Fr. Tom Soroka: Welcome to Ancient Faith Today!. This is Fr. Tom Soroka, and I’m so glad that you’re with us this evening. We’ll be taking your calls in a bit at 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Bobby will be answering your calls, so please make sure to turn the show volume off before you come on air. You can also join us in the chat room which is now open by going to ancientfaith.com/live. Another way to connect with us is to go to facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday and place your questions in the thread for tonight’s show. Finally, you can also send us an email at AFT@ancientfaith.com. So let’s get started!

Tertullian wrote that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. While we know much of the heroic faith and deeds of the martyrs throughout the history of the Church, and more recently the holy new martyrs during the period of the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent decades, there is a period following that upheaval that is fascinating for Orthodox Christians to learn about. What was happening in the Church in Russia after the period of World War II, or referred to as the Great Patriotic War in Russia, when even the Church cooperated with the government to save the homeland against Nazi aggression.

Why were holy elders so important to that period, and what role do holy elders play in Orthodoxy today? So that’s our topic tonight: the fascinating but largely unknown period of Church history that’s still in the minds of many faithful in Russia—but not in many books. Holy elders, or staretsi, in Russia after World War II: why are they so important, and what can we learn from them in our contemporary experience of Orthodoxy today?

Tonight we welcome scholar, author, and professor, Dr. John Burgess, to lead us through his extensive research that he’s conducted in this field. Dr. Burgess is the James Henry Snowden Professor of Systematic Theology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. John received his Ph.D. in Christian theology from the University of Chicago. He holds an M.Div. from McCormick Theological Seminary, and specializes in the areas of ecclesiology, worship, and the Orthodox Church in post-Communist Russia. He’s the author of seven books, including Holy Rus’: The Rebirth of Orthodoxy in the New Russia, published by Yale University. John, welcome to Ancient Faith Today!

Dr. John Burgess: Thank you, Fr. Tom. Great to be with all of you.

Fr. Tom: I’m glad that you’re here with us tonight. This is a fascinating topic, not just for those of us who are interested in Russian Orthodoxy, but I do think there is tremendous value for all Orthodox Christians today. All traditions of Orthodoxy have in their history many well-known and beloved elders and teachers to whom the faithful flocked in time of crisis. I think it’s especially relevant to us today to learn the lessons from those elders and about them so that we can learn from their wisdom.

What I’d like to do is kind of set the groundwork for our discussion tonight. Let’s begin here: How did you become interested in the Russian Orthodox Church? I know that you’ve traveled many times to Russia. How did you become interested in that, and specifically about Orthodoxy in general?

Dr. Burgess: My background is as a Protestant and a theologian at a Protestant seminary, but when I had my first sabbatical coming up in 2004, my wife and I decided to see if we could spend a year in Russia. We obviously knew about Protestantism, we knew quite a bit about Catholicism, but we didn’t know very much about Orthodoxy. We were especially fascinated to learn how the Orthodox Church in Russia had come back to life after 75 years of Communist persecution. So we managed to arrange a sabbatical year in St. Petersburg. We took our three young daughters—they were 14, 11, and eight at that time—and the world of Orthodoxy began to open up for us.

Fr. Tom: Amazing. Wow. So tell us more: what did you do while you were in Russia there?

Dr. Burgess: [Laughing] Well, I was 46 years old, and learning Russian. I had had no previous training in the Russian language, but I did a summer intensive at the University of Pittsburg. Here I was, the old guy in the class, with 17- and 18-year olds, and I felt like the tortoise and the hare. They kept running ahead, but the old tortoise would kind of crawl up behind, especially on weekends after they were out partying. [Laughter]

Anyway, that was the foundation for going to Russia, and I sort of imagined: Well, now at least when I get to Russia I can do some research. But a summer intensive is just the beginning of the Russian language. We got over there, and it was obvious that we needed more Russian language instruction, and that realistically I wasn’t going to be able to do serious scholarly research. I remember talking to an Orthodox priest, and he said to me, “John, if you want to learn about Orthodoxy, go to the liturgy.” So I gave up my idea of studying in a library or archives or collecting books, and I just began going to worship services, as many as I could—during the week, on weekends, on holidays, festival days. I went to monasteries, I went to parishes, I immersed myself in the Orthodox world.

Fr. Tom: Wow. I’m curious, though, in terms of the language barrier. You had learned modern Russian, and obviously it was a process for you, but to go and hear the services in Church Slavonic, which is a little bit different than modern Russian…

Dr. Burgess: Absolutely.

Fr. Tom: How were you able to grapple with that, and how did you come to understand what was happening in the services?

Dr. Burgess: Well, actually that took a long time and wasn’t really possible in that first year in Russia. That was 15 years ago, and we’ve gone back regularly since then. But you’re quite right: the liturgy in Russia is still in the Slavonic, except for the sermon. And we, I guess being a good Protestant, I kind of lived for the sermon! [Laughter] That was the one thing that I could begin to understand. We would begin to get things down like the Lord’s Prayer and the Symbol of Faith, the Creed. I remember I knew so little Russian that at first I didn’t even recognize the Lord’s Prayer, and so it was amazing over the course of the year to begin to understand words, phrases, and then to understand more and more of the sermon. It was tremendous to begin to make that connection in the Russian language, and a little bit of Slavonic.

Fr. Tom: That’s amazing. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. We’d love to hear from you if you are interested in this topic and want to speak with an expert in a minute, Dr. John Burgess.

Dr. John, let’s actually skip now to the recent research that you did. I know that you were Belgorod and you want to Moscow and various places to do this research which seems like a rather small niche, but it’s very important, because we know much about the new martyrs, so there’s been a tremendous amount of publications and research and their canonization and so forth—but you now are researching about a period that is—and explain it to me; I may not have it exactly right—this is after World War II, or what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, and what was the history of the Church or the relationship between the Church and the government like at that time? We know it was very filled with tension before World War II, but what was it like afterwards? Let’s set that up first before we talk about your research.

Dr. Burgess: Yeah, very good. Let me just say for the first part of your inquiry, what got me really interested in this topic was a sabbatical year that we spent in Moscow in 2011-12. So the first experience was in St. Petersburg, but then seven years later in Moscow. I began to discover that all the leading priests who had emerged after the fall of Communism had been spiritual children of holy elders in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s. So I got really curious what kind of influence these holy elders had had on this new generation of leadership in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Now, as to the history of the Church after World War II, after the Stalinist period of intense persecution in the 1930s, there was this falling of Church-State relations, as you’ve noted, during World War II. After World War II, however, with the rise of Nikita Khrushchev, there was a new period of persecution. Now, the second period of persecution was not sending people to the gulags. That did happen occasionally still, but it was not like Stalin’s persecutions; there were fewer martyrs. Khrushchev was more effective in secularizing society, in driving out the last remnants of religion that had remained in the grandfathers and grandmothers who had lived through the war, had fought on behalf of Russia, but their children and grandchildren were being raised with an atheistic education in the public schools, in universities, in their places of work. And that’s what I wanted to understand: What was it like to be a Christian, not during a period of martyrs, when there were still heroes of the faith, but how were you a Christian in a period when there are no heroes, but just this continuous marginalization of the Church, making it socially disadvantageous to participate in Church life?

After Krushchev there was this period of stagnation, as they call it, where the number of churches remained relatively stable, but it was impossible to open new churches. There were very few monasteries, and most of the monasteries that were open—I think there were fewer than 20—most of them were in Ukraine and not in Russia. So where did people go to find a deeper spirituality, people who wanted to get away from the grip of atheistic propaganda?

Fr. Tom: Yeah, and, John, let me stop you there before you go on, and that is: in Russia and places that have that deep Orthodox culture—Russia, Greece, Romania—you have a very close connection between Orthodox piety—those who are deeply steeped in Orthodox Christianity, the Orthodox faithful—they are often making pilgrimages to monasteries, correct?

Dr. Burgess: Yep, that’s correct.

Fr. Tom: So what you’re saying is, because there were so few monasteries, the faithful were not able to make those pilgrimages as frequently, because there weren’t as many monasteries.

Dr. Burgess: That’s right. Every monastery that is in the territory that is now the Russian Federation, every monastery had been closed down in the 1930s. Even after the war, there was only one monastery open, and that’s because the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, where there was the Church of the Caves in Pskov. But that had been part of Estonia until the changes in borders after World War II. So one monastery.

Fr. Tom: Oh my! And so, because there was only one monastery, let’s now go to this research that you did. So there were elders that were—that God was raising up, I believe—that became quite popular, but even to this day are still in the minds and hearts of their spiritual children, so they are largely unknown, and you’re doing this research, right?

Dr. Burgess: Right.

Fr. Tom: How did you become interested in that particular period, and why were these elders so important? What role did they play in the lives of ordinary Christians?

Dr. Burgess: As you’ve noted, there’s just one monastery open, and monasteries have always been the backbone, the heart, of Russian Orthodox spirituality. So religion’s being marginalized, the Church is very much under the control of the state authorities, the KGB is vetting everyone who wants to go to seminary, people are discouraged from going to church, discouraged even from going to Pascha. These very dire circumstances—under those conditions, when religion is so marginalized, where it’s pushed to the very edges of society, nevertheless there were people who kept searching for a deeper spirituality. And you’re quite right: there was this re-flowering, re-blossoming of this Orthodox tradition of holy eldership under those circumstances.

By word of mouth, people who were searching for deeper expression of Orthodox spirituality began to hear about these holy elders and would make pilgrimage to them. Now, they were all far away from Moscow and St. Petersburg. They were often in remote rural areas, were not very easy to get to. And that’s why they had a little bit more freedom, because the state felt that they would never create a mass movement, they would never become very influential on society as a whole. Then people began to go.

Fr. Tom: I was going to ask: How did the Soviet leaders deal with… Surely they knew, because you had the whole system of people spying on one another, right?

Dr. Burgess: Right.

Fr. Tom: Especially during the Stalinist era, you had this often where people were spying on each other. How was it that people could keep this a secret, could be able to keep these elders from being harmed by the Soviet authorities? Were the Soviet authorities actually going after them? What was the relationship here between the Soviet authorities and these elders?

Dr. Burgess: Well, that is a really interesting question. You know, the Soviet authorities, they had officials for religious affairs in every province, who of course were keeping close tabs on every priest. The KGB was doing the same. There was both the religious affairs official and the KGB that was looking what people were preaching, looking at who was going to church, the numbers of baptisms, the number of marriages. All of this is now in the archives, so you can really read about how extensive the efforts at control were.

But, you know, despite all of that, there were parts of the Russian heart where some longing for religion continued. The government officials were very discouraged at the number of people who continued to want to have their children baptized. This put them into a kind of dilemma. They needed to repress religion, and yet they feared that if they repressed it too hard it would all go underground, and they preferred to have it above-ground where they could control it than to repress it so hard that it would all go underground, as it had in the 1930s under Stalin. So they were willing to tolerate a few elders, yeah.

Fr. Tom: Not to go too much off-topic here, but many of our listeners may not know, but correct me if I’m wrong: the government had created a kind of parallel system where, within official Communism and so forth, they were having rituals that would take the place of the Church’s rituals, right?

Dr. Burgess: Yes, absolutely.

Fr. Tom: They were having naming ceremonies for children, they were having marriage ceremonies—to take the place of what people were doing in church.

Dr. Burgess: Absolutely.

Fr. Tom: So, again, just to put context—is it that that was not working and that people were still getting their children baptized and so forth?

Dr. Burgess: The only ritual where the Communists were successful was marriage. Most marriages began to take place in government offices, not in the Church, but they were much less successful with baptisms and funerals.

That doesn’t mean… That’s a separate question. That doesn’t mean that people were going to church. It didn’t mean that they knew what the faith meant, but there was this still deep connection somehow to these rituals of the Church. As I’ve said, the government officials didn’t want to drive all of that underground. They preferred to have it above-ground, so they were willing to tolerate a few of these people who became renowned as holy elders, as long as they were far away from the centers of population. But they were important.

Fr. Tom: Okay, very good. We’re going to talk about them and hear about your research right now. 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Feel free to call in. We are talking with Dr. John Burgess.

Dr. John, you did this research. Tell us what your research uncovered. Tell us, first of all, about some of the most well-known elders. And how did you actually go about this research, too? I think that would be very interesting for our listeners to learn about that. How did you find out about them, and so forth? So first, how did you find out, and then tell us about some of the most well-known elders.

Dr. Burgess: Yes, well, Fr. Tom, you know, it’s interesting: if you walk into the best religious bookstores, Orthodox bookstores in Moscow, such as at the Sretensky Monastery, there are now hundreds of books about holy elders. This is a huge, huge area of interest in Russia today. The people that I’ve researched are well-known in Orthodox circles in Russia, but as you’ve noted they’re not so well-known in Orthodox circles in the United States. A lot of their writings have not been translated. There are very few good English biographies of them. But there were a handful of very well-known holy elders in this period after Khrushchev in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

The man that I got to know best, the legacy of this man, his name is Seraphim Tyapochkin. He was in a village only about 15 miles from Belgorod, where I was stationed on my fellowship. So I had the privilege of regularly going out where he had been a priest. The priest who serves there today was very hospitable to me. He has preserved the holy elder’s cell in a small house next to the church, and it’s a kind of museum, a kind of shrine. I even had the privilege—he invited me during Lent, during the Great Fast—to spend a weekend and to actually live in the cell where Seraphim Tyapochkin had lived.

Fr. Tom: Oh my.

Dr. Burgess: So that was just tremendous, to be surrounded by the icons that had been his, to pray before them, to light candles before them, to enter into that very special atmosphere. So that was one man, Seraphim Tyapochkin.

But the one who’s probably best known and might be better known in the United States was Ioan Krestiankin. He was a monk at this one monastery that remained open in Russia after World War II. He was the spiritual father of many of the leading priests in Moscow today, especially I’m sure some of your listeners have read—what’s the English translation? Nestvyatyye Svyatyye, The Unholy Holy Ones. But I know the English translation…

Fr. Tom: Oh, Everyday Saints.

Dr. Burgess: Yes, Everyday Saints, there we go. Tikhon (Shevkunov), the author, was a spiritual son of this holy elder, Ioan Krestiankin. So he was perhaps the best known and most influential, but there were others. Nikolai Guryanov, who was a priest on an island close to Pskov. Tavrion (Batozsky), who was a priest in a remote parish in Latvia, close to the Russian border. Nikolai Guryanov—these were among a handful of very well-known elders during that period and were renowned for the depth of their spirituality.

You know, in a period where, frankly, because the state controlled the Church so thoroughly, most priests were not very talented people. They were not very good priests under those circumstances. They were performing religious functions, but they weren’t very bold, and they weren’t very good examples of the Christian life. So where do you go to find someone who’s deeply living the spiritual life, when monasteries are mostly closed and your parish priest is not necessarily a very good example? These holy elders were one place in Soviet society where people could see someone deeply living the Christian life, who exuded love, who welcomed people with deep hospitality. I think the key factor was these men, these holy elders, lived without fear. They were fearless. They were no longer afraid of anything that the government could do to them. They had this inner spiritual freedom that made it possible for them to do their ministry, to speak openly about spiritual problems with the people who came to them, and to create an island, an island of spirituality, an island of spiritual freedom, that was so attractive that people who could make the journey would keep going out to them.

Fr. Tom: So, John, because there were no monasteries, were these holy elders monastics in the traditional sense? That is, had they been tonsured, or were they priests? Were they ordained, or were they more sort of charismatic figures?

Dr. Burgess: Well, all of the above. [Laughter] They were priests in many cases who had been posted at these remote parishes, but then often, later in their lives, took monastic vows. There was Ioan Krestiankin at the one monastery who was open, but the others were priests and serving parishes.

Fr. Tom: Interesting. So can we, after the break, learn more about Ioan Krestiankin and Seraphim a-Tiapochkin? Learn more about their life and their teaching and so forth?

Dr. Burgess: Yeah!

Fr. Tom: Okay, very good. We are going to go on a break here, just for a few minutes. When we come back we’re going to talk with Dr. John Burgess about his research. We’re going to learn about the lives of these holy elders, some of the lessons, how they lived, what they taught, what their themes were, what the people learned from them, and also what we can learn from them, too. We’ll go away; in a few minutes, we’ll be right back.

Fr. Tom: We are back, and we’re talking with Dr. John Burgess about the holy elders of the late Soviet period. John, before the break, we were just starting to get into the names of some of these holy elders, and we’d like to learn more now about the details of their life, where they were, and really the most important thing for us to learn is: what did they teach? What were the most important lessons that they taught the pilgrims and their disciples? Can we begin with Fr. John, Fr. Ioan Krestiankin? Tell us more details about him. Where did he live, and what did he teach those that came to him?

Dr. Burgess: Yeah, so Ioan Krestiankin had grown up in the area around Oryol, an area south of Moscow, and was a pious believer from a believing family; became a priest, but then was arrested, as so many priests were under Stalin; and spent quite a few years in a Soviet concentration camp. He came out of that experience not broken but stronger. When he eventually became a monk at this monastery at the caves near Pskov, he had this ability to look into people’s eyes and to sense their deepest spiritual problems. He had this reputation for knowing, even before a person spoke, what was in their heart, what they were struggling with, and he also had a sense of what they needed to do. This is often why people would come, because they needed advice, they needed the counsel. They didn’t have a spiritual father anywhere else. In Ioan Krestiankin, they found someone who seemed to understand them, to care for them, and to be able to direct them about how to live as a Christian.

So their teachings were very much basic Orthodox teaching about loving your neighbor, caring for those in need, spending a lot of time in prayer—this was really a big emphasis of the holy elders, that to live as a Christian means to enter deeply into prayer, to read the Scriptures, to give your life in service to those around you. Very basic teachings, nothing that is radical or unusual, but in an era where it was so hard to find authentic teachers of the Orthodox faith, it was people like Ioan Krestiankin who inspired their spiritual children.

They also came to be reputed for having powers of healing, and they themselves were reputed to have amazing powers of prayers. So people would come and ask Ioan Krestiankin to pray for them, and they were confident that his prayers made a difference.

Fr. Tom: It’s very interesting, John: in the chat room, the folks in the chat room are looking up Fr. John Krestiankin, and they found a Wikipedia article on him, and there is a picture there of Fr. John with Vladimir Putin from 2000. [Laughter] And he is in the cell with Fr. John, and I don’t want to go too much off-topic here, but I guess I want to ask you two questions here. Number one, let’s take somebody like this Fr. John Krestiankin. What would he have said to his pilgrims that came to say, “How should I feel about the government? How should I deal with the Soviet authorities?” [Laughter] That’s the first question. The second question I’ll wait in a second, because I know that you have a very clear understanding of what’s happening in Russia today, because that came up, and I know that’s off-topic from our show, but I think our listeners are interested in that, too. So let’s first talk about the idea of: if someone were to come—I don’t know if this was in your research—to say, “How should I feel about [the] Soviet Union? How should I feel about the Soviet leaders, these godless atheists?” and so forth, what would Fr. John or these elders have said?

Dr. Burgess: Well, they would have said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” They would have said, “You should obey the government unless the government teaches you to do something against the commandments, against the will of God. And then you’ve got to be strong enough in yourself not to obey and to take the consequences, to suffer.” He himself had lived this. He had suffered in the concentration camps for being a believer, and he knew that people could develop the spiritual capacity to be free inside of themselves, even when they lived in a society that was not free. So they were not rebels; they were not calling for revolution. They weren’t trying to organize the overthrow of the Soviet government, and they would not have been interested in being an opposition party to Vladimir Putin, but they did believe that a Christian has to give his deepest loyalties to God, not to the state, and if the state asks you to do something that contradicts the will of God, you cannot obey. You suffer, you take the consequences, you make the same kind of witness that the martyrs made.

Fr. Tom: Thank you for that. The article here said that he was arrested by Soviet authorities in 1950, and he was sentenced for seven years, but he was freed from the camp in 1955, so thank you for clarifying that.

Again, I want to stay on topic, but I can’t help but to ask this, because the listeners in the chat room are thinking about it, and I think it is a good question. So give us… Let’s just set this topic aside for one moment. What is your impression of Orthodoxy in contemporary times? The question in the chat room is: Is Orthodoxy still growing in Russia in the past ten years? Does Putin support Orthodoxy because he’s truly interested in it or because it’s an organization that is useful to him to infuse ethics into the Russian people?

Dr. Burgess: Yeah, oh, those are great questions. So: Is Orthodoxy growing? Well, the number of churches is growing, the number of monasteries is growing. There are 300 new churches being opened every year in Russia today. So the Church as an institution has again become part of the civic and rural landscape in Russia. But the number of people who are active in Church life is not growing; it’s remained pretty stable. At the most, 10% of the population has some kind of relationship to worship life, to the liturgy. Those who regularly attend, it’s probably not more than two or three percent of the population. So, a very difficult picture: institutional growth, but still a lot of work to do in growing people’s spiritual life.

Fr. Tom: You did some research with the—not just research, but work on the ground in understanding some of the contemporary work that the Russian Orthodox Church is doing with the help of other churches and agencies in setting up charities and ministries and so forth. There’s a lot of that work that’s going on the ground.

Dr. Burgess: Oh, if you turn to those questions, you’re right. It’s amazing. Some of the most cutting-edge, creative social services in Russia today are from the Orthodox Church: drug rehabilitation programs, orphanages, hospices—things where the government network is still very rudimentary, the Church is doing wonderful, wonderful social ministry.

Fr. Tom: Good, good. So let’s get back to the topic. Thank you for that little left turn that we made there. Another member in the chat room, Kristy, had asked, “Is there a particular book that you can recommend about Fr. John Krestiankin or his teachings? Are they all in Russian? Is there anything in English? Even if it’s in Russian, is there a popular book that we can find out more about it?”

Dr. Burgess: [Everyday] Saints is one really good introduction, because Tikhon (Shevkunov) who wrote the book, the abbot at that time at the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow, says quite a bit about Ioan Krestiankin in the book. So for an English-speaking audience, that’s probably the first place to start.

Fr. Tom: Okay, very good. Let’s move on here to another one of the elders that you brought up. I want to remind everybody: 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. Feel free to call. Dr. John Burgess is on the line, and we’re talking about the holy elders of the late Soviet period. John, you had also mentioned about Seraphim Tyap— I can’t pronounce it. Tyapochkin. Tell me about Fr. Seraphim.

Dr. Burgess: Tyapochkin. You know, Fr. Seraphim, like Ioan Krestiankin, had suffered in the Stalinist concentration camps. He had been a priest in Ukraine, in Dnipropetrovsk, a large city in the eastern part of Ukraine, and then was arrested several times and eventually was sentenced to ten years in the gulag.

There’s this amazing story about him, how he continued secretly to celebrate the liturgy, how he would make communion elements out of berries and pieces of bread given to the prisoners for their daily rations. He would also find ways to share the eucharistic elements with other prisoners. They would sometimes gather secretly on the outskirts of the concentration camp at night. When his term of service was almost up, his ten years, the commandant of the concentration camp called him in, and he said to Fr. Seraphim; he said, “What are you going to do when you’re released?” And without hesitating, Fr. Seraphim said, “I’m a priest. I’m going to serve the liturgy.” And the commandant said, “In that case, I’m giving you five more years in prison.”

Fr. Tom: Oh my!

Dr. Burgess: And he was exiled to a prison camp in Kazakhstan.

But you see, Fr. Tom, that’s the strength that a man like Fr. Seraphim Tyapochkin had. That’s why, after his release, he was fearless. What more could the government to do him? He was going to be a priest. He was going to serve the liturgy. It didn’t matter any more if government officials threatened him. He’d been through it all, and it was that kind of freedom, that kind of strength that was so important in the ‘60s and ‘70s. People are not going to go to the gulag any more for their faith, but to meet somebody who had that strength to say, “I’m going to be a priest; I’m going to serve the liturgy,” that was such an inspiration.

Fr. Tom: And I know that also there’s a famous figure in Russian Orthodoxy. Some people would consider him a kind of a contemporary parish priest kind of elder, not necessarily of the monastic type but more of an academic, and that was Alexander Men.

Dr. Burgess: Yes.

Fr. Tom: Would he have been kind of in this same lineage? I know he comes a little bit later. Can you compare and contrast some of the ways that we might see Tyapochkin versus an Alexander Men who also stood up to the authorities and so forth, but was in many ways kind of an ordinary parish priest, but did more kind of active missionary work?

Dr. Burgess: Right. Well, you know, Men is an interesting, very interesting figure. He, again, was a threat to the Soviet authorities. They didn’t like intelligent priests. They made sure that they couldn’t get a post in Moscow, so they sent him out to a small village on the outskirts, well outside of Moscow city.

Fr. Tom: Interesting.

Dr. Burgess: But he was very, very intelligent. He was very well read, and apparently very eloquent: a magnificent preacher. These other holy elders were not known for their preaching; they were known for their spiritual counsel. Alexander Men was not known so much for his spiritual counsel, one-on-one, but he was known as an aspiring preacher and thinker, writer. His legacy is a little bit more complicated in Russia today, because some of his teachings pushed the envelope. They went in the direction of a kind of ecumenical theology that many Russian Orthodox regard as too liberal. But he certainly was in the lineage of the holy elders.

He was familiar with spiritual children of Alexei Mechev, who was a holy elder in the early 20th century, and his son, Sergei Mechev, both of them served a very important parish in Moscow. When Stalin came to power, the Mechev father and son had again lived out of this spiritual freedom and taught this parish, their spiritual children, to continue to meet, to continue to find priests to continue to serve them the liturgy secretly in their homes. And apparently Alexander Men knew some of those spiritual children and was inspired by them.

He today would not be considered one of the holy elders, or would be a more controversial example, but certainly he was a powerful intellectual figure during the late Soviet period.

Fr. Tom: Thank you. Thank you for that. I appreciate it very much.

So in the period that we are in today in Russia… Obviously you were talking to some of the spiritual children of these elders, is that correct, or maybe grandchildren?

Dr. Burgess: That’s right. Yes, yes.

Fr. Tom: So what’s the situation today? How are those spiritual children keeping the teachings alive of their spiritual fathers? And are there any movements toward canonization of these particular elders? How are they keeping that teaching alive? What is, to borrow kind of a Latin term, what is the cult surrounding those particular elders that’s being carried on by their spiritual children?

Dr. Burgess: Yeah, well, you know, I think that it really goes back to this question of: How do you live in spiritual freedom? And that’s a question in Russia today; it’s a question really in every Western society today, because we all face temptations, we all face distractions, diversions, whether it’s consumerism or excessive nationalism or just plain human selfishness. And also this sense that, especially in Western Europe and the United States, the Church and Christianity are being marginalized in a way that we’re not used to. We certainly would not compare it to life in the Soviet Union, but still there are some similarities that a Church that was once at the center of a culture’s life is now being pushed to the margins. People are indifferent, maybe even suspicious. So that’s where I think the legacy of these holy elders can be an inspiration in different ways, to Russians, but also to Americans.

In Russia— How are you going to live with spiritual freedom? This goes back to the question of Vladimir Putin. Part of the dilemma for the Russian Orthodox Church today is that it’s learned to cooperate pretty closely with state authorities and has been very reluctant ever to criticize President Putin’s policies. So could the spiritual children of these holy elders find the freedom that their spiritual fathers taught them? Could they live out of that spiritual freedom in a way that would be fearless in today’s Russia? Again, not to call for overthrow of a government or to take sides in a political campaign, but to encourage people to think critically, to live out of their faith. I think you do occasionally see examples of this, but it’s not so much on the level of the patriarch and the hierarchy; it’s with particular priests on the ground. I think of particular parishes that I’ve gotten to know, with priests who really do encourage their parishioners to be active in Church life, to take responsibility, to think in ways that we would call democratic, to organize social service projects, not just to be passive recipients of a hierarchical Church, but to see themselves as members of the body of Christ.

I could point to several parishes I’ve gotten to know that, again, sometimes are doing amazing social work, educational work. They are reaching out to the society around them to do better, to make Russia a better place, because they live out of this legacy of the spiritual freedom of the holy elders.

Fr. Tom: You know, it was funny, you had mentioned about this freedom and living under freedom. A few weeks ago we had a guest, several guests, that were missionaries in China, and they had both recalled the Chinese Christians who were basically saying, “Oh, we pray for the American Christians,” and the question was, “Well, why do you pray for American Christians?” and they said, “Well, because you don’t live under persecution, and we pray that you would live under persecution so that you would really understand and value your faith.” So are you saying that the challenge for Russians today and these spiritual children of these elders is now how do we truly live as Orthodox Christians, as Christians, but in a society that that is free?

Dr. Burgess: Well, you know, one priest said to me in Russia, he said, “The Church is more free than it’s ever been in Russian history. The question is: Will we make use of that freedom?” And he said, “I’m afraid that most of the time we don’t.” Now isn’t that interesting? “We have more freedom than we’ve ever had, but do we make use of it, or do we let ourselves get comfortable?” We let ourselves be dependent on the largess of the state or wealthy sponsors. Are we really learning to live in the freedom of the Gospel?

Fr. Tom: Exactly. So, John, we just have a few minutes left in our show tonight. I want to thank you for everything. What I want you to do is help us understand… You obviously have experienced Orthodoxy in Russia, you’ve experienced Orthodoxy here in America, you are a Christian teacher, a theologian, and so forth. You’ve obviously taken all of this tremendous information in about all of these elders. Help crystallize that for us, as a Christian man in a Western nation. What is the message of these elders for us today? What can we take away? Give is maybe two or three points to help us live our Christian life.

Dr. Burgess: Well, I think the message of those who were martyred under the Communists, and then again the message of these holy elders who were not martyred but were living in very difficult social circumstances—I think their message is that the Christian faith gives you a freedom to speak the truth in love. This amazing capacity to look at those who maybe are persecutors, look at those who may mock your religion, be indifferent to it, and not to back away from your convictions but to be able to speak those convictions in a way that loves your opponent, loves your enemy, tries genuinely to understand them and to communicate to them in a way that they can experience the love of Christ that you’ve experienced for yourself.

Would that all of us could learn that, to be free enough in ourselves that we don’t fear what other people think about us. We’re not afraid to criticize our government if it is promoting values antithetical to the Christian faith, not afraid to criticize a society that says wealth and economic comfort are the highest values. The freedom to say, as we are going to learn through this coronavirus, that we can be free in the Lord even under the most difficult of social circumstances.

I think that’s what these holy elders keep calling us back to. We don’t get our freedom from the state. We don’t get our freedom from the amount of money that we have in the bank. We don’t get our freedom from the number of possessions that we own. We get our freedom from living in Christ, the Christ we encounter in the liturgy and the sacraments, and that gives us the strength to speak truth in love. I think that’s somehow how I would sum it up, Fr. Tom.

Fr. Tom: Thank you so much, John. That is a wonderful message to leave us with, that no matter our circumstances, that we are free in Christ. Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge and research with us. It is really a wealth of information that you’ve given us tonight. John, there are some other books that I know you’ve written about Orthodoxy and so forth. I’m going to post those on our AFT page, on Facebook, if anybody wants to go there and check those out. John, thank you very, very much for sharing these spiritual riches with us this evening.

Dr. Burgess: You’re very welcome. So good to be with you, Fr. Tom.

Fr. Tom: I appreciate it. God bless you.

I also want to thank Bobby for taking care of all the engineering today; for everybody in the chat room, thank you very, very much.

I just want to offer a few final thoughts. In contemporary culture, Orthodox Christianity is often learned from books and from online sources. While this is mostly helpful—but it can at times be misleading—we can never truly understand the holiness that deep faith in Christ produces until we actually meet someone that is truly holy. In our own country, contemporary elders such as the recently deceased Elder Ephraim, Fr. Roman (Braga), Fr. George Calciu bring us this experience and wisdom. However, true holiness can be somewhat elusive in our contemporary world. So let’s pray that God would raise up for us new holy elders, both men and women, from whom we can draw spiritual wisdom and deep grace.

That’s our show for tonight. Remember to like us on Facebook at facebook.com/ancientfaithtoday; share out our program after that’s posted; give us your feedback and contact us with any ideas or topics that you might want to hear about. Join us for the next edition of Ancient Faith Today; we’ll be talking to Dr. Gary Jenkins about classical education and a new Orthodox school that’s being formed in eastern Pennsylvania under his leadership. Good night, everybody!