The witness of the Orthodox Church in the 20th century

This article by Bishop Kallistos Ware constitutes a theological lecture delivered at an Orthodox congress at the end of the twentieth century. The author offers a retrospective and prospective reading of the witness of the Orthodox Church through three structuring terms: martyria, diaspora, and hesychia. He shows that the past century was marked by massive persecution of Orthodox Christians under communist regimes and in Asia Minor, by unprecedented emigration to the West, and by a renewal of the hesychast and philocalic tradition. The theological contribution of the article lies in its synthesis of the major orientations of contemporary Orthodox thought — the primacy of Trinitarian theology, the link between prayer and dogma, the Palamite renaissance — and in the identification of tasks ahead, notably the canonical unity of the diaspora, ecumenical dialogue, and the deepening of theological anthropology.