The Moscow Council:
an orthodox reform 400 years after the Protestant Reformation
Article summary proposed by the Contacts review with LLM assistance
This article offers a Protestant reading of the Moscow Council of 1917-1918, a major event in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. Adopting a comparative and ecumenical approach, André Müller examines the Council's principal decrees — Church-State relations, synodal constitution, the role of the patriarch, parish autonomy, the participation of laypeople and women, and the emergence of an ecumenical committee — by setting them against contemporary developments in German Lutheran Churches. The central argument is that the Council of 1917-1918 constitutes an ecclesiological programme of structural reform comparable, in its scope, to the transformations experienced by Protestant Churches after the First World War. On the theological level, the article highlights significant convergences between the Orthodox notion of sobornost and certain Protestant ecclesiological principles, thereby underscoring the lasting ecumenical value of the conciliar decisions.
This article has not been translated yet — it is available in its French version here.
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