Вестник Екатеринбургской духовной семинарии (Oct 2024)
On the History of Higher Theological Education in the Ekaterinburg Diocese in the 20th — First Quarter of the 21st Century
Abstract
The article is devoted to studying the history of formation and development of higher theological education in the Ekaterinburg eparchy for the last hundred years. It shows that Ekaterinburg’s path to academic theology has been slow and thorny. The first attempts to create its own theological educational institutions (though without any claim to the highest level of education) date back to 1917–1919, when the system of traditional theological education actually ceased to function and the search for new forms of existence of theology as a science and practice began. In 1917, a never-implemented project was proposed for Ekaterinburg: to reform theological schools and the seminary and create an Orthodox gymnasium on their basis, and also to organize a Theological-Pastoral Institute with a three-year duration of study based on the subjects of the 5th-6th grades of the seminary. Moreover, under the conditions of Decree on Separation of Church from State and School from Church, the Ekaterinburg People’s Theological Institute was opened in autumn 1918, to provide extracurricular religious education and the widest possible dissemination of theological education, which existed until the second half of 1919. The project of the Theological-Pastoral and successfully functioning People’s Theological Institutes had strong potential, and under favorable conditions, with proper support, they could have grown into higher educational institutions. With the fall of the atheist regime and the attainment of religious freedoms in the 1990s, it became possible to organize higher theological education in Ekaterinburg. The author reveals that in 1994–2008 Ekaterinburg had a Centre for Distance Education of the Orthodox Saint Tikhon’s Humanitarian University, which carried out its activities in two areas: pastoral-theological and catechetical-pedagogical. In 2001–2012, the Social Institute of the Russian State Professional and Pedagogical University, supported by the Ekaterinburg Diocese, had the Department of Theology, where students were trained in the specialty ‘Orthodox Theology’ and after graduation, for the first time in the history of the Urals region, graduates were given state diplomas. In 2009 there was an unsuccessful attempt to enroll students on the Theology Course at the Urals Institute of Business. Currently, there are several educational institutions in Ekaterinburg that implement the Federal State Educational Standard in Theology under the Bachelor’s program: Missionary Institute, Ekaterinburg Theological Seminary, and Theology Department at the Ural State Mining University. The latter two educational institutions also have Master’s programs in the Church History (Ekaterinburg Seminary) and the ChurchState and State-Confessional Relations (Ural State Mining University).
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