VATICAN

n VATICAN n VATICAN n VATICAN n VATICAN T he Continuing Impact of the 50 SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

imothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School of Samford University in the United States declared “that the Second Vatican Council was the most momentous religious event of the twentieth century—and not only for Catholics.” George, chair of the Baptist World

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Alliance Commission on Doctrine and Unity, represented the churches in the Reformation tradition when he delivered a lecture at Gregorian University in Rome on November 21, 2014, on the occasion of the 50th

anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on Ecumenism.

years later

It is not all hopeless however. The

many results of Vatican II included the effort on the part of the Catholic Church to have dialogue with other Christian traditions, including Baptists. Two rounds of dialogue were held between the BWA and the Vatican, from 1984-1988 and 2006-2010. “At Vatican II the Catholic Church entered the ecumenical movement and by doing so transformed it,” George claimed.

This new ecumenical cooperation and

openness by Catholics was consistent with earlier cooperation by Protestant churches through the World Missionary Conference held at Edinburgh in 1910, with its theme “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and the movement for Faith and Order, which held its first world conference at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1927. “There are many milestones along

the way for which we can give thanks and celebrate, including the landmark document, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982), and Pope John Paul II’s great encyclical on ecumenism, Ut Unum Sint (1995).”

Vatican II opened on October 1962 and

its fourth session closed in December 1965. It addressed relations between the Catholic Church and the modern world. George said the great concepts of that

Council included “conscience and freedom, especially religious freedom.” Another was the focus on the “scandalous divisions among the people of God.” Declaring that he spoke “as a Protestant

who is also an evangelical and a Baptist,” George stated, “the fact that Christians today are divided—most outrageously at the Table of the Lord—contradicts the prayer of Christ and countermands the church’s missionary task to communicate and display the love of God to all peoples.” Contending that “the quest for Christian

unity and the task of world evangelization are inseparable,” he asserted that the problem of disunity among Christians is even more urgent now than it was in 1964. He claimed there is a “growing divide not only between but within churches on matters related to marriage and family, sexual ethics, bioethics, and religious freedom.”

26 BAPTIST WORLD MAGAZINE Other examples include the 2010

report of the Lutheran-Mennonite International Study Commission, Healing Memories: Reconciling in Christ, which addressed the Lutheran persecution of Anabaptists during the Reformation of the sixteenth century. George noted that “In light of this ecumenical study, the Eleventh Assembly of the Lutheran World Federation took the historic step of asking the Mennonites for forgiveness, expressing compunction—deep regret and sorrow—for violence done against sixteenth-century Anabaptists in the name of Christ.” George pointed out that Pope Francis,

who became Catholic pontiff in March 2013, has taken a number of initiatives that bode well for Christian unity, such as his visit to the Pentecostal Church of the Reconciliation in Caserta, Italy, in July 2014. “His homily there on Christian unity included a plea for forgiveness for ‘those Catholic brothers and sisters’ who in past times had ‘made laws . . . persecuted, and denounced their Pentecostal brothers.’”

Baptists in Jamaica and the United Kingdom (UK) celebrated 200 years of joint partnership in 2014. The first Baptist missionary from the UK, John Rowe, arrived in Jamaica in 1814 to continue to strengthen the work that had begun in 1783 under George Liele and Moses Baker, former enslaved persons from the United States. Rowe was followed by a succession of British missionaries to the Caribbean country. Over much of the 200-year period,

Jamaican and British Baptists have collaborated to enrich the lives of Jamaicans. Baptists in Jamaica were among the most strident opponents of slavery. Sam Sharpe, who has received the country’s highest honor, the Order of National Hero, led a slave strike in December 1831, which became violent after colonialists in Jamaica retaliated with force. An estimated 600 enslaved persons, including Sharpe, were executed. Almost 150 Baptist places of worship were destroyed by British colonizers. Unrest ended in May 1832. Historians contend that the Sam

Sharpe Rebellion was the catalyst that broke the back of slavery in much of the British Commonwealth. The British Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. British missionaries, such as William Knibb, Thomas Burchell