Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

he civil war, made everyone expert on suffering. M passed through periods of weakness and retained a keenly eae aes as ae unfaithful. The feeling that the suffering was also divine : aoe ecause nothing could happen without divine permission is also The new evangelical church which emerged after the war had been reduced to a religion of the essentials. How would they be biblicists without Bibles? That is still a problem. These experiences simply underlined for them the primacy of salvation. This is why Christian and atheist observer. alike draw attention to the soteriological preoccupation. The persecutio and suffering, the implacable opposition of an atheist state, plus a dis ae tionalist theology produced an unusually strong interest if sates It was an escatology characterized by an escapism. The many prayers ie Christ to come quickly were appeals to cut short their life on earth hi i was primarily a vale of tears, ava, Both ECB unions have actually said very little on the subject of escha- tology. None of the Baptist journals in the 1920s carried articles devoted to a detailed discussion of the second coming of Christ. Bratskii Vestnik has not devoted a major article to the subject. A possible reason is that the state defines as a crime “the commission of fraudulent actions for the purpose of inciting religious superstition,” and Mr. Kuroedov described “the dissemi- nation of tumors about the end of the world” as such a crime." In their oe respondence course lessons on dogmatics, the AUCECB warned that i connection with the thousand-year reign of Christ “we must not give wa our human fantasies if they are not based on Holy Scripture.” The Bible was brief and unclear on the subject of eschatology, therefore the Baptist noe urged caution. But in the same breath they went on to say: “We ee Tie a of basis for keeping silence about this blessed period of The confession of faith composed by Oncken. for the German Baptists had also been accepted by the Russian Baptists and provided the fasts for the first Mennonite Brethren confession of faith. In 1906 both union (Baptist and Evangelical Christian) submitted confessions of faith to the a thorities. They were rather similar, although the Evangelical Christia confession had four additional articles: as a. result of which there was stronger emphasis on good. works and. freedom of conscience.'8 When the union. took place in 1944, a formal confession of faith was not adopted but 344 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il in general the more specific wishes of the Baptists became tas for union. But it was Evangelical Christians who carried it out an t eir ok relaxed attitude on doctrinal questions irritated the Baptists. Finally, in the AUCECB adopted a short confession of faith which had been written by Ivan Kargel. This had be