Perspectief 2015-29

2015-29 An Eastern Orthodox Reaction 35 Reag eer confessions as equal, nor do they compromise the Orthodox claim to be the true Church. […] In view of this explicit statement […], Orthodox can take part in the Ecumenical Movement without endangering their Orthodoxy. And if Orthodox can take part, then they must do so: for since they believe the Orthodox faith to be true, it is their duty to bear witness to that faith as widely as possible.” The Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement is then not only understood as a witness to the undivided church, and as an invitation to the other Christians to return to the common tradition of the first millennium (as another wording of the final document of the 3rd Pre-Conciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference of Chambésy maintains), but very often it is related to the expectation that this search for the common biblical and patristic sources and the return to the roots would eventually lead to the conversion of the Western Christians to Orthodoxy. In this more or less exclusivist ecclesiological perspective, ecumenical dialogue was justified by the very fact that it should one day lead to the acknowledgment by all Christians of the truth and authentic faith preserved in the Orthodox Church. Of course the Orthodox constantly appealed to the need for all Christians (the Orthodox included) to return to the tradition of the undivided Church, but by identifying this tradition exclusively with the Eastern Church, and by assigning to the other Christian churches and confessions a status of deficient or partial ecclesiality, they finally come to imply that they should all return to Orthodoxy. The same ambiguity can be observed in the issue of the recognition of the Baptism of the other Christians: Despite the general rule prevailing until the 18th century of receiving Western Christians who wish to convert to the Orthodox Church only through Chrismation, and without re-baptizing them (which implies the recognition of their Baptism); despite a fundamental theological agreement reached between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches in the Trinitarian, Christological, ecclesiological and sacramental domains—including a common vision of baptismal initiation—as it is recorded in the Munich (1982), Bari (1987), and Valamo (1988) documents, there is not any explicit recognition on behalf of the majority of the Orthodox churches of the baptism of the Western Christians, not even of that celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church. A hopeful exception to this general negative rule is the fact that almost all the Orthodox churches in