PROTESTANTISM IN THE MIRROR OF THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX THEOLOGY OF THE 19-20th CENTURIES
The article deals with the phenomenon of the “golden age” of the Russian Orthodox theology of the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. The scientific breakthrough occurred due to the fact that the authors of the most significant works in the field of church-historical science (V. V. Bolotov, E. E. Golubinsky, V. O. Klyuchevsky, N. N. Glubokovsky) began to use the historical-critical method. As the works of Russian church historians were noticed in Germany, so the works of German Protestant theologians were well known in Russia. The opinion of German Protestants concerning natural sciences, methods of historical science, modern cultural and social processes (“secularization”) was of particular interest here. In the works of Russian Orthodox theologians, the author distinguishes between three approaches to the “Protestant question” - receptive encyclopedical, confessional-polemical, and constructive-critical; according to the author, the signs of the latter allow us to speak of the birth of Orthodox “liberal theology” in Russia, which is related to “liberal theology” in Germany. The author explains the reasons for the interest in Protestantism in the Orthodox Spiritual Academies at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries by the presence of extensive German-Russian relations, which allowed Orthodox theologians, who lived in a sense of crisis, to draw arguments from their Protestant colleagues for a polemic with a rapidly secularizing society in Russia. The author expresses confidence in the need to strengthen Protestant and Orthodox academic theological cooperation, which is especially important today in the situation of “de-christianization”.