On Conciliarity, War, and the Christian Response

Part I. Analytical Essay “Why Anti-War Christianity Has Not Become aConciliar Force”

Foreword

We are publishing this text as an attempt at a Christian reflection on war,

ecclesial fragmentation, and the possibilities of a common response to what is taking

place. For us, it was important not to confine ourselves to mere reaction or to a

private statement, but to carry the line of thought through to its end: first to name the

problem, then to give it both human and Christian expression, and finally to try to

outline possible forms of action.

This publication consists of three parts. The first is analytical: it seeks to

understand why anti-war Christianity, despite its many honest voices and initiatives,

has not yet become a conciliar force. The second is a manifesto: a word that is at once

personal and addressed to many, speaking of the pain of fragmentation, the

necessity of unity, and the vocation of the Church to be not only a place of

compassion, but also a place of common witness. The third is a programme of action:

an attempt to translate diagnosis and appeal into the language of practical steps—

both intra-Orthodox and pan-Christian.

This text does not claim finality or exhaustive completeness. It is, rather, an

invitation: to conversation, to disagreement, to clarification, to the continuation of

thought. But above all, it is an invitation to take the question itself seriously. It seems

important to us to speak of war not only in the categories of political analysis or

humanitarian response, but also in the categories of ecclesial responsibility,

conciliarity, repentance, and peace.

This text has also been prepared in an English version for those who may wish to

pass it on further.

We hope that this publication will become an occasion for reflection and

perhaps also for new forms of Christian cooperation where fragmentation and

dispersion have thus far prevailed.

Publication prepared by:

the Peace Unto All project / Friede Allen e.V.

1. Introduction: Unity as a Christian Norm

In the Paschal season, Christ’s prayer for unity resounds with particular urgency:

“that they all may be one.” What is at stake here is not only outward cohesion, nor

merely institutional affiliation, but a living unity in God and in His love. For this reason,

the unity of the Church is not a decorative ideal, but a matter of her very essence and

of the credibility of her witness to the world.

2. The Primary Symptom

Four years of war have laid bare one of the most painful problems of

contemporary Christianity: the anti-war wing of Christianity remains deeply

fragmented.

Small initiative groups, individual priests, laypeople, and charismatic leaders act

in their own local spheres: some minister to banned clergy, some help conscientious

objectors, some gather signatures for petitions. There are projects such as Peace to

All, Christians Against War, Ark, and Declaration, as well as individual Telegram

channels and blogs of anti-war Christians — from Orthodoxy and Zombies to the public statements of Fr. Ioann Burdin, Fr. Alexei Uminsky, Fr. Andrei Kuraev, and others. Yet none of this has coalesced into a single recognizable form of common action — into a conciliar force capable of offering a real alternative to the militarized wing of the church world, whose loudest example today remains the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

3. An Analogy with Anti-War Media

A similar situation can be seen in oppositional anti-war media. The television

channel Dozhd, Breakfast Show, Novaya Gazeta, Zhivoy Gvozd, Radio Liberty, Meduza, and dozens of other outlets unanimously condemn the war; yet each remains within its own principles, under its own banner, at times even publicly criticizing its

colleagues. Journalism, of course, is inevitably mixed with marketing and its logic of

“target audience” and “unique selling proposition”: media outlets must secure their

own survival. As a result, instead of a common and recognizable voice in defense of

peace, there exists a multitude of separate voices, united in rejecting the war but not

forming a single public witness. More than that, even this space is often internally

divided, as people who hold the same anti-war position criticize one another for

insufficient boldness or insufficient sharpness of expression. As the poet, musician,

anti-war Christian, and co-founder of the Peace to All foundation Pavel Fakhrtdinov

put it in one of his songs:

…You are helping in the wrong way,

You sympathize with the wrong people,

You are reading the wrong channel,

Your themes are all the wrong ones…

Like a school composition,

You write as if taking dictation.

And thus you sink

Into diktat…

What matters here is the underlying logic itself: diktat becomes possible not

only in a militarized environment, but also in an anti-war one—every time shared

searching gives way to reproach and prescription, to telling others “how one ought”

to speak and act. The political dimension of anti-war resistance requires a separate

discussion and lies beyond the scope of this essay. Let me note only that civic and

political associations, in some cases, demonstrate a higher degree of coordination

than the Christian milieu.

4. Why This Has Become the Norm

Within the Christian world — vast, diverse, and called to live by the principle “in

essentials, unity; in secondary matters, diversity; in all things, love”—a coherent space

of common action has, regrettably, never fully taken shape. In a time of war, the

emphasis of Christian witness should inevitably have shifted: without abolishing

dogma or canons, ecclesial consciousness should have placed at the center the

protection of human life, peace, and dignity. To a great extent, the Christian world has

pushed to the periphery Christ’s command to be “salt”—a force that not only gives

flavor to life, but preserves the world from corruption, disintegration, and final moral

disorientation.

Instead of a more integral and institutionally articulated response, what we see

above all are small-scale forms of practical support and pastoral care for the

repressed, the dispossessed, and those suffering locally. This, of course, does not

mean that such forms are unnecessary; but they are not enough. If only because an

enormous number of people often remain outside the field of vision—either because

it is physically impossible to help them, as in the case of those who remain in the

Russian Federation, or because what they require is the search for unique forms of

assistance. Sometimes a person needs direct and immediate help; at other times,

what is needed is the possibility of building a long-term way of surviving and acting.

There is not always enough time, strength, or—let us be honest—human capacity for

such searching.

The fragmentation of anti-war Christianity today no longer appears to be an

accidental weakness or a temporary confusion. It has become a stable mode of

existence to which many have inwardly adapted. That is where its danger lies: once it

becomes habitual, it ceases to be perceived as a problem and begins to seem like

the natural order of things.

5. Why the Pro-War Side Is Stronger

The realities of war, by contrast, reveal a high degree of consolidation on the

other side. Militarized ecclesial consciousness, integrated into state rhetoric, has

proved capable of offering a clear—however tragically distorted—yet coherent image.

Within this environment, there have emerged its own language, symbolism, rituals,

institutional support, and notion of a “higher” mission, all of which rather effectively

serve the idea of war as an inevitable and necessary instrument for resisting cosmic

evil. This image is inwardly false, but it is whole—and therefore it works.

In response to this, anti-war Christianity offers truth and peace, but does not

offer a common form of shared existence. And so truth easily goes unheard, because

four years of war have shown that for very many people it is more urgent to attach

themselves to an authoritative majority that, in a moment of danger, will offer them a

sense of protection from censure, arrest, and persecution.

The phrase from the Book of Isaiah (chapter 28)—“we have made a covenant

with death… and with falsehood we have taken shelter”—strikingly describes a

condition in which falsehood becomes a collective refuge. War is justified, sacralized,

clothed in the language of protection and spiritual duty. The answer to this could

have been not only the prophetic voice of the “other” Church, but also her gathered,

recognizable form—that alternative majority in which a searching person would no

longer feel alone. For the sake of condescension to human weakness—or, in ecclesial

language, for the sake of oikonomia—the consolidation of all anti-war Christians is

necessary.

6. Where the Weakness of Anti-War Christianity Lies

The chief weakness of anti-war Christianity lies not in a lack of truth, but in a lack

of form: it knows how to bear witness, accompany, and denounce, but it has not yet

developed durable forms of common life capable of making that witness lasting,

recognizable, and conciliar.

Today, anti-war Christianity has to a significant degree remained on the level of

exposure and reactive response to pro-war rhetoric, but has not moved on to

building another, firmer foundation for peace. It exposes falsehood and opposes the

sacralization of violence, yet it has not created sufficiently stable forms of church life

and interaction in which truth might not only be proclaimed, but concretely lived. For

this reason, even a just word often proves insufficient: it sounds around a pro-war idea

that has not changed its vector for four years, and it gradually loses force unless

accompanied by the creation of new forms of common action and a positive agenda.

Over these years, Christians have still not managed to consolidate and present

to the world a compelling alternative: a theology of peace that would be not merely

protest, but a positive conciliar response and a foundation for a future reconciliatory

dialogue between the peoples now at war.

For universal Christianity, the present situation is a challenge: will it be able to

overcome its differences for the sake of preserving the world created by God? It is

also a challenge to the ecumenical movement itself, if “oikoumene” is understood as

the inhabited world. True unity does not mean the erasure of differences, but it does

presuppose agreement that common witness is more important than private symbolic

leadership, success, individual authority, and other self-interested concerns. It means

a willingness to limit one’s own presence for the sake of strengthening the common

voice — following the apostolic call to imitate Christ, who revealed kenosis: voluntary

self-emptying for the sake of the other.

Today, evangelical anthropology is hardly articulated in anti-war Christianity as a

systemic alternative. Christ does not merely teach about peace: He restores to the

human person the original image, destroying the very logic of enmity and division.

There are individual texts, individual sermons, individual testimonies, but no integral

vision has yet emerged of how, in the life of the Church, a person is formed who is

capable of living outside the logic of violence. Nor has there emerged an institutional

form that would sustain this process as the conciliar work of the Church.

As a result, anti-war Christianity finds itself in a position where it is capable of

consoling and accompanying, but far less capable of forming a common space of

shared action. It remains a meaningful space of solidarity and help, but has not yet

taken shape as an environment for the formation of common practice and common

action. That is precisely why the key task today is the transition from scattered

initiatives to a more coherent form of coordination, self-understanding, and common

witness.

7. Personal Transformation and Conciliarity

So that this diagnosis may not sound like a call to purely external consolidation,

two fundamental questions must be clarified.

The first concerns the relation between the personal and the collective within

the life of the Church — a relation that may be expressed, in particular, by the principle

of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands around you will

be saved.” What is primary and more fruitful: the transfigured life of an individual

person, with its philosophy of small deeds, or conciliarity —t hat is, the gathering

around Christ of such persons?

The second concerns how any active influence of the Church (and of religion

more broadly) upon secular society is possible in an age of postmodernity, post-truth,

post-irony, and the like, where not only evangelical values but any universal moral

maxims are called into question.

Today, in an age when psychology enjoys immense popularity, the phrase

“Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved” is often read in

a psychotherapeutic key, with the emphasis falling on its first half, and sounds like an

objection to every form of consolidation—a call to inner stability, the restoration of

boundaries, and the reduction of the destructiveness of one’s own condition.

Certainly, the doors of the Kingdom of God close and open from within the concrete

human person: everything begins with inner transformation and the search for the

inner keys to those doors. But does it end there? Did St. Seraphim—and with him the

whole ascetical school of Christianity—really mean that it is enough merely to learn

how to cope with personal terror, existential emptiness, and inner fragmentation?

There is an important truth in that reading, but it does not exhaust the meaning

of St. Seraphim’s words. A person who is inwardly collapsing is incapable either of

action or of responsibility. In that sense, the psychotherapeutic dimension is indeed

necessary. But Seraphim of Sarov is speaking of something else. His “salvation” is not

adaptation to reality, but its radical rethinking. It is not simply the restoration of inner

equilibrium, but such a transfiguration of the person that it changes one’s relation to

the world and thereby acts upon the world around him. And this is precisely why his

formula has a second half: around such a person “thousands are saved.”

Here a decisive distinction emerges. In the therapeutic logic, inner change is

directed toward the reduction of suffering. In the ascetical logic, inner change is

directed toward the transfiguration of reality, which inevitably passes beyond the

person himself and begins to act in the world. Thus, the formula “save yourself” was

never individualistic in the sense of turning a person into a self-enclosed system. A

person’s inner state affects the space around him. He becomes either a source of

destruction or a source of creation.

Metaphorically speaking, the human being can be imagined either as a creature

in whom inner and outer dimensions are rigidly divided, or as a creature in whom one

constantly passes into the other. Christian experience—especially in light of the

Incarnation—testifies rather to the latter: the inward is not isolated from the outward,

and the bodily and the historical are not excluded from the space of salvation. That is

why “saving oneself,” as a certain way of seeing oneself, other people, and the world

in the light of Transfiguration, has never been a private matter. It took place within a

concrete tradition, within a community, within ecclesial experience, communicating to

the person a new truth about the human person.

The solitude of the ascetic was never a total isolation: even when the ascetic

desired that, God often transformed it into a form of service, making the labor evident

to others. Individual transformation and conciliarity do not stand in opposition to one

another. They exist in a tense yet necessary unity. Without inner work, any union turns

into ideology or into an activism devoid of depth. But without community, inner

transformation risks closing in upon itself and, in the language of asceticism,

becoming prelest—spiritual delusion.

The formula “save yourself” works in its fullness only when an environment is

formed in which the “thousands” recognize themselves, one another, and gradually

gather into common action. If such an environment is absent, dispersion occurs. Each

person becomes an island. He may be luminous, stable, and deeply worked through,

but he remains isolated and separated.

8. The Church in the Secular World

The question of the conciliar force of anti-war Christianity inevitably leads to

another problem: how the Church can act at all within secular society. In a secular

world, where the state is separated from the Church and where, for the majority of

people, evangelical principles and ecclesial postulates are not significant values, the

Church cannot act by the old mechanisms of coercion, manipulation, or appeal to

religious duty. That path has historically led either to clericalism or to marginalization.

In secular society, the primary resource of ecclesial influence becomes moral and

cultural legitimacy—the trust the Church acquires not by declarations, but by deeds

intelligible to the world, by arguments, and by forms of life. In other words, what is

required is such an ordering of inner life and outward action as will be perceived as

morally persuasive, practically meaningful, and worthy of public trust.

In a secular political system, at least three factors are especially significant:

public opinion, international reputation, and pragmatic calculation. It is precisely at

these points that ecclesial witness can become socially tangible.

The Church’s task in this context is not to please the state or satisfy it on all these

counts, once again serving its will to power. The task is to appear as a force of help

alternative to the state, to show people that the state is not the only thing capable of

responding to their needs and concerns. Many in contemporary Russia remain silent

precisely because they experience their total dispensability: the state “loves” and

“tolerates” you only so long as you are loyal and support its rhetoric; otherwise, a

person is left alone with the question of his own survival. In this context, the

Ecumenical Church could appear as a space of protection, recognition, and practical

support for those who are cast out by the state and by the official ecclesial system.

9. The Historical Resources of Christian Peacemaking

Yet any discussion of the Church’s conciliar peacemaking role cannot remain

merely normative. Christian tradition already possesses its own history—partial,

contradictory, yet real—of resistance to violence and the limitation of war.

From its earliest centuries, the Christian Church lived in an ethical tension

between the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” and the reality of a world in which

war was commonplace. Yet history shows that it was precisely in moments of greatest

danger that the Church found the strength actively to resist violence—not only in

word, but through concrete mechanisms for limiting war, protecting the innocent, and

forming alternative practices of peace. This resistance developed differently in the

three major confessions, but it always rested upon a common evangelical foundation:

love for the human person as the highest norm.

Thus, the early Church (1st–4th centuries), before Constantine, largely rejected

participation in warfare and killing. Tertullian, in the Apology and On Idolatry,

declared plainly: “We do not carry arms and do not raise the banner of revolt…

Christ disarmed Peter, and in so doing disarmed every soldier.” Origen, in Against

Celsus, defended Christians with the words: “We no longer take up sword against

nation, nor do we learn the art of war… we have become sons of peace through

Jesus.” Hippolytus of Rome, in the Apostolic Tradition, canon 16, prescribed: “If a

believer seeks to become a soldier, let him be rejected.” Yet even after

Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in 313, when Christianity acquired legal status and

rapidly entered into alliance with imperial power, we still find important witnesses to

the condemnation of war. Thus St. Basil the Great, in his 13th canon, preserved this

logic: “He who has killed in war, even if by necessity, must abstain from

communion for three years”—killing remains a sin requiring purification even in

defensive war.

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church created institutional mechanisms for

limiting war. After the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, when Europe was plunged

into the chaos of feudal warfare, the Catholic Church established effective restraints

on violence. In 989, at the Council of Charroux, the Pax Dei (“Peace of God”) was

proclaimed: under threat of excommunication, it was forbidden to attack clergy,

monks, pilgrims, women, children, peasants during sowing and harvest, as well as

churches, monasteries, mills, and livestock. In 1027, at Toulouges, the Treuga Dei

(“Truce of God”) emerged: military action was forbidden from Wednesday evening

until Monday morning, as well as during Advent, Great Lent, and the Christmas and

Paschal seasons—up to ninety days a year. The Lateran Councils of 1123, 1139, and

1179 made these norms part of universal canon law.

In the twentieth century, the Catholic Church made a turn toward nuclear

pacifism. Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963) declared that in the nuclear age

war as an instrument of policy had lost its meaning. The Second Vatican Council, in

the constitution Gaudium et Spes (1965), took a decisive step: “Any act of war aimed

indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is

a crime against God and man.” The Council openly praised “those who renounce the

use of arms” and recognized the right to conscientious objection. After Vatican II, Pax

Christi became a global movement for nuclear disarmament. Popes John Paul II,

Benedict XVI, and Francis called nuclear weapons a “crime against humanity” and

demanded their complete prohibition. In 2017, the Catholic Church officially

supported the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Mainline Protestant confessions as a whole accepted the theory of just war. Yet

within the Radical Reformation an organized pacifist wing was born. Anabaptists,

Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren became the “historic peace churches.” Their

principle was absolute nonresistance: not only refusal of weapons, but refusal to

participate in any system that sustains violence. During the First and Second World

Wars, it was precisely Mennonites, Quakers, and Brethren who created alternative

service—civilian labor in place of military service. Quakers, through the American

Friends Service Committee, and Mennonites, through the Mennonite Central

Committee, organized aid to victims of war, including during the Vietnam War and in

contemporary conflicts. The modern institution of alternative civilian service grew in

large measure out of the practices of Christian pacifist communities and was later

adopted by secular states as well. It is noteworthy that the Russian Empire under

Catherine II was among the early powers in which certain religious groups were

exempted from military service.

The Orthodox tradition developed less institutionalized, yet still principled,

forms of moral limitation of war. Defensive war was understood as a tragic and

compelled evil, a morally wounding act requiring repentance. That is why the canon

of St. Basil the Great remained a decisive point of reference: even participation in a

defensive war does not remove a person from the sphere of moral responsibility. And

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Orthodox hierarchs did speak out against

nationalist wars.

10. Possible Forms of Influence

Above all, the inter-Christian community, despite the secularity of modern

societies, possesses an immense resource for creating moral consensus through

independent platforms. It can form and lead broad coalitions in which Christian

voices sound alongside secular ones: human rights organizations, academics,

environmentalists, cultural theorists, philosophers, physicians, psychologists. A

present-day example is the Catholic Pax Christi movement or Quaker organizations,

which for decades have influenced the politics of nuclear disarmament not as “the

Church,” but as expert bodies of impeccable reputation. In Russia and Europe, an

analogue might be a similar interconfessional and secular platform, provisionally

called Peace to All, in which demands for a ceasefire, humanitarian corridors, and

protection for conscientious objectors are formulated not in theological, but in legal

and humanitarian categories, with reference to the Geneva Conventions, the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Refugee Convention, and the like. The

state would find it far more difficult to ignore such a consensus, because to do so

would mean losing legitimacy in the eyes of part of its own population and of

international partners.

Institutional presence could also take the form of supporting independent

humanitarian, expert, and human rights structures: foundations, legal aid services,

rehabilitation centers, monitoring initiatives that provide services which the state

either cannot or does not wish to provide effectively. When people receive, through

church channels, legal assistance and—most importantly—help, refuge, and

international protection that do not require ideological or confessional loyalty, the

state is confronted with a reality: the ecclesial community is capable of self-

organization and of resolving problems that the state itself has created.

In secular society, the decisive criterion of persuasiveness is not declarations, but

practical results, institutional reliability, and visible forms of solidarity. And here a

historical example may be found in the Quakers and Mennonites during the Vietnam

War, whose alternative civilian service and aid to victims made pacifism respected

even among atheists and the political left.

By supporting secular forms—conferences, educational and cultural

programmes, film, podcasts, books, theatre productions, and much else — the Church

can translate evangelical values from “religious” language into the cultural language

of human rights, psychology, ecology, and so forth. A vivid example here is the

influence of Pope Francis, whose encyclicals on ecology and fraternity are read and

cited by secular activists precisely because they are argued in rational and empirical

terms.

Finally, the most powerful influence is exerted by the personal and local

example of concrete individuals. When a priest who has been defrocked for his anti-

war stance continues to minister, does not become embittered, prays, and offers

pastoral support to others “cast out for righteousness’ sake,” this produces an effect

that a secular person cannot always explain rationally. Such figures often acquire

moral authority even beyond the ecclesial sphere, because their witness proves

readable in a universal human register. History knows many figures of moral witness —

from prisoners of the Gulag and “hidden” Soviet priests to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin

Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa—whose public influence often proved stronger

than that of many official hierarchs. Today such priests are given a hearing by secular

publications, YouTube media, and bloggers, who invite vivid representatives of the

Church into their studios for dialogue. But this work could be made more systematic

if a corresponding impulse also came from church leadership.

11. Conclusion

Thus, the problem of anti-war Christianity does not lie in the absence of

conscience, courage, or private initiatives. On the contrary, the years of war have

given rise to many honest forms of help, accompaniment, and witness. But by

themselves these have not yet taken shape as a durable conciliar form capable of

becoming a recognizable and lasting Christian response to war.

This is precisely where the main rupture lies: between the multiplicity of living

voices and the absence of an integral witness, between the fidelity of individual

persons and the lack of a common form that would allow that fidelity to become a

recognizable force. The question today, therefore, is not only what Christians say

about war, but in what form that word exists, is transmitted, and is sustained.

If anti-war Christianity can move from scattered initiatives to a more coherent

form of coordination, self-understanding, and common action, it will have a chance to

become not only a space of assistance, but also an environment for forming the

human person, the community, and the language of peace. And then the question

will no longer be merely one of tactical association, but of returning to the very logic

of ecclesial being itself, in which unity is the condition for a full and credible witness.

The Peace to All project / Friede Allen e.V.