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This article deals with issues in the current study of ancient Christian theological legacy and uses an extensive material of Russian and foreign historiography. The article proposes a clear-cut typology of the main approaches to the study of patristics. It consists of the three groups which correspond to the specifi c scholarly programmes, i.e. clericalisation of patristics, secularisation of patristics and topicalisation of patristics. The clericalisation programme is reconstructed on the material of the fi rst vloume of the new handbook in patrology edited by A.I. Sidorov (2019); the secularisation programme is extracted from an in-depth analysis of the methodology and main content of A.A. Stoliarov’s monograph Патрология и патристика (‘Patrology and patristics’, 2nd ed., 2004); finally, the topicalisation programme is being built upon the totality of the methodological and conceptual experience in the study of ancient Christian texts achieved in international and interconfessional scholarship up to the present day as well upon the results of its incorporation in the academic and religious context. The article pays particular attention to the fundamental terminology of the subject and explications of the corresponding confessional and academic projections. The analysis carried out in the article shows the specificity of each approach, traces their internal logic, evaluates the achieved results and, finally, makes an attempt at a probabilistic explanation of the choice in favour of a certain programme through certain reasons of both academic and corporate character. The use of a wide range of studies and methodological agendas allows us to make several generalising conclusions, on which basis the article proposes a conceptual model for current studies in patrology that meet the requirements of topicality and eff ective employment of international and interconfessional experience of work in the relevant fi eld. The specifi city of the proposed model is characterised by following the principle of topicality in the study of ancient heritage, which is implemented due to the principle of double contextualisation (“symphony of the Fathers” as a “diachronic and synchronic polyphony”). A signifi cant prerequisite of this model is the event of the patristic renewal in the mid-20th century together with the method of ressourcement formulated as its result and being used in the Russian academic context for the first time.

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