Faithful Theology is Ecumencial Theology

Should Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christians pursue reconciliation with one another? Here’s a “hard-to-argue-with” blurb from T.F. Torrance on the matter…

“Any theology which is faithful to the Church of Jesus Christ within which it takes place cannot but be a theology of reconciliation, for reconciliation belongs to the essential nature and mission of the Church in the world. But taking its rise from God’s mighty acts in reconciling the world to himself in Christ, the Church is constituted ‘a community of the reconciled,’ and in being sent by Christ into the world to proclaim what God had done in him, the Church is constituted a reconciling as well as a reconciled community. The task of theology is made more difficult, however, by the fact that although the Church has been sent into the divided world in the service of reconciliation it has allowed the divisions of the world to penetrate back into itself so that its own unity in mind and body has been damaged, and its mission of reconciliation in the world has been seriously impaired. … Ecumenism refers to the dynamic concern for the unity and renewal of the Church and of all things in Jesus Christ… In it there struggles to become manifest an immense reality deriving from the foundation of the Church in the Incarnation of the Son of God, understood as the coming of God himself into the structures of worldly and human being in order to restore the whole of creation to its unity and harmony in himself” (Thomas F. Torrance, Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1996), 7, 15).

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