Actual state of a most Christian confessions, or churches, nowadays may evoke memories on John. 12:31, namely the Greek text of the Evangelium: νῦν κρίσις ἐστὶν τοῦ κόσμου τοῦτου. This word from New Testament lexicon (and in the very original context: “now is the judgement of the world” John. 12:31 (KJ21)) describes exactly the modern situation. The secular ideology, together with globalism influenced two general characteristics in modern perception of Christianity.

First is a progressive refocusing of religious value-system due to demands of environment, the consumerist society. The metaphysical idea of transcendental Redemption seems to be replaced by searching for real, and immediate, terrestrial “redemption” under which mainly the financial welfare is meant.

The change of existential values, which has started in Enlightenment epoch by noblesse, has spread into the lower classes of society along with developing of competitive economy in Europe and the rest of Eurocentric civilization. Typical modern apprehension to common piousness may be expressed as “hypocrisy”, and it’s manifestations as “clericalism”; further, the usage of theological lexica is meant to be an unmistakable sign of back view of things, bankrupt anti-progressive ideology, which is set against the science and common sense.

But in contrast to ousting private religious demands and their gratification from our lives, modern people make themselves open to a wide scope of magical and quasi-magical practices. They are appealed to substitute a common piousness by any kind of ideology, which can provide a “material religiosity”, including voodoo, Buddhism, and psychoanalyses. Thus, the modern society has shown itself as amendable to the most primitive forms of mythological perception of the world, taken from diverse religions (in their context they possess a sacred sense, which is immediately lost without a context), and enrolled as a tool for a completely material branch of science. For example, practice of meditation or confession, without it’s religious meaning must the at least senseless, in worst case even harmful, while it reminds on neurolinguistic programming.

All this tendencies are representing the attempt to provide a terrestrial welfare, formed by devaluated quasi-religious practices (which are actually to be called “shamanism”), instead of a hope of Redemption and everlasting life, are leading some part of Christian society to a consumerist, magical perception of church services and even of liturgical life of Church. About thirty years ago this phenomenon was described by famous Russian historian Prof. Boris Rybakov (speaking about mediaeval Rus’) as “paganism in orthodox Christianity” [Rybakov 1987]: Christianity, which was the way of communication with God, became a magic tool of physical survival in material world; the Church, which was the point (as it teaches for last 2 thousand years) where the God and the human truly conjoined, is turning to a “place where the dear god lives”.

This demonstrates, that self-identification has changed, and church starts to fail to understand itself in a correct way.

The second this is, that Christendom has faced the danger, since autocephaly in Western orthodox churches with it’s noticeable inclination to ethnophiletism, and searching for acceptable forms of national churches in Catholicism, like Gallicanism, Febronianism or Josephinism, to degrade from universal to an ethnographic phenomenon.

Religious mind cannot cast any doubt about a possibility of crisis in Church: when it is thought as the mystical essence with Christ atop, it is impossible either now or later, because of the fact, that His Own time, on which He had told — κρίσις τοῦ κόσμου τοῦτου — will come when “there should be time (χρόνος) no longer” (Rev. 10:6), and there will “the great and terrible day of the Lord (ἡμέρα κυρίου)” (Joel. 2:31). The Church will stay until this time, as it was said, “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew. 2:31). Nonetheless the modern state of church institutes as a frame of society aimed to confess and manifest Christian faith, cannot be valued as completely stable due to many reasons.

There are at the least nine manifestations of crisis, which are to be seen in various parts of organized church institutes [Simonov 2017]:

These complicated circumstances one may define as a structural crisis. A research in Church history as a branch of historical science faces the most basic challenge of keeping the scientific objectivity in analysis of it’s subject and prognosis dynamics, and avoiding the temptation to “follow the source”, which may cause (especially in today’s extremely complicated ideological context) some undesirable subjective assessment. In general, it’s the challenge of choosing the point of view of scientific objectivity among all the possible perspectives on the subject.

Back in times of study at Historical faculty of Moscow State University, we were learnt that the scientific essence of history consists in correct understanding of historical process even more than in it’s description, and the art of historian is not simply a fine way to present the source material — it is achieving of possibly adequate interpretation of this material, which allows to detect objective features and development patterns as a research subject. The founder of the Annales Marc Bloch wrote 1941 in his “The Historian’s Craft” (“Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien”, first published 1949): “Un mot, pour tout dire, domine et illumine nos études: ‘comprendre’” [Bloch 1964:72; Bloch1986].

Academic journals are not only the way to capture the certain steps on the way to understanding that but also the way to draw the attention of science community to the work of individual researchers, let them refine and improve their statements and arguments in course of science discussion (if one arises due to science importance or social relevance of the problem) and as a result to put the individual conjectures a form of science hypothesis, the hypothesis a meaning and content of a concept.

During the centuries journals existing as a narrative genre a few types of it have developed (which are defined with a certain degree of convention). A Journal is:

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