EVANGELICAL BRETHREN

EVANGELICAL BRETHREN (in Russia). This group, including Herrnhutters, Mennonites, and Moravian Brethren, may be identified as Anabaptist-or have so subsequently identified themselves-and may be considered generally as German sectarians. The history of their spiritual legacy in Russia is not well known. They settled in Russia during the reign of Catherine II, largely due to conscription in their home countries and their pacifist political stance. The tsars for the most part respected their religious pacifism and pardoned them from governmental service, while establishing them as large communities in agricultural areas where they retained their own culture and language. They seem to have been tolerated by the Church as benign and understood as a type of primitive Christian community in dogmatics and social organization.

Theologically, they brought with them an orientation toward apocalypticism and some adventism, and were disposed toward allegory (q.v.) and “spiritual” interpretation of the Bible. Some left Russia in the 19th c. with the threat of conscription from unsympathetic tsars and because of the forced Russification under Ober-Procurator Pobedonostsev. Stalin is said to have eradicated five million Germans in his purges of the Volga River basin, most of whom would have been Lutheran and Evangelical Brethren.