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Pacifism and Apocalyptic Discourse Among Russian Spiritual Christian Molokan-Jumpers

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Pacifism and Apocalyptic Discourse Among Russian Spiritual Christian Molokan-Jumpers Church History 80:1 (March 2011), 109–138. © American Society of Church History, 2011 doi:10.1017/S0009640710001587 The Woman Clothed in the Sun: Pacifism and Apocalyptic Discourse among Russian Spiritual Christian Molokan-Jumpers J. EUGENE CLAY ITH its violent images of heavenly and earthly combat, the book of Revelation has been criticized for promoting a vengeful and Wdistorted version of Christ’s teachings. Gerd Lüdemann, for example, has attacked the book as part of the “dark side of the Bible,” and Jonathan Kirsch believes that the pernicious influence of Revelation “can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.”1 Yet, surprisingly, nonviolent pacifists have also drawn on the Apocalypse for encouragement and support. This was especially true for generations of Russian Spiritual Christians (dukhovnye khristiane), a significant religious minority whose roots trace at least as far back as the 1760s, when the first “spirituals” (dukhovnye) were arrested and tried in Russia’s southern provinces of Tambov and Voronezh. Although they drew upon apocalyptic martial imagery, the Spiritual Christians were pacifists, some of whom came to identify themselves with the Woman Clothed in the Sun of Revelation 12. Spiritual Christians refused to recognize the sacraments, clergy, and icons of the state church; rather than kiss and bow to icons, they kissed and bowed to one another, and thus venerated human beings, who were the true image—or Research for this article was supported by the Pew Evangelical Scholars Initiative, by seed grants from the Institute for Humanities Research and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University, and by the International Research and Exchanges Board with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State. I would like to express my appreciation to Andrew Conovaloff, who has generously shared his personal library and papers with me and who maintains an excellent website devoted to Molokan history (http://www.molokane.org), and to the Monks of Hilandar Monastery and the Hilandar Research Library of Ohio State University. I alone am responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation in this article. 1Gerd Lüdemann, The Unholy in Holy Scripture: The Dark Side of the Bible, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1997), 114–17; Jonathan Kirsch, A History of the End of the World: How the Most Controversial Book in the World Changed the Course of Western Civilization (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 18. Rebecca Skaggs and Thomas Doyle, “Violence in the Apocalypse of John,” Currents in Biblical Research 5, no. 2 (February 2007): 220–34. J. Eugene Clay is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. 109 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 02 Oct 2021 at 13:08:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640710001587 110 CHURCH HISTORY icon (ikona, obraz)—of God. Convinced that the world was coming to an end, these Spiritual Christians openly ridiculed the most sacred Orthodox rituals, and they looked forward to the return of Christ and God’s direct instruction by the Holy Spirit. Although they recognized the Bible, these Spiritual Christians—later labeled “spirit-wrestlers” (dukhobortsy or Dukhobors) by heresiologists after the (completely unrelated) fourth-century heresy of the pneumatomakhoi—believed that their own oral tradition and contemporary divine inspiration took precedence over the scriptures.2 By the end of the eighteenth century, Spiritual Christianity had split into two major branches, the Dukhobors and the Molokans, who were divided over the authority of the canonical scriptures. The Dukhobors emphasized the indwelling spirit of God in each individual; the Molokans insisted on the authority of the written Bible. The Molokans received their name because they ignored the extrabiblical fasting rules of the Orthodox Church and drank milk (moloko) and ate other dairy products on the days that such foods were forbidden. Although they preferred the term Spiritual Christians, they also used the term Molokan, which could signify not only their liberation from Orthodox tradition but also their commitment to the pure spiritual milk of God’s word (1 Peter 2:2). In the early nineteenth century, the Molokan commitment to biblical authority helped them to fashion their particular understanding of the Woman Clothed in the Sun, who became a particularly poignant symbol for persecuted Spiritual Christians. Pictured as a heavenly figure attacked by an evil dragon, the Woman of the Apocalypse has traditionally been seen by Christian commentators as symbolic of an embattled righteous community. In the narrative of the Apocalypse, the Woman, who is thrice rescued from the attacks of the serpent, serves as a parenesis—moral encouragement for a persecuted community that identifies itself with her.3 Envisioning themselves as the Woman Clothed in the Sun, some Spiritual Christians fashioned the 2On the first Spiritual Christians, see Nikolai Gavrilovich Vysotskii, Materialy iz istorii dukhoborcheskoi sekty (Sergiev Posad: Tipografiia I. I. Ivanova, 1914); Pavel G. Ryndziunskii, “Antitserkovnoe dvizhenie v Tambovskom krae v 60-kh godakh XVIII veka,” Voprosy istorii religii i ateizma 2 (1954): 154–93; Svetlana A. Inikova, “Tambovskie dukhobortsy v 60-e gody XVIII veka,” Vestnik Tambovskogo universiteta, seriia Gumanitarnye nauki 2, no. 1 (1997): 39– 53; Inikova, “The Tambov Dukhobors in the 1760s,” trans. Liz Bliss, Russian Studies in History 46, no. 3 (Winter 2007–2008): 10–39. The Spiritual Christians held firm to their iconoclasm, in contrast to most Russians, who deeply and sincerely venerated icons. Vera Shevzov, “Icons, Miracles, and the Ecclesial Identity of Laity in Late Imperial Russian Orthodoxy,” Church History 69, no. 3 (September 2000): 610–31. On the fourth-century pneumatomakhoi, see Wolf- Dieter Hauschild, Die Pneumatomachen: Eine Untersuchung zur Dogmengeschichte des vierten Jahrhunderts (Hamburg: Hauschild, 1967). 3Dorothy A. Lee, “The Heavenly Woman and the Dragon: Rereadings of Revelation 12,” in Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, ed. Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 201. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 02 Oct 2021 at 13:08:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640710001587 THE WOMAN CLOTHED IN THE SUN 111 answers to their very real dilemmas of plague, famine, and state persecution by placing themselves within the apocalyptic narrative. The Apocalypse provided the discursive tools for understanding and responding to their predicaments, and the drama of the Woman Clothed in the Sun served as a cultural script, suggesting possibilities for responding to the crises that they faced.4 As an image drawn from the Bible, the Apocalyptic Woman also illustrated two major features that distinguished the Molokans from the state church: (1) their commitment not only to the Bible, but also to its spiritual interpretation; and (2) their ecclesiology, which reserved the term church to the assembly of the faithful, not to some sacred space or building. Understood in a spiritual sense, the Woman represented the community of true believers. Some time before 1820, the Molokan merchant Semen Andreevich Shvetsov of Tambov province, in an effort to gain recognition for his faith, outlined the main tenets of Spiritual Christianity for the provincial governor. Citing John 4:23– 24, Shvetsov contended that the Molokans worshiped God in spirit, unlike the Orthodox priests. Secondly, Shvetsov noted that “we regard the church, in accordance with the words of holy scripture, as an assembly of people, for the holy apostle Paul in the second epistle to the Corinthians, in the sixth chapter, says ‘you are the church of the living God.’” In the same way, Shvetsov argued that the sacraments had to be understood and celebrated spiritually: “baptism consists in the teaching of the word of God”; confession was to be done among fellow believers, not to priests; communion meant “studying the words of God and the fulfillment and observance of his holy commandments”; and the only hierarch among the Spiritual Christians was Christ himself.5 For his pains, Shvetsov ultimately ended up in monastic confinement in the Suzdal’ Spaso-Evfimiev monastery.6 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the most radical Dukhobors and Molokans also embraced an uncompromising pacifism, which was expressed most dramatically in 1895 when Dukhobors organized a mass burning of arms as a protest against war.7 Shortly afterward, in 1898 to 1899, some 7,500 Dukhobors emigrated to Canada, their voyage financed in part by the 4Anna Wierzbicka, “Russian Cultural Scripts: The Theory of Cultural Scripts and Its Applications,” Ethos 30, no. 4 (December 2002): 401–32; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,” International Organization 54, no. 4 (Autumn 2000): 845–77, esp. 852; Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (April 1986): 273–86. 5Nikolai Varadinov, Istoriia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, vol. 8: Istoriia rasporiazhenii po raskolu (St. Petersburg: v Tipografii Vtorogo Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii,
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