Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: The opening words of the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism, promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 21 November 1964 stated that 'The restoration of unity among all Christians is one of the principal concerns of the Second Vatican Council'.Earlier that year, on 7 January, Pope Paul VI had met the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras in Jerusalem, and exactly twenty-three months later, on 7 December 1965 the anathemas pronounced by either side in 1054 were solemnly lifted.In the course of the forty years since the Decree on Ecumenism the Catholic Church has been involved in theological dialogue, not only with the Eastern Orthodox Churches which share with the Catholic Church an acceptance of the doctrinal Formula of Faith issued by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, but also with those Oriental Churches which do not accept the Chalcedonian formulation, that is to say, the four historic Oriental Orthodox Churches (Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syrian), and the Church of the East. 1 Although these two groups share a common dislike of the Chalcedonian Formula of Faith, they represent different ends of the Christological spectrum and object to different elements in the phraseology.Since the intricacies of the theological issues are not the concern of the present article, it will suffice here to point out that the divisions arose because of differing understandings of the same terms (in particular, 'nature' and 'hypostasis'). 2 In the heat of the controversy and polemics of the fifth and sixth century each side had understood the other side's position from its own understanding of the technical terms; this situation (and the misleading names by which each side called its opponents) became fossilized by the Arab invasions of the seventh century, which cut off Middle Eastern Christianity from the Byzantine Empire and the West.It has only been with the advent of ecumenical dialogue in the last forty years when theologians on each side have realized that, once they are willing to consider the other side's position from the other side's understanding of the terminology, underlying the verbal conflicts there lies a common understanding of the nature of the Incarnation and what it has effected.
Source: The Heythrop Journal
Author: Sebastian Brock
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2009428498