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Quod Ubique The Common Confession of the Universal Church

Layer 5 · 08

The Leuenberg Agreement — Lutheran and Reformed Church Fellowship in Europe

Lutheran, Reformed, and United Churches of Europe

1973

Cross-references: Layer 4 document 07 (Justification) treats the forensic/transformative split that Leuenberg presupposes; the Layer 2 document on the Lord’s Supper names the eucharistic consensus Leuenberg’s signatories inherit; Layer 5 document 01 (JDDJ) is the subsequent bilateral on justification that built upon the methodological pattern Leuenberg had first articulated — the naming of historic condemnations as no longer applicable to present teaching.

1. The Dialogue

The Leuenberg process had a decades-long predecessor in the post-World War II rethinking of Lutheran–Reformed relations across a devastated Europe. The Arnoldshain Theses of 1957 — named for the conference centre in the Taunus mountains where they were produced by Lutheran and Reformed theologians of the German churches — had already proposed that the sixteenth-century mutual condemnations on the eucharist could be theologically examined and, where appropriate, lifted.1 The Arnoldshain work was methodologically the predecessor; the Leuenberg process from 1969 to 1973 brought the question to the level of actual church agreement.

The Leuenberg conversations themselves were convened by the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, the Lutheran World Federation’s European region, and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches’ European section. Four consultations were held between 1969 and 1973, the final at the Leuenberg Castle Conference Centre (Tagungsstätte Leuenberg) near Hölstein in the Canton of Basel-Landschaft, Switzerland.2 The text was agreed at this final consultation on 16 March 1973.

The Agreement’s co-conveners included theologians whose names mark the European ecumenical conversation of the period: Max Geiger (Reformed, Basel), Günther Gassmann (Lutheran, Germany), Harding Meyer (Lutheran, Strasbourg Institute for Ecumenical Research), and Wilhelm Dantine (Lutheran, Vienna). The process was not driven by any single communion’s hierarchy; it was produced by a working theological community that the signatory churches subsequently received at the synodal level.

The immediate signatory trajectory was:

  • Churches that signed the Agreement during 1973–1974: the Lutheran, Reformed, and United churches of the Federal Republic of Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Austria, and several others
  • Subsequent accessions through the 1980s and 1990s extended the signatory body
  • By 2024 the signatory count stood at 97 churches across Europe and — on the basis of the 1994 Joint Declaration — seven Methodist churches of Europe

The signatory churches include, alongside the classical Lutheran and Reformed bodies, the Waldensian Church (Italy — a pre-Reformation tradition that has adopted Reformed theology), the Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren (inheritor of the Hussite and Czech Reformation), and several Moravian Brethren provinces.3

2. What Was Said Together

The Agreement is structured in four substantive sections (totalling some 49 numbered paragraphs) preceded by an introduction:

  • Part I: The Path to Fellowship
  • Part II: The Common Understanding of the Gospel
  • Part III: Accord in Regard to Doctrines of the Reformation Period
  • Part IV: The Declaration of Fellowship

On the common gospel

“We together in the Reformation tradition confess the gospel of God’s free grace in Christ, witnessed to in Scripture, expressed in the creeds of the ancient church, and witnessed by the Reformation confessions” (§§7–12).4

The Agreement locates the shared theological identity of Lutheran and Reformed in the common inheritance of apostolic faith as articulated by the first four ecumenical councils and the Reformation’s confessional witness.

On the sixteenth-century mutual condemnations

The Agreement’s central move is the explicit naming of the historic condemnations and their reception:

“In the light of our shared confession of the gospel, the historic doctrinal condemnations of the Reformation age between Lutheran and Reformed churches no longer apply to the partner’s present doctrinal teaching” (§§18, 23–26, summarising).

The Agreement addresses the specific condemnations in turn:

  • On the Lord’s Supper (§§18–21) — the Lutheran and Reformed traditions agree that “in the Lord’s Supper the risen Lord Jesus Christ gives himself in body and blood given up for all through his word of promise with the bread and wine. He thus grants himself without reserve to all who receive the bread and wine; faith receives the Lord’s Supper for salvation, unfaith for judgement.” The divergent confessional articulations — Lutheran in, with, and under; Reformed true and substantial partaking by the Holy Spirit through faith — are named as legitimate theological elaborations within the shared confession that Christ truly gives himself5

  • On Christology (§§22–24) — the Lutheran and Reformed traditions affirm together the full divinity and full humanity of the one Christ; the divergent confessional articulations on the communication of idioms and on the extra-calvinisticum (the Reformed insistence that the divinity of Christ is “also outside” [etiam extra] the assumed humanity) are treated as legitimate theological elaborations

  • On predestination (§§24–26) — the Lutheran and Reformed traditions affirm together the gracious election of God in Christ; the divergent confessional articulations (Lutheran single predestination within the hidden-and-revealed God; Reformed double predestination or supralapsarian/infralapsarian variants) are treated as legitimate theological traditions that the Agreement does not ask either side to abandon

The Declaration of Fellowship

“On the basis of the consensus which they have reached in their understanding of the gospel, the churches which assent to this Agreement declare that their respective traditional doctrinal condemnations of the Reformation period are henceforth inapplicable to the present doctrinal teaching of the other partners. They thus commit themselves to church fellowship, to mutual pulpit and altar fellowship, and to the mutual recognition of ordained ministries” (§§29–30, 37).

The technical ecumenical term the Agreement uses is church fellowship (Kirchengemeinschaft). It is narrower than “full communion” in the Anglican sense (as used in Porvoo and Called to Common Mission) but sufficient for the specific ecumenical commitments the Agreement names: pulpit sharing (Lutheran pastors preaching from Reformed pulpits and vice versa), altar sharing (mutual eucharistic reception), mutual recognition of ministries, and common witness.

What the Agreement does not claim to establish is corporate organic unity; the signatory churches remain distinct ecclesial bodies with distinct synodal structures, distinct liturgical traditions, and distinct confessional identities.

3. Reception by Tradition Witnesses

From within the Lutheran tradition

The Lutheran World Federation welcomed Leuenberg as a positive development within the European Lutheran–Reformed relationship while noting — through its member churches — that Leuenberg’s specifically European framework did not directly address the LWF’s broader global Lutheran conversations.

Harding Meyer, who co-convened the Leuenberg conversations and continued as Director of the Strasbourg Institute for Ecumenical Research, named Leuenberg in his subsequent work as “the methodological breakthrough” — the first ecclesial document to articulate the naming of historic condemnations as no longer applicable to present teaching, a method that JDDJ (1999) would subsequently extend to the Catholic–Lutheran relationship.6

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) received Leuenberg at its 1988 founding (from the merger of the LCA, ALC, and AELC) and treated it as an instrument of the broader ecumenical family within which ELCA’s own ministry was situated, while recognising that ELCA is not a European church and Leuenberg’s signatory pattern does not directly include it.

From within the Reformed tradition

The World Alliance of Reformed Churches (now the World Communion of Reformed Churches, WCRC, from the 2010 merger with REC) has consistently treated Leuenberg as a model ecumenical document within the Reformed family — the first sustained twentieth-century success in lifting the historic Reformed–Lutheran condemnations.

Lukas Vischer (1926–2008), a Swiss Reformed theologian who served as Director of Faith and Order at the WCC during the Leuenberg process, named Leuenberg in his subsequent work as demonstrating that the Reformed tradition’s historic theological distinctiveness — particularly on the eucharistic presence — could be received by Lutheran partners without requiring Reformed surrender of the extra-calvinisticum.

From within the United traditions

The Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) and its Prussian Union predecessors had structurally existed since 1817 in a partially unified Lutheran–Reformed communion that Leuenberg retroactively validated and theologically articulated. The EKD’s reception of Leuenberg was institutional and immediate.

From within the broader Protestant family

The seven European Methodist Churches — including the Methodist Church in Britain, the Evangelical Methodist Church in Germany, and others — entered church fellowship with the Leuenberg signatories on the basis of the Joint Declaration of Church Fellowship (1994), which extends Leuenberg’s principles to the Methodist tradition without requiring Methodist surrender of its Wesleyan theological distinctiveness.7

The Waldensian Church (Italy), as a pre-Reformation tradition that has historically adopted Reformed theology, is a founding signatory.

The Evangelical Church of the Czech Brethren (Czech Republic) signed in the early years of the Agreement.

From within the confessional Lutheran bodies outside Europe

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) has explicitly declined to receive Leuenberg. The LCMS theological objection:

“The agreement does not resolve the sacramental-theological differences between Lutheran and Reformed on the eucharistic presence. It declares the mutual condemnations no longer applicable to the partner’s present doctrine, but the Lutheran confessional article in question (Augsburg Confession Article X; Formula of Concord Article VII) is not a historical artefact subject to renegotiation; it is a doctrinal confession of the Lutheran Church that binds the Lutheran Church, and in the Missouri Synod’s reading, Leuenberg’s method of lifting the condemnations is a departure from the confessional Lutheran understanding of sacramental union (sacramental unity of two natures in the bread-and-body) that the Reformed tradition does not teach.”8

The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS) hold substantially similar positions — declining to recognise Leuenberg as a Lutheran ecumenical advance.

From within the Roman Catholic tradition

The Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity has engaged Leuenberg as a significant methodological predecessor to the bilateral work the Catholic Church subsequently undertook with Lutheran and Reformed partners. JDDJ (1999), The Church and Justification (Lutheran–Catholic, 1993), and the subsequent Catholic–Reformed conversations have built methodologically upon Leuenberg’s “historic condemnations no longer apply to present teaching” articulation, while the Catholic Church has remained a party to each bilateral rather than a signatory to the multilateral Leuenberg itself.

4. Who Declined and Why

The LCMS, WELS, ELS, and other confessional Lutherans

The confessional Lutheran bodies outside the Leuenberg signatory community — primarily the LCMS, WELS, ELS in North America; the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church (SELK) in Germany; the various East African confessional Lutheran bodies — have not signed Leuenberg. The theological grounds are consistent across these bodies:

  1. The Augsburg Confession Article X (real presence of Christ’s body and blood “truly given with the bread and wine”) is understood as naming a specifically Lutheran doctrine of sacramental union that the Reformed tradition does not teach and that Leuenberg’s differentiated formulation does not require the Reformed tradition to receive
  2. The Formula of Concord Article VII (on the Lord’s Supper) articulates the Lutheran doctrine in terms (in, with, and under; the manducatio oralis; the manducatio impiorum) that the Reformed tradition explicitly rejected at Dort and that Leuenberg’s §§18–21 do not require the Reformed side to affirm
  3. The Formula of Concord’s treatment of the person of Christ (Article VIII) articulates a Lutheran communication of idioms (genus maiestaticum) that the Reformed extra-calvinisticum reads as incompatible, and that Leuenberg treats as a legitimate theological alternative rather than as a matter on which one side must yield

The consequence

The result is a Lutheran-world bifurcation:

  • The European Lutheran churches in Leuenberg are in church fellowship with the Reformed and United churches in their territories
  • The confessional Lutheran churches outside Europe, including the LCMS, WELS, ELS, and SELK, are not in church fellowship with the Reformed and see the European Leuenberg Lutheran churches as having adopted an ecumenical position the confessional Lutheran tradition does not warrant

This bifurcation is not resolved by Leuenberg and does not admit of easy resolution; it reflects a genuine theological difference within global Lutheranism on the question of what the Lutheran confessional writings require of Lutheran ecumenical practice.

The Anabaptist and Free-Church traditions

Leuenberg does not include the Anabaptist, Baptist, Pentecostal, or broader Free-Church traditions. Their absence is methodological — Leuenberg addresses the historic Reformation-era condemnations specifically between the magisterial traditions (Lutheran, Reformed, United) — rather than exclusionary; subsequent ecumenical work (notably the Catholic–Mennonite conversations of the 2000s) addresses the Anabaptist question on different terms.

5. What This Document Did Not Settle

The Lord’s Supper doctrine itself

Leuenberg’s differentiated eucharistic formulation does not resolve the Lutheran–Reformed difference on the mode of Christ’s presence. Lutherans continue to confess sacramental union; Reformed continue to confess spiritual real presence through the Spirit. The Agreement treats both confessions as legitimate articulations of the shared claim that Christ truly gives himself. Whether this is genuine resolution or is an ecumenical agreement to disagree at the level of formulation while agreeing at the level of substance, is the question the confessional Lutheran tradition continues to pose.

The Reformed reading of Christology

The extra-calvinisticum — the Reformed insistence that the divinity of Christ is “also outside” the assumed humanity — is preserved in Leuenberg as a legitimate Reformed formulation. Lutherans who hold the Formula of Concord’s genus maiestaticum read this as theologically incompatible; Leuenberg does not resolve the incompatibility but names it a legitimate diversity.

The ecclesial organ of reception

Leuenberg is received by each signatory church through its own synodal process. Whether the Agreement’s claims about the “Church” in its singular sense (the Church of Jesus Christ, whose unity Leuenberg serves) are ecclesially adequate, is a question subsequent Leuenberg-signatory work (The Church of Jesus Christ, 1994) has attempted to address.

The broader Catholic and Orthodox relationships

Leuenberg establishes church fellowship among the signatory Protestant churches of Europe. It does not address these churches’ relationships with Rome, with the Orthodox, or with the confessional Protestant bodies outside Europe. Those relationships are the concerns of the various bilateral agreements (JDDJ, the Catholic–Reformed conversations, the Orthodox–Lutheran dialogues) that have proceeded on their own terms.

6. The Dialogue’s Present Phase

The Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE)

In 2003 the signatory churches of the Leuenberg Agreement formally reorganised the Leuenberg Church Fellowship into the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe (CPCE; German: Gemeinschaft Evangelischer Kirchen in Europa, GEKE), with its headquarters in Vienna, Austria.9 CPCE continues as the institutional home of the Leuenberg commitment. The CPCE General Assembly meets regularly; specific doctrinal working groups produce ongoing studies on questions including ecclesiology, ministry, ethics, and ecumenical relations.

The CPCE’s subsequent doctrinal studies include:

  • The Church of Jesus Christ (1994) — on ecclesiology within the Leuenberg framework
  • Church and Israel (2001) — on the relationship of the Christian Church to the Jewish people
  • Church Communion (2001) — on the specific nature of the Leuenberg church-fellowship
  • Ministry, Ordination, Episkopé (2012) — on Protestant ministry within the European ecumenical context
  • Freedom, Responsibility, Recognition (2018) — on sexual ethics and marriage

These studies have the status of CPCE working documents rather than of binding ecclesial agreements; each signatory church receives them through its own synodal processes.

The living condition of Leuenberg

The 97 signatory churches continue in church fellowship. The arrangement has proven resilient across major ecclesial developments — the ordination of women (received variously by the signatories across the 1980s–2010s); the 2009–2019 wave of signatory churches’ decisions on same-sex marriage (received variously); the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and its effect on the signatory churches of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states; the continuing questions of secularisation and decline across European Protestant Christianity.

The subsequent bilaterals that Leuenberg’s methodology made possible — most notably JDDJ (1999) — continue to extend the method into new ecclesial territory. Whether Leuenberg’s “church fellowship” model is the appropriate level of ecumenical commitment (as against the “full communion” Porvoo established, or the “corporate reunion” that Rome and the Orthodox seek) remains a question each signatory and prospective signatory answers for itself.

7. For Further Study

Primary text

  • Agreement between Reformation Churches in Europe (the Leuenberg Agreement), Leuenberg Conference Centre, 16 March 1973; the authoritative German text is in the CPCE archive, with English translations published by the WCC and the LWF

Predecessor documents

  • Arnoldshain Theses on the Lord’s Supper (1957)
  • Leuenberg Concord (a preliminary draft of 1971 that was refined in the subsequent consultations)

CPCE doctrinal studies

  • CPCE, The Church of Jesus Christ (1994)
  • CPCE, Church and Israel (2001)
  • CPCE, Church Communion (2001)
  • CPCE, Ministry, Ordination, Episkopé (2012)

Methodological predecessor / successor

  • The Malta Report (1972) — Lutheran–Roman Catholic Study Commission on justification
  • Lehrverurteilungen — kirchentrennend? (The Condemnations of the Reformation Era: Do They Still Divide?), directed by Karl Lehmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg (1986) — the German study that extended Leuenberg’s method to the Lutheran–Catholic relationship
  • Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (Lutheran–Roman Catholic, 1999) — the subsequent bilateral extension of Leuenberg’s method (Layer 5 document 01)

Scholarly treatments

  • Harding Meyer, That All May Be One: Perceptions and Models of Ecumenicity (Eerdmans, 1999) — the standard Meyer treatment
  • Michael Root, “The Leuenberg Agreement and the Issues of Lutheran-Reformed Relationships,” Lutheran Quarterly (1993)
  • Hervé Legrand OP, La place du ministère de Pierre dans l’œcuménisme contemporain (Cerf, 2002) — on Leuenberg’s methodological role within the broader ecumenical conversation
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Locher, Streit unter Gästen: Die Lehre aus der Abendmahlsdebatte der Reformatoren für das Verständnis und die Feier des Abendmahls heute (Zwingli-Verlag, 1972) — the Swiss Reformed treatment adjacent to Leuenberg’s Supper section

Confessional Lutheran critique

  • LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations, A Lutheran Response to the Leuenberg Agreement (CTCR, various editions); and the confessional Lutheran theological journals (Concordia Theological Quarterly, Logia) of the 1970s–1990s

Notes

Footnotes

  1. The Arnoldshain Theses of 1957 are the immediate methodological predecessor of Leuenberg, first articulating the possibility of lifting the sixteenth-century eucharistic condemnations at the ecclesial level. ↩

  2. The four consultations (Leuenberg I–IV) met between 1969 and 1973; the final consultation produced the Agreement on 16 March 1973. ↩

  3. The 97-signatory count and the inclusion of the Waldensians, Czech Brethren, and Methodist churches via the 1994 Joint Declaration are drawn from the current CPCE membership records. ↩

  4. §§ references are to the authoritative text as published by the CPCE and in English translation by the WCC and LWF. ↩

  5. On the differentiated eucharistic formulation at Leuenberg §§18–21, the authoritative German text uses Gegenwart Christi (presence of Christ) in terms that both Lutheran and Reformed readers can affirm as their own. ↩

  6. Harding Meyer’s “methodological breakthrough” characterisation is developed across his That All May Be One and his collected essays. [∗] ↩

  7. The Joint Declaration of Church Fellowship (1994) between the Leuenberg signatory churches and the European Methodist Churches extends Leuenberg’s framework to the Methodist tradition. ↩

  8. The LCMS position is articulated in the LCMS Commission on Theology and Church Relations materials on Lutheran ecumenism; the specific phrasing here is a fair summary. [∗] ↩

  9. The CPCE was formally constituted in 2003 at a General Assembly in Belfast, renaming the Leuenberg Church Fellowship as the Community of Protestant Churches in Europe. ↩