Towards Understanding of the Practice of Proclamation: The Core Element of Russian Baptist Worship, Timofey Cheprasov, 2015

e disengagement requires to be explained case by case. implication, it shows the importance for a theologian to be a part of a community of faith, to share the story of this community, so that he/she could not only understand its convictions, but, and here is its normative or revisionist part, also ask questions, express doubts, and question the practices of this community, which hopefully will result in stronger, sounder beliefs and practices, thus producing greater integrity of the community’s character. °° This view of theology transforms it from boring (as many people perceive it) and a useless activity done by some disconnected from the ordinary world scholars,°° into a relevant and exciting task of understanding ourselves, our convictions, critically * Jolley, “Biography, baptist and the Book,” p 6. *° Ibid. 6° McClendon, Ethics, p 23. * Ibid., p 39. ° Jolley, “Biography, baptist and the Book”. 6° A very common view shared by many people outside of the seminaries, not only non-Christians, but even many pastors and ordinary members of the church. See Cherenkov, “Nash Baptism: Istoriia | Sovremennost.” 156 examining them and ‘creatively transforming them into better ones if possible.’”° This definition of theology as a study of convictions that are expressed in biography, and embodied in life, explains the necessary pluralistic character of theology. Christians always understand the Lord they follow and the Gospel they have through their experience, understood as ‘what we have lived through and lived out in the company with one another,’”* thus introducing ‘a contextual, not a sinful, pluralism into the theological task.’”” Let me bring this very short review of McClendon’s theology to a conclusion: Christian (and any other) faith is about something deeply self-involving. McClendon calls this — convictions. True convictions (our true beliefs) are embodied in a particular form of life, not in the form of propositional statements or creeds. Therefore, in order to understand what an individual Christian and/or a Christian community believe, one needs to study its biography, its life. Biography is important not only because convictions are 7° McClendon, Biography as Theology (1990), p 20. ™ McClendon, Ethics, p 37. ” Ibid., p 35. Such understanding of theology as contextual may raise a question about whether it is a relativistic approach. Does it justify any set of convictions or beliefs? This issue was addressed in McClendon and Smith’s book Convictions, where they argue that the two extreme approaches to convictions were imperialistic and relativistic approaches. The first argued that ‘convictional differences can be eliminated by the application of the correct method and the correction of (others’) character defects’ (p 9) while the second insists that the conflict between rival convictional sets cannot be resolved at all, as ‘convictional differences are inevitable, inerad