The Forum on Bilateral Dialogues yesterday and today

Ecumenical Review, The, Oct, 2009 by Odair Pedroso Mateus

Since the mid-1960s, international ecumenical dialogue involving official representatives of two "World Confessional Families" (known since the 1980s as Christian World Communions), and addressing inherited common divisions related particularly to doctrine and ministry, have become a constitutive element of a wider search for full visible unity among Christian churches.

While these bilateral dialogues were proliferating in the early 1970s and transforming the world confessional families into full ecumenical actors (which explains their self-renaming as Christian World Communions), the multilateral WCC Faith and Order commission was deepening the New Delhi-Uppsala understanding of the unity we seek by describing it as a conciliar fellowship of churches which are themselves truly united in each place and-logically, by the same token--challenging the world confessional bodies both to recognize that confessional identities "are time-bound in their terms of reference and relevance" and to clarify with the WCC their role in the one ecumenical movement. (1)

This was the horizon of an intra-ecumenical debate that took place during the mid-and late 1970s, which may be described vaguely by polarizations such as the ecumenical versus the confessional, the multilateral versus the bilateral, conciliar fellowship (which presupposes organic union) versus reconciled diversity (which presupposes mutual recognition), conciliar fellowship, united and uniting churches versus churches living in mutual recognition.

The recognition of the fundamental complementarity between the axis of Faith and Order-World Council of Churches-uniting churches, on the one hand, and the axis of bilateral dialogues-Christian World Communions-churches in mutual recognition, on the other, has found one of its expressions since the late 1970s in the Forum on Bilateral Dialogues.

The Forum, created initially "to facilitate the exchange of information among the bilaterals; to review recent developments in bilateral conversations; to continue the discussion on themes of common interest; to promote an interaction between bilateral and multilateral discussions; to study the implications of bilateral findings for the ecumenical movement as a whole; to examine issues of method relevant to all bilateral conversations", survived its initial three-year mandate. Although it was not envisioned as "a permanent ecumenical structure, but a flexible ad hoc instrument", (2) it is alive and in good shape and the desirability for an intensification of its work has been expressed in 2009 both by the WCC and by several Christian World Communions.

The theme of the most recent meeting of the Forum was "The Vision of Unity Today". This issue of The Ecumenical Review includes some of the contributions to that meeting.

Taken together, the contributions by William Henn, Andre Birmele and Sarah Rowland Jones provide, in particular, a unique entry point to the question of what the Roman Catholic, Reformation and Anglican churches are doing and thinking about the search for flail visible unity today.

At the Forum, an extensive presentation on the commitment of the Eastern Orthodox was presented by Viorel Ionita of the Conference of European Churches; this contribution has already been published in English and may be consulted in the journal Studii Teologice. (3) We also are deeply grateful to Forum participants Neville Callam and Bishop Nareg Alemezian for their updates on the roles of Baptists and Oriental Orthodox in dialogue.

The Commission on Faith and Order is already laying plans for a future Forum on Bilateral Dialogues. In preparation for that, it intends to gather updated information on ongoing bilateral dialogues and make it available in a future issue of The Ecumenical Review.

Odair Pedroso Mateus

Lecturer at the Ecumenical Institute, Bossey

Guest Editor

NOTES

(1) Cf. the report of the Faith and Order 1973 Salamanca consultation on concepts of unity and models of union: "The Unity of the Church--Next Steps", The Ecumenical Review, XXVI, April 1974, pp.291-303; cf. also G. Gassmann (ed.) (1993) Documentary History of Faith and Order, WCC, Geneva, pp.35--49.

(2) (1981) The Three Reports of the Forum on Bilateral Conversations, WCC, Geneva, p.2.

(3) V. Ionita, The Vision of Unity in the Multilateral Dialogues and in the Bilateral Dialogues of the Orthodox Churches with the Other Churches, Studii Teologice (Bucharest: Theological faculties of the Romanian Patriarchate), series 3, year 4, no. 3, July-September 2008, p. 7-58.