To Love Your Neighbour's Church as Your Own: A Manifest For Christian Unity
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About this ebook
"Divisions among Christians are a scandal. There is no other word for it: a scandal!" These words are from Pope Francis during an audience in 2015 and refer to a reality that obscures the good news of Jesus to a world in need of healing. Christians are divided. Does a divided Church have any real credibility? Is the unity of the Church possible? Is it realistic to hope for the visible unity of the Church on this side of eternity?
After spending much of his life praying and writing about things pertaining to these questions, Peter Halldorf shines a light on the question that matters most to Jesus Himself: The unity of His children, that they would be one. With pastoral care, he writes about the personal testimonies and lives that has exemplified what it practically means to love your neighbour's church as your own, testimonies of sacrificial love and radiant hope. Inspired by the examples of faith in the first part of the book the author doesn't shy away from facing the stumbling blocks that the Church needs to acknowledge in order to fulfil the prayer of Jesus. In the second part of the book, he tackles the questions surrounding the primacy of the pope in such a way that Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians might be able to find common ground while retaining their personality. The book suggests that it is in recognizing the differences in each other that we discover who we are, broken yet healed in the mystery of the cross. Five hundred years into the Reformation, this book gives a glimpse of holy hope, that a 'miracle of unity' in the worldwide Church is still possible.
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To Love Your Neighbour's Church as Your Own - Peter Halldorf
To Love Your Neighbour’s Church as Your Own
A manifest for Christian unity
Peter Halldorf
To Love Your Neighbour’s Church as Your Own
© Peter Halldorf
© Jakob Palm 2019-2020 (English edition)
COVER DESIGN
Jonatan Palm
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Tellwell Talent
PRINTED WITH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM
Holy Covenant Evangelical Orthodox Church
www.holycovenanteoc.com
Tellwell Talent
All rights reserved.
Tellwell Talent
www.tellwell.ca
ISBN
978-0-2288-0855-8 (Paperback)
978-0-2288-0856-5 (eBook)
Table of Contents
Foreword
Part 1: Manifest for Christian Unity
Part 2: An Ecumenical Perspective Concerning the Office of Peter
A word from the translator
Bibliography
About the author and translator
Dedicated to the ecumenical community in Bjärka-Säby.
Foreword
The Orthodox metropolitan Johannes Zizioulas described how ecumenism has three dimensions. He calls them the ecumenism in time, the ecumenism in space and existential ecumenism.
Within the ecumenism in time, we find the work of being reconciled as Christians based on our common 2,000-year-old history, the Bible and the Church fathers. This is the ecumenism that dominates the official ecumenical dialogues, and we are all aware this work is progressing at a very slow pace.
The ecumenism in space occurs when Christians from different parts of the world and different traditions come together to share their experiences, to pray together and to join in cooperative action and events. We give testimony to the catholicity of the Church every time this takes place.
These two vantage points have dominated the ecumenical landscape for the last couple of decades but Zizioulas would like to add a third dimension that he chooses to call existential ecumenism. He defines it as our cooperative desire to confront the crucial existential challenges that humanity is facing today – not only in certain places or certain circumstances. Ecology is one such area where Christians are challenged to stand together to address some of the dire situations impacting the world.
Zizioulas writes: "I see in it an important ecumenical dimension in that it brings the divided Christians before a common task which they must face together. We live at a time when fundamental existential problems overwhelm our traditional divisions and relativize them almost to the point of extinction. Look, for example, at what is happening today in the Middle East: do those who persecute the Christians ask them to which Church or Confession they belong? Christian unity in such cases is de facto realized by persecution and blood – an ecumenism of martyrdom."
This essay is my attempt to put into words what a contemporary ecumenical posture could look like, with this existential and spiritual perspective towards ecumenism at the forefront and through the lens of my ecclesial circumstance – the Pentecostal movement. This does not mean we can neglect the theological questions that still stand in the way of Christian unity. But, there are existential questions that need to take precedence. Unity, the issue that Jesus Himself prioritized: so that the world will believe. For this reason, a couple of words from the contemporary monastic father, Matta al-Miskin has become a point of reference to me: We must start by living together in the one and innermost being of faith before we can agree on the content.
Where do we begin? This is the question.
This essay has two parts. In the first part, which I’ve chosen to call Manifest for Christian Unity, the personal testimony takes front stage. People and communities that not only speak about, but also incarnate, unity in a radical vision of oneness keep the flame of hope alive. However, there are stumbling blocks that we must acknowledge and confront. One of those is outlined in the second part of the book: An Ecumenical Perspective Concerning the Office of Peter. Here, as well as in many other situations, the reference point must be a Bible study. In the reflections about the pope, the bishop of Rome, I make reference to the ecumenically-minded orthodox theologian Olivier Clément and his book You are Peter, where he formulates a posture that we could potentially gather around.
Peter Halldorf
San Masseo, Assisi
I. Manifest for Christian Unity
1
During the 20th century a host of ecumenical movements were birthed and, independently of one another, put the question about the visible unity of the Church on the map. Already at the turn of that century, Elena Guerra, founder of the Order of the Oblates of the Holy Spirit, wrote 12 exhorting letters to Pope Leo XIII about renewed teaching concerning the Holy Spirit. She asked the pope to invite the faithful to rediscover a life in the Spirit and to encourage prayer for Christian unity.
In the following years, Pope Leo XIII distributed several important documents concerning the Holy Spirit and invited the Church to pray that the 20th century would become the century of the Holy Spirit. He introduced the so-called Pentecostal Novena, a nine-day time of prayer for spiritual renewal, between Ascension and Pentecost every year.
2
An answer to those prayers of the pope arrived six years later. On Azusa Street, a Los Angeles backstreet, behind a timber yard and some stables, the modern Pentecostal movement was born in April 1906. Within this movement, the gift of tongues caught some attention, but the most revolutionizing feature even offensive to some – was the way this movement broke down barriers between races, classes and churches.
William Seymour, the Afro-American front-figure of the moment wrote in 1906