Is Orthodoxy Finished?

Photo by Steve Harrris on Unsplash

Over at ABC Religion & Ethics, Australian philosopher N.N. Trakakis asks: Is Orthodoxy Finished?

Trakakis points out that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has exposed a rupture in the World Orthodox Church between the Russian Orthodox with Patriarch Kirill and the rest of the Orthodox World represented by the bishop of Constantinople patriarch Bartholomew. To be honest, that point is nothing new, Kirill and Bartholomew have been at logger-heads for years. Precisely why in 2019 Bartholomew granted the Ukrainian Orthodox Church the status of autocephaly (i.e., independence from the Russian Orthodox Church). Yet Kirill’s enthusiastic support for the Russian invasion has been noticeable as it has been affronting to many as we are forced to witness one Orthodox country invade and attack another Orthodox country.

Even this week just gone by, Kirill delivered a sermon at Russia’s Cathedral of the Armed forces where he rehearsed Putin’s propaganda that Ukraine and Russia are one people and that Ukraine is infested with fascists. No surprises that former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has called for the Russian Orthodox Church to be expelled from the World Council of Churches.

Trakakis also observes:

A small minority of Russian clergy has bravely turned against their leader, and much of the Orthodox communion worldwide (with the disgraceful exception of the churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, and Jerusalem) has condemned the invasion and Kirill’s part in it. But what has gone largely unnoticed by Kirill’s critics — whether they be Orthodox or not — is the way in which the Orthodox Church, in both its theological systems and its organisational structure, had enabled the Ukraine war. Kirill’s messianic exceptionalism, his vision of Russkiy mir, of Russia as called to save the world from itself, might well be a distortion of the ancient Orthodox faith as rooted in the biblical and patristic traditions. But Kirill’s way of thinking and his complicity with the propaganda and actions of the Russian state (not only now, but over many years) are not surprising given Orthodoxy’s strained relationship with the modern world.

Trakakis believes that the Orthodox Church as a whole has failed and is therefore finished because it has refused to meet the challenges of Modernity, it has no function other than to provide religious capital to nationalism in former Byzantine countries, and its own structures remain woodenly authoritarian.

I think these are good questions and other Christian denominations and other religions have been asking similar questions of themselves too.

The struggle with Modernity and Postmodernity has been going on since the late seventeenth century. If Churches resist meeting the challenges, try to ignore them, then they are pursuing a kind of Amish ecclesiology and just freeze themselves in time away as a kind of escape from the wider culture. Or else, if Churches embrace the zeitgeist of the age with enthusiasm, they inevitably turn into the Episcopal church with its desperate attempt to baptize everything that is inscribed across the pages of the NYT or appears on the Oprah Network.

On religion and nationalism, well, you don’t need to be in Moscow or Kyiev to see the problem there. The UK and USA have their own forms of Christian nationalism which can be no less insidious.

On Church organization and authority, again, the issues are not limited to the Orthodox Church. The Catholic church in particular has come to understand the limitations and lapses in its own purportedly infallible structures. Lest Evangelicals be tempted to gloat with giddy, their own mega-churches and multi-site churches can be no less authoritarian albeit in the style of religious capitalism and celebrity culture.

I doubt that the Orthodox Church is finished, but global challenges are certainly apparent for the very reasons that Trakakis recounts.

I’m keen to ask my Orthodox readers what do they think of Trakakis’ article?