The ecumenical movement and the Second Vatican Council

From Edinburgh to Amsterdam

Nineteenth-century missionaries carried one gospel to Asia and Africa but planted churches under the West's many names, and to new believers these divisions stood in the gospel's way. In June 1910 about 1,200 delegates of Protestant missionary societies met at Edinburgh to plan how they could work together in world mission World Missionary Conference, Report. The chairman was the American Methodist layman John R. Mott, known for the Student Volunteer Movement's watchword, ‘the evangelization of the world in this generation’. Nearly every delegate came from Europe or North America; those from Asia are usually counted at fewer than twenty, and at least one of them said plainly that the young churches did not want to inherit the West's divisions.

Three streams followed Edinburgh. Its Continuation Committee became the International Missionary Council in 1921. Charles Brent, an American Episcopal bishop in the Philippines, launched Faith and Order, so that the churches might face their differences of doctrine and order honestly (Lausanne, 1927). Nathan Söderblom, the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, led Life and Work, which called them to act together on questions of society and peace (Stockholm, 1925). Rome stayed apart: in 1928 Pope Pius XI's encyclical Mortalium Animos forbade Catholics to take part.

Faith and Order and Life and Work came together at Amsterdam in August 1948 to form the World Council of Churches, with 147 member churches. Its basis asked one confession of the churches that joined: that the Lord Jesus Christ is God and Saviour The Basis of the WCC. It was not, the council insisted, a super-church set over its members. Some Orthodox churches belonged from the start; in 1961, at New Delhi, the Russian and other Eastern European Orthodox churches joined, bringing most of the Orthodox churches inside. The same assembly took in the International Missionary Council and enlarged the basis to ground its confession in the Scriptures and name the triune God.

The text the movement turned to more than any other was the prayer Jesus prayed on the night he was betrayed:

I am not asking on behalf of them alone, but also on behalf of those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.

John 17:20-21

Jesus ties the unity of his people to the faith of the world: they are to be "perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me" (John 17:23). Chrysostom saw it long ago: "there is no scandal so great as division, whereas unity amongst believers is a great argument for believing" Chrysostom. Paul urges the church "to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3), for there is "one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Ephesians 4:5).

Evangelicals prized the same prayer, yet many held back from the council. Paul's unity rests on one faith, and some member churches had leaders who doubted the authority of Scripture or the bodily resurrection of Christ (liberal theology); a unity that left truth unsettled was not, they thought, the unity Christ prayed for. From the late 1960s, as the council gave more of its energy to racial justice and political struggle, they feared that evangelism was being redefined as social change. Many held, too, that unity is the Spirit's gift, which Paul tells us to keep rather than create, so that Christians can pray, preach and serve together without merging into one structure. They kept their own fellowship, from the Evangelical Alliance of 1846 to Lausanne in 1974 (Evangelicalism). In Korea, joining the WCC was a central issue when the Presbyterian Church divided in 1959 (the Korean church). Those in the council answered that division itself contradicts the Lord's prayer, and that churches must pray and talk together even while they disagree.

The Second Vatican Council

Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958, surprised the church in January 1959 by announcing a council, the first since the First Vatican Council of 1869–1870. His word was aggiornamento, bringing up to date: the same faith, spoken so that the modern world could hear it. He set up a Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, and when the council opened in St Peter's on 11 October 1962, more than two thousand bishops were joined by Protestant and Orthodox observers. John died in June 1963; Paul VI carried the work to its close in December 1965. Catholics count it the twenty-first ecumenical council.

Its first document, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963), asked that the faithful understand the worship and truly share in it, opened the way for the people's own languages beside Latin, and called for much more of Scripture to be read at Mass Sacrosanctum Concilium. Within a few years most Catholics heard the Mass in their own tongue. Dei Verbum (1965) taught that Scripture and Tradition together hand on the one revelation God has entrusted to his church, and that only the church's teaching office, the Magisterium, may interpret it with authority; yet the Magisterium, it added, is the servant of God's word and not its master Dei Verbum. It wanted every Catholic to be able to reach the Bible readily, in good translations from the original languages, prepared together with other Christians where that proved possible.

Lumen Gentium (1964) pictured the church first as the people of God: before popes and bishops it speaks of the whole baptized people, all called to holiness. It taught that Christ's one church ‘subsists in’ the Catholic Church, led by the pope and the bishops united with him, and yet that real gifts of holiness and truth are at work among Christians beyond its walls Lumen Gentium. The Decree on Ecumenism of the same year admitted that neither side had been blameless in the divisions. Christians who grew up in other churches and believe in Christ are not guilty of the old breach; since they have been justified by faith and baptized, they belong to Christ, and Catholics are to welcome them as brothers and sisters Unitatis Redintegratio. Protestant and Orthodox Christians were now ‘separated brethren’, and Catholics were encouraged to pray with them for unity. On 7 December 1965, the day before the council closed, Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras lifted the excommunications of 1054 (the parting of East and West).

Liberation theology

Latin America was a Catholic continent, much of it poor and under military rule. In 1968 its bishops, meeting at Medellín in Colombia, applied the council to their own lands and treated the unjust structures that kept the poor poor as a matter of sin. The Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutiérrez (1928–2024) gave the movement its classic, A Theology of Liberation (1971) Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation. For him theology begins in what Christians do beside the poor, and then examines that work, honestly and self-critically, by the light of God's word. The God of the Bible takes the side of the oppressed in history, a conviction later summed up as God's preferential option for the poor. His key text was the exodus:

I have indeed seen the affliction of My people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their oppressors, and I am aware of their sufferings. I have come down to rescue them

Exodus 3:7-8

Gutiérrez saw in the exodus a real liberation of real slaves: salvation touches the whole of life. Yet he spoke of liberation at three levels: freedom from economic, social and political oppression; men and women taking responsibility for their own history; and, deepest of all, freedom from sin, from which every injustice grows, into fellowship with God and one another. In 1984 the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith warned against borrowing the Marxist analysis of class struggle uncritically and reducing salvation to political liberation.

Evangelicals answered in more than one voice. Latin American evangelicals such as René Padilla took the challenge seriously and spoke of integral mission, evangelism and justice held together. On this passage Matthew Henry wrote, "God hears the cries of his afflicted people" Matthew Henry. The God of Scripture is not deaf to the poor. Yet evangelicals also warned that when the Bible is read first through the struggle of the poor, the gospel can shrink to social liberation, though Gutiérrez himself called freedom from sin the deepest. The exodus leads on to Sinai and points to the redemption Christ won on the cross. Henry ends his note, "Those whom God, by his grace, delivers out of a spiritual Egypt, he will bring to a heavenly Canaan" Matthew Henry.

Justification in 1999, and what remains

On 31 October 1999, Reformation Day, the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification at Augsburg Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. Together they confessed, on justification, that God accepts us by grace alone, through faith in what Christ has done and not for anything we have earned, and gives us the Holy Spirit, who makes our hearts new and sets us to good works. They declared that the sixteenth-century condemnations do not apply to the other's teaching as the declaration sets it out (on Trent, see the Catholic Reformation). They did not claim to have settled everything: the declaration names open questions about the church, authority, ministry and the sacraments, and many Protestant theologians in Germany publicly opposed it as glossing over real differences.

There is much here for evangelicals to welcome. Catholics worship in their own languages and are urged to read the Bible; Christians long divided confess their share of the blame, call one another brothers and sisters in Christ, and pray together. The Reformers longed for no less. Real differences remain. The Catholic Church teaches that the Magisterium interprets Scripture and Tradition with authority; evangelicals hold Scripture alone as the final judge of all teaching. Catholics believe that the Mass makes present the one sacrifice of the cross, the bread and wine becoming Christ's body and blood (transubstantiation); and the dogmas of Mary's Immaculate Conception (1854) and bodily Assumption (1950) remain articles of faith that evangelicals do not find in Scripture.

The last thirty years leave questions more than answers. Is the goal one visible church, a reconciled diversity of churches, or fellowship and shared work among all who hold the gospel? How will the growing Pentecostal and evangelical churches of the global South, mostly outside these councils, take part? When the WCC held its tenth assembly at Busan in 2013, Korean Christians were sharply divided over it.

The Nicene Creed confesses "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" The Nicene Creed. That unity is the Spirit's gift before it is our task, and we keep it in truth and in love: never treating the truth lightly, never refusing to pray and serve with all who confess the same Lord. For more, see the doctrine course's lesson What the church is, How do Catholics and Protestants differ? and How do the denominations differ?

Practice