Herrnhut, 1727 · Story · Unity and Fellowship
Herrnhut, 1727
In 1727 a quarrelling settlement of refugees at Herrnhut in Saxony agreed to live together as one congregation.
The carpenter who founded Herrnhut once dug his own well and built his own house a few yards outside it, to keep clear of the parish church.
and with diligence to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
- When
- 13 August 1727
Summary
Protestants fleeing persecution in Moravia began settling on Count Zinzendorf's estate in Saxony in 1722 and built the village of Herrnhut. Settlers of many kinds followed, and within a few years they had divided over doctrine and over the parish church. Zinzendorf took the settlement in hand, and on 13 August 1727 the settlers took communion together. The Brethren kept that day as the spiritual birthday of their renewed church.
- The communion was held in the parish church at Berthelsdorf, about a mile from Herrnhut, at the invitation of its pastor, Rothe.
- The settlers bound themselves by written agreements in May and July 1727, before the communion of August.
- The accounts of that morning come from the Brethren themselves and from historians of their own church.
The Refugees Come to Herrnhut
Two years after it began, Herrnhut had only three small houses.
Herrnhut, 1727 is the story of a village whose people came to it for freedom of faith and then fell out over that faith. It belongs to the value of unity, because it shows how a divided settlement was made one congregation.
The question the story answers is how the settlers of Herrnhut were brought from quarrels to fellowship, as told by Spangenberg's life of Zinzendorf and Hutton's history of the Moravian Church. It follows the dated events and sets out the quarrels and the agreements. It gives the Brethren's own words on the communion and sets Spangenberg's judgment of the Count's later years beside Hutton's.
J. E. Hutton, in A History of the Moravian Church (1909), tells how the carpenter Christian David asked Count Zinzendorf for leave to bring persecuted Protestants from Moravia to his estate at Berthelsdorf. The Count promised that if they came he would find them a place to live.
Zinzendorf's steward, Heitz, settled the first band on a bare hillside about a mile from the village, the Hutberg. He wrote to the Count that he hoped the town built there would “abide under the Lord's Watch (Herrnhut)”, and the name stayed.
From Sehlen to St. Thomas
Every date in the record comes from Hutton, with Spangenberg beside two of them.
Five years passed between the first tree felled on the Hutberg and the communion at Berthelsdorf, and five more before the first missionaries left.
- 27 May 1722Christian David leads a small band out of Sehlen in MoraviaHutton, chapter 2
- 8 June 1722The band reaches Zinzendorf's estate at BerthelsdorfHutton, chapter 2
- 17 June 1722Christian David fells the first tree on the HutbergHutton, chapter 3
- 12 May 1724Five young men of Zauchtenthal arrive, sons of the old Brethren's ChurchHutton, chapter 3
- 12 May 1727Zinzendorf lectures the settlers on schism, and they agree to the statutesHutton, chapter 3; Spangenberg, page 83
- 4 July 1727The Brotherly Union and Compact is signedHutton, chapter 3
- 4 August 1727Zinzendorf reads the settlers the old Brethren's rules of disciplineHutton, chapter 3
- 13 August 1727The settlers take communion together at BerthelsdorfHutton, chapter 3; Spangenberg, page 88
- 27 August 1727The hourly intercession is arrangedHutton, chapter 3
- 21 August 1732Leonard Dober and David Nitschmann set out for St. ThomasHutton, chapter 6
A timeline of ten dated steps from the departure from Sehlen to the first mission, each with its date and the account it comes from (the chapters are those of Hutton's Book Two).
4 August 1727, 13 August 1727, 27 August 1727, 21 August 1732
From Quarrels to Agreement
The settlers split into parties before Zinzendorf bound them by a written agreement.
Word spread that the Count had opened his estate to persecuted Protestants, and Hutton writes that “all sorts of religious malcontents” came. Some leaned to Calvinism, some followed the mystic Schwenkfeld, some were Lutheran Pietists, and some were descendants of the old Church of the Brethren. Hutton's verdict on the years that followed is that “As the settlers learned to know each other better they learned to love each other less.”
A preacher named Krüger called the Berthelsdorf pastor, Rothe, the “False Prophet” and Zinzendorf “The Beast”, and most of the settlers stopped attending the parish church. Rothe, for his part, “thundered from his pulpit against the ‘mad fanatics’ on the hill.”
Zinzendorf took leave from his post at Dresden and came to live at Herrnhut. Of Christian David, who had turned against him, Zinzendorf said that it was “not a bad maxim,” and went on, “when honest men are going wrong to put them into office”.
In May he gathered the settlers in the Great House on the Hutberg and, Hutton writes, “lectured them for over three hours on the sin of schism”. Spangenberg says that the statutes agreed that day “obtained their validity, not by the orders of the civil powers, but by fraternal agreement and voluntary approval”. The settlers, he writes, “were ashamed of their religious quarrels, and were unanimously disposed to bury them in oblivion.”
In July the settlers signed the Brotherly Union and Compact. Hutton says that “of their own free will, they signed a promise to end their sectarian quarrels, to obey the ‘Statutes,’ and to live in fellowship with Christians of all beliefs and denominations.”
Christian David, now chief elder, led them through the First Epistle of John that summer, which Hutton calls the study of “the art of love Divine”.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.The verse stands here as the charge of the letter the settlers studied together in the summer of 1727.
The Communion at Berthelsdorf
Hutton and Spangenberg give the morning and the meal that followed it.
Hutton writes that “As the Brethren walked down the slope to the church all felt that the supreme occasion had arrived”. On the way, he says, “all who had quarrelled in the days gone by made a covenant of loyalty and love.”
In the church, he writes, “they attained at last the firm conviction that they were one in Christ”. They believed that the fire of the Holy Spirit had rested on them as on the disciples at Pentecost.
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.The Brethren measured their communion against this day, as Hutton reports their belief.
“We learned,” said the Brethren, “to love.” David Nitschmann said, “From that time onward Herrnhut was a living Church of Jesus Christ.”
Spangenberg adds that when the congregation came back from the sacrament, seven small companies formed without planning it, and the Count sent each of them food from his kitchen. In this way, he writes, “the Agapes or love-feasts customary in the primitive church, were revived in Herrnhut.”
Hutton closes his account with the Moravian poet James Montgomery, who wrote of the Brethren, “One cup they drank, one bread they brake, One baptism shared”.
The Prayer Watch and the First Missions
Prayer by turns and missions abroad followed within five years.
After the communion the Brethren kept watch in prayer by turns, so that their prayer, in Hutton's words, “should rise continually day and night”. Spangenberg counts twenty-four brethren and sisters at the start and seventy-seven soon after. Each of them took one hour of the day or night. Hutton says only that the watch “is said to have lasted without interruption for over a hundred years”. From that praying village the first two missionaries went out to the island of St. Thomas.
The fire shall be kept burning on the altar continually; it must not be extinguished.Hutton compares the watch of prayer to the fire on the altar that was never allowed to go out.
Zinzendorf and the Sifting Time
Two Moravian historians weigh the Count's share in the troubles of the 1740s.
In the 1740s the Brethren passed through what their histories call the Sifting Time, which Hutton dates from 1743 to 1750 and calls “the saddest period in the history of the Brethren's Church”. How much of it was Zinzendorf's own doing is where the two accounts part.
The Count saw traces of it and tried to stop itAugust Gottlieb Spangenberg
Spangenberg's life of Zinzendorf, in Samuel Jackson's translation (1838), says that the Count “had no clear perception of the sifting which subsequently took place”. Yet, Spangenberg writes, “he observed traces of it, and sought either to remove the evil, or at least stop its further progress”. Once it had passed, the Count “continued to bring it to their remembrance”, and he held that the churches should stay on guard against “the extravagances which had occasioned it.”
The objection: Hutton cites the Count's own Litany of the Wounds of 1743 and his likening of the Trinity to a family.
The Count was its chief causeJ. E. Hutton
Hutton wrote, “The chief sinner was the Count himself”. He allowed that “As long as Zinzendorf used his own mental powers, he was able to make his ‘Blood and Wounds Theology’ a power for good”. In Hutton's account the Count then carried the doctrine to excess.
The objection: Spangenberg's record shows the Count himself keeping the churches on guard against those extravagances.
One in Christ
The settlers came to their unity by an agreement freely kept and by a shared table.
Zinzendorf later said, in Spangenberg's account, that Herrnhut on 12 May 1727 “was balancing between the formation of a new sect, and the intentions of the Saviour respecting his church in those days.”
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- J. E. Hutton, A History of the Moravian Church, second edition, revised and enlarged (London: Moravian Publication Office, 1909)
- August Gottlieb Spangenberg, The Life of Nicholas Lewis Count Zinzendorf, translated from the German by Samuel Jackson, with a preface by P. La Trobe (London: Samuel Holdsworth, 1838)
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