Baptistic Theologies, 2009

in Russia: The New Wars for Souls (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999). 13 Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, p. 17. 14 Ibid., p. 17. 15 In Russian Orthodox philosophy ‘sobornost’ was understood as ‘the soul of Orthodoxy’. See S. N. Bulgakov, Pravoslavie: Ocherki Ucheniya Pravoslavnoy Tserkvi [Orthodoxy: Essays about the Teachings of the Orthodox Church] (Moscow: TERRA, 1991), p.145. 16 Gleb Yakunin, Podlinnii Lik Moskovskoi Patriarhii [The Real Face of the Moscow Patriarchy] (Moscow: 1995) on line at http://www.rusbaptist.stunda.org/, accessed 11 th March 2008. 17 M. Danilushkin (ed.), Istoriya Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi. Novii Patriarshii Period. Tom 1. 1917- 1970 [History of the Russian Orthodox Church. New Patriarch Period. Volume 1. 1917-1970] (St. Petersburg: Voskresenie, 1997), p. 745. 18 Ibid., p. 749. Relationships between Evangelicals and the Orthodox Church in Russia 75 reform within the Orthodox Church, and those seeking salvation outside the bonds of the established creed’. 19 Although many opinion-formers were indifferent to religion, there were many who were seeking the renewal of Russia primarily through the reformation of its religious or spiritual foundations. Those who wanted to work with the Orthodox Church ‘were convinced that the religion of Incarnation calls men to freedom, and that membership in the Orthodox Church demands not mere passive obedience to 20 its authority but the full exercise of man’s creative and intellectual gifts’A Pashkovism, which developed in the 1870s, is a good example of a worldview seeking spiritual renewal. It is worth noticing that the main feature of this movement was a concern ‘not only for.. .personal salvation and for 21 religious and moral problems, but also for the existing social order’. Pashkovites were Russian aristocrats who were not interested in religion at first but who began to look for solutions to their own spiritual aspirations and the problems that Russia had faced. It is important to see that they existed first of all as an evangelical movement within the Orthodox Church. They became separate only as a result of the persecutions they suffered because the official Church did not recognise their goal: ‘the transformation of Russia on a 22 religious and moral basis without adhering to any specific denomination’. The changes that took place in Russian society in the 1860s created a fertile soil that made the appearance of different ways of thinking and of different religious and non-religious movements possible. This led to new movements in the Church, of which Pashkovism was one of the most significant examples. In the next section I will examine the personality of Pashkov, his teaching and his ministry. Pashkov and Pashkovism Colonel Vasilii Pashkov was a significant figure in the history of the development of the Evangelical and Baptist movements in Russia. He symbolised the beginning of a new e