Johannes Börjesson

The Lutheran tradition shares with the Catholic Church a reformatio ideal, which is a striking feature of the Western ecclesiological tradition of the last millennium more generally. This paper first examines some aspects of Lutheran ecclesiology as it relates to the Una Sancta, the canonical and synodical tradition, and ecumenical pursuits. It then goes on to use the ‘reformatio’ lens to reflect on the councils of Constantinople of 869–70 and 879–80 and the current estrangement between Rome and the Eastern churches in regard to the diverging standings of these councils. A solution is provided, it is suggested, in the call of Unitatis redintegratio (1964) to ‘continual reformation’ in the context of ecumenism as well as to an honouring of the conditions that held between East and West before the schism.

Introduction

The Lutheran Churches that date back to the sixteenth century were both born in and would henceforth be formed in schism. Pre-Tridentine Western Catholic provinces and communities, mostly in Northern Europe, were ruptured from communion with Rome and embarked on a journey through history that for almost five hundred years has kept them, as well as the churches they helped found elsewhere, separated from their brothers and sisters of the larger Roman Catholic community. This rupture has also separated them from the Western patriarch, as well as from every other chair with an apostolic predecessor. Through this long history, Europe has gone through violent wars based on the reformation lines, a transformative enlightenment project which aimed to create a new common ground for public life on the continent, a remarkable process of globalisation, and a recent century of both unprecedented decline of Christian practice in the West and increase of ecumenical dialogue worldwide. The relationships within Western Christianity look very different on this side of history compared to in the sixteenth century.