Christian Apologist Anatoly Yudenko: An Analytical Article in Defense of Voronaev.

June 11, 2011 · Adam Bondaruk, Baptists, Victor Belykh, AUCECB, Persecution, Interview, KGB, Books, Unregistered Pentecostals, Nikolay Kotyakov, On Emigration, United Church of Evangelical Christians, Vestibule, Petr Saenko, Pentecostals, Religious Mafia, Slavik Radchuk, Contemporary Persecution, Security Services

Who said Voronaev is wrong?

The true understanding of being born again—as a birth from heaven, a birth from God—was, in the view of the first Christians, necessarily recorded in the New Testament scriptures for subsequent generations. And the modernised, earth-bound version of being born again, reduced to the level of a mere traditional rite, stands as the norm among nearly all traditional Christians of our time. Is this a mistake, or a deliberate distortion of the truth?

And so, being born again: then and now. One example.

Then, in the time of the apostles.

“While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper country, came to Ephesus and found certain disciples. He said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ They said to him, ‘We have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.’ He said, ‘Into what then were you baptized?’ They said, ‘Into John’s baptism.’ Paul said, ‘John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people that they should believe in the one who would come after him, that is, in Jesus Christ.’ When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke with other languages and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all.” Acts 19:1-7

It happened that when the Apostle Paul arrived in Ephesus, he met a certain group of people who were believing disciples—believing not in the Jewish religion, nor in some variety of paganism, but Christians, instructed in the first rudiments of the teaching of Christ. This is immediately clear from the question posed by the Apostle Paul; he asked them: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” The word “believed” serves as a key that unlocks the meaning of the question. Naturally, to Jews professing Judaism such a question would be out of place, because they had not believed today or three days ago, but had professed their religion for hundreds and even thousands of years. Were they disciples of John the Baptist? Even if they were, whom did they worship as God—John the Baptist, or after all Jesus Christ? Christ, of course.

Most likely this was one of the small groups, scattered among the surrounding peoples, of believers baptized by John who had not yet managed to join the large Christian communities that had formed, and remained on their own, though they were already Christians, if only because John the Baptist, after baptizing, always pointed to the One coming after him, i.e. to Jesus Christ, and directed those baptized after their repentance to Him. Thus, having met a group of about twelve people, Paul immediately saw that they were Christians, and having realized (apparently from conversation) that they lacked the fullness of Christ’s teaching, asked them: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” The Apostle Paul understood that what they lacked was not a closer acquaintance with Christ, but only baptism with the Holy Spirit, because they were already well enough informed about Christ, and it only remained to receive the fullness which they still lacked.

These were people—to use modern language—Baptists. But unlike some of our contemporaries, they were humble, possessing the fear of the Lord, and therefore did not enter into polemics with the Apostle Paul, though they might have had the right to do so, because upon hearing for the first time, without even knowing that the Holy Spirit is or who He is, they trusted like children, believed, and immediately received the grace of the Holy Spirit.

It could also be that all these twelve people had believed through Apollos, of whom we read in Acts 18:24-28:

Now a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by birth, an eloquent man, mighty in the Scriptures, came to Ephesus. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning the Lord, though he knew only the baptism of John. He began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. And when he desired to cross over to Achaia, the brethren wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him; and when he arrived, he greatly helped those who had believed through grace, for he vigorously refuted the Jews publicly, showing from the Scriptures that Jesus is the Christ.

Later the Apostle Paul, mentioning Apollos and including him in the common apostolic labor, says of him that he watered the sown fields of Christianity, which means that he helped them to grow and develop in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. He loved the Lord and burned in spirit to speak to others about Him, but interestingly, he himself had not yet been born again, i.e. had not been baptized with the Holy Spirit, because, as everyone knows, being born again flows from the fact of baptism with the Holy Spirit and is a consequence of baptism. We see this from the fact of the birth of the church on the day of Pentecost. Before Pentecost, there could be no talk of being born again. Indeed, such a term as “born again” did not exist before Pentecost, before the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. And how sad it is that today there are very, very many light-minded Christians, unregenerated and not thinking about their deficient and pitiful condition.

But Apollos immediately accepted, and accepted with joy, this missing part of the teaching from Aquila and Priscilla. And that it was so, we see from the fact that Aquila and Priscilla were very close co-workers of the Apostle Paul, who on every occasion always sent greetings from them to all the churches with which he communicated. And knowing the Apostle Paul’s zeal for the Holy Spirit, we can boldly assert which particular part of spiritual instruction Aquila and Priscilla passed on to Apollos. Of course, about the Holy Spirit.

It should be noted that the first question of the apostle Paul was: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”—because this was the chief question for all believers. And after a short instruction, Paul laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke with other languages and prophesied. They did not argue with Paul, or find fault with him, or try to prove something of their own. They simply believed Paul, and every single one of them received Christ into his heart.

That is how it was in the time of the apostles. And how was it, and how is it, in our days?

Could it be that, apart from those distorted notions that have swept across almost all of Russia and beyond today, nothing of the apostles has remained with us? No. We have inherited a great deal. It is enough to recall Ivan Efimovich Voronaev, practically the first pioneer of the evangelization of Russia, about whom our respected brother in Christ, the writer and historian Vladimir Ivanovich Franchuk, writes a good deal in his book “Russia Asked the Lord for Rain”.

I would like to quote a short passage from Vladimir Franchuk’s book, where he speaks highly of Voronaev as a missionary, yet at the same time finds in him, as it were, a certain weak spot – a point on which I should like to pause and reflect a little on how accurate this actually is.

So, let us read the text:

The name of Voronaev is linked with the creation of the fellowship of Christians of the Evangelical Faith in the USSR. I.E. Voronaev was an evangelist of the highest caliber, a talented organizer, and a blessed pastor to his sheep. But, unfortunately, he cannot be counted among the notable teachers of the Pentecostal movement. If the teaching he proclaimed had drawn a very clear distinction between such gospel concepts as the baptism in the Holy Spirit and being born again, the success of his preaching would have been even greater and even better. A clear example of this is the fellowship of Christians of the Evangelical Faith in the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, where such outstanding theoreticians of the worldwide Pentecostal movement as Donald Gee and Gustav Schmidt labored. They taught that every person who comes to God is born of God, has salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and is a child of God, while the baptism in the Holy Spirit was preached by them as a being clothed with a special power from God for service and for the proclamation of the gospel (Acts 1:8). Voronaev, unfortunately, did not understand this. Let us not hide Voronaev’s mistakes – and to the same extent we ought not to suppose that we ourselves are completely free of mistakes. Sometimes Ivan Efimovich also got drawn into fighting not according to the spirit but according to the flesh. Especially when his opponents from other denominations verbally and in print reviled him and mocked the teaching he preached and for which he was ready to lay down his life – he then lacked Christian long-suffering, brotherly love, and the humility of Christ. So he would enter into polemics, answering coarse insults with coarseness… To be fair, consider also what sort of times they were – not only were politeness and the courteous choice of words and expressions not weighed with any great care, but human life itself was sometimes worth nothing in those years. Believing sincerely and wholeheartedly in what he preached, Voronaev – and to the same extent his co-workers in the Union of Churches of Evangelical Faith – supposed that the entire evangelical movement in Soviet Russia must and would already become oriented Pentecostally, that all churches must accept the teaching on the baptism in the Holy Spirit in the form and manner in which Voronaev understood it. And therefore, quite often, the object of Voronaev’s and his coworkers’ preaching was not only unbelievers but also entire congregations of Evangelical Christians and Baptists, which led to all kinds of sharp clashes on the grounds of theology and not only theology. In the process, existing congregations were sometimes split, and human ties that had been carefully preserved for years between friends and relatives were broken off. For the sake of fairness, it must be said that within the congregations of the Baptist Union itself (and to an even greater extent within the Union of Evangelical Christians under the leadership of I.S. Prokhanov) there existed a great interest in and attraction to the question of the baptism in the Holy Spirit – probably not so much in the academic-theological aspect as in a purely practical, applied sense: many people experienced some sort of emptiness and dissatisfaction in their spiritual lives; they clearly lacked something. And so on and so forth.

Here I will stop quoting from Franchuk’s book, “Russia Asked the Lord for Rain”.

Now let us, step by step and as deeply as possible, define the reason for what constituted this main mistake (as Franchuk defined it) in Voronaev’s teaching.

On the whole, V.I. Franchuk acknowledged at least three indisputably high qualities in Voronaev. First, that he was an evangelist of the highest caliber. Second, that he was a talented organizer. And third, that he was a blessed pastor to his sheep.

A most excellent appraisal! Precisely and fairly stated. Such an assessment was given to him even during his lifetime, not only by his opponents but even by his enemies.

At that point, Vladimir might have simply put a full stop. And everything would have been fine and fair. But instead, he went and put a comma, and in that comma was hidden the proverbial fly in the ointment, from which everything later went awry. That is, that Voronaev was also a teacher – well, so-so, mediocre. A lover of arguing and fighting not even according to the spirit but according to the flesh. He lacked long-suffering, brotherly love, and the humility of Christ. He answered coarse insults with coarseness. And so on.

In short, he fell far short of those great men of faith that Donald Gee and Gustav Schmidt were. I do not know how great they were, but having read the entire fourth chapter of Franchuk’s book, where he describes their ministry in Ukraine and Belorussia in rather great detail, I did not find in their ministry anything extraordinarily special compared with Voronaev. On the contrary, where they – for some reason – kept silent or failed to speak plainly (for instance, about the Holy Spirit), Voronaev, in the words of the same Franchuk, rose up to defend this teaching, just as the apostle Paul did in his day when he said: we did not yield to them for a moment (to those famous ones).

Therefore, it is not out of the question that when his opponents began to be rude and mock the Word of God, to scoff and insult the Holy Spirit, Voronaev certainly gave them a worthy rebuff. And he did right, so that they would learn not to blaspheme. And Christ-like humility and brotherly love did not consist in following the lead of the ungodly and showering courtesies on apostates and revilers of God’s Word, but in opposing them with firm faith and defending God’s work and the flock from error—which, again, according to Franchuk’s words, Voronaev did, and for which he was ready to lay down his life. Strongly said and just. He loved his flock and defended it. Praise the Lord!

He was not a weak teacher, but on the contrary, a strong one, and he understood that in no case can rebirth from Above be separated from the baptism in the Holy Spirit, if only because rebirth itself is the result of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. And anyone who tries to separate them is like someone who tries to create the Church of Christ without Christ Himself. Absurd.

I believe that Donald Gee and Gustav Schmidt were very good preachers, tireless workers in God’s field. But if Franchuk’s words are to be believed that they separated the inseparable, then I, having no right to intrude into their ministry, must nevertheless note that I. E. Voronaev far surpassed them in the knowledge of the teaching of Jesus Christ. And as it turned out, Voronaev, as a teacher too, stood a level above all the teachers of that time. So Voronaev, by the way, was not mistaken when he affirmed the baptism in the Holy Spirit as the sole condition for rebirth from Above.

For example, I personally asked many Christians, what stream in Christianity do you follow? All answered with a special delight: we are Voronaevites! The teaching is Christ’s, but Voronaev imparted it to us.

And Vladimir Franchuk merely expressed his opinion, not supported by Scripture. Just an opinion, nothing more, which everyone has a right to have.

For instance, some of our Pentecostals, also having their own opinions, have gone so far as to agree to be registered with the Baptists on the following conditions:

Our fellowship has conceded to the Baptists the assertion that the baptism in the Holy Spirit can occur without the sign of other tongues, while the Baptists in turn have conceded that for Pentecostals separately it can occur with the sign of other tongues. Here you have the birth of a new teaching. Take a good look, please. What a caricature of God’s Word! I think Voronaev would never have gone along with that.

As you can see, this lame duck of the distortion of God’s Word, starting somewhere around 1925, or perhaps even earlier in the last century, has limped dutifully into our new year 2011 and in some places holds its position to this day. Although everyone knows that already in the first century AD the apostles had a firm rule that only the one who spoke in other tongues was considered baptized in the Holy Spirit. Even such conservatives as believers from among the Jews—if they heard someone speaking in other tongues, they all fell silent and said: So God has also given the Gentiles the Holy Spirit, just as He did to us at the beginning. And at that, all human opinions ceased.

And Voronaev was and remains a caring shepherd and teacher of the highest class, and for the sake of the truth of God’s Word, upholding divine principles, he never compromised, and stood firm preaching the uncorrupted Word of God. And every time he, in preaching, affirmed the baptism in the Holy Spirit, he called it rebirth from Above. And this was not a mistake, but a firm conviction. It was his strength, not weakness. And if anyone had a misunderstanding on this matter, it was not Voronaev who lacked understanding, but those “great and famous outstanding theoreticians of the worldwide Pentecostal movement.” And if Voronaev had followed their lead, then today we would have before us some truncated, clipped, and shortened, but neatly combed and smoothed teaching of the New Covenant—convenient and acceptable in every way and to every taste, but far from the actual reality of the teaching of Jesus Christ.

June 10, 2011

Anatoliy Yudenko.

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