Not “A Faith of Protest and Mere Denial” - Lutheranism for the Post-Soviet World

Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in and read a paper at a conference entitled “The Churches of the Reformation in their Moral and Political Responsibility for the One World,” held in Hermannsburg, Germany, at the University of Applied Sciences for Intercultural Theology (FIT). A number of people in attendance asked that I share the text of my presentation, and so I decided it might be interesting to put up here, too. If all goes well next year a modified / expanded / footnoted version of this paper will be published together with the contribution of the scholars from around the world who took part in this conference. In addition to the text itself, I've added a small afterward in order to eliminate one possible misinterpretation of the intent of this paper.

Not “A Faith of Protest and Mere Denial” - Lutheranism for the Post-Soviet World

The Churches of the Reformation in Their Moral and Political Responsibility for One World Conference, Hermannsburg. 25 June 2016.

Rev. Bradn Buerkle

Greetings to you on this significant day in the history of our tradition, The Day of the Presentation of the Augsburg Confession! Perhaps in 14 years time we'll come together again, to once more look backwards and forwards about the ways the Reformation has affected our world.

I see this presentation as an opportunity to reflect on my experience and to share my thoughts about the influence of the Reformation on the world's largest country. I must say at time it has been frustrating. I don't know how often I've explained that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King are two different people. I've been in the odd situation of trying to convince someone that no, Martin Luther did not hang himself, but died an ordinary death, etc. Such misunderstandings are not that surprising given that objective information on religion (and, in particular, Western Christianity) was hard to find in the not too distant past. But one would expect that practicing Lutherans would have a sense of crucial aspects of the Reformation. However, even here there are problems. For example, when speaking with one lay preacher in Siberia, I learned from him the difference between Orthodox, Baptists and Lutherans: the first drink and baptize babies, the second neither drink nor baptize babies, while “we” don't drink but do baptize babies.

In preparing for this paper, I thought about why this should this be the case. One of the goals of this conference is to speak about the responsibility of our tradition for the one world, but it seems that the Russian Protestant churches have not ever been able to look beyond the walls of their own church, even within their own country. Instead, to a large degree, believers throughout the world have been caring for (or attempting to care for) them rather than the other way around. At various times in history political and church leaders from Germany, Denmark, and the United States (to name a few) have intervened with Russian authorities on behalf of Christians in general or Protestants in particular. Because of its diaspora or quasi-diaspora status and its place as a minority in an Orthodox-dominated country, international ties have been mostly about Russia Christians receiving support from abroad, the exception being Russian-Germans who emigrated to other parts of the world and helped support the Lutheran churches in their new homeland, whether that be in the Americas or in Europe.

But to return to the central question of this paper, I ask once again – why has the influence on the Reformation in Russia been so small? Why does the author who drew me to Russia, Fyodor Dostoevsky, see Lutheranism as “a faith of protest and mere denial,” offering nothing positive to the Christian world?¹ Shouldn't it have been clear to him, as it is to me, that the churches of the Reformation and the Orthodox churches have a lot to learn from each other?

It would be one thing if Dostoevsky and other Russian thinkers only had limited experience with Lutherans during there visits to the West or through literature. Then their superficial and negative impression would be understandable. Dostoevsky, though, lived in a country where the Lutheran church was a state church, the second largest Christian confession in the empire. It's congregational buildings and members were prominent in the capital of St. Petersburg, the city Dostoevsky called home.² Certainly Dostoevsky knew of Lutherans in Omsk, where he was imprisoned; there was even a Lutheran congregation in the small city of Staraya Russa in the Novgorod region, where he wrote “The Brothers Karamazov.”

By Dostoevsky's lifetime, Russian Lutherans had made great contributions to country and society. For centuries foreigners had come to Russia to serve the country in various capacities. While some of these found it in their interests to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy³, many preserved their faith – from engineers and miners in the Altay region to farmers on the Volga and the Black Sea, from artisans and craftsman in Moscow to officers in the military serving in the Far East, from architects in the capital to governors in Siberia, the Lutheran presence in the country was significant and stretched back to the 16^th century. Names every Russian knew – the painter Karl Brullov,

 Franz Lefort - Peter the Great's ally in reforming the Russian military, 

the jeweler Karl Faberge,

Prince Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly, whose status stands prominently on Nevsky Prospekt, the first Field Marshal and Minister of War during the war with Napoleon 

– were Protestant. If one looks carefully, it is relatively easy to see that the influence of Protestants on the country was not, in fact, small, it was significant. As citizens of the Russian empire, their positive influence was high, disproportionally high given their numbers.

Why, then, was there so little interest in the Reformation in Russia among its intellectual leaders? My proposal is that the root of the problem here lies in the kind of influence that mainline Protestants (Lutheran and Reformed) had on Russian society. More to the point – they saw they had something to contribute (and contributed very generously) as citizens of the country, but they acted as if the Reformation had no positive role to play in the spiritual / intellectual / mental and religious environment of the country.

What might explain that? There could be various reasons. One that seems obvious to us today is that Lutherans might have experienced a deep respect for the Eastern church and its traditions and did not want, as immigrants and ethnic minorities to the country, to disturb the traditional faith of the country. Unfortunately, from a historical point of view, this is unlikely to have been the case. Among some Protestants, yes, respect for Orthodoxy probably played a certain role. However, many more foreigner visitors to Russia at this time were incapable of understanding why Orthodoxy might be attractive, instead dismissing Eastern Christianity as a superstitious form of faith reflecting the relatively uneducated status of the Russian masses.

The reluctance of Protestants to spread their spirit to Russia, then, seems to lie not with the relationship of Protestants to Orthodoxy but with finding their own place as a minority in the country. Here it is important that we briefly think about the status of the Lutheran church in Russia throughout its history.

It is difficult to do this briefly, but I will make the attempt.

Lutherans came to Russia at first with embassies to the Russian tsar to see if they might find an ally in the fight against Rome; secretly, they hoped to try to convert him. That some of them had hope shows quite clearly that foreigners have a hard time understanding Russia – there was not the slightest sliver of a chance that Ivan IV (“the Terrible”) would consider changing his faith. While Ivan could treat Lutheran guests politely from time to time, at other times he would get enraged, even hitting one theologian on the head with a whip when the he spoke poorly of an Orthodox leader. Lutherans were allowed to build a church building in Moscow in 1574/5, but 3 years later the German neighborhood of the city (together with the church) was burned down upon Ivan's order.

St. Michael's Lutheran in Moscow as it looked on the eve of the Revolution

During the 16^th and throughout the 17^th centuries, the Lutheran church grew, but had to deal with a high degree of instability related to the place of foreigners in the Russian state. Many new foreigners were coming in to the country, some invited related to needs of the state, others as refugees. On the one hand, they experienced a degree of religious tolerance that was on a fairly high level compared to other places at the time; on the other hand, they could have very little confidence in their status, since everything depended on a particular tsar's particular needs.

Under Peter I and his successors in the 18^th century there was an explosion of foreign influence in the country, both in terms of numbers (thanks to territorial expansion and immigration) and in terms of prominence. Great changes in the life of the Orthodox church were undertaken by Peter, who saw that conservative forces tended to gather there to resist his reforming projects. Peter's opponents were right to see that Protestant church-state relationships served as models for these reforms, even if they were carried out by the Orthodox theologian Feofan Prokopovich.

Foreigners continued to play a over-sized role throughout the century, though this was a mixed blessing. By the reign of Catherine II (1762-96) this issue became particularly prominent. In her years the number of Lutherans grew exponentially thanks to her invitation extended to farmers from Germany to settle the Volga region. The growth of Lutherans (and a smattering of other Western Christian groups, too) was such that they (and Catherine!) had to be particularly careful not to be seen as misusing their position to the disadvantage of the Orthodox population.

The 19^th century was characterized by attempts to bring stability to the position of Protestant churches in Russia. The high point of this was the establishment of a constitution for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia in 1832. This, too, was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Lutherans had less to worry about in terms of their long-term status in the country. They would be protected by the state, to a large degree, even sponsored by it. At the same time, there were very clear boundaries drawn for the church (e.g., mixed marriages only if the children were Orthodox, very difficult to convert to Lutheranism, until the late 19^th century – worship not allowed in the Russian language.) The Lutheran church was to be insulated as much as possible; this gave them stability and order from within, but completely took away from the church any opportunity for independent action apart from the state. The whole point was that the Russian state strove to submit the Lutheran church to it and eliminate its possibility for influencing Russians.

The Lutheran church, then, even after obtaining state status, remained completely foreign. By the early 20^th century, a leading actor on the Russian religious scene, the Ober-procuror Constantine Pobedonostsev, could say: “In the Protestant faith there is something cold and inhospitable to the Russian person. More than that – if a Russian believer were to say of a Protestant church building that it was 'mine,' it would be the same for him as dying.”

To summarize the position of Protestants in pre-Revolutionary times, we can say that the church was “trained” to see that it is to its advantage to remain firmly within the walls of ministry among “traditionally Protestant” groups. As long as the church acted as a spiritual home for Germans, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Swedes and other foreigner immigrants, it would be tolerated. But if it were to reach out to other peoples, let alone to Russians, or if it were to try to make a stand as a church in regards to some social or political issue, it would be punished.

It is no surprise, then, that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia was shocked by the October Revolution and, as an organization, could provide no resistance to Soviet repressions. Thanks to heroic efforts of individual believers and church leaders, Lutherans were able to contribute to efforts to eliminate the effects of famine in 1922-3, but other than that simply tried to re-negotiate the church's relationship to the state in a way that it had done in the preceding centuries, i.e., in a way that it would allow the church to survive as an isolated group within Russian society.

The rest of the 20^th century was full of dramatic and tragic history for all Christians in Russia, including for those from the Reformation tradition. After the elimination of Lutheran church structures in the Soviet Union by the end of the 1930s and their humble re-emergence in the second half of the century, after the hope-filled growth of the church in the late 80s and early 90s and the disappointment related to the emigration of many of Lutheran heritage in the decades since, where does that leave us? What is the heritage of the churches of the Reformation in Russia today, and what might be its contribution toward others in Post-Soviet societies?

Today we are obviously dealing with a different problem than before – in pre-Revolutionary Russia the issue was a church that was walled in. Now – we are dealing with a church that is very, very small. Is it really possible for such a minuscule church to occupy an important place in building society? Only time will tell. But in the meantime, the church is seeking to answer the question in the affirmative, to show with its efforts to contribute to the country's intellectual and spiritual life here and now that it believes that the Reformation tradition has something important to say for 21^st century Russian society.

How is it doing so? One important factor is the church's attempt, especially under its young Archbishop Dietrich Brauer, is the use of the church's position as a “historical” church to get its voice heard. Archbishop Brauer and other leaders from Moscow have gained a place at the table in the government's dealing with religion in recent years. The Archbishop addressed a Duma committee earlier this year, for example, and representatives of the Moscow office of the church frequently take part in government-led round table discussions and conferences dealing with various societal issues. By frequently using the opportunity to send women (lay or ordained) to these meetings the church is already witnessing something about our Reformation heritage.

But the efforts of the church today are not primary about looking back at a “glorious” history as Russia's second Christian confession. The current leadership of the church is trying to help its members forge, for the first time, an identity that is both Russian and Lutheran. In that regard there are many attempts to utilize the "heritage of the Reformation" and to contextualize it for post-Soviet society. This is visible in the church's main publication - “Der Bote.”

There we can see how the church is trying to develop its own thought by learning more both about Lutheranism (thanks to sermons and theological articles in every issue) and, lately, also more about Orthodoxy. Last year, for example, I wrote an article about the theology of icons, while a member of the publication staff wrote a piece about the place of the “holy fool” in the Orthodox tradition.

While these efforts are important for a general audience, for those interested in deeper theological thinking, there is the possibility of participating in seminars run through the “Equipping for Service” program in which I am in charge. More interesting still, perhaps, are the works by Seminary President Dr. Anton Tikhomirov, whose two small books “Dogmatics Without Dogmatism” and “The Truth of Protest” are unparalleled in terms of expressing the values of the Reformation with an authentic Russian voice. The latter's subtitle is “The Spirit of Evangelical Lutheran Theology,” and it is this way of thinking theologically, probably more than concrete theological positions, that is so new and fresh here. Together with Archbishop Dietrich Brauer, Tikhomirov wrote “And You Will Be Free Indeed!”, summing up the Lutheran understanding of freedom and responsibility in a way that has obvious implications for the context.

In other ways the Lutheran church strives to be a small, quite voice of reason – this alone is enough to carve out a special place in the Russian religious environment. This was particularly visible in the past two years, when the relationship between Russia and the West has deteriorated. The pressure on Russian religious groups to support the policies of the Kremlin is high. In church declarations and publications the ELC shows a commitment to refuse to “toe the line” in terms of official positions. The church is too small to show outright opposition, but by declining to repeat the “right words,” the words expected of them by the Kremlin, and by asking questions and shifting attention to other issues, the Lutheran church in Russia is staking out unique ground. History has shown that even remaining silent during controversial questions is punishable.⁴ Yet, in “Der Bote” articles in the past two years on peacemaking and on refugees, a voice was given to believers in Ukraine and Georgia; again, this approach makes the Lutheran witness unusual.

In summary I'd like to say that the Reformation heritage in Russia was never one of “protest and mere denial,” but its isolation from Russian society in the Imperial period means thats its influence on society was severely limited. Today, despite limitations, there is a new chance for the Lutheran church to be authentically Russian voice expressing the core values of the Reformation in a way that has the potential to have positive impacts on the religious and social environment of the country.

Afterward

In this paper it may seem that I have taken it upon myself to judge the way the Lutherans in Russia lived out their faith in the first nearly 350 years that they resided in the country. Accusation, however, was in no way my intention. At nearly every step along the way it seems clear that making a move towards “localizing” the faith would have had significant consequences, many of which might have turned out to have negatively affected the witness of the church in the country. At the same time, the relatively obvious fact that Lutheranism remained a foreign element on Russian soil demands some explanation. It won't do, either, to condemn the religion policies of the tsarist governments. politics of the tsarist government instead. It would be anachronistic, after all, to fault the tsars for a lack of religious tolerance. After all, where else in 18^th century Europe would there be such a wide variety of religious attitudes tolerated in one country? In what other capital city could Lutheran, Catholic, Armenian and Orthodox churches be seen, nearly side by side, on the main street of the capital? While one might wish that the situation had been different and that the country wouldn't have been caught up, from time to time, in a degree of xenophobia, what country's history is free of such moments?

Through analyzing the history of the Lutheran church in Russia, I hope to emphasize just how special this moment is, and, for all those who pray and work for the church, to thank God for the opportunity that has arisen to be a new kind of witness in this country.

1F.M. Dostoevsky. “A Writer's Diary,” January 1877.

2 As much as 10% of St. Petersburg was Lutheran at the time.

3In particular the tsars of German heritage, including Paul III and Catherine II. The latter, it is said, was a true Christian who struggled with her decision to become Orthodox or not. In the end she decided to become Orthodox because she sees “no real difference between the Greek and Lutheran faith.” If this quite is fairly attributed to her, it shows that she remained Lutheran in spirit!

4 E.g., Pastor Ganzen, the only pastor to refuse to sign the letter of greeting to the Bolshevik government at the church synod in 1924, was later sent to the GULAG, and his refusal to sign the letter was named as one of the reasons.