BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. Theology has traditionally kept its distance from politics, and these days the boundary between them grows harder to find. I have in mind here something other than political theology, namely a theology inlaid with the political propaganda of the dehumanising ideology of the “Russian world.” It puts faithful theologians before a hard choice, since defending Christian values while resisting the pull of political advantage is not a simple matter. And the question that follows is whether any faithful theologians remain inside Russia today who can withstand the propagandistic mythology of the “Russian world” at all.

In an age of globalisation and clashing civilisations, Russian red Christian thinkers, working through a post-imperial syndrome, look for ways to strengthen the standing of their ideological version of Orthodoxy, and now of Evangelicalism as well, on the world stage. An excessive emphasis on geopolitical ambition, however, ends by substituting political ideology for theology altogether. They attach themselves by various means to integrative church and educational alliances in order to spread their influence in the spirit of the “Russian world,” according to which things with the West and with Christian civilisation are never quite clear, and by which aggression is justified, along with the destruction of national identity in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, and the killing of dissenters as a kind of divine practice.

Since all of this rests on state mythology and popular anti-Western rhetoric rather than on theology in any serious sense, fundamental theology gives way to political illusion. Public theological discussion in Russia has by now been effectively banned, including inside the classrooms of theological schools. Church ministers are alarmed at the mere possibility that somebody may hold an opinion differing from Kremlin propaganda and from the ideology of the “Russian world,” and many of them take offence at the very suggestion that a person might learn to think apart from propaganda discourses built exclusively around a red Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God.

Theological education is under the same pressure from expediency. The traditional stance of searching for truth has been replaced by the propaganda of correct views, so that dogmatism stands where critical reflection used to be, and the search for divine and theological truth has given way to following state authorities and their narratives. Teaching in the seminaries now proceeds according to correct ideas about the end times, about how things are never quite clear, about the need to defend traditional Christian values as propaganda defines them, and to defend the Russian people wherever they happen to live, including through aggression and murder. Students learn either to keep silent or to accept the myth that Russia holds a divine messianic calling to unite the whole Orthodox or Christian world under its leadership, through aggression and torture and murder if necessary.

The imposition of the political ideology of the “Russian world” under the appearance of Evangelical or Orthodox theology, which carries more than a whiff of God-fighting communism and atheism, therefore leads directly to the degradation of spiritual education in Russia. Theology worth the name cannot serve as a mouthpiece for political slogans or for the worldview doctrines of the “Russian world” and of making somebody great again. Its calling is to serve the spiritual renewal of a society on Gospel and Christ-centred foundations rather than on Russian imperialist and ethno-religious ones, and that calling requires a dialogue between church, society and government which the theological community in Russia has all but given up.

So instead of forming independent-minded theologians able to seek truth and to enter dialogue, the seminaries turn out a steadily growing number of people who are either obedient as leaders or silent about the dehumanising communist-Christian propaganda of their state, propaganda that breaks the unity of the Body of Christ. It also destroys the missionary nature of the Christian community in Russia itself, which is called to challenge dehumanising ideologies, the “Russian world” among them, rather than to adapt to them and to serve as their leaders at home and abroad, including in the occupied territories of sovereign countries such as Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

Peace be with you.

Taras Dyatlik, Ukraine
11 September 2023