Theological Modernism as Attempted Christian Reception of Capitalism

Modernism in its most general form can be understood as desire to adapt the church institution to the conditions formed by this world, individualism and progressive secularism being among its main characteristics. The development of capitalism and its transition to the global stage significantly reduce the social base of religious communities and create external stimuli for the crisis of institutional Christianity; theological modernism that arose at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as an unorganized antithesis of the individualistic ideology of capitalism, in the second half of the 20th century began to significantly influence the official theology of a number of Christian denominations and had a practical impact on everyday religious practices (liturgical reforms, the theory of “dogmatic development”, transformations of ascetic practices of the laity, etc.). In the 21th century, this resulted in the consequences directly opposite to the expected ones (for example, in the Catholic world there is a decrease in the number of people who resort to church sacraments, a quantitative reduction of white clergy and monastics, dogmatic indifferentism, “de- Christianization” of certain regions of the world, etc.). The article describes a contradiction between the principles of ecclesiastical universalism and secular globalization, as well as the place of Christian theological modernism in forming ideological foundations globalism.