New Ecclesiologies and New Ecclesio-geographical Challenges: The Emergence of Post-ecclesiological Modernity

Abstract

Lack of unity among Churches prevents them from fully and effectively bearing Christian testimony in public. During the second millennium, the three major Christian traditions – Roman Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox – moved away from the territorial principle of ecclesiology, according to which the Church must be one “in every place.” Since the Crusades, the Roman Catholic Church started to establish Latin Patriarchates as an alternative to the already existing Oriental Local ones and created the ecclesiological problem of co-territoriality. Gradually, Roman Catholic ecclesiology allowed Churches of different ritual traditions to co-exist within a single territory. This anti-ecclesiological, anti-canonical conviventia created a new, post-ecclesial, epoch. During the sixteenth century, Protestantism, emphasizing “confession of the faith” as the foundation of the Church, created the ecclesiological problem of Confessionalism and admitted the co-existence in a single place of churches of different confessions. Orthodoxy did not consider the interruption of communion with the Western Church as a full schism nor did it create anything resembling an alternate “Orthodox Patriarchate of Rome.” Since the nineteenth century, the emigration of Orthodox Christians to regions outside the traditional territory of their respective locally established Churches, together with the growth of Ethno-phyletism, led to the creation of multiple Orthodox dioceses, based exclusively on ethnic-national criteria in full communion with each other. National Orthodox Churches went so far as to claim a kind of extra-territoriality to enable them to minister to compatriots abroad. This chapter conducts a global research on the ecclesio-canonical problem of co-territoriality through the three major Christian Ecclesiologies of the second Christian millennium: (1) the Crusades, (2) the Reform, and (3) Ethno-Phyletism. An original scientific and critical approach reveals that: the first Millennium resolved Christological problems, the second offers inherited unresolved Ecclesiological problems, and in the third Millennium we are invited to examine and to resolve them.