The presentation was delivered on April 9, 2025, during the webinar “Myths and Prejudices as Obstacles to the Unity of Ukrainian Orthodoxy”, held within the joint project of the Sofia Brotherhood and the German foundation Renovabis: “Contemporary Ukrainian Orthodoxy: Debunking Myths for the Sake of Reconciliation and Social Consolidation.” The Sofia Brotherhood may not necessarily share the views expressed by speakers, and some opinions voiced by members of the Brotherhood in the framework of the project may not reflect the organization’s official position.
Sergiy Bortnyk, Doctor of Theology, Professor, Head of the Academic Initiative Foundation
First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation to speak at this event. To make my presentation more relevant and grounded, I will share some reflections based on my practical work within the structures of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
Primarily, this includes my teaching at the Theological Academy, where I teach subjects about the “others” — if not “outsiders” — such as Catholics and Protestants. I also teach a course on “Contemporary Orthodox Theological Thought,” which, though intended to remain faithful to centuries-old tradition, is often viewed with suspicion as bordering on modernism.
Additionally, I am involved in interchurch and interreligious relations on a practical level. I participate in joint events with representatives of various major Christian denominations and jurisdictions in Ukraine. These typically take place within the framework of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, where the UOC is still formally a member. However, the problem is that the UOC has increasingly been ignored: first, it was excluded from international advocacy efforts, then from events involving senior Ukrainian government officials, and now it seems to be almost entirely excluded from public platforms.
This exclusion reflects a deep communication crisis. Representatives of the UOC who have chosen not to leave their Church during wartime — for political or personal reasons — have remained together. The Church leadership has made no moves toward compromise, no effort to initiate dialogue or meet the demands set by the state. Meanwhile, accusations of “pro-Russian narratives” persist, as well as claims of rejecting unity with the “truly patriotic” Church. Parish seizures continue, often with the support of local authorities.
Many of the UOC’s critics would argue that its faithful are fanatical followers of the “Russian world,” secret saboteurs, and so on. This is often the view held by the average, non-religious citizen of Ukraine, who tends to trust the dominant stream of media narratives, which are likely shaped — if not manufactured — by national outlets and social media ecosystems.
Deacon Andrey Kuraev once called the UOC “the silent Church” — long before Metropolitan Onufriy was enthroned as Primate. This has long been a problem and has only deepened, especially due to war and political tensions. For instance, in the mid-2010s, the only UOC diocese without a website was the Chernivtsi diocese.
From what I can observe, this reluctance to engage in external communication is a trait specific to Metropolitan Onufriy himself. It’s important to draw a distinction between external and internal communication. This also maps onto a divide between “outsiders” — those not belonging to or loosely connected with the Church — and “insiders,” who are loyal to the Church leadership and willing to remain faithful to the end.
After Metropolitan Onufriy relocated to Kyiv in 2014, this communication model increasingly became dominant within the UOC as a whole. I recall several of his public comments on the Holodomor and the Donbas conflict — all of which triggered controversy. Soon after, the Church leadership withdrew from making public statements or reduced them to a bare minimum.
This posture of silence, in a time when society demands answers in the context of war and political confrontation, may be interpreted in several ways. As I have mentioned, accusations of pro-Russian sentiment are common. Others might explain it as inability, unwillingness, or lack of readiness to speak publicly. Some might even see it as disrespect for an audience assumed to be incapable of grasping spiritual matters.
However, in contrast to such critiques, one might attempt to theologically justify this silence. After all, biblical references do support the idea that silence can be spiritually meaningful. This shifts the question from a political to a theological domain.
The clearest Gospel illustration is Christ’s response to Pilate: “Do you not speak to me? Do You not know that I have power to release You and power to crucify You?” Jesus answered: “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above.”
(John 19:10–11)
This same Gospel also includes more radical statements about the world’s hatred toward Christ’s followers: “If the world hates you, know that it hated Me before it hated you… A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also.” (John 15:18–20)
This opposition between the followers of Christ and the world is well known. If desired, one can find many other radical sayings from Christ that reinforce this dualism.
This idea of contrast between believers and “the world” echoes the Apostle Paul’s distinction between the carnal and the spiritual. As Paul writes in Romans: “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God…” (Romans 8:6–7; see also 1 Corinthians 3:1–3)
These are only some of the biblical passages that allow for a contrast between the faithful of Christ and those considered “outsiders” or incidental to the Church. Thus, the current isolation and silent resistance of the UOC faithful can be interpreted through a theological lens as a manifestation of this very opposition: between Church and world, between the spiritual and the carnal.
The cited verses show that within a conservative Christian worldview, there is ample basis for skepticism toward the surrounding “world,” which, in the words of the Apostle John, “lies in wickedness” (1 John 5:19). If a person has lived for years under strong psychological influence from their priest or parish environment, it is only natural that they are deeply embedded in that context. After all, we all may find ourselves part of social groups that tend toward closed systems.
Yet there is also a more positive view of this Church–world distinction. If someone has experienced spiritual uplift, a sense of truth, or divine grace in their Church, it is hard to convince them that the Church where they encountered this should now be declared hostile to the nation, or that they must abandon it for a supposedly more correct structure.
To describe such deep-rooted loyalty to the UOC, one might recall the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky: “I do not believe in Christ like a child. My ‘Hosanna’ has passed through the crucible of doubt.” Thus, the experience of encountering Christ in a particular Church community provides a serious reason not to change jurisdictions lightly or for merely political motives.
A key question, directly related to the theme of this webinar, is the following: Can such belonging to one’s Church be considered mythologized? In our webinar title, “myths” are listed alongside “prejudices,” likely implying a negative connotation. But the post-Soviet context invites a broader interpretation: perhaps all of religious life — in this framework — is “myth”: imagined, untrue, disconnected from “reality”?
Answering that fully would take too long. But for a theoretical perspective, I refer to Alexei Losev’s work Dialectics of Myth. In the concluding section, he writes that mythology is “a fundamentally religious interpretation of behavior and life itself,” and can be understood as “sacred history.” (Philosophy. Mythology. Culture, p. 165) In other words, a person’s self-understanding in relation to God is inherently mythological.
Losev wrote this in the 1920s, under intense pressure from the Soviet atheistic regime. For inserting censored quotes into his manuscript without authorization, he was sentenced to 10 years in labor camps. This is not the place to explore the positive meaning of myth in depth. But it’s worth noting the hostile opposition between anti-religious propaganda and “mythological consciousness” in its constructive sense.
Practically speaking, I still remember Soviet times when any religious worldview was labeled “myth” or “fiction.” Many of today’s opponents of the Church in Ukraine were trained in “scientific atheism” or were shaped by systems that instilled a deep aversion to religion, which continues to influence them.
This kind of aggressive opposition was evident during the controversies over the UOC’s eviction from the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra two years ago. That’s the sadness of our current situation — different arguments are used depending on convenience. On one hand, the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) tells us that belonging to the Moscow Patriarchate is not a dogma of faith, and believers can easily reject it. On the other hand, UOC faithful have been mocked and demonized — sometimes with such severity that it resembles the worst periods of Soviet anti-religious coercion.
This context leads us to a central idea in Christian theology: the oneness of the Church, founded by Christ. In the Gospel of Matthew, the Church is built upon Peter’s confession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” To which Christ replies: “On this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) Here, the Church is not just a place of spiritual comfort — it is a fortress, a divine refuge whose gates guard believers from destruction.
The following verses speak of the “keys to the Kingdom of Heaven”, which are traditionally interpreted as referring to ecclesial authority — the power to “bind and loose.” Faith in the Church founded by Christ is also expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, recited at every liturgy: “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” Such faith — this desire to remain within the true Church and draw nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven — can powerfully motivate UOC believers not to abandon the community of their spiritual birth.
In my view, the current religious conflict in Ukraine — both on the level of church–state relations and between different Orthodox jurisdictions — can and should be interpreted through theological categories of belonging to the true Church of Christ. There are many people who belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) for whom such affiliation carries existential significance. They may not all be fully capable of articulating or reflecting on their religious sentiments, but they feel a threat to their Orthodox Christian identity — an identity they have fought for over a significant part of their lives. And this results in what we might call a kind of “silent but stubborn” Orthodoxy.
As a way out of the current complex situation, I propose dialogue — one in which both sides of the conflict would be able to reflect not only on their own convictions but also on those of the other. As a professor of theology, I call upon all of us to engage in such dialogue and reflection. And I am glad that this webinar provides an opportunity for this. I would like to suggest two directions for such reflection.
On the one hand, we should reflect on the nature of the Church and its outward boundaries — particularly the distinction between canonical and sacramental boundaries. For instance: what does it mean that Christians exist outside the borders of our Church? If we see that they are genuinely motivated by faith in Christ — do they not, in some sense, bear signs of ecclesial belonging? More specifically: is their baptism valid as a sacrament that initiates one into the life of the Church? I am convinced that it would be useful to transfer the concept of the “One, Holy Church” (Una Sancta) from the realm of interconfessional relations into the sphere of intra-Orthodox dialogue.
On the other hand, we must also reflect on the divine and the human within our own jurisdiction. Does everything our hierarchs proclaim align with the Gospel and divine truth? Do the faithful have the right to critique their own Church structure? In other words: must we not, within our own Church life, begin to separate the wheat from the tares? Christ Himself, in the parable from Matthew 13:24–30, first says to wait: “Lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.” But when the harvest time comes, the weeds must be gathered and burned, while the wheat is to be collected and preserved.
And so this question is directed at us today: Has the time of harvest come, to separate the wheat from the tares? In my conviction, the full-scale war is a compelling reason for deep reflection and for the rejection of the political as something external and secondary in the life of the Church. Yet often, the Church leadership needs a push — and support — to take more active steps on the path of purification. That support can come not only from the faithful of the UOC but also from external voices who sincerely desire constructive transformation within Ukrainian Orthodoxy.