Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

range of disciplines, including the social sciences,’ as well as historical’ and Biblical® ecclesiology. The concept of structure can also be helpful in analysing the origins of Baptists in Russia and Ukraine. This paper restricts examination primarily to the Ekaterinoslav and Kherson provinces, which at the time of the early Baptists in the 1860s were part of South Russia. Today these territories belong to the Republic of Ukraine. THE DEVELOPMENT OF Baptist STRUCTURES AT THE LEVEL OF INDIVIDUAL FAITH Pietism and the Origins of the Baptist Movement in South Russia Pietism, the local version of which was known in Russia as Stundism, was primarily a movement of lay people. It is considered to be a significant element in the beginnings of the Russian and Ukrainian Baptist movement, both by adherents of the “indigenous genesis theory” as well as supporters of the hypothesis of “foreign planters’. The former view, represented by Ukrainian Baptist historian Iurii Reshetnikov, claims that around 1867, having developed “Baptist views on their own, Ukrainian believers began to look for how and through whom they could be baptised” (emphasis added).’ A good illustration of the latter view is found in the voluminous document collection from the first decades of the Baptist movement in Russia, compiled by a strong opponent of Baptists at the end of the nine- * Peter M. Blau (ed), Theorien sozialer Strukturen: Ansdtze und Probleme (Opladen, Ger- many: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1978), p. 11. [German translation of Peter M. Blau (ed), Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (London: Open Books, 1976)]. * Rainer Prewo, Jiirgen Ritsert, and Elmar Stracke, Systemtheoretische Ansdtze in der Sozi- ologie: eine kritische Analyse (Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 1973); Blau (ed), Theorien sozialer Struk- turen. * Hans Kiing, Strukturen der Kirche, 2nd edn (Freiburg: Herder, 1963). ° Josef Hainz, Ekklesia: Strukturen paulinischer Gemeinde-Theologie und Gemeinde-Ord- nung. (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1972); A. Gilmore (ed), The Pattern of the Church: a Baptist View (London: Lutterworth, 1963). ’ Jurii Ie. Reshetnikov, “Stanovlennia ta diferentsiatsiia ievangel’skogo rukhu v Ukraini” (The formation and differentiation of the evangelical movement in Ukraine] (Dissertation, Insitut filosofii im. H.S. Skovorodi Natsional’noi akademii nauk Ukraini, Kiev, 2000), p. 78. See also Iurii Reshetnikov and Sergei Sannikov, Obzor istorii Evangel’sko-baptistskogo brat- stva v Ukraine [A Survey of the history of the Evangelical-Baptist brotherhood in Ukraine] (Odessa: Bogomyslie, 2000), p. 59. 35 teenth and early twentieth centuries. This collection begins documentation of Russian Baptist history with events in the German colonies in Ukraine in 1862.° Rather than evaluating Pietism/Stundism in terms of a successionist approach, seeking the roots of the Baptist movement solely in Russia, this paper examines typical patterns of Pietism and