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Where Ecumenical Dialogue Has Actually Moved the Needle

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Where Ecumenical Dialogue Has Actually Moved the Needle

Article one sets out six mutually exclusive positions and is right to insist that none of them is simply "the Christian view." What it does not cover is the considerable, if partial, convergence recent ecumenical dialogue has achieved between some of those positions without abolishing any of them.

The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission's Windsor Statement on Eucharistic Doctrine (1971) found that Anglicans and Catholics could affirm together that Christ is truly, really and substantially present in the eucharistic elements and that the bread and wine become his body and blood, while explicitly declining to require that Anglicans adopt the Aristotelian vocabulary of transubstantiation to say so. That is a genuine narrowing of the gap between the Catholic and the "real presence, mode undefined" Anglican positions article one describes, achieved by separating the shared substance of the claim from one tradition's preferred philosophical framework for stating it.

The World Council of Churches' Faith and Order text Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (1982), the Lima document, attempted something broader still, offering language on the Eucharist that participating Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, including bodies holding the memorial position article one describes, could each recognise their own faith in without abandoning their distinct positions. It has not produced doctrinal agreement in the strict sense and was not designed to, but it demonstrates that a text can be written which each communion can affirm as compatible with what it already teaches, a more modest achievement than resolving the dispute but a considerably larger one than simply restating the six positions side by side.

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