Posted on 05/28/2009 8:28:16 AM PDT by annalex
A Common Date for Easter is Possible
Contact: Juan Michel, World Council of Churches, +41-22-791-6153, +41-79-507-6363 media@wcc-coe.org
MEDIA ADVISORY, May 28 /Standard Newswire/ -- The hope that all Christians will be able to celebrate Easter on the same day in the future was reaffirmed by an international ecumenical seminar organized by the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, 15 May.
The problem is just about as old as the church itself: As Christianity started to spread around the world, Christians came to differing results on when to commemorate Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, due to the different reports in the four gospels on these events.
Attempts to establish a common date for Easter began with the Council of Nicaea in the year 325. It established that the date of Easter would be the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox. However, it did not fix the methods to be used to calculate the timing of the full moon or the vernal equinox.
Nowadays the Orthodox churches use the 21 March of the Julian calendar as the date of the equinox, while the churches of the Western tradition – that is the Protestant and Catholic churches – base their calculations on the Gregorian calendar. The resulting gap between the two Easter dates can be as much as five weeks.
All participants at the seminar in Lviv, which included Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians from a variety of European countries, endorsed a compromise proposed at a World Council of Churches (WCC) consultation in Aleppo, Syria, in 1997. The proposal was to keep the Nicaea rule but calculate the equinox and full moon using the accurate astronomical data available today, rather than those used many years ago.
Concretely, participants at the seminar expressed the hope that the years 2010 and 2011, when the coincidence of the calendars will produce a common Easter date, would serve as a period during which all Christians would join their efforts "to make such coincidence not to be an exception but rather a rule" and prepare for an Easter date based on exact astronomical reckoning and celebrated by all Christians on 8 April 2012.
However, the seminar entitled "A common date for Easter is possible" did not turn a blind eye to what participants considered to be "the main problem": "not the calculations, but the complex relations and missing of trust among different Christian denominations because of long divisions."
French Orthodox theologian Prof. Antoine Arjakovsky, director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies, pointed out: "Whilst the astronomic reckoning of the Nicean rule comes closer to the Gregorian calendar than to the ancient Julian one, the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches did take a step towards the Orthodox churches in Aleppo, accepting that the date of Easter should be established on the base of a cosmic calendar rather than by a fixed date as had been proposed prior to the inter-Orthodox meeting in Chambésy in 1977."
Other speakers at the ecumenical seminar were Rev. Dr Dagmar Heller, professor at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey and executive secretary of the WCC Faith and Order Commission, Jesuit Father Milan Zust, an official of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, and Prof. Konstantin Sigov, director of Saint Clement Centre in Kiev, Ukraine.
Further to the students of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies – a consortium between the Ukrainian Catholic University, the National University of Lviv and several other European universities – the seminar had gathered representatives of the city's major denominations: the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches of the patriarchates of Moscow and Kiev as well as the Autocephalous Orthodox Church in the Ukraine, the Greek and Roman Catholic Churches, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Baptist and the Evangelical Church.
Frequently asked questions about the date of Easter
http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=3169
Proposals from the Aleppo consultation
http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=2678
More information about the seminar (Ukrainian Catholic University website)
http://www.ecumenicalstudies.org.ua/eng/ies_activity/one.easter/
Additional information: Juan Michel,+41 22 791 6153 +41 79 507 6363 media@wcc-coe.org
The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 349 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 560 million Christians in over 110 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, from the Methodist Church in Kenya. Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland.
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BTW, I apologize for all my typos, past, present, and future. These fingers!!!
By another ecumenical council, and since it is a matter decided by the unified Church, it better be a hyper-ecumenical supercouncil with East Orthodox and Catholics together.
Yes, but the topic is by itself fascinating.
Amen! Here’s one vote for a hyper-ecumenical super-council!
I usually have a strong personal bias in favor of “hyper.” :o)
Cool. I love stuff that corresponds to solar/lunar events. Howcome 7 days in Israel, and 8 outside? (Jus’ curious...)
I vote no. Neither Church is ready, and unity from top down will not last. That already was tried, at Florence, and did not work.
Conditions favorable to reunification now exist, but the maturity necessary for reunion is not there. What best can be done now is to study each other and, Catholics in particular, to study the patristic Church. The two Churches need to fall in love with each other once again. By and large, it is not happening.
Well, that's a big if. The Evangelicals are welcome to study Catholicism and convert, and of course we are happy to cooperate on some social issues with the Evangelicals (or anyone else), but the doctrinal differences are not reconcileable at all. A reconciliation with the Orthodox is, on the other hand, the logic of history and undoubtedly will happen perhaps even in our lifetimes, but more likely in a couple of generations. Yet it is the calendar issue that visibly separates us from the Orthodox (and the Orthodox within themselves). We do not have calendar issues with the Protestants that I am aware of, except certain judaizing factions of them.
The WCC is a bastion of false ecumenism: the notion that all differences between Christians are reconcileable. As a whole, that is a silly and profoundly heretical idea. However, if they sponsor a technical study on an issue such as this and help the Orthodox and the Catholics find common ground, that is quite salutary.
The correct seven days will be covered by makingI believe it is Rabbinical, putting a hedge around the law.
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
it eight days for different time zones.
Let’s say I’m for the hyer-super with the necessary preconditions.
Correct; there are 8 days really because of historical differences in calendars and just plain error — until the advent of “Greenich Mean Time” (and train timetables) — even “unified” calendars weren’t unified.
So they made it longer in case the local-current date was “off.”
IMHO, it’s unnecessary in this day and time of atomic clocks, and I actually agree with the Reform folks that it should be just 7 days.
There is no division on the issue of Easter. All Orthodox Churches celebrate Easter on the same day, according to the Old Calendar.
I didn’t mean to slight you; I pinged Kolokotronis because he has a ping list, as well as the others to whom I addressed that initial post.
I do not maintain my own ping list any more and instead piggiback on others.
Correct; the divisions of calendar exist among the Orthodox but not on the paschalia.
Orthodox ping!
Kolo gave me the list. It’s on my profile and I ping all of them.
Thank you.
Yes it is. The solemnities of the Christian pasch are fulfillment of the Jewish Passover, whose full moon enabled the Israelites' travel out of Egypt by both night and day. Conforming to this, Christians are reminded of the urgency with which we are called to escape death and cross over into life.
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