Perspectief 2016-34

Perspectie 40 Viorel Coman MA mention three examples from the encounter between Orthodox theology and Roman Catholic theology in the last century. The first example brings to the surface the positive effects of the encounter of Roman Catholic theology with Orthodox theology in the 1940s and 1950s, when important Eastern theologians had to leave communist Russia and move west. It is an example of Orthodoxy rather giving than receiving. It concerns the important role of Nicholas Afanasiev’s Eucharistic ecclesiology on the rediscovery of the importance of local church in the documents and ecclesiology of the Second Vatican Council and afterwards. The claim that his thought exerted certain influence on Catholic ecclesiology prior and after Vatican II is confirmed by the fact that he was mentioned three times in the preparatory documents for the council’s Constitution on the Church. 14 Likewise, the Trinitarian renaissance in Western theology was inspired by Orthodox theologians from the Russian diaspora in Paris. Although the doctrine of the Trinity was never lost in Western Christianity, for a long time it was not considered as a structuring and unifying principle of the whole theology. Under the influence of Orthodox theologians such as Vladimir Lossky or Nikos Nissiotis, theologians in the West started placing the dogma of the Triune God at the heart of their theological constructs, as a fertile source for crucial reflections on every dimension of Christian existence. Something similar happened in the documents issued by the World Council of Churches. It suffices to say here that whereas at the First Assembly in Amsterdam in 1948 the WCC defined itself as a fellowship of Churches which accepts Jesus Christ as God and Savior, in 1961, under the Orthodox influence, the New Delhi Assembly broadened its basis and placed the initial Christological principle within a Trinitarian setting. 15 The second example intends to highlight the idea that one can also see a mutual and simultaneous influence between the two Christian traditions in the agenda of the Orthodox School of Neo-Patristic theology and the French Ressourcement : the common 14 John Zizioulas, “Eucharist Ecclesiology in the Orthodox Tradition”, in: Jean-Marie Van Cangh (ed.), L’ecclésiologie eucharistique (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2009), 188. Peter De Mey, “An Investigation of the Willingness to Develop a Eucharistic Ecclesiology in Roman Catholic Magisterial Teaching on the Church and in the Orthodox-Roman Catholic Ecumenical Dialogue”, in: ET Bulletin 2 (2008), 79. 15 W. A. Visser’t Hooft, “The Basis: Its History and Significance”, Ecumenical Review 38:2 (1985): 170-174.