The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church

Justin Popović’s central work: the three-volume Dogmatika Pravoslavne Crkve (The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church), the first comprehensive Orthodox systematic theology in Serbian, whose first two volumes appeared in 1932 and 1935 and whose third was published only after his death. This file describes its scope, its distinctive patristic method, and its place in twentieth-century Orthodox theology.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Work and Its Publication

The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church (Dogmatika Pravoslavne Crkve) is the monument of Justin Popović’s scholarly life and the first full-scale systematic theology written in Serbian. It grew out of his lectures as professor of dogmatics at the University of Belgrade, and it appeared in three large volumes: volume one in 1932 and volume two in 1935, both published while he held the Belgrade chair; the third volume, long delayed by the circumstances of his life under communism, was completed later and published only in 1978, the year before his death, in some accounts appearing posthumously in its final form (the publication history in Popović’s Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije Jevtić; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019). The long gap between the second and third volumes is itself a fact about Justin’s biography: the systematic theologian was removed from his chair in 1945 and confined to the Ćelije convent, so that the completion of the Dogmatics had to wait on decades of internal exile (see Celije Monastery).

The three volumes together are sometimes described, from the theanthropic idea that governs them, as a Pravoslavna filosofija istine — an “Orthodox philosophy of truth” — the phrase under which the collected dogmatic work has been gathered in the Sabrana dela (the Sabrana dela, ed. Jevtić; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). Portions have appeared in English, above all in the anthology Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ (trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994), which gathers dogmatic and ascetical essays drawn from the larger corpus; the complete Dogmatics exists in full only in Serbian, a fact this collection observes by citing the work and its themes rather than manufacturing page references for editions it treats at second hand (per METHODOLOGY §2).

Scope

In scope the Dogmatics is a complete systematic theology, covering the standard loci of Orthodox dogmatic teaching: the doctrine of God — the Holy Trinity, the divine names and attributes; creation, the angelic and human worlds, and the image of God in man; the fall, sin, and death; the person and two natures of Christ the God-Man and the whole economy of salvation; the Church, the sacraments, and the life of grace; and the last things — resurrection, judgment, and the life of the age to come (the structure of the Dogmatika as set out in the Sabrana dela; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the shape of Justin’s dogmatics). What distinguishes the work is not the list of topics, which is traditional, but the single principle that Justin makes govern every one of them: the God-Man. The doctrine of God is expounded with a view to the Incarnation; anthropology is expounded as the account of the being whom the God-Man came to save and deify; ecclesiology is the doctrine of the God-Man’s body; eschatology is the consummation of the theanthropic economy. The Dogmatics is thus not a neutral survey but a sustained argument that all of theology is Christology in the widest sense — that everything is to be seen “from the God-Man” (see Christ the God-Man).

Method: Theology as a Mosaic of the Fathers

The most striking formal feature of the Dogmatics is its method, which is deliberately patristic to the point of self-effacement. Justin does not, in the manner of the older scholastic Orthodox dogmatics (the “Western captivity” textbooks influenced by Latin and Protestant models), argue from theses and proofs; he writes instead a dense tissue of Scripture and the Fathers, letting the sources speak and binding them together with his own doxological and polemical commentary (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the patristic and doxological character of the Dogmatics; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019, situating Justin within the twentieth-century “return to the Fathers”). The result reads at times more like a liturgical or hymnographic meditation than a modern academic treatise: dogma is presented as the content of the Church’s worship and the saints’ experience, not as a set of propositions to be demonstrated. This is entirely of a piece with Justin’s conviction that theology can be done rightly only from within the ascetic and liturgical life of the Church, and that the dogmatician’s task is to hand on the mind of the Fathers rather than to innovate (see The Dogmatics’ theme of experiential knowledge; and the Macarian roots of this in Petrograd, Oxford, and Athens).

This method is both the strength and, for some readers, the limitation of the work. Its strength is its saturation in the sources and its refusal to reduce the faith to a system; its cost, as some critics note, is that the sustained argumentative and historical-critical engagement expected of a modern dogmatics is largely absent, replaced by citation and rhapsody (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, weighing the character of the work). Justin would have regarded that trade as no loss at all: for him the Fathers are not data for a modern synthesis but the living voice of the Church, and to let them speak is precisely the theologian’s job.

Place in Modern Orthodox Theology

Justin’s Dogmatics belongs to, and in some respects anticipates, the great twentieth-century Orthodox movement usually called the “return to the Fathers” or the “neo-patristic synthesis” associated above all with Georges Florovsky (Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019, on the neo-patristic movement and Justin’s place near it; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Where the older academic Orthodox dogmatics had borrowed heavily from Western scholastic and Protestant models, Justin — like Florovsky, and in his own way like his elder Nikolai Velimirović — sought a theology drawn wholly from the patristic and liturgical sources of Orthodoxy itself. His first volume (1932) is roughly contemporary with the beginnings of that broader movement, and his lifelong polemic against “European humanism” is the negative form of the same impulse: to free Orthodox theology from what he saw as its captivity to Western categories (see Against European Humanism).

He is generally regarded as the foremost Serbian dogmatic theologian of the twentieth century and one of the significant Orthodox dogmaticians of the age, though his stature has been somewhat obscured outside the Serbian and Greek worlds by the fact that his central work remains largely untranslated, and by the controversy over his anti-ecumenism, which has sometimes overshadowed the dogmatic achievement (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019; and see the assessment in Legacy and Assessment). The judgment of his disciples and of sympathetic scholars is that the Dogmatics, not the polemics, is his true monument — a complete Orthodox systematic theology built around the God-Man and woven from the Fathers, produced against the grain of a century that had, in his diagnosis, forgotten both.

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Dogmatika Pravoslavne Crkve [The Dogmatics of the Orthodox Church], 3 vols. Belgrade, 1932 (vol. 1), 1935 (vol. 2), 1978 (vol. 3); collected in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije (Jevtić) et al. (Scope, structure, method, and publication history.)
  • Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (English anthology of dogmatic and ascetical essays drawn from the corpus.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The character, method, and place of the Dogmatics.)
  • Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Justin’s dogmatics, the neo-patristic movement, and his stature.)