Features of teaching the course “Epistles of St. Paul” in a modern theological school: Problems and prospects

Abstract

This article is devoted to the relevant problems of teaching a course on the Holy Scripture of the New Testament in a modern theological school, in particular the corpus of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul. The epistles of the Holy Apostle Paul have always been and remain an invaluable storehouse for theologians and preachers of the Church. It is no coincidence that almost all the holy fathers and teachers of the Church turned to the works of the holy apostle to one degree or another in order to find in them an unshakable foundation of theology. Often, opponents of the Church use excerpts from the Pauline epistles, taking them out of context, to justify their errors. Due to such a high significance of the written heritage of the “apostle of languages”, a young Christian and future shepherd of spiritual sheep studying at a theological school is obliged to know and understand it. The eternal problems of motivating students and their knowledge of sources when studying the Holy Scriptures of the New and Old Testaments do not disappear, and new ones are added to them. In this work, the problems that young teachers may face at the beginning of their teaching activities are brought to the fore. In the second half of the article, possible solutions are presented, which have been partially tested in practice.