April 22, 2022 Show with Matthew Heise on “Faith & Perseverance in the Soviet Union”

Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Introduction and Proverbs 27:17

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And I am thoroughly enthusiastic about today's first-time guest and the topic, I am sure, is going to be utterly fascinating, perhaps even more fascinating because of what is currently going on in Ukraine at the hands of Vladimir Putin and the Russian army.

Today, we have Dr. Matthew Heisey on the program. He is Executive Director at Lutheran Heritage Foundation and today we are going to be discussing his book, The Gates of Hell, An Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union.

And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Matthew Heisey.

Thank you very much, Chris. It's a real joy to be with you today.

Well, tell our listeners about the Lutheran Heritage Foundation.

Well, the Lutheran Heritage Foundation was founded by Reverend Robert Rahn about 30 years ago with the express purpose to kind of restore a Christian witness to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

So Pastor Rahn went in there and began making connections with old Lutheran groups of people who had begun forming in the late 80s because of the Glasnost. And he was able to begin to start working on translations of Martin Luther's small catechism, children's Bible story books, even up to a book of Concord into Russian.

Because even though many of these people who had been parts of these congregations had maybe German, Estonian, Latvian, Finnish ethnic heritage, they pretty much lost their languages and they've been thoroughly Russianized.

So they spoke Russian. Well, that's kind of what he thought that would be the work. And then by God's grace, in 30 years now, we work in 96 countries and over 140. The Holy Spirit is working. His word is being….

Wow.

And just for our listeners' sake so that they can look this information up for Lutheran Heritage Foundation, go to LHF for Lutheran Heritage Foundation, missions .org, LHF, missions .org, and God willing, we'll be repeating that later on in the program.

We have a tradition here on Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, Dr. Heisey, whenever we have a first-time guest, we have that guest give an account, a summary of their salvation story. And I know having done radio for many years, those in different branches of the Christian faith may have a different explanation of that.

It's the same gospel, of course, if we are truly members of Christ's true church. Same gospel, same Christ, but sometimes, in fact, many times, the stories of how we become aware of this Christ and this gospel and when we come to enthusiastically embrace it and repent of our wickedness and so on, those kinds of details may differ radically, and sometimes you even have folks, possibly you, I don't know, who are raised in the faith since infancy and they don't even remember a time when they didn't know and love Jesus.

So why don't we hear from you a summary of your story?

Sure. Actually, I was raised in the faith and kind of connected even to the story that I write here. My paternal grandparents were Germans from Russia in 1917, for which the family is infinitely grateful because, of course, we know what happened in those years after.

And they were faithful members of Christ. And so my parents raised me in the faith and confirmed. And, of course, then, you know, you get into your early 20s and there is the tendency to maybe begin to look at other people because he is more than a great teacher.

And I love reading, of course, C .S. Lewis, which aided me greatly in that, that he is not just a great teacher because if that's all he is, there are plenty of great teachers. But this great teacher is God as well.

Amen.

In fact, that reminded me, I don't know if you remember this, but during the Republican primaries, when George W. Bush was first running for President of the United States, one of the Republicans running against him was Alan Keyes.

And although I disagree theologically with Alan, he is a Roman Catholic, I thought that he had the best statement in the entire Republican primaries. When they were asked, all of the candidates were asked who their favorite philosopher was, George W. Bush said that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ.

And he got a round of applause because people thought that was very bold and noble of him to say that during a highly contested political campaign viewed by millions. And Alan Keyes rebuked him correctly, I believe, by saying, Mr. Bush, Jesus Christ is not a philosopher, he is God.

That does trump philosopher, doesn't it? Yes.

I'm sorry, I interrupted you. You can continue where you left off.

No, no, that was pretty good. I began doing some teaching in Canadian because the principal, I reminded him, okay, I'm teaching history, what happens when I come to the Reformation? And he said to me, oh, I forgot about that.

And I said, that's okay, we were right and you were wrong. No, I said, I will present it honestly from both sides. And he said something that really struck me, because it was trying to reach out to inner-city kids, it was a Detroit Catholic school, and he said, I would rather have a strong Christian.

And I always appreciated that. And so that was certainly part of my spiritual journey. And then eventually I decided in my 30s to go to a seminary. And in the mid -90s I'd done a volunteer mission stint that extended into two years in Russia.

So I lived in Moscow from 1994 to 1996. And then went back to teaching, but it wasn't quite the same. And then entered the seminary and thinking, okay, now I'm going to go on for the Ph .D. I'm thinking I'm the academic, and one of my professors said, no, you're going to Russia.

I said, okay. And so I did from 2001 then to 2014. And in the former Soviet Republic, like Ukraine, and actually teach in Russian. So that's always an intimidating reminder of pride comes before. I was learning a language.

I wanted to kind of impress the students that I had a degree in higher education. So I told them, I wanted to tell them I had Vyshabrazavania, but I left out a syllable. And the lesson is don't leave out a syllable in Russian, because I told them I had Vyshabrazavania.

Vyshabrazavania and Vyshabrazavania are really close, but I told them I had a higher circumcision. So the Lord has a way of humbling us, doesn't he?

Oh, yeah. He has had a habit of doing that all my life.

Yeah, me too. And then in 2014, I came back. My mother was not as well, and I became the director at Lutheran Heritage Foundation, where I have remained for now eight years.

So this organization predates your existence as the executive director.

Yes, although ironically, when I was in Russia in the 90s, Pastor Ron, since I was a native Detroit area boy, I would end up helping found a soup kitchen mission to street people in Moscow with my Russian Orthodox friends.

And I would end up bringing a lot of this. Eventually, they made me the director then.

Praise God. And you are in, if I'm not mistaken, the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod?

I am.

Yes, that is one of the certainly more conservative and biblically-based Christian Lutheran denominations, some of which have completely fallen away not only from their Christian heritage, but even from their Lutheran heritage.

And some of them are denominations that Martin Luther himself, if he could see what is happening here, would be rolling over in his grave and be furious that his name was attached to such a denomination.

But we thank God for denominations such as the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church for upholding the biblical roots of the Reformation and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And that's actually one of the most important phrases that we can. Amen.

Well, one of those books is the book that we are addressing today, The Gates of Hell, An Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union. What is the background of the Lutheran Church in Ukraine and Russia?

Because when I keep hearing about everything that's going on right now in Ukraine, predominantly you hear about the Eastern Orthodox Church. You also hear sometimes about the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and you hear about evangelicals.

I have interviewed a seminary professor, Grace Bible Seminary in Kiev, and Mykola Leliovsky. I've had him on the program at least twice and a very strong proponent of the true gospel over there in Ukraine.

But tell us about the background of the Lutheran Church in Ukraine and Russia.

Okay, yeah. Let me actually start with 20 years after Martin Luther's death. Lutheran congregations forming in Moscow primarily. Ivan the Terrible noted, Ivan the Terrible said, Well, this is what we believe, and they had a copy of the Augsburg Confession, and he had that translated.

Ivan was actually deeply interested in Christianity and theology, and so after he read it, he said, Okay, that sounds like Christianity. Build your churches. He did not get that title for no reason. Ivan the Terrible soon changed his mind and said, Burn the Lutheran Church in Moscow.

And so it was, of course, under his reign. But the churches remained afterwards and began to grow, but they were all ethnic churches, German, Estonian. So most of it could actually be in Ukraine as well.

So you have the meeting. I'm probably going on to the other things, but as I was walking as well near Odessa, I was able to see other Protestant denominations. Some had been turned back into Orthodox.

One of the more fascinating ones was a marcher for the church. He was engrossed in even how he outlined that it wasn't traditional Orthodox. He came up to us and told us that he was very aware and wanted to preserve some of that history.

But, of course, he was Orthodox now. I was impressed because I have not always had those kinds of conversations. So that was really good to see, that someone saw this continuity of the Christian faith.

Persecution of Lutheran Christians Under Soviet Rule

Now, what was it like specifically for Lutheran Christians to live in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1939?

Yeah, that is really kind of an era of... So they went after Patriarch Tithon, and the other churches had a little bit of freedom from Stalin. That's when things began to change. And then the 30s began on all churches.

And the story that you focus on amongst the general information about Lutheran Christians and their persecution, you specifically hone in and highlight the story of Pastor Kurt Muss. So tell the story of how this book came to be written to begin with.

Well, I had some parishioners. Actually, I was serving as a missionary at the seminary on the outskirts. I never have known of this, but in contact with some of his... He said, you know, we're very faithful.

And after, I said, do you really want to know who he is? I said, if you don't, you actually will have a lot of personal... I call Kurt Muss the Russian Bonhoeffer. He worked exclusively with youth near future, and he wanted to prepare the youth for that.

And so he said, you know, you have to know what's coming. You have to be grounded in this faith, because the day will come when... You need to know God's word. You need to plant it in your heart, because God is creating this temple.

You could see what was going on in Helmut Hansen also. Hansen spoke mostly German, but Muss was fluent in Russian and German, which is why many of the youth congregated around him, because they had...

They spoke Russian exclusively. And... He often didn't go up in the pulpit. He would go down among the people and speak to them. And one of his students also prominently... One day to buy some things from a...

We would call it a pharmacist. So he was interesting. He walked in. He had this... And some of these... nurtured them. And Muss is kind of one of the more prominent figures in the book. There are many others, too.

They see that the vanguard of the future beginning to heavy taxation. It was no longer 7 cents, even though, you know, you've got Sunday through Saturday. And so Sunday was never the same day. So people...

The church on a Sunday, because the workers all had different shifts. And you'd have to have services then at 7 o 'clock at night. This all happened in late 1929. So actually, I put the quote from Revelation on this chapter where it says that, you know, he will think to change the times and the seasons.

I can imagine that many of the people in those days were also thinking, you know, this sounds an awful lot like Revelation.

Yeah.

Soviet Motives for Persecuting the Church

We have a listener already with a question. We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who asks, what were the specific reasons the Soviet Union publicly declared for persecuting the church? And if they were different, what do you think their real reasons were?

Well, there was... in the Russian... individuals with promises of heaven. And they said, good, we need to... and the problem is... one of the interesting statements that was called NKVD at that time interviewed one of the Sunday school teachers that I talked to in 1929, one of Kurt Mosse's teachers.

And he basically, he said, we cannot teach hate. And so this was an enemy. Lutheran, Baptist, it didn't matter. These people...

And as the...

I hope that gives some answer to it.

Oh, yeah, it does. But the listener, RJ, also asked, do you think that there were unstated reasons why the Soviet Union persecuted Christians?

Sure. What do you mean by unstated?

Like, for instance, in China, there is language used. There historically has been language used that appears to equate the Chinese government with deity. Whereas you have some communists really obliterating the entire concept of deity.

They're really claiming to be deity, whether they say that specifically and clearly or not. And so perhaps the Soviet Union just viewed, just like the Romans of the first century, viewed the Christians as worshiping a competing god, a god that was not them.

Right. A different theist, yeah. Yeah, here, not so much. Although the intriguing thing is, you remember the old parade practice. No attempt to really say, this is a deity. It's not Lenin. It's not Stalin.

But it is...

And we have to go to our first station break. By the way, RJ, in White Plains, please give us your full mailing address because you have just won a free copy of The Gates of Hell, An Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union by our guest, Matthew Heisey.

Compliments of our friends at Lexham Press. And it will be mailed out to you, compliments of our sponsors, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com. That's C as in Cumberland, V as in Valley, BBS for BibleBookService .com.

They will actually be shipping the book out to you if you provide for us your mailing address. We're going to our first break, and if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Matthew Heisey about his book, The Gates of Hell, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Don't go away. We're going to be right back with Matt Heisey right after these messages.

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And that's ignitedbytheword .org, ignitedbytheword .org. We are now back with our guest today, Matthew Heise. And Matthew is the author of the book we are addressing, The Gates of Hell, an Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union.

We do have a question from Ted in Moundville, Alabama. He said, I was wondering whether Stalin may have been more motivated to persecute Christianity in the Soviet Union because he himself had been a seminarian in the Russian Orthodox Church and that perhaps he was trying to overcorrect his former religious beliefs which he eventually regarded as a sort of secular apostasy.

Any comments on that, Matthew?

Actually, that's a very interesting point by Ted there. I did actually live in Tbilisi, Georgia for a little while. It was exactly, he was trying to find ways for foreigners to work in Georgia. Once that cleared up, I did get down to Tbilisi and lived there for a while.

But I did often pass by the old seminary through these robberies. And he used to hang out in the Lutheran Cemetery, which still exists there. There's a Lutheran church in Tbilisi. To carry out his... Him there, he would worship in a way.

And Stalin understood in depth on that. But it would be because he did understand the faith. And certainly...

Well, thanks, Ted. Give us your full mailing address in Moundville, Alabama. And we will make sure that cvbbs .com ships out to you a free copy of The Gates of Hell, An Untold Story of Faith and Perseverance in the Early Soviet Union.

This is a beautiful hardback, nearly 500 pages. So we thank Lexham Press once again for providing these giveaway copies, a limited number. We also thank cvbbs .com, Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, for shipping these books out to our winners when the weight of that package is going to be quite extraordinary.

Well, I'll tell you, Lexham did... Elliot Ritzema and Todd Haynes and the staff there did an incredible job editing down my book because it probably would have been 700-some pages. So they really... I'm really, really honored to have worked with them and very grateful to them.

Yes, and we're very grateful to them for providing us these giveaway copies. How did an American, Dr. John Moorhead, figure so prominently in this story, and what role did he play in keeping the church alive?

He is a fascinating character. He was a professor, the president of Roanoke College. It was a Lutheran college, certainly, when he was president in the early years of the previous century. World War I, John Moorhead, overseas, he had actually done some studies over in Leipzig.

He had learned German. And after he saw the devastation of World War I, he tried to find ways for Americans. Nothing quite like the trip that he took to Moscow when he met Theophil Meyer, who would eventually be...

And he went on a journey with Meyer to the Volga and other regions. Forever after then, until his death in 1936, he was committed to keeping the Lutheran church.

In Russia alive.

And he never left a stone unturned in the States. He certainly connected to many of the... There were a large number of Volga Germans who lived in, who still, of course, their ancestors live out in the American Midwest, in the Dakotas, in Nebraska, and Colorado.

And so he certainly went to those folks. And many of them still have relatives in what was now the Soviet Union. And so he was able to get aid to them. He got aid to Reformed communities. He was not that particular when it came to helping Christians.

He did not draw a distinction. I only give it to Lutherans. I don't give it to Reformed. Because when you get to the Volga area, you have Reformed and Lutheran there. And he supported all. And he said, the aid goes to everyone.

And really, this was a famine that took place in the early 1920s, and literally saved a lot of lives physically. He became so closely tied to the church. He wanted to make sure that they would receive the resources that they needed.

And so he would always find... I mean, he would never quit. Even though he was working in a situation where I think a lot of the Russians would, but also said that that can do spirit, and probably shortened his life by several years because he took it all there.

In fact, this is when Kurt Muss, who took over some of the work that John Moorhead was doing, and was arrested by the Soviet state because he was distributing aid, and he was connected. We have some of these situations today where Americans and things along that line.

By the way, several times you have mentioned bishops in the Lutheran church. And for as long as I've been an evangelical Protestant and have had many discussions with Missouri Synod Lutherans and Lutherans of other conservative Bible-believing backgrounds, I don't recall ever those two words being put together, Lutheran bishop.

Is that a common thing in Lutheran denominations today?

It is for Europe. You know, we have a president of Missouri Synod, Matthew Harrison, Reverend Dr. Matthew Harrison. We've always had a president, and part of that, too, was because there was a distinction.

The Europeans didn't keep that type. Their theological identity is now in a stance. And so, if you had these German theological professors who came into the Baltic state, and they had the tradition of bishop, they were just referred to as bishops.

Tell the story about the cover image on this book. As you were saying, Lexham Press really did an exquisite job in the publishing of this book, even cosmetically. I mean, it's a very eye-catching book, and the cover is quite compelling.

It's the ordination party in the Crimea.

Yeah, this is the Herschelman family. In fact, if you get the chance to look at the cover, you will see on one corner, there is a gentleman with a kind of large white mane there, and a big white beard, and that is Ferdinand Herschelman, Sr., who was one of the more respected pastors in the church.

And the picture is the occasion of his son, Ferdinand Jr., basically, where a large number of Crimea became Russian. But at that time, the time of the Herschelmans, Crimea had a large Lutheran population.

You had a lot of these Germans who had immigrated there, who had been invited in by Catherine the Great way back in the Black Sea colonies and so forth. And so the picture shows this ordination of the families there, but what's tragic about the picture is you will note that five of the pastors will either be physically executed or die.

Herschelman, the younger son, who was ordained that day, up with a tree of laborers working in the... And his father, ironically, came out of retirement because he saw... John Moorhead had said, you know, these guys can't retire.

We're losing pastors. We have all these congregations with no pastors. They need a shepherd. And Herschelman was already in his 70s and he felt compelled to go back and do mission work. And so he ended up going into a Siberian village with his daughter and was arrested.

And he died in a Soviet labor camp at the age of 76. So, I mean, these are just incredible people of faith. And I guess what's so extraordinary to me is they don't pretend to be anything but ordinary Christians who say, faith we proclaim.

And, you know, like Paul would say, you know, whether I'm in good health or bad, it doesn't matter. The circumcised will proclaim Christ. And he's a great-granddaughter of Ferdinand Senior. It was a great exchange, actually, because I did go into the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America Archive in Chicago, and I had letters from my great-grandfather.

Wow. I could share with her. And she shared pictures with me. So I had some real great opportunities to connect with people who were connected to many of the figures in the book.

Midway Break and Sponsor Messages

Well, we have to go to our midway break right now. If you have questions for Matthew Heisey, on the gates of hell, and I hope that all of you who have already submitted your questions will be patient as we will eventually get around to you, God willing, to have your questions read and answered on air.

But if you want to get in line, folks, if you haven't submitted your question yet, send it to ChrisArnson at gmail .com. ChrisArnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

This is the longer than normal break in the middle of the show. Please be patient with us. Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, requires of us a longer break in the middle because they are required by the FCC to air their own public service announcements and other things that localize Iron Sharp and Zion Radio geographically to Lake City, Florida.

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