Tom 12 (2020): Zeszyt 1 (April 2020)

The seventeenth century was a period of political and religious turmoil in the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. The confessional conflicts produced martyrs whose cults consolidated the confessional boundaries of the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox, and the Greek Catholic Church. In my article, I compare three such saints: Josafat Kuntsevych (1580-1623, Greek Catholic), Afanasiy Filippovych (c. 1595–1648, Orthodox), and Andrzej Bobola (1591-1657, Roman Catholic), who were martyred in the hands of their Christian neighbours. For material, I use the hymnographical services composed for the saints. I argue that, in quest of genuine ecumenism, certain content in these services, such as exclusive concepts of the true faith and church unity, may actually induce rather than prevent hostility between the Churches.

In my article I would like to document assessments from the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation in the perception of the Romanian Orthodoxy. From these evaluations, conclusions about the current position of Orthodoxy to Protestantism can be drawn. The focus is on a total of seven contributions. Two are from the online news portal of the Bucharest Patriarchate www.basilica.ro by Gheorghe Anghel and Aurelian Iftimiu. Three articles were published in the “Revista Teologică” from Theological Faculty in Sibiu by Daniel Buda & Aurel Pavel, Mihai Iordache and Maria Curtean. Finally, I’m referencing to two contributions published by the Bucharest theologian Cosmin Pricop in German-language publications.

The Ecumenical legacy of the Council of Crete convened in 2016 is extremely important because of the consistent discussions on this topic during the grounding of the Council, but mostly subsequent to that, when the process of reception of the Council began. The Holy and Great Council of Crete of 2016, known also as the Pan-Orthodox Council, issued six official documents plus a Message and an Encyclical. Among those documents, one is dedicated to the question of ecumenical relations. Inside various Orthodox Autocephalous Churches different groups denounced the Council because of its ecumenical approach, meaning that a good understanding of the ecumenical legacy of the Council of Crete is one of the most important keys in its reception. In this study I will try to inspect the ecclesiological theology found in the Document on Ecumenical Relations released in 2016 by the Council of Crete, thereby analyzing why some of the groups rejected this document. Comparing different forms of the documents with the final approved form will help us understand how the Orthodox approach to ecumenism evolved in time, since the beginning of the preparations for the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church.

The purpose of the article is to analyse the degree of theological diversity and coherency displayed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland in theological dialogues with different Orthodox churches in the 2010s. The ELCF engaged in a bilateral dialogue with the Orthodox Church of Finland and the Russian Orthodox Church. Theological diversity and coherency are dependent on the composition of the delegations, in which gender balance and the chosen theological lines both play a role. The chosen theological line and gender balance are also interwoven.

This article deals with the development of hermeneutics in the dialogue between confessions within the ecumenical movement, from its beginnings in 1927 until the current time. As an overview of historical circumstances, it critically presents the main document of ecumenical hermeneutics, including its contemporary tendencies and challenges. Special attention is given to the various models of ecumenical hermeneutics, the influence of philosophical hermeneutics, as well the role of hermeneutical questions in the contemporary ecumenical dialogue.