In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love.
The motto is older than the Moravians and they made it a constitution: the church has deliberately never adopted a detailed confession, holding that a short list of essentials leaves room for a long fellowship. The Ground of the Unity of 1957 is four pages, not four hundred.
The Moravians are the shortest-confession church in Protestantism, and it is deliberate. The Ground of the Unity, adopted by the Unity Synod in 1957 and revised since, sets out what the church holds and explicitly declines to legislate beyond it, on the grounds that the Unitas Fratrum exists to be in fellowship rather than to be correct. This is why Moravians were unusually able ecumenists from the start: they entered full communion with the Episcopal Church in the United States in 2010 and with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in 1999, and they had recognised orders with the Church of England since 1749. It is also why the church has relatively little internal doctrinal machinery: disputes go to synod as questions of practice.
The Unitas Fratrum recognises no other standard of faith and life than the Holy Scripture, and holds that the essential thing is not agreement in doctrinal formulation but the fellowship of those who belong to Christ.
The Ground of the Unity, adopted by the Unity Synod of the Unitas Fratrum, 1957 (rendered)Condensed from the English text of the Moravian Unity's brief doctrinal statement.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.