Apostolicity and Apostolic Tradition (16-17.04.2010) - ISTITUTO DI STUDI ECUMENICI SAN BERNARDINO

Apostolicity and Apostolic tradition

Seminar on Ecumenical ecclesiology

(Venice, 16-17 April 2010)

The debate on the «apostolicity» of the Church covers one of the most relevant aspects of the current Ecumenical dialogue, being that many of the issues on the Ecumenical field are still open and tightly connected with the definition of «apostolicity» of the Church and of the criteria linked to it. Due to the importance of this topic with particular regard to ecclesiological reflection, the Institute of Ecumenical Studies (ISE) opted to devote the yearly seminar of ecclesiology to it, with invitations to teachers from the Institute and other Faculties of Theology, in order to collegially discuss the texts prepared by the participants and to present and investigate individual aspects of such a complex topic.

The seminar was opened, in a tradition by now well established, with a presentation by Tecle Vetrali, emeritus professor at ISE, on the occurrence of the word «apostle» in the New Testament to verify the various ways the term is utilized in neo-testamentary writings, including some non-secondary differences between the synoptic Gospels and John's work as a whole. The next three presentations reflected upon the term as considered by the diverse confessions of faith: Fulvio Ferrario, professor at the Valdese Faculty of Theology and at ISE, chose to present the apostolic Church in an evangelical perspective through ten theses purposely underlining the challenges of the issue in the Protestant context, also in relation with the current Ecumenical dialogue.

The presentation of Hans Martin Barth, a Lutheran and emeritus professor at the Faculty of Theology of Marburg, may be aligned within the same perspective. He put forward a recent document Die Apostolizität der Kirche, a study compiled by the Catholic-Lutheran theological Commission in a decade of concentrated and vigorous work. The position of the Orthodox Church was addressed in the presentation of Panaghotis Yfantis, a professor at Aristotle University of Thessalonica, who highlighted the understanding of apostolicity in the Orthodox world, underlining the limits of the Orthodox reflection when investigating the topic in the Ecumenical perspective. The Roman Catholic point of view was covered by Roberto Giraldo, Dean of ISE. The professor tackled the issue, starting from an attentive reading of the most recent documents of bilateral dialogue on apostolicity of the Church and the apostolic succession, clearly pointing out that the dogmatic reflection is closely connected with deriving consequences from the daily life of Christian communities, while rediscovering the life of apostolic communities as an Ecumenical style of Christian testimony.

For a better understanding of the position of the Catholic Church, Ioannis Asimakis, a professor at ISE, proposed a short reflection on various positions of apostolicity of the Church as intended in some writings by Joseph Ratzinger and Ioannis Zizioulas. Lastly, Giovanni Cereti, emeritus professor at ISE, went over some of the documents of bilateral dialogue published in Enchiridion Oecumenicum to demonstrate the presence of the topic, proposing some indicative hypotheses on the implicit consequences of these bilateral dialogues in the ecclesiological reflection which represents an element of strong dialectics among Churches.

The seminar demonstrated the number of steps taken in the removal of elements of pure contraposition in the ecclesiological reflection on such a central aspect as the definition of apostolicity of the Church which represents a compulsory passage, and, still controversial in many aspects, on the way of an Ecumenical dialogue having not only as objective the setting of common declarations, but the rediscovery of a shared essentiality in the Christian testimony.

Riccado Burigana