Page 16 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
Cross, and above all His Resurrection—expanded its horizons
to embrace within itself the “nations,” the non-Jews of that
time.
Thus the door was opened wide for the Greeks to enter the
early Church—initially with the help of the Hellenistic Jews of
Palestine and the Jewish Diaspora, and soon through the bap-
tism into the new faith of a great number of Gentile Greeks.
Within only a few decades, Christians of Greek origin came
to constitute the majority of the Church’s members and as-
sumed its leadership. Everything now seemed to indicate that
the Greek spirit had been called by God to leave an indelible
mark on the historical course of the Church.
From that time onward, Orthodoxy would bear strongly
the characteristics of the Greek spirit—not in order to become
narrowly Greek, but because its roots were deeply planted in
the preaching of the Gospel and the faith of the first ecclesial
communities, according to which “there is neither Greek nor
Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian,
slave or free” (cf. Gal 3:28). Though marked by the Greek spir-
it, Orthodoxy remained, in its very nature, universal—em-
bracing within its bosom every human being, regardless of
race, language, or culture.
Through the influence it exercised upon Hellenism, it
shaped it into something of universal scope, revealing the
Church as a value for all humanity. Thus, the Orthodox
Church never tolerated being confined within the narrow lim-
its of nationalism, but condemned as heresy every form of
ethnophyletism. Nor did it ever understand itself as merely a
Christian denomination or an exotic “East,” but as the “One,
Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.”
This universality the Orthodox Church shaped through the
spirit and teaching of her great Fathers, who struggled in-
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