„Er schuf sie als Mann und Frau“ Orthodoxe Anmerkungen zur säkularen Kultur der Gleichberechtigung
"He created them male and female". Orthodoxe remarks to the secular culture of equality

Summary/Abstract: Opposing the contemporary liberal and egalitarian project of securing equality in status and opportunity between the sexes by relativizing their differences, this essay examines what the Tradition teaches on the relationship between man and woman. Against modernizing tendencies, even within Orthodox academic literature, to see both merely as equal and complementary, the essay’s first part explores the guidance provided by Genesis, Christ’s own attitude to women, and the Apostolic letters, all of which affirm a male monarchy. The implications of this teaching for marital love are developed in the second part. Against the dominant view that love requires equality, three dimensions of the lovers’ inequality are laid out in terms of therapeutic equalizing of un-equals, mutual training in selflessness, and emulating the Divine love. As a result, the love between husband and wife surfaces as a diversified obedience structure that responds to and mirrors the monarchical character of the Divine love. The conclusion draws out some implications of that theological ideal for husbands and wives in egalitarian social democracies. It locates the major challenge for Christians today in the need to keep their pursuit of holiness clear of the secular moral discourse endorsed in their social environment.

• Details
• Contents