the Decree on Ecumenism, cf. UR, secs. 14-18 for the Eastern churches and secs. 19-24 for Christian communities in the West. Some worship in common (communicatio in sacris), which includes the sharing of the Eucharist, is only explicitly encouraged in relation to the Eastern churches, cf. UR, sec. 15. Since this is not the focus of my study, I will engage with the Catholic Church’s regulations regarding common worship in the Western context more frequently throughout this thesis. 12 John 17:21 NJB.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw