In his approach to religious mission, Sysoev clearly departed from the official ROC line. In 1995, the Church published its ‘Conception for the Revival of ROC Missionary Activity’(Kontseptsiia vozrozhdeniia missionerskoi deiatel’nosti Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi), and established a special Synodical Missionary Department (Sinodal’nyi Missionerskii Otdel), but programmatic documents on ROC missionary work remained very moderate in their tone and goals: the 2007 document, entitled ‘The Conception of Missionary Work of the RussianOrthodox Church’ (Kontseptiia missionerskoi deiatel’nosti Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi) urged Orthodox Christians to conduct ‘a mission of dialogue’ and ‘of reconciliation’, based on ‘missionary friendliness, openness, social responsiveness’, and without getting involved‘in extremist activities’ (Kontseptsiia 2007). The ROC was obviously being careful to avoid conflicts with the other major religions in Russia, and emphasizing its respect for the rules of the secular state
The assertive style of Sysoev’s missionary activities clearly placed him beyond the scope of these regulations. Sysoev disagreed with the ‘defensive’ mode of the ROC in interfaith relations, and rejected the established consensus that discouraged active evangelism as a means to spread the word of God (Sysoev n.d.a). For Sysoev, a good attack was the best defence.Sysoev’s criticism of the ROC is embodied in his concept of uranopolitizm, with which he questioned the ROC’s increasingly patriotic discourse in Putin’s Russia. Accordingto Sysoev (2009f), Christians are ‘just wanderers and aliens’ in this world, because their realcitizenship will only come in Heaven.
Uranopolitizm (from Greek uranos – ‘heaven’, and polis – ‘city’) thus implies the supremacy of divine laws over terrestrial/secular legislation.Sysoev (2009f) believed that the main and only kinship among people is ‘not blood or country of origin, but kinship in Christ’.
In denying any correlation between religion and ethnicity/nationality, Sysoev challenged one of the very fundamentals of Russian (russkii) identity: since the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, Orthodoxy has been promoted as an important component of Russianness (Knox 2005; Richters 2012). Sysoev (2009b) challenged this conception by arguing that nations only result from the arrogance of ‘those who built the Tower [of Babel]’; a person who over-emphasizes his or her ethnic background and connection with a given country‘builds the same Tower, namely the Terrestrial Kingdom’.
By insisting that the Orthodox Church must be open to all nationalities, Sysoevasserted (2009f) that a firm believer must not be a patriot: one cannot be devoted to both the terrestrial motherland and God, for this would mean ‘serving two masters’. Such an ideacould have many implications. If patriotism is not a religious virtue, Orthodox Christiansshould not condemn persons accused of having betrayed their fatherland. Sysoev elaborated on this with the examples of the White Army General Anton Denikin (1872–1947) and the Soviet defector to the Nazis, General Andrei Vlasov (1901–1946), both of whom modern Russian historiography sees as traitors. According to Sysoev (2009c; 2009d), the Bible does not include ‘high treason in its list of sins’: even a person who has committed war crimes can be acquitted by God’s mercy, and can enter Heaven, if s/he repents.
While the official Church sees patriotism as an obligation for a believer (see, for example, Steniaev 2007), Sysoev argued that these are false convictions that provoke God’s anger. When in the summer of 2009 bad maintenance led to a serious accident at the hydro-power station in Khakassia, Sysoev posted in his LiveJournal: ‘Just as on 11 September 2001 God’s anger struck at America’s arrogance, in August 2009 God also started to punish Orthodox people for their arrogance, which in the contemporary mendacious language is called patriotism and nationalism’ (Sysoev 2009e).
Sysoev’s publications on uranopolitizm provoked criticism from various ROC officials and clergy, and also from Andrei Kuraev, a Church intellectual operating on the liberal fringe of the ROC spectrum (Kuraev 2013; n.d.). Equally upset were representatives of the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church (‘Old Believers’) (Novozhilov and Shakhmatov2007), the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia ( Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ Zagranitsei) (Nazarov 2006 and lay people (for example, Malinina 2010).
Although the ROC never obstructed Sysoev’s missionary activities, it did not support him either. In 2003, in order to create his own platform independent of the ROC, Sysoev launched a project to establish the ‘Community of the Church in honour of Prophet Daniel’.The goal was to build a stone church complex in southern Moscow, with space toaccommodate 2000 persons. The complex was intended to host a missionary school, toorganize Bible lectures and lessons on Orthodox Christianity for migrant workers, and to offer psychological support for new converts.
From the article "Daniil Sysoev: Mission and Martyrdom" by Gulnaz Sibgatullina
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