The Emergent Ecumenism
A Response to Robert P. George
by Thomas C. Oden
Six recent ecumenical gatherings set the tone for what is being called the “new ecumenism.” (1) Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) met recently in New York for preliminary drafting of a new study on the Universal Call to Holiness. (2) Earlier I had attended the Notre Dame conference on Faith and Order, which was essentially a post-National Council of Churches (NCC) planning conference. (3) Then I went to Washington, D.C., for the meeting of the Association for Church Renewal (ACR), which is in the process of creating a theological arm of the confessing movements within the mainline. (4) Then I went to Dallas to meet with the Confessing Theologians Commission with young orthodox theologians from the mainline confessing and renewing movements to draft a statement for the first grass-roots national meeting of the Association for Church Renewal. (5) Then I chaired the board meeting of the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which seeks to ground in classical Christian teaching an ecumenical social witness within the mainline churches. (6) Then came this Touchstone conference on the unity we cannot as yet actualize, facing up to the forms of disunity that we must sustain.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on ecumenism from the online archives
more from the online archives
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor