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Perspectief 32 Dr. Pantelis Kalaitzidis in their journey towards unity.” And as the same text remarks in the next § 10: “Currently, some identify the Church of Christ exclusively with their own community, while others would acknowledge in communities other than their own a real but incomplete presence of the elements which make up the Church. Others have joined into various types of covenant relationships, which sometimes include the sharing of worship. Some believe that the Church of Christ is located in all communities that present a convincing claim to be Christian, while others maintain that Christ’s church is invisible and cannot be adequately identified during this earthly pilgrimage.” In § 37 the same convergence text goes a little further and accounts some of the requirements for the mutual recognition or even the full communion among churches: “The journey towards the full realization of God’s gift of communion requires Christian communities to agree about the fundamental aspects of the life of the Church. ‘The ecclesial elements required for full communion within a visibly united church – the goal of the ecumenical movement – are communion in the fullness of apostolic faith; in sacramental life; in a truly one and mutually recognized ministry; in structures of conciliar relations and decision-making; and in common witness and service in the world’.” The above views on mutual ecclesial recognition should be related to the issue of unity in diversity which is briefly treated in § 12, and then in a more extended way in §§ 28-30. Without denying the limits of diversity and without losing sight of the goal of unity, the agreed text is praising legitimate diversity to the point to consider it as an integral aspect of Christian catholicity (§ 12), echoing to a certain degree in this point the well-known wordings of the leading Eastern Orthodox theologian Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon on the relationship between otherness and identity. According to Zizioulas, the latter, in a wider pneumatological and eschatological perspective, encompasses otherness too, as “the other becomes an ontological part of one’s identity,” and “otherness is not a threat to unity but a sine qua non condition of it,” to the extent that “otherness is constitutive of unity, and not consequent upon it.” 4 However, the text under discussion 4 Metropolitan John D. Zizioulas of Pergamon, “Communion and Otherness,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly , 38 (1994), pp. 10, 9. Πρβλ. idem, Communion and Otherness. Further Studies in Personhood and the Church , London-New York: T&T Clark, 2006; Emmanuel Clapsis, “The Orthodox Church in a Pluralistic

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