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.

We cannot avoid the problem of science and methodology: we will force ourselves to prove things that are simply impossible to prove in the name of science, for example, Paul's authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews or the creation of the world seven thousand years ago. But we will have to convince everyone that this is exactly what our correct science is, although in fact it will not be a science at all, but will only borrow some scientific forms. For example, a few decades ago, a dissertation was defended at an Islamic university in an Arab country, proving that the earth is a plane around which the Sun and the Moon rotate, because this is how the Koran describes it. It sounds ridiculous, but today there is more and more Islamic research proving the opposite: no, the Qur'an teaches that the earth is spherical. This sounds no more convincing. It would seem that there is a simple way out: to admit that at the time of the writing of the Qur'an (as well as the Bible), people believed the earth to be flat, and the text reflects these views. For Islamists, this is inconceivable, since the Qur'an is dictated to them directly by God and does not contain the slightest inaccuracy or incompleteness – but why should we Christians take on such an intolerable burden?

The second problem is pedagogical. I happened to see people (I knew two well) who were Orthodox Christians, began to study biblical studies, and... left the Church, losing faith at least in the Church, if not in God. It can be said that their faith was weak, and that biblical studies is a spiritually dangerous field, I will not argue with this. But there is another side to this problem. It was explained to these people at one time that the Church has a certain standard set of correct answers to all questions. Until they subjected these answers to their own analysis, they were satisfied with them. But as soon as they tried to understand everything from the position of reason, the answers ceased to be convincing. Honesty demanded that they reject either the arguments of reason or the postulates of faith — they decided to follow reason. Unfortunately, no one suggested to them at that moment that faith is not hostile to reason, it does not necessarily include all those elements that were presented to them by the fundamentalist environment as the only possible ones for a Christian.

Back in the early nineties, I happened to see a brochure on the truth of the Bible, where everything was built on the book of the prophet Jonah. The author reasoned as follows: atheists say that a person cannot live three days in the belly of a whale and stay alive, and therefore they reject the Bible. But there are cases (he gave examples that I have not had the opportunity to verify) when sailors fell into the mouth of a large fish and came out of it after a while alive, so the Bible is right. It seems that this move has completely failed. The author, in effect, declares that the Bible is right if and only if the account of the book of Jonah is to be understood as fully explicable from a scientific point of view, namely that whales swallow people and people remain alive. If we reason in this logic, the answer of an unbiased rational person can only be this: whales do not swallow people alive, therefore the Bible is wrong, it is a collection of ancient myths that has nothing to do with reality. Among all the possible explanations of the book of Jonah (it was a miracle, it can be understood allegorically, etc.), the author chose the most losing one and bet on it, as if on a stake, the entire truth of his faith. One cannot help thinking that inveterate atheists with their clumsy criticism of religion serve the Church better than such a preacher!

Finally, it is a spiritual problem. With such an approach, I am afraid, our Church runs the risk of sharing the fate of Alexandria, once the most glorious and greatest in the whole East. The Alexandrians stubbornly adhered to the formulations of their great father, St. They did not depart from them in any way, did not in the least belittle the Divine dignity of Christ, but fell first into heresy, and then into insignificance. Today, the Coptic Church still preserves the verbal formulations of the Holy Scriptures. St. Cyril, preserves its ancient rites, but it is already an ethnographic relic, an island in the Muslim or secular sea. Her fate is a warning to us.

So, the time has come to draw a completely predictable conclusion. Fundamentalism often presents itself as a way out of the situation into which liberal biblical criticism seeks to lead Christianity. In fact, this is not a way out, but exactly the same challenge as this criticism, only a challenge from the other side, and less obvious for the Orthodox. Fundamentalism is not identical with sound, creative conservatism, which is much more suitable for the Orthodox Bible scholar. At this point, of course, one can ask what this sound conservatism should consist of, but it is a much more complex question, and I do not yet have an answer to it. My talk follows more of an apophatic model: what should be avoided and what we should create can only be determined by all of us together and shown in practice.

15. Linguists on evolution

In the fall of 2006, St. Petersburg schoolgirl Masha Schreiber and her father filed a lawsuit against the Ministry of Education: their religious feelings were offended by teaching the theory of evolution at school. The lawsuit was lost, Masha left her native school and went all the way to the Dominican Republic. Whether the theory of evolution is taught in the tropics, or whether it is explained that the world was created in a ready-made form in six days, we know nothing about this. But among Christians, disputes on this topic do not cease to this day: how to treat evolution? Is it a scientifically proven theory or a conciliarly condemned heresy?