A Quick Guide to Some Ecumenical Concepts: Reception

To many peo­ple it prob­a­bly seems like ecu­meni­cal con­ver­gence and con­sen­sus are the deci­sions of far-off the­olo­gians hav­ing quick meet­ings all over the world and then say­ing, “Everything’s OK; for­get your past; unity exists.” Life doesn’t work this way and nei­ther does the church. Unity can­not be imposed by force or by just say­ing so. It takes time. It takes the accep­tance of all the peo­ple in the church every­where. And this can only hap­pen by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Recep­tion is spir­i­tual. It is not a pro­gram with a sched­ule. Recep­tion is some­thing you always see after­ward, never ahead of time. When Philip Melanchthon wrote the Augs­burg Con­fes­sion, he didn’t know that he was writ­ing an impor­tant church doc­u­ment that thou­sands upon thou­sands of ordi­nands would take vows to uphold over the next sev­eral cen­turies! It was only later that the churches of the Ref­or­ma­tion rec­og­nized how impor­tant the Augs­burg Con­fes­sion was. They received it; it became part of their spir­i­tual life.

Every sin­gle gen­er­a­tion of the church makes a deci­sion about what it will receive from the past. Every gen­er­a­tion of the church has received the Scrip­tures. Most churches have received the Apos­tles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed or both. The creeds are not true because they are old. They are old now because so many gen­er­a­tions of Chris­tians have been inspired by the Holy Spirit to receive them.

Newer things can also be received by the work of the Holy Spirit. The Joint Dec­la­ra­tion on the Doc­trine of Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is an exam­ple of a new doc­u­ment with a very high level of recep­tion among the Lutheran churches of the world, on the offi­cial level.

But it is not in the hands of church author­i­ties to decide what will be received and what will be rejected. It is the long, slow process of dis­cern­ment in the whole body of Christ that deter­mines what is essen­tial to the faith of the church and what by con­trast divides the church. Which is why it’s so impor­tant for you—whoever you are, wher­ever you are, and what­ever you do—to take these mat­ters to heart and join in the dis­cern­ment process.

Devin Rose says:
September 15, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Hi Sarah,
Every sin­gle gen­er­a­tion of the church makes a deci­sion about what it will receive from the past. Every gen­er­a­tion of the church has received the Scriptures.
But dif­fer­ent “groups” choose to accept or reject dif­fer­ent (and often con­flict­ing) creeds/books/confessions. Take “the Scrip­tures,” which you say every gen­er­a­tion has accepted. But Protes­tants have 66 books that they call the Scrip­tures, Catholics have 73, the East­ern Ortho­dox 75, and the Ethiopian Ortho­dox 78 (and even some Luther­ans take Luther’s “canon within a canon” and rel­e­gate the books he dis­missed in the first edi­tion of his Bible to second-class sta­tus). So it is a bit too hand-wavy to declare that we all accept the Scrip­tures when we have so many dif­fer­ing canons for what, exactly, com­prises God’s Word.
Regard­ing the creeds, you didn’t explain why they are true (or aren’t), just why they are old. Under sola Scrip­tura Protes­tantism, a creed only has author­ity inso­far as it agrees with [a given person’s inter­pre­ta­tion of] the Scrip­tures. But since dif­fer­ent Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tions inter­pret the Scrip­tures dif­fer­ently (and even have dif­fer­ent books in their Scrip­tures), the creeds, under this sys­tem, can­not have any authority.
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