Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania

Front matter

Sectarianism and Renewal in 1920s Romania The Limits of Orthodoxy

and Nation-Building

Roland Clark ii

Part Three Renewal Movements

8 The Lords Army 143 9 The Stork’s Nest 169 Conclusion 193 Bibliography 198

Index 219

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to many outstanding people whose generosity, insights and hard work have enriched both the project and myself personally. A number of exceptional studies on church history and religion in inter-war Romania have appeared in recent years, finally making a book of this nature possible. This project has developed in conversation with the members of two scholarly organizations in particular - the Society for Romanian Studies and the Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture. I have presented this material at conferences run by both organizations over the years, receiving valuable feedback from Scott Kenworthy, Jennifer Spock, Matthew Miller, James Kapaló, Aleksandra Djuri Milovanovic, Ryan Voogt, lemima Ploscariu, Iuliana Cindrea and Dumitru Lisnic, among others. Ionut Biliuta, Anca Sincan and Martin Heale read drafts of the entire manuscript and made invaluable suggestions for its improvement.

Emanuel Contac has generously shared documents with me and commented on earlier versions of Chapter 9, which was originally published in a different form in Pleroma under his editorship. Philippe Blasen and James Kapaló have also shared some fascinating resources and discoveries in Romanian archives that I would otherwise never have come across. Thanks also goes to Dumitru Lacatusu for assisting with the archival research, and to Catherine McManamon, Mary Dixon, Helen Hall and Kathryn Barnes at the University of Liverpool Library, who have spent a great deal of their institutions money locating hardto-find books for me. In Bucharest, I am grateful to the staff at the Library of the Holy Synod, the Central University Library, the Library of the Romanian Academy, the Romanian National Archives and the Archives at the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. They have tirelessly helped track down materials and generously opened their collections to me. Archives are no longer only held in hard copy these days, and my task would have been much harder without the digitized collections at Moldavica, Publicatii Baptiste, OasteaDomnului.info, the digital library of the Alexandru D. Xenopol Arad County Library and the digital library of the “Lucian Blaga Central University Library in Cluj.

Acknowledgements ix

Finally, an ocean of thanks goes to my wife Laura, my daughter Linda and our parents Geoff, Yvonne and Daniela, for their support, encouragement and patience while this book was being written.

All Biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.

Open Access was made possible by the support of the University of Liverpool, UK, and for this both the author and Bloomsbury Academic are deeply grateful.

Introduction

Ruth Rouse, a former Anglican missionary, spent eight days in Bucharest as part of a fact-finding journey through Europe for the World Christian Student Federation at the end of January 1911. She found Romanian attitudes to religion completely foreign and inexplicable according to the criteria of British Protestantism. Rouse noted down some of her observations in a report to the Federation.

Irreligion prevails amongst the educated. I will not say Agnosticism or Atheism: their irreligion is far too unreasoned and a matter of atmosphere to be classified under one form of unbelief or another. They have simply no interest in religion, no idea that it could possibly have significance for any educated person. Religion is for them dead and gone. Never in any country have I suffered so from the impression that spiritual ideas, however simply expressed, were simply not understood. The church of the country is Orthodox, but can do nothing for educated people. They openly mock at their priests, who are for the most part low-class men, uneducated, sometimes unable to read, often with no form of training for their work except ability to read the services, unpaid, venal, because dependent for their livelihood on fees for religious services, and too often of bad life.

Yet, with all their contempt for their church, the Roumanians have a Chauvinistic dread of foreign influence, and do all they can to make missionary work among them impossible. They are exceedingly suspicious of Roman Catholicism, which has made some progress. They are suspicious also of Protestant effort, though in a less degree. Protestant missions are represented by the Seventh-Day Adventists and Plymouth Brethren. Both have made some progress, though their missionaries are put over the border as soon as they are found at work.

Reform movements within the church scarcely exist. There are, however, some signs of hope. The Roumanian Church possesses one great advantage over all other Orthodox Churches. The services and the Scriptures are read in the language of the people, not in an incomprehensible Archaic tongue. Some priests are striving after better things ... Some earnest laymen are issuing a little magazine giving very simply religious instruction of a decidedly evangelical kind. It is rather closely modelled on the magazine issued by the Plymouth Brethren, and even reproduces its articles, but it is an Orthodox effort.'

Rouses reports about her visits to Balkan countries were consistently derogatory and her language more than a little racist. She wrote about Serbians, for example, that they had a fanatical attachment to [the Orthodox Church] as a national institution, combined with open avowed sceptism [sic] and utter contempt for the priests as uneducated and corrupt. But whether from a kind of superstition or a primitive sort of hypocrisy, (the Servians are very primitive in lots of ways) many of them still seem to go through a certain amount of church attendance.’

The idea that Serbians went to church when Romanians did not gives us an insight into the reliability of Rouse and other commentators who bemoaned the lack of Romanian religiosity. Serbians were famous in the Balkans for failing to attend church services, and Romania had roughly one parish priest for every 900 people, compared to Serbias one per 3,000 people? Commentaries about how ‘religious’ a society is are always in the eye of the observer. Knowing what is going on in someone elses heart and mind when they close their eyes in prayer is impossible when you are standing next to them, let alone when we are talking about entire countries of people who lived a hundred years ago.

Regardless of how accurate Rouse' negative views about Romanian religiosity were, such opinions were consistently reiterated by Romanian writers for the next twenty years. During the late nineteenth century British and American ideas about what constituted ‘good’ religion came to dominate Romanian public opinion. According to Western criteria, churches were judged based on how many people attended weekly worship services, how much they respected their clergy, how well lay people were able to articulate their beliefs, how fervently people embraced these beliefs (as expressed through their emotional states)

! Ruth Rouse, Report to the World Student Christian Federation, ‘Roumania, 25 January to 2 February

1911, Lambeth Palace Archives, R. T. Davidson Papers, Student Christian Movement, 1905-25, vol. 491, ff. 50-1. 2 Rouse, ‘Serbia, 3-7 February 1911, in ibid., ff. 53-4. On Ruth Rouse, see Ruth Franzén, Ruth Rouse Among Students: Global, Missiological and Ecumenical Perspectives (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2008).

Bojan Aleksov, Religious Dissent between the Modern and the National: Nazarenes in Hungary and Serbia 1850-1914 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006), 42 n. 50.

and how strongly religion shaped believers’ everyday lives. Grigorie Comşa, a dedicated anti-Protestant evangelist, complained in 1921 that ‘in church life we see indifference about indifference. We acknowledge painfully that even some priests are addicted to commerce. No one goes to church anymore; the laws and commandments of the church are ignored. Adultery is becoming widespread; the name of God is mocked, the holy mysteries are trodden underfoot, and sectarianism ravages the land.’* The editors of the church magazine Crucea (The Cross) introduced their first issue in 1923 by stating that ‘almost everyone now believes that the Romanian Orthodox Church is incapable of doing its job.5 Nicolae Iorga, a well-known atheist, committed nationalist and erudite historian, concluded the second edition of his two-volume History of the Romanian Churches (1928) by observing that, at the beginning of the First World War, ‘following the destruction of its spirit and purpose by the constant intrusions of the state as [political] parties vied for its control, the Church of the Romanian Kingdom no longer represents that moral force which once constituted its glory. Rouse and other commentators point to a general dissatisfaction with the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) as a social and spiritual institution, coupled with a deep hostility toward foreigners - and towards foreign missionaries in particular. At the same time, they noted that there were efforts by both priests and laypeople to spread 'evangelical ideas through magazines and newspapers.

Rouse writes that young women in Bucharest welcomed her and were eager to spend time with her. A chance to speak English and to learn about the West was worth the time spent answering the questions of this interesting English woman. Orthodox writers frequently compared themselves to the British when discussing the merits of their own church.’ An anonymous priest commented in 1909 that 'the [religious] questions that are now being discussed in Romania, the civilized peoples of the West have been discussing for a long time. We have opened our eyes quite late. But at the end of the day it is a good thing that we have opened them at all. è Prominent Orthodox leaders in Bucharest welcomed the increasing dialogue between the Anglican and Romanian Orthodox

Gheorghe Comşa, Istoria predicei la români (Bucharest: Tipografia Cărtilor Bisericesti, 1921), 3. ‘Starea de plans a Bisericei Ortodocse, Crucea, 1 March 1923, 6.

Nicolae Iorga, Istoria Bisericii Românești si a vieții religioase a românilor, vol. 2, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Saeculum, 2011), 319.

“Congresul preoţilor, Biserica Ortodoxă Română, December 1923, 1125.

Un preot de mir, Chestiuni de discutat (Piteşti: Tipografia Transilvania, 1909), 1.

Churches that began in the early 1920s.’ Rouse’s interest in ‘reform movements, her position at the intersections between Orthodox and Western Christianity, her discussions of lay spirituality and her observations about the Orthodox use of Protestant literature all lie at the heart of this book.

Rouse was not imagining the productive relationship between these religious currents. She visited Archimandrite Iuliu Scriban while she was in Bucharest, who was the director of the Central Theological Seminary in Bucharest. “He is a remarkable man, Rouse wrote, ‘full of both spiritual and intellectual power’.

He is, perhaps, the only priest in Roumania who has entered the priesthood from a sense of vocation. He is a man of good family and independent means. He studied theology for five years in Germany (1904 to 1907), at Strasbourg and Heidelberg, has alibrary full oftheological books and magazines in five languages, and has travelled in France and Switzerland. He corresponds with friends of his abroad, both Protestant and Catholic. He was a member of the German Student Christian Union all the time he was in Germany, and is now an Altfreund der DCSV: He reads Die Furche [The Furrow], Le Semeur [The Sower], Fide e Vita [Faith and Life] regularly (all Student Movement magazines), cheerfully greeted me by saying he knew all about me, and was just contemplating an article on the Constantinople Conference in a Roumanian newspaper! One felt at once in the completest sympathy with him. He is a man of deep spiritual life and evangelical fervour, and it is glorious that he has the training of young priests in his hands. He longs to see the Federation at work in Roumania. 'Our young people don't understand that the Gospel is the basis for practical life; he said again and again."

During the early twentieth century Scriban and a small but influential group of Orthodox leaders set out to ‘rejuvenate’ the Romanian Orthodox Church. Their efforts coincided with an increased interest in religion and spirituality in both cities and villages." Miron (Ilie) Cristea became the Metropolitan- Primate of Greater Romania in December 1919. As metropolitan-primate and then as patriarch, he reorganized the Church, placing it on a new constitutional

? Irineu Mihálcescu, ‘Relatiunile dintre Biserică Ortodoxă și cea Anglicană, Biserica Ortodoxă Română, November 1923, 1053. On Anglican attempts at building relationships with Eastern Orthodoxy in the early 1920s, see J. A. Douglas, ‘Prospects of Union between the Eastern and Anglican Churches, The Christian East 1, no. 1 (1920): 36-46; Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 71-85; and Romanian National Archives (henceforth ANIC), Fond Ministerul de Cultelor si Artelor (henceforth MCA), Dosar 109/1925, ff. 91-105.

Rouse, ‘Roumania, f. 52.

George Enache, “Biserică - societate — naţiune - stat în România interbelică: I. Explorári in orizont liberal, Revista teologicd 2 (2010): 169-70.

setting, expanding its jurisdiction and presiding over the establishment of new seminaries, libraries, theological faculties, printing presses and newspapers across the country. In the process, he fought to marginalize the Roman and Greek Catholic Churches and oversaw a reform of the liturgical calendar that gave rise to the Old Calendarist (Stilist) movement.

Strong regional tensions dominated 1920s Romanian Orthodoxy. Each region approached the challenges of expansion, modernization and spiritual renewal in different ways. The Transylvanian wing of the Church was led by Nicolae Balan, elected Metropolitan of Transylvania in February 1920. Almost immediately Balan established Lumina satelor (The Light of the Villages), a church newspaper dedicated to spreading the Gospel in rural areas, appointing a young priest by the name of Iosif Trifa as its editor. The newspaper soon gave rise to a grassroots lay movement known as the Lord’s Army (Oastea Domnului), which brought an evangelical flavour into Orthodox lay practices and was eventually suppressed by Balan himself. In Oltenia, Vartolomeu Stanescu became Bishop of Ramnicul Noului Severin in March 1920. As bishop he launched his own renewal movement, Rebirth (Renasterea), aimed at parish priests, and the magazine Solidaritatea (Solidarity) to bring theological ideas into the public sphere. His colleagues from Moldavia, such as Gurie Grosu, the Archbishop of Chisinau si Hotin, and Visarion Puiu, the Bishop of Hotin, pursued similar agendas in their preaching and writing while encouraging a specifically Moldavian approach to church governance.

In Bucharest the prolific writer and teacher Irineu Mihalcescu shaped a generation of priests and theologians through his all-encompassing vision of dogmatic theology. One of his colleagues at the University of Bucharest, the Old Testament scholar Ioan Popescu-Mălăeşti, established a reading circle entitled “Take and Read’ (Ja si citeste) to encourage both priests and lay people to read Christian literature. Parish priests who had trained under Scriban, Mihalcescu and Popescu-Malaesti began publishing newspapers and preaching fiery sermons encouraging their listeners to repent and to take the spiritual life seriously. Two of them, Teodor Popescu and Dumitru Cornilescu, drew crowds to St Stefan’s Church, colloquially referred to as the Stork’s Nest. Their success attracted unwelcome attention from other reforming priests and the two men were driven out of the Church on charges of heresy. Popescu and Cornilescu, their colleagues decided, had gone too far and had somehow become Protestants.

? Petre Sperlea, Vartolomeu Stánescu: Episcop al Ramnicului Noului Severin (1921-1938) (Bucharest: Basilica, 2014). 8 [on Vicovan, Jon Irineu Mihálcescu: Apostol al teologiei românești” (Iasi: Trinitas, 2006).

Protestantism has deep historical roots in Transylvania, but less elsewhere in the country. The 1930 census listed 15.5 per cent of the population of Transylvania as Reformed Calvinists and 7.6 per cent as Evangelical Lutherans." Predominately made up of ethnic Hungarians, the Reformed Church dates back to the sixteenth century, when Calvinism spread through the region encouraged by the Edict of Turda (1568) granting freedom of conscience and religion in Transylvania.” The Evangelical Lutheran Church emerged among Transylvanian Saxons following Johannes Honteruss publication of a 1542 edition of Martin Luther’s writings in Brasov. It adopted the Augsburg Confession in 1572, and remained a predominately Saxon church until 1918, when a separate Evangelical Lutheran Church was established for non-Saxon Lutherans.’ The majority of Transylvanian Lutherans were liberal Protestants who valued their church as much as a bastion of Saxon culture as for its spirituality, but the incorporation of Lutherans from Bessarabia and Dobruja after the First World War brought Swabian Pietist currents into the church as well. Many Saxons became disillusioned with their church during the inter-war period, just as they were with the Romanian state. Some turned to National Socialism in the early 1930s, much to the chagrin of church leaders who were then placed under significant pressure to ally themselves with German Nazism, which they did by the end of the decade.” Neither of these ‘historical’ churches particularly worried the Orthodox leadership so long as they remained predominantly Hungarian and Saxon and did not try to convert ethnic Romanians.

Protestant ‘Repenter’ churches, on the other hand, encountered staunch opposition from the Orthodox. Baptists represented the largest of the Repenter denominations. Although they only made up 0.001 per cent of Romanias population in 1920, almost all Orthodox newspapers and magazines mentioned Baptists, Repenters and sectarianism in every issue.!* Of the roughly 18 million people living in Romania at the time of the 1930 census, 0.3 per cent were

=

Sabin Manuilă, Recensământul general al populaţiei României din decemvrie 1930, vol. 2 (Bucharest: Institutul Central de Statisticá, 1938), xxiv, xxvii.

5 Robert Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 104-17.

Oskar Wittstock, Johannes Honterus, der Siebenbürger Humanist und Reformator: der Mann, das Werk, die Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1970); Ludwig Binder, Die Kirche der Siebenbürger Sachsen (Erlangen: Martin Luther Verlag, 1982).

Ulrich Andreas Wien, “Biserica Evanghelică C.A. din România începând cu anul 1918, in Un veac frământat. Germanii din România după 1918, ed. Ottmar Trașcă and Remus Gabriel Anghel (Cluj- Napoca: Institutul pentru Studierea Problemelor Minorităţilor Nationale, 2018), 201-2, 214-16. Direcţia Generală a Statistice, Anuarul statistic al României 1922 (Bucharest: Tipografia Curţii Regale, 1923), 20.

a u

E

Baptists, 0.08 per cent were Seventh-Day Adventists and 0.04 per cent were classified as belonging to ‘other religions and sects. Fears about Repenters dominated Orthodox discussions about the meaning and character of Orthodoxy throughout the inter-war period. Baptist churches were established among ethnic Germans in Bucharest and Tulcea during the 1850s and 1860s, respectively, spreading among Saxons and Hungarians in Transylvania during the 1870s. These communities began attracting ethnic Romanians during the 1890s and a flourishing, albeit small, communion of Romanian Baptist churches existed by the turn of the century.? Nazarenes, a Protestant group that emphasized adult baptism, pacifism and rejected oath-taking, spread in the Banat from the 1870s onward and in Greater Romania once the Banat was split between Romania and Serbia in 1918.” Seventh-Day Adventist missionaries from Poland and Germany arrived in Romania soon after the Baptists, and scores of Adventist communities were well established by the early 1920s.? Swiss missionaries established the first Brethren churches (Creștini după Evanghelie) in Bucharest in 1901. By the time ofthe First World War, Brethren communities could be found in Ploiesti, Brasov, Sibiu and Bárlad. New churches sprung up in Iasi and the surrounding region during the war, and disillusioned Baptists in Maramures and Bihor formed their own independent churches along Brethren lines.? Pentecostal believers could be found in Moldavia from 1908 and spread through the rest of the country during the 1920s, supported by missionaries sent by the Romanian émigré community in Detroit.” Bible Students, or Jehovah's Witnesses as they later became known, began preaching in Cluj in 1911 and spread throughout Romania during the inter-war period.”

Despite the very real doctrinal and practical differences between Baptists, Brethren, Nazarenes, Pentecostals, Adventists and Bible Students, all became known as ‘Repenters’ (Pocáifi) A pejorative term, Repenter was used to

Manuila, Recensámántul, vol. 2, xxiv.

% Alexa Popovici, Istoria baptistilor din România (Oradea: Făclia, 2007), 17-28, 279-82; Dorin Dobrincu, ‘Sub puterea Cezarului. O istorie politica a evanghelicilor din Romania (a doua jumatate a secolului al XIX-lea-1989), in Omul evanghelic: O explorare a comunităților protestante românești, ed. Dorin Dobrincu and Dănuţ Mánástireanu (Iași: Polirom, 2018), 42-64.

Aleksov, Religious Dissent, 133-64.

Iemima Ploscariu, ‘Pieties of the Nation: Romanian Neo-Protestants in the Interwar Struggle for Religious and National Identity (MA diss., Central European University, Budapest, 2015), 16-17. Dobrincu, “Sub puterea Cezarului, 64-70; Bogdan Emanuel Rádut, “Comunitatea creştinilor dupa Evanghelie: 100 ani in Oltenia si 90 ani la Craiova, Oltenia: Studii, documente, cercetări 4, no. 2 (2014): 111.

Ciprian Balaban, Istoria bisericii penticostale din România (1922-1989): Institufie si harisme (Oradea: Editura Scriptum: 2016), 15-23.

S differentiate these groups from the ‘historical’ churches by highlighting their emphasis on repentance from sin, personal conversion, devotion to prayer and personal Bible reading, and rigorous abstinence from things of ‘the world’ including alcohol, swearing, ostentatious displays of wealth or gluttony and sex outside of marriage. Though they remained committed to their denominational labels first and foremost, most Repenters in the inter-war period embraced the term despite its negative social connotations. As uncomfortable as I am about using a term of abuse as a category of analysis, other labels used are equally problematic. Scholars frequently use ‘Evangelical’ as a blanket category for Baptists, Brethren or Pentecostals, and, although this has the advantage of accurately defining those groups on their own terms, it excludes Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses for doctrinal reasons even though they were sociologically quite similar to other Repenters and were all lumped together by Orthodox pundits.** Repenters are often called ‘neo-Protestants’ in contemporary Romania to distinguish them from Reformed and Lutheran Protestants. But this term only became popular after the Second World War and it would be anachronistic to project it back into the inter-war period. Finally, the standard term used by both Orthodox clergy and police was ‘Sectarians’ (sectanfi), which implied schism, heresy and intent to destroy the Church. Anyone who was not a member of one of the ‘historical’ churches was a sectarian in the eyes of the state, but I avoid the word here because of its strong pejorative connotations.” The actual number of Repenter churches was small relative to the size of the population, but Orthodox commentators spoke constantly about their sudden appearance and apparent success, making their impact on Orthodox Christianity disproportionate to their numbers. Opposition to Repenters took different forms from one region to another. In Transylvania, groups like the Lord’s Army argued explicitly that they were needed to blunt the appeal of Repenters, while Church leaders in Crişana and Bessarabia appointed ‘anti-sectarian missionaries’ to fight Repenters at a village level. Regional differences sometimes mirrored the actual strength of Repenter movements - Repenter communities were more common in Crisana and Bessarabia than elsewhere in the country, for example - but also reflected the resources and agendas of Orthodox leaders in those areas.

?* Paul E. Michelson, “The History of Romanian Evangelicals 1918-1989: A Bibliographical Excursus’, Arhiva Moladviae 9 (2017): 191-234.

7 Lucian Ionel Mercea, “The Concept of Sect in the Interwar Period, in The Holistic Society: Multi- Disciplinary Perspectives, ed. Ioan-Gheorghe Rotaru and Denise Elaine Burrill (Beltsville, MD: Scientia Moralitas Research Institute, 2017), 192-205.

The institutional reforms of Cristea, Balan, Stanescu and their colleagues are well documented, as is their militant nationalism, antisemitism and their associations with fascist and right-wing movements such as the National Christian Defense League (Liga Apararii National Crestine, LANC) and the Legion of the Archangel Michael (Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail).% A growing literature has also emerged in recent years on the history of evangelical groups such as the Baptists, Brethren and Pentecostals. Evangelical historians frequently demonize the Orthodox Church because of its role in suppressing their churches. This book brings histories of Romanian Orthodoxy into conversation with histories of Repenter Christianity, showing how both stories were catalysed by rising literacy rates, new religious practices, new ways of engaging with Scripture, a newly empowered laity inspired by universal male suffrage, a growing civil society that was taking control of community organizing and the sudden expansion of the Romanian nation-state.

Most histories of both Orthodox and Repenter churches focus primarily on the legal and institutional changes that shaped them as organizations. Although I too discuss these questions, this book draws on the sermons, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines they left behind to reveal that behind the mutual hostility and competition lay different approaches to reading the Bible and different ways of developing doctrine. Juxtaposing the thought-worlds of educated Orthodox bishops and self-taught Repenter preachers shows how Christians practised their faith in different social contexts, and gives us a clue to how and why movements like the Lord’s Army and the Stork’s Nest evolved out of solidly Orthodox settings into communities that looked remarkably like the Repenter movements they had set out to oppose. The picture that emerges is of 1920s Romania as a dynamic and polyphonic religious sphere. Behind the “us against then’ rhetoric lay a collection of diverse religious communities responding to rapid social change in different ways.

The Romanian story has parallels in other Orthodox countries, most notably in late imperial Russia and the Serbian regions of Austria-Hungary. Sergei Zhuk has described the clash between Repenters (he calls them ‘peasant evangelicals’) and Orthodox Christians as a ‘culture war: “The paradox of this

? Hans-Christian Maner, Multikonfessionalităt und neue Staatlichkeit: Orthodoxe, griechisch-katholische und rémisch-katholische Kirche in Siebenbürgen und Altrumünien zwischen den Weltkriegen (1918-1940) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008); Florian Kührer-Wielach, Siebenbürgen ohne Siebenbiirger?: Zentralstaatliche Integration und politischer Regionalismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014).

confrontation, he writes, ‘was that the roots of the peasants’ radical religion were in popular Orthodoxy itself. To some extent, the peasant evangelicals tried to be more rigorous and pious Orthodox believers than their less religious and more cynical neighbors. They constructed their religion by appropriating the available and well-known elements of Orthodoxy.” Rather than one borrowing from the other, other historians have suggested that both Repenter and Orthodox groups were responding to a complex nexus of historical changes. Heather Coleman emphasizes that the rise of Repenter Christianity was a symptom as well as a cause of a broad sea change in how previously marginalized people engaged with civil society and the state. ‘Contemporary observers from all across the political spectrum; she says, ‘regarded the Baptists’ presence and activities as emblematic of the penetration of Western ideas beyond the educated elite, the challenge of the emergence of a culture outside the boundaries of the society promoted by the state and its church, and the increasingly articulate demands of lower-class people for a voice and a role in shaping that culture. The unique historical context that catalysed the spread of the Baptists also impacted the Orthodox Church, which is why combating Protestantism was as much about negotiating the limits of Orthodoxy as it was about stopping ‘foreign influences’ spreading through the country. As Vera Shevzov has argued, when the Orthodox spoke about other Christians they did so in an attempt to clarify tensions within their own church.?' Moreover, the process of limiting Repenter evangelism involved ‘radical innovations’ such as appointing anti-Sectarian missionaries, as well as bringing some characteristically Protestant spiritual practices into the Orthodox Church.” Whereas most historians of Russian religion have focused on the Orthodox versus Repenter struggle, the reform movements of 1920s Romania such as the Lord’s Army and the Stork’s Nest provide an opportunity to see the same social tensions that threw the Orthodox Church into conflict with Repenters at work inside the Orthodox Church itself. Such movements are examples of what James Kapaló calls liminal Orthodoxy’ - forms of Orthodox Christianity

? Sergei I. Zhuk, Russias Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millenialism, and Radical Sects in Southern

Russia and Ukraine, 1830-1917 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), 3. * Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905-1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3.

Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 14. J. Eugene Clay, ‘Orthodox Missionaries and “Orthodox Heretics” in Russia, 1886-1917, in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 40.

w m S suspended between Orthodoxy and other religious traditions; bitterly critical of the established Church while still tenaciously clinging to it.?

The leaders of both of the Lord's Army and the Storks Nest were eventually driven out of their ministries by the ROC hierarchy, and their fate reflects a deep mistrust of innovation as well as shedding light on the development of Orthodoxy in the twentieth century. Orthodoxy teaches that the full truth was revealed in Jesus Christ and that the fundamental structures of church organization were created by the Apostles, but that the truth also resides in the whole Church as the body of Christ, including all believers, living and dead. Tradition, or parddosis in Greek, is encapsulated in the actions and teachings of the Church in the past and the present. It acts as a guide for believers.** In his 1922 Manual for Biblical Hermeneutics, Iuliu Scriban explained that 'the Church has the duty to use the entire store of faith and piety produced by Christians hearts, and to preserve it for the future. We therefore need to listen to the Church when it comes to explaining or to guiding our faith and piety.” Antonie Plámádealá, who served as Metropolitan of Ardeal between 1982 and 2005, writes that Tradition ‘has a certain elasticity’ and must be ‘constantly adapted to the environment, mentality, and culture of the times, and even to each individual, with a great deal of consideration and generosity? It is the prerogative of ones spiritual elder to interpret Tradition, however, whether they be a priest, an abbot, a bishop or a patriarch. One cannot simply decide for oneself how to apply Tradition to ones own circumstances.

The fear that well-meaning reformers may have gone beyond Tradition has resulted in a deep-seated wariness of renewal movements within Eastern Orthodoxy. In Russia, the Holy Synod initially forbade the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovnas attempt to establish a semi-monastic community known as the Martha and Mary House of Mercy in 1909. They were concerned about the fact that the sisters vows were only for set periods, that they were known as deaconesses, their uniforms, the fact that they ate meat and that the women could work outside of the community. Feodorovna was only able to put