During his visit to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople in September 2016, Heinrich Bedford-Strom, Chairman of the Council of German Evangelical Churches, told His All-Holiness that “it would be a special honor” if the patriarch would attend the celebrations for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in Wittenberg and Tübingen this month.
Having accepted the invitation, Patriarch Bartholomew will head to Germany next week, reports Sedmitza.
The patriarch will arrive in Stuttgart on Sunday, May 28, and will be awarded an honorary doctorate from the Evangelical Theology and History Department in Tübingen the next day. He will also be presented with the German translation of his book Encountering the Mystery. Then the patriarch will attend a two-day symposium on Evangelical and Orthodox theology.
According to the organizers of the Reformation celebrations, the invitation to Patriarch Bartholomew is intended to remind about the first contacts between representatives of Orthodoxy and adherents of the Reformation, which took place in 1573 between Martin Crusius and Jakob Andreae and Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremias II.
The Patriarchate of Constantinople entered into a bilateral theological dialogue with the Evangelical Church of Germany in 1969.
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