Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (126 page)

Zinzendorf never lost his commitment to an ecumenical benevolence towards all Churches, symbolized by his inheritance of the Moravians' continuing government by bishops in succession from the united Western Church - an episcopal succession which was recognized by the British Parliament in 1749, in an ecumenical gesture without parallel at the time. The Count's authoritarian temperament and Pietist compulsion to organize demanded a new congregation as highly structured and centred round worship as the most rigorous monastic order, while it also moulded the whole family lives of men, women and children. Zinzendorf's communities worshipped as frequently as monks - seven times a day on weekdays, longer on Sundays - and their worship was full of song: sermons might be sung, they wrote a whole new crop of hymns, enjoyed a daily hour of singing with the congregation as full choir, and moreover had no Puritan fear of musical instruments. The Count had a special liking for trombones and recommended them as a way of cheering up funerals.
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The Moravians much valued cheerfulness. It was Zinzendorf's chief quarrel with Francke that he had seemed to make the Christian life too much of a grim struggle.
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Stressing emotion against reason as the best means of reaching out to Christ, Zinzendorf set aside all previous Christian doctrinal requirements, with the sole exception of his own Lutheran inheritance, the Augsburg Confession of 1530. What he added was an idiosyncratic and intense communal piety, in which he placed extreme stress on his own selection from very traditional themes. He took up the language of mystical marriage familiar to many medieval spiritual writers, and made this one of the principal themes of Moravian worship, the eroticism of the vocabulary forming a sometimes unstable combination with a rigorously policed set of everyday relations between the sexes. He spoke of the Holy Spirit as Mother, as Syrian Christians had done long before (see pp. 182-3). He almost fetishized Luther's emphasis on Christ's sufferings for humankind, producing an obsession with Christ's blood and wounds - 'so moist, so gory', as Zinzendorf's
Litany of the Wounds
described them, with a relish which may have little appeal now.

In 1749, after the Count himself had encouraged emotions in some Moravian communities to boil too high, in what was later euphemistically termed the 'Sifting Time', he now felt compelled to rein them in. He banned his people from celebrating Christ's 'little side-hole' (
Seitenholchen
). This was the toe-curling designation which he and they had given to the spear wound suffered by Christ on the Cross, a wound which represented for Zinzendorf 'the Mother of our souls, as the earth is the mother of the body'. The Count's embarrassment at the consequences of his devotional imagery led to a not untypical outburst which, in his struggle to regain control, blended his usual mystical language (much of it baffling to outsiders) with a choleric threat to bring the whole Moravian edifice crashing down. Having signed off a long and testy letter from London 'Your brother, Ludwig', he continued menacingly in a postscript:

If you do not follow me, I will not only lay down my office completely in all
Gemeinen
[Moravian communities] and at the same time make a new departure to the heart of Jesus, but I also want to assure you in advance that the Elder-Office of the Savior will also cease. I know behind what I stand, and I cannot help myself.
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The crisis passed, and as Moravians travelled to missionary work in new settings, their bloodthirsty language struck unexpected chords with some of the peoples they met, particularly indigenous peoples in North America, and that brought Moravian missions great success. For one of the most significant characteristics of this ebullient yet tightly structured movement was its hunger to undertake missions overseas to non-Christians. People who had already exiled themselves once to join the Moravian family zestfully threw themselves into fresh exile to spread the excitement which they had experienced in their own new lives. This was the first Protestant Church to commit itself to the task with such consistency, just at the moment when Protestant powers were creating overseas empires which might aid the work. Pietist Lutheranism did offer one outstanding precedent. In 1706, when Count Zinzendorf was still only six years old, August Francke had encouraged a former student of Halle, Bartholomaeus Ziegenbalg, to travel to India and begin mission among Hindus.

Ziegenbalg was the first Protestant missionary in the subcontinent. He took advantage of the kingdom of Denmark's modest but significant foothold at Tranquebar, the only European outpost in Asia offering a potential direct bridgehead for Pietism, to provide a base for his mission. He adopted strategies which were often subsequently ignored: like the Jesuit de Nobili before him (see p. 705), he showed a deep respect for Hindu traditions and tried to avoid presenting Christianity in woodenly Western terms. His resolution to discuss his faith thoughtfully with Muslims and Hindus took precedence for him over seeking rapid conversions. Ziegenbalg's work aroused the interest of Anglicans: it helped that Queen Anne of England's husband, Prince George, was Danish, and that the Prince's chaplain was a friend of Francke's. In a gesture of ecumenical cooperation rare at the time and not consistently shown later, the Anglican educational Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge sent Ziegenbalg a printer and press to make it possible to publish a pioneering translation of the Bible into Tamil. Alas for his gradualist strategy, he was beset by political troubles in India, and his fragile constitution led to an early death.
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Zinzendorf had his own close connections with the Danish Court, and from the 1730s he made something permanent of Ziegenbalg's interrupted work. Yet there was a difference from nearly all previous Western missions: the first Moravian missionaries whom he sent out were laypeople, often quite humble and uneducated folk, who tried to earn their livings by their craft skills on mission (see Plate 62). The Count himself personally joined his followers on an extraordinary series of journeys worldwide - to North America and the Caribbean, as well as travels through Europe from France to Britain to Scandinavia. These adventures came close to bankrupting him, and the work had to be rescued by others, but it continued. Moravian missionary work among slaves in the British West Indies and in America proved acceptable to slave owners, as they found that the Moravians taught their converts obedience and made them more hard-working. Moravians sought to improve the welfare of slaves rather than give institutional support to the growing British calls for the abolition of the trade and the institution (see pp. 870-71). Ostentatiously abstaining from involvement in politics, they still managed, in an astute balancing act, to preserve the esteem of British abolitionists. More generally, the Moravians showed other Protestant Churches that missions could be successful and that the initiative was worth imitating. Moravian numerical strength now lies outside their European homeland, thanks to their missionary work worldwide.
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THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL: METHODISM

In parallel with the Pietist movement in Germany and enjoying many links with it was a renewal of English-speaking Protestantism which came to be described as the Evangelical Revival.
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In the background were similar concerns to those which had galvanized the Pietists to action: devout English Protestants were unnerved by the changing character of the society in which they found themselves. England's prosperity and increasingly secular preoccupations (see pp. 787-91) were matched by a failure of its ecclesiastical courts, the disciplinary structure which the Church of England had inherited from the pre-Reformation Church. These had been effective enough up to the outbreak of the first English civil war in 1642, but they had never regained their authority when the restored episcopal establishment failed to include all English Protestants after 1662. The courts' decay was all the more pronounced after 1688. This collapse in ecclesiastical discipline was much more radical than in Lutheran countries, where the growth of Pietism had been impelled by different disruptions of society (see p. 738), but the resulting anxiety was similar. The English Parliament passed in 1697-8 an 'Act for the effectual suppressing of blasphemy and profaneness', by which it principally meant systematic anti-Trinitarian belief. The Act was an admission by the legislators that it was now possible to see 'Socinianism' as a serious threat to the Church, and that the Church was not capable of taking its own action against the threat. Earlier in 1697, the Scots had executed a rashly garrulous sceptic named Thomas Aikenhead as a blasphemer, an assertive piece of practical Christianity which was widely criticized even in Scotland and not thereafter repeated. The English Act of Parliament did not stem the tide of theological change.
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One first reaction to the new situation in England was the channelling of Christian activism into voluntary societies. Some were like Spener's
collegia pietatis
, devotional groups within individual parishes, but many of these ran into problems through worries that they might be 'Jacobite' front organizations for those seeking a restoration of the exiled King James or his heirs.
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It was politically safer to concentrate on voluntary organizations with specific practical focuses on obvious needs, two of which organizations we have already met in passing: the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, founded in 1698, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, founded in 1701 (see pp. 746 and 725). A third element was Societies for the Reformation of Manners, voluntary organizations set up from the 1690s in London and other provincial towns to enforce public morality. They involved a not altogether stable coalition of all those who mourned the collapse of social discipline, and who together sought to recruit paid informers to search out varieties of human sin for public prosecution. This plan for a Protestant subscribers' version of the Spanish Inquisition found few recruits to do the informing: England had been heartily sickened by the efforts of Puritans in Oliver Cromwell's time to improve on the discipline exercised by courts of the pre-war episcopal Church. By the 1730s the work of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners had collapsed, aided by their internal doctrinal squabbles.
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One might say that the Evangelical Revival was an answer to this failure; it was in the decade of the Societies' collapse that the new movement began gaining momentum.

Like the Pietists and Moravians, English Evangelicals sought to create a religion of the heart and of direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ, in consciousness of his suffering on the Cross - his atonement to his Father for human sin. Once more, it was the message of Augustine, filtered through Luther. The impulse in part found a home in the Church of England, but it also revitalized existing English Dissenting denominations from the mid-seventeenth century, and it produced a new religious body which by accident rather than design found itself outside the established Church: Methodism. The leader in what became a worldwide movement was John Wesley, a man who made sure that his career was as well documented as any Pietist might desire, assuring that his own version of his story would get first hearing.
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He was an Anglican clergyman, as was his father. His mother's father had likewise been a clergyman, ejected from the national Church after Charles II's restoration as a Dissenter, but both John's parents were strong Tories. Indeed his mother was for some time a Non-Juror (see p. 734), and Samuel and Susanna Wesley's disagreements over the royal succession had disrupted the marital bed - John's conception was actually the sign of their ideological reunion.
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High Churchpeople were increasingly left aside after James's flight, as subsequent regimes harboured often justified suspicions about their loyalty. The Church which Wesley knew as a young man was dominated by the very different religious style of the 'Latitudinarians'.

The young Wesley, already out of step with the establishment of his Church, followed the family profession of ministry to ordination and a Fellowship of an Oxford college, in a university itself still an obstinate stronghold of the embattled High Church party. Here he gathered a group of friends to share a devotional life and carry out works of charity rather in the style of a Counter-Reformation confraternity (see p. 656); their ordered lifestyle earned them the initially mocking title of 'Methodists'. Now wider influences came to bear on Wesley's religious outlook. He and his brother Charles set off in 1735 for the newly founded English American colony of Georgia to work among the settlers on behalf of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (itself dominated by High Churchmen). This ended in an ignominious voyage home, mainly thanks to John's pastoral clumsiness, but while heading out he had been much impressed by the piety and cheerful courage of a group of Moravians, apparently unmoved by storms which terrified everyone else on board.

On John Wesley's return from Georgia, his self-confidence severely damaged, he was much comforted by Moravians, and that led to an important moment for him - characteristically ambiguous in its setting between his High Church past and something which he found both old and new. One night in 1738, having attended Evensong at St Paul's Cathedral in London, he went on 'very unwillingly' to a Moravian prayer meeting nearby in Aldersgate. While the solemn music of Evensong still rang in his memory, he was listening to a reading from Martin Luther's restatement of Paul's message to the Romans - justification by faith alone. In a phrase now famous, he felt his 'heart strangely warmed' - less frequently remembered, though characteristic of the man, is the fact that this led him immediately to pray in a somewhat passive-aggressive manner 'for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me'.
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The Reformation came alive for him. With a conviction that he must not simply seek personal holiness but spread a message of salvation as far as he could, Wesley embarked on a lifetime's mission throughout the British Isles. He learned much from the Moravians, even though he eventually broke with them - not least, the importance of travel. His restless journeyings were eventually to wreck a marriage already ill-chosen when he entered it in 1751, and were also to prove a welcome escape from that mistake.
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