Church unification efforts

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With the advancing Reformation and the recognizable impossibility between the Roman Catholic. Ignoring the church and the “Protestants” manifested rift or even reversing it, the willingness to talk grew on both sides in the 16th century . Pope Hadrian VI had a first step under the influence of Erasmus of Rotterdam . Already done in 1523 with a clear commitment to the responsibility of the Catholic Church in the Reformation. In this sense, the Confessio Augustana presented at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 by the Protestants under the leadership of Philipp Melanchthon can be read as an extensive willingness to make theological concessions on the basis of a simplicitas vitae christianae (simplicity of Christian life).

From this point on, the Roman Catholic-oriented humanism , which was strongly influenced by Erasmus, is the real motor of the unification efforts, which on the Protestant side v. a. Melanchthon and Martin Bucer were involved (Religious Discussions Leipzig, 1534 and 1539, Hagenau and Worms, 1540). At the Regensburg Reichstag, Melanchthon and Gasparo Contarini reached an extensive dogmatic agreement, v. a. in the doctrine of justification, which, however, both Martin Luther and Rome refused to approve because of the still open questions in the doctrine of the Church and transubstantiation .

The increasing consolidation of the Protestant churches into Lutheran and Reformed churches in the 17th century , the Roman Catholic Church strengthened by the Tridentinum and the pressure of the Counter-Reformation also resulted in an increasing willingness to talk in all camps. The differentiation in articuli fundamentales et non fundamentales already prepared by Bucer prepared the ground for this, as did the return to the largely common recognition of the Christian tradition of the first centuries, implemented by Georg Calixt in an attempt on the basis of the Apostolicum and the ecclesiastical doctrinal decisions of the first centuries ( consensus quinquesaecularis ) to bring about an ecclesiastical unity that encompassed the fundamentally essential Christian truths that distinguished Calixt from the later non-fundamental articles of faith. On the Protestant side, this attempt led to the decades-long syncretistic dispute , but it was also completely unacceptable for Rome after the fundamental decision of the Tridentine on the question of church tradition .

After 1673 the cleric Cristóbal de Royas y Spinola, with temporary support from the emperor and indirectly also from the pope, visited German princely courts and led negotiations for a reunification of the churches with certain concessions from the Catholic Church. Like this attempt, the broad-based efforts of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , the Calixt student Gerard Walter Molanus and on the Catholic side JB Bossuet and Spinola in the so-called Reunionsbriefwechsel and in lengthy negotiations from 1683 to 1702 dogmatic and v. a. to reach practical agreement. Ultimately, the attempt failed because of the Roman Catholic demand to recognize the Tridentinum as Orthodox.

Apart from the large churches, the pietistic Philadelphian societies are to be mentioned as non- denominational groups that are solely oriented towards the "true faith". In addition, in particular, the movement of socinianism, which is close to the Enlightenment, and its contempt for dogmatics. It almost naturally included the idea of ​​tolerance, albeit at the level of the confession for which only one was personally responsible, but also insisted on the idea of ​​the reunification of all Christians.

In the further 18th century , the overcoming of confessionalism through enlightenment-oriented theology and pietism created fundamentally good conditions for church unification efforts, which, however , were made more difficult with the increasing tendency towards secularization and the associated loss of importance of the churches as a whole. An exception to this was the Catholic reform movement of Febronianism with its anti-Roman, more national church-oriented goals, which of course did not evoke any noteworthy echo on the Protestant side (cf. the rejection by the otherwise theologically rather shallow neology representative Karl Friedrich Bahrdt ) and so on remained “an intra-Catholic problem” for a few decades.

The beginning of the 19th century saw another extensive literary attempt at Catholic and Protestant understanding, which was no longer really noticed at the time, in the correspondence between Johann Anton Sulzer (Truth in Love in Letters on Catholicism and Protestantism, Konstanz / Freiburg 1810 ) and Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (answer through truth in love, Nuremberg 1811).

On the agenda of the time are the questions of internal Protestant unification, beginning with the Old Prussian Union and increasingly the ecumenical movement .

Selected literature

  • CW Hering: Gesch. the ecclesiastical union attempts since the Reformation up to our time. 2 vol., 1836
  • R. Stupperich: The humanism u. the reunification of denominations. 1936
  • E. Benz: Leibniz et al. the reunification of the christl. Churches. (ZRGG 2, 1949/50, 97–113)
  • M. Geiger: The Union aspirations of Switzerland. possibly theol. under the leadership of helvet. Triumvirates. (ThZ 9, 1953, 117-136)
  • R. Rouse / SC Neill: A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948. London 1954
  • Karin Masser: Christobal de Gentil de Rojas y Spinola OFM and the Lutheran Abbot Gerardus Wolterius Molanus , Münster 2002