Ivan Stepanowitsch Prokhanov

Ivan Stepanowitsch Prochanow ( Russian Иван Степанович Проханов ; born April 17, 1869 in Vladikavkas , Russian Empire ; † October 6, 1935 in Berlin ) was an engineer and theologian . From 1911 to 1928 he was Vice President of the Baptist World Federation . He is considered to be the founder of the All-Russian Covenant of Gospel Christians .

Life

Prochanow grew up in a wealthy North Caucasian Molokan family as the son of the married couple Stepan Prochanow and Nina Vasilevna and graduated from the secondary school in his hometown. As a schoolboy he found connection to a group that dealt with philosophical literature. Here he came under the influence of a worldview which he later characterized as nihilistic and which he blamed for a suicide attempt that he committed at the age of 16. In his youthful life crisis he came under the influence of an awakening preaching. It moved him to make a conscious choice to believe in Jesus Christ . In 1887 he was baptized and joined the Baptist church .

After graduating from high school, Prokhanov moved to St. Petersburg in 1890 to study engineering at the Technological Institute there. Here he came across the so-called Pashkovite Movement, which was named after its initiator, Vasily Alexandrowitsch Paschkow , and which had its followers mainly in St. Petersburg aristocratic circles. The Pashkovites were baptismally minded students and knew they were closely connected to the English and German Brethren movement . Paschkow himself and other followers of the Paschowites (including the Petersburg Princess Lieven) were baptized by Georg Müller , the Bristol orphanage father and co-founder of the Open Brethren ( Open Brothers ). Also Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker and John Warns cultivated close contacts with this movement. Prokhanov stuck to the Pashkovite circle that gathered in Princess Lieven's palace. During these years he also had close encounters with the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov and the writer and anarchist Leo Tolstoy . In 1893 he successfully completed his studies, moved to the vicinity of Simferopol , where he gathered believers from different backgrounds and founded a so-called general community with them . It was called Vertograd .

In 1894 the Russian Ministry of the Interior passed a series of laws by which the stundist movement, which incidentally also included the Baptists, was classified as a dangerous sect and thus banned. Their leaders have been threatened with arrest and deportation. Prokhanov, who was included in this group, evaded arrest in 1895 by illegally emigrating to Finland . From there he traveled to England, where he began studying Protestant theology in Bristol and London . His further path led him to Berlin , where he continued his studies with Adolf von Harnack , among others . After a final study visit to Paris , he returned to Russia in 1898 via Egypt , Palestine , Syria and Cyprus . There he was arrested for leaving the tsarist empire without permission and brought to his place of birth. However, he managed to escape a second time, this time to Riga , where he was given a private lectureship at the Polytechnic.

After the Russian Revolution , Prokhanov returned to St. Petersburg and received a high-paid position at the American electrical engineering company Westinghouse , which he held until the October Revolution of 1917. As early as 1902, the first edition of the first hymnbook for the stundistic movement had been published. It was titled Gusli (German: harp ) and contained 500 songs, some of which came from Prokhanov's, but also from Gavriil Romanowitsch Derschavins and Alexander Sergejewitsch Pushkin's pens. Because of his position, Prochonow was able to have the songbook produced in 1906 with a second edition of 20,000 copies in the print shop of the Ministry of the Interior.

Prochanov's political and social commitment should also be emphasized. He was a co-founder of a Christian party and organized - even after 1917 - agricultural cooperatives, including in the Crimea .

In 1909 Prokhanov invited representatives of the various evangelical movements in Russia, including Baptists, to a congress in St. Petersburg. The aim of the congress was to bring about a closer union. His plan was only partially successful. The deputies of the South Russian Baptist Association , which was strongly influenced by Johann Gerhard Oncken , rejected a federation because of various doctrinal differences. Nevertheless, during the meeting the All-Russian Federation of Gospel Christians was established and Prokhanov was appointed its chairman. A period of strong growth followed for the communities united in the All-Russian Federation . In 1928 they had more than a million members who gathered in over 1,000 local churches and were cared for by more than 600 full-time ministers. As early as 1911, during its 2nd Congress in Philadelphia (USA) , the Baptist World Federation decided to accept the Russian Gospel Christians and elected their chairman Prokhanov as one of its six vice-presidents. During his tenure he also devoted himself to the theological training of preachers. His Bible school , founded in 1922 and beginning in 1913, was the first evangelical seminary in Russia to teach in the Russian language.

During a youth conference of Gospel Christians in Tver , Prokhanov was arrested in 1921 and sent to a labor camp for several months. After his release, he continued to campaign for the unification of the various evangelical movements and “the breakthrough of a national reformation right into the camp of orthodoxy”. This endeavor, which reached its climax around the turn of 1922/1923, was followed by violent disputes with the Communist Party and the state authorities. The main reason for this was the rejection of military service by the Gospel Christians and other peace churches .

Prokhanov remained in his high church offices until 1928. Especially after the communist Russian Revolution of 1917 , his work was of great importance in building the All-Russian Federation of Gospel Christians. Since the pressure of persecution, which was directed against religious leaders in particular, increased sharply at the end of the 1920s, Prokhanov did not return to his homeland after his participation in the 4th Congress of the Baptist World Federation, which took place in Toronto ( Canada ) Residence in Berlin. Here he mainly devoted himself to writing.

Ivan Stepanovich Prokhanov was married. His wife died in 1926. The marriage resulted in a son. Prochanow's grave is located in the old cemetery of the Trinity Community in the Kreuzberg district (Berlin).

Works (in selection)

• Hymnal Gusli. St. Petersburg 1906 (Ed.)
• Resurrection songs. Collection of Russian Gospel Songs. with Russian original phrases and sentences, in German translation. (Ed.) Missionsbund 'Licht im Osten', Wernigerode 1915, OCLC 779839359 .
• Together with Johannes Warns and Friedrich Berner:
  • Volume I: Russia and the Gospel, images from the evangelical movement of so-called Stundism. Kassel 1920.
  • Volume II: Gospel Successes in Russia. Wernigerode 1929.
  • Volume III: The Blowing of God's Winds in Russia. Bamberg 1930.

Literature (selection)

• Hans Brandenburg: Prochanow, Iwan Stepanowitsch. In: Helmut Burkhardt, Erich Geldbach , Kurt Heimbucher (eds.): Evangelisches Gemeindelexikon. Wuppertal 1978, ISBN 3-417-24082-4 , p. 420, SpI.
• Wilhelm Kahle: Ways and Forms of East Slavic Protestantism. In: Church in the East. Volume 20, 1977, pp. 128-146.
• Wilhelm Kahle: Evangelical Christians in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ivan Stepanovič Prochanov (1869-1935) and the path of the Gospel Christians and Baptists. Wuppertal / Kassel 1978, ISBN 3-7893-7056-8 .
• Wolfgang Heller: Article PROCHANOV, Ivan Stepanovič. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon. Volume VII, Nordhausen 1996, Sp 977-979. online ( Memento from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
• Ludwig Steindorff (Hrsg.): Party and churches in the early Soviet state. The Protocols of the Anti-Religious Commission at the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bol'ševiki) 1922–1929. Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8258-8604-2 , p. 394 (short biography)

Web links

• Literature by and about Iwan Stepanowitsch Prochanow in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wilhelm Kahle: Evangelical Christians in Russia and the Soviet Union. Ivan Stepanovič Prochanov (1869-1935) and the path of the Gospel Christians and Baptists. Wuppertal / Kassel 1978, ISBN 3-7893-7056-8 , p. 18.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Wolfgang Heller: PROCHANOV, Ivan Stepanovič. ( Memento from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Biographisch-Bibliographische Lexikon. (Online edition): Accessed February 19, 2012
3. ↑ Heinrich Löwen jr .: Congregational Education in Russian-German Free Churches in the Tension Between Past and Present. (Dissertation), Norderstedt 1998, ISBN 3-640-59721-4 , p. 196f.
4. ↑ Quoted from Wilhelm Kahle: Evangelical Christians in Russia and the Soviet Union. 1978, p. 31.
5. ^ Wilhelm Kahle: Evangelical Christians in Russia and the Soviet Union. 1978, p. 17.