scholarly journals «ПАСТИР ДОБРИЙ»: СУСПІЛЬНИЙ ПРОЕКТ МЕЛЕТІЯ СМОТРИЦЬКОГО

2019 ◽  
pp. 30-39
Author(s):  
Г. Г. Півень
Keyword(s):  
Social Behavior ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Main Role ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Ideology ◽  
The Church ◽  
Ukrainian Society

The article analyzing the treatise by Meletius Smotrytsky's «Threnos» attempts to systematize the views of the author on the role and place of the Orthodox hierarchy in the formation of Ukrainian national ideology and political tradition.The key idea of the «Threnos» is the idea that social and historical conditions of that time in Ukraine require the appearance of a constellation of prophets or shepherds who are understood by author as spiritual mentors of the people. Their task was to enlighten Ukrainian society and raise its national-religious consciousness. The author of the «Threnos» pays considerable attention to the criticism of the hierarchs of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church when he determines their role in society, therefore, he obviously correlates this role with the expected arrival of the named ecclesiastical and moral leaders, and this gives us reason to suppose that the church should nominate the mentioned spiritual shepherd. Orthodox Church is also versed by Smotrytsky as an authoritative social institution obliged to become the basis for the moral improvement of society and its consolidation before the realization of an external threat.  Smotrytsky pays special attention to the condemnation of the actual culprits of the situation that was formed ‑ in fact, the members of the church hierarchy. He distinguishes three main levels of criticism, which are used to judge the degree of decline of the spiritual shepherd - theological, ethical and social. According to Smotrytsky, each of these levels logically follows from the previous one, creating a peculiar hierarchical sequence linking the true shepherd with God, on the one hand, and with the Ukrainian society on the other one. He sees the main cause of evil in forgetting God's covenants.  Smotrytsky believes that the indifference to the testaments of God is connected with the ignorance and incompetence of the ministers of the church, devastating to the whole flock. In other words, only the enlightened mind of the shepherd can make him a real mediator of the will of God - "good shepherd". Meanwhile, the ignorance is the cause of the ethical decline of the hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, and as a result, the moral degradation of all classes of Ukrainian society. According to Smotrytsky, the key to understanding the social behavior of the «evil shepherd» is the principle of the formation of the Orthodox hierarchy, namely the practice of selling church positions, for which the applicant was not obliged to undergo a pre-examination and election procedure, which would exclude a bad candidate. The result is logical: the immorality of shepherds, standing at the basis of their social behavior, leads to the humiliation of the authority of the Orthodox hierarchy, which, in turn, stimulates the collapse of the church structure that should cement Ukrainian society. Constructing an oppositional set of properties that relate to the characteristics of a «good shepherd», Smotrytsky draws his image in terms that repeat the foregoing, but receive a qualitatively different ethical sound. If pastorship was based on the authority of ethical perfection, it would provide the opportunity to cure the social diseases that struck the church, the main of which is the sale of church positions.  However, though necessary, these steps are insufficient to consolidate the entire Ukrainian society. According to Smotrytsky, as a result of the healing of the Orthodox Church, its shepherds will have the moral right to lead the entire Ukrainian «nation». Thus, the ideas of Meletius Smotrytsky became, in fact, the first fixed attempt of Ukrainian intellectuals to offer their option for the further development of Ukrainian society, designed to ensure the continuity of the process of forming a national ideology and political tradition in conditions of explicit tension in interconfessional relations. The main role in this process is given to the updated Orthodox Church and its expected «good shepherds», who are called not only to improve the Church itself but also to consolidate the Orthodox community.  In spite of the expressive motives of Christian providentialism, in the future this concept has found completely secular application, contributing to the ideological justification of the actions of the Orthodox brotherhoods and the Zaporozhian Cossacks, aimed at the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy as new political elite. 

The City, the Countryside and the Social Gospel in Late Victorian Nonconformity

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 415-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Bebbington
Keyword(s):  
Church Attendance ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Adult Population ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The People ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

True Church, National Church, Minority Church: Episcopacy and Authority in the Restored Church of Ireland

2016 ◽  
Vol 85 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Rose Sawyer
Keyword(s):  
First Principles ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
The People ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
The Social ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church

The Church of Ireland in the later seventeenth century faced many challenges. After two decades of war and effective suppression, the church in 1660 had to reestablish itself as the national church of the kingdom of Ireland in the face of opposition from both Catholics and Dissenters, who together made up nearly ninety percent of the island's population. While recent scholarship has illuminated Irish protestantism as a social group during this period, the theology of the established church remains unexamined in its historical context. This article considers the theological arguments used by members of the church hierarchy in sermons and tracts written between 1660 and 1689 as they argued that the Church of Ireland was both a true apostolic church and best suited for the security and salvation of the people of Ireland. Attention to these concerns shows that the social and political realities of being a minority church compelled Irish churchmen to focus on basic arguments for an episcopal national establishment. It suggests that this focus on first principles allowed the church a certain amount of ecclesiological flexibility that helped it survive later turbulence such as the non-jurors controversy of 1689–1690 fairly intact.

scholarly journals Social and Political Consequences of the Pandemic for the Russian Orthodox Church

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-558
Author(s):  
Roman N. Lunkin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Russian Orthodox Church ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cyber Space ◽  
The Church

In the article analyzed the social and political consequences of pandemic of coronavirus for the Russian Orthodox Church in the context of the reaction of different European churches on the quarantine rules and critics towards the church inside Russia. The author used the structural-functional and institutional approaches for the evaluation of the activity of the Russian Orthodox Church, was analyzed the sources of mass-media and the public claims of the clergy. In the article was made a conclusion that Orthodox Church expressed itself during the struggle with coronavirus as national civic institute where could be represented various even polar views. Also the parish activity leads to the formation of the democratic society affiliated with the Church and the role of that phenomenon have to be explored in a future. The coronacrisis makes open the inner potential of the civic activity and different forms of the social service in Russian Church. In the same time pandemic provoked the development of the volunteer activity in the around-church environment and also in the non-church circles among the young people and the generation of 40th age where the idea of the social responsibility for themselves and people around and the significance of the civil rights was one of the popular ideas till 2019. The conditions of the self-isolation also forced the clergy to struggle for their parishioners and once again renovate the role of the church in the society and in the cyber space.

The Social and Political Role of the Orthodox Church in Post-Communist Russia

1992 ◽  
Vol 20 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Paul Valliere
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Political Role ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Social ◽  
Security Network ◽  
Cultural Roles ◽  
The Church

The political role of the Orthodox Church in post-communist Russia is more difficult to assess than its social and cultural roles for several reasons. First, to offer any systematic observations on the matter one must attempt to construe the nature of the church-state relationship in Russia, a notoriously controversial subject. Second, one must make an educated guess concerning the part played by the huge internal security apparatus which only yesterday dominated the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, including religious affairs. The security establishment has been dislodged from its hegemonic role in the Soviet state as a result of the Gorbachev reforms, but there is little question that it continues to exist as a political force in the country. Reading the aims of this network is no easy matter, however, because by definition it operates in relative secrecy and by means of diversionary tactics. One also has to reckon with the possibility that the security network has been disrupted by the changes of recent years, and operates with less coordination than in the past.

Piety and Poisoning in Restoration Plymouth

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 261-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Literary Source ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
True Crime ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
Convicted Felons ◽  
The Church

Can we identify a pre-eminent physical location for the encounter between elite and popular religious mentalities in seventeenth-century England? A once fashionable and almost typological identification of ‘elite’ with the Church, and ‘popular’ with the alehouse, is now qualified or rejected by many historians. But there has been growing scholarly interest in a third, less salubrious, locale: the prison. Here, throughout the century and beyond, convicted felons of usually low social status found themselves the objects of concern and attention from educated ministers, whose declared purpose was to bring them to full and public repentance for their crimes. The transcript of this process is to be found in a particular literary source: the murder pamphlet, at least 350 of which were published in England between 1573 and 1700. The last two decades have witnessed a mini-explosion of murder-pamphlet studies, as historians and literary scholars alike have become aware of the potential of ‘cheap print’ for addressing a range of questions about the culture and politics of early modern England. The social historian James Sharpe has led the way here, in an influential article characterizing penitent declarations from the scaffold in Foucauldian terms, as internalizations of obedience to the state. In a series of studies, Peter Lake has argued that the sensationalist accounts of ‘true crime’ which were the pamphlets’ stock-in-trade also allowed space for the doctrines of providence and predestination, providing Protestant authors with an entry point into the mental world of the people.

scholarly journals Jean-Marc Éla’s Hut and Empty Granary: Rethinking the Social Significance of Theology in Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentine Ugochukwu Iheanacho
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
People Of God ◽  
Pope Francis ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
God's People ◽  
Village Life ◽  
The Church

Jean-Marc Éla, in his book My Faith as an African (1988), articulates a pastoral vision for the church in Africa. According to Éla, the “friends of the gospel” must be conscious of God’s presence “in the hut of a mother whose granary is empty.” This awakening arises from the capacity of theologians “to catch the faintest murmurs of the Spirit,” and to stay within earshot of what is happening in the ecclesial community. The vocation of an African theologian, as a witness of the faith and a travelling companion of God’s people, obliges him/her “to get dirty in the precarious conditions of village life.” Decades later, this thought of Éla echoes in Pope Francis’ pastoral vision: “I would prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its security” (Evangelii Gaudium, 49). The purpose of this article is to espouse the pastoral vision of Éla in light of the liberating mission of African theologians. This mission goes beyond armchair theologising toward engaging the people of God “under the tree.” With the granary understood as a metaphor for famine—and famine itself being the messenger of death—the article will also argue that the “friends of the gospel” are not at liberty to shut their eyes and drift off to sleep with a clear conscience, amidst a declining African social context.

scholarly journals The Social Background of 1 Corinthians 1-4

Perichoresis ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (s2) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Corin Mihăilă
Keyword(s):  
Social Background ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
The People ◽  
Household Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Unique Identity ◽  
Large Household ◽  
The Cross ◽  
The Church

Abstract The social structure of the Corinthian ecclesia is a reasonable cause for the dissensions that had occurred between her members. The people from the higher social strata of the church may have sought to advance their honor by desiring to extend their patronage over those teachers in the church that could help them in that regard. This situation was aided by the fact that the members of the Christian community have failed to allow the cross to redefine the new entity to which they now belonged. Rather, they perceived the Christian ecclesia according to different social models that were available at that time in the society at large: household model, collegia model, political ecclesia, and Jewish synagogue. As a result, the apostle Paul, in the first four chapter of 1 Corinthians, shows how the cross has overturned the social values inherent in these models. He argues that the Christian ecclesia is a new entity, with a unique identity, and distinct network of relations, which should separate those inside the Christian community from those outside.

scholarly journals Orthodox churches in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-141
Author(s):  
Sergei A. Mudrov
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Church ◽  
Ukrainian Society

I discuss the religious life in Ukraine before and after the 2014 «revolution of dignity». The main focus of the article is on the Orthodox сhurches, as the most numerous and influential in Ukraine. I argue that since 2014 the pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) has intensified substantially, with a purpose of creating from this сhurch an image of the «radical other». The pressure was going along several lines: mass-media discussions, actions of authorities and the attempts to make changes in the relevant legislation. At the same time, the Church of Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church were receiving more support. However, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) has kept its status of the most numerous denomination, holding its firm presence in most Ukrainian regions. The attempts to marginalize this сhurch have further divided Ukrainian society, blurring the prospects for reconciliation.

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