Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

arguing instead that the Lord’s Supper was not a means of grace but simply a symbolic remembrance. 340 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il The British Baptist movement developed in the early 17th century through the joint influence of Calvinist Puritans and Dutch Mennonites. A later British historian developed the argument that the modern free church was the product of the motherhood of Anabaptism and the fatherhood of Calvinism.? Not all historians would agree with his characterization of the mother and the father, but it is clear that new offspring appeared. One of the most important direct influences on the Russian Baptists was the German Baptist Johann C. Oncken. Oncken, born a Lutheran, had received a strong Calvinist influence from Scottish Presbyterians and English Baptists. He was converted in an English Methodist meetinghouse and be- came a Bible Society agent. After some difficulty, he was finally rebaptized by Rev. Sears of the American Triennial Baptist Convention and was com- missioned as their agent. This baptism by total immersion had been in- troduced by English Baptists around 1641 and had become a major dogma of the American and English Baptists. Oncken’s uncompromising emphasis on baptism by immersion, as well as refusal to permit anyone not baptized in this way to participate in communion, produced a very strict exclusivist church order.8 This emphasis among the Russian Baptists under Dei Ma- zaev proved to be one of the major hindrances to an early union of evangel- icals. Both Anabaptists and Calvinists had undergone subtle transformations through the influence of the revivalist-holiness movements. Parallel to the Pietist movement on the continent, the Great Awakenings in Britain and North America provided new stimuli for the expansion of the believers’ church movement which till then had suffered from minority status, dis- crimination, and outright persecution. For the Russian evangelicals, these influences came together in the Keswick movement and its most ardent proponent in America, Dwight L. Moody. One scholar pointed out that the Russian journal, Baptist, during its four years of publication, printed forty- five articles by foreign writers.° Twenty-three of these articles were directly linked with the Keswick movement, which began in England in 1875 with annual conferences for spiritual nourishment, many of the speakers travel- ing widely. In addition, several dozen Russian emigrés, who had studied at Moody Bible Institute or other institutions influenced by Moody, returned to the Soviet Union after the Revolution. Here they assumed a major role in shaping the unprecedented evangelistic program which caused the Russian evangelicals to grow so rapidly during the twenties. Besides the emphasis on personal holiness and the strong emphasis on an evange