ECCLESIOLOGY

ECCLESIOLOGY. The word means the study or rationale of the Church. Never rigorously discussed in its own right in the earlier centuries, the Church emerged a theological subject of first importance only in the 20th c. and as a result of the ecumenical movement (q.v.). Orthodox theologians in this century, following and attempting to articulate the hints present in the New Testament and Church Fathers (q.v.), have sought to define the Church fundamentally as sacrament, i.e., as the presence in this world and communication of the Kingdom of God, the body of the risen Christ animated by the Holy Spirit (q.v.). In particular Russian theologians such as Nikolai Afanasiev, Georges Florovsky, Joh n Meyendorff, and Alexander Schmemann, together with Greeks such as Joh n Zizioulas and the Romanian Dumitru Staniloae (qq.v.), have advanced an ecclesiology based on the Eucharist (q.v.) as central-to the other sacraments (q.v.) and the Church’s historical self-understanding, e.g., the evolution of the three sacred orders (sacramental ministers).

The contribution of these men has been admired by and influenced other Christians, notably Roman Catholics; but they have raised the legitimate question that Eucharistic ecclesiology does not address the political reality of the universal Church, i.e., the Christian Church is a worldwide society whose unity requires an officer charged with the responsibility for the whole. They see this office in the “petrine ministry” exercised by the papacy (q.v.). The question of primacy is perhaps the burning issue facing the Orthodox Church as it approaches the 21st c. The old relations between Church and state (q.v.) that obtained in the Christian East up until the opening of the 20th c., wherein the Church’s unity was in great part the responsibility of the Christian state, now no longer apply. Recent initiatives on the part of the Ecumenical Patriarch (q.v.) allow some hope that contemporary Orthodoxy is moving toward a possible resolution of the question.