Rational theology in antiquity

Rational theology is formed as an attempt to “rationalize” religious truths, adapting them to those discourses that are relevant in the education, science, and consciousness of the “average person”. This adaptation is often historically necessary as it was the case in the history of the Early Church. Its necessity arises in three cases. The first is a change in the intellectual horizon, which ceases to correspond to the traditional religious picture of the world. The second is a clash with a typologically different religious tradition (the “clash” of Judaism and Hellenism). The third is the emergence of a fundamentally new religious truth, as happened in the case of early Christianity. In this article we will deal only with the ancient world - in the historical sense in which it can be understood as a preamble to the rational theology of early Christianity. And we will touch only on the first type of the listed “incidents”, from which rational theology actually began its history.