Icons, Miracles, and the Ecclesial Identity of Laity in Late Imperial Russian Orthodoxy

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, clergy and professional theologians in the Orthodox Church in Russia found themselves engrossed in debates over the theological nature and “proper” institutional fashioning of the sacred community called “church.” Insofar as this intensive reflection on communal life heatedly addressed issues of religious authority and the role of laypeople in that life, this period in Russian Orthodoxy in many ways lends itself to comparison with two critical points on the time line of the history of Christianity in the West: the Reformation and Vatican II. True, the “evolution” or brewing “revolution” (depending on one\u27s interpretation of those debates) in Russian Orthodoxy never had the chance to become a comparable definitive “event,” largely on account of the political aftermath of the 1917 revolutions.1 Nevertheless, the acute tensions in thinking about “church” that surfaced during that period suggest that had it not been for the sociopolitical events of 1917—events that propelled the Orthodox community into another level of concern—the landscape of Orthodox Christianity in Russia might well have undergone “modernizing” shifts comparable to those in the West