Personal Assessment on the Documents of the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church (original) (raw)
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Koinonia Ecclesiology : An Orthodox Perspective
2012
In light of modern scepticism on communion ecclesiology, this article seeks to provide a theological justification of koinonia as a most appropriate term for understanding the nature and function of the church. After providing a brief overview of the meaning of the term ‘koinonia’, the article examines the extent to which ekklesia and koinonia are connected, in this way affirming the term’s suitability for ecclesiology. The paper then aims at further consolidating its case by analysing how the New Testament church lived outs this fellowship with God and one another. Accordingly, communion ecclesiology is shown to be a highly significant way of approaching the church; indeed one with existential and salvific ramifications. Fundamentally, communion ecclesiology is simply a most basic way of characterising and approaching the very nature of the church, together with its various ministries and functions. ‘Communion’, or more precisely koinonia, is a theological expression – and an extre...
Revisiting the Concept of Koinonia: Dimensions of Pauline’s Theology of Communion
ConScienS Conference Proceedings of Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. Princeton,, 2021
It is the aim of this article to sketch the dimensions of Pauline theology of koinonia. The Christian life is lived in the reality of participation in Christ's death, resurrection and suffering. And these are the elements of what could be called the vertical dimension of koinonia with Christ, at the individual and communal level. There is also a horizontal dimension of koinonia with Christ, namely the communion of believers in the Body of Christ, the Church. Any individual believer is to acknowledge his participation in the community of Christ. This is actually reminded anytime when the believers share the Eucharist. The common element that connects the two dimensions, vertical and horizontal, of koinonia with Christ, is His example, expressed powerfully in his kenosis. The church mirrors Christ's kenosis in every member's attitude towards each other, in the embrace of the other in the same way in which, lovingly and sacrificially, Christ embraced humanity, in his body, transforming it from within.
The Development of the Concept of Koinonia in Faith and Order and the Orthodox Contributions to it
The purpose of this study is to investigate the development of an important ecclesiological concept called koinonia. This koinonia ecclesiology played a significant role in ecumenical dialogues, especially in the documents published by the Commission of Faith and Order. Being present at the very beginning of those ecumenical dialogues, the Orthodox Churches and their representatives made an impact in shaping this concept. By studying the Faith and Order conferences, The Church: Towards a Common Vision document and the Orthodox responses to it, this thesis seeks to find how much and to what extent this koinonia concept is framed by the Orthodox theology.
The Unity of the Church as Koinonia: Some Reflections from an Orthodox Standpoint
The Ecumenical Review, 1993
From an Orthodox standpoint, it has to be said at once that the new prominence given to the idea of church unity as koinonia in the World Council of Churches is most welcome. This is not only because this approach has been developed at the highest level within the WCC by the Faith and Order Commission, at the request of the central committee, and then revised and adopted by the WCC assembly in Canberra, but also because Orthodox ecclesiology as a whole, and so also the Orthodox view of the unity of the church, is precisely that of koinonia or cornrnunio. To use a modem yet genuinely Christian terminology, this means the unity of the church as lived and embodied in the diversity, or koinonia, of the many local churches in the polycentric ' Ibid.
Integrating the ascetical and the eucharistic: current challenges in Orthodox ecclesiology
International Journal for The Study of The Christian Church, 2011
In contemporary Orthodox theology, the claim that the Church is constituted in the eucharistic assembly has the status of a first principle in ecclesiology. In this article, I hope to give a general outline of this eucharistic ecclesiology as presented by its most well-known exponent, Metropolitan John Zizioulas. In so doing, I also intend to trace briefly its history back to the Orthodox theologians George Florovsky and Nicholas Afanasiev. Although the most influential form for Orthodox understandings of the Church, eucharistic ecclesiology does not necessarily share an unchallenged consensus among Orthodox theologians, and I will show how Vladimir Lossky and Dumitru St aniloae do not endorse a strict identification of the Church with the Eucharist. I will argue that although the Eucharist should continue to shape the Orthodox understanding of what the Church is, the way forward for an Orthodox eucharistic ecclesiology is an integration of the ascetical and the sacramental through a trinitarian theology that offers an account of the eternal relation of the Son to the Holy Spirit. Finally, I wish to raise the question of the implications of a eucharistic ecclesiology for a political theology.
2023
The object of the article is to detail the reasons used by Joseph Ratzinger to justify the binary ontological relationship between the Church and the Eucharist, projecting onto the identity of believers. With the use of an analytical-deductive method, it is argued that the Eucharist is not only an efficient cause for the existence of the Church and the continuance of believers in Christ, but it constitutes its essence and is the guarantor of the ontological identity of believers reflecting their mystical union with Christ and projecting onto the vitality of the Church. Based on Ratzinger's theological writings, it is demonstrated that he found a justification for the complementarity of this relationship in the Christological-pneumatological dimension of the essence of the Church and the Eucharist expressed in the concepts: People of God, Mystical Body of Christ, and Community. He started from the event of the Last Supper as the foundation of the interdependence of Church and Eucharist. He emphasised the need to understand liturgical celebration to justify the vitality of the Church. He demonstrated the Christological/ontological principle linking the Church and the Eucharist on the basis of one faith, worship, supremacy, and fraternity.
The Theology of the Holy Eucharist and the Doctrine of Transubstantiation
E-Journal of Religious and Theological Studies, 2021
From the perspective of the Catholic Church, O. Ludwig defines the Eucharist as "that sacrament, in which, Christ, under the forms of bread and wine, is truly present, with His Body and Blood, to offer Himself in an unbloody manner to the Heavenly Father, and to give Himself to the faithful as nourishment for their souls." 1 It is learnt from the Second Vatican Council Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, that the Church's ultimate vocation is to maintain and promote communion with the triune God and communion among the faithful. For this purpose, she possesses the Word of God, Dei Verbum, and the sacraments, especially the sacrament of the Eucharist, by which she constantly lives and grows, 2 and expresses her very nature. The Council emphasizes that the Eucharist is the height of all the sacraments in perfecting communion with God the Father. 3 It identifies believers with His Son [Christ] through the workings of the Holy Spirit. "Unlike any other sacrament", in the Eucharist, "the mystery of communion is perfected. This perfection brings Christians into the heights and goals of every human desire, for in the Eucharist they reciprocally attain God
Towards A Personal Ontology Of The Church - Doctoral Thesis
The primary identity of the Church as ‘Body of Christ’ in her relation with God is questioned. Understood somatically, since the Logos is the hypostasis of Christ, it fails to give the necessary ontological space for Creation to respond to God’s love. Congar’s ecclesial ontology, formulated as Body of Christ, is investigated. His hierarchical interpretation of the relation between church structure, whose ontos as visible Body derives apneumatically from the incarnate Logos, and the Spirit, which vivifies the mystical Body through faith and the sacraments, is drawn from the filioque, subordinating the Spirit to the Institution. Souls united with God are eschatological ‘brides’, the reality for which the institution temporarily exists. Christ, or the Spirit, is the ‘I’ of the Church, which is not a ‘person’. Ultimately, souls are to be catholic, transparent to each other and God’s love. There is no explicit relation of Church to Creation. Bulgakov identifies humanity as the hypostatic centre of Creation. In creating, God kenotically gives away his own being (Sophia) establishing temporality and otherness. Humanity is spirit-embodied earth, hypostasising created Sophia, drawn, through deification by the Spirit, into communion with God. The Trinitarian communion of the Godhead is imaged in Creation as the kenotic, hypostatic transparency of the Church. The Incarnation is a synergism between the Logos and Mary, who thereby participates in the salvific activity of the Son and the Spirit, as Spirit-bearer. She is the ‘Bride’ in whom all others participate. Congar’s eschatology and Bulgakov’s kenotically hypostasised Creation proffer an understanding of the Church as the invited ‘yes’ of the personalised cosmos, reborn from Christ through the Cross, eschatologically irradiated by the Spirit with the glory of God, unified in kenotic love, whose communion with the Trinity as the ‘fourth’ hypostasis, ‘the Bride,’ proceeds through her nuptial union with the Son.
More Than Communion : Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology
More Than Communion : Imagining an Eschatological Ecclesiology, 2015
Communion ecclesiology has become the dominant paradigm in recent ecumenical dialogue concerning the Church, as exemplified in the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission's convergence text The Church: Towards a Common Vision (wcc, 2013). The culmination of a long process of theological reflection stimulated by the publication of the landmark Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (wcc, 1982) and sustained through multilateral and bilateral dialogues at a world level, The Church represents probably the most comprehensive articulation of communion ecclesiology to date. Here the concept of koinonia denotes the fundamental character of God, the Church and creation such that the Church is essentially a communion in the Triune God. In theory at least, communion ecclesiology maintains equilibrium between the unity and diversity of the Church, and between the universal Church and the local churches. When viewed through the lens of koinonia, even the nature and structure of the ministry and sacraments (a longstanding topic of theological controversy) becomes an area of deepening ecumenical agreement. Nevertheless, communion ecclesiology is not a specific theology of the Church but rather a broad genre in which common themes and concepts sometimes serve to obscure underlying differences concerning theological method and norms which reflect and generate deep divisions among the separated churches. In a dense theological study, Scott MacDougall surveys the development of communion ecclesiologies in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and ecumenical traditions before focusing specifically on the work of John Zizioulas and John Milbank as representative of the dominant forms. MacDougall detects eschatological deficiencies in their respective approaches, which (in simple terms) place too much emphasis on the 'already' to the neglect of the 'not yet' in the structure of eschatology, thereby reducing the Church of the future to a projection based on the Church of the present gathered for the celebration of the Eucharist. Such an overly-realised eschatology leads to a problematic relationship between the Church and the world. According to MacDougall, Zizioulas' ecclesiology is so focused on the Eucharist as an icon of heavenly communion that the Church is essentially located beyond the present world, whereas Milbank's ecclesiology situates the Church over against the world as a bulwark of divine harmony against a chaotic postmodern, secular world.