Perspectief 2015-29

2015-29 The Making of an Ecumenical Text 7 Reag eer ground for questions of ecumenical method: What is the status of a text to which mandating churches have at least once responded affirmatively? Should there be necessarily visible consistence between the responses from the mandating churches and the final expression of the revised text? Are mandating churches the ultimate authority in the process of redrafting an ecumenical text that has already been submitted to them? I will confine myself in this tedious paper to the description of the process of production of The Church: Towards a Common Vision and leave the methodological questions as an invitation to further study. I Ecclesiology as an Ecumenical Problem 1. The churches and the Church “The fundamental problem of the Church is the existence of the churches”, wrote the authors of a volume in preparation for the first Assembly of the World Council of Churches, held in Amsterdam in 1948 2 . Indeed, on the one hand we all confess with the Creed that the Church of Jesus Christ is one and, on the other hand, we make the experience that the One Church in history appears as many and – that’s the problem - divided. Being divided, the churches are unable of full catholicity, i.e., of bearing visible analogical witness to the biblical hope in God’s unification of all things in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Thus the ecumenical problem is traditionally understood as the problem of the universal Church in God’s design for the whole cosmos. 2. Ecclesiology often presupposes division Although there is a meditation about the Church in the first centuries, the theological discipline which we call “Ecclesiology” presupposes a de facto situation of church division, in which different churches confess at the same time and sometimes in conflict with each other that the Church is One. They answer to the question “What is the Church?” by describing themselves as the true Church. These answers remain in irreconcilable diversity 2 Man’s Disorder and God’s Design – The Amsterdam Assembly Series . New York, Harper and Brothers, 1948, book I: “The Universal Church in God’s Design”, 17.