Hennadii Khristokin, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences, Professor

In the two previous texts, we discussed the common good and why it does not arise from proclaimed values but is born from common action, social imagination, and a living social contract. We showed that the Church possesses a particular and irreplaceable potential in this regard: it is capable of shaping society’s very imagination, that is, the image of the human person, the neighbour, and the future from which genuine common action alone can grow. But we left aside one question without which this entire discussion remains incomplete. What exactly is the Church’s imagination? Where does it come from, what is it made up of, and why is the very same Church capable both of opening people’s eyes to the dignity of their neighbour and of blinding them with hatred toward that neighbour?

The answer we propose appears simple at first glance, but it has unexpected consequences. The Church’s imagination is never a single thing. It operates simultaneously on several levels; it looks both ways, from the Church and toward the Church, and precisely for this reason it can be at once the greatest resource for social harmony and the deepest source of social division.

What the Church’s Imagination Is Made Of

Let us begin with a simple observation. When a person who never participates in worship hears the word “Mother of God,” some image nevertheless arises in their mind, vivid and recognisable, often associated with protection and intercession. This is the deepest and most diffuse level of the Church’s imagination, the one shaped not by preaching or catechism but by ritual, icon, song, and stories passed down from grandmother to granddaughter. It lives within people who would never call themselves theologians.

Above it lies a level that we might call confessional. Here it is no longer simply the “Mother of God as intercessor,” but “our Mother of God,” “our baptism,” “our tradition,” distinct from that of others. Here the same event, for example, the Baptism of Rus’ in 988, begins to be interpreted differently depending on the jurisdiction to which a person belongs. For some, it provides grounds for contemporary local ecclesial independence and independence from Moscow. For others, it is proof of an unbreakable unity with Moscow. The event is the same, but the images it produces are opposite.

Higher still is the theological level, where this confessional intuition acquires scholarly language, concepts, and doctrine. It is precisely at this level that, for example, the idea of “Holy Rus’” emerges, an idea that has been transformed from an abstract theological metaphor into an instrument for justifying war. This is a reminder of how dangerous this level can become when it is detached from people’s lived experience and begins to serve purposes that are foreign to theology.

And finally, there is the personal level: the way all of this lives within a particular person, in their prayer, in whether they are capable, for example, of praying for someone who is foreign to them, who is not one of “their own,” who is an enemy. It is precisely here that abstract images either become lived experience or remain merely memorised language.

These four levels do not exist separately from one another; they nourish one another. A theological idea returns to people in the form of a new icon or sermon. Confessional identity makes use of both religious images and theological ideas to strengthen “us” against “them.” And personal experience is the place where all of this either comes alive or remains an empty shell. This is precisely why, when we speak of a crisis in the Church, we should always ask at which particular level it is taking place. Sometimes people continue to pray sincerely while at the same time looking with indifference or even hostility at displaced persons from another region: this is not a decline of faith, but a rupture between a living religious sensibility and a closed confessional image of the neighbour narrowed to include only “our own.”

An Imagination That Looks Both Ways

We have already written in the previous text about the first direction of this imagination, the one in which the Church shapes society. Here we can put it briefly: a single sermon, a single public statement by a hierarch, a single gesture is simultaneously both a word addressed to the faithful and a signal to society as a whole about who is a neighbour and who is an enemy, what is just and what is a crime. When the Church blesses weapons or blesses people for battle, it shapes not only the attitudes of a parish but also a broader understanding of what is justified. When it remains silent where the dignity of particular people is violated, it likewise shapes the imagination, only in the opposite direction: it conveys the idea that silence is an acceptable response to injustice.

But there is also another direction, one discussed far less often even though it is no less important: the way society itself shapes the imagination of the Church. This process is no less real, and failing to see it means having only half the picture.

The first way in which society influences the Church lies in the fact that today’s public sphere is predominantly secular. This means that, in order to be heard, the Church must translate its language into a language understandable to those who do not share its faith: the language of dignity, human rights, and social benefit. Such translation is not always a bad thing: it is precisely through this process that the biblical idea of the human person as the image of God became one of the sources of the modern idea of human rights. But this same translation contains a temptation: the Church may become so accustomed to speaking the language of services or psychological support that it forgets why it is doing all of this in the first place.

The second way is even more subtle: the logic of contemporary media and social networks. This logic favours short, sharp, emotional messages and the image of an enemy far more than prolonged, attentive conversation about the neighbour. And when Church rhetoric begins imperceptibly to adopt this same logic, polarising claims instead of catechesis, the image of a threat instead of the image of a human person, it is no longer the Church that shapes the social imagination. Rather, the Church adopts the ready-made form of the media environment, retaining only religious vocabulary.

The third and most obvious way is when the state or a political force directly subordinates Church language to itself while presenting this as theology. We already know the most striking example: the concept of the “Russian World” did not emerge as an independent theological reflection; it is the translation of a geopolitical doctrine into the language of eschatology and sacred history. Here it is not the Church that shapes the state’s imagination, but the state that shapes the Church’s imagination, leaving the Church with the role of providing sacred justification for an already formulated political project.

Understanding these two directions simultaneously, from the Church to society and from society to the Church, gives us a much more accurate picture than either a one-sidedly heroic or a one-sidedly critical view. The Church is neither an omnipotent creator of the social imagination nor its defenceless victim. It exists in a constant dialogue with society in which both sides shape one another, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

What Is the Church’s Distinctive Vocation?

If the Church exists in such a constant, two-way dialogue with society, does it not lose something distinctive? Does it not become simply one more voice among others, alongside the voices of the state, the market, and the media?

In our view, it is precisely here that the Church’s distinctive vocation reveals itself. It consists not in offering yet another version of the imagined world among competing versions, but in revealing that which transcends all of them: a horizon that no institution, nation, or ideology has the right to claim as the ultimate, self-sufficient reality. This is what we would call the transcendent dimension of the Church’s vocation: a reminder of the boundary beyond which nothing human is absolute.

This is not a call to detachment or silent neutrality. On the contrary, precisely because the Church remembers this boundary, it is capable of taking an active part in social life without dissolving entirely into it. A Church that withdraws into itself under the pretext of spirituality betrays this vocation just as much as a Church that identifies itself completely with a particular political position, sanctifying it as the only correct one. The same caution with which the Orthodox tradition has always approached any images of God, understanding that no image can exhaust Him, must also be extended to images of the state, the nation, or even the ecclesiastical institution itself. None of these images has the right to occupy the place that belongs to God alone.

In wartime, this vocation becomes particularly acute and particularly difficult at the same time. The Church is called to speak about the dignity of every human being when society, quite understandably, is inclined to dehumanise the enemy. It is called to keep open the horizon of possible reconciliation and reconstruction when all attention is focused on victory. It is called to remember the most vulnerable when all resources are being directed to the front. This is not a refusal to support the defence of the country; it is a distinctive function available precisely to the Church: to speak about what is possible and what ought to be when the logic of survival, quite naturally, absorbs everything around it.

Where the Imagination Breaks Down

The Church’s imagination regularly betrays this vocation, and it is worth identifying several typical ways in which this happens.

The most common way is when the imagination ceases to be living and open and begins merely to justify the existing order instead of revealing an alternative to it. This is what happened with “Holy Rus’”: instead of remaining an image calling people to transformation, it became an instrument for preserving the existing order and justifying aggression.

The second way is when the state subordinates Church language to itself, and the Church, instead of opening up a transcendent horizon, provides sacred justification for political decisions that have already been made.

The third way is when competing Church jurisdictions define one another primarily as “foreign” or “uncanonical,” rather than as part of a broader Christian community. The conflict between the Orthodox Church of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a revealing example here: it unfolds simultaneously as a canonical, property-related, identity-based, and media dispute, but behind all these dimensions stands the same mechanism. Each side constructs an image of the other as unworthy of dialogue: one sees the other as the “Moscow Church,” reducing a complex and internally contradictory community to a single characteristic, while the other sees the first as an “artificial project,” ignoring real people and real parishes. In both cases, the Church, whose vocation is to see the image of God in every human being, applies to another Orthodox Christian the very same optics of exclusion that it ought to resist.

The fourth way, the quietest of all, is when Church thinking imperceptibly absorbs the logic of social networks: a short emotional assertion instead of a sustained explanation, the image of an enemy instead of the image of a neighbour. Here the Church does not so much consciously abandon its vocation as simply cease to resist this logic.

What Can Be Done

None of these distortions can be corrected by organisational reforms alone, because they are secondary to the imagination itself, which must first be restored.

The first and most important step is theological education oriented not only toward precision of formulation but toward the very capacity to see. Precise doctrine without a living imagination remains a dry formula behind which one can hide but by which one cannot live.

The second step is a constant, rather than occasional, practice of the Church speaking to society in a language understandable beyond the narrow Church circle, without losing what is most important in its own message.

The third step is the concrete practice of inter-Orthodox and interreligious dialogue that does not wait for permission from above. When people from different jurisdictions and confessions work together on a common task, whether helping displaced persons or rebuilding what has been destroyed, they discover through their own experience that the boundary between “us” and “them,” which seems impenetrable at the level of hierarchies, is far more fluid at the level of living common action. It is precisely this kind of practice that we seek to cultivate in the work of the Sophia Brotherhood: not through declarations about unity, but through concrete common action in which this unity becomes tangible.

The fourth step is transparency, which makes visible the distance between what the Church proclaims and what it actually does. As long as this distance remains hidden, no one feels the need to overcome it.

Conclusions

The Church’s imagination is never homogeneous and never moves in only one direction. It exists on several levels simultaneously, from the deepest religious sensibility to the personal experience of a particular individual, and it remains in constant dialogue with society, both shaping society and being shaped by it. Understanding this two-way movement frees us from two temptations: seeing the Church either as an omnipotent creator of social consciousness or as its helpless victim.

The Church’s distinctive vocation is not to be simply one more voice among competing voices, but constantly to remind us of the boundary beyond which no institution, ideology, or nation has the right to present itself as absolute. When the Church betrays this vocation, whether by subordinating itself to political power, withdrawing into hostility toward other jurisdictions, or imperceptibly adopting the logic of social networks, it ceases to be a resource for social harmony and becomes yet another source of division.

The way out of this condition does not begin with major synodal decisions. It begins where particular people from different jurisdictions and confessions choose common action instead of mutual rejection, where theological education teaches people to see rather than merely to speak correctly, and where the Church’s word seeks to be heard rather than merely proclaimed. This is slow work, and that is precisely why it is real.