Parousia: The Imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ: Is The Invasion of Ukraine by Russia Forces a Battle for the Unification of the Orthodox Church -A Holy War?
by Dr. Paul Gotthard Kraemer, III
In 988, Vladimir of the Rus, returning to Kiev after a huge religious-political military victory, held a mass baptism on the banks of the river Dnieper. This iconic act was the founding of Russian Orthodox Christianity. The Russian church today hopes to reunite with the independent Ukrainian branch under a single patriarch in Moscow that would allow it to control the holiest sites of Orthodoxy in the Slavic world. Those sites are in and around Kiev.
It was from Kiev, that Christianity would spread out and merge with the Russian love of the motherland, to create a powerful mixture of nationalism and spirituality about the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ. In this baptismal event of 988, it was if the whole of the Russian people had been baptized. Vladimir was declared a saint, and eventually after the rise and fall of the Byzantine empire, Russians saw themselves as its natural successor, a “third Rome”.
It has been said that Vladimir Putin’s father was an atheist, his mother a devote Russian Orthodox Christian. Putin was secretly baptized into the church, it is unsure whether he believes in the Faith or he is using it, the end justifying the means, for geopolitical control.
According to Putin, it is not Russia, but “Holy Russia” that is at stake. Speaking about Vladimir’s mass baptism, Putin explained:
“His spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilization, and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.”
It appears that Putin wants to do the same again, unite the people and the Orthodox church, and to do this he needs Kiev back. He has stated:
“We see many of the Euro -Atlantic countries are rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”
But while Ukraine’s government is calling on every able-bodied male to defend the country against the Russian invasion, the Russian Orthodox archbishop sees things a little differently. Because Russians and Ukrainians are one people with one religion, he said, the Russian army is not an enemy. Believers in Ukraine should “pray for peace, not for victory.”
Launched by President Vladimir V. Putin to reassert Russian influence in the region, the war in Ukraine may also be a contest for the future of the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches.
The Russian church has made no secret of its desire to unite the branches under a single patriarch in Moscow, which would allow it to control the holiest sites of Orthodoxy in the Slavic world and millions of believers in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, for its part, has been slowly asserting itself under its own patriarch, reviving a separate and independent branch of Eastern Orthodoxy, after the independence of Ukraine in 1991.
If Ukraine prevails against the Russian invasion, the Moscow church will all but certainly be ejected. If Russia wins, the Ukrainian church is unlikely to survive inside Ukraine.
The branch of the church in Ukraine subordinate to Moscow also enjoys the loyalty of a majority of city, town and village churches in Ukraine, though the newly independent Ukrainian church has had success encouraging parishes to switch allegiance. Those efforts extremely angered Mr. Putin that he openly warned in 2018 that it could “turn into a heavy dispute, if not bloodshed.”
For both the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, the stakes are high and likely to shape the future of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia and Ukraine.
The Ukrainian church that was formed after independence was granted legitimacy in 2019 by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the senior authority in Eastern Orthodoxy, outraging Russian political and religious leaders. Parishes in Ukraine soon began switching their loyalties, and the Ukrainian church today counts about 700 parishes in the country, with 12,000 remaining under Russian influence.
Both the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches arose from the conversion of a Kyiv prince, Prince Vladimir in Russian and Volodymyr in Ukrainian, to Christianity in 988. In one indication that Mr. Putin is animated by this history, after annexing Crimea in 2014 he erected a statue to Prince Vladimir beside the Kremlin walls in Moscow.
The Ukrainian church had been under Moscow’s jurisdiction since 1686. Under pressure from Russia, it abandoned allegiance to Constantinople until 2019, when it formally regained its independence.
The churches share the same holy sites, perhaps the most important being the Monastery of the Caves founded in 1051 and located in Kiev, and its catacombs holding the bodies of saints deeply revered in both Ukraine and Russia.
Imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ| Also read: Parousia and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ: The World Economic Forum and The Great Reset
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