Abstract
This paper describes some motivations and outlines some limits regarding the possibility and necessity of interreligious, interconfessional, and interideological dialogue, in an attempt to improve our understanding of Orthodox Christianity’s role in these important aspects of domestic and foreign politics. This study aims to resolve the divergent opinions that exist in the Orthodox Church regarding the possibility of remaining in this kind of dialogue. The ancient philosophical mode of dialogue and the modern one are analyzed: dialogue as debate and negotiation. The study begins from the analysis of some technical terms describing the social and spiritual dimensions of dialogue; from the perspective of these spiritual and social dimensions, the possibilities, the potential positive results, and the risks of remaining in dialogue with someone of another confession, belief, or ideology are analyzed. It reveals the evolution of the dialogue’s content, its enrichment with the spiritual dimensions of martyria and exomologesis, and the efficient centrality of the Logos in it, as suggested by the etymological definition of dialogue. It also emphasizes the necessity of a deep understanding of all these spiritual dimensions of dialogue for achieving efficient and fruitful communication with representatives of other social or religious groups. This communication can be seen as a guarantee of peace and social stability.
Highlights
This paper describes some motivations and outlines some limits regarding the possibility and necessity of interreligious, interconfessional, and interideological dialogue, in an attempt to improve our understanding of Orthodox Christianity’s role in these important aspects of domestic and foreign politics
The efforts in our modern period to enrich the dialogue between religions (Pătru 2014, p. 701), confessional groups (Heller 2019, pp. 464–72), and groups of political ideologies have been continuous as a guarantee for maintaining and promoting social and political peace and stability
Dialogues of the religious leaders of some countries have been ongoing with those opposing the religious political regimes and rulers of peoples; debates and even dialogues of the representatives of all kinds of feminist, transgender, revolutionary, extremist, etc., ideologies with the official and common representatives of social and political life around the world
Summary
The efforts in our modern period to enrich the dialogue between religions (Pătru 2014, p. 701), confessional groups (Heller 2019, pp. 464–72), and groups of political ideologies have been continuous as a guarantee for maintaining and promoting social and political peace and stability. Certain species of ancient culture and literature were adopted by Christianity as well; these adopted elements constituted the foundation for the later manuals of doctrine in which the formulas comprised in the Creed were expressed; they evoked cataphatical knowledge, “in mirror and in part” (1 Co 13:12) This dialogue presents an encounter between the supernatural and natural knowledge of Christ offered to the people when they were christened and through which they lived in the Church as the imitators of Christ, the incarnate Logos. Church would have remained an agnostic self-isolated and self-excluded denomination due to an autistic faith in a God totally transcendent and ineffable To avoid this perspective and to more precisely understand what dialogue represents, how it is an instrument, and how it is a means of communication, we must contextually analyze some constitutive elements of dialogue, including how it used to be understood in ancient philosophy and in the patristic tradition. I expose a few personal thoughts regarding the need, possibilities, and limits of dialogue
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