Folia Canonica 8. (2005)
STUDIES - Grigorios D. Papathomas: An Open Ecclesial Communitarism: Dispar-Mixed Marriages and Adult Converions
152 GRIGORIOS D. PAPATHOMAS Certain practices were adopted in single-culture societies, or in “millet ”, ethno-religious islands within an empire, and other practices developed de facto in multi-culture societies. It is also true that at some point in human life and History, marriage was adopted as a factor for building and stabilising a homogenous and united Religious Community. However, when marriage was used only for that purpose, it actually made people entrench themselves against others instead of widening out and meeting them. The use of marriage as a means to achieve that purpose brought about national entrenchments validated through custom and law, thus deepening the said entrenchments later on. As a result, in our days, in the universal struggle for unity among peoples, marriage, which is defined as an event of love and centripetal communion of persons, as well as an image of the Kingdom, has become a dominant factor for frictions and disputes between the members of the couple-family, producing centrifugal trends. And this is always happening with the institutional, open or silent, approval of the Religious Communities. At this point, if we want to situate the issue in a historical context, we could say that the theological stance maintained by the Orthodox Church on this issue was, prior to the Fall of Constantinople (1453), different from the one maintained later on, from the Fall till today. The reason for the change does not have to do with the theological stance itself, but mainly with the change of established order and even with reasons of historical survival. These reasons, however, led to the current dominant theological stance, which, in view of the change of socio-political givens, naturally needs to be reviewed. Let us take a brief look at how this theological stance is outlined and what its recent historical development has been. Church Theology Above all, Church Theology holds that marriage accomplishes the mystery of life, the communion of persons and the unification of two beings into one body, as conceived by God (cf. Mat. 19:6; Mark 10:8; Eph. 5:31). The term “marriage” had been exclusively adopted to characterise the unique union of man and woman, founded by God Himself, in order to accomplish His cosmogonic as well as eschatological visions. Every marriage event, regardless of Religion or hierology, fully accomplishes the cosmogonic objective and the cosmogonic wish of God, that is for “mankind to be fruitful and multiply” with a perspective of co-creation (Gen. 1:28; 9:1, 7), as a condition for receiving and then transforming the one and only humankind into the communion of the Kingdom. That is why the word of the Bible insists: “What God has yoked together let no man [or Community] put apart” (Mat. 19:6; Mark 10:9). The conjugal relation introduces
