Read Online Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Diarmaid MacCulloch
Tags: Religión, General, History, Christianity, Church History, Christianity - History - General, Religion - Church History
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quarrels in which he had become involved at St Thomas's. His monumental late work, the Latin Mass in B minor, escapes beyond the requirements of Lutheran liturgy, for which its first components, written in 1733 for the Elector of Saxony, had still been appropriate. Taking its cue from the Elector's own conversion to Catholicism in defiance of his affronted subjects in the heartland of the Reformation, the Mass transcends the battles of the previous two centuries, to reunite the divided Western Latin Church in music. No Protestant had previously written anything like it. 48
While Lutheranism was largely able to contain the Pietist movement, the Pietists engendered one distinctive offshoot which, although never very large-scale, had a rapid and significant effect on Protestantism worldwide. This was the Moravian Church, a radical restructuring of some of the last remnants from the pre-Reformation movement of dissent in the kingdom of Bohemia, the Unitas Fratrum (see p. 573). From 1722, a handful of these refugees from Moravia in Bohemia, victims of the inexorable Habsburg recatholicization of central Europe, were given shelter to the north of the Habsburg frontiers by a Lutheran nobleman, a Pietist with the strongest credentials as a former student of Francke at Halle and a godson of Spener. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf used his estate in the hills of southernmost Saxony to build a showcase village for a growing collection of proteges. He named it Herrnhut, a place for craftwork and farming, the first of a network of communities which eventually spread as far as Russia, Great Britain and across the Atlantic.
Zinzendorf was a charismatic and passionate man. Proudly conscious of his family's Lutheran heritage stretching back to the Reformation, he found that the only way he could remould the Lutheran Church was by leaving it; he arranged for bishops of the Unitas Fratrum to consecrate him as bishop for his Herrnhut community. There was a certain convenience for Zinzendorf in the fact that very few of the people who gathered at Herrnhut were genuinely from Moravia. That meant that he could forge a unifying myth out of the Moravian past, to create an identity for a new community which was in reality a very disparate group, drawn from radically different and contending Churches - Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists. Most were Pietists who had found their own religious environments increasingly difficult and had now made the momentous choice to start a new life, uprooting themselves from a familiar homeland. It was not surprising that their emotions ran high in those pioneering decades.
Zinzendorf never lost his commitment to an ecumenical benevolence towards all Churches, symbolized by his inheritance of the Moravians' continuing government by bishops in succession from the united Western Church - an episcopal succession which was recognized by the British Parliament in 1749, in an ecumenical gesture without parallel at the time. The Count's authoritarian temperament and Pietist compulsion to organize demanded a new congregation as highly structured and centred round worship as the most rigorous monastic order, while it also moulded the whole family lives of men, women and children. Zinzendorf's communities worshipped as frequently as monks - seven times a day on weekdays, longer on Sundays - and their worship was full of song: sermons might be sung, they wrote a whole new crop of hymns, enjoyed a daily hour of singing with the congregation as full choir, and moreover had no Puritan fear of musical instruments. The Count had a special liking for trombones and recommended them as a way of cheering up funerals. 49 The Moravians much valued cheerfulness. It was Zinzendorf's chief quarrel with Francke that he had seemed to make the Christian life too much of a grim struggle. 50
Stressing emotion against reason as the best means of reaching out to Christ, Zinzendorf set aside all previous Christian doctrinal requirements, with
While Lutheranism was largely able to contain the Pietist movement, the Pietists engendered one distinctive offshoot which, although never very large-scale, had a rapid and significant effect on Protestantism worldwide. This was the Moravian Church, a radical restructuring of some of the last remnants from the pre-Reformation movement of dissent in the kingdom of Bohemia, the Unitas Fratrum (see p. 573). From 1722, a handful of these refugees from Moravia in Bohemia, victims of the inexorable Habsburg recatholicization of central Europe, were given shelter to the north of the Habsburg frontiers by a Lutheran nobleman, a Pietist with the strongest credentials as a former student of Francke at Halle and a godson of Spener. Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf used his estate in the hills of southernmost Saxony to build a showcase village for a growing collection of proteges. He named it Herrnhut, a place for craftwork and farming, the first of a network of communities which eventually spread as far as Russia, Great Britain and across the Atlantic.
Zinzendorf was a charismatic and passionate man. Proudly conscious of his family's Lutheran heritage stretching back to the Reformation, he found that the only way he could remould the Lutheran Church was by leaving it; he arranged for bishops of the Unitas Fratrum to consecrate him as bishop for his Herrnhut community. There was a certain convenience for Zinzendorf in the fact that very few of the people who gathered at Herrnhut were genuinely from Moravia. That meant that he could forge a unifying myth out of the Moravian past, to create an identity for a new community which was in reality a very disparate group, drawn from radically different and contending Churches - Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists. Most were Pietists who had found their own religious environments increasingly difficult and had now made the momentous choice to start a new life, uprooting themselves from a familiar homeland. It was not surprising that their emotions ran high in those pioneering decades.
Zinzendorf never lost his commitment to an ecumenical benevolence towards all Churches, symbolized by his inheritance of the Moravians' continuing government by bishops in succession from the united Western Church - an episcopal succession which was recognized by the British Parliament in 1749, in an ecumenical gesture without parallel at the time. The Count's authoritarian temperament and Pietist compulsion to organize demanded a new congregation as highly structured and centred round worship as the most rigorous monastic order, while it also moulded the whole family lives of men, women and children. Zinzendorf's communities worshipped as frequently as monks - seven times a day on weekdays, longer on Sundays - and their worship was full of song: sermons might be sung, they wrote a whole new crop of hymns, enjoyed a daily hour of singing with the congregation as full choir, and moreover had no Puritan fear of musical instruments. The Count had a special liking for trombones and recommended them as a way of cheering up funerals. 49 The Moravians much valued cheerfulness. It was Zinzendorf's chief quarrel with Francke that he had seemed to make the Christian life too much of a grim struggle. 50
Stressing emotion against reason as the best means of reaching out to Christ, Zinzendorf set aside all previous Christian doctrinal requirements, with
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