TABOR - Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Romanian Orthodox Church
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Prolegomena to a history of Orthodoxy
The article proposes a new perspective on Orthodoxy, which starts from the need of removing the confusion between a spiritual content and the loyalty to it through time, on one hand, and the forms of civilization that have been formed because of this spiritual content, on the other hand. Thus, the „orthodoxy” of a civilization does not mean the exact same thing as the „orthodoxy” of the faith. Nevertheless, in the current historiographical debate, the cultural and political aspect of the Orthodoxy prevails over the spiritual and theological aspect. The proposed analysis approaches the subject with the conceptual tools of historical and religious anthropology, trying to separate, from the multitude of events and data, its identity core, stable over two millennia of Christianity, but also to explain the social mechanism that turns faith into a way of organizing society. The study contains a chronology, a thematic inventory and a bibliographic and methodological excursus to identify the intellectual resources of this new discussion on an eternal subject.
 

PETRE GURAN