Page 267 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P O F T H E O R T H O D O X C H U R C H W I T H O T H E R C H R I S T I A N S
The Relationship of the Orthodox
Church with Other Christians
Emerging from the crisis of confessionalism, Fr. Georges
Florovsky not only called for a return to the Fathers, but
also opened a path toward a renewed encounter with other
Christian traditions, grounded in the ecclesiology of commu-
nion.
A strong reaction against what was labeled as the “West”
emerged in 19th-century Russia, perhaps as a result of the
monastic revival that followed Paisij Velichkovsky’s return
from Mount Athos and the rise of the starets tradition, which
influenced renowned writers like Dostoevsky and Gogol. This
movement was initiated by the group known as the “Slavo-
philes,” whose most prominent representative was the lay
theologian A. Khomyakov.
The central aim of this school of thought was to highlight
that Roman Catholics and Protestants, despite their apparent
opposition, are in fact both “Western”—that is, participants in
the same Western tradition, posing the same questions. Or-
thodoxy, by contrast, represents an entirely “new world,” the
Eastern world, where not only the answers but also the ques-
tions themselves differ from those of the West.
This approach, which sought to shake Orthodox theology
free from its dependence on the West, could have led to a
creative overcoming of the polarization created by confes-
sional Orthodox theology—namely, the division between a
“Romanizing” Orthodox thought and a “Protestantizing”
one—and thus marked a return to the very sources of the
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