Faith and Order Commission
The Faith and Order Commission (Engl. Faith and Order Commission ) is one of the key areas of work of the World Council of Churches (WCC) . She does theological groundwork by dealing with the causes of the separation of Christian churches and working towards the “visible unity of the church ”. The concept of “ reconciled diversity” is of central importance.
The commission, which sees itself as “the most comprehensive theological forum in the Christian world”, has 120 members, clergy , lay people , academics and church leaders who are appointed by their respective churches. The Roman Catholic Church , which is not a member of the WCC, has been a full member of the commission since 1968. The most important working method is the preparation of studies in broad consultation processes .
history
The commission emerged from the Faith and Order Movement , which existed between 1910 and 1948 as a forerunner of the World Council of Churches. World Conferences on Faith and Order were held in Lausanne in 1927 and in Edinburgh in 1937 with the aim of reaching an understanding between the churches on contentious issues relating to the doctrine of the faith and the constitution . From 1938 the movement merged with the Movement for Practical Christianity , which led to the founding of the WCC in Amsterdam in 1948 . Since then, the movement's goals have been pursued within the WCC through the Faith and Order Commission.
In 1952, at the third world conference in Lund (Sweden), the comparative methodology was abandoned in favor of a theological dialogue process that takes up contentious questions based on common biblical and christological premises. In 1963 the fourth world conference was held in Montréal (Canada) and after exactly 30 years the fifth world conference in 1993 in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). The consultation process that led to the Lima Declaration (1982) falls in between .
Topics and successes
Since 1910 the Faith and Order Movement, and later the Commission, have dealt with a wide range of theological issues: the meaning and practice of baptism ; Eucharist and Ordination ; Church and conceptions of its unity; interdenominational community; Scripture and Tradition ; Role and significance of creeds and denominations ; Ordination of women ; the influence of political , social, and cultural factors on efforts for church unity.
Parallel to these controversial questions, Faith and the Church Order has increasingly taken up topics that either affect all churches or are of fundamental importance for the expression of their already realized community: prayer and spirituality (e.g. the commission prepares together with the Pontifical Council for the Promoting Christian unity ( the material for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ); Christian hope today; the interaction between bilateral and multilateral discussions between the churches.
Thanks to the unprecedentedly broad and intensive discussion about Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry ( Lima Declaration ) , published in 1982, and its reception, the faith and church constitution became known to a broader ecclesiastical public. In the course of this process it became increasingly clear that the main question behind the divisions between Christians is the different conception of what it means to be the church or to be the church. The commission has therefore been working on a larger study on ecclesiology since the 1990s, the third version of which was published in 2013 as The Church: Towards a Common Vision .
literature
- Günther Gassmann (Ed.): Documentary History of Faith and Order 1963–1993 . WCC, Geneva 1993.
- Tobias Brandner: Unity given, lost, striving. Thoughts of Faith and Order . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1996.
Web links
- Official website
- Collection of Commission documents
- Faith and Order Commission. In: New Catholic Encyclopedia ( digital edition , accessed April 2, 2019)