Faith and Order Movement

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The Movement for Faith and Order (English Faith and Order movement ) belongs together with the Movement for Practical Christianity and the International Missionary Council to the three roots of the modern ecumenical movement . Founded in 1910, it was consolidated through two World Conferences on Faith and Order in 1927 and 1937, and in 1938 decided to merge with the Movement for Practical Christianity , which was sealed with the establishment of the World Council of Churches in 1948.

The movement had no fixed organizational structures for a long time. It was initiated by the first world missions conference in Edinburgh in 1910 , which had ended with a call for Christian unity. Bishop Charles Brent of the Episcopal Church of the United States who took part in the conference, campaigned in his church for an initiative to overcome the differences between the Christian churches by talking about controversial issues of beliefs and the church constitution . On October 19, 1910, the general assembly of the Episcopal Church in Cincinnati decided to invite the other churches to a world conference. A commission with Bishop Charles Palmerston Anderson as president and Robert Hallowell Gardiner as secretary endeavored in the next few years to establish contacts and to achieve the establishment of support committees in other churches, especially in the USA, Canada and Great Britain. In May 1913 a first interdenominational conference was held in New York City. The focus of participation was in the Protestant world, but Orthodox and Old Catholic churches also agreed to support them. Even an initial reply from Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri in December 1914 was friendly. But then the outbreak of the First World War interrupted the hopeful beginnings and made international cooperation more difficult. In January 1916, however, at a conference of various American churches in Garden City (Long Island), the first substantive determinations for the planned world conference were made. After the Lambeth Conference and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople had supported the efforts for Christian unity in appeals to all Christians in 1920 . August 1920 invited to Geneva for a preparatory conference. 133 delegates from over 80 churches in 40 countries came together and elected a committee to prepare the world conference. The only member from Germany was August Lang . Brent was elected chairman and Gardiner secretary. After Gardiner's death, Ralph W. Brown (1885–1981) took over his office in 1924; the Secretariat moved from Boston to Geneva.

On the sidelines of the World Conference on Practical Christianity in Stockholm in 1925, another preparatory meeting took place, at which Lausanne was determined as the location of the first World Conference on Faith and Order. Over 400 representatives from 127 Orthodox , Anglican , Old Catholic and Protestant churches gathered there from August 3 to August 21, 1927 . The German delegation included representatives from regional churches (including Martin Dibelius , Martin Schian , Karl Ludwig Schmidt , Wilhelm Zoellner ) and free churches (including Johann Wilhelm Ernst Sommer , Johannes Schempp , Benjamin H. Unruh ). Bishop Brent acted as president and the British congregationalist Alfred Ernest Garvie (1861–1945) as vice-president . The conference passed seven section reports and a rather general final declaration because it could not agree on the question of the form of the desired Christian unity ( organic union or federation of independent churches) and elected a continuation committee to coordinate further work. In addition to Lang u. a. Adolf Deissmann , Otto Dibelius , Werner Elert , Friedrich Heiler , Adolf Keller , John Louis Nuelsen and Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze . Archbishop William Temple succeeded Bishop Brent, who died in 1929, as President . Herbert Newell Bate (1871–1941) and later Leonard Hodgson (1889–1969) had already taken over the office of additional theological secretary .

The continuation committee set up four commissions to examine the churches' statements on the Lausanne conference and to prepare documents for the follow-up conference. For the second world conference, for which more than 400 participants from 122 churches in Edinburgh came together from August 3 to 18, 1937 , extensive preparatory material was already available. However, it was not possible to agree on a common conception of church unity, even if the model of organic union was now favored. For further ecumenical discussions, it was also important to approximate the questions of the doctrine of justification . Because the German Evangelical Church saw itself isolated in ecumenism, it boycotted the conference, so that only two Free Churches ( Friedrich Heinrich Otto Melle and Paul Schmidt ) and the Old Catholic Bishop Erwin Kreuzer came from Germany.

The conference made a general decision to merge the Faith and Order Movement with the Practical Christianity Movement. Therefore, in addition to the continuation committee, a joint committee was formed which, at a meeting in Utrecht in May 1938, decided to found the World Council of Churches and laid down the main features of its constitution. The continuation committee of the Faith and Order Movement confirmed this at the end of August 1938 in Clarens VD , where another meeting of the continuation committee took place in 1939. Then the Second World War interrupted further work. In 1947 the Swedish bishop (since 1950 archbishop) Yngve Brilioth was elected to succeed the late Archbishop Temple as president of the continuation committee. It was not until 1948 that the World Council of Churches was founded in Amsterdam , whose Faith and Order Commission has continued to pursue the goals of the movement ever since.

literature

  • Reinhard Frieling : The Movement for Faith and Church Order 1910–1937; with special consideration of the contribution of German Protestant theology and the Protestant churches in Germany . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1970.
  • Günther Gassmann : Concepts of unity in the movement for faith and church constitution 1910-1937 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1979.
  • Andreas Karrer: Confession and Ecumenism. Income from the first decades of the ecumenical movement. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996.
  • Geoffrey Wainwright :  Faith and Order Movement . In: Religion Past and Present (RGG). 4th edition. Volume 2, Mohr-Siebeck, Tübingen 1999, Sp. 1392-1395.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Ruth Rouse , Stephen Charles Neill : History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948. Vol. 2. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1958, p. 12.
  2. ^ HN Bate: Faith and Order. Proceedings of the World Conference Lausanne, August 3-21, 1927. Doubleday, Doran & Company, Garden City, New York 1927; Hermann Sasse : The World Conference on Faith and Church Order - German official report on the World Conference in Lausanne, August 3-21, 1927. Furche-Verlag, Berlin 1929.
  3. ^ Karl Heinz Voigt : Ecumenism in Germany. From the founding of the ACK to the Charta Oecumenica (1948–2001). Vol. 1: International Influences and Networking - Beginnings 1848–1945. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8471-0417-9 , pp. 166-171.
  4. ^ Leonard Hodgson: The Faith Talk of the Churches. The Second World Conference on Faith and Order. Evangelischer Verlag, Zollikon-Zurich 1938.