Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 31

After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Orthodox tradition became increasingly fragmented, and individual Orthodox churches began to identify with the individual nations within which they existed. The Orthodox Church of Russia paved the way. In the early 1500s, Russia (and its Russian Orthodox Church) tried to position itself as the new successor to the old Orthodox Byzantine Empire, even going so far as to call Moscow the “third Rome.” (The city of Constantinople had been called the “second Rome” following the fall of the western Roman Empire in the mid‐400s.) But tensions and disputes within the Russian Orthodox Church weakened its claim of preeminence within the Orthodox world. In the year 1700, the Russian Empire eliminated the Orthodox Patriarchate and declared the Orthodox Church to be a branch of the national government under the control of a lay (nonordained) administrator called an oberprokuror. The Russian Orthodox Church effectively became the Russian Orthodox Church, belonging to the Russian people and no one else. The interests of the broader transnational Orthodox community became secondary.

Other new national Orthodox churches began to appear in the 1800s as the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which had controlled most of Eastern Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, began to weaken. As the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire slowly slipped back like a receding glacier toward Turkey, the various peoples of Eastern Europe one by one reasserted their older national and Orthodox religious identities. The result was the creation of a new European map of Orthodoxy that merged nationhood and religious affiliation. This is when, for example, the modern Greek state and the Greek Orthodox Church were created, and the same dynamic was at work in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and elsewhere. The typical pattern was for political independence to come first, followed by a local declaration of ecclesiastical autonomy, and then an affirmation of independence from other Orthodox churches. Thus, for example, Greek political independence was restored in 1832; this was followed by a declaration of Greek Orthodox Church autonomy in 1833, and autocephalous status was granted in 1850. In Romania the process was slightly different, with ecclesiastical independence coming first (1865), national independence next (1877), and finally Romanian Orthodox autocephaly in 1925.

In the twentieth century, the Orthodox nations of Russia and Eastern Europe faced yet one more bitter trial: life under Communist rule. In 1917, Communists took control of Russia and, after World War II, they extended that control to almost all of Eastern Europe. These Communist regimes were atheistic and ideologically opposed to religion. Under Communism, individuals were discouraged from belief in God, many churches were closed, and the religious education of children was often banned. This last restriction was especially harmful for Orthodoxy since the nurture of faith during childhood undergirds the Orthodox process of becoming Christian. Many churches declined in membership and attendance, sometimes drastically, but Orthodoxy managed to survive. Since the fall of Communism in 1990, a revival of Orthodox faith has been underway, most prominently in Russia, but also in most of the other countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. (See Figure 1.5 for an outline of key events in Orthodox history.)

But the issue of nationalism remains, and nationalism in the modern Orthodox experience has sometimes verged on worship of the nation itself. Orthodoxy’s future will be determined largely by how it handles this issue. George Tsetsis, an Orthodox theologian associated with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, says:

Figure 1.5 Key events in Orthodox history.

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If Orthodoxy is to give a convincing concerted and united Orthodox witness in today’s pluralistic world, then the rediscovery of an Orthodox conscience … that goes beyond ethnic and national cleavages is, I believe, an urgent matter. Orthodoxy will be credible only when all local autocephalous and autonomous Orthodox churches are able to speak and act as one single body and not as separate ethnic or national entities.³

This plea to move beyond divisive nationalism is both a harsh judgment and a high ideal. It is a sentiment that comes from deep within the Orthodox community itself, and it reflects a genuine dilemma: how to balance the love of God and all people with a valid love of one’s nation. With nationalism on the rise worldwide, Orthodoxy will have to buck that trend if it is to become more globally unified as one of Christianity’s four contemporary mega‐traditions.