Baptistic Theologies, 2009

the first conversions, Stundism reached at least 350 geographical locations in South Russia and Transcaucasia. 9 Even if the millions of Russians from Widens vision remained a dream, by 1917 the fruits of the revival numbered about 200,000 believers. 10 This number more than tripled by 1929. 11 The main Pietist arguments - personal salvation, biblicism, a holy life - combined with the missionary zeal of ordinary people, continued to have its effect. Unnoticed Diversity of Revival In the traditional Russian Baptist historiography, revival is the central link in the triad search for truth - revival - first baptisms. From today’s perspective, this approach is fully legitimate and means that the first baptisms were preceded by revival that in turn was preceded by a search for truth. From the viewpoint of a contemporary witness, however, revival did not necessarily lead to baptism. The non-Baptist branches engaged in the revival have usually been underexposed in confessional Baptist accounts. The archives present a surprisingly multicoloured picture of the revival in Russia in the 1860s. Here are some important elements of it that were somewhat underexposed in the established scheme used by many Baptists or differently interpreted. First, a strong Presbyterian presence existed. It began as early as 1837 with John Melville, who made Odessa a centre for the distribution of Russian New Testaments into South Russia at a time when Bible distribution was unwanted by the central government. He distributed books of the British and Foreign Bible Society although he avoided the status of being its regular agent. 12 Naturally, alongside sharing the New Testaments he set Presbyterian accents according to his own Christian tradition. The people who established a New Testament distribution system, also 8 ‘Prigovor Nikolaevskogo (ono she Vodyanaya) sel’skogo skhoda Bashtanskol volosti Aleksandrilskogo uezda’ [Sentence of the Nikolaev (also known as Vodyanaya) Village Gathering of the Bashtan Volost, Aleksandriya District], [Episkop] Aleksil, (ed.), Materials diva istorii religiozno-ratsionalisticheskogo dvisheniya na yuge Rossii vo vtoroipolovine XlX-go stoletiya [Materials for the History of the Religious Rationalist Movement in the South of Russia in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century] (Kazan’, 1908) pp. 295-6, 295. 9 Aleksil, pp. 1-324, 557-83, 610-68. 10 Savinskii, Istoriya, p. 168. 11 Estimation by Savinski; more conservative estimations could be based on: P.V. Ivanov-Klyshnikov, ‘Trud i zadachi Baptistov v SSSR' [Work and Tasks of Baptists in USSR], Baptist 7 (1928), pp. 4-5. 12 J. Urry, ‘John Melville and the Mennonites: A British Evangelist in South Russia, 1837 - ca. 1875’, Mennonite Quarterly Review 54 (1980), pp. 305-22, 311-12. 18 Baptistic Theologies established an infrastructure of spreading the revival based on the sola Scriptura principle. The next Presbyterian traces in the revival