The Phenomenon of Religious Renovation: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Analysis
Religious Renovationism as a problem of scholarly and theological discourse took shape in the early 20th century, due to the rapid rise of modernity, which caused a wave of religious modernism and fundamentalism in Russia, Western Europe and the Islamic world. Today, the concept of religious Renovationism is widely used to describe religious processes and phenomena resulting from the interaction between religion as a dynamic spiritual and social subsystem and society as a social system undergoing development. So far, religious studies have not suggested an integrative approach to understanding the phenomenon of religious Renovationism, which would explain why Renovationism has become a form of self-expression for many religious movements within different religious traditions. Also unexplained is what actually unites them in this intention. Studying the experience of Renovationism within the Russian Orthodoxy in the early 20th century, we can see that its representatives (K. Aggeyev, M. Chel'tsov, Archimandrite Mikhail [Semenov]) defined religious Renovationism as a possibility of creative development of the religion with the emphasis on the Holy tradition as the dynamic foundation of Orthodoxy. Roman Catholic modernism sees modernizing the church as the main mission of religious Renovationism. It strives to help Catholicism attain universality and the ability to understand any culture. At the same time, as it has been shown by leaders of the Catholic Church in their public speeches (J. Ratzinger), modernizing cannot be imagined without reference to the fundamentals of Christianity. Islamic theologians define religious Renovationism as the process of discovering the origins and foundations of religion. Islamic reformers believe that an appeal to the Koran and Sunnah, in their correct interpretation, provides a necessary clue to solving the urgent problems of modernity. All of this proves that the phenomenon of religious Renovationism appears on the periphery of religious fundamentalism and religious modernism, combining the features of both. Such a position is also corroborated by the theoretical and methodological research in this field (M. Marty, L. Caplan, M. Riesebrodt, P. Gurevich). They have convincingly shown that fundamentalism and modernism could be viewed as two non-mutually exclusive parts of the same tendency. Thus, through the prism of the fundamentalism/modernism disjunction, the author proposes a socio-philosophical conceptualization of the phenomenon of religious Renovationism, which could at the same time serve as a convenient heuristic mechanism for analyzing the complex forms of religiosity.