Reflection of the juridical and moral worldviews in modern Catholic and Orthodox translations of the New Testament

Abstract

The article analyzes the objectivity of the antithesis West-East, formulated in the Russian theology of the 19th century, in particular, in the dissertation of Archimandrite Sergius (Stragorodsky) “Orthodox Teaching on Salvation”, 1895. The analysis is based on a comparative research of modern official translations of the Gospel of Luke in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Well-recognized critics of Archimandrite Sergius agree that the opposition of the West and Russia through the prism of juridical and moral worldviews is “not so unambiguous” and therefore could not be a reliable basis for the “Orthodox doctrine of salvation”. It is argued that the thesis about the difference between the two worldviews had an artificial origin, since it was dictated by the desire of the early Slavophiles and their followers to create in Russia its own theological system, totally different from the Western one. The importance of the topic is due to its direct relation to the dogma of salvation, which is the main goal of the Christian doctrine.