Abstract

In the context of the present ecumenical dialogue as well as the division of Christendom or its trivial acceptance, the author analyses various ways to overcome the lack of the in-depth dialogue among ecumenical communities and churches in the present spiritual situation of the postmodernity and challenges of globalization. The author does it through a new understanding of missionary in the reception of human oikoumene in a sense of associations of civilizations as cultural forms of Christendom. Consequently he is able to intelligibly grasp ecumenism as it is understood in the Gospel – in its direct sense of the New Testament term of hē oikouménē (“the whole inhabited world”).