The Problem of the “Boundaries of the Church” in the Perspective of the Theology of History
The article presents a conceptual overview of the problems of the boundaries of the Church with the involvement of historical patristic material and author's developments in the field of theology of history. The general “background” of the development of ecclesiological thought, on which the concepts of the boundaries of the Church in the first half of the 20th century are formed, is considered. Questions about the hypostatic in the Church and the hypostatic being of the Church itself, which were linked with the problem of the Church as an active subject, received different, contrary, answers from ecclesiologists of those years. The theological substantiation of the self-identity of the Church as a whole is at the stage of its formation, the first attempts to use the dogmatic conceptual apparatus, and often even conceptual ambiguity. Against this background, the basic concepts of the boundaries of the Church are being formed, considering which, the author notes the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches of ecclesiologists of the 20th century to solving this problem. The question of interpretations of the heritage of the patristic authorities of antiquity in the field of ecclesiology is also raised, the key patristic provisions traditionally attracted by modern theologians to solving the problem of the boundaries of the Church are studied. Based on the findings, the author proposes his own concept of the “boundaries of the Church”, which is based on the “hierarchical model” of the internal structure of the Church, defended by the “Cyprianite” thesis of St. Hilarion (Troitsky) about the hypostatic reality of the borders of the Catholic Church, the “Augustinian” intuitions of Fr. G. Florovsky on the hypostatic boundaries of reduced ecclesiological education and reliance on the strict use of the conceptual apparatus. The author's view, substantiated by historical and theological research methods, is accompanied by the hypothesis of the existence of two partly overlapping types of classifications of breakaway communities.