Danut Manastireanu
I truly am honored to have the opportunity to respond to a number of aspects of Malkhaz Songulashvili’s book on the Baptists in Georgia. For full disclosure, I have to confess that I am a friend of Bishop Songulashvili, whom I genuinely admire as one of the most Christ-like people I have ever met, even if we do not agree on everything, theologically or otherwise. (I never waste my time with people with whom I fully agree.) Despite our differences, we deeply respect each other because of our common commitment to the Church, the mystical Body of Christ, “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” and to a radical and holistic understanding of our gospel call. Furthermore, I love Georgia and I have often visited the Baptist Peace Cathedral in Tbilisi, where I have preached a number of times. Yet, when it comes to ideas and academic matters, objectivity, as much as is humanly possible, has to prevail. I hope I will succeed in that regard.
The Lord’s Army—A Brief Overview
Since other articles in this issue describe the Baptist Church in Georgia, I will begin with a concise description of the Lord’s Army in Romania, which I will compare with the Georgian Baptist Church. In 1923 Father Iosif Trifa, from Sibiu, initiated an Orthodox renewal movement in Romania, which reached approximately 300,000 members, with about one million participants before the Second World War. During the Communist period, the movement was forced to go underground, and it barely survived the heavy persecution to which it was subjected. Despite the difficulty of obtaining precise numbers, it is estimated that the movement presently has approximately 50,000 active members, counting all its factions.
Moving on to comparisons between Georgian Baptists and the Lord’s Army, keep in mind that the former is a small denomination while the latter is a movement within the Romanian Orthodox Church to which some 86 percent of Romanians pay allegiance to one degree or another. Thus, valid comparisons coexist alongside significant contrasts.
Convergence
The two entities share similar efforts of religious convergence (defined as the openness and willingness to learn from other ecclesial traditions). The movement led by Fr. Trifa has sought to incorporate (or rather make more prominent) among its followers characteristic aspects of evangelical Protestantism: the need for new birth, repentance, and conversion; the personal responsibility of each believer to witness for Christ; and the active role of laity in the church, including preaching and teaching. For their part, Georgian Baptists more recently have engaged in convergence by incorporating in their theology and worship elements that are more characteristic of Orthodoxy: a hierarchical, episcopal church governance; an elaborated liturgy; the use of a Bible lectionary (similar to the revised one used by Anglicans and other Western churches); the use of priestly vestments; the use of incense in the liturgy; the use of icons as aids to prayer and reflection; and the adoption of a sacramental theology.
Spirituality
In contrast to the more mystical and contemplative spirituality of Orthodoxy, the general character of Lord’s Army spirituality is pietistic, which makes it similar to other renewal movements in Orthodoxy, Eastern and Oriental: Zoi in Greek Orthodoxy, and the Brotherhood of the Armenian Apostolic Church. This pietistic influence derives from the fact that Fr. Trifa initiated his movement in reaction to the prevalence of excessive drinking, swearing, sexual immorality, and gambling in Romanian villages. He saw pietistic values as a way to counteract such moral decadence. It is true that, although the movement is admired by many for the temperance it promotes, not all Orthodox are happy with this pietistic bent. Christos Yannaras, for instance, one of the most prominent Greek Orthodox theologians and a former member of the Zoi Movement, sees pietism as dangerous and foreign to the spirit of Orthodoxy.
In comparison, the spirituality promoted by Georgian Baptist leaders, especially by Bishop Malkhaz, is contemplative. With the exception of the use of iconography and the Eastern liturgical tradition, the spirituality of Georgian Baptists is closer to the classic Western contemplative tradition than to the mystical strain in Orthodoxy. The presence in the church of quasi-monastic orders, one for men (the Order of New Desert Fathers), and one for women (the Order of St. Nino), is another unique characteristic of Georgian Baptists. The fact that Bishop Malkhaz is a third-order Franciscan may have played an important role in the emergence of these orders.
Contrasting Stances on Social Issues
Being an Orthodox movement, the Lord’s Army shares with its parent a very conservative, and in this particular case, a quite rural ethos. For example, as a religious community, the Lord’s Army is patriarchal, with women contributing merely as helpers. By contrast, Georgian Baptists manifest a more dynamic, forward-looking, and radical ethos, clearly committed to gender equality, with women ordained as both pastors and bishops.
The more conservative Lord’s Army, for its part, shies away from controversial issues such as women’s ordination, and even more so from issues related to human sexuality. The traditionalism of the Romanian movement is nowhere more starkly in evidence than when juxtaposed against the radical (and I would say overly daring and perhaps insufficiently reflective) engagement of Georgian Baptists with these same issues. While the Lord’s Army shares with later pietism an emphasis upon personal rectitude to the neglect of collective social engagement, Georgian Baptists are much more involved in addressing social ills, even more so than their counterparts in the West, through charitable work on behalf of the poor and the elderly, in interfaith engagement, and in support for and defense of various persecuted minority groups— Muslims, Yazidis (followers of a Middle East religion combining elements of Christianity and Islam), and homosexuals.
Liturgical Comparisons
If one witnesses a Lord’s Army assembly meeting, as it is called (there are many recordings available of such events on YouTube), the first impression is of a typical, rural evangelical church service. Yet, when the time for teaching begins, the Orthodox character of the movement becomes more obvious. Conversely, when one participates in a Georgian Baptist church service, the use of icons, incense, and clerical vestments, even if with an original touch, gives a clear Orthodox impression, which is, in fact, intentional. However, as the service proceeds, the Baptist ethos becomes more obvious, but is more subtle and less obtrusive for worshippers in an Orthodox cultural context that is the case in Baptist churches elsewhere, which, again, is part of the intention of Georgian Baptist leaders.
Genuinely Orthodox Lord’s Army followers (there are also Lord’s Army groups that have really become Protestant in their beliefs and practices) attend the Sunday morning liturgy in their parish church, and then participate in a Lord’s Army assembly meeting in the evening, usually in a separate building. The Lord’s Army also uses the occasion of various church feast days to organize larger and longer meetings, with sometimes thousands in attendance.
Religious Nationalism
Leaders of both Georgian Baptists and the Lord’s Army are clearly nationalistic. Being part of the majority Romanian Orthodox Church, Lord’s Army followers are tempted, like all Orthodox, by phyletism, a fusion of ethnic and confessional identity, as expressed in the phrase “to be a Romanian is to be Orthodox.” The 1872 Council of Constantinople condemned phyletism as a heresy, although majority Orthodox churches never fully embraced this conciliar decision. By contrast, the emphasis on national identity among Georgian Baptists is rather a way of expressing their independence from Russian—including Moscow Baptist—hegemonic attempts to control and dictate to the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union.
Theology
The Lord’s Army represents a serious ecclesiological challenge to Romanian Orthodoxy, and at times it has included capable theologians. Fr. Vasile Mihoc, who is currently the official leader of the Lord’s Army and one of Romania’s most important biblical scholars, is one example. Nevertheless, the movement as a whole has never emphasized the need for deeper theological reflection within its ranks. This, I consider a real pity.
On the other side, Georgian Baptist convergence with elements of Georgian Orthodoxy is a phenomenon of less than 25 years, and it is unrealistic to expect significant theological reflection in such a short time. Songulashvili’s Ph.D. thesis and Bishop Rusudan Gotsirdze’s master’s thesis are the first serious attempts to engage academically with the interface between Georgian evangelical and Orthodox theology. However, the theology of a church can rarely be the fruit of the labor of just one or two theological minds, as brilliant as these may be. This fact is the reason I have constantly encouraged my Georgian Baptist friends to obtain higher degrees, to thereby sharpen their critical faculties, in order to start toiling on the laborious and complex task of elaborating a Georgian Baptist theology. This process has begun, but the pace is discouragingly slow and certainly not without hurdles.
Creativity
A common characteristic of both ecclesial bodies is the way they encourage creativity in their midst. The practical expressions among Lord’s Army faithful tend to take more rural forms, mostly through music, poetry, and drama, while among Georgian Baptists such manifestations are more characteristically urban: painting and iconography, choral music, and liturgical dance. (An interesting supplementary observation is that Romanian evangelical churches—if they have not adopted the highly out-of-place rock concert form of church service—are extensively employing poetry and music created by Lord’s Army artists, which are perceived to resonate more deeply with the Romanian soul than translated Western praise choruses.) At the same time, the iconography promoted by Georgian Baptists, even when it expresses veneration for prophetic heroes of Baptist faith such as Martin Luther King, Jr., is closer to the more elusive classic Georgian iconographic style, with its use of discrete mineral colors, in contrast to the more vivid colors characteristic of the imperial pomp of later Russian iconography.
In Summary
Romania’s Lord’s Army and the Georgian Baptist Church both represent genuine examples of Christian confessional convergence, albeit not without risks and difficulties. Nevertheless, pietistic influences upon Lord’s Army Orthodox and Orthodox influences upon Georgian Baptists provide great opportunities for ecumenical interaction and deeper theological reflection. Sometimes, in the heat of the process, such opportunities are lost, as I believe is the case with theological and ecclesiological reflection within the Lord’s Army, but, hopefully, not for good. In other cases, such as that of the Georgian Baptist Church, it is hoped that deeper reflection upon the relationship between evangelical and Orthodox theology and practice, will yet be the case. Should that occur, both of these Christian confessions could be enriched.
Danut Manastireanu is an Anglican theologian living in Iasi, Romania, with a keen interest in EvangelicalOrthodox dialogue. He recently completed 20 years of service with World Vision International in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
Editor’s Note: For additional background see Tom Keppeler, “A Summary of Trifa’s What Is the Army of the Lord,” and “Two Factions in Romania’s Army of the Lord,” East-West Church and Ministry Report 2 (Summer 1994): 8-9.