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.

But there is also something in fundamentalism that surpasses this symbol, which is no longer shared by all traditional Christians: first of all, the principle of the literal inerrancy of Scripture: since it is the Word of God, every utterance of it is true in the direct and immediate sense. Scripture should be interpreted literally, unless the text of Scripture itself calls for the opposite (for example, does not call the narration a parable). This position also seems traditional, but in fact it is not, because for the Church Fathers, and indeed for almost all medieval interpreters, the allegorical and other indirect meanings of Scripture had no less, and usually even more, value than the literal meaning. Fundamentalism, on the contrary, insists on the unconditional primacy and infallibility of the letter of Scripture, which the Church Fathers often left aside.

As a result, proponents of this trend, for example, categorically reject the theory of evolution on the grounds that the book of Genesis describes the creation of animals as a one-time process that leaves no room for gradual development. And the six days of creation themselves are usually understood by fundamentalists as six intervals of 24 hours, and the age of the universe according to this approach is about seven thousand years. Such a view is called the only one that corresponds to the Bible, but it seems that the only biblical view is that of a flat, motionless earth over which the sun, moon, and stars move, since this is the language used by the biblical writers (and all of us when we say "the sun has risen" or "the sun has set below the horizon").

In fact, this approach is the other extreme of liberal biblical criticism. Rejecting the obvious lie of liberal criticism with its reconstructions, fundamentalists themselves begin to create artificial and unconvincing reconstructions (for example, their geology, which agrees with the idea of the world created seven thousand years ago in a ready-made form) and offer their own untruth, which, in the words of the Apostle, has only "the appearance of piety." Then the principle of infallibility spreads even further than that of the Protestants, and the same property is endowed with the Fathers of the Church, and, ultimately, with the elected spiritual leaders...

Before the revolution of 1917, Russian biblical studies were a fairly young, original scientific school, the Russian doctrine had not yet had time to form, and their main efforts were reduced to comprehending and creatively adopting the best achievements of Western biblical studies. In fact, there is nothing new in this – this is how the path of Russian science, including theology, usually began, in order to later become completely independent and in some areas even surpass Western European. This was successful, for example, with liturgics, but this did not happen with biblical studies either before the revolution, or even more so, after it. As a result, Russian biblical scholars at this stage are forced to adopt Western methods in one way or another, to use the conclusions of Western colleagues; It is quite natural for the Orthodox to follow the most conservative models.

That is why fundamentalism, a movement of Protestant origin, suddenly begins to be perceived in Russia as a kind of almost patristic teaching, supposedly the only possible one for the Orthodox. But in this lecture I will try to show that in fact it is more destructive than useful for Russian biblical studies, which is only beginning to take shape in our country. Today it is not uncommon to hear Orthodox Christians vehemently disputing the propositions of A. von Harnack or G. Gunkel, as if they were expressed yesterday (R. Bultmann is much less likely to reach him, although this would be much more relevant). However, today almost no one shares the position of these scientists in its pure form, all criticism against them has long been expressed, here it remains only to repeat for the hundredth time what was said a long time ago; But the dangers of fundamentalism are noticed much less often.

In part, this was already the case with the generation of pre-revolutionary scholars: when N. N. Glubokovsky in emigration began to prove with the help of historical and philological methods that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written directly by the Apostle Paul, he took upon himself an insoluble task. One can say: "I believe that the Epistle was written by the Apostle himself, since many church writers testify to this," and this will be a self-sufficient statement, because faith does not require proof. But if we are to resort to an analysis of the style, composition, and manner of presentation, if we look at the place of this book in the New Testament canon, then we will have to admit that it is very different from all the other epistles that bear the name of the Apostle Paul. The method contradicts the conclusions, and, moreover, scientific analysis aimed exclusively at proving a predetermined point of view ceases, in fact, to be scientific. The researcher here does not so much analyze various arguments as select those that he needs for proof, for him it is not the analysis that is primary, but the conclusion. Therefore, the discussion loses its meaning: if both sides have a definite and unchanging point of view, which cannot be shaken by anything, then they have nothing to talk about among themselves. Unfortunately, it is precisely this model that often follows the "dialogue" about the Holy Scriptures in our society.

When the revolution broke out, Russian biblical scholars had not yet determined their position on this scale, one pole of which was liberal critics, and the other was fundamentalists. It is clear that after 1917 completely different issues appeared on the agenda, but a lot of valuable things were said, for example, by A. V. Kartashev in his report of 1944, which has not lost its relevance to this day (although there is something to correct in terms of specific examples). It is worth noting that in the same years, approximately the same process of searching for a "middle way" between the two extremes was going on in the Catholic Church, for example, the encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu, published in 1943. Life posed urgent questions to the Church, which had to be answered in modern language, without at the same time betraying the centuries-old Tradition, and there is probably no need to explain that in our time of peace we encounter similar problems.