Zenit is reporting that the Pontificial Commission for Promoting Christian Unity is expecting to have a new document out soon with the Lutheran World Federation.
This time the topic is apostolicity and apostolic succession, and they’re hoping to publish it next year.
What kind of document it is and whether 2006 is just meant to inaugurate a discussion of it or be its final proclamation, I dunno. The story isn’t specific enough. They might follow the path they did for the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, which involved having an initial release of it for comment, followed by a revision, followed by the Lutherans voting on it, followed by the Vatican getting cold feet at the last moment, followed by a Catholic response document, followed by behind the scenes negotiations, followed by a much-embarrassed both parties finally promulgating it.
Only I hope not.
Speaking of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, Cardinal Kasper indicates that the document may not remain an exclusively Catholic-Lutheran work.
According to him the Methodists are planning on endorsing it next year, too.
I was a member of the ELCA for 17 years and am returning to the Catholic Church. I wonder how you dialogue with folks who support a woman’s “right” to chose and “committed” same sex couples. I read the sexuality study when it was first released. The answers were written and then the questions were formulated. Everything they believe is decided by “standing” committee. They wasted a lot of money dediding not to decide on a lot of stuff. The folks in charge don’t live on the same planet as the rest of us. Their shrinking numbers show it.
The denominations that make up the World Lutheran Federation are far left. You can be a bishop of one of these denominations and not even believe in the virgin birth or the deity of Christ.
Rome should be talking with the orthodox Lutheran organizations, not the apostates. Rome will find, as B16 knows, that she has more in common with us than with them.
Yeah, but conservative protestants don’t seem to like us very much. There is a lot of prejudice in that camp.
Lutherans and Catholics agreed in JDDJ that we are justified by grace through faith. The fact that we have different definitions of the word “justification,” “grace,” and “faith” was simply ignored (a pity, too, since real ecumenical progress might have been made by examining those definitions, and the degree to which category or substance is the real problem. But that’s another rant).
But agreement wasn’t the issue. The issue was a post-modern decision to treat truth as irrelevant.
Incidentally, I was an ELCA pastor for twelve years. I’m in the process of becomeing a Missouri Synod pastor now, despite the problems the LCMS is also having. It needs to be understood that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is Evangelical or Lutheran in the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire famously was Holy, Roman, or an Empire- which is to say not at all. Neither is there anything Lutheran about the Lutheran World Federation.
Inquisitor, a great many of us confessional Lutherans reject the label “Protestant,” even though we were the original ones known by it. Theologically, it stands for a group of denominations which which we have comparatively little in common. On some points we’re even closer to you guys than we are to them. And prejudice toward those of other confessions is by no means restricted to those outside the Roman communion.
Finally, I’d like to make an observation here I’ve made on my own blog, and elsewhere: I never feel closer to my Roman Catholic brothers and sisters than when I attend a Catholic Mass, and I am not invited to the communion rail- as you would not be invited to ours. I appreciate the integrity behind my exclusion, and am moved to reflect that far from dividing, a dedication to substance and integrity rather unites.