A Secularism of the Royal Doors: Toward an Eastern Orthodox Christian Theology of Secularism
A Secularism of the Royal Doors: Toward an Eastern Orthodox Christian Theology of Secularism
The opposites, sacred and secular, are in an ‘original’ or ‘polemical unity’ in Christ and do not have their reality except in Him in a polemical attitude toward one another bearing witness in this way to their common reality and unity in the God-Man. History’s movement consists of divergence and convergence from and toward Him. One cannot, therefore, understand secularism and the secular and secularization apart from the fact that the secular is what is continuously being accepted and becoming accepted by God in Christ. Influenced by the work of Bonhoeffer, Bulgakov, and Richard Kearney and invoking Orthodox liturgy and iconography, Gallaher points to a church that images Christ and the Trinity by manifesting itself in kenosis. He argues for a move from an Orthodox anti-secularism that simply denounces and shakes its fist at the West to a positive Orthodox theology of secularism that tries to see how Orthodoxy might witness boldly to Christ in the modern pluralistic and secular West.
Keywords: anti-secularism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sergii Bulgakov, Richard Kearney, kenosis, modernities, programmatic secularism, Western culture
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