This dissertation examines the ecumenical relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion and the necessity for a symbolic cognitive and narrative conversion in both communions. Drawing upon Karl Rahner's theology of symbol, this dissertation argues that such a cognitive and narrative conversion is determined by the interpretation and appropriation of God's mystery as the origin and goal of Christian activity and belief. As such, there is a demand for a second naïveté in both communions, whereby, the methods employed by ecumenical dialogue extend beyond the logic of criticism and seek to embrace a postcritical logic of symbol. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Theology / PhD; / Dissertation;

Thesis advisor: Mark S. Burrows / Ecclesiology in Motion: Ecumenical Vocation and the Developing Ecclesial Identity and Self-Understanding of the United Church of Christ (USA) By: Jason M. Donnelly Advisor: Mark S. BurrowsThis study explores the question of ecclesiology in the United Church of Christ by presenting a historically descriptive account of this church's developing ecclesial identity and self-understanding during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Chapter one, "Ecumenical Vocation and the Question of Ecclesiology in the United Church of Christ" considers the context and composition of the organic union that established the United Church of Christ in 1957, engages the founding documents and early developments of the UCC's ecclesial identity and self-understanding up to 1982, and situates this study within its larger historical, ecumenical, and theological contexts. Chapter two, "Corporate Expressions of Ecclesial Identity in the United Church of Christ" examines the emergence of a theologically descriptive tradition of ecclesial identity and self-understanding in the UCC. Proposing that this united and uniting church developed its own ecclesiological tradition in the process of responding to a series of ecumenical texts from the 1980s, this central chapter charts the gathering momentum of a maturing ecclesiological tradition evident in the processes and corporate responses of the UCC to these ecumenical texts as the young church remained faithful to its ecumenical vocation by adapting to an ecumenical context vastly different from the one that inspired the creation of the UCC in 1957. The four ecumenical texts that provoked these corporate expressions of the UCC's ecclesial identity between 1982 and 1995 include: Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, the 1982 text produced by the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches; An Invitation to Action, the 1984 text produced from Series III of the Lutheran-Reformed Dialogue; The COCU Consensus, the 1984 text presented to the member churches of the Consultation on Church Union for formal action; and Churches in Covenant Communion, the 1988 text, also presented to the member churches of the Consultation on Church Union for formal action.Chapter three, "Deepening Ecclesial Self-Understanding" briefly explores the origins and ecclesiological significance of the UCC's three full-communion agreements, focusing primarily on the theological content behind the UCC's most recent full-communion agreement with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the Reformed Church of America.Chapter four, "Assembling the Expressions of Ecclesial Self-Understanding" presents the theological content expressed in the four corporate texts considered in chapter two in conversation with The Nature and Mission of the Church.Chapter five, "Conclusion" provides a brief overview of the study and suggestively explores the significance of what has been advanced in relation to the ecumenical movement in general and the UCC's ecclesiology in motion in particular. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

The ecumenical movement was the major international expression of organized Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth-century. This dissertation reconstructs the intellectual origins of the movement and its principal institutions, showing how ecumenical ideas and practices were transformed in response to geopolitical cataclysms, such as World War I, the collapse of European order in the 1930s, the Cold War, and decolonization, that divided international Protestant and Orthodox elites in the North Atlantic and Asia. Focusing on church leaders and lay intellectuals like John Mott, Joseph Oldham, Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, Willem A. Visser’t Hooft, John Foster Dulles, and M. M. Thomas, the project shows how a new relation between Christian faith and politics emerged from Protestant-led efforts to internationalize religious authority. Seeking to manifest world unity through common faith, ecumenists successively redefined the meaning of Christianity in their efforts to secure international consensus on the public role of the church among a politically polyglot constituency that included liberals, conservatives, communists, and fascists. This dissertation argues that the ecumenical movement went through three stages between 1900 and 1952: the first oriented around building the Kingdom of God on earth (1900-1925), the second seeking the realize the worldwide church as the basis of universal community (1930-1950), and the third mobilizing Christians for political revolution (1946-1952). The focus of the dissertation – chapters 2 through 5 – concerns the rise and decline of the ecumenical project to realize the church, which I argue was the first systematic and internationally successfully effort to articulate “ecumenicity” as a form of Christian pluralism. I show how this project was grounded in a missionary theology of anti-secularism that attributed a breakdown of social and international order to modern civilization’s repudiation of God. First defined at a conference of the International Missionary Conference in 1928 as a new “system of life and thought” that had displaced other religions as Christianity’s chief global rival, “secularism” identified an enemy that Allied and German Protestants, estranged since World War I, could unite in opposing. Mobilizing dialectical theology against the “totalitarian” claims of the state and the cogito alike, ecumenical anti-secularists jettisoned the historicist theological liberalism on which earlier forms of Protestant internationalism was based. In the 1930s, organizations like the Universal Christian Council of Life and Work and the World Council of Churches institutionalized theological dialogue as a mode of submission to God’s sovereignty; for the architects of these bodies, Christian faith was the only possible basis of community life in an age of global fracture. A strategy of international consolidation that ascribed political polarization to spiritual alienation, the ascendant anti-secularism of the 1930s did not anathematize the Nazi-sympathizing Reich church but sought to incorporate it into a world Christian community prioritizing the subordination of “political” to religious loyalties. After 1948, however, the ecumenical program to realize the church collapsed as its leaders struggled to surmount the ideological divisions of the Cold War. While Eastern European church leaders attacked the World Council as a mask for Western imperialism, critics in the West attacked the Council as an agent or stooge of world Communism. To escape the ideological impasse of East and West, the movement turned to the Third World in search of a new basis of global Christian unity. Reinventing the ecumenical project in the postwar world, a younger generation of theologians from the global South argued that the universal fellowship of the church would be actualized not by overcoming politics, but by specifying political commitments in solidarity with the liberation struggles of the poor, the non-white, and the colonized. In this paradoxical denouement, those struggling to surmount internal political divisions embraced political action as the essential expression of religious faith, and Christianity, long declared to be the basis of social order, came to be seen as its revolutionary solvent. By locating the ecumenical movement within a history of the ideas that made its institutional functioning possible, this project breaks from common narratives that lodge the movement within trajectories of secularization that rely on problematic attempts to adjudicate the boundaries between theological and non-theological thought and practice.

Thesis (M.A.)-- Wheaton College Graduate School, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-99).

The doctrine of justification tells how the saving grace of God in Christ can be actualized in the believers. Because of the very importance of this doctrine, disputes broke out between Augustine and Pelagius, later in the medieval period, and most importantly during the Reformation period - which led to mutual condemnations and the division of the Western church. The church still does not have a unified voice in interpreting the doctrine despite recent ecumenical dialogues, which culminated in the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Theology / PhD; / Dissertation;

Thesis (S.T.L.)--Catholic University of America, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 190-213).

Despite the fact that partnership has be en a pronounced goal in ecumenical relationships for over eighty years, the realization of mutuality, solidarity, and koinonia has, even until present times, proven to be illusive. This fact raises a number of questions. First, why is this so? What wer e the historical antecedents that led to the concept of partnership? What were the original secular and religious contexts in which the term partnership was used, and how has its meaning been understood and contested over time? And secondly, what can we learn from this history? Are there any problematic issues or themes that repeatedly appear in the narrative, causing churches to continually fall short in these relationships? In seeking to answer these questions, this thesis will trace the history of ecu menical partnerships from its antecedents, found in the beginning of the modern Protestant missionary movement, through to current times, focusing on the relationships between churches historically involved in the International Missionary Council (IMC) and , after 1961 when the IMC integrated with the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME). Importantly, Lamin Sanneh’s typology of churches as either Global (the churches of the North or Western world, also forme rly known as ‘sending’ or ‘older’ churches) or World (the churches of the South and East, formerly known as ‘receiving’ or ‘younger’ churches) will be the lens used to understand these ecumenical relationships. Using this typology, each of the chapters th at form the main body of this research focuses on a different era of history and will follow a similar pattern. The first section of each chapter serves to situate the church’s partnership discourse in its secular setting, paying special attention to issu es pertaining to North/South political and economic power, as well as how power has been contested. The remainder of each chapter will trace the ecumenical history of partnership, focusing especially on the discussions and findings of world ecumenical mis sion meetings, starting with The Ecumenical Conference on Foreign Missions in New York in 1900. While the main emphasis will be on these ecumenical meetings and their findings, attention will also be given to individuals and events that played significant roles in the development of the understanding and practice of partnership. Significantly, at the conclusion of each chapter four prominent themes or issues will be traced which continually reappear in the narrative and make partnership difficult to reali ze. When reviewing this history, it is evident that the term partnership was a product of colonial times and therefore captive to colonial and, later, neocolonial interpretations. However, it is also clear that from the very beginnings of the moder n Protestant missionary movement some church and missionary leaders, from both the Global and World churches, have sought to ground partnership in Biblical, egalitarian, and liberationist understandings. While this can serve to encourage those involved in partnership today, the historical analysis also shows plainly four key themes or issues that continually make the attainment of equitable relationships impossible to realize; namely, the home base , humanitarianism and development , authority , and rhetoric and reality . It is clear that the differences in worldviews, as described by Sanneh’s typology, have had and continue to have detrimental effects on the relationships between the churches of Global and World Christianity. Given this history, it is assert ed in this thesis that for ecumenical partnerships to have any chance of overcoming these issues, the churches of Global Christianity must stop seeing mission as expansion and lose the desire to remake others in their image; in short, they must become, in their worldview and ethos, World churches. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.

No abstract available / Proefskrif--PU vir CHO

No abstract available / Proefskrif--PU vir CHO

In the 20th Century the Nordic region was often regarded as a politically, socially and ecclesiastically homogenous area. This was partly a conception formed by Archbishop Söderblom´s creating of a Nordic  Bishops´Council to coordinate actions and declarations by the Nordic Folk churches. The general ecumenical development during the 19th and 20th Centuries created a perceived need for a regional ecumenical organisation in the Nordic region to serve the emerging WCC. Mr Manfred Björkquist was the man who proposed the setting up of a Nordic Ecumenical Institute in Sigtuna, Sweden. His proposals were strongly critizised in particular by the Oslo Bishop, Eivind Berggrav. Bishop Berggrav managed to force Björkquist to give up his plans for academic research to be one of the objectives of the Nordic ecumenical Sigtuna Institute. In addition WCC elected to abandon the original planfor a regional membership structure for WCC. One may note a particular pattern for ecumenical impediments repeating itself. In the 19th Century intended church cooperation was made impossible in the Nordic region through political stress and theological controversy. Political stress during the 19th Century occurred when Denmark failed to muster Nordic support for a military take over of Schleswig. In the 20thCentury the 2nd World War created considerable political stress in the region. Theological controversy occurred in the 18th Century over the theology of Grundtvig and in the 20th Century over Episcopacy. Political stress and theological controversy created a non helpful context for the Nordic Ecumenical Institute after its formation in 1940. In that context the Institute had to handle the adverse effects of the loss of Academic research and the loss of a regional membership structure for WCC. The combination of losses in the unhelpful context appear to have been innate defects for an organisation that elected to ignore the dramatic changes and carry on with "business as usual" and in that manner prepare for its own disintegration.