Abstract:
An important moment in the history of the Orthodox Church is despite the withdrawal of
local churches like the Bulgarian, Russian, Georgian and Alexandrian ones and the fear of
Serbian Church to take part in it, the Pan-Orthodox Council of Crete remains an important
meeting that influenced the history of Orthodoxy and shifted its conception to the world. The
relevance of some of the topics discussed there explains why it can be found inside the
important theological journals from the entire world chronicles of the event and articles
dedicated to some of the topics investigated. Noticing this fact, we have tried to see the way
the social thinking of the Orthodox Church is reflected in the documents released by the
participants and its encyclical letter. Because of the fact that, until today, only the Russian
Orthodox Church has a document that defines in an articulate way its social thinking and this
one was published in 2002, when many challenges were not present in society, the ideas
presented there are not only important for their relevance and actuality (because there are
approached topics like fundamentalism, terrorism, nuclear weapons, family crisis, persecution
of Christians of migration crisis), but also for the fact that they became the official document
that articulates the landmarks of social thinking of the Eastern Orthodox Church, seen as a
federation of local churches that are in Eucharistic and doctrinaire communion. Therefore, we
have tried to see how the bishops presented to the Pan-Orthodox meeting, the way they
understood and approached these topics and what represented the motivations of their
conclusions.
Description:
Rev. Iuliu-Marius is
participating in the research
project, ‘Political Theology’,
directed by Dr Tanya van Wyk,
Department of Systematic and
Historical Theology, Faculty
of Theology and Religion,
University of Pretoria.
