Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0003-0724-4625.
Abstract
The article traces the institutional history of theological education in Ukraine from the Ostroh Academy (1576) to the present, proposing a typological framework of four models. The Ostroh Academy is interpreted as a proto-university synthesising Orthodox confessional formation, humanist learning, and civic responsibility. The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (1632/1701) is read as a paradoxical Counter-Reformation continuation of the same logic, appropriating the Jesuit collegium model as an instrument of resistance to Polonisation and Latinisation. The eighteenth-century network of collegia — Chernihiv, Pereiaslav-Khmelnytsky, Kharkiv, and the Poltava Slavonic Seminary — is treated as a mature networked form integrating theological education with Pietist influences transmitted through Symon Todorsky, Hryhorii Skovoroda, and Eugenios Voulgaris. The nineteenth to twenty-first centuries are framed as a post-Reformation epilogue in which the Humboldtian reform of 1810 institutionalised academic theology as an autonomous type, whilst the Russian Empire produced a parallel dual structure: secular universities without theology faculties alongside a separate ecclesiastical vertical. This division, with only fragmentary exceptions, has persisted into contemporary Ukraine. The Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022–2025 has exposed the structural unpreparedness of both branches to offer a theological response to the nation's existential crisis, returning to the agenda the triadic model — learning, confessional formation, and civic responsibility — first articulated by the Ostroh Academy four centuries ago.
Recommended Citation
Khromets, Vatalii Leonidovich Dr.
(2026)
"The Reformation and the Formation of a Ukrainian Model of Theological Education: From the Ostroh Academy to the Present,"
Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe: Vol. 46
:
Iss.
6
, Article 7.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55221/2693-2229.2840
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/ree/vol46/iss6/7