Russia's Proposed Law: No Evangelizing Outside of Church

[jazzflower92]

http://www.christianitytoday.com/gl...lizing-outside-of-church-russia-proposes.html

You know how people herald Putin's reign as being a return to a Christian nation, well this certainly shows again that Putin just uses the church as propaganda for his own use in order to pass a lot of tyrannic laws.

 

[Sketcher]

Former KGB. Not surprised.

 

[FireDragon76]

This doesn't surprise me at all. There are actually only 3 official religions in Russia (Orthodoxy, Islam, and Vajrayana Buddhism), the rest exist at the mercy of the state and face varying degrees of repression historically.

 

[HondaMan]

It passed. Putin signed it. Title update?

 

[retlaw]

I'm sure Hillary is jeallous.

 

[Bob Crowley]

I don't think the Russian Orthodox Church would have a problem with the law. It bore the brunt of Stalinist persecution, and probably fails to see why the divided house of Protestantism should be allowed to make inroads into their traditional home.

Is there a reason why Protestants should be allowed to compete with the Orthodox Church in Russia? Their mere presence means that they are implying that the Orthodox Church is in error.

Secondly the whole character of the church-state relationship in Russia is a direct descendant of the Byzantine Empire, or the Holy Roman Empire, centred in Constantinople before it became Istanbul after the Turks defeated the Empire. The Emperor had a central role in that Empire's Christian expression, and that tradition is basically being reclaimed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Western experience is different - there were times when the Pope and the state were to some extent allied, but the Popes have never been seen as Emperors. They descended from the authority given to Peter by Christ.

For some time Rome was a backwater, when the Byzantine Empire was at its peak. But it gradually recovered, as the Pope is a spiritual figure and not a secular figure.

Russia has never had a Protestant Reformation with the millions of deaths that involved - something we tend to ignore today - and the divided church that resulted. William Shirer, author of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (and a Protestant as he himself said) stated that the wars of religion in the century following Luther caused the population of Germany to decline from sixteen million to six million. It was the memory of such religious war, a direct result of the Reformation, that made the American Founding Fathers so determined to allow toleration of religion as part of their charter.

But in doing so, America now has a less visibly unified church than any other nation on earth, with every flavour of doctrine to be found somewhere in a divided house. As my old Protestant pastor once said to me (back when I was still a Protestant) "When it comes to theology, Protestants couldn't agree how far to spit!"

Why should the Russians want to follow suit?