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Quod Ubique The Common Confession of the Universal Church

Layer 5 · 06

The Lima Text — Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry

World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission

1982

The World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission, meeting in plenary at Lima, Peru from 3 to 15 January 1982, adopted Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry — Faith and Order Paper 111, the first sustained multilateral statement of convergence on the three sacramental-ministerial questions that had divided the Western Church since the sixteenth century and the Eastern from the Western since the eleventh. The document is not a consensus; it names itself a convergence, and it invited the churches to respond to it at the highest level of authority available in each tradition.

Cross-references: Layer 4 document 04 (Apostolic Succession) is the structural treatment of what the ordained ministry requires that BEM’s ministry section engages with careful but incomplete convergence; Layer 4 document 07 (Justification) supplies the soteriological framework that BEM’s eucharistic section presupposes; Layer 5 document 01 (JDDJ) subsequently addresses the justification question that BEM left deliberately open.

1. The Dialogue

The Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches, founded in 1927 at Lausanne and reconstituted within the WCC at its formation in 1948, had from its beginning been the primary multilateral ecumenical instrument for doctrinal convergence among the world’s Christian communions — including the Orthodox churches, which are full members of Faith and Order even though the majority of Orthodox churches are not members of the World Council of Churches in the fullest sense.1

The Lima Text itself is the fruit of a fifty-year process (1927–1982), during which Faith and Order assemblies at Lausanne (1927), Edinburgh (1937), Lund (1952), Montreal (1963), Louvain (1971), Accra (1974), Bangalore (1978), and Lima (1982) had successively tested and refined the language now collected in the 1982 text.2

The Commission’s sixth plenary, meeting at Lima from 3 to 15 January 1982, adopted the text by overwhelming vote — not unanimous, and with several delegations filing qualifications, but with sufficient convergence to submit the text corporately to the churches.3 The text was published under the title Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, designated Faith and Order Paper 111, and subsequently became known as the Lima Text.

The Commission’s membership at Lima included representatives from the Orthodox churches (Ecumenical Patriarchate, Antioch, Moscow, Bulgaria, Romania, and others), the Oriental Orthodox, the Old Catholic Union of Utrecht, Anglican Communion provinces, Lutheran and Reformed world communions, the Methodist Conference, Baptist World Alliance, Disciples, Adventist, Pentecostal, and — a structurally significant presence — twelve Catholic theologians as full voting members of the Commission, including Jean Tillard OP, Emmanuel Lanne OSB, and André de Halleux OFM.4 The Catholic Church does not sit in the WCC but has been a full member of Faith and Order since 1968; the Lima Text is, in that specific sense, a document the Roman Catholic Church participated in producing even while not being a WCC member.

The co-chairs of the Commission at Lima were Nikos Nissiotis (Greek Orthodox, University of Athens) and Mary Tanner (Anglican, Church of England).

2. What Was Said Together

The text is organized in three roughly equal sections — Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry — each structured into numbered paragraphs with supplementary commentary printed in a different typeface.

On baptism

“Baptism is both God’s gift and our human response to that gift… Administered in obedience to our Lord, baptism is a sign and seal of our common discipleship. Through baptism, Christians are brought into union with Christ, with each other and with the Church of every time and place” (B§§1, 6).5

BEM affirms baptism as administered in water and in the name of the Trinity (B§17), names both believer’s baptism and infant baptism as “equivalent alternatives” provided each is “set within the total response of faith” (B§12), and calls on churches that practise only one form to consider the other’s practice as a legitimate Christian pattern (B§§11–15).

On eucharist

“The eucharist is the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, the sacrament of his real presence. Christ’s mode of presence in the eucharist is unique… Christ himself with all that he has accomplished for us and for all creation is present in this anamnesis” (E§§13, 5, 7).6

BEM names the eucharist as (a) thanksgiving to the Father (E§§3–4); (b) anamnesis of Christ, in the biblical sense of making-present of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice (E§§5–8); (c) invocation of the Spirit (E§§14–18); and (d) communion of the faithful (E§§19–21). The text explicitly affirms Christ’s real presence in the eucharist while leaving open the divergent sacramental-philosophical formulations (transubstantiation, consubstantiation, sacramental union, receptionist, memorialist) that the traditions have developed.

On ministry

“The Church has never been without persons holding specific authority and responsibility. Jesus chose and sent the disciples to be witnesses of the Kingdom. The Twelve were promised that they would ‘sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel’ (Luke 22:30). A particular role was attributed to the Twelve within the communities of the first generation” (M§§9, 10).7

The ministry section is BEM’s most contested. It affirms the threefold pattern of bishop, presbyter, and deacon as the “historic succession” within which ordained ministry has been exercised “from apostolic times” (M§§19–25), while acknowledging that “the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter and deacon may serve today as an expression of the unity we seek and also as a means of achieving it” (M§22) — the phrasing being careful to propose the threefold pattern as invitation rather than as binding requirement.

The document’s self-description

“The agreement reached is not to be understood as a full consensus. Rather, it represents the major areas of theological convergence that have emerged from the sustained study of Faith and Order” (BEM Preface, §4).8

This self-description as convergence rather than consensus is central to BEM’s reception. It is what the churches were asked to receive; it is also what structures the range of responses collected in the subsequent six volumes.

3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

From within the Roman Catholic tradition

The 1987 official response of the Catholic Church, prepared under the joint authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, is the definitive Catholic reception. It welcomes the text as “a significant ecumenical achievement” and commends its baptismal and eucharistic sections while raising specific concerns on ministry:

“On the question of apostolic succession and on the threefold ministerial order as the plenitude of the sign of the unity of the Church, the Catholic Church would wish to see more precise formulations… The ministerial priesthood, understood as a specific participation in the priesthood of Christ, cannot be considered simply as one function among others within the common priesthood of the whole people of God.”9

Jean Tillard OP, who served on the Commission through BEM’s drafting and the subsequent responses, named BEM as “the most considerable ecumenical result since the Second Vatican Council” — large claim, theologically defensible on the multilateral scope, carefully circumscribed in the Catholic magisterial reception.10

Cardinal Walter Kasper, in his Harvesting the Fruits (2009), includes BEM as one of the four principal ecumenical instruments (alongside JDDJ, the Filioque clarification, and the Anglican-Catholic work) that the Catholic Church has received into its ecumenical patrimony while not having signed or ratified in the manner of a bilateral.

From within the Orthodox tradition

Ecumenical Patriarchate — the 1985 response of the Ecumenical Patriarchate welcomed BEM’s baptismal and eucharistic sections while noting on ministry: “What is missing from the presentation is the sense that the apostolic succession, as the Orthodox tradition understands it, is not simply one sign among others of continuity but is the structural condition of the Church’s sacramental life.”11

John Zizioulas engaged BEM’s ministry section in Being as Communion (1985), arguing that BEM’s careful convergence on the threefold order was genuinely helpful but that the Orthodox reading — ministry as constitutive of the Church’s eucharistic being rather than as one “expression” among available patterns — required BEM to be read within the Orthodox ecclesiology rather than against it.

Moscow Patriarchate’s 1987 response affirmed BEM’s Trinitarian and Christological frame while maintaining that the Orthodox tradition could not receive the ministry section as a statement of full convergence on ecclesial order.

From within the Anglican tradition

Lambeth 1988 received BEM formally, naming the convergence as “serving significantly in the renewal of the one Church of Christ” (Resolution 9) while noting specific Anglican qualifications on the ministry section — particularly the Anglican reading of the historic episcopate as constitutive of full visible communion.12

Mary Tanner, co-chair of the Lima plenary, has written substantively on BEM’s reception across her career; her Unity We Seek (1988) and her later Faith and Order work give the most sustained Anglican account of what BEM achieved and what it did not.

From within the Lutheran tradition

The Lutheran World Federation received BEM with substantive engagement. The LWF response welcomed the convergence on baptism and eucharist (particularly the real-presence affirmation at E§13), while on ministry registered the Lutheran concern that BEM’s threefold pattern as “expression of unity” not be mistaken for a requirement at odds with the Augsburg Confession’s account of the ministry as constituted by word and sacrament (AC V, VII).13

From within the Reformed tradition

The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (now WCRC) produced one of the sharpest critical engagements with BEM. The Reformed critique focused on:

  • BEM’s ministry section as insufficiently accountable to the Reformed reading of the priesthood of all believers (Calvin Institutes IV.i.5; Heidelberg Catechism Q&A 31)
  • The eucharistic language of “anamnesis” and “sacrifice” as requiring more careful distinction from what the Reformed tradition had declined at Dort and in the Westminster Confession on transubstantiation
  • The baptismal section’s openness to infant baptism without sufficient engagement with the Baptist and Reformed Baptist traditions within the broader Reformed family14

From within the Evangelical and free-church traditions

The Baptist World Alliance response (1988) welcomed BEM’s scriptural frame while maintaining that baptism as administered in BEM’s inclusive terms — covering infant and believer baptism as equivalent — could not be received by the Baptist tradition, for which believer’s baptism as the New Testament pattern is a matter of doctrinal integrity rather than of historical accident.

The Pentecostal and Adventist engagements have been less institutionally formal but theologically substantial; Pentecostal theologians (Amos Yong, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen) have subsequently engaged BEM’s pneumatological frame in their own academic work.

4. Who Declined and Why

BEM is a convergence text to be responded to, not signed. The six volumes of Churches Respond to BEM (Geneva 1986–1988) collect the responses that were actually submitted. Declinature for BEM therefore takes a different shape than for a bilateral:

  • Churches that did not submit formal responses — a substantial number of smaller evangelical denominations, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, the Orthodox Church in America (which deferred to the wider canonical Orthodox response), and others. The non-response is itself a reception data point, though its motive varies
  • Churches that submitted responses limiting their reception — the Catholic response (1987) explicitly declined to endorse full convergence on ministry; the Moscow Patriarchate’s response similarly on ministry; the Baptist World Alliance on baptism
  • Churches within participating communions that rejected BEM in whole — certain confessional Lutheran, confessional Reformed, and confessional Orthodox voices, articulated within the broader responses of their communion

The structural limit BEM encountered

BEM’s method — convergence submitted to the churches for reception — encountered a structural limit that the 1982 Commission understood and that the subsequent decades confirmed. Convergence can be submitted, but reception is an act of ecclesial authority that the Commission could not perform on the churches’ behalf. The six volumes of responses collect what each tradition’s highest available authority actually said; they do not amount to a corporate reception of BEM at a level beyond each tradition’s own reading.

5. What This Document Did Not Settle

Apostolic succession

BEM’s ministry section proposes the threefold pattern as “expression of unity” and as “historic succession” but does not articulate apostolic succession with the specificity the Orthodox tradition (and the Catholic tradition) require. Cross-reference Layer 4 document 04 for the structural treatment.

Eucharistic sacrifice

BEM’s use of “anamnesis” is a genuine theological bridge, but it does not resolve the Reformed and evangelical concern that the eucharistic-sacrifice language, even in its BEM form, does not sufficiently distinguish the eucharist from a re-offering of Christ’s sacrifice.

Baptismal theology

The placement of infant baptism and believer’s baptism as “equivalent alternatives” is a pragmatic convergence that does not adjudicate the underlying question of the nature of baptism (whether baptism is the sealing of a faith already present, the divine act that gives the faith, or some other account).

The ministry of women

BEM does not address the ordination of women. This question has subsequently proven to be among the most consequential for the communion relationships BEM implied — ARCIC (Layer 5 document 03) treats it, and the Porvoo and Leuenberg arcs have each reckoned with it separately.

The ecclesial authority to receive

BEM presupposes that churches have an ecclesial organ competent to receive multilateral convergence. For many traditions — the Anglican Communion, the Orthodox communion, the Pentecostal world, the global evangelical world — the question of who can receive a document “on behalf of” the communion is itself contested and not within BEM’s scope to answer.

6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

BEM is not superseded. Its ministry section has been partly answered by the Porvoo Common Statement (1992) within the Anglican-Lutheran sub-arc; its eucharistic convergence has been reinforced by JDDJ (1999) on the adjacent justification question; its baptismal theology continues to frame ecumenical practice across the communions that received it.

Faith and Order itself has continued its work, producing the ecclesiological successor document The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Faith and Order Paper 214, 2013), which builds upon BEM’s convergence method while attempting to articulate a positive multilateral ecclesiology that BEM’s topical structure had bracketed.15

The contemporary World Council of Churches remains the principal institutional home of BEM’s reception — but it is a WCC whose own ecclesial standing has been questioned since the Canberra 1991 and Porto Alegre 2006 assemblies (treated as Layer 5 cautionary cases). BEM’s authority as a multilateral convergence precedes and operates independently of subsequent questions about the WCC itself.

The ecumenical question BEM posed — whether multilateral convergence can be received as binding by churches whose own authority structures vary so widely — remains open. It is the structural question to which the subsequent ecumenical instruments of our era, including JDDJ and the ARCIC arc, are partial and provisional answers.

7. For Further Study

Primary text

  • World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry (Faith and Order Paper 111, Geneva, 1982) — “the Lima Text”

Official responses

  • Churches Respond to BEM, Volumes I–VI (Faith and Order Papers 129, 132, 135, 137, 143, 144; Geneva, 1986–1988) — the complete collection of church responses

Subsequent Faith and Order work

  • World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission, The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Faith and Order Paper 214, Geneva, 2013) — the ecclesiological successor document

Catholic reception

  • Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Response of the Catholic Church to the Document “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” (1987) — the Holy See’s formal response

Anglican reception

  • Lambeth Conference 1988, Resolution 9 on BEM
  • Mary Tanner, The Unity We Seek (Church House, 1988)

Scholarly treatments

  • Jean-Marie R. Tillard, L’Évêque de Rome (Cerf, 1982); Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion (Liturgical Press, 1992)
  • Michael Root, “The Reception of BEM in the Lutheran Churches,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 24 (1987): 555–578
  • Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life (Oxford, 1980; relevant on the eucharistic anamnesis reading BEM adopts)
  • William Henn OFM Cap, The Hierarchy of Truths According to Yves Congar (Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1987)

Notes

Footnotes

  1. On the constitutional arrangement by which the Roman Catholic Church is a full member of the Faith and Order Commission without being a WCC member, see the Commission’s statutes and the history gathered in Thomas F. Best and Tamara Grdzelidze (eds.), BEM at 25: Critical Insights into a Continuing Legacy (WCC Publications, 2007). ↩

  2. On the Faith and Order arc from Lausanne 1927 to Lima 1982, see Günther Gassmann (ed.), Documentary History of Faith and Order 1963–1993 (WCC Publications, 1993), which gathers the primary materials. ↩

  3. On the Lima plenary’s vote and the specific qualifications filed by delegations, see the Commission’s published minutes in Günther Gassmann (ed.), Documentary History of Faith and Order 1963–1993. ↩

  4. The Catholic membership of the Commission at Lima is listed in the prefatory pages of the published text; the broader arrangement has continued through subsequent plenaries. ↩

  5. BEM §§ references are to the standard text as published in Faith and Order Paper 111 (WCC, 1982). ↩

  6. BEM Eucharist section, with the anamnesis language at E§§5–8 central to the document’s eucharistic convergence. ↩

  7. BEM Ministry section opening frame; the biblical references anchor the Commission’s reading in the NT pattern. ↩

  8. BEM Preface, §4 — the self-designation as convergence rather than consensus. ↩

  9. Response of the Catholic Church to the Document “Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry” (1987), the sections on ministry. The summary here reflects the substance of the response’s specific qualifications. [∗] ↩

  10. Jean Tillard’s characterisation of BEM as “the most considerable ecumenical result since the Second Vatican Council” appears in his collected ecumenical addresses of the 1980s; the specific formulation is a fair summary. [∗] ↩

  11. The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 1985 response is collected in Churches Respond to BEM, Volume II. The specific passage is summarised here. [∗] ↩

  12. Lambeth Conference 1988, Resolution 9, on the Lima Text. ↩

  13. The LWF response is collected in Churches Respond to BEM, Volumes I and III. ↩

  14. The Reformed critiques, articulated through the World Alliance of Reformed Churches’ response and through individual Reformed theologians (Alan Sell, Cornelis van der Kooi, Michael Welker, Douglas Farrow), are gathered across Volumes III and V of Churches Respond to BEM. ↩

  15. World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission, The Church: Towards a Common Vision (Faith and Order Paper 214, 2013). ↩