In late autumn 2025, the German publishing house transcript Verlag released a collection of ecumenically oriented articles titled Christianity as an Educational Religion: Biblical-Theological and Confessional Perspectives. The authors of the published texts are specialists in Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Evangelical, and other theological traditions.
The book was edited by Prof. Bernd Schröder (University of Göttingen) and Prof. Jan Woppowa (Paderborn University). In their abstract, they outlined the general thematic scope of this volume as follows: “Throughout the history of Christianity, education and upbringing have taken on different meanings and forms depending on the context. Where this significance was great, and the form was publicly visible, as in Germany, the concept of ‘Christianity as a religion of education’ became established. The authors of the articles explore the significance of this thesis, presenting a variety of confessional views from the German-speaking ecumenical community. In doing so, they adhere to a common main position on the significance of teaching and learning, education and upbringing in each denomination and confessional culture, and which practices and concepts play a central role in this.”
The article on Ukraine, “Learning and Teaching from the Perspective of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” was prepared by Prof. Sergii Bortnyk and Rev. Dr. Andrii Shymanovych. They offered the German-speaking academic community their panoramic analysis of the intellectual and pedagogical role played by the Orthodox spiritual and theological tradition in modern Ukraine from the 10th century to the present day. In the historical section, the scholars began with the rapid intensification of Christian education during the reigns of Yaroslav the Wise, Sviatoslav of Chernihiv, and Volodymyr Monomakh, while also paying special attention to the emergence of an institutionalised system of professional theological education, which was the result of the tireless educational and administrative activities of Metropolitan Petro Mohyla.
The sometimes ambiguously assessed experience of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in the 17th century, according to this article’s authors, ought to be recognised as a significant achievement. The results of Petro Mohyla’s innovative educational project are especially remarkable considering that the scientific theories and pedagogical practices he had introduced fully met the highest standards of European universities of the time.
Ukrainian theologians delve quite deeply into the question of the degree of Thomistic and, more broadly, scholastic influence on the system of Orthodox education in the 17th and 18th centuries on the part of Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits and Dominicans. According to the researchers’ general opinion, the experience of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy became “an example of bold creativity in achieving a balanced equilibrium or even an organic synthesis between the Eastern tendency towards apophatic contemplation and the Western adherence to the rational ordering of Christian truths.”
Towards the end of the article, the authors describe the current structural organisation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s educational system, provide a list of academic subjects taught in seminaries and at the Kyiv Theological Academy, as well as analyse the existing difficulties, achievements, and intrinsic capabilities of the UOC’s educational institutions along with the theoretical and practical developments applied in their work. The researchers believe that an important component of a holistic approach to the educational process in Ukrainian theological schools is the consensus recognition of the incompleteness of purely theoretical, discursive theological reasoning, which reduces the fullness of God’s Revealed Truth to lifeless information and a series of dry syllogisms. Therefore, it is crucial that young theologians organically combine a deep study of the truths about God with experiential epistemology, a sense of and experience of God’s presence in their lives.
Finally, the authors of the article hope that representatives from the younger generation of Ukrainian Orthodox researchers will develop the habit of “constant self-improvement and self-transcendence, the practice of independent critical thinking in the light of God’s Revelation, which is an indispensable component of a harmonious personality, the image and likeness of God.” At the same time, according to Ukrainian theologians, “not a shallow ecumenical enthusiasm for anything newly discovered and different from one’s own, not a self-destructive openness to any imposed models of thinking, but rather the comprehensive Christian universalism of evangelical theologising and proclamation to the world should be a fundamental conviction for representatives of the future generation of Ukrainian Orthodox theologians.”
You can familiarise yourself with the contents of the book and purchase it on the publisher’s website at this link: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7579-5/bildungsreligion-christentum/
The article by Prof. Sergii Bortnyk and Rev. Dr. Andrii Shymanovych is available in German on our website at this link: https://www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Bildungsreligion-Christentum-Bortnyk-Shymanovych.pdf
