A devastating aspect of the modern and post-modern world is the tendency to separate and isolate, to disintegrate and fracture. The spiritual and material are divided from each other, as are the metaphysical and existential, and the theoretical and practical. Faith and knowledge are opposed. Theology and piety are divorced. Freedom is put in opposition to authority as the individual person-or parish, province, tribe, or region-is place against, rather than within, the larger community of family, church, society, nation, and world. Prophet is opposed to priest, charismatic to institutional, individual to corporate, private to public. An essential task of Orthodox theological education is to expose this literally "diabolical" approach to reality, and to teach and demonstrate in action the proper relationship between unity and diversity in all areas of human life and activity. Orthodox theological schools and institutions, like the Church itself, must find the royal way of maintaining its essential unity with the diversity that true accord requires for its actualization in life.
Unity and diversity in a theological school that is truly Orthodox will exist between the academic and the pastoral dimensions of the educational program and process. It will exist between scholarly work and practical application, and between the educational process as a whole and the work of the separate pedagogical disciplines: Scripture, liturgy, history, patristics, dogmatics, language, and the various courses of pastoral theology and practice. It will ensure the freedom for objective scholarship in proper relationship to the Church's received tradition, which is guided and guarded by the Church's episcopal authority in communion with the faithful believers. And it will also hold together the diverse elements essential to a full and complete program of Orthodox theological education: academic study, liturgical worship, spiritual formation, practical field experience, and community life and service.
Fr. Thomas Hopko, Speaking the Truth in Love, PG.33-34
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