John Zizioulas and Otherness: Gender, Sexuality, and the Influence of Zizioulas’s Theology

by Spyridoula Athanasopoulou-Kypriou

Metropolitan of Pergamon John D. Zizioulas did not develop a systematic theology of gender and sexuality. According to his theological project— an eschatological ontology that he considered to have been articulated in the Bible and fully realized by the patristic age—sexuality does not belong to the eschatological state of being, the kingdom of God, but to postlapsarian nature. As opposed to an ontology grounded in sexual or biological differentiation, Zizioulas develops a concept of personhood springing from otherness.

Spyridoula Athanasopoulou-Kypriou

A religious education teacher at the Moraitis School in Athens and a trained integrative psychotherapist. She studied theology and philosophy of religion in Greece and the UK and holds a PhD in systematic theology from the University of Manchester, where she was a lecturer in philosophical and Christian anthropology, and on religion, culture, and gender. She has also taught theology and literature at the Hellenic Open University. Dr. Athanasopoulou-Kypriou has published various books and articles on theology and literature, philosophy of religion, existentialism and psychoanalysis, feminist theology, and the history of religious women. Her recent projects focus on contemporary issues of gender and sexuality.

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