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The Gift of Salvation," published here for the first time, was adopted by a group of Catholic and evangelical theologians, of which I was a part, meeting in New York City on October 7, 1997. Unlike the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification issued earlier this year, this statement is not the result of an officially sponsored dialogue, but the collaborative work of individuals who speak from and to, but not for, our several communities. This statement is being translated into various languages and will be distributed to pastors and church leaders around the world. We invite all Christians to consider what we have been able to say together about the gift of salvation.

We come together by the common recognition that all who truly believe in Jesus as Savior and Lord are indeed, by God's grace, brothers and sisters in Christ. We sense that urgency of our Lord's high priestly prayer for all his disciples—"that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me" (John 17:21). True Christian unity, we believe, is not so much a goal to be achieved as a gift to be received. To this end, we have tried to speak with both clarity and charity, rejoicing in the remarkable convergence we have discovered, while ever mindful of the persistent and serious differences that remain.

We reject the kind of ecumenical euphoria that assumes the way to peace in the church is to downplay doctrine and theology. We are committed to an ecumenism of conviction, not an ecumenism of accommodation. In his encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That All May Be One), Pope John Paul II has reiterated this same theme: "In matters of faith, compromise is in contradiction with God, who is Truth. In the Body of Christ, 'the Way and the Truth and the Life,' who could consider legitimate a reconciliation brought about at the expense of truth?"

"The Gift of Salvation" has been made possible by a major realignment in ecumenical discourse: the coalescence of believing Roman Catholics and faithful evangelicals who both affirm the substance of historic Christian orthodoxy against the ideology of theological pluralism that marks much mainline Protestant thought as well as avant-garde Catholic theology. Thus, for all our differences, Bible-believing evangelicals stand much closer to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger than to Bishop John Spong!

What is the relationship between "The Gift of Salvation" and the original Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) declaration published on March 29, 1994? ECT called for a continuing process of study, discussion, and prayer "for a better understanding of one another's convictions and a more adequate comprehension of the truth of God in Christ." "The Gift of Salvation" emerged from a series of conferences convened by Charles Colson and Richard John Neuhaus in direct response to this statement in ECT. A volume of essays and papers presented at these meetings will be published in the near future.

While the 1994 ECT statement garnered a broad measure of support, it also elicited strong criticism, especially among certain evangelicals. Some of the original drafters of ECT readily admit that certain expressions in that statement could have been written with greater clarity and precision. "The Gift of Salvation" directly addresses two important topics of perceived ambiguity in ECT: the doctrine of justification by faith alone and the biblical mandate for world missions and world evangelization.

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December 8 1997, Vol. 41, No. 14