Ecumenical dialogue
- When
- 1948–2026 AD
- Where
- Worldwide
- Kind
- Rapprochement
The World Council of Churches, the lifting of the 1054 anathemas, and the 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification narrowed some divisions without ending them.
The World Council of Churches was formed in 1948, bringing most Protestant and Orthodox bodies into permanent conversation; Rome is not a member but participates in its faith and order work. The mutual excommunications of 1054 were lifted in 1965. The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification in 1999 recorded that Lutherans and Catholics now say enough of the same thing about the doctrine at the centre of the Reformation that the condemnations of the sixteenth century no longer apply to each other's teaching; Methodists, Anglicans and Reformed have since associated themselves with it. The dialogues have not produced reunion, and the questions that remain — orders, authority, and increasingly ethics — are the hard ones.
Who stands here
- Karl Barth
1886–1968
Barmen set the terms a church uses to refuse a state, and shaped the century after it
Either side of it
The whole timeline, from the apostolic communities to the present.