Soviet Evangelicals Since World War II, Walter Sawatsky, 1981

~ such official importation since 1945, BWA officials responded with under- standable joy but unnecessary hyperbole. General Secretary Robert Denny, for example, advised his members: “Forget what you read about necessity for underground evangelism; we now have opportunity for above-ground evangelism in Eastern Europe.”® Then he went on to claim that: “There is no need to smuggle Bibles into Eastern Europe ... our problem is to find money to pay for those that we have permission to import.” Had Denny restricted his remarks to Poland or the DDR, which are relatively well sup- plied with Bibles, his statement would be acceptable, but a total of 405,000 Bibles and New Testaments which have been printed officially or imported legally since the war scarcely begins to meet the demand of at least 50 million believers. What becomes apparent is that both smugglers and legal importers are desperately competing for limited financial resources. This competition must be kept in mind when examining the ethics of smuggling. Opponents of smuggling argue that smuggling is usually under- stood as a criminal activity, and when such smugglers are discovered, atheist opponents of the church gain new ammunition for their war against religion. Advocates of smuggling insist that there is a battle in progress 402 Soviet Evangelicals Since World War Il between good and evil and that the forces of good must employ all their weapons, including the weapon of deception in order to win. The primary passage of Scripture cited on behalf of smuggling is Acts 5:29: “We must obey God, not men” (GNB). Bratskii Vestnik may be unable to print this verse on the pages of its journal, but the validity of this injunction is accepted by both smugglers and their opponents. What is meant by obeying God rather than men? Brother Andrew recently published a book called The Ethics of Smug- gling in which he used the image of warfare, whereby the enemy naturally obstructs’ the road (forbids Bibles) and it is the task of a good Christian soldier to overrun the position (bring the Bibles through anyway).4° Few Christians would argue the emphasis that when it is a simple matter of preaching or not preaching the Word,. Christ's Great Commission comes first, at least in the long run. But how does one proceed? Can a Christian tell-a lie, use elaborate means of deception in order to achieve a good end? Is God, who is fully in charge of the world, dependent on evil means to do good? To this, Brother Andrew replied that “concealment is not lying, you must be careful to guard the distinction between partial truth and un- truth.”4! Then he went on: It’s not telling a lie if I hide the truth from people who have utterly for- feited the right to know the truth. If I stand at the communist border and have my car loaded with Scriptures, then I am under no obligation whatsoever to tell them the truth, because they are in the s