Ecumenical or evangelical?

As expected, the highlight of the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea was the ecumenical prayer presided over by Pope Leo XIV at the ruins of the church of St Neophytus in Nicaea (today the name of the town is Isnik), where the Council meetings were held in 325 AD.

The Pope was symbolically at the centre of the scene, the point of connection between everyone, flanked by the Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew and other ecclesiastical dignitaries seated behind him in lesser roles.

The question that was not asked (but its positive answer only assumed) is: In what sense the Nicene Creed is the basis for ecumenism? The reality is that while different people can affirm – and even recite – the words of the Nicene Creed together (e.g. remission of sin, Mary, church), they mean different things according to their different theological frameworks and church’s allegiances. Evangelicals want their faith to be not loosely attached to Scripture, but under God’s Word and always open to be corrected by it.

In any case, it was a theatrical representation of contemporary ecumenism: all united around the successor of Peter, the Roman Pope, the only one dressed in white.

That said, what happened in Nicaea is only one step in the ecumenical trajectory. The direction was indicated by Pope Leo himself during the flight to Lebanon. Speaking to journalists, the Pope said of the meeting in Nicaea with ecumenical leaders: “Yesterday morning we spoke about possible meetings in the future. One would be in the year 2033, two thousand years after Redemption, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ … We have not yet made the invitation but there is a possibility of celebrating this great event of the Resurrection, for example in Jerusalem in 2033. We still have a few years to prepare for it.”

2033, precisely. This is the next strategic step in the journey imagined and planned by the ecumenical movement at large. Nicaea 2025 was only the rehearsal in preparation for Jerusalem 2033. The great evocative power of the celebration of the 2,000th anniversary of Christ’s Resurrection and Pentecost will be put at the service of what could be the ecumenical movement’s final coup: having representatives of all Christian bodies gathered by and around the Roman Pontiff all celebrating their “unity” and having spiritually and theologically “reconciled” relationships.

The kind of unity that will be promoted in 2033 will also involve some kind of recognition of the global and transversal (albeit differentiated) role of the Roman Pope for all denominations and bodies on the basis of a theology that considers the “solas” of the Protestant Reformation to be definitively overcome.

For those who participate in the initiatives planned for 2033, it will no longer be “Scripture Alone,” but Scripture elastically understood as to include tradition, even those traditions which run contrary to the Biblical message (e.g. the Marian dogmas, the “imperial” papacy). No longer “Faith Alone,” but faith that is not sufficient to receive the gift of salvation and needs to be supplemented by human works and the sacraments administered by the church. No longer “Christ Alone,” but a Christ who is inclusive of the mediations of Mary and the saints and perhaps of other religious figures. All of this will be included in this version of ecumenically pacified but Biblically deviant Christianity.

For sure, for evangelical Christians the year 2033 will be an opportunity to celebrate the gospel truths of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection and ascension, plus the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Amen.

However, ecumenical celebrations of the same events will not be neutral and at no cost for evangelical fidelity. The ecumenical 2033 will be a decisive point scored for the absorption project that Roman Catholicism has been pursuing for centuries, i.e. integrating different bodies, leaders and beliefs under its umbrella. Will it be the unity the Lord Jesus prayed for in John 17? Hardly so.