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

icable, and ultimate fact of human existence’ thus making ‘even communication at any significant level along these lines... impossible’ (p 8), thus, people should simply accept it and leave it as something given. The authors reject both of these approaches and offer their own approach — perspectivism, which ‘regards convictional conflict as expected, but not inevitable, fundamental, but not ultimate, enduring but not inherently ineradicable.’ People and communities do have different convictions, and ‘will experience, think, and speak about their worlds differently, and these differences will not necessarily be the result of mistakes or character flaws.’ But these differences are not walls that cannot be overcome, thus ‘communication, understanding, or even persuasion among words’ is possible (p 9). (McClendon, Smith, Convictions). See also Parush R. Parushev, “Convictional Perspectivism: A Constructive Proposal for a Theological Response to Postmodern Conditions,” in John Currie and Cathy Ross, eds., Mission in Context: Explorations inspired by Andrew Kirk (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 111-124. 157 expressed in actions, but also because they are formed by experiences of life. However, experience alone, although important, is not the only element that contributes to the formation of one’s Christian faith. The Bible is the other, second element. Therefore, while it comes second in this work, it is in no way less important in its formative power. Now | am going to turn to the Bible and its role in McClendon’s theology. The baptist vision Ethics, the first volume of McClendon’s Systematic Theology, begins with the quest for a baptist vision. There are a few reasons for having such a starting point. Firstly, that it is an attempt ‘to overcome the poverty of baptist theology’ by recovering a ‘standpoint for theological reflection’ and by retrieving ‘diverse baptist voices as partners for theological conversation.’ Another reason comes directly from the definition of theology. By understanding theology as a study of the convictions of a convictional community, the first question to be answered is how to define the borders of this community and what constitutes a distinctive set of convictions. In the case of looking at baptistic community, the question turns into a quest for a theological centre, an organising principle for baptistic theology, which can be seen as a starting point in defining the community of reference, whose convictions and practices a theologian is going to discover and possibly transform. McClendon begins his search by reviewing several ‘persistent marks of the heirs of the Radicals,’ which are biblicism, mission, liberty, discipleship, and community. He analyses different attempts to define the major conviction or belief that should organise the rest. However, he arrives at the following conclusion: none of the traditional baptistic hallmarks can serve as a cornerstone