Review "Perry T. Hamalis, Valerie A. Karras (eds.), Orthodox Christian Perspectives on War (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 402 pages, ISBN - 978-0-268-10277-7," in Review of Ecumenical Studies, Vol. 10, Issue 2 (August 2018), 290-293. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Orthodox Christian Perspectives on War
2018
Many regions of the world whose histories include war and violent conflict have or once had strong ties to Orthodox Christianity. Yet policy makers, religious leaders, and scholars often neglect Orthodoxy’s resources when they reflect on the challenges of war. Through essays written by prominent Orthodox scholars in the fields of biblical studies, church history, Byzantine studies, theology, patristics, political science, ethics, and biology, Orthodox Christian Perspectives on War presents and examines the Orthodox tradition’s nuanced and unique insights on the meaning and challenges of war with an eye toward their contemporary relevance. This volume is structured in three parts: “Confronting the Present Day Reality,” “Reengaging Orthodoxy’s Tradition,” and “Constructive Directions in Orthodox Theology and Ethics.” Each exemplifies the value of interdisciplinary reflection on “war” and the potential for the Eastern Orthodox tradition to enhance ecumenical and interfaith discussions surrounding war in both domestic and international contexts.
Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences, 2020
The subject of this article is the Orthodox Christianity's approach to war. Christians of other denomination have developed an elaborate theory of war, so-called "Just War Theory" (JWT), which has also been accepted by non-Christians and even secular thinkers regarding the nature and justification of war. A vast literature has been produced in a dire attempt to render perfect the world by insisting on the claim that war is the act of punishment for breaking the law. The result is an epistemological ease from which everything seems evident in advance including who is right and who at fault, who is and who is not favored by God. By removing from war an essential feature-that it is a form of conflict-JWT takes away the concept of reciprocity and introduces an in advance declared inequality which enables removal of uncertainty about the war's outcome. In Orthodox Christianity, the situation is different. With still live debate whether to persevere or abandon original Christian pacifism, for Orthodox Christianity, war is always a combination of cataclysm and temptation and far less Manichean than anything present in JWT. The aim of war is peace; but, however necessary, justice is an insufficient condition for justification. The difference between "justness" and "justification" is preserved through the uncertainty whom God, at war's end, loves more, because both victors and vanquished remain and continue to be in His grace. Losing a war, as such, does not turn the vanquished into criminals, nor does victory give the vanquisher the right of revenge for defending oneself. The latter approach Теория справедливой войны... to war has significant potentialities: preserving the distinction of ius ad bellum and ius in bello, preserving reciprocity, mutual respect and trust, impossibility of incrimination of war per se, the possibility of honorable defeat, etc.
War – Just or Justifiable? A Christian Orthodox Perspective
Studia Oecumenica
Being sent to the world Christianity had to determine its moral assessment of different worldly realities, war and peace among them. While the Western tradition rather early developed a just war doctrine, the East took a different path. War has constantly been perceived as evil though in some circumstances necessary and hence justifiable (but strictly speaking neither “just” nor “good”). Both the Greek Fathers and later Eastern authors and Church figures, like Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, would develop their understanding of warfare as “irrational” and an obstacle on every Christian’s path to theosis. The Russian Orthodox Bishops’ The Basis of the Social Concept is a rare example of a more elaborated theory of the justification of warfare.
Eastern Orthodoxy: Religion, War, and Ethics
Eastern Orthodoxy: Religion, War, and Ethics, 2014
The provenance, historical trajectories, and modern transformations of Eastern Orthodox cultures vis-à-vis the ethics of war display both significant analogies and dissimilarities to the respective Western Christian developments but have received much less in-depth and comprehensive treatment. However, in the last three decades some intense debates have evolved among Eastern Orthodox theologians, Byzantinists, and historians of the modern period centered on the Eastern Orthodox Churches’ and cultures’ traditional and current stances on the legitimization and conduct of just, justifiable, and “holy” warfare, as well as on pacifism and nonresistance to violence. These debates have ranged from the scriptural and patristic substructures of these stances to their more recent reformulations and political instrumentalizations in modern ideologized, “nationalized,” and reformist trends in Eastern Orthodox thought and societies. The study of the Eastern Orthodox perspectives on the morality and justifiability of warfare, the principal stages of their evolution, and figures involved in their conceptualization and elaboration is still hampered by the fact that a good of deal of the relevant late antique, medieval, and early modern material has been neither edited and published nor translated into modern Western European languages and thus remains not sufficiently accessible and little known, not only to the general public but also to the larger scholarly audience While comprising predominantly texts already available in English translations, it is hoped that the present selection of sources will provide an informative and balanced picture of the normative and influential Eastern Orthodox perspectives on the nature and laws of war, as they evolved in diverse religio-historical contexts.
Religions, 11(1), 2, 2020
The article focuses on the reclaiming of militaristic ideas and the emergence of specific "militant piety" and "theology of war" in the Orthodox discourse of post-Soviet Russia. It scrutinizes the increasing prestige of soldiering in the Church and its convergence with the army. This convergence generates particular hybrid forms, in which Church rituals and symbols interact with military ones, leading to a "symbolic reception of war" in Orthodoxy. The authors show that militaristic ideas are getting influence not only in the post-Soviet but also in American Orthodoxy; they consider this parallel as evidence that the process is caused not only by the political context-the revival of neo-imperial ideas in Russia and the increasing role of power structures in public administration-but is conditioned by socio-cultural attitudes inherent in Orthodox tradition, forming a type of militant religiosity called "militant piety". This piety is not a matter of fundamentalism only; it represents the essential layer of religious consciousness in Orthodoxy reflected in modern Church theology, rhetoric, and aesthetics. The authors analyze war rhetoric while applying approaches of Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, R. Scott Appleby, and other theoreticians of the relationship between religion and violence. After the collapse of the ideology of state atheism, the advent of religious liberties in Russia provided the Orthodox Church with a wide range of opportunities to assert and manifest itself in the humanitarian field. However, during the demilitarization in perestroika and post-perestroika years, society has not expected the Church to do with war, earthly battles, and military service, to discuss the consecration of nuclear weapons or to build monuments to the army's glorious weapons. However, the recent Church's activities greatly belied these expectations in quite a systemic way. Well-known religious scholar Karen Armstrong uses the term "military piety" to denote the aggressive religiousness of fundamentalist movements in the second half of the 20th century and their hostile rejection of modernity. She writes that "the emergence within every major religious tradition of a militant piety popularly known as 'fundamentalism' has been one of the most startling developments of the late 20th century" (Armstrong 2001, p. 7). However, such a view suggests that militant piety is a modern anomaly and belongs only to fundamentalism, while "regular" religions are inherently peaceful and constructive (see also Armstrong 2014). We want to dispute this claim and suggest that positive attitudes towards war and militancy, practices and artifacts related to them
The Unholy War. Heresies and Theological Errors in the Russian Orthodox Church's Support for War
Theological Reflections, 2023
It is difficult not to see how the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has taken the wrong side when it openly supported the war against Ukraine. But in so doing, ROC invited in some problematic and even heretical teachings. It embraced the heresy of (ethno-)phyletism, it combined ethnic nationalism with civilizational nationalism into a toxic mix, and it also violated its own social teaching that explicitly states that waging aggressive external war is one of the areas "in which the clergy and canonical church structures cannot support the state or cooperate with it." Moreover, it has promoted and supported a political ideology that downplays the human dignity inherent to every living person. This paper will shortly explore each one of these theological transgressions and will conclude with some warnings that such ideas have a contagious potential that could easily spread to other countries in the region, with emphasis on Romania's case.
Norms of War in Eastern Orthodox Christianity
Norms of War in Eastern Orthodox Christianity , 2009
In: 'World Religions and Norms of War', edited by V. Popovski, G. M. Reichberg and N. Turner, United Nations University Press, 2009, pp. 166-220
War and Peace in the Context of the Theory of «Ambivalence of the Sacred»
Grail of Science
In the conditions of Russian aggression, the question of the interpretation of war and peace in religious doctrines became too topical, already in view of the fact that the conduct of military operations of the Russian Federation against Ukraine is actively supported and sanctified by the Russian Orthodox Church. The manipulative accusations of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine of «non-canonicality» became one of the arguments for waging a «holy war» - the aggressive policy of the Russian Federation in seizing Ukrainian territories for its own benefit. Currently, on both sides of the military conflict there are believers of the same, Orthodox, religion. Once again, it became necessary to investigate the attitude of the Orthodox Churches to the war and the participation of their faithful in it. Examining this problem in historical retrospect, with the help of religious documents, catechisms (confessions of faith) theologians found out that the official doctrines of the Russian Orthodox...