Keywords: Church, Orthodoxy, mission, teaching, spirituality, academic theology, empirical theology, teacher, spiritual life, purification, illumination, deification
Abstract:
Spiritual experience of the Church Saints and the Church teachings are stored up in various testimonies (texts, monuments, artistic expressions etc.) about the Church presence and work in the world. Theology, as a science, under the form of curriculum disciplines, is searching, drawing conclusions, rehabilitates in a critical manner, studies and interprets all these testimonies or draws arguments from them in the endless dialogue between the Church and the world. The framework of this approach, aimed at studying the Church testimonies, also includes the education offered in the Faculties of Theology. This education transmits to the students, on the one hand, knowledge obtained as a fruit of scientific theological research, and, on the other hand, gives them orientation in the Church life, namely in the life according to Jesus Christ’s teaching, as it has been lived and experienced by the Saints. Theology, in all its manifestations, represents a Church function, and its space is the Church body, consequently it is related to the Church mission in the world. For this reason, the function of the Church, as place of worship and of healing for man and the function of School, be it Faculty of Theology or Theological Seminary, are related, being one. Both the Faculty of Theology and the education it provides belong to the vocational domain, which supposes not just external training, namely the appropriation of knowledge, but especially inner training, spiritual transformation and ascension, because the graduates’ role, regardless of whether they become clerics or religion teachers etc., is to be a catalyst in the society and to promote a fundamental thing: man’s salvation. Due to this thing, the mission of the Faculties of Theology belongs to the framework of the Church mission, and the student’s life to the sacramental and liturgical space of the Church. Consequently, the scientific and positive character of academic theology, as theological function of the Church and of its mission, must have in view the aim of the theological education received in a Faculty of Theology, namely, the cultivation of the therapeutic-ascetic function of the Church, in other words, the integration of the student in the spiritual life of the Church, which is expressed by pursuing of the states of purification, illumination and deification, namely his integration in the Church spirituality, where he ought to feel the Saints’ communion. All these confirm the reality of empirical theology, as a binder between academic theology and the Orthodox Church mission, but also the relation that ought to exist between the place of worship and the Faculty of Theology; in other words, yet, starting from the latter, the relation between academic theology and Church life or between erudition and the way of life and thinking of the Church. Neglecting the role of empirical theology, as the only dynamic reality vitalizing the synergy between academic theology and the Church mission in the contemporary society, will trigger many negative consequences, by the materialization of certain trends that many theology teachers have drawn our attention to.
Pages: 26-47