The Church Towards a Common Vision

Abstract

There is over fifty years of history of the doctrinal dialogue connected to the Church reality, which has been conducting by the Commission “Faith and System” of the World Council of Churches. Its newest effect is a document titled The Church Towards a Common Vision. It was proceeded by plenty of bilateral dialogues on the nature and aim of the Church, on Jesus Christ and His Church or generally on Church created by God to become, at last, the multilateral document, breakingdown one of the main aprorias, which have existed until now between various religious traditions. The significance of this document equals the Document of Lima (1982), dedicated to “the sacrament of baptism, Eucharist or cleric service”, which was a very important foreground for further research process connected to the Christ’ s Church reality.#One must agree with the authors of that document, because 1) it shows the synthesis of research results, taken in the last decades during ecumenical dialogues on the ecumenical subject, which is very significant for Christians; 2) Churches were asked to rate those results. Nowadays, the evaluation is being prepared by the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity at the request of World Council of Churches. It is being made by Councils of Ecumenism of the local Conferences of Bishops, also in Poland; 3) The document made the occasion for Churches to reflection on the reading time signs, which concerning even larger growing in unity. Although, one cannot say that the full consensus in the study on Church, it cannot be omitted that this rapport give a little hope for the agreement in many issues connected to ‘spiritual service”, e.g. to the problem of apostolic succession or pope’s primacy.