Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

oductions presented by the union’s general secretaries at the congresses. > In the final chapter of his classic The Christian Tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan noted how many theologians began to speak of the twentieth century as the “age of the church”. As he put it, “each of the major churches of a divided Christendom was obliged, for reasons of its own, to address anew the doctrine of the church” such as its message, nature, identity, marks of con- tinuity, its authority and structure and “above all its authentic unity despite and beyond the historic divisions’. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: a History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 5, Christian Doctrine and Modern Culture (since 1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 282. 188 So what motivated Slavic evangelicals toward unity? Suffice it here to highlight a few primary elements. To be a follower of Christ necessi- tated membership in the body of Christ, usually by baptism, followed by conscious subordination to an organised church, including its confession of faith and constitution. In the Western tradition, the Roman Catholic Church had developed a hierarchical structure with the bishop in Rome claiming supremacy over all other bishops and demanding subordination of all rulers. That was around 1300, and by the time the Reformation of the sixteenth century ended its first phase, independent states were claiming sovereignty, including over the various Christian confessions the ruler would tolerate. After 1870, the Pope no longer ruled over Papal States, there were no Prince-Bishops in German principalities, and papal claims were limited to spiritual supremacy over not only the Roman Church, but over all who wished to be recognised as belonging to the true church. As we know, the Orthodox story is rather different. The Ecumenical Patriarch attempted to exert leadership when meeting with other patriarchs, but that became rare after 1453 when that office in Constantinople was reconfigured into the Ethnarchos of the Orthodox Millet. By 1589 the Russian Orthodox Church had its own acknowledged Patriarch. It was fully autocephalous. Neverthe- less, after 1666 an important wing of Orthodox Christianity challenged the patriarchal church as being subordinated to the Russian Emperor, so Old Belief has now existed for more than four hundred years as a de facto free church in its theology of church and state, or as a persecuted sect in most history books. When the evangelical movement took root in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century, after numerous other reformist movements had tried and failed, it too viewed the structure and practice of Orthodoxy as an undesirable norm over against which the leaders sought to establish a more authentic church. What were its central elements? When writing their confessions of faith, most free churches, including Baptists, have tended to stress the sole authority of the Bible. But how