Dialectics of religious renovation: secular and Christian views

Abstract

The article attempts to speculate on two topical issues of the modern socio-cultural and religious dynamics: religious renovation of the modernity and it relation to the religious renovation in general. These issues are relatively independent, but at the same time they are inseparable since the format of future socio-cultural community depends on their correlation. In other words, any discussion on this topic rests on the following questions: is it acceptable to reduce the religious renovation of the modernity only to a «turn to religion» or «return of religion»; what gives the right to form the ethos or does the religious renovation of the modernity involve renovation of religion, intensification of theological self-reflection and new forms of religious reformation? As the secular and Christian discourse at the turn of the 20–21st centuries indicates, the religious renovation of the modernity is conceptualized as the religion’s social action strategy that concedes an inclusion of religious and non-religious ideologies and worldviews into this process. It rises up from the religious renovation as a version of the religious reformation and combines elements of religious fundamentalism and religious modernism, that interact and creatively re-construct under the secular influence and thus convert the religious tradition. As a result, the religious renovation of the modernity and the religious renovation close on each other. It is a kind of a cultural «middle way» that lies between the religious tradition and innovation and focuses on development of alternative options of the social development.

Keywords

• religion
• religious reformation
• religious modernism
• religious fundamentalism
• religious tradition
• secularism
• secularization