The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf
1700–1760German (Saxon)Moravian
The count who gave refugees his estate and got a hundred-year prayer meeting and the modern missions movement back.
Summary
- Lived 1700–1760, German (Saxon).
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists and The Missionaries.
- Tradition: Moravian / Pietist.
The life
Count Zinzendorf was a Saxon nobleman raised in Pietism who let a band of persecuted Moravian refugees settle on his estate in 1722. The village they built, Herrnhut, 'the Lord's watch', was quarrelsome until a communion service in August 1727 that the community ever after described as its Pentecost. Out of it came a prayer watch, men and women covering every hour, that by the Moravians' own records continued for around a hundred years.
Out of the praying came the sending: within five years Herrnhut was dispatching missionaries to enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and to Greenland, decades before Carey. A Moravian meeting in London is where John Wesley's heart was 'strangely warmed.' Zinzendorf's motto held it all together: 'I have one passion, it is He, it is He alone.'
What was happening while he lived2 moments · 1600–1730
- 1698Francke's orphanage opens at HalleAugust Hermann Francke had started a school for poor children in 1695 with a few coins left in a parish box. Halle grows into orphanage, schools, hospital, and a Bible press.
- 1707Watts publishes *Hymns and Spiritual Songs*Isaac Watts, a dissenting pastor with a weak body and an enormous ear, argues that Christians may sing new words and not only metrical Psalms. The book carries "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and effectively begins English hymn-singing.
In their own words
“I have … but one passion—’tis He, ’tis only He.”
Spangenberg (1775), page 2164; Hutton (1909), page 180 · on Philippians 1:21
“For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”
“If it were possible … that there should be another God than Christ I would rather be damned with Christ than happy with another.”
Hutton (1909), pages 179 to 180 · on Psalms 73:25
“Whom have I in heaven but You? And on earth I desire no one besides You.”
“Jesus, still lead on, Till our rest be won! And although the way be cheerless, We will follow, calm and fearless; Guide us by Thy hand To our Fatherland.”
Borthwick, Hymns from the Land of Luther (1854), page 24 · on Luke 5:11
“And when they had brought their boats ashore, they left everything and followed Him.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you. Hangs on The Missionaries: The ones who looked at a map and could not stay home.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.
Listed the exact lies that talk a believer into sin, and gave the exact answer to each one.