The Inaugural Florovsky Week Evaluation

Director Doctor Erin Doom reports on the Florovsky Week held last month:

I'VE SAID it before and I’ll say it again: “The inaugural Florovsky Week was glorious!” It was a great success, far exceeding my hopes and expectations. But it wasn’t perfect.

As for its success, it was remarkable to see how much in common Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants actually have…if they return to the Fathers. And this is precisely what the plenary speakers did (Hans Boersma – Protestant; Kenneth Howell – Catholic; and Bradley Nassif – Orthodox) as they explored the key question posed for the event: “Justification by Faith Alone?” And they all found the same emphasis of participation in Christ, or deification, as the Orthodox put it. Heeding Florovsky’s call to return to the Fathers as a way to overcome division thus proved to be an effective proposal. And it was amazing to experience it. If you missed it, you don’t want to repeat that mistake next year. You can go ahead and put it down on your calendar: June 4-8, 2019 on “The Patristic View of Church Authority: Bible, Pope or Conciliarity?”

When Doctor Doom discusses the imperfection of the week, he focuses on the thing I noticed too--we never really discussed, nor did anyone cogently defend, Martin Luther's doctrine of "Justification by Faith Alone"--in fact, we hardly mentioned it:

As for its imperfections, the key question that was posed was never actually addressed. So while it was remarkable to see the united understanding of salvation as participation in Christ, that emphasis distracted us from the question of justification. I think there are two ways to look at this failure. On the one hand, it’s really not such a failure. The speakers heeded the admonition to return to the Fathers. And they just didn’t find much on the issue of justification. Instead, they found participation, union, and deification. And I mostly agree with all three speakers who indicated that this pre-Reformation emphasis on participation might be the way to get past the dividing issue of justification. But on the other hand, the question of justification was a real question during the period of reformations. . . .

Please read the rest there. Among the main speakers, Hans Boersma, an Anglican, who was the designated Protestant speaker, focused on what he termed "participation"; there were Protestant speakers in the breakout session too, but none of their abstracts indicated that they discussed or defended Luther's doctrine of Justification by Faith Alone. I wonder why.