THE MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD IN RUSSIA (1789 - 1910), P. M. Friesen, 1911

but to a church which their own self-conceit had dreamed up. And when questionable abuses cropped up in Pastor Wuest’s immediate environs, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater; stories which I would rather not repeat, were concocted and retold as the gospel truth. Against this man, who should probably rather have been included among the apostolic order mentioned in Rom. 15:20, people rose up with great malice. At the same time, however, the church created the appearance of tolerating sin in her midst (open adultery should still be disposed of with an admonition of the father confessor), of opposing the call to repentance, to faith and to sanctification, because she did not wish to confess her own weaknesses and shortcomings and remedy them wherever possible. This confused the consciences of many and gave occasion to the others to slander her, saying: the church has become a Babel from which we must separate ourselves. I must mention here that Foell, a consistorial councillor and pastor at Hochstaedt [a parish in the Lutheran colonies of Molotschna, apart from Prischib the oldest church center], in spite of repeated demands, did not sign the accusations raised against Wuest, and the late Pastor Landesen of Kharkov always remained in warm fellowship with Wuest. . . .” (Cf. further # 170 .) 3. Pastor Wuest’s Theology and Message, a) These testimonies of four witnesses concerning Wuest shall suffice: two “brothers” of outstanding importance, a Mennonite elder from the time when the struggle with the newly organized M.B. Church was still carried on with great intensity, and another who, until his death, remained a good Pastor Wuest 211 “church" Lutheran pastor. If, in addition, we also present his inaugural sermon, we will gain a true-to-life picture of this worthy man, who did not remain without shortcomings in his ministry. Aside from his in- augural sermon, 13 we also possess a funeral address, three Christmas and ten Passion sermons of his in print, all delivered between 1845 and 1852. According to everything we have and know about him, Wuest retained the theology he espoused in his inaugural sermon throughout his active career. Only, as he grew older, he naturally became more level-headed and temperate, as the above testimonies indicate. Wuest’s delivery was that of a fiery witness of the full, free, and ever-present grace of God in Christ: “Christ the Crucified.’’ He did not preach the doctrine of sanctification, which he personally believed in and practiced, either systematically (a sign of the times), or in the right proportion to his joyous and in itself purely evangelical message of grace; as a consequence, because of the lack of a balance between justification and sanctification in his preaching, there was something not quite evangelical about his ministry. This had to manifest itself in his circle of friends, the more so because of his lively temperament and great, though noble and