Lutheran–Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017

Several media outlets have reported the announcement of the joint publication by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church of From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017. (Ecumenical News, for example, posted "Catholics, Lutherans launch historic joint document on Reformation" on July 18.) A PDF of the full 93-page document is available for free download on the Lutheran World Federation web site. I hope Christians of all communions will read, mark, and inwardly digest this publication and contemplate how they might receive these convergences beyond the sixteenth-century divisions of the church in the West.

While this is a most welcome ecumenical development, it is not unanticipated, for it represents the harvest and synthesis of almost fifty years of sustained Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical dialogue that involved rigorous mutual biblical, historical, and theological scholarship. The following documents issued by the Lutheran-Catholic joint commissions over the years (published among other places in the three-volume Growth in Agreement series issued by the World Council of Churches) represent the foundational work for this exciting publication:

Phase I (1967–1972)

The Gospel and the Church (Malta Report – 1972)

Phase II (1973–1984)

The Eucharist (1978)

All Under One Christ (1980)
Ways to Community (1980)
The Ministry in the Church (1981)
Martin Luther – Witness to Christ (1983)
Facing Unity – Models, Forms and Phases of Catholic-Lutheran Church Fellowship (1984)

Phase III (1986–1993)

Church and Justification (1993)

Phase IV (1995–2006)

Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (31 October 1999)
The Apostolicity of the Church (2006)

A Latin American Baptist on Pope Francis, Catholic-Evangelical relations

Harold Segura

Many readers of Ecclesial Theology will be interested in the initial reactions to the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis posted by Harold Segura, a Baptist minister and theological educator from Columbia who currently serves as Regional Director for Church Relations and Christianity Identity for World Vision--Latin America and the Caribbean. Segura participated in a "pre-conversation" conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina in December 2001 that paved the way for the second series of international theological conversations between the Baptist World Alliance and the Roman Catholic Church held 2006-2010 (the official report from which will be published this summer). During the 2001 Buenos Aires meeting Segura presented a paper offering Baptist responses to a paper presented by Walter Cardinal Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, on "The Concept of Communio as a Framework Within Which to Discuss Issues of Concern."

Also of interest in these connections is a blog journal posted by Segura while he served as a Baptist observer at the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean in Aparecida, Brazil in May 2007. Segura's journal postings were published  in book form as Crónicas de Aparecida: Un pastor evangélico en la Quinta Conferencia general del Episcopado Latinoamericano y del Caribe by (Ediciones Kairós, 2008). John L. Allen, Jr. published an interview with Segura in the National Catholic Reporter regarding his experiences observing the bishops' conference in Aparecida and his reflections on implications for ecumenical relations in Latin America.