The Project of an Ecumenical Council as a Space of Renovationist Utopia (Based on Materials from the “Bulletin of the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Russian Church”)

This article analyzes the strategic vision of the Renovationist movement in the USSR during the 1920s, which sought a radical transformation of global Orthodoxy (and subsequently of world Christianity) through the mechanism of regularly convened and democratically elected “ecumenical councils”. Initially, the Renovationists planned to rely on Greek reformers when convening such a council. Later, however, they envisaged using the state resources of the Soviet Union to integrate this project into the broader process of world revolution through a comprehensive revision of Christianity. In this sense, the initiative functioned as a messianic project aimed at sacralizing revolutionary modernity. The institution of the “ecumenical council” was conceived as the final stage in the construction of a system of ecclesiastical electoral democracy. The project was to begin with the ecumenical legitimization of the decisions of the so-called Second All-Russian Local Council of 1923, which introduced a married episcopate and permitted second marriages for clergy. However, the Renovationists’ ambitions extended much further. Their proposals included strategies for the permanent transformation of Church Tradition, a complete restructuring of canon law, the creation of a new “official confession of faith”, and, ultimately, the reduction of dogma to the minimalist formula “Jesus Christ is the Son of God”. Although the planned “ecumenical council” would not have been a genuine Ecumenical Council in the canonical sense, unanimous support from the participating Local Churches could have made it a powerful instrument for dismantling global Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the uncompromising stance of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church (who, even after the death of Patriarch Tikhon, categorically refused to consider union with the so-called Renovationist “Russian Orthodox Church”), prevented the movement from presenting itself as the legitimate fullness of the Russian Church before the wider Christian world. In this way, the act of moral courage of these figures became a means of preserving Orthodoxy itself.

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