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

n, “A New Vision,” p 214. ** Ibid., 220. ® |bid., p 220. Cf. Wink argues that ‘the church’s peculiar calling is to discern and engage both the structure and the spirituality of oppressive institutions.’ (Wink, Engaging the Powers, p 84). °° MacIntyre, After Virtue, p 194. 180 because practices and institutions are locked into unbreakable union — one cannot exist without the other, and yet the goodness of the practice ‘is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution.’ This is why virtues are important; they resist the ‘corrupting power of institutions,’ and ‘enable evils to be overcome, the task to be accomplished, the journey to be completed.’®’ The integrity of a social practice fully depends on ‘the way in which the virtues can be and are exercised in sustaining the institutional forms which are the social bearers of the practice.’ © This is the point where McClendon suggests a correction, arguing that in reality institutions are no different, and therefore, should be identified as practices. He wrote, the “institutions versus practices” distinction is not viable. Instead some practices, for example, hospital operation, are institutionalized; they are given by law or custom a formal status that fixes their place in the social structure. The practice of its operation, and not the building... is the hospital. Thus even those principalities and powers that our society institutionalizes (its hospitals, schools, police departments, religious institutions) are rightly identified as (Macintyrian) practices.°° Therefore, the conclusion: every practice is a powerful practice that can either produce a virtue or a vice, because its connection to power is subject to perversion. The term “powerful practice” originates from McClendon’s understanding of the biblical concept of principalities and powers, which he reviews in the first volume of his Systematic Theology. He points to seven important elements that help us to discover the meaning of this term today. Beginning with the Old Testament, he shows (1) the inseparable connection between gods and nations (Egyptians and their gods, for example) in the worldview of the ancient people, thus linking gods with ‘politics and society’; and moving toward (2) a theological struggle of ancient Israel: how to be the nation of the God called JHWH? Turning to the New Testament he points to (3) the powers viewed as ‘God’s creatures... [although] fallen and rebellious,’ and therefore (4) the understanding of the * Ibid., pp 195, 175. ° Ibid., p 195. 6° McClendon, Ethics, p 179. Italics of McClendon. 181 mission of Jesus Christ ‘as conflict with and conquest of these (corrupted) powers.’ These powers are referred to both in a ‘proclamatory form,’”° as well as in a form of a story (as in the Gospels), ‘[T]hey are the story, and the opponents are... the human overlords of state and temple... or they are the demonic forces that sponsor i