Editor’s Introduction

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Professor Nikolai Ivanovsky of the Kazan Theological Academy held a series of public conferences in St. Petersburg with local Old Believers, sponsored by the Society for Religious and Moral Enlightenment: open debates meant to test the schism’s arguments against a scholar who had spent his career studying it. This short occasional piece is Saint John of Kronstadt’s response to one heckler who, cornered by the evidence, tried to claim in front of the crowd that Ivanovsky had answered nothing.

John answers with Scripture, and the barrage is deliberate. Christ to the Pharisees, Paul and Barnabas to the unpersuaded Jews of Antioch, Isaiah’s word to a hardened people, Enoch’s word on judgment as quoted by Jude, and the Epistle to the Hebrews on the fate of those who spurn what they once knew. Five citations in ten paragraphs, each pressing the same conclusion: obstinacy in the face of plain truth is not a neutral position. It is a brief, sharp-edged piece of nineteenth-century Russian religious controversy, worth reading as much for what it shows of Kronstadt’s polemical voice as for the case it makes.