In 2012, Pantelis Kalaitzidis and Nikolaos Asproulis published an article entitled ‘Greek Religious Nationalism and the Challenges of Evangelization, Forgiveness and Reconciliation.’ In the text, two authoritative Greek theologians reflect on the issue of the Church’s infiltration by one of the classic modern ideologies.
The authors analyze the Church’s experience of self-awareness both in terms of imperial reality and in the context of the emergence of nation-states, where the Church was often instrumentalized for the purposes of preserving ethno-cultural and religious authenticity.
As to Greek theologians, the Church should be reinterpreted as a new spiritual community and a new supra-national, supra-ethnic, supra-class reality that transcends physical and biological forms of kinship, calling everyone to unity in Christ through the Eucharist.
According to patristic texts, the Church should be reinterpreted as a new spiritual community and a new supra-national, supra-ethnic, supra-class reality that transcends physical and biological forms of kinship, calling everyone to unity in Christ through the Eucharist.
To whom do we owe the preservation of religious and ethnic identity by the Greeks? Was it thanks to the efforts of the patriarchs-ethnarchs or the remarkable tolerance of the Turkish sultans? The answers to these questions can be found in the analysis by Fr. Andrii Shymanovych.
A review of this article is available in Ukrainian at:
