Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

inking, and sexual immorality. The latter three were considered especially serious.%° Maintaining the principle of the “church of the regenerate only” de- manded strict discipline. An article by N. A. Levindanto on church dis- cipline was reprinted several times.*! Here he identified a five-part process, five steps the church should follow: a confrontation with sin; then an admo- nition; then a specific prohibition; then a trial or probation period for the erring member and if this did not succeed, then the individual would be ex- communicated. Should a minister be excommunicated, he would lose forever the right to serve as presbyter should he repent and be restored to faith. This ruling has meant that rather frequently, considering the persecu- tion experiences, a preacher who became unfaithful but was later restored during the revival movement often played an important role as a local preacher but was ineligible for election to church office. + Soviet evangelicals acknowledge a problem with excommunication.” S. P. Fadiukhin admitted at the 1966 congress that the union had excom- municated persons due to state pressure.** The Reform Baptists had tried to use excommunication as a weapon against the Moscow leadership and also violated acceptable practice thereby. That problem is now less acute, but Alexei Bychkov complained in 1974 that the church still appeared hasty in excommunicating members. During the previous five years, 4,000 persons had been excommunicated. In the city of Volgograd, a foreign visitor reported that couples had been ‘excommunicated for practicing birth con- trol.%> Very likely the relative inattention to ethics in evangelical theology, relying rather on specific prohibitions, has resulted in a constant struggle with legalism. A group visiting a large church in Siberia asked what were Soviet Evangelical Theology 347 tion whether a Christian should be permitted to wear a ring. 3. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper: Complaining that no Christian truth underwent such major changes during the history of Christianity as did the understanding of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the Dogmatika writers proclaimed that Evangelical Christian Baptists were trying to under- stand these ordinances as they had been given by Jesus. The writers then proceeded to declare that “bearing the name Baptists ... we believe that baptism is neither sprinkling nor effusion with water but immersing into the water the entire body of the person baptized.’’%* This, they felt, was precisely the way Philip had baptized the Ethiopian eunuch and the way Jesus had been baptized. In addition, immersion was the most vivid way of symbolizing having died to sin and rising to life in Christ. This emphasis on immersion as the only correct form of baptism distin- guishes Soviet evangelicals from their Anabaptist forebears, who were baptized by pouring. The Anabaptists received their name not because of their form of baptis