Hello Matthew,
It is widely perceived in the West that Eastern Orthodox Churches are highly nationalistic. Is this perception a misconception? How can you demonstrate this to be the case?
If the Eastern Orthodox Churches are nationalistic, how can this fit comfortably with Christ’s teachings?
I am not going to challenge the fact that eastern churches are nationalistic. The church recognizes that this can be a problem, you can read
here for more information.
It is not actually an exclusively Orthodox phenomenon, but that doesn’t make it ok.
On the other hand, the Apostles went out to preach the Good News to all nations, they were not consciously attempting to destroy the concept of nations, just convert them all. We are supposed to see Christ in everyone, and we are not to hide the Light of Truth under a basket.
So it’s ok to preach and teach aliens, and reach them by any means. The problem comes from people identifying their religion closely with their nationality to the point that they become unwelcoming to others. That is exactly the opposite of what Christians are supposed to do.
Essentally, if an Orthodox person moves from one country to another that person will attend the local Orthodox church. The Romanian Orthodox church does not build parishes in Russia or Poland (the Russian and Polish churches are there), and the Polish Orthodox church does not build parishes in Romania or Serbia. These people join local parishes under the hierarchy of the local church, because thay are Orthodox and that is now their home church.
The early church was composed of local synods in communion with one another. It wasn’t an ‘imperial’ church, it was a collection of locally run churches in and out of the empire. Some of these churches were outside the empire from their very beginnings, like the Armenian church and the church in India. Others were within the empire, and it seems that the Fathers decided to use political bounds to delineate the extent of each church’s reach, presumably to avoid overlappping and competing with one another.
Within the empire these provincial bounderies often corresponded to national groupings, it was a reality everyone recognized and understood.
people.ucalgary.ca/~vandersp/Courses/maps/fullmap1.jpg
North America is a special case.
My home parish is a cathedral originally founded as a mission of the Russian church. From it’s inception it has always had a mixed congregation (Russians, Serbs, Ukrainians, Romanians etc.), but that mix has changed over the decades. It now includes Irish, Germans, Poles and African-Americans as well as some descendants of the original population.
Most north Americans see numerous national or ethnic varieties of Orthodox, and wonder about that. It wasn’t that way from the beginning. The Russian church was established early, and other Orthodox migrating tended to join the local (Russian) church if one was available. Of course this made some immigrants uncomfortable and probably would have inhibited their spiritual growth but when enough of a certain nationality would live in a city, they would sometimes choose to erect a new parish for themselves, under the Russian bishops. Priests would come on invitation from those countries to serve these parishes. To address this need the Russian church began to provide bishops for these immigrant groups, I think it first provided an Arabic/Syrian bishop for that population.
Then the Bolshevik revolution occured. The Russian church was suppressed and people were afraid of the possibility that atheists were taking control. In fact there was a large emigre/refugee population of Russians fleeing the communists who refused to have anything to do with the Moscow church. So in America there was a schism, with two Russian hierarchies (the one originally in place, and the refugee bishops who fled but didn’t have a diocese waiting for them). In addition to this some other Orthodox synods sent bishops to care for the flocks from their own countries. Those must have been sad times for the church
This uncanonical situation was to hopefully have been temporary, until the crises passed. Then after WWII the communists overran eastern Europe as well and there were new divisions between those who remained loyal to their home churches and those who would not for fear of church collaboration and subversion. It was quite a mess.
Today the schisms are almost all gone (the Serbs have reunited and the Russians have reunited, for example), but the Orthodox still have some parallel overlapping hierarchies. There has been a lot of progress in knitting these together and eventually this uncanonical situation should come to an end.
But there will probably always be immigrant communities which will be served in their own languages, it’s rather unavoidable if people keep migrating in sufficient numbers.
