Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians

[00:00:00] Martyrs and Missionaries is a production of Revive Studios. You're listening to Martyrs and Missionaries. I'm Elise and in every episode, I'll bring you a new martyr and or missionary, the called and the brave. In this episode, we're talking about Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians.

[00:00:43] I want to give a quick thank you to our newest Patreons, to Ben and Jean and Julie. Thank you guys very much for hopping on and supporting us. I also want to thank all of you who bought shirts and other merchandise during our promotion about a month ago.

[00:00:56] You guys bought a lot of stuff. You have excellent taste and I'm sure you look either lovely or handsome. If you happen to glance the title of this episode before you clicked on it, then you know, it's about the Moravians and I want to start with this little

[00:01:09] quote by William Carey. It says, see what these Moravians have done. Can we not follow their example and in obedience to our heavenly master go out into the world and preach the gospel to the heathen? This is a quote you will see all the time.

[00:01:23] I think I came across it at least seven different times when I was doing the research for this episode and I wanted to do this episode because I thought, you know, you come across the Moravians a lot. Just in passing.

[00:01:35] It's never in detail, but it's like, oh, and the Moravians were over here doing this or especially you hear them in connection with Count Zinzendorf and I thought this would be kind of an interesting deep dive to kind of look

[00:01:47] into the origins of the Moravians and then their missions movement because that's what they're known for, right? But the more that I studied the Moravians, the more this episode turned into something that we've never done an episode like this before.

[00:02:03] I mean, we always take a martyr or missionary. We kind of go through their story or we'll look at a missions movement, which is what I originally intended this episode to look like.

[00:02:14] But as I was going through it just it just got weirder and weirder and I felt like I couldn't do the episode on missions anymore. But I think it is it's fascinating because I've never done an episode like

[00:02:30] this before and I will say with that that this is the first episode that I've had to do that comes with a sexual content warning. I've had, you know, cannibalism warnings and things like that before but

[00:02:44] this one does have a sexual content warning, but I will say that you are safe for most of this episode and I will actually before I begin talking about that kind of stuff, I will give another warning so that way, you know, you've

[00:02:56] got you've got plenty of advance notice if you want to usher out your little listeners. So let's let's talk about the Moravians. We have done a couple episodes that have referenced the Moravians. If you listen to the John Huss episode that I did a couple years ago, you're

[00:03:14] probably familiar with the Moravians because they started out as Hussites in Czechoslovakia. They are proto-Protestants. John Huss was killed about a hundred years before Martin Luther and then after his death, the Hussites were split into two groups.

[00:03:30] Now one of these groups threw out everything Catholic and then rebelled against the Catholic Church in 1419 and that kicked off the Hussite Wars. Now the more moderate Hussites side with the Catholic Church and the war ended about 20 years later in 1439 with the defeat of this anti-Catholic sect and

[00:03:49] then the remaining Hussites were then brought into the more moderate sect. It gets confusing from here, but the basics are essentially that a group of Hussites then later on wanted to form a community where they could live freely

[00:04:03] and practice their faith in the way that the early church did. And now Gregory the Patriarch who was a Moravian or a Hussite with connections was then able to petition the king of Czechoslovakia and he was able to receive a land grant in the northeastern city of Kuhnwald.

[00:04:21] And this led to the establishment of the Church of the Brethren or the Unitas Fratrum in 1457. Now according to Gregory the Patriarch, what made a Christian was not necessarily the doctrine that they believed but that a person lived his or

[00:04:37] her life according to the teachings of Jesus Christ. He described these first Moravians as people who have decided once and for all to be guided only by the gospel and the example of our Lord Jesus Christ and

[00:04:49] his holy apostles in gentleness, humility, patience, and love for our enemies. And that comes from G.E. Hutton's book History at the Moravian Church, which you can get for free on the internet archive. It's like 500 and something pages of very very small script.

[00:05:05] So you'll forgive me for not not reading it all but if you want to it's there. So we're skipping forward about a hundred years later. And at this point most of Czechoslovakia was Protestant and had even taken over many of the formerly Catholic universities.

[00:05:20] And as far as their doctrine goes at this time, they're aligned most closely with the Lutherans except for in the area of communion because Martin Luther believed that the body and blood of Christ is physically present in the Eucharist and the Moravians believe that it definitely was not.

[00:05:37] And then in 1618 the king announces his successor who is a radical Catholic and these Protestant nobles were then terrified of losing their freedom. So they rebelled against the king and then two years later, they were completely destroyed and were beheaded. So it didn't go well.

[00:05:57] After this the Moravians scattered some went into the Netherlands, Sweden, some stayed in Czechoslovakia, albeit underground and then a vast majority of them went to Poland. When persecution came again for these Moravians living in Czechoslovakia,

[00:06:12] they found refuge on the estates of a German Lutheran pietist whose name was Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf. And in order to understand what happens next in the story of these Moravians we have to talk about Count Zinzendorf.

[00:06:27] He is born in 1700 in Dresden in the Saxony region of Germany, which was at this point basically the seat of power for the Holy Roman Empire, which is different from the Church of Rome in Italy. His father dies six weeks after he was born.

[00:06:43] So he was raised by his sister and his grandmother because after her first husband died his mom marries a soldier and I guess she just kind of moves on with her life. But his grandmother Lady Gersdorf was a advocate of pietism, which was a

[00:07:00] movement started by a man named Philip Spencer who was a friend of Zinzendorf's grandmother. The pietist movement kind of coexisted alongside whatever denomination you happened to be associated with in this case is the Lutherans and pietists believed in Holy Living.

[00:07:17] They believe that we were set apart and so they kind of practice an aloofness from the world. They focus on hymns and poetry and they were big advocates for writing a bunch of poetry and hymns. So they emphasize the sacred and the spiritual and Lady Gersdorf herself was

[00:07:36] an accomplished poet. She encouraged Bible translation work and then she even started a school for girls. So Count Zinzendorf grows under this godly influence of his grandmother and then this pietistic company that she keeps. And then as a result, he's an emotionally intelligent boy.

[00:07:53] He's prone to feelings of joy and love and religious devotion and he was known for writing love letters to Jesus and then tossing them out his window to scatter the courtyard below and then when the Swedish army invades Saxony

[00:08:08] when Zinzendorf is six years old they come into his grandmother's castle and they burst into his room and they find him praying which is a scene that's As he's getting older Zinzendorf's grandmother absolutely refuses to let

[00:08:21] him enter the clergy and she impressed upon him the importance of his station. He's that which is that of a nobleman in this prominent family. So at 10 in keeping with the life of a nobleman, he leaves the family estate

[00:08:33] to study at the University of Hall, which is the Center for Pietistic Learning under a special name. So he's a very important person in the family. University of Hall, which is the Center for Pietistic Learning under a staunchly pietist disciple August Franca.

[00:08:50] By 15, he could read Greek French and Latin and just as well as his native German and although he struggled with Hebrew, he showed an acute gifting in poetry, but then instead of continuing on at Hall, he was forced to transfer

[00:09:04] to Wittenberg University, which was because he was a noble. And he wasn't allowed to continue through with this pietistic school and Wittenberg is a sharp contrast to Hall and it was really hard for Zinzendorf. Wittenberg was devoted to Lutheran Orthodoxy and had no concern really at

[00:09:24] all for this emotional pietism that Hall had. It's funny because today they're actually the same University. They were combined but at the time I guess there was a real rivalry going on. But Zinzendorf felt that this study of the nuanced theological differences

[00:09:39] that Wittenberg kind of harped on in his opinion tended to make students just as likely to become atheists as they were to become Christians. He just wanted everybody who said they loved Christ to get along and I think

[00:09:52] this is where you can see the beginnings of this ecumenical approach that he had to Christianity in his promotion of unity above creeds and confessions and denominations. And he even tries to heal the rift that's been going on

[00:10:06] between the leaders of these two schools, but it doesn't work. And then later on the son and successor of August Franca would publicly denounce what he was doing with the Moravian brethren. But as was customary at the time after Zinzendorf completed his studies at

[00:10:24] Wittenberg, he embarked on this grand tour of the centers of learning on the continent first in the company of his half-brother. He attended lectures in Holland, studied English and visited Dutch cities. And then in 1720 he and his tutor went to Paris where they stayed for six

[00:10:40] months. But he was far more impressed with the relief work being carried on at a Paris hotel and it was here that he forged a strong bond of friendship with the primates of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese. I think that's right.

[00:10:54] It sounds like it shouldn't be right, but I think it's primate. If it's not then I just made a faux pas that I'm going to keep in there. Anyway, but as he is exposed to these fine arts and cultural riches his

[00:11:05] heart is inclined even more and more to the Savior and less and less to these worldly interests. And then when he sees Domenico Fetis behold the man portrait of Jesus in the Dusseldorf Art Museum, he reads the inscription, I have done this for you.

[00:11:21] What have you done for me? And Zinzendorf says to himself, I have loved him for a long time, but I've never actually done anything for him. And from now on I will do whatever he leads me to do.

[00:11:34] When he turns 21, he purchases his own estate from his grandmother in the town of Berthelsdorf in southeastern Saxony and then he decides that he wants to get married, but he only wants to get married to a partner who shared his ideals, which makes sense.

[00:11:48] And he thought he found the perfect woman for this in his cousin, but then he found out that his best friend was in love with her. So then he marries his best friend's sister, who is Countess Erdmuth Dorothy von Roos.

[00:12:01] And they're married in 1722 and she is also raised in this pietistic culture and she actually probably was more devout than he was at least at the beginning. They wanted everybody to know that they did not marry for romantic reasons,

[00:12:14] which I think is a little bit odd to make sure that everybody knows that I don't love her. I love the Lord, but they both wanted to be champions of Christ and they thought they could accomplish that better together. So no romantic love, but love for Christ.

[00:12:29] So they move in together to their new castle home in Berthelsdorf and Zinzendorf soon had this dream to use his estate to create a Christian community and he doesn't have to wait very long because soon an Arabian guy

[00:12:42] named Christian David arrives at his doorstep seeking asylum after hearing through the grapevine of what Zinzendorf wanted to create. So Zinzendorf is beside himself with joy and he grants their request pretty much right away.

[00:12:57] And so the first group of 10 moves on to the estate in December of 1722 about two months after his marriage to Dorothy. They settled onto a plot of ground near the manor, but with enough room to kind of be its own separate community and they named this settlement

[00:13:13] Hernhut, which means under the Lord's watchful care. And then within a year and a half, they have a print shop, an apothecary, and they're working on an Academy which would mirror the University of Hall.

[00:13:27] Around this time, you have these five men from Moravia, which is a region in Czechoslovakia. They're escaping under the cover of darkness headed for the Moravian settlement in Poland when they were discovered by Christian David and then encouraged to check out Hernhut and they loved it so much.

[00:13:42] They decided to stay. One of those people was David Nietzschmann who is a carpenter. He has an eight-year-old daughter whose name is Anna. So remember her name because it will pop up later. Both of them will but Anna is a little bit more important.

[00:13:56] So this community is not just for the Moravians. Eventually Lutheran Pietists become part of it, former Catholics, Separatists reformed and then Anabaptists moved to this new community and by 1726, this population had swelled to be 300 people. But the differences in their denominations began to chip away at this

[00:14:18] dream of unity because the Moravians and the Lutherans didn't agree on the liturgies for worship. There were differences in economic status and then cultural and language barriers. There was even this really, it seems like unhinged guy.

[00:14:32] They let in that he was kicked out of the Lutheran Church for being a heretic. He causes a ton of damage in the community before eventually he suffers a mental breakdown and I think he leaves the community or is forced out.

[00:14:44] But because of all this drama, Zinzendorf moves his family into the community and lives in the orphanage there to try to mediate these differences and he goes from house to house counseling these families and he also reluctantly then sets up this list of community rules they needed

[00:15:00] to follow in order to stay in this community. And this was really hard for him because he's not a guy who likes orthodoxy or rules and he just wanted everybody to love the Lord. I mean thought that if you love Jesus, you could come together in perfect

[00:15:15] love. But his oversight helps heal these rifts and then soon the community comes together and agrees to live in this brotherly agreement. They appointed 12 elders and appointed night watchmen who would announce the hours with a hymn and they also appointed people to care for the sick

[00:15:33] and people to take up alms to give to the poor. And then in July, Zinzendorf is traveling and he's browsing this library and he discovers a copy of the constitution of the ancient Unitas Fratrum, also the Moravian Brethren, and then he understands that the

[00:15:49] Moravian Brethren was already a fully established church that predates Lutheranism itself. And he's amazed at the similarities between this constitution and the newly adopted brotherly agreement. So he copies portions of it into German and shares it with the people on his return to Herrnhut.

[00:16:08] That summer, the people had become a prayerful united community and then on Wednesday, August 13th at a communion service, they claimed that such a powerful manifestation of the spirit came upon the people that Zinzendorf afterward referred to that day as the Pentecost of the renewed Moravian

[00:16:25] Church. In this constitution that Zinzendorf finds and brings back, the author wrote that evangelization of the heathen is an imperative obligation for a living church. So because of this, the Moravians appoint 24 men and 24 women and they

[00:16:41] pledge these people to pray at certain times around the clock. And soon the number of people praying at certain times of the day has increased to 77. In 1728, groups of people start being together to pray and then

[00:16:54] even from the very first time that they meet, there was talk of being missionaries in different countries. And this movement of praying around the clock lasts for a hundred years, which is pretty impressive. And this seems to be also around the time that they divided the community

[00:17:09] into groups called choirs, which were based on their age, gender, and marital status. People no longer lived with their nuclear families, so you didn't have a husband and wife and kids living together. But also they weren't buried with their family.

[00:17:25] They were buried with their choir mates and then by their death date, so not their family name. And we'll talk about that a little bit more later. They were also kind of radical when it came to the roles of women.

[00:17:38] Women were allowed the role of elder or I guess eldress and were permitted to preach just the same as men and they were, they also had instances of women prophetesses, etc. And Anna Nietzsche, who was in

[00:17:51] her early teens at this time, was given the role of eldress and was commissioned as head over the single women's choir. Within a year or two, she is also invited to be the governess over Zinzendorf's children. A few years later, Zinzendorf is invited to the coronation of

[00:18:09] Christian VI in Copenhagen and he rarely participated in any of the duties of his office and he was determined to decline the invitation. But I think, and this is complete conjecture, but I'm curious if the reason that he decided to decline was a little bit more of

[00:18:26] wounded pride because a few years earlier, he had sent two of the Moravian brothers to see if Denmark would like their assistance to help with a struggling mission colony in Greenland and they were turned down. But he decided to lay the matter before the congregation

[00:18:41] to decide whether he should go and they drew lots on it and drawing lots among the Moravians was really common and they would actually continue doing this up until almost the 20th century. So both the congregation and the lots were in agreement that he should

[00:18:56] go and so he does. And while he's there, he meets Anthony Ulrich, who is a man from St. Thomas, which is an island in the Danish West Indies who had been brought to Europe and then he later becomes a Christian.

[00:19:09] And then with Zinzendorf and David Nietzschman, who had also come along, Anthony pleads for someone to go to St. Thomas with the gospel to share with the slaves among whom were his sister and brother. And it wasn't that the church didn't already exist there, but it only

[00:19:24] existed if you were a colonist. So Zinzendorf comes back and he tells the good news to the brethren and then two young men felt that they should go. So they write a letter to Zinzendorf and he tells them to wait for a year and pray.

[00:19:39] And then they present the matter before the brethren, but the brethren can't decide if they should stay or go. So they lead the matter up to the lots and only one man is chosen to go and his name is Leonard Dober and he's sent with David

[00:19:54] Nietzschman, who is a carpenter who will stay with him to help him find a place to live or to build him a cabin. And while they're preparing to leave from Copenhagen, they hear over and over again how they're going to fail and then they have

[00:20:06] to hear it all over again from the crew for the next 10 weeks as well, which would be demoralizing. But in April of 1733, Dober was left there all alone for 15 months. Once he almost starved to death, another time a fever rendered

[00:20:22] him helplessly dependent on others, but then he persisted in talking with the slaves and then one by one, he led a few to confess faith in Christ and one of these was Carmel Oli who then returns to

[00:20:34] Herenhut with him the following year as one of these first fruits of the gospel. And then in July of 1734, reinforcements arrive in the form of 17 volunteers, but when they arrived, they had already been at sea for seven months and so they were not healthy and demoralized

[00:20:52] and their first service on the neighboring island where they were going to go work was actually a funeral to bury one of their own and then within three months, nine of them had died. And then 11 more missionaries arrived in May the following year,

[00:21:07] but this great dying, it's called continued and so 22 of their first 29 missionaries die forcing a temporary retreat from this neighboring island. But yet the tide of missionaries continues to go out from Herenhut and in 1733, you have three brethren who go to Greenland

[00:21:28] to help out with the Danish mission there. They've been given permission. The following year, Moravians go to Finland and then Georgia in the New World in 1735. They go to Suriname in 1736. They go to the Guinea Coast in 1737, South Africa the next year

[00:21:46] and then to Amsterdam's Jewish Quarter in 1739. They go to Algeria in 1740. They go to the North American Indians, Romania, Constantinople. This time period for the Moravians was known as the Golden Decade from 1732 to 1742. So more than 70 Moravian missionaries from a community of only

[00:22:10] about 600 inhabitants had been sent out by 1742. And it's during this Golden Decade that in 1735, John Wesley, who is the founder of the Methodist movement, finds himself on the same ship as a group of Moravians headed to the little

[00:22:27] settlement of Savannah in the colony of Georgia, which had been founded only two years before. So while they're on their way, there's a terrible storm that comes up and a lot of their ship is damaged. They've got downed masts and all sorts of crazy terrifying things

[00:22:42] that you don't want to happen on a ship. And the Moravians were entirely calm. They prayed through the whole thing and Wesley admires their faith and he finds them very different from the English Christians that he's used to interacting with.

[00:22:57] Wesley was going to the New World in order to share the gospel among the Native American population, but because there was a lack of ordained clergy in Savannah at the time, that meant that he spent most of his time serving as the pastor among the Europeans.

[00:23:12] While he's there, he falls in love with a lady. He's 33, she's 18, it's perfect. But if you know anything about John Wesley, his love life is not enviable. And this woman that he really, really liked, really wanted to marry her. He then decides that he actually is maybe

[00:23:33] thinking of staying single for some unknown reason. It kind of reminds me of like Bible college where somebody's like, I'm going to date Jesus for a while. That seemed to be what he was going through and she seems to test

[00:23:44] him and says, well, hey, I'm thinking about marrying this other guy over here. What do you think about that? And he was like, yeah, I guess that's fine. You can do that. And so then she marries this guy and he's not happy about it.

[00:23:58] So later on during a church service, he denies her communion claiming some, there was a reason in his mind that he did, but it very clearly seemed to be for petty reasons. And she goes and complains to the elders and they kind of form

[00:24:18] a lawsuit against him so that he flees the colony right before Christmas in 1737 and he spends his time thinking on the way back to England, how we would like to have a faith like the Moravians not unsteady and disquieted like his own.

[00:24:33] And when he arrives back in England, he meets Peter Boller who's a Moravian who is in England waiting to be sent out to Georgia, but he keeps getting delayed. But while he's there in England, he's been actually commissioned

[00:24:45] by Zinzendorf to see if he can get something going among students at Oxford. So in this pursuit, he ends up discipling the Wesley brothers, Charles and John. He encourages John Wesley to preach faith until he has it and Boller's counsel on the nature of grace and heart

[00:25:03] religion was instrumental in the conversions of both John and Charles Wesley. But then later in his life, Boller becomes a universalist. He believes that all men will be reunited with God after death with the damned souls as he called them being

[00:25:17] literally plucked from hell. But it wasn't long after he was being mentored by Boller that he has his Aldersgate experience, which actually results in his actual conversion as he calls it his heartwarming experience where he actually receives

[00:25:34] Christ. At the time, Wesley writes in his journal, I who went to America to convert others was never myself converted to God. So after he has this Aldersgate experience where he becomes a Christian, he continues to work with the Moravians. He visits

[00:25:49] the group in Germany and then he more frequently visits the one in England who had at this point had formed a little society. They called the Fetter Lane Society. They were founded by Boller with the blessing of Zinzendorf.

[00:26:03] I've told you a few times about a great podcast called compelled. It uses gripping immersive storytelling to bring Christian testimonies to life. One story that's especially powerful is with Hannah Overton. Hannah was a mother of four with another

[00:26:26] baby on the way. Then one day out of the blue, Hannah was falsely accused of murder. Hannah was shocked by the accusation and as a firm believer, she knew that God would come to her rescue and would never let

[00:26:38] such baseless lies be spread. But the exact opposite happened. Hannah eventually stood before a jury of her peers and heard them sentence her to life in prison. But she was innocent. She'd done nothing wrong. This was a terrible mistake.

[00:26:52] How could God have let her down? But Hannah would soon discover that God had a plan all of his own. Listen to Hannah Overton share her incredible story on episode 16 of compelled titled falsely accused and sentenced to life in

[00:27:06] prison. Search for compelled on your favorite podcast app or visit compelledpodcast.com. Again, That's compelledpodcast.com. So under Boller's guidance, many in the group had adopted a Moravian understanding of salvation and then this was shaped under Zinzendorf's influence. Zinzendorf

[00:27:35] had actually broken with his Hall education over the idea that you needed to struggle with repentance is kind of a they called it Buschkampf which was this necessary prerequisite for conversion. So if you didn't feel guilty enough, I guess you weren't ready to become a Christian.

[00:27:52] So Zinzendorf stressed instead the simple acknowledgement of sinfulness and sincere reliance on the blood of Christ. So this theological understanding meant that rather than organizing around rules for pursuing holiness, the Federline Society focused on the sinner sincerely seeking faith.

[00:28:09] So while Wesley does wholeheartedly agree with this this belief on trusting Christ completely for salvation. He still thought that it was also important to pursue holiness and the implications for abandoning the pursuit of holiness became clear as the Anglican members of the Federline Society

[00:28:29] were influenced by this Moravian emphasis on stillness and receiving salvation. So Zinzendorf insisted that the only duty a Christian had was to believe Christ's word. And if they truly believed, Zinzendorf was convinced that their nature would evidence holiness.

[00:28:47] But then if they sought holiness itself as a duty, they would be defeated. So they had no duty for example to receive the Lord's salvation and should in fact be still waiting for God to act and bring them to faith.

[00:29:04] And although the Moravians had a dominant influence on the Federline Society, they were also impacted by the Methodist revival and the Moravians at Federline were seeking and expressing the presence of the Holy Spirit with these noisy responses and groaning and

[00:29:21] crying and it was getting kind of a lot. And as some of the Federline members abandoned practices like communion, the reading of scripture and even prayer out of fear that these would be considered works rather than faith. And after this John Wesley becomes really concerned because his own

[00:29:40] view on these practices were that these means of grace were ordained by God for our use. And so even if you had a weak faith, were you still having fear or doubt, you should participate in them so that God could use them to address this need.

[00:29:54] And so conflict over this continues to grow within Federline over several months which then culminates in Wesley's departure from the Society in July of 1740. And then several members leave with him. So this departure strengthens the Moravian identity at Federline

[00:30:12] and they are officially considered to be a Moravian congregation recognized by Zinzendorf. So for going through some of the problems here with the Moravian belief system, one of those is this emphasis on stillness. But according to Zinzendorf because salvation is God's gift not a human

[00:30:33] achievement, the believer needs to receive passively what God has offered. So this meant meditating on the wounds of Christ, especially the wound made in his side during the crucifixion that they called the side hole. So this would allow believers to be filled with Christ and so emptying

[00:30:51] oneself to be filled with Christ was this mortification of the flesh, a dying in Christ. We'll come back to the side hole later. But while Wesley was helped by the Moravians to recover the priority of God's gracious work in salvation, he was also really worried about

[00:31:09] these antinomian overtones in their teaching because he realized that English people who had adopted the Moravian views sometimes took them to the extreme. And so he takes this question up with Zinzendorf directly in an extended conversation, which is interesting because it was in Latin because

[00:31:30] neither one of them was fully comfortable in the other person's native tongue. And then Wesley actually published this conversation in his journal. So the point of this conversation was whether Christians have any inherent perfection or holiness in themselves. And Count Zinzendorf basically said that God gave believers

[00:31:49] justification and sanctification at the same time. And so in an instant, we received not only forgiveness but also holiness. And then in addition to that, both forgiveness and holiness were imputed. So there's no holiness inherent in the believer but only through Christ.

[00:32:05] And so our only duty is faith and faith is what makes us holy, holy, entirely holy. And so for Wesley, this narrow understanding of duty implied antinomianism. But I told you all this story about John Wesley not to bore you with the differences in theological minuteness because there

[00:32:27] are many other troubling things with the Moravians we'll discuss in a little while. But because when you look at the Moravians, one of the things that people will say is like, oh, John Wesley loved the Moravians. He was friendly with him for all of his days.

[00:32:42] And I came across that several times in otherwise well-researched articles, but they would kind of drop it off even though as I began to dig a little bit more, it actually was very, very easy to find that actually, no, he had this pretty public breaking with them.

[00:33:01] So I wanted to impress that in this episode because you will hear it and it is not the entirely true story. The other thing you will often hear is that quote by William Carey. So these are the first things that I saw as I was reading about them.

[00:33:18] So, as I said, I'm taking you through it as I went through it. But now I want to focus back on what's been going on with Zinzendorf personally. So in 1736, he is kicked out of Saxony because he was accused of trying to set up a new religion.

[00:33:35] But he and the other Moravians continued to insist that they only wanted to join in the work with other Christians in unity. But he and his family and a small group traveled west near Frankfurt and settled in a rundown castle, which they immediately began to

[00:33:50] renovate and expand and they called it Heronhag. And then in time it actually overtook their first settlement of Heronhut in size. But while they're in this rundown castle, Countess Dorothy and Zinzendorf's three-year-old son becomes sick and he dies while the

[00:34:08] count is away. And Dorothy feels very isolated. And even though she would actually have 12 children, only four of them would reach adulthood. So she spends time traveling between these two settlements because unlike the count, she is not banned from Saxony.

[00:34:25] But in 1737, the year after he's banished from Saxony, Zinzendorf is ordained as the bishop of the Moravian Church, which kind of flies in the face of his idea of not creating his own church. And three years before this, he had been ordained as a Lutheran

[00:34:42] minister. But then he creates a traveling team of executives he calls the Pilgrimage Congregation and they oversee the work of the Moravians overseas and in Europe. And one of these pilgrims is Anna Nieschmann, who's the head of the Single Sisters Choir,

[00:34:57] the eldress, former governess of his children, who is ever-present at his side. And then in 1738, he goes with some of these Pilgrimage Congregation members to pay a visit to the St. Thomas Mission and arrives just in time to rescue a group of Moravians from jail where

[00:35:15] they had been imprisoned for having invalid or I guess lack of ordination. Because, I forgot to mention this, but the Moravians did not send out ordained clergy. You'll see that when the London Missionary Society and the Church Mission Society get started a

[00:35:31] little bit later in the 1700s, they're very strict on having ordained clergy that be the ones to go out. So these guys do not. They're mostly laypeople without ordination. But a few years later, he spent 14 weeks in the New World in Pennsylvania where

[00:35:48] the Moravians had moved to after being kicked out of Georgia in 1740 because they were pacifists. So he names their new settlement in Pennsylvania Bethlehem and they're very proud of their Moravian and colonial heritage even today. And they actually surprisingly

[00:36:06] have one of the best Christmas markets in the world, which took me by surprise because it's not like Americans are not known for our Christmas markets. But if you visit Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, you would be wowed. But he makes several trips out to the Indian

[00:36:21] settlements nearby to try to establish missionary work among them. And he also tries to unite these various Protestant branches in America, arguing that the New World didn't have the same kind of division, this history of division that Europe had had so they

[00:36:35] could start fresh. But his efforts failed because there was a reason they branched off from each other and he returns back to England in 1743. And his band in Saxony had been lifted for a few years, but he actually preferred spending time in England where the political

[00:36:51] and religious climate towards the Moravians was becoming much more friendly. And then later on, he would actually make London his headquarters. By the year 1747, 200 missionaries have been sent out from Harenhag, which was this new settlement they built after Zinzendorf was kicked out of Saxony. Many of these missionaries

[00:37:12] were sent to the New World or to work among the Moravians who were living scattered across Europe. So now we have made it far enough into the story that you will see why I have put a sexual content

[00:37:23] warning in this episode. So this is your warning. I told you I would be gracious. I wouldn't throw it at you. So about Harenhag, it is designed to express the height of the Moravian ideal and it served a unique purpose. It was planned as the house of God.

[00:37:41] There were to be 12 gates following the description of the New Jerusalem in Revelation. In the center was the well of the water of life, which refers to Revelation. So according to Zinzendorf, the purpose of Harenhag would be that this would be where you

[00:38:00] would live in the end times. It was designed to be the residence of Christ. He said that we have the Holy Spirit's care to thank for the fact that we are brought here together, that we dwell in a mother city. Now, if you're confused by the term mother

[00:38:15] city, you should be and we will get to that in a little while. But this idea of creating a city of refuge for the end times reminds me of what happened with the Anabaptists in the city of Munster about 200 years before. And if you are not familiar

[00:38:32] with the Munster Rebellion, then you should definitely check out the episode Dan Carlin did on his podcast Hardcore History. But the oversight of Harenhag was given to Zinzendorf's son, Christian, who is also known as Christel. You'll see that in

[00:38:48] a lot of the records and it's not spelled like what we would consider Christel, like the girl's name. It's C-H-R-I-S-T-E-L. They were supposed to be under the direct rule of Christ with Christian as their representative. Christian would often say

[00:39:06] that he lives no more, that Christ lives in me. I speak no more. Christ speaks in me and when you speak with me, you speak with him. When you have love for me, so you too have love for

[00:39:20] him. And when you hate me, so too you hate him. And when you have a word from me, so too you have it from him. This idea of actually Christ living in another person was also a fundamental

[00:39:33] belief shared by both the Quakers and the Shakers who also had these roots in Pietism and the indwelling of Christ. Another really important movement that was happening among the Moravians at Harenhag was the wound litany or the five wounds of Christ.

[00:39:53] So they focused on his head, his hands, his feet, his circumcision and most importantly the spear wound in his side which they called the side hole. The side hole was considered to be the most important because it was his last wound and the one they

[00:40:10] claimed birthed forth salvation. So Christian actually has a marriage ceremony where he becomes married to the side hole, but we'll talk about that in a minute because first we had to talk about how marriage was viewed by the Moravians. So about

[00:40:27] physical marriage, these spouses were chosen by lot and then assuming that the two people involved agreed with this pairing, they were married. They didn't live together because they lived in their, everybody lived in their respective choirs. And so

[00:40:41] in this case, they would really just go from the single men and women's choir into the married men and women's choir. And Zinzendorf recommended that couples have sex once per week and your weekly schedule was pinned in by somebody called the bedmaster who

[00:40:58] would then let you into this little room or a cabinet which was called the cabinet. And then while in the cabinet, you were taught to focus on your union with Christ and this is because the Moravians believed in mystical marriage, which is the

[00:41:13] idea that we are literally the bride of Christ and so we should think about him as our literal husband. And this was obviously problematic if you were a guy. And this leads us back to Christian. So during the 1748 Single Brothers Festival at

[00:41:31] Harenhag, Christian and his assistants, they enter wearing white robes implying that it was Christ who was actually entering and then later that day, Christian and his 12 assistants led communion further representing Christ and the Apostles. And during the service, those in attendance believe that the side

[00:41:51] wound of Christ was literally standing before them in the bodily forms of Christian and Rehbush, his co-leader of the brothers. So they sing this welcoming hymn for Christ and then the single brothers all gather around and they hug and kiss

[00:42:08] Christian. The implication being that they were actually hugging and kissing Christ. There was also a pictorial representation of the side hole that was large enough that each man could pass through it. And in this way, the men felt that they were becoming

[00:42:24] one with Christ. And then Christian also declared that all of the single brothers were now female. And so one of these boys in this single brothers choir writes about the experience. He says, A few days earlier, the brothers in Harenhag with astonishing

[00:42:43] feeling were all accepted and declared as single sisters and we experienced this astonishing thing ourselves this evening and were blessed by dear Herzl with Christian, Rehbush, and Kallie singing and laying on hands. There was also communion and foot washing. And it seems that in addition to this, there

[00:43:03] were also many instances of homosexual experimentation as well as extramarital relations that were running rampant at Harenhag. And the wound litany was also getting out of control, but it wasn't just limited to Harenhag. A vast majority of poetry and hymns were composed detailing this side hole. Pictures were

[00:43:27] drawn and given out as graphic devotional cards, and I'm going to give you a few examples. I obviously cannot share the picture with you of these devotionals and you probably should be thanking me for that. But here's a

[00:43:39] few examples. In the little side hole, I lie just right and sleep a couple of million fathoms deep. The moment the stab occurred, I leapt out, hallelujah, deep inside, deep inside, deep inside the little side, trembling in the side wound. Those are the inscriptions

[00:43:59] beneath these pictures, whatever they had. They would actually draw the side hole and then they would have like little pictures going on inside of the side hole. So that would be then the inscription underneath whatever the picture was. But here are

[00:44:16] some of the hymnal lyrics. They have little side hole, little side hole, little side hole, thou art mine, most dear little side hole. I wish myself entirely inside. Ah, my little side hole, thou art my little soul. Yes, the dearest little place, side shrine, body

[00:44:35] and soul passes into thee. There are many, many more of these examples, but I will spare you all. Zinzendorf wrote many hymns that emphasize the wounds of Christ and told the faithful they were taught to picture themselves as bees and birds resting in

[00:44:52] the wounds of Christ, especially the side hole. Moravians were told that when they were sleeping, they should think of themselves as resting in the side hole. In 1749, John Wesley publishes a satirical pamphlet entitled, Hymns composed for the use of the brethren

[00:45:11] by the right reverend and most illustrious CZ. The pamphlet compiled excerpts of hymns that Wesley considered to be the most ridiculous in a recent collection he had published called, The Collection of Hymns Published for Use by the Moravians. Wesley

[00:45:27] didn't officially attach his name to this, but it was widely known that it was him. And I won't share any of these other like hymns or anything like that, but there was also kind of a fixation on the death of Christ, like what Christ looked like after death.

[00:45:44] So they had different hymns and poems written about his pale face, his cold lips, and like being kissed by these things and it gets really weird. But all of these crazy things that are going on at Harenhag are getting a lot of negative attention. And there are

[00:46:00] several people who have already left Harenhag because of these weird things that are only too ready to spread the details of what happening. And these reports are mingled with salacious rumors, including one that Zinzendorf traveled with his mistress, Anna

[00:46:15] Nietzschmann. And so when word gets out to Zinzendorf about what is happening at Harenhag, he is horrified and recalls Christian to London. There's actually a letter that Zinzendorf sends to the people at Harenhag and he tells them, there's some problems you

[00:46:34] guys have going on, one of which you need to stop the holy kissing it's going too far, stop the foot washing, stop the communion. And then also his biggest beef actually was referring to the side hole as being little. He said stop saying it's little because

[00:46:51] that like demeans the sacrifice of Christ so you can refer to it as the side hole. There's no problem with that. No problem with any of that kind of stuff, but just don't call it little. So there weren't the things we would have problems with.

[00:47:06] He didn't seem to have a problem with those. But when Christian arrives in London, he's only 22 years old, but he arrives mentally and physically broken. He would die two years later from tuberculosis while his mother was en route to see him. Zinzendorf and his wife,

[00:47:23] it seems like at this point they were officially estranged. That was something that was happening to them slowly over the course of their marriage, but by Christian's death, they were officially estranged. But after Christian's death, Countess Dorothy only lives

[00:47:37] for another two weeks before she then dies as well. And in the year after his wife dies, Zinzendorf marries Anna Nietzschmann. Later in his life, Zinzendorf embraced a theology about the Trinity that I think many of us would find troubling. He considered

[00:47:56] the Holy Spirit to be a mother and here are some of his thoughts on how he came to this conclusion. He says, God, Christ, is even our dear husband. His Father is our dear father and the Holy Spirit is our dear mother. With that we are

[00:48:40] finished with the family idea, the oldest, the simplest, the most respectable, the most endearing idea among all human ideas. The true biblical idea is established with us in the application of the Holy Trinity. No one is nearer to one than father, mother, and

[00:48:56] husband. So that's not great. Zinzendorf dies May 8th, 1760 and Anna Nietzschmann dies shortly thereafter. And after they die, the Moravian Council of Elders gathers up everything they could find from this time period they call the Sifting Time, which is referencing

[00:49:17] Harenhog and these other controversies and they burn them all. And this includes, interestingly in my opinion, the diary of Anna Nietzschmann. And after this period of cleansing, the Moravians actually become far more conservative and Orthodox even to the

[00:49:34] extent that they dismiss female elders and they adopt a more traditional approach to church leadership. Today, there are more than 1 million members of the Moravian Church in the world. Most of them are in Eastern Africa. Other major Moravian centers

[00:49:48] are in the Caribbean and then in Honduras and Nicaragua, in South Africa, in Winston-Salem in the US and then also in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But there is a Moravian University in Bethlehem that I got a lot of information on this Sifting Time from essays

[00:50:06] that were written by some of their professors. So hopefully by this point it is obvious why I did not do an episode on the history of Moravian missions in a more traditional martyrs and missionaries sense. But it just, the more I got into it, the

[00:50:24] more it just, the scandals abounded. There is a lot more that could be said about this Sifting Time period. There are several books that have been written on it. Some I could recommend with a bit more knowledge. Some of them I definitely

[00:50:38] would not. But it's out there if you want to learn more about it. So now you have these fun nuggets bouncing around in your head that you can take with you to all the Christmas parties you'll go to this year and you can share this information.

[00:50:52] Although I would refrain from using the term side hole too much. People get a little weird about that. You don't need to ask me how I know that. I just do. But hopefully you enjoyed this episode and you learned as much from it as I did. And

[00:51:07] that on some level, maybe you enjoy weird history. This is kind of what this is. This is weird history. But also pointing out some serious fallacies and why maybe we don't see the Moravians mentioned more in missions work. So as always,

[00:51:25] thank you for listening to Mars and Missionaries. I'm Elyse.