Here, however, everything depends on the specific circumstances. In Germany, the theological faculty is a common phenomenon in a state university, but not so in France, where at one time the church was separated from the state, and, as the French joke, now the only sacred thing for the state is its secular character. At the same time, there is such a faculty in Strasbourg, France: the thing is that this city belonged to Germany for a long time, and when it passed to the French following the results of the First World War, they did not change the current state of affairs. And the secular nature of the state does not interfere with the existence of such a faculty... Or rather, two at once: Catholic and Protestant.

Our educational system is the direct heir of the atheistic Soviet Union. This means that we do not have theology in universities, but should it be returned? And, by the way, will there be, for example, two faculties at Moscow State University, and two scientific councils for dissertations: one for Orthodox, the other for Protestants? And in Kazan – for Muslims, in Elista – for Buddhists, and somewhere else for Catholics, Jews, and even pagans and Rastafarians... Or will everyone officially be only Orthodox, as they were atheists under the Soviets?

Theology cannot be neutral, independent of confessional affiliation, like physics or chemistry, this is understandable. Can it then be called science? But if we take the example of philosophy, as well as other humanities, any work in this field is inevitably based on certain ideological prerequisites. And yet, there are no "Platonic" or "Aristotelian" faculties, although each of them, of course, may have its own school that follows a certain line of thought. The main thing is that there are general rules for conducting scientific research and discussions. Apparently, theologians can do the same.

But what is theology in general? The Church calls only three saints theologians: John the Evangelist, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Symeon the New Theologian. This does not mean that all the other Fathers were alien to theology. For example, St. Basil the Great means for our theology no less than his friend St. Gregory. But by giving the saint such a name, tradition emphasizes the special nature of his ministry. Thus, all the evangelists spoke of Christ, but among the four, John really stands out, so to speak, for the "height of flight": the rest cite more facts, and John first of all expounds ideas. In the same way, Gregory differs from Basil, the most active bishop, in the more armchair nature of his ministry – he left beautiful sermons, letters and even poems.

Such theology, of course, cannot be learned at the university, you cannot defend a dissertation on it. So today we call theology rather "theological studies." Literary critics-Pushkinists do not write new poems and stories, like Pushkin, they study and systematize what has already been written, compile biographies of Pushkin, tell the public about him. The majority of modern theologians act in the same way, acting precisely in the scientific paradigm: whether a certain author wrote such and such words, in what sense they should be understood, how they relate to the words of other authors – all these are questions for the most ordinary humanitarian research. These works correspond to the criterion of falsifiability necessary in science: in principle, the untruth of the scientist's statements can be proved. For example, if I assert that there were four canonical Gospels from the beginning, this assertion may be refuted by the discovery of some ancient and authoritative Christian document (for example, the letter of St. Gregory, or the decrees of some council) in which the Gospel of Peter or "Thomas" would be equated with the texts known to us. To date, there is no such text.

But how can the key thesis of the Christian faith, that the Son of God died for our sins and rose again, be proven or disproved? Even if the crucifixion and unexpected return to life of Jesus of Nazareth are 100 percent proven, science will tell us nothing about whether He was the Son of God or what these events mean for our eternal life, if only because that eternity itself lies beyond the scope of scientific knowledge. As well as God: biology studies the living (bio-), geology studies the earthly (geo-), but theology, theology, does not study the divine itself (theo-), but rather people's ideas about Him.

Then how do they differ from religious studies or culturology? Obviously, the theologian does not simply state the fact: this treatise says this and that, but draws practical conclusions. It is written in this way, and this is the truth, which means that we should live in such and such a way. And such a theology, of course, will inevitably depend on the author's ideas about God, on his confessional affiliation. There is no need to establish two or three different faculties, because many facts and theories will be common to honest researchers of all faiths, but it must be imagined that such a science will never be completely objective and "confessionally sterile." True, approximately the same can be said about philosophy, which no one is going to cross out from the list of scientific disciplines yet.

So, should theology be given the status of an officially recognized science? I don't have a definitive answer to this question, because it all depends on how exactly you do it. Indeed, if the course of Orthodox (or any other) dogmatics replaces Marxist dialectical materialism, and the history of the Church replaces the history of the CPSU, then it is better not to. But such an approach would have nothing to do with science at all. It was just as wrong to equate doctrinal propositions with scientific hypotheses, to deduce them from facts and to prove them logically. And, finally, it would be completely absurd to impose the principle of confessionality on the humanities. A scientist may be an Orthodox or a Protestant, and his views will inevitably influence his work, and they will need to be taken into account when reading his works. But if we try to fence off our church science from the world scientific community "for the sake of the purity of the faith," then it will immediately cease to be both church and science, and will turn into sectarian dogmatism.

But if the recognition of theology as a science contributes to the integration of church scientists into a single scientific space, this can only be welcomed. To a large extent, this is already happening now: recently I was defending my Ph.D. thesis in theology, which, in my opinion, could well be held in the academic council in history (specialty is source studies) or even in philology. The content and design of the work, the nature of the discussion and everything else fully met the requirements of academic science... True, here we can begin to talk about the situation of this very science in Russia, but this is a separate conversation, and not the most joyful one.

Only theologians themselves will have to think about the fact that state-recognized diplomas will not only give them more weight, but will impose strict obligations on them, primarily formal ones. It will not be possible to submit a dissertation for defense, no matter how good it is, until there are enough publications in peer-reviewed journals (and it will not be easy for the journal to get into this list either). You will need to meet many other requirements of the Higher Attestation Commission... Unfortunately, now our administrators from science are primarily concerned with their own control over it: to come up with as many formal indicators as possible, for non-compliance with which they can be punished. It is clear that unscrupulous careerists will always crawl through the sieve of these requirements much easier than real scientists, and there are no such algorithms by which it would be possible to separate beautifully designed nonsense from serious scientific work.

Actually, this is the main question: what will be in the first place in such a reform? Changing the sign for the sake of PR - or serious, painstaking and sometimes thankless work on the essence? But this question relates not only to theology or science, but to our entire present life, both social and ecclesiastical.

14. Fundamentalism: A Way Out or a Challenge?

Liberal biblical criticism, which flourished in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was largely based on the fact that the text of the Bible in its present form is not of significant interest to scholars. All the attention of such critics was directed to the reconstruction of a certain initial state of the text, or, more precisely, to the reconstruction of the events that lay at the basis of this text. Everything miraculous was deliberately excluded from this reconstruction, and in general everything that in one way or another did not correspond to the theories of the reenactors. Instead of the Christ in whom the Church believes, a certain "historical Jesus" was brought to the stage, and he turned out to be different for different researchers.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that for traditional Christians of any denomination, such an approach turned out to be unacceptable. Fundamentalism, a movement that originated at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States, became a kind of "negation of the negation". Now the word is applied to any religious group that insists on the impeccable observance of the rules of its religion and often actively imposes it on all others, but fundamentalism was originally born among Protestants, although these views were and are shared by many Catholics and Orthodox. Its very name goes back to the series of books "The Fundamentals", published in 1910 by M. and L. Steward. As the name implies, the proponents of this movement insisted on some fundamental truths of the Christian faith: the virgin birth of Christ, His bodily resurrection, and the authenticity of His miracles. In principle, this is the natural position of any group of Christians who adhere to their tradition. To profess it, you do not need to write separate books – a symbol of faith is enough.