AHC: Orthodox Reformation

Your challenge is to have a reformation in the Orthodox world, inspired against the corruption and poor practices in the Orthodox leadership. Ideally this comes to something as close to Lutheranism as you can get it.
 
Perhaps the alt!Reformation starts out as a heresy in a surviving Byzantine Empire against the corrupt patriarchy, but then spreads quickly, even into Catholicism, and maybe getting the attention of Rome.

Even with a Orthodox Reformation, the way things were going in Rome, there was going to be some kind of need for a reform.
 
Hmmm...in my first timeline I had an iconoclasm occur in the Russian Orthodox Church, but this didn't really change the structure of Church politics, just the expression of belief of the laity and the way of worship.
 
Caesaropapism in Orthodoxy makes this unlikely. As long as the state has as much control of the Church as it does in Orthodoxy, an incensed people can always turn to the government to remove and replace corrupt officials. In a way, the amount of power Lutheran princes gained over the churches in their domains after Augsburg made those churches a lot more like Orthodoxy. On top of this, the fact that Orthodoxy isn't as centralized as Catholicism means that problems or corruption in one autocephalous (meaning it has its own patriarch/head and isn't answerable to anything short of an Ecumenical Council) Church won't be seen as indicative of the whole structure being corrupt, and prelates from other Churches can take the corrupt Churches to tax by excommunicating their members, appealing to Constantinople, etc. The people can always say "Well things are going fine over there, it's just the priests over here that are corrupt."

Furthermore, the intellectual history that inspired the Reformers just doesn't exist in the East. As I've said every time someone posts a thread like this, what ultimately allowed the Reformers' to form their doctrines about how their churches should be governed and what constitutes right Christian belief was the rediscovery in the West of ancient texts like the Greek New Testament, the Non-neoplatonic Plato, Aristotle, etc., since this spurred the desire to return "ad fontes" or to the original sources. It was through this process that some Western Christians came to the conclusion that there were inconsistencies between what Catholicism teaches and what Scripture says. But the texts that enabled this to happen had always been extant in the East and had a long history of use which shaped how they were viewed there. Further, there are certain arguments the Protestants made which wouldn't make much sense to Easterners, given that they operate in a completely different theological milieu (the iconoclasm of the Reformers will be a non-starter for sure, given how much Orthodoxy venerates the Seventh Ecumenical Council and how well-known St. John Damascene is among Eastern theologians).

So in short, this is a scenario that will be hard to pull off, and more likely than not would have to be a top-down reform in a country where the state has a lot of power. The best I can do for you is have a Tsar impose something like Protestantism out of Europhilia, but this will be rejected by the populace as being too Western and will be very hard to enforce. It would help tremendously if the changes are indigenous. Maybe an early Rasputin-like figure is the way to go. It's very hard to enforce doctrinal conformity in Siberia, and so perhaps a "mad monk" who spent a lot of time there forming Protestantish doctrines and ideas of how the Church should be run eventually worms his way into the Imperial Court, causing the Tsar to impose his beliefs on the people, although he probably won't be completely successful and will have to use a lot of violence to get it done.
 
Agatho is correct.

There is also the history of the Catholic Church to consider. In the centuries before Protestantism, the Church had ranged from the pornocracy, up to the heights of the Crusades, back down into being a French puppet during the 14th century, then fractured in the Western Schism, before settling back down into being a corrupt Italian city-state with a theocrat at the helm.

This Church corruption was not present in the East, where Imperial control and the idea of symphonia between ruler and Church prevented the Orthodox Church from becoming a profane and temporal power, with armies, lands, etc.
 
Well, there WAS a Reformation in the Russian Orthodox Church (in strictest sence of the word Reformation): Nikonian reforms that produced the Old Believers as the result of Schism. And Peter I went full on with Caesaropapism by abolishing Patriarchy and establishing a Sinode (basically a Ministry of Religion Affairs which turned a head of state into de facto head of Church).

If you're interested in pre-17th century something and/or close to Protestant (read Calvinist?) ethics - there's this example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sect_of_Skhariya_the_Jew#History
Failed for many reasons, the foremost being "too radical".
 
1) The Reformation in the West was heavily based on the rising middle class, increased literacy and the printing press. So, the Orthodox don't have most of the impetus for it.

2) The West was split into several competing states, even microstates. Orthodoxy certainly had a few states, but Russia and the Ottomans were pretty overwhelming. When Luther managed to convince several German princes that it was in their secular best interest to avoid Roman authority, it really, really helped the growth of Protestantism.

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To get Orthodox Reformation, you might need the Byzantine Empire to collapse and not be conquered by Muslims. Having a dozen or hundreds of statelets competing would be a good start.
 
As others have said, it's a bit more difficult due to the structure of the Eastern Orthodox nations to have something very similar to OTL Protestant Reformation.

Not to say that a Reformation is impossible, but it would be one shaped and grounded in the particular political and religious situation of those peoples.

Really, the best (albeit difficult) way that you could get this is starting not from a religious perspective but from a political one: the high church hierarchy is perceived as corrupt on its own and is supported by the government against any legitimate efforts to fix it. A peasant revolt led by or allied to a movement of priests that are seeking to fight corruption and overly heavy handed control of the Church by an equally corrupt government, for example. It wins enough before being crushed to become a rallying cry for similar political movements in that particular nation and an internal political crisis gains some religious dressing on it. Things could potentially radicalize from there as the conflicts drag on.

Now, it likely would still not be close to OTL Lutheranism in theology, but you would probably get a not insignificant number of more rural/unorthodox priests giving similar talks about serfdom and the Church being made by men, and it being possible to unmake them as per Luther OTL before he realized his Prince backers weren't so fond of those lines.

Sola fide, predestination, and other traits of OTL's Protestant Reformation though are unlikely to gain ground: priests in the East were generally better educated on Church theology and more firmly entrenched in the hierarchy, relative to the kind of rural, Latin illiterate priests in Germany, Switzerland, and Bohemia that drove the OTL Protestant movement and its antecedents.
 
Joasaph was deposed OTL--I imagine he would have ended more violently if he had tried to go more Protestant, especially in his role as leader of the Christian millet.

Lucaris himself was anathematized.

Without the support of secular rulers--or, more specifically, Russian rulers--I doubt Patriarchal dabblings with Protestantism would have gone anywhere.
 

Sulemain

Banned
Agatho is correct.

There is also the history of the Catholic Church to consider. In the centuries before Protestantism, the Church had ranged from the pornocracy, up to the heights of the Crusades, back down into being a French puppet during the 14th century, then fractured in the Western Schism, before settling back down into being a corrupt Italian city-state with a theocrat at the helm.

This Church corruption was not present in the East, where Imperial control and the idea of symphonia between ruler and Church prevented the Orthodox Church from becoming a profane and temporal power, with armies, lands, etc.

Except that, at the dawn of the 18th Century, it did very much become an instrument of temporal power, its spiritual leaders at the beck and call of secular authority.

And that's just Russia. Let's not even talk about the way the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire interacted.
 
Except that, at the dawn of the 18th Century, it did very much become an instrument of temporal power, its spiritual leaders at the beck and call of secular authority.

And that's just Russia. Let's not even talk about the way the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire interacted.

And in neither case was the Orthodox Church independent, as opposed to the very independent and temporal RCC which, even in Avignon, exercised its own temporal prerogatives on Earth.
 

Sulemain

Banned
And in neither case was the Orthodox Church independent, as opposed to the very independent and temporal RCC which, even in Avignon, exercised its own temporal prerogatives on Earth.

Of course, the temporal power of the RCC was not by design, but by historical accident and no small part fraud.
 
1) The Reformation in the West was heavily based on the rising middle class, increased literacy and the printing press. So, the Orthodox don't have most of the impetus for it.

2) The West was split into several competing states, even microstates. Orthodoxy certainly had a few states, but Russia and the Ottomans were pretty overwhelming. When Luther managed to convince several German princes that it was in their secular best interest to avoid Roman authority, it really, really helped the growth of Protestantism.

----
To get Orthodox Reformation, you might need the Byzantine Empire to collapse and not be conquered by Muslims. Having a dozen or hundreds of statelets competing would be a good start.

I agree with everyone that the impetus was not as strong.
But I think there might be another option.
Reformation wasn`t the exclusive domain of the middle class. A lot of the dynamics stemmed from the peasant revolts - although Luther opposed them - and radical reformation relied to some extent on them. Now, oppressed peasants is something you certainly had in the East, too. And reformation started earlier than the printing press: Don´t forget the Hussites!

Speaking of the Hussites:
They are my no. 1 bet for this OP. There were not only Bohemian, Moravian, Lusatian and Silesian Hussites (speaking forms of Czech, Slovak, Polish and German), but also Hungarian ones, including in Transilvania during the Budai Nagy Antal revolt in 1437 (speaking Hungarian, but also Romanian / Vlachian).
Have, as a PoD, the moderate and the radical Hussites stand together and consolidate their own separate republic or confederacy, and have the successful model spread Eastward. Calixtianism certainly had little appeal for orthodox peasants, but revolutionary Taborites are quite a different thing. If they remain strong and unbeaten, they can support peasant revolts elsewhere, starting in Transilvania, where you had a similar combination of ethnic discrimination and economic exploitation of the peasantry by a Catholic minority. If Taborism gains traction with Romanian-speaking Transilvanian peasants, I could well imagine a Vallachian or Moldavian ruler attempt to play the nationalist card and profit from such a fifth column in an attempt to carve out some part of Transilvania.
With an (again moderate, of course) Hussite Stefan cel Mare, for example,
you could have bible schools instead of monasteries all over Moldavia.
 
Oh, and I should add to that scenario:
Ottoman advances are bound to weaken Hungary, and Ottomans might want to play a small sect against the larger Catholic Church and support the former. Or, if they don`t, and Byzantium still falls, then the Hussite Reformation model in its national adaptation for the Moldavians or Valachians might provide a blueprint for Slavic rulers in distancing themselves from Ottoman-controlled Byzantium - radical autocephaly, if you want.
 
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