The Present Status of Slavic Studies in Church History

Abstract

There was a time when it was customary to divide religion into two simple categories: the true and the false. The true was wholly true, the false was wholly false. There were no other colors but white and black: gradations of greys from black to white did not exist at all. More than that: it was not Christianity as a whole that was true, but generally only the particular denominational brand which the individual in question professed. Christians who differed in almost everything else, were unanimous in dubbing all but their own views false. But since the days of Schleiermacher, who abandoned both the wooden rationalism as well as the ossified orthodoxy of the eighteenth century, and defined religion as the feeling of dependence, it was found increasingly difficult to deny a genuinely religious character to other than the Christian religion. To-day students of comparative religion, and the majority of thoughtful Christians as well, treat Christianity as but one among many other religious developments, conditioned by different historical environments and at different stages of moral and religious evolution. Such pitiful provincialism as was customary a century ago is unthinkable among educated Christians to-day; we are thinking of religion in terms of world-wide, all-embracing, general concepts, in which the faiths of mankind are accorded their due consideration.