BIG BOOSTS FOR CHURCH UNITY: Vatican sources, on the eve of Pope John Paul II's visit to Ireland and the United States, have announced the convening of an extraordinary conclave of cardinals in November. The purpose of the meeting has not yet been revealed, but it will undoubtedly be an important one. For the "princes of the church" to gather for reasons other than the election of a new pope or the naming of new cardinals is unprecedented.
Whatever the reason for the conclave, there is much movement below the surface in the field of ecumenism — the search for common religious ground — especially between Roman Catholicism and the mainline Protestant churches. Ecumenism will be very much in evidence during the Pope's trip to the U.S., with the scheduling of several meetings between the Pontiff and representatives of Protestant and Jewish groups.
Ecumenism received a big boost too in September with the election of Bishop Robert Runcie as the Church of England's 102nd Archbishop of Canterbury. Bishop Runcie replaces Dr. Donald Coggan, who retires when he reaches his 70th birthday next January. The 57-year-old Bishop Runcie, incidentally, is the Bishop of St. Albans.
Within hours of his election, Bishop Runcie told reporters he wanted to meet Pope John Paul and leaders of other churches as soon as possible, hopefully within his first year of office. According to Anglican sources, the two leaders have important things to discuss, the chief being progress towards unity and intercommunion.
The two churches entered into a serious dialogue 10 years ago with the formation of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. This team of learned theologians has issued three agreed statements on the eucharist, ministry and ordination, and authority, and these have still to be approved by the Pope and the Archbishop.
The toughest nut to crack for the Anglican-Catholic theologians has been the question of papal primacy. They issued a joint statement on church authority in 1976 but failed to agree in the area of papal authority. Now there appears to be some movement, as yet unspecified, on this thorny issue and other controversial points. A joint statement from London on September 14 said that "Real convergence took place, which if it fell short of complete agreement on these highly divisive issues, encouraged the commission to hope that it might be able to offer its final report to the authorities of the two churches within two years."
Lutheran Rebellion Now Focal Point of Unity Drive
Perhaps the most important milestone in the church reunity movement will occur next June 25th. On that date, Lutherans around the world will be honoring the 450th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession. A report from the Religious News Service gives the ecumenical significance of the coming anniversary:
"A document that proved unsuccessful in reconciling Lutherans and Catholics in the early days of the Protestant Reformation is getting new attention as a possible basis for further progress in the modern ecumenical movement. [It is] the Augsburg Confession [which] was drafted by Philip Melanchthon on behalf of the Protestant territories of northern Germany for presentation to Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530.
According to a RNS release dated September 21, "there were two basic purposes Melanchthon had in mind in drafting the confession — to set forth the principles of the Lutheran movement and to seek to demonstrate that they were in agreement with essential doctrines taught by the Church of Rome. It was divided into two parts: Articles of Faith (I-XXI) and articles of the Roman Abuses, which have been eliminated in the Reformed Churches (XXII-XXVIII). When the confession was read in German before the Diet, the Roman theologians responded by drafting a Confutation of the document. The Confutation was accepted by the emperor as his own position, and read to the Lutherans on August 3, 1530. While the Augsburg Confession thus failed in its original aim to heal the breach between the Lutherans and the Romans, it immediately became a rallying point for Lutheran supporters. It has since been described as the most ecumenical confession of the Reformation."
In 1530, Roman theologians, according to this report, had no difficulty with the first 21 articles of the confession, which dealt with such subjects as the Lord's Supper, baptism, free will, and the church. But articles 22 through 28, which dealt with such distinctly Lutheran emphases as justification, good works, confession, and repentance, posed problems. Article VII of the Augsburg Confession states that "for the true unity of the church it is enough to agree concerning the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments." This position has been taken by both Lutherans and Catholics, both in the 16th century and today, and is one of the elements of the confession that is prompting theologians to reexamine it as a basis for contemporary ecumenism.
In 1976, a Vatican ecumenist told the Lutheran World Federation's executive committee that efforts to have the Augsburg Confession accepted as an "expression of Christian truth" were being looked upon favorably by Cardinal Jan-Willebrands, president of the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity.
"We have no illusions that the efforts for a Roman Catholic reception of the Augsburg Confession as a basis for a common confession will be easy," said Proessor Heinz Schuette of Bonn, who was then the secretariat's expert in Lutheran-Roman Catholic relations. But he noted that the confession's 450th anniversary would be celebrated in 1980, and suggested that "it would be an important event if we could come closer by that date to the real intention of the Augsburg Confession, which is unity of the churches which remain churches, but at the same time become one Church."
Church historians have also pointed out that the Augsburg Confession must be examined today from the perspective of 4-1/2 centuries of development of Christianity since it was first drafted. "Many of the articles of the Augsburg Confession, and particularly those in the second part, do not seem to be very relevant today," says Kirchenrat Werner Schnoor, former editor of the newspaper of the Lutheran Church in Mecklenburg, West Germany. The dean of the School of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America adds: "What Lutherans and Roman Catholics believe in common is far and away more significant than what divides them."
"By going back to the original purpose of the confession," concludes the RNS report, "Lutherans and Catholics may find that it has real meaning in the 20th century despite all that has happened since the Reformation. Bishop Cyril Wismar of the New England Synod of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches recently noted that the Augsburq Confession was 'intended to be a positive declaration within the church, not to be a divisive thing. It's taken 450 years for us to realize that,' he said. 'It's my hope that by the end of the millennium we will be back to where we were before, one Church in Christ.'"
Significantly, the Roman Catholic bishop of Augsburg, in consultation with Lutheran officials has asked Pope John Paul II to visit Augsburg for the Augsburg Confession Ceremony. However, the Lutheran leadership appears divided at the moment, and unless an official invitation is extended, the Pope will not attend. The Vatican however has announced that it will send some leading cardinals, including Cardinal Jan Willebrands, head of the unity secretariat.
It is also significant that a rallying point of the unity movement seems to be a common perception — or, rather, misperception — of what the gospel message really entails. The truth of God, on the other hand, should stand in even starker contrast in the years ahead.
ON THE WORLD SCENE
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