As nightfall nears for the twentieth century and a third Christian millennium dawns, some observers discern not merely an energizing of eschatological interest, but also new and bolder ecclesiastical proposals for religious unity.
Beyond end-times and doomsday warnings they detect signals foreboding both a reconstructed evangelical Protestantism and a refashioned liberal mainline ecumenism and, even more notably, the emergence of a Catholic-Lutheran end-run around the Protestant Reformation.
The World Council of Churches (WCC), formed in 1948, soon subordinated evangelicalism to socio-political concerns and some leaders were criticized for quasi-Marxist redistributionist sympathies. Its effort to achieve one great visible world church yielded instead to the emergence of ever larger global denominational bodies (e.g., Lutheran World Federation, World Methodist Council, World Alliance of Reformed Churches). Many evangelical churches viewed the WCC's doctrinal basis as too inclusive, while some liberal churches considered it too restrictive.
Debate has emerged over whether the future of Lutheranism lies in closer liaison with the Roman Catholic Church. World Lutheran Federation (WLF) reportedly is probing possibilities of a new and more intimate relationship. This is ironic, since Luther identified the papacy with the antichrist.
Later this year some WLF leaders are expected to present to committee, for further consideration by the movement's national assembly in 1997, significant proposals to be submitted later to the eighth assembly of the World Council of Churches. The proposals, purportedly involving compromise on the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper, would facilitate a major announcement in the year 2000.
The Church of Rome is not without unofficial representation in related dialogues. In recent writings Pope John Paul II notably views himself as God's appointed servant in the promotion of ecumenicity. The Petrine ministry is said to make ecumenism imperative. Formulated as an integral component of Catholic orthodoxy, ecumenism had been among John Paul's priorities and he addresses Eastern Orthodoxy, Western Protestantism, and Evangelicalism.
In May 1994, a consistory of cardinals shared projections leading to the Jubilee Year 2000. A proposal that the Catholic Church publicly confess sins and guilt for the Inquisition and for the persecution of heretics and Jews was offensive to many cardinals, who are reluctant to concede the Catholic Church's institutional capacity for sinning. Catholic theologians are exploring ways in which the church can offer absolution to others while it affirms internal institutional repentance.
One report from a usually informed source is that John Paul has designated seven cardinals to prepare a major meeting initiating the new millennium. While direct confirmation is lacking, an influential representative of the World Council of Churches reportedly was chagrined, because no invitation was simultaneously issued to WCC authorities to participate in the planning.
The emphasis on unity in truth is increasingly cast in dialectical form, so that plural differences can be viewed as contributory to intellectual congruity.
Any comprehensive ecumenical approach inevitably involves the question addressed by John Paul in a chapter titled "Is Only Rome Right?" in his recent book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. To say there is "no salvation outside Christ," he tells us, does not mean that many who do not know the name of Christ are therefore outside of Christ. Other religions, as John Paul sees it, contain "seeds of the Word," apparently "true and holy" elements which are aspects of Christ. Christ redeemed all, and has "His own ways of reaching them" in salvation history.
John Paul is not saying that other religions are redemptive. When it comes to the New Age he can even sweep it aside as in conflict "with all that is essentially Christian." Yet he writes of redemption's cosmic character. Though he considers fear of hell well-founded, he hesitates over the certainty of eternal damnation. Despite unfamiliarity with the Gospel a "truly upright life" is nonetheless one in which the Gospel is already at work. Yet if such persons are saved, it is "by God's grace in Christ."
Among evangelicals the response to pluralistic ecumenism has largely been reactionary. Spokesmen voice little agony of soul over the Christian church's divided condition. This indifference explains partly why they shun exploration of deeper unity and, worse yet, why they accommodate more and more divisions. Yet, to their credit, evangelical denominations rally with interdenominational fervor in sponsoring biblical evangelicalism and missions, the priority that liberal ecumenism most dwarfs.
Mainline modernism deteriorated into a political ideology. At the same time conservatives, supposedly the guardians of biblical theology, pursued church growth through murky evangelical pluralism. Their annual conventions featured individual leaders more than a cognitively definitive movement impacting the culture, and their funding appeals sometimes had more fervor than their cultural confrontation. To be sure, the growing disposition of Southern Baptists to be known as evangelicals stimulated the National Association of Evangelicals, yet Christian Reformed and Fuller Seminary spokesmen preferred a pluralistic framework, hoping to reshape liberal ecumenism into a moderate evangelicalism affirming a broad view of biblical authority.
World Evangelical Fellowship, constituted in 1951, links 57 autonomous national and regional bodies through an international headquarters in Singapore. The movement's history, written by missionary veteran Harold Fuller, is to appear shortly. Commissions in theology, women's concerns, and church renewal have had only modest influence, although the reinforcement of missions interests has been more significant. WEF has discussed possible sponsorship in the summer of 1999 of a major global meeting which would issue a strong evangelical statement on the continuing imperative of world evangelization based on Reformation doctrine and principles.
A considerable variety of new ecumenical alternatives is postulated in the United Sates, not all of them involving church structures. Southern Baptists have reached out for closer cooperation with Afro-American churches and churchmen. Conservative Reformed churches, troubled by the doctrinal thinness of many contemporary evangelical churches, are meeting April 17-20, 1996, as the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, emphasizing "the great solas of the Reformation"–Scripture alone and justification by faith alone.
Yet the participating Reformed scholars have faced distressing subdivisions in their own ranks. One of their spokesmen, Michael Horton, has spoken of the Reformed world as "a divided part of the vineyard that cannot seem to get along with itself, much less with other Christians." Yet he comments rightly that it is rarely those who are committed to the classical Reformed distinctives who evidence this spirit. "Rather, it is those who want to redefine Reformed in terms of contemporary trends and fashions, ranging from theonomy to therapy." The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals notably encompasses both Reformed and Lutheran participants and its summit will even include some dispensationalists.
