Russia's Mission in the World: the Perspective of the Russian Orthodox Church (original) (raw)
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A Selected Bibliography of Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology
International Bulletin of Mission Research, 1977
This listing is offered with the hope that it will encourage the Kovach, Michael George. "The Russian Orthodox Church in Rus study of the Eastern Orthodox Church and, in particular, of Or sian America." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh,. thodox missions. A few notes of explanation may be helpful. 1957. Pp. iv, 290. Included are histories of Orthodox mission work, especially in the A history of the Aleutian-Alaskan mission. first section, because no book-length treatment of Orthodox mis Orthodox Church in America. The Orthodox Church in America sion theology has yet appeared and the histories give the theologi Its Mission to America. Syosset, New York: American Or cal framework in which Orthodox missions were undertaken. thodox Church, 1975. Pp. 59. General works on the Orthodox Church and Orthodox theology The working papers and documents preparatory to the Fourth are omitted because references to mission in these works are All-American Council. Shows the self-understanding of the limited to a few pages. The journal Porefthendes was for a little AOC with regard to missionary work and witness. more than a decade the publication of the Inter-Orthodox Mis sionary Center, "Porefthendes," Athens, Greece. Publication of Spiridon, Archimandrite. Mes Missions en Siberie. Translated by the journal has been suspended, but the back numbers demon Pierre Pascal. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1950. Pp. 156. strate the creative thinking done by the Orthodox connected with A critical review of Orthodox missionary work by an Or the Center. Porefthendes was published. in identical Greek and thodox missionary. English editions, the English edition being cited exclusively be Smirnoff, Eugene. A Short Account of the Historical Development low. The writer would welcome critical comments and suggested and Present Position of Russian Orthodox Missions. London: additions to the bibliography. Rivertons, 1903; reprint ed., Willits, Calif.: Eastern Orthodox Books, n.d. Pp. xii, 83. I. Books, pamphlets, and dissertations. Valuable missionary history and record of missionary princi pies.
(Re)Constructing Sacred Statehood: The Orthodox Church and Great Power in Contemporary Russia
The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) enjoys high visibility in contemporary Russia and is among the most trusted institutions in the country. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ROC emerged as a prominent political actor voicing opinions on domestic, international and global issues. Since 2012, when Vladimir Putin began his third presidential term, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kremlin have been cooperating ever more closely. Against this background, the study examines what kind of political order the Russian Church advances, how this is done, and why. Relying on poststructuralist, post-secular and postcolonial theory and employing discourse analysis as the primary method, the study offers a characterisation of the ROC’s political attitude and discerns what made this attitude possible. The analysis shows that from the early 1990s, the current ecclesiastical leadership gradually developed a great-power nationalist outlook. The post-Soviet ROC re-constructed the image of Russia as a Great Orthodox Power, borrowing creatively from the ideological legacies of the past, suspending some of its former narratives and adopting new ones. Thus, driven by a fantasmatic ideal of complete and harmonious unity of Church, State, people, and ‘civilisational space’, the official ROC has been actively involved in the emergence and consolidation of the dominant order in Russia. The latter foregrounds the centrality of the State as an agent of Russia’s historical continuity, civilisational unity and special mission in the world. The ROC plays a simultaneously hegemonic and subaltern role in this order. Insofar as the Church performs the function of a ‘unifying force’ bearing the memory and values of ‘historical Russia’, its position is hegemonic; as the Patriarchate cannot speak about politics in any other language except the state-centric one, its identity is subaltern. Finally, the only role that the ROC’s official discourse assigns to ‘the people’ is to serve, protect and be loyal to the reified ‘Fatherland’.
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2024
Alicja Curanović's 2021 book The Sense of Mission in Russian Foreign Policy is an important contribution to the study of Russian politics and foreign policy, and since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Moscow, its importance has only increased. The ultimate failure of "structural" and rational-choice models to account for Russia's behavior has only reemphasized the importance of approaches that open the "black box" of domestic politics and examine the long-term cultural and identitary patterns which both shape and help legitimize the decision-making in an authoritarian polity relying on pronounced anti-Western discourse and "siege mentality." Keywords identity, missionism, Russia, foreign policy, imperialism Alicja Curanović's 2021 book The Sense of Mission in Russian Foreign Policy is an important contribution to the study of Russian politics and foreign policy. The ultimate failure of "structural" and rational-choice models to account for Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine highlights the need for approaches that open the "black box" of Russian domestic politics and examine the long-term cultural and identitary patterns which both shape and help legitimize the decision-making in an authoritarian polity relying on pronounced anti-Western discourse and "siege mentality." The contribution of the book is not limited by its area studies focus, that is, Russia. On the contrary, out of the five chapters in this monograph the first two ones are dedicated to a more general overview of messianism as a socio-political phenomenon, of its cultural and religious roots, and of the nexus it forms with identities and foreign policies. The chapters do a good job of digesting the previous debate for the reader, drawing fine conceptual lines between such close but analytically distinct notions as missionism, messianism, or exceptionalism. Chapter 1 also surveys the different typologies of messianism based on varying criteria, from secularity to temporality and beyond. The subsequent chapter constructs a similar typology of missions based on their temporal dimension, geographical scope, or their ultimate source, that is, that actor who is said to bestow the mission onto a particular nation. The conceptual matrix that Curanović develops can thus be employed to analyze cases beyond Russia.
Russian Orthodox Church and Russian Foreign Policy
Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy, (London: Routledge, 2018) pp. 217-232., 2018
The recent “conservative turn” in Russian politics has raised to new levels the role of spiritual and moral values in political discourse. The new partnership formed between the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the state, a modernized version of the traditional Byzantine symphonia, has also affected Russian foreign policy. One notable example is the emergence of the “Russian World” as a key concept in Russia's relations with Ukraine and the rest of the CIS. Although the Church plays a subordinate role in this relationship, it is far from being merely the Kremlin’s puppet. By decentering the nation, this investigation seeks to shed light on the Church’s distinct approach to politics, and show where it draws the line on cooperation with civil authorities. Only by viewing the ROC as an autonomous political and eschatological actor, will we be able to appreciate how it influences Russian foreign policy.
Eastern Orthodox Church and the Christian Mission in the Twenty-First Century
Mission Studies, 2015
The Orthodox Church is present today all over the world, due to its mission and to the migration of the members of this church from their motherlands to the Western world. This migration took place so that its people could live in freedom, during the period of totalitarianism, or to have better conditions of life, particularly after the fall of Communism. Its mission has to be seriously taken into account in the context of Christian world mission, in order to have a relation with the living tradition of the church, on the one hand, or to know and have a vision of the doctrine of Christianity in its unity and witness in Christian history, on the other hand. By migration, the Orthodox Church became a factor in universal witness to the world as, for example, the Orthodox Romanian diaspora in the eu or usa.
Mission(s) and Politics: An Orthodox’s Approach
Politics, Society and Culture in Orthodox Theology in a Global Age
continue to exhibit a premodern mentality. This image of Orthodoxy is readily cultivated by conservative circles even within Orthodox Christianity but is almost more pronounced in Protestant Christianity, for example, where Orthodoxy is quickly and easily viewed in this way. This overlooks the fact that the challenges posed to Christianity today as a whole by postmodernity, secularisation, and globalisation, need to be dealt with urgently in Orthodox Christianity as well and are indeed being actively discussed. Drawing attention to this is also one of the intentions of this volume of essays. These challenges include questions such as the compatibility of the Orthodox Church and its theology with modern moral concepts and democratic values or the acceptance of human rights in Orthodoxy. While such questions used to be quite often met with great scepticism in Orthodox churches and were deliberately left ambiguous, things began to change in recent times when it became clear with, among other things, the publication in March 2020 of the document For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. The document was composed by a special commission of Orthodox scholars appointed by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and blessed for publication by the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. This highly significant document, already translated into fifteen languages, addresses-along with its social sensitivity and its concern for inclusion-contemporary social and moral issues, challenges, and other issues in an unusual way for the Orthodox Church. These issues include poverty, racism, human rights, democratic values, reproductive technology, new forms of marital and family life, and the environment.10 They are issues that are ever-present on a 9 Cf. the recent "Declaration" by eminent Orthodox theologians who oppose the "