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388
meddelanden och aktstycken
and meaning of God’s whole activity for salvation, whereby He
has revealed himself to us and has, in spite of our sin, opened to
us in Jesus Christ His paternal bosom. The revelation has no
other meaning that could be put on a level with this: everything else
that we derive from it is only a consequence of this. And when
we combine the Grace of God and the Faith of man in a close
connection, we mean only to determine thereby more fully the nature of
prevenient Grace against all pelagianizing tendencies. Faith means
to us, not something which man has to do that might precede and
be a condition of God’s grace and remission of sins, but faith is only
that ÖQyavov /.rjTiTr/.öv which is created by God’s grace, and whereby
God’s grace is received by man: out of the revelation of God’s love in
Christ Jesus our trust in this love is born and by that it is sustained.
The new moral life is a fruit of this communion with God, which
has been opened to us independently of any works of man. Our
moral life is not the condition of and does not sustain our religious
relationship to God, but it is rather conditioned and sustained
thereby. »Good works» are, to speak with Luther, not the condition
of blessedness, but that blessedness which is prepared for us in
spite of our sin, when we are called to be the children of God,
is the condition without which »good works» cannot be done at
all. That those two principles which we began by discerning in
this letter are fundamentally one, is made still more manifest by
contemplating the opposites, which are denied by them. If the
principle of revelation turns in the first place against any form of
institutionalism and legalism (nomism), the principle of faith or of
grace has primarily in view all sorts of pelagianism. But then
institutionalism, nomism and pelagianism are only different aspects
of that one fundamental conception which is totally denied by us.
Both principles could be most simply combined in this: between
God and the soul, or which is the same to us, between Christ and
the faith, nothing, no third principle, no institution, no law, no
proper works must intervene.
The same conception is contained in its outlines, so far as we
have been able to see, partly in the sixth, partly in the eleventh,
twelfth and thirteenth of the Thirty-nine Articles.
We are convinced that between our branches of the Universal
Church of Christ, notwithstanding the shades of opinion that may
exist, there is an essential unity in that fundamental conception
which we have now briefly indicated, and to which we unswervingly
adhere. In this conviction we accept with fraternal confidence the
outstretched hand. We rejoice at the decision of the Anglican
Bishops, and on our side we approve of the practice that members
of the Anglican Communion, qualified to receive the Sacrament in
their own Church, should be admitted to Holy Communion in our
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