ECUMENICAL REVIEW最新文献

Looking to the forthcoming Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, we might recollect that the fifth conference at Santiago de Compostela in 1993 spoke of “continuing our study” on the ordination of women, but this ambition has never been carried out. The 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea offers an opportunity to revisit how the council dealt with the issue of the ordination of women, in particular as deaconesses. This article argues that although the canons of Nicaea reflect a general male-centred orientation of ecclesial authority, one of the canons reveals a more complex picture, in which deaconesses – though ambiguously situated – were at least present and acknowledged. The anniversary of Nicaea invites us to acknowledge the historical presence and liturgical roles of ordained women in the early church and celebrate the ministry of women not only as a past reality but as a living tradition that still calls for discernment and renewal today.

The year 2025 marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and the initial draft of the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed continues to be recited and used regularly by almost all Christians today. This demonstrates how instrumental it has been for the Christian church. The way in which this creed and the inner relations within the Godhead were interpreted, however, has had serious consequences for the structure of ecclesial communities. Both the East (Greek) and the West (Latin) structured communities based on and justified by its interpretation of the creed. In both, however, Jesus Christ as a particular vision of human society and discipleship goes missing. For Mennonites, this critical missing piece hinders the full and enthusiastic embrace of the Nicene Creed. Jesus the Christ – the person and economic expression of God’s salvation – was largely forgotten in Nicaea’s formulation. This article will highlight both the gift that the Nicene Creed has been and what it failed to provide to the detriment of the Christian church and faith since the 4th century.

This article compares two documents from the World Council of Churches (WCC): The Church: Towards a Common Vision, published by the WCC’s Commission on Faith and Order in 2013, and The Gift of Being, published as a joint venture by the WCC’s Ecumenical Disabilities Advocates Network and Faith and Order and presented to the WCC central committee in June 2016. This article explores the concerns of persons with disabilities as ecumenical and ecclesiological issues. These issues tend to be understood as questions of human rights and of working against practices that discriminate against persons with disabilities. However, this article explores how our understanding of these concerns changes if they are seen as ecumenical and ecclesiological questions.

“Where now for visible unity?” is the main question that will be discussed by the participants of the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order, taking place in Egypt in October 2025. This article begins by exploring the different approaches to and concepts of visible unity in the history of the ecumenical movement and according to different church traditions. It then goes on to look at the idea of “gradual church communion” or “making unity visible step by step” on the basis of four main pillars – faith, prayer, witness, and communion – corresponding to the four marks of the church: martyria, leitourgia, diakonia, and koinonia.

This article explores decolonial thinking as a necessary condition for ecumenical conversations in preparation for the Sixth World Conference on Faith and Order in October 2025. Arising out of the complex history and experience of the African Caribbean and surveying the wide sweep of decolonial thinking coming out of the global South, this article considers the violence of coloniality, especially its presence in the continued emergence of the church. It is argued that a focus on visible unity requires attention to the inner life of the church and its various denominational and confessional forms. Attending to the internal, particularly often-unresolved, histories of violence within denominational and confessional bodies is the task of decolonial approaches.