The 1994 Moscow Conference on Christian Faith and Human Enmity

Abstract

"The same criticisms could be made about some of our western expectations of interchurch relationships in the postcommunist period. I fear that we may have over- looked too readily the fact that 70 years of religious oppression may have done more to entrench rather than to eradicate the nineteenth-century tensions within the Russian Orthodox Church between the Slavophiles and the Westernisers. We should have expected a resurgence of such tensions once the Russian people were free again to discover their cultural past, and therefore refrained from pitching our ecumenical expectations too high. Yet, that being said, it is still deeply distressing to observe how interconfessional criticism and open hostility have seriously marred the life and witness of the Christian Church since the breakup of the Soviet Union. "