My dissertation advances Orthodox Christian social ethics by creating a typology of Orthodox Christian ethicists’ and theologians’ engagement with systems of oppression. Orthodox Christian theological ethicists rarely discuss systems of oppression and privilege (like racism, sexism, etc.) or systems of liberation (like community organizing) explicitly. To make matters more confusing, Orthodox thinkers leverage the same theo-ethical language, sources, and liturgical traditions to make competing claims. For example, as Russia has used Orthodoxy to justify an invasion of Ukraine to save it from “Western ideologies,” like gender fluidity and feminism, Archbishop Elpidophoros, the primate of America, baptized the child of a gay couple, a first within Greek Orthodoxy. Still, both of these ways of thinking have some claim on what it means to live an Orthodox ethical life and to interact with systems of oppression, privilege, the State, and imperialism.

The job of theological ethics is to adjudicate such contradictory claims through analysis of their foundations, assumptions, and implications. Systems thinking is well-suited to this project because it reveals the implicit worldviews behind competing Orthodox social visions. This dissertation uses systems change theory to unmask the ways Orthodox Christian ethical claims interact with theories of social governance and concrete, historical systems of oppression and privilege. I argue that there are four major types in Orthodox theological ethics: New Symphonia, totalizing world-rejecting asceticism, local social service, and theotic pluralism. In other words, some Orthodox social ethics are pluralist, and others authoritarian; some are inward-looking and individualizing, and others focus on the local impact of service. Clarifying these differences eases pathways to intra-Orthodox understanding and collaboration in social justice more broadly.