Folia Canonica 8. (2005)
STUDIES - Grigorios D. Papathomas: An Open Ecclesial Communitarism: Dispar-Mixed Marriages and Adult Converions
DISPAR-MIXED MARRIAGES AND ADULT CONVERSIONS 161 are unable to perceive Him, to see Him. He stirs and probes people even through the thickness of their historical existence. If ecclesiastical reality, the ecclesial body, finally encompasses the whole of the aforementioned endo-confessionalistic - sometimes Old Testamentary - assets relating to marriage, Christianity will not be the future of the world, unless it can surpass and overcome all the representations which cause the modem and globalised citizen to feel alien. A lack of theological, in the sense sketched above, presence in the world is equivalent to a lack of evangelical faith. Modern day validity of the ecclesial message has to come not only from a Church that, as an eschatological partner, engages itself within the world but also from the experience of mankind today. Finally, it is high time that the Orthodox Church abolishes the cultural and nationalistic barriers raised in the recent past and becomes theologically more open and soteriologically orientated towards the heteroreligious communities, notably to Islam and Muslim Communities, given the long-lasting historical ecclesiastical precedent, and because this opening is objectively possible today. Konstantinos Paparregopoulos, a Greek historian of the 19th century, points out that after the Fall, the two Communities, Christians and Muslims, inside the same society and the same Empire, mixed like water and oil, and remained uninfluenced and independent. In this historically accurate example, the use of these two constituents shows that there had also been a deliberate institutional immiscibility. The abolishment of dispar marriage in the life of the Church has considerably contributed to this immiscibility. In our days, however, during the age of post-modem multiculturalism and in a pluralistic civic society, the Orthodox Church has all the necessary experience from its long and theologically rich past to initiate an opening towards every Muslim community across the world. That is why the entire Orthodox Church is invited to take part in the International Muslim-Christian Dialogue commenced by St. John of Damascus (8th century)1, continued by St. Gregory Palamas and others (8th-14th centuries)2, and whose realisation is in progress today under the initiative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In this context, the revival of dispar marriage is a favourable starting point for theological overture and dialogue... 'See J. Damascene, Écrits sur l'Islam. Présentation, Commentaires et Traduction (Sources Chrétiennes 383), R. Le Coz (par), Paris 1992, 272. 2 Voir A-T. Khoury, Les Théologiens Byzantins et l'Islam. Textes et Auteurs (VIIT - XIIIe siècles), Louvain-Paris 21969, 334.
