8. The Moravian Church

Fetter Lane

After Johannes Kelpius died, the brotherhood greatly diminished, and the few remaining members lived out their days as solitary holy men who were associated with the Ephrata Cloister and the Moravian Church.[1] The origins of Evangelical Christians are usually traced to 1738, with various theological streams contributing to its foundation, including English Methodism, German Lutheran Pietism and the crypto-Sabbatean Moravian Church of Count Nicolaus Zinzendorf (1700 – 1760).[2] Formally named the Unitas Fratrum (Latin for “Unity of the Brethren”), was derived from the Hussite heretical movement started by Jan Hus, and to which had belonged Comenius, a core member of the Hartlib Circle. Zinzendorf was raised by a grandmother who corresponded with Leibniz in Latin, read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, and studied Syrian and Chaldean, and exposed him to themes of Jacob Boehme and Christian Kabbalism.[3] This would bring Zinzendorf into contact with heterodox Jews, whose sympathies for the teachings of Sabbatai Zevi led them to positions close to Christian students of Kabbalah, seen by many Pietists as a medium between the two religions.[4]

Zinzendorf was the pupil and godson of the direct originator of Pietism, Philipp Jakob Spener (1635 – 1705). Pietism was a movement within Lutheranism that began in the late seventeenth century, whose forerunners were Jakob Boehme and Johann Valentin Andreae, the author of the Rosicrucian manifestos.[5] Spener was an intimate friend of Johann Jakob Schütz (1640 – 1690), a cousin of Andreae. Schütz was also a friend of Johannes Kelpius’s teacher, Johann Jacob Zimmermann.[6] Both Spener and Schütz very much admired the Kabbala Denudata of Knorr von Rosenroth.[7] Spener was powerfully influenced by the preaching of the converted Jesuit preacher Jean de Labadie (1610 – 1674). Originally a Jesuit priest, Labadie became a member of the Reformed Church in 1650, before founding the community which became known as the in 1669. Labadie was among those who had been kept informed on the progress of Zevi’s mission by Peter Serrarius, and spoke about the Sabbateans in his sermons.[8]

According to Masonic historian Arthur E. Waite, Zinzendorf organized his followers into a hierarchical secret society that functioned as an offshoot of “irregular” or “illuminist” Freemasonry.[9] In 1722, Zinzendorf created a secret society called the Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed, connected to Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism. The order was revived in 1739, when Zinzendorf managed to recruit to it the archbishops of Canterbury and Paris, as well as Christian VI (1699 – 1746), King of Denmark. It was also one of the first innovatory orders introduced into early German Freemasonry, meaning orders which added new material, often Christian or Templar, to the traditional three-degree system. In 1803, C.G. von Murr wrote that the Order of the Mustard Seed was a “pale imitation of the Society of the Rosicrucians” and a form of “spiritual Freemasonry.”[10] Critics charged that Zinzendorf “bestows orders of knighthood,” while his initiates wore a “Templar style cross.”[11] The first article of the Order affirmed that “the members of our society will love the whole human family,” and as crusaders for Christ seek conciliation with the Jews.[12]

In 1738, Peter Boehler, the London Moravian leader, and his followers, established the Fetter Lane Society in London, the first flowering of the Moravian Church in England. Following their practice in Germany, they had a custom of fellowshipping at a common meal, or a “love feast,” prior to taking communion. According to James Hutton, an English Moravian who became a lifelong friend of Richard Cosway, the public society held open meetings in the Fetter Lane Chapel, while the elite interior order met secretly, lived communally, and practiced Kabbalistic rituals.[13] According to the Kabbalistic theories of Zinzendorf, God and the universe are comprised sexual potencies, the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah, which interact with each other and produce orgasmic joy when in perfect equilibrium, recalling the union of the cherubim in the Holy of Holies.[14] Kabbalists claimed that the cherubim were embraced in the act of intercourse, symbolizing God’s union with the Shekhinah. After the destruction of the Temple, the reunion of the cherubim depends on ritual intercourse between Kabbalist and his wife.[15] Zinzendorf began the practice of “adjusting” marriages by switching partners, and often held “mass adjustments” during which a large number of young boys and girls were brought together in sexual unions within the meeting house.[16] In public sermons, the Count claimed that “a person regenerated enjoys a great Liberty,” because “Christ can make the most villainous act to be a virtue and the most exalted moral virtue to be vice.”[17] Because the genital organs of either sex are “the most honorable of the whole body,” he commanded the wives, when they see the male member to honor that “precious sign by which they resemble Christ.” The female vulva is “that little Model of a Chapel of God,” to which husbands are to offer worship.[18]

 

Great Awakening

Zinzendorf was a major influence on the leaders and major figures of the Evangelical Protestant movement, such as English Puritans John Wesley (1703 – 1791), George Whitefield (1714 – 1770), and Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758).[19] By 1737, Whitefield had become a national celebrity in England where his preaching drew large crowds, especially in London where the Fetter Lane Society had become a center of evangelical activity.[20] Whitefield, John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley (1707 – 1788) are credited with the foundation of the evangelical movement known as Methodism, which was heavily influenced by Moravian pietism. In 1735, John and Charles sailed for Savannah, when he met with a group of Moravian Brethren led by August Gottlieb Spangenberg. After an unsuccessful ministry of two years at Savannah, Wesley returned to England and aligned himself with Fetter Lane.[21] Wesley was initiated at a Masonic lodge at Downpatrick in Ireland in 1788.[22] Wesley later read and commented extensively on Swedenborg’s work.[23]

Zinzendorf’s Moravian Church was a major influence in the Great Awakening, which refers to the first of a number of periods of religious revival in American Christian history. The First Great Awakening, which began in the 1730s and lasted to about 1740, was a rebellion against authoritarian religious rule which spilled over into other areas of colonial life.[24] The First Great Awakening began in 1740, when Whitefield traveled to North America. Whitfield joined forces with Jonathan Edwards to “fan the flame of revival” in the Thirteen Colonies in 1739–40.[25] Edwards married Sarah Pierpont, the daughter of James Pierpont (1659 – 1714), the head founder of Yale College, and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Thomas Hooker (1586 – 1647), a prominent Puritan colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts. Jonathan Edwards’ son, Piermont Edwards (1750 – 1826), served as the first Grand Master of a Masonic lodge in New Haven, Connecticut.[26] His son, Henry W. Edwards, was Governor of Connecticut and his daughter, Harriett Pierpont Edwards, was married to inventor Eli Whitney. His nephew, who was only five years younger than himself, was Vice President Aaron Burr.

Zinzendorf’s visit to Pennsylvania was partly in response to letters sent to him by Whitefield.[27] Benjamin Franklin, who played an important role in the First Great Awakening, met Zinzendorf after he and David Nitschmann (1696 – 1772), the first Bishop of the Moravian Church, led a small community to found a mission in the colony of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on Christmas Eve 1741. In 1735 in Berlin, Nitschmann had been consecrated the first Bishop of the Moravians by Daniel Ernst Jablonski, grandson of the Rosicrucian John Amos Comenius. Local settlers in Pennsylvania became alarmed at the presence of the Moravians. Zinzendorf was denounced in Pennsylvania as “the best of Revelation,” a “false prophet,” the leader of a ban of “devils” and “locusts” from “the bottomless pit.”[28]

 

Clapham Sect

The Evangelical Christians were chiefly responsible for advancing the cause for the abolition of slavery. It was only when John Wesley became actively opposed to slavery that the small protest became a mass movement resulting in the abolition of slavery. In 1791, Wesley wrote to his friend, the English politician William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833), to encourage him in his efforts to end the slave trade. Wilberforce had become an evangelical Christian in 1785, and became a leader of the Clapham Sect, a group of influential Christian like-minded Church of England social reformers based in Clapham, London, at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Members of the Clapham sect were chiefly prominent and wealthy evangelical Anglicans. They shared in common political views concerning the liberation of slaves, the abolition of the slave trade and the reform of the penal system. The Clapham sect have been credited with playing a significant part in the development of Victorian morality. In the words of historian Stephen Tomkins, “The ethos of Clapham became the spirit of the age.”[29] The sect is described by Tomkins as:

 

A network of friends and families in England, with William Wilberforce as its center of gravity, who were powerfully bound together by their shared moral and spiritual values, by their religious mission and social activism, by their love for each other, and by marriage.[30]

 

In 1783, when Wilberforce and his companions travelled to France and visited Paris, they met prominent Freemasons like Benjamin Franklin, General Lafayette as well as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI.[31] Wilberforce headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade for twenty years until the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. In 1787, Wilberforce had come into contact with Thomas Clarkson, who called upon him to champion the cause to parliament. As the British abolitionists had been somewhat disappointed with their own campaign in Britain, Wilberforce, hoping that the ideals of the French Revolution would support the cause, entrusted Clarkson with the mission to France to gain the collaboration of the French abolitionists. Upon his arrival in Paris, in August 1789, Clarkson thus immediately contacted the French opponents to the slave trade, Condorcet, Brissot, Clavière, La Fayette and Illuminatus Comte de Mirabeau, with whom he was particularly impressed. Wilberforce made his last public appearance when he was named by Clarkson to serve as the chairman of the Anti-Slavery Society convention of 1830, at Freemasons’ Hall in London, the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England and the Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons of England, as well as being a meeting place for many Masonic Lodges in the London area.[32] In 1833, the British government passed the Slavery Abolition Act, advocated by Wilberforce, which abolished slavery in the British Empire the following year.

 


[1] Fisher. “Prophesies and Revelations,” p. 300.

[2] Donald M. Lewis & Richard V. Pierard. Global Evangelicalism: Theology, History & Culture in Regional Perspective (InterVarsity Press, 2014); Evan Burns. “Moravian Missionary Piety and the Influence of Count Zinzendorf.” Journal of Global Christianity (1.2 / 2015); Jonathan M. Yeager. Early Evangelicalism: A Reader (Oxford University Press, 2013); Mark A. Noll. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (InterVarsity Press, 2004).

[3] Marsha Keith Schuchard. Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (Vintage, 2013).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Dickson. The Tessera of Antilia, p. 19; Popkin, Laursen & Force. Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, Volume IV, p. 108.

[6] Elizabeth W. Fisher. “‘Prophesies and Revelations’: German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania.” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 109:3 (1985), pp. 299-333.

[7] Ibid., p. 311.

[8] Matt Goldish. The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), p. 17.

[9] Arthur E. Waite. A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (London: William Ryder, l921), 194.

[10] Christoph Gottlieb von Murr. Uber den wahren Rosenkreutzer und des Freymaurerordens (Sulzbach: J. E. Semler, 1803), p. 81.

[11] Rimius, Supplement, p. xlix; Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 465.

[12] Schuchard. “Why Mrs Blake Cried.”

[13] Daniel Benham. Memoirs of James Hutton (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., l856), p. 118. On Zinzendorf's “règle du secret, disciplini arcani,” see Pierre Deghaye. La Doctrine Esotérique de Zinzendorf (1700-1760) (Paris: Klincksieck, l969); cited in Keith-Schuchard. “Why Ms. Blake Cried.”

[14] Raphael Patai. The Hebrew Goddess (New York: Ktav, l967), pp. 101-03, 120-22.

[15] “Sexuality and Spirituality in the Kabbalah,” in David Biale. Eros and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, l992), pp. 101-20.

[16] Jim Keith. Secret and Suppressed, p. 105.

[17] Rimius. A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhutters, pp. 3, 60, 64.

[18] Keith-Schuchard. “Why Ms. Blake Cried.”

[19] Tim O’Neill. “The Erotic Freemasonry of Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf,” in Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, ed. Jim Keith (Feral House, l993), pp. 103-08.

[20] Mark A. Noll. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield, and the Wesleys (InterVarsity Press, 2004), pp. 87, 95.

[21] Kai Dose. “A Note on John Wesley’s Visit to Herrnhut in 1738.” Wesley and Methodist Studies. 7 (1) 2015: 117–120.

[22] Bro. W.J. Chetwode Crawley, LL.D. Senior Grand Deacon, Ireland. “The Wesleys and Irish Freemasonry.” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (Volume XV, 1902).

[23] E. Swedenborg. True Christianity, Containing a Comprehensive Theology of the New Church That Was Predicted by the Lord in Daniel 7:13–14 and Revelation 21:1, 2 (Swedenborg Foundation, 2006, Translator’s Preface, Vol. 2, p. 36 ff.)

[24] “Great Awakening.” Encyclopedia Britannica.

[25] David W. Bebbington. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 20.

[26] The Freemason’s Repository, Volume 18 (E. L. Freeman & Son, 1889), p. 557; The Freemason’s Chronicle, Volume 30, (W.W. Morgan., 1889) p. 90.

[27] John Joseph Stoudt. “Count Zinzendorf and the Pennsylvania Congregation of God in the Spirit: The First American Oecumenical Movement.” Church History Vol. 9, No. 4 (Dec., 1940), p. 370.

[28] Alan Sica. The Anthem Companion to Max Weber (Anthem Press, 2016), p. 77.

[29] Stephen Tomkins. The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s circle changed Britain (Oxford: Lion, 2010), p. 248.

[30] Ibid., p. 1.

[31] William Hague. William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: HarperPress, 2007), pp. 53–55.

[32] Zachary Macaulay. Anti-slavery Monthly Reporter, Volume 3 (London Society for the Mitigation and Abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions, 1831), p. 229.

Divide & Conquer