“Nations and Nationalism: A Challenge to Orthodox Ecclesiology”

A Seminar at Saint-Serge in Paris

The Orthodox Theological Institute of Saint-Serge in Paris is organizing a master’s-level conference during the spring term of the current academic year, with the theme: “Nations and Nationalism: A Challenge to Orthodox Ecclesiology”.

As the notice for the seminar states, religious nationalism is one of the most serious problems facing the Orthodox Church today. Certain specific  and very important aspects of this problem are, the identification of the Church and the nation; the Church and national-cultural identity; the Church and national ideology; the Church and the state and, consequently, the idea and reality of national Churches, which, in the end, demonstrate our inability to think of the Orthodox Church, its mission and witness in the world, separately from the perspective of the nation and each individual national history and narrative.

As a result of this substitution of the ecclesiastical criterion by the national, the Orthodox Church has, for decades now, been confronted by a very profound separation between the various national churches, while being challenged to confront the notion that the Orthodox Church is a “federation of national churches”. As the autocephalous principle  transformed into “autocephalism”, the idea of the self-sufficiency of each national church became linked to the lack of interest in the way in which the unity of the Orthodox Church could be manifested. According to the organizers of the seminar, the realization and manifestation of the unity and catholicity of the Church had become a subsidiary issue for contemporary Orthodoxy.

The seminar will have a historical as well as an ecclesiological perspective and will examine themes such as the changes in the concept of  the “nation” in the Patristic and Byzantine period; the manner in which the Church became a tool of the state in Imperial Russia; the nationalist movements in the Balkans until the Synod in 1872; the derailment of “autocephalism” and the problems of the Orthodox “diaspora”; nation and national churches in multi-cultural societies in the age of globalization; the Church and nations in an eschatological perspective; the place of the nation in Orthodox ecclesiology, and so forth.

Information related to the seminar has already been posted by the Saint Serge’s site: http://www.saint-serge.net/evenements/avenir.html#nationalisme, the French Orthodox site www.orthodoxie.com and reposted by the Russian www.sedmitza.ru.