A. Edward Siecienski
All Articles by A. Edward Siecienski
Associate Professor of Religion, Clement and Helen Pappas Professor of Byzantine Culture and Religion, Stockton University, New Jersey USA
‘Unity of the Churches—An Actual Possibility: The Rahner-Fries Theses and Contemporary Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue’
In 1983 Karl Rahner, SJ and Heinrich Fries wrote Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility (Einigung der Kirchen—reale Möglichkeit) a small book proposing eight theses that they hoped could bring about the almost immediate reunion of Christendom. Although widely criticized for their ‘epistemological tolerance’, if ‘resurrected’ and properly adapted to issues currently under discussion in the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue (e.g., the filioque, the papacy, the Marian dogmas), these theses (particularly 1, 2, 4a, 4b) have the potential to build upon the progress already made and move East and West even closer toward full communion.
A Personal Note
In the years since the publication of my book on the filioque,1 and then its companion volume on the papacy,2 I have been asked many times by both Catholic and Orthodox friends if and when these debates will end so that the goal of unity between the churches can finally become a reality. Up to this point I have not addressed these questions in print, because until now I have restricted myself to chronicling what has been rather than detailing what should be. My work has largely been descriptive rather than prescriptive, a natural consequence of being a dogmatic historian far more concerned with the past rather than with the future.
However, I must admit that as a scholar who has spent the last two decades studying the genesis and progression of the schism I have often wanted to take the
A. Edward Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
A. Edward Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).