Russia: A Refuge for all True Christians Living in the Last Days

If only it were so. It was not only a fringe group of Russian Mennonites who believed that they were living the Last Days. This view was widely shared--though rejected by the minority conservative Kleine Gemeinde.

In 1820 upon the recommendation of Rudnerweide (Frisian) Elder Franz Görz, the progressive and influential Mennonite leader Johann Cornies asked the Mennonite Tobias Voth (b. 1791) of Graudenz, Prussia to come and lead his Agricultural Association’s private high school in Ohrloff, in the Russian Mennonite colony of Molotschna.

Voth understood this as nothing less than a divine call upon his life (note 1; pic 3). In Ohrloff Voth grew not only a secondary school, but also a community lending library, book clubs, as well as mission prayer meetings, and Bible study evenings. Voth was the son of a Mennonite minister and his wife was raised Lutheran (note 2).

For some years, Voth had been strongly influenced by the warm, Pietist devotional fiction writings of Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. Jung-Stilling considered Napoleon’s defeat in Russia and eventual collapse as the overthrow of the First Horseman of the Apocalypse (Revelation 6), and as such a heavenly indictment of the Enlightenment’s philosophical claim to establish the new age by reason alone (note 3; sample pic 4).

Tsar Alexander I and many in his circle were also influenced by German Pietists. In 1814, the Tsar and Jung-Stilling met in Württemberg—the home state of the Alexander’s mother, and where his sister was also queen. Jung-Stilling had become convinced that Russia was predestined to oppose the antichrist and inaugurate a millennial kingdom and the rebirth of Christianity. “Praise the Lord, who has made the greatest monarch of the world and especially of Christendom into a great instrument for the preparations of his Kingdom” (note 4).

Jung-Stilling promoted the idea that Western Europe was the future kingdom of the antichrist, and that Russia was the great sheltering, protecting eagle foretold in scripture; in Russia “the fleeing ‘wise virgins’ were to be ‘kept secure from the great tribulation’” (note 5).

Already in his popular allegorical novel Heimweh (“Longing for Home”), Jung-Stilling's protagonist Prince Eugenius gathers the faithful and leads them to “Solyma” a distant land of peace that would become a refuge for all true Christians at the end of time (note 6).

Jung-Stilling’s fiction became seen by many as prophetic, and the novel served to launch the migration of radical German Pietists to South Russia for decades, particularly those from Württemberg who hoped to escape the persecution of the antichrist.

Of special note for Voth and other Mennonite readers was that Heimweh’s Prince Eugenius—an Abrahamic figure—meets and marries a spiritually insightful “noble beauty” from a “Swiss Mennonite family,” his biblical “Sarah” (note 7).

Elder Görz, like his friend Tobias Voth, shared the conviction that history was capable of unanticipated leaps forward toward a final consummation in the Last Days—perhaps in their lifetime.

The next generation’s most influential Russian Mennonite preacher, Bernhard Harder of Halbstadt, was also strongly influenced by the millennialist writings of Jung-Stilling and believed that the mid-century chaos of European revolutions was yet again a sign of the rise of the antichrist.

Harder was as convinced as Voth and Görz that the Russian monarch was a divinely ordained bulwark against the “pestilence,” and “vain and sinister schemes of democrats” and “servants of Satan” (note 8).

While Mennonites did not fit easily or fully into the mold of German Pietists, they were at least “distant cousins.”

We do not fully understand the Mennonite devotion to Tsar and state in the nineteenth century, or the self-understanding and mission of our “non-resistant” ancestors in Russia, without considering Jung-Stilling and the hopes, fears and expectations of the era that he helped to shape.

But … what about the Kleine Gemeinde?

Klaas Reimer of the Kleine Gemeinde was greatly troubled by a discussion with tne Rudnerweide elder: “We quickly came around to the [oncoming] ‘thousand-year reign [of Christ]’ and how at that time the spears would be made into scythes and the swords into plowshares and that this millennium would soon be instituted” (note 10).

Prussian Mennonites had sent multiple copies of a booklet by Swabian Pietist Johann J. Friederich on “the faith and hope of the people of God living in the era of the antichrist” to the Ohrloff Church, which alarmed Reimer.

Friederich sought to show that End Times persecution by the antichrist had begun in 1800, which—according to his reading of scripture—would precede the imminent arrival of the Thousand Year Reign (note 11).

Reimer emphasized that such matters were of no concern to Menno in his Foundations book, nor were they consistent with the popular biblical history read by Mennonites over generations, The Wandering Soul (note 12).

While this seems to be a correct reading of the tradition, “the sixteenth century was, like the present, a time of feverish preoccupation with the approaching End of all things,” writes Reformation scholar Walter Klaassen (note 13). Anabaptists in the Low Countries under the influence of Menno taught a penitent life in patient, peaceful endurance until the Great Judgement. Though they had abandoned broader diabolical conspiracies and violent apocalyptic fantasies since the Münster fiasco, these Mennonites had their own form of discipline to keep the devil in check, namely through excommunication and avoidance of those under the ban, and in this way uphold the purity of the church in anticipation of the salvation of the Lord (note 14). That is an important strand of the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition.

Certainly the majority of Russian Mennonites were convinced that world time was now accelerating and bringing with it terrifying and joyful things, according to the prophetic Word. When challenged by Kleine Gemeinde founder Klaas Reimer, Elder Görz allegedly told his interlocutor: “If the apostles were alive and here today, they would teach differently than what they had taught” (note 15).

Strange? Klaassen’s reflection that that preoccupation was not unlike “the present” gives me pause to think ...

            --Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Letter, Tobias Voth (Graudenz) to David Epp, October 22, 1821. In Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive, file 871, reel 35. From Robarts Library, University of Toronto. Pic 3.

Note 2: Voth’s autobiography is included in P. M. Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia 1789–1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1978), 689, https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/. See also John B. Toews, “Tobias Voth: The Gentle Schoolmaster of Orlov: A Document of 1850 [‘A word about school discipline’],” Mennonite Life 33, no. 1 (March 1978): 27-29. https://ml-archive.bethelks.edu/store/ml-archive/files/1978mar.pdf.

Note 3: A. Walicki, The Flow of Ideas: Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to the Religious-Philosophical Renaissance (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 103, 132. Cf. For an exhaustive literature review of Jung-Stilling on the “eternal east,” Alexander I, and on Christian Russia, cf. Gerhard Schwinge, Jung-Stilling als Erbauungsschriftsteller der Erweckung: eine literatur- und frömmigkeitsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 133–156, https://digi20.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00046226_00001.html.

Note 4: In Gustav A. Benrath, “Glaube und Frömmigkeit bei Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling,” in Blicke auf Jung-Stilling.Festschrift, edited by Michael Frost, 95–113 (Kreuztal: Wielandschmiede, 1991), 108. In that year, the Austro-Prussian-Russian coalition marched victoriously into Paris.

Note 5: Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 570f.; 1025 fn. 350; 97.

Note 6: Jung-Stilling derived “Solyma” from Jerusalem, and the Jewish word “shalom,” which means peace.

Note 7: Cf. Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Heimweh, parts 1–3, vol. 4 of Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Scheible, 1841) pt. 1, bk. 1, 67–72. https://books.google.ca/books?id=1Cf16QIVYIMC&dq=inauthor%3A%22Johann%20Heinrich%20Jung-Stilling%22&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false. Cf. also “Jung-Stilling über Menno Simons,” Mennonitischer Rundschau 20, no. 34 (August 23, 1899), 1, https://archive.org/details/sim_die-mennonitische-rundschau_1899-08-23_20_34/mode/2up?q=Stilling.

Note 8: Bernhard Harder wrote two hymns in response to the assassination; Geistliche Lieder und Gelegenheitsgedichte, vol. 1, edited by Heinrich Franz (Hamburg: A-G, 1888), https://chortitza.org/Pis/Hard1.pdf; no. 521, 568f.; and no. 533, 583. Cf. also “Mennonites in Asia,” Herold of Truth 39, no. 8 (April 15, 1902), 117, https://archive.org/details/heraldoftruth39unse/page/n59/mode/1up.

Note 10: Klaas Reimer, “Ein kleines [sic] Aufsatz or A Short Exposition: The Autobiography of Aeltester Klaas E. Reimer (1770-1837),” in Leaders of the Mennonite Kleine Gemeinde in Russia, 1812 to 1874, edited by D. Plett, 121–156 (Steinbach, MB: Crossway, 1993), 134, https://www.mharchives.ca/download/1261/.

Note 11: Cf. Johann Jakob Friederich, Glaubens- und Hoffnungsblick des Volkes Gottes. Aus den göttlichen Weissagungen gezogen. On Friederich, see especially: Renate Föll, Sehnsucht nach Jerusalem. Zur Ostwanderung schwäbischer Pietisten (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2002), https://tvv-verlag.de/pdf/foell_sehnsucht_nach_jerusalem.pdf.

Note 12: Reimer, “Ein kleines [sic] Aufsatz or A Short Exposition,” 134; Joh. P. Schabalie, Die Wandelnde Seele (Stuttgart, 1860), https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008917852; on Menno, cf. Marjan Blok, “Discipleship in Menno Simon’s Dat Fundament,” in Menno Simons: A Reappraisal, edited by Gerald R. Brunk, 105–130 (Harrisonburg, VA: Eastern Mennonite College, 1992), 122, n.50.

Note 13: Cf. Walter Klaassen, Living at the End of the Ages. Apocalyptic Expectation in the Radical Reformation (New York: University of America Press, 1992), xi; cf. also “Eschatological Themes in Early Dutch Anabaptism,” in The Dutch Dissenters: A Critical Companion to their History and Ideas, edited by Irvin B. Horst, 15–31. Leiden: Brill, 1986) 1,5-31.

Note 14: See Helmut Isaak, Menno Simons and the New Jerusalem (Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2006), 93f.

Note 15: Reimer, “Ein kleines [sic] Aufsatz or A Short Exposition,” 136.