ICOANA CREDINȚEI No. 15, Year 8/2022 http://revistaicoanacredintei.com/ ISSN 2501-3386, ISSN-L 2393-137X STUDIES AND ARTICLES Page | 5 https://doi.org/10.26520/icoana.2022.15.8.5-13 THE HISTORY OF THE THEOLOGY AS RESTORATION OF THE MAN FOR A POSTMODERN CULTURE: THE VISION OF FATHER PROFESSOR DUMITRU STĂNILOAE Fr. Prof. PhD. MIHAI HIMCINSCHI, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, "1 Decembrie 1918" University, Alba-Iulia ROMANIA Email: himmihai@yahoo.com ABSTRACT The man's deification, or the restoration of human nature, historically fallen under the slavery of the sin and the death; it is not possible except through the embodied Son of God, at the fulfilment of time (Gal. 4: 4). In this demarche, history plays a positive role, for the man is born in it. Namely, the man becomes a historical personality, and also in history continues the sanctifying dynamism of the ecclesiastic life. History is not a prison – in an Origenistic sense –, which the man struggles to escape from, for the man has Christ, the God-Man and the Man- God, Who opens to the believers the perspective of eternity through the history's gate. With such a courageous initiative of an organic synthesis between history and theology, Father Dumitru Stăniloae consolidated the Church's faith when facing the danger of the Bolshevik atheism during World War Two by promoting the idea of restoration of history, of the creation, and the man through Jesus Christ. Keywords: Church; deification; history; mission; preaching; salvation; INTRODUCTION Published at Sibiu, in full swing of World War Two, the book of Father Dumitru Stăniloae, entitled Jesus Christ or the Restoration of the Man (Sibiu, 1443), constitutes for the postmodern society too, a Christological challenge in a very well determined historical frame. The Church's mission, as a historical extension of the Kingdom of God, has a direct and immediate purpose the struggle against the historical spreading of the evil within the human society, and that is why the contrary state of the ones who lack their faith it is, actually, a state of deep resistance against the Church's Head: our Lord Jesus Christ (Luka 2:34). Before the Embodiment, though God did not abandon the world of the corruption, of the sin, and the death (Hebr. 1: 1-2), the history of humanity opened itself to the divine Revelation, in stages, in order the man to want and to progressively know the soteriological ascension. That is why one can affirm that history is the beginning of the gradual Revelation, and the end of history is the beginning of the consummate Revelation. The history is the interval between A and Ω (Apoc. 21: 6), Christ being the beginning of the creation's history, as One through Whom all the things were created (Creed, art. 2), but also the end of this age (Mt. 24: 3), namely the end of the historical time. By being Himself these, there is no historical person on earth, since the old Adam to the end of the ages, capable of equaling Christ's historical dignity and of comprising between the Revelation's limits (starting with the first day of the creation and to the second coming of the Lord Christ), to fill up the time, 1 to embrace the history with his arms like Christ did on Golgotha’s Cross.