Miracle and Supernatural in the Gospel Narrative: the Apologetic Position of the Kyiv Theological Academy’s Professor Dmytro Bohdashevskyi (Archbishop Vasilii)

Abstract

In this article, the author carries on his research into works by Dmytro Bohdashevskyi (Archbishop Vasilii, 1861–1933), the famous Professor and Rector of the Kyiv Theological Academy in the early 20th century. The paper covers Dmytro Bohdashevskyi’s theological apologetics of the miracle and the supernatural in biblical narrative. It was established that Kyiv researcher realized the synthesis of epistemological, hermeneutic, dogmatic and religious-practical components in his position. Great attention is paid to his peculiar religious phenomenology, epistemology and praxeology of the Gospel miracles. Bohdashevskyi proposed a phenomenological representation of wonderful events in the acts of life experience. Religious structures such as experiencing the miraculous and experiencing the meeting the Absolute play the most important role. The epistemological basis of Bohdashevskyi ‘s reasoning about miracle in the Bible is the affirmation of its coherence with the human mind. This coherence is based on the act of religious faith in which a sacred rationalization of a miracle takes place. This way of rationalizing Gospel miracles objectively opposes both the primitive magical and the modern rationalistic (psychological, sociological, moralistic and scientific-natural) interpretations of the miraculous. However, the Kyiv apologist sometimes finds himself vulnerable to denying the significance of the act of faith and moving beyond the theological discursiveness to which his rationalist-minded opponents resort. The researcher objectively describes the assumption of the miracle as an intrinsically problematic cognitive act, demonstrating the complexity of human cognition as one of the underlying reasons for the emergence and existence of religion. In this way, D. Bohdashevskyi came very close to the comparison of scientific and extra-scientific knowledge, rational and extra-rational components of cognitive process.Article received 15.08.2019