QUESTIONS OF THE ONTOLOGICAL BALANCE OF BEING IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Authors:   Mariupol State University, Mariupol, Ukraine, Gudyma Іgor 
Published: May 2023

The article is a brief overview of the views of modern Christian theologians on the question of the contingency of being and ways to preserve and maintain the ontological balance of God. The context of philosophical understanding of problems is the philosophy of religion and ontology. The author tries to show that, according to religious intellectuals, it is the contingency of the world, its subtle ontological structure and the existing danger of its return to non-existence that are completely eliminated by God's providence. The providence of God is presented by theologians as two interrelated processes – ordinary natural changes, as the objectification of the boundless will of God in action and his direct creative acts of influencing the universe in a miracle. The modern elucidation of the essential and necessary features of these concepts, for the most part, strives to ensure that with any, even the most daring theological innovations, they still retain the general immutability of their content and their conformity with the basic Christian principles. The providence of God and the miracle, as a special case of it, in accordance with fundamental Christian teachings, without significant disagreement, are clearly interpreted by theologians of all major Christian denominations in their theophanic perspective, as the constant discovery of God in the realm of their own creation. Almost all major theological approaches to this issue boil down to justifying and showing the presence of God in the natural and human world through the terms "preservation" and "management", as well as by pointing to emergency cases of God's direct creative acts. Such ways of God's interaction with the world, according to theologians, are designed to preserve the ontological balance of being, which was originally established by God, which is accidental and has no basis for its existence in itself. The ontological instability of the world, consisting in its randomness and the danger of its return to non-existence, is completely balanced by the Providence of God. This Providence is aimed at preserving the originality of the world, it is also the source of its formation, it also forms its basis as an internal goal. The providence of God, without much disagreement, is shown by theologians of the main Christian movements as successive processes, on the one hand, of ordinary natural changes, as the objectification of the divine will in action, and on the other hand, as direct creative acts of God's interaction with the world in a miracle, when he creates something or superior in strength to natural things. The content of the innovations allowed here by theologians mainly covers the clarification of the existing understanding of the logical connection between the concepts of "general providence", "special providence" and "miracle" and, most importantly, the establishment of a measure of their correlation with the factors of the objective world. Common in the positions of theologians of different Christian denominations is that they unanimously emphasize the inadmissibility of a speculative interpretation of the above concepts. All this, in the end, is aimed at introducing into the minds of believers the ontological image of God, constantly testifying to itself in history and the obligatory ontologization of a miracle.