Justification And The Future Of The Ecumenical Movement

On October 31, 1999, in Augsburg, Germany, officials of the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church signed two documents, an Official Common Statement with its Annex and the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. The Lutheran Churches belonging to the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church were declaring publicly and in a binding manner that a consensus in basic truths of the doctrine of justification exists between Lutherans and Catholics.

Within four months of the Augsburg signing, the Yale University Divinity School and the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale sponsored a theological conference “Justification and the Future of the Ecumenical Movement.” The goal of the conference was to begin testing the wider import of the Joint Declaration.

The essays in Justification and the Future of the Ecumenical Movement explore the larger implications of the Joint Declaration. The majority of the chapters are the presentations made at Yale in 2000. Three of the chapters were written later than the Yale conference and are included in this collection to expand the range of the discussion and to add new insights.