Irenicism

He supported Irenicism (the importance of unity) and the democratic and ecumenical element in the Church.

Those who affiliate themselves with irenicism identify the importance of unity in the Christian church, and declare the common bond between all Christians under Christ.

Since his time, irenicism has postulated removing conflicts between different Christian creeds by way of mediation and gradual amalgamation of theological differences.

The major debates between Protestants and Catholics proving inconclusive, and theological issues within Protestantism being divisive, there was also a return to the Irenicism: the search for religious peace.

Bodo Nischan, John Bergius: Irenicism and the Beginnings of Official Religious Toleration in Brandenburg-Prussia, Church History, vol.

False irenicism or false eirenism is an expression used in certain 20th-century documents of the Catholic Church to criticize attempts at ecumenism that would allow Catholic doctrine to be distorted or clouded.

Already the Sandomierz Agreement of 1570, which was an early expression of Protestant irenicism later prominent in Europe and Poland, had a self-defensive character, because of the intensification of Counter-Reformation pressure at that time.

Irenic movements were influential in the 17th century, and irenicism, for example in the form of Gottfried Leibniz's efforts to reunite Catholics and Protestants, is in some ways a forerunner to the more modern ecumenical movements.

Graeme Murdock,The Boundaries of Reformed Irenicism: Hungary and Transylvania in Howard Louthan, Randall Zachman (eds), From Conciliarism to Confessional Church, 1400-1618 (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 2004).

Bury was in fact in the tradition of latitudinarianism and Protestant irenicism, and the early Unitarian Thomas Firmin had a hand in the publication, which suggested that a minimal set of articles of Christian faith should suffice; but he included Arianism as an acceptable position for salvation.