The Mystery of Holy Church unity and the human society. The secular culture and / or the culture of spirit. The theological vision of Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov

The Mystery of Holy Church unity and the human society. The secular culture and / or the culture of spirit. The theological vision of Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov

15 September 2015

This study considers the theme of the Church’s unity from the perspective of the Archimandrite Sophronius Sakharov’s theological vision. We tried to analyze, focusing on the unity of Church, which are the theological foundations, the consequences and implications of this sacred gift that God made to the world, in terms of the concrete life of the human being. We emphasize, in this way, that the hypostatic and catholic dimension of the Church is the only one that expresses in the most sublime way the divine - Trinitarian hypostatic unity as the basis of the ecclesial life. In this respect, all people are called to participate in the life of the Church because only in the Church there is the perfect existence, after the image of the Holy Trinity. The Church is one. It is founded this way precisely for unity and union, so that all may be one (Jn 17:21). The unity of the Church necessarily follows from the unity of the Godhead, since the Church is not a multitude of people in their individual isolation, but in the unity of the divine grace, living, present in the multitude of hypostatic rational creatures. The church is new life with Christ and in Christ, led by the Holy Spirit on the basis of the Trinitarian unity and catholicity. The Church is called thus to reproduce the divine Trinitarian existence into its existence, that is, to achieve in the human society the unity of various kinds of hypostases, based on the Holy Trinity’s model, and to transform the culture of the world into a culture and civilization of the spirit.