Church union

A church union is the name given to several historical attempts to reunite the Christianity, which has been divided into the Eastern Orthodox and the Western Catholic Church since 1054, mostly under the primacy of the Roman papacy, see Uniate Churches (Catholic) .

• 1253–1259: Ecclesiastical Union of Galic. Submission of the Russian Prince Daniel Romanowitsch of Galicia to the supremacy of Rome; the Russian prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod refuses.
• 1274–1281: Ecclesiastical union of Lyon between the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII and Rome, in the Second Council of Lyon
• 1439: Church union of Florence between the Byzantine Emperor John VIII and Rome; Kiev agrees, but the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church rejects it, see Council of Basel / Ferrara / Florence .
• 1453: Siege of Constantinople and offer by the Byzantine emperor Constantine XI. to Pope Nicholas V on church union, if he can organize military aid; However, this comes too late and the Byzantine Empire falls apart.
• 1596–1630: Church union of Brest within Poland-Lithuania with Kiev; Kiev later revokes and soon becomes Russian, but the Ukrainian Uniate Church in Lviv remains .

Despite the failure of all these approaches, the idea came up again with some Pan-Slavists ( Križanić ), especially in the second half of the 19th century ( Solowjow ), while other Pan-Slavists strongly opposed it.

See also

• Ecumenical movement
• Uniate Church
• Uniate Churches (Protestant)
• Unionism (Protestantism)

literature

in the order in which they appear

• Michael Beyer, Ferdinand R. Gahbauer, Wolf Friedrich Schäufele a. a .: Art. Union, Church . In: Theologische Realenzyklopädie 34 (2002), pp. 311–331 (I. Use of language and definition of terms ; II. Unions of the Orthodox Churches with the Roman Catholic Church; III. Unions of the Protestant Churches with the Roman Catholic Church; IV Unions and unions between Protestant and Anglican churches, IV / 1. Germany; V / 2. Non-German)

Theologically

• Arnold Rademacher : The inner unity of faith. A theological prolegomenon on the question of church union . Peter Hanstein, Bonn 1937.
• Reinhard Groscurth (Ed.): Church unions and church fellowship . Lembeck, Frankfurt am Main 1971, ISBN 3-87476-010-3 .
• Martin Borchert: Are church unions stations on the way to the unity of the church? Diss. Humboldt University, Berlin 1989.
• Karl-Heinrich Lütcke, Eckhard Zemmrich (Ed.): What does church union mean today? Contribution to a symposium of the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Schlesische Oberlausitz . Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Leipzig 2015, ISBN 978-3-374-04140-4 .

Church history

• August Heisenberg : New sources on the history of the Latin Empire and the Church Union , 3 volumes. Publishing house of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich 1923.
• Jürgen Wilhelm Winterhager: Church unions of the twentieth century . Gotthelf-Verlag, Zurich 1961.
• Gerhard Ruhbach (ed.): Church unions in the 19th century . Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, Gütersloh, 3rd edition 1982, ISBN 3-579-04431-1 .
• Peter Halfter: The Papacy and the Armenians in the Early and High Middle Ages. From the first contacts to the establishment of the church union in 1198 . Böhlau, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-412-15395-8 .
• Ernst Christoph Suttner : Sources on the history of the church unions from the 16th to the 18th century . German translation of the Latin source texts by Klaus and Michaela Zelzer. 2nd, revised edition, edited by Barbara Hallensleben and Nikolaus Wyrwoll. Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 2017, ISBN 978-3-402-12019-4 .