Christian Life and Witness. Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf
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to all his property (thereby making her the owner and not himself).
It was also in 1722 that a band of ten religious refugees appeared on Zinzendorf’s estate. The Count approved their staying on his lands until a more permanent place could be found for them. He seems to have intended that they should eventually have moved to the lands of his father-in-law, Count Reuss, a Pietist who was already sheltering some religious dissenters. But this never happened. Instead, with the Count’s approval from Dresden, they began to build a small settlement on Zinzendorf’s lands.
This community came to be called Herrnhut (the Lord’s watch). It began to attract religious dissenters of different kinds. Such people heard there was a place where they could live free of persecution. The story of the development of this community and of Zinzendorf’s engagement with and influence upon them is interesting in itself. Suffice it to say here, that the community became the vehicle for Zinzendorf’s adolescent pledge to preach the Gospel to every creature, and especially to those for whom no one else cared. After a stunning experience of the power and grace of God, this little community became an intrepid, irresistible legion of missionaries undaunted by disease, distance, risk, or death. And die they did, only to be replaced by new volunteers who joyously went to carry the news of the Savior. Within a decade this community of three hundred people had missionaries on every inhabited continent. True to Zinzendorf’s youthful promise, they went first to those places and peoples to whom no one else would go because the journey, the environment, or the people themselves were too dangerous. Moreover, these missionaries, lacking any theological training, were extraordinarily effective.
Zinzendorf led the missionary effort and at the same time continued his engagement with the churches in Europe. He formed a society within the churches that transcended the boundaries of the confessions. His aim was to bring together those whose hearts were bound to the Savior through love. Some further communities modeled on Herrnhut were also formed. They constituted a renewal of the pre-Reformation Hussite church from Bohemia and Moravia. They quickly came to be called the “Moravian Brethren” or the “Moravian Church.” The intention was not to be a church alongside other churches. Rather, in Zinzendorf’s conception they were to be a fellowship, a leaven, within all the churches, calling people to the heart of the Gospel, to a response to God’s love in Jesus Christ that was passionately loving, and to a resulting love for people of all kinds, including and especially the excluded, the overlooked, and the neglected. Within Europe this produced concern for and activity on behalf of prisoners, the mentally ill, and the developmentally challenged.
The Count seemed to be everywhere. His customary practice was to speak extemporaneously. Much of the material in his Hauptschriften (major writings) consists of transcripts of speeches given on various occasions for different purposes. His appearances, his speeches, the missionary activity, the trans-confessional societies, and his way of using language all provoked heated opposition from the Orthodox (with some exceptions, e.g., the theological faculty at Tübingen supported him) and from other Pietists. Nevertheless, he carried on. The speeches contained in the present volume come from the mature Zinzendorf. He gave them in Berlin at almost the midpoint of his adult life. His aim was to clarify the main point, the central point, of Christian life. He intended to do that by commenting on Luther’s explication of the second article of the creed, the one dealing with Jesus Christ.
What did his thought contribute to the wider Christian community? First, the explosion into the world of those missionaries from Herrnhut and its related communities gave birth to modern Protestant missions. Subsequent missionary movements, and missionaries, were inspired and informed by this Zinzendorf and his Herrnhuters.
Second, his effort to unite Christians across confessional boundaries on the basis of Jesus Christ himself was the impulse and idea that gave rise to the ecumenical movement. Some began to take his talk seriously. Moving along the trajectory of his language and thought, they pushed discussions of the meaning of the divisions between Christians, and the meaning of Christian community and Christian faith, in such a direction that two centuries later brought the ecumenical movement into being. Paradoxically, against his intention, this effort also brought the Lutheran Church in America into being. His idea of forming one Christian church in which each of the theological and liturgical traditions would remain and have their own integrity seemed very dangerous to his contemporaries. Thus, when he travelled to North America, Lutheran authorities in Germany who had before that time mostly ignored requests from America for a Lutheran pastor, immediately sent Muhlenberg to organize the Lutherans in America as a distinct and separate church, and to wrest them away from Zinzendorf’s influence.
Third, he was a prolific writer of hymn texts and had a great impact on Western Christian hymnody. Under his direction the Moravian Fellowship was a musical band of missionaries.
Fourth, in days when the great storm of the Reformation seemed to have burned down to a few coals, he called for faith to become again a living, blazing fire rather than a cold acceptance of doctrinal formulations and a formal adherence to socially accepted manners and morality.
Of great significance was his engagement with the Enlightenment. This was many sided. There were features of that intellectual movement that he regarded as good and some that he rejected quite forcefully. He was in agreement, for theological reasons, with the Enlightenment’s call for religious toleration. Indeed, he preferred people who were passionate about and deeply devoted to what they regarded as holy to those who were casual or indifferent or, as he put it, “cold minded.” In contrast to many of his Christian contemporaries, he embraced biblical criticism. Anything that helps us better understand the texts that preach Christ to us was a good thing in his estimation. Thus, while many Christians feared and attacked early scholarly forays into historical criticism, Zinzendorf welcomed them as useful.
Also, he loved the philosophical writings of Pierre Bayle, who is sometimes called the grandfather of the Enlightenment. He particularly loved Bayle’s merciless criticism of every human system, every intellectual pretense, and every confident claim to knowledge. He loved Bayle’s demand for plain speech and his refusal to whitewash matters either ethical or religious.
Moreover, most, if not all, other Christian thinkers of the period engaged Enlightenment deism and atheism by trying to argue within the terms and limits set by Enlightenment thinkers. Christians accepted from these Enlightenment thinkers, mostly without criticism, how God was to be spoken of and argued for, i.e., what conceptual scheme was acceptable. They accepted the Enlightenment understanding of reason and the Enlightenment’s meaning or use of the term “truth.” Thus, the game was lost before it was even begun. But in stark contrast, Zinzendorf sharply rejected these. He refused to play on a field marked out by the Enlightenment and doubted they were even playing the same game. Central to this was his refusal to accept or engage in any talk about God that was not talk about Jesus. God as a cold abstraction, as the conclusion arrived at by a chain of human reasoning or observation of the world, as something or someone whose being and purposes could be somehow sketched out by rationality was for Zinzendorf nothing but a chimera (his word) concocted out of human desires and wishes and shaped by the limits of reason. It reflected nothing more than the limits themselves. Concepts of “God” resulting from reason and observation were nothing more than the mirror of finitude. They were not concepts of the real God. God could only be spoken of on the basis of God’s own act and God’s own speech: Jesus Christ.
Zinzendorf was thus radically christocentric. For him, no Scripture passage is really rightly understood until it has been referred to Jesus Christ. No statement about God can be taken seriously with respect to truth unless it is about and one way or another has reference to Jesus Christ. No talk about what a Christian ought to do or how one ought to navigate the world is legitimate unless it is about and has direct reference to Jesus Christ. In an age that began to be squeamish about reference to God, he boldly spoke a full and rich Trinitarian God and did not hesitate to refer to Jesus as “God incarnate.” At the same time, one would have difficulty locating a Christian thinker who takes more seriously or considers more directly the full and authentic humanity of Jesus. All this is clear in the speeches in this volume.
There are other things interesting and noteworthy in Zinzendorf that warrant more study and discussion. He was working on understanding child development and tried to focus communication for children in ways