7 - The Church

Summary

It was by adopting the Christian faith from Byzantium that Russia found a place among the ‘civilized’ nations of the early Middle Ages. And since 988 the history of the Orthodox Church in Russia is inseparable from the history of Russia itself. Until 1917, and throughout an otherwise turbulent history, the Russian Church represented a solid element of continuity and stability. Eastern Orthodoxy has known none of those ultimate crises, such as the Renaissance or the Reformation, which disrupted the history of western Christianity. In Russia modern secularism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was confronted directly, almost without preparatory stages, with a form of religion which had been evolving organically since early Christianity and throughout the Middle Ages: this encounter is still taking place today and only the future will show the ultimate results.

DOCTRINE, LITURGY, SPIRITUALITY, AND MISSIONS

Even if the schism between East and West was not yet officially consummated when Russians accepted the Christian faith, their affiliation with the eastern, Byzantine tradition of Christianity had a decisive effect upon their entire religious destiny. One of the main points of disagreement between the Greek and the Latin Churches concerned the question of authority. While in the West it was widely accepted that the pronouncements of the Bishop of Rome were final in matters of faith, the East stood on the assumption that the highest doctrinal authority was the ecumenical council, and that even such a council – normally convened by the East Roman Emperor and consisting of all the bishops of Christendom – could eventually prove to be a ‘pseudo-council’ and needed, therefore, to be ‘received’ by the consciousness of the whole church in order to be recognized as the truthful expression of divine will.