However, on the whole, Kartashov's position was shared by a few Orthodox Christians: I remember very well how, as early as the late 1980s, the very expression "Paris School of Theology" was perceived almost as the name of a heresy, and when Patriarch Alexy II mentioned the names of its representatives in a positive sense in his public speech at Moscow State University, it had the effect of an exploding bomb. Times are changing, and today it is even strange to remember it... To some extent, Fr. A. Men continued Kartashov's line, and we know how many complaints his books caused. Unfortunately, instead of concrete criticism (which, of course, is always appropriate), it was usually a matter of indiscriminate rejection of the very approach that combines scientific analysis with a spiritual reading of the text: it is unseemly for the Orthodox to talk about such things! This position has usually positioned itself as conservative and traditionalist, but in essence it is difficult to call it anything other than fundamentalist.

Thus, the approach of A. V. Kartashov and other scholars and theologians belonging to this "middle" trend is to allow oneself the freedom of scientific analysis, remaining within the framework of church dogmas. This framework is quite broad: after all, belief in the Resurrection of Christ or in the creation of the world by God cannot be confirmed or refuted by science, since science studies natural things, and we believe in the supernatural. The dead, according to science, are not resurrected, which is why faith in the Resurrection, which surpasses the laws of nature, is so important for us. If it had conformed to these laws, there would have been nothing salvific for us in it.

Thus, an Orthodox scholar can remain a completely conscientious scholar, and therefore, in particular, not prejudge his conclusions. If it then seems to him that some of these conclusions contradict the faith of the Church, this contradiction should become for him not a source of fear, but a source of creative tension, the starting point of the search for truth. Something like this. Anthony of Sourozh advised us to approach the reading of the Gospel: not to gloss over the contradictions that arise in the soul, but, on the contrary, to note them, to reflect on them, so that they become points of spiritual growth. It is possible that some of these questions will not be resolved for the rest of our lives, but the point is not to get some smooth answers to all questions, but to have this life in Christ in reality, and to make it genuine. In the same way, science and education are needed only when they are genuine and taken seriously. I may not have an answer to some question that is important enough, and scientific honesty, as well as spiritual sobriety, demand that I admit that there is none. But I trust God that this answer can be found in principle, even in the life of the age to come. This is better than grabbing the first answer that comes across and declaring it final.

But if we sometimes have moments of internal disagreement with the Gospel itself, then much fewer such controversial cases are associated with scientific analysis and they are much easier to resolve. For example, if a researcher concludes that the Apostle Paul almost certainly did not write Hebrews in its final form, what does that mean for him? Only one thing: the authority of the text is not connected with its human authorship. The Church accepted this Epistle as divinely inspired, saw in it an exposition of her faith and included it in the canon. Whether it was written by Paul's disciples from his words, or by some individual author, in this case does not affect the authority of the text itself, the truth of the ideas expressed in it.

The other way is to abandon any scientific analysis altogether so as not to embarrass anyone. Perhaps this is why the successes of Russian biblical studies are so modest? Let us imagine for a moment that liturgists were given the task of justifying perfection and primordial predetermined in their studies... not even the Typikon, but our current usage. Let us assume that any remark in the spirit that a certain element of worship arose quite late and is of no essential importance would be dismissed at once as obviously impious. Would liturgics have been able to reach its present heights under such conditions? I strongly doubt it. But then we should not make these demands on biblical studies either.

Like a century ago, we can creatively adopt Western experience today. Our lag has its positive sides: we can not repeat other people's mistakes, but immediately draw conclusions from them. For example, many lances have been broken about Q theory, which is common to Matthew and Luke and to a source unknown to Mark, but today a growing number of New Testament scholars are leaving this hypothesis aside as unproven and not very useful for practical purposes. Perhaps we should not focus too much on it, focusing on more pressing issues. In the West, there has been a discussion about fundamentalism for a long time, I will now cite only one name that is well known to the Russian reader – J. Dunn. I do not share all of Dunn's points, but he is remarkably correct about fundamentalism.

First of all, I would like to note that the psychological factor is extremely important here. A fundamentalist craves security. He must know for sure that certain provisions important for his faith remain unshakable and no one dares to encroach on them. It would seem that such confidence is directly related to faith... But it actually excludes another concept, named by a word from the same root. Confidence excludes trust. If I am sure of something, it means that I know everything for sure, I control everything myself and I will not allow anyone to dispose of this territory. But if I trust a person or God, I can be sure of nothing but a happy outcome. I am ready to accept any turn of events, I do not prejudge anything and entrust everything to the care of the one I trust. That was the faith of Abraham and the faith of the apostles — they responded to God's call without knowing anything, not being sure of anything in particular.

And such confidence also excludes the possibility of surprise. If I know for sure what things I will find in my wardrobe, then I am sure that there is nothing unfamiliar to me, nothing got there without my will. Trust, on the contrary, is always ready to be discovered: with childlike spontaneity, it enters the beautiful garden of a loving Father and does not know what flowers and fruits it will find in it today, but only knows that they will be beautiful. Trust is ready to be endlessly surprised, which means it can grow, change and live. This is not given certainty, she walks around the beautiful garden like a watchman with a mallet, and keeps a watchful eye that no stranger gets in there. But the watchman is not up to using the gifts of this garden.

Dunn says that fundamentalism rejects three things, and I agree with him on that. Of these, the first is the idea of the limitation of the human word, the conventionality of our formulations. For the patristic approach, the apophatic approach has always been significant: we are simply not able to express in words the fullness of the Truth, we can only point to it, to determine the limits beyond which it does not exist. But the fundamentalist begins to claim that verbal formulas contain its entirety. Among Protestants, this leads to the so-called "bibliolatry," where people worship the text of the Bible rather than the One of whom the text speaks. Since Orthodox Christians read the text much less often, they cannot be reproached for bibliolatry, but still the fruits are not very good.

Second, fundamentalism rejects the situational and contextual nature of the texts of Scripture. We see in it a multitude of human stories, and what is said to one person in his situation cannot necessarily be applied to another in another – but with a fundamentalist approach, the text is bronzed in the form of complete dogmatic formulations, uttered once and for all time. The personal dimension disappears from it, it no longer becomes a testimony to people's lives, but the rules by which people should live. But was it not this approach that Christ denounced when arguing with the Pharisees?

Finally, the fundamentalist loses the variety of styles and techniques, becomes insensitive to the poetry of the biblical text. Everything that can be understood literally must be understood literally for him, but this leads to many absurdities. For example, when the book of Exodus tells us that the water in the Nile turned into blood, should we understand that it became real animal or human blood, and therefore contained red blood cells and white blood cells, was of a certain type? Hardly. But if we are to be consistent fundamentalists, we will have to prove that this and only such a reading can be considered true.

It is not difficult to see that such an approach was not characteristic of the Church Fathers. They usually cared little at all about literal, historical interpretation – and this is not surprising, they were well aware that they lived in a different country centuries after these events, spoke a different language than biblical characters and did not have sufficient means and methods to clarify the details of certain historical events. Therefore, although the spiritual and moral interpretation of the Bible by the Fathers has been performed at an unsurpassed level, there are still many gaps in the literal understanding of the Scriptures. They can be partially replenished with the help of modern science, and there is no reason for us to refuse its help, just as the Fathers did not reject the philosophy of their time, which was pagan in origin, and just as they used for the interpretation of the Scriptures the rudiments of the natural scientific knowledge of that time, which was very imperfect (the best example of which is the "Six Days" of St. Basil the Great). Moreover, it is this approach that may seem relevant and in demand to the modern reader, who still finds it difficult to master the theological treatises of the Fathers, but he perceives simple biblical narratives with much greater interest.

Dunn also talks about three practical consequences of fundamentalism. Firstly, it is a refusal to interpret the text, in the Orthodox version it can be framed as "the fathers have already said everything for us". In any case, it is the notion that there is a very limited set of correct interpretations, which is already exhaustively enumerated in a few books, and that we just need to repeat them. But this would mean consigning the Bible to the archives, ceasing to see in it the Word of God, addressed not to the ancient interpreters, but to each of us. The second consequence is the homogenization of the text, that is, its reduction "to a form convenient for logarithm." In his time, for approximately the same reasons, Tatian compiled a consolidated version of the four Euxangelia, the "Diatessaron", but the Church rejected it – it was important for her to preserve the testimonies of the four Evangelists, even if they differed from each other in some small details (and this just testifies to the authenticity of the testimonies, since four people can never report exactly the same thing if they have not previously agreed with each other). And the third consequence is harmonization, the desire to eliminate at all costs all formal contradictions, not only between the different books of the Bible, but also, for example, between all of them and the data of the natural sciences. With this approach, the Book of Genesis is obliged to be at the same time a textbook on cosmology, astrophysics, geology, paleontology, botany and a dozen other disciplines. But why?

More broadly, fundamentalism leads to the loss of the human element in the Bible. It is understood as the Word of God, and this seems quite correct and pious, but it is denied that it also contains something human. I remember how once I was invited to teach a course on biblical poetics at the Moscow Theological Academy, and I began it with the statement that we would not be talking about the divine, but about the human side of Scripture. Some students unleashed a flurry of indignation on me: how is this possible! But I am afraid that if we consider this impossible, we will face a number of very, very serious problems. Again, after Dunn, I will name three.