Dissertation is a comprehensive religious and philosophical study of divergent processes, their internal and external causes in the late Protestant denominations of Ukraine in the second half of the XXth – the beginning of the XXIst century. On the basis of the study of a considerable volume of philosophical, theological and historical sources and researches, a conceptualized definition of divergent processes was proposed. Divergent processes are meant as one of the processes of self-organization of a complex open system, which is religion, an inherent system centrifugal process characterized by a reaction to closure, conservation of the current state of the religious system, resulting in the development of the maximum possible set of options and solutions leading to its transformation and renewal. These processes are considered to be specific and logical structural components of any system development, a tool for religious system’s dynamic equilibrium maintaining, which can manifest itself either as a tool for the ideological and institutional separation of new formations from the maternal tradition or as a means of adaptation and preservation. The specificity of divergent processes consists in the fact that it is not only about changes in the institutional or organizational order (that one can fix as divisions, splits, reforms, updates, etc.), and above all about conceptual, dogmatic, ideological shifts that can formalize institutional features, and may exist unformed in this way.
Proposed research analyzes the external and internal factors that determine and support the variability and plurality of the late Protestant organizations of Ukraine both in the Soviet era and during the independence of the Ukrainian state, studies their character and forms of manifestation as means of survival as well as development and transformation.
It’s shown that nature and quality of divergent processes in confessions of late Protestantism in Ukraine and in the world depends on external and internal factors. The external factors of these processes are the state of the sociopolitical environment in which a specific religious confession is. The internal factors of divergent processes, respectively, are the activities of specific people, i.e. religious leaders, their personal ambitions or conflicts, disagreement with doctrinal, liturgical, behavioral norms, any other moments of the organizational life of the religious community, which often occurs in response to the change of group doctrines, liturgy, and/or the degree of severity, that is, the liberalization or fundamentalization of the mainstream doctrine, the change of generations of believers and church leaders, the level of their general education, the depth of the irrational principles of its own religious tradition, openness to the world and society, the availability of alternative means of legitimating. In the Soviet times, the model of divergent processes for Baptists, Pentecostals and Adventists is similar. In the independent Ukraine there are specific features reduced to the questions of doctrine and organizational and institutional identity of each of the above-mentioned late Protestant denominations. Also, in addition to external divergence, there is an internal divergence on the basis of the attitude and belonging to the new Ukrainian identity, or the preservation and reproduction of it as the old Soviet or post-Soviet.
Key words: late Protestant denominations, Baptism, Adventism, Pentecostalism, divergent processes, reforms, transformation, adaptation, religious dissidence.
