Constructing Congregational Legitimacy: Heinrich Mühlenberg s Dispute with Niklaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren in 18th Century Pennsylvania by: Joshua Nicholas Sullivan March 1, 2016 Abstract: This paper begins as a critique of Mark Granquist s 2015 book Lutherans in America: A New History. By focusing on Granquist s account of the formation of Lutheranism in British colonial America in the 1740s this investigation seeks to highlight theological issues which continue to divide American Lutheran churches today, namely human sexuality and ecumenism. Taking into account the contrast between the voluntary Free-Church congregationalism model of church membership in the British colonies and the German confessional state-church model, it is argued that theological and pastoral authority was a matter of argumentation and construction in this new, liberal context. The conflicts between immigrant pastor Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and the Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and his Moravian Brethren highlight such issues as close-yet-divergent beliefs, radical efforts at ecumenism, and sexual practice. It is asserted that Mühlenberg constructed his authority in his three assigned Pennsylvania congregations by appealing to traditional forms of European establishmentarian self-identification, which necessarily othered the religious and sexual practices of Zinzendorf and his followers. In conclusion, it is suggested that this form of identity construction is still at work today. Many scholars of 18th century Europe, early American history, and Lutheran theology will certainly verify that Lutheranism s transition from continental Europe to British North America involved significant change and adjustment. Regarding the nature and cause of these changes, however, there is little agreement. In a recent review in the Lutheran Quarterly Mark Noll s sizes up Mark Granquist s recent book Lutherans in America: A New History. Noll asserts that Granquist s approach to the narrative of American Lutheranism does not sufficiently explain or investigate the extent to which Lutheran theology has guided the course of Lutheran RESONANCE: A Religious Studies Journal. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: ResonanceRSJ@gmail.com.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 2 history in America. 1 This paper, therefore, follows Noll s criticism and seeks to investigate how theological indeed were the maneuvers Lutheranism made in order to establish authority in the North American British empire. It is hard to diagnose whether or not this weakness in Granquist s history of American Lutheranism is because Granquist himself is an American Lutheran. It does seem significant however, that various contemporary scholars of Protestant history, both from Europe and America, tell very different narratives. In order to remain precise in my critique I will investigate the first decade of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg s time as a pastor in Pennsylvania during the 1740s. Mühlenberg (1711-1787), the product of Hallensian Lutheran Pietism, was sent to the British colonies in 1742 with the herculean task of organizing, disciplining and caring for three congregations of German immigrants in Pennsylvania. 2 This paper will look to Granquist s account of Mühlenberg s actions and motivations in this British colonial context, and then seek to problematize Granquist s assumptions with the work of other historians in order to prove that the transatlantic shift of Lutheranism in the mid 18 th century did indeed involve intense theological debate and decision. No account of American Lutheranism s foundations can be done without acute attention to these important theological issues. Granquist s account is of course largely correct and it is not my intention to assassinate his project, but certain inconsistencies and assertions occur which require investigation. To begin, Granquist notes the dramatic shift of Lutheran polity and self understanding between a confessional and state-sanctioned Lutheran church in Germany to the voluntary Free-Church 1 Mark Noll, A Good Time for Looking Back: Mark Granquist s Lutherans In America: A New History, Lutheran Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2015): 321. 2 Thomas Müller-Böhlke, The Significance of Großhennersdorf for Mühlenberg s Formation, in The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Hermann Wellenreuther, Thomas Müller-Bahlke, et al., (Halle, DEU: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2013), 83.
3 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan congregationalism, with its stress on membership that German immigrants encountered in British North America. 3 This leads to what Granquist calls a new sense of power and ownership that these lay people had developed for their new religious identities and their hard-wrought congregations. 4 However, these congregations products of deliberate lay decision making in Granquist s account lacked regular pastoral leadership and created openings for clerical opportunists, several of which came to plague the Lutheran work. 5 As will be seen below, this is largely true, but neglects an important nuance. Here, what at first seems to be simply a logical contradiction, i.e. how could lay-led congregations with power and ownership be duped by pastoral leadership that they themselves could either accept or reject, is a normative assumption. Granquist s account presupposes the arrival of Mühlenberg and views his later organizing and unifying work as morally and theologically superior to the intentions and actions of itinerant preachers, rogue Lutheran pastors, and Moravian leaders. In light of T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall s article, Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England, the phenomenon that Granquist is referring to as Free-Church congregationalism appears to be an over-simplification of the cultural, theological and political context. Breen and Hall note that as the foment of the Great Awakening began to spread in New England in the 1740s colonists were forced to confront the task of reappraising the meaning of order and disorder, appearance and reality, authenticity and fraud. In other words, in this new, liberal society 3 Mark Granquist, Lutherans in America: A New History, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 39. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 Ibid., 68.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 4 individual colonists were required to determine for themselves the sources of authority and authenticity in politics, economics, and most importantly religion. 6 These issues of choice were not unique to only the colonies of New England. While Breen and Hall argue for the sudden advent of this crisis of choice and legitimacy during the Great Awakening, Hermann Wellenreuther suggests similar notions were already in place in German language settlements south of Connecticut at this time. 7 Regardless, these assertions of Breen, Hall and Wellenreuther certainly provide more detail to the situation that Granquist is describing. When these other factions either itinerant preachers, Lutherans of different theological stripes, or Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) and his Moravian Brethren 8 sought to lead congregations of German immigrants they were not only vying for the congregations loyalty, but they were signaling to other Lutherans, namely Hallensians, that authority must be constructed and argued for in a context as complex as the British colonies. An environment that Granquist and others rightly point out was quite different from that of continental Europe. The reactions of the religious hegemony in New England is certainly comparable to that of Hallensian Pietists like Mühlenberg. Breen and Hall point out that critics viewed itinerant preachers, like George Whitefield and others, to be similar to the disruptive motion of comets whose orbits ran quite cross the spheres of the Earth, and all the other Planets. 9 Established religious leaders warned their flocks that the legitimacy of these new spirit-led preachers callings were suspect because they lacked institutional roots. Ironically, in 6. T. H. Breen and Timothy Hall, Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England, The American Historical Review 103.5 (1998): 1411. 7. Hermann Wellenreuther, The World According to the Christian People in North America around 1740, in The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century, 100. 8. Granquist, Lutherans, 54, 68. See also Craig Atwood, The Hallensians are Pietists; aren t you a Hallensian? Mühlenberg s Conflict with the Moravians in America, in The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century. 9. Breen and Hall, Structuring Provincial Imagination, 1427.
5 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan turn, attacks upon these new preachers authenticity put that of the hegemonic leaders themselves up for debate in the public sphere. Therein lies the dilemma that Mühlenberg faced and that which Granquist seems to deny theological status. While this shift in authority in British North America was of course a cultural matter of persuasion it did force religious leaders to be theologically explicit about how and why they were fit to lead. Granquist suggests that itinerant religious leaders insinuated themselves into vacant congregations, but if one takes Breen and Hall s argument seriously, this notion that congregants could be so easily swayed ignores the fact that the laypeople were the arbiters in many respects of just who either because of ethnic, familial or theological reasons would be in charge pastorally. 10 Müller-Böhlke aptly concurs with this shift in authority and notes in regard to Mühlenberg: The only thing that truly mattered in America was whose authority the Lutheran congregation themselves acknowledged and submitted to. 11 As will be demonstrated below, this was certainly the case with Mühlenberg, who seemed to excel in his call in Pennsylvania either because of his experiences as a young man in Germany dealing with the public or his ability to grasp the nature of public opinion in North America, or both. 12 It seems strange that Granquist would note, Lutherans had to make major adjustments, not so much in their theology but in their practice of religion and in the forms of organization that they developed to support this 10. Granquist, Lutherans, 68. See also for example Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, The Correspondence of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. John W. Kleiner and Helmut T. Lehmannm (Camden, ME: Picton Press, 1993), 64. 11. Müller-Böhlke, Significance of Großhennersdorf, 180, italics original. 12. Müller-Böhlke, Significance of Großhennersdorf, 88-92.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 6 practice. 13 What could be more grounding for the practice of religion than theological understandings of ecclesiology, sacraments, and ministry? Granquist asserts that Mühlenberg s ministry in Pennsylvania was designed to begin and aid the transition of an extent tradition (at the time already ninety years old) of Lutheranism in the New World away from European models and support and towards a more organized form of American Lutheranism. 14 While the end point of establishing a unique transatlantic Lutheranism was certainly achieved by Mühlenberg and his supporters, the impetuous for which he achieved this end seems to run against the notion of turning away from European models and support. It is true, as Craig Atwood argues, that Mühlenberg and his Hallensian supporters viewed the Moravian ecumenical activity in North America as a threat to the Lutheran Church as they understood it. 15 Mühlenberg notes in a 1743 correspondence to his mentors and supervisors in Europe that Zinzendorf sought to be a Reform pastor to the Reformed German immigrants and a Lutheran pastor to the Lutheran immigrants, and in so doing sought to bring them all into the same Moravian polity. This consternated Mühlenberg and his confessional 16 understanding of Christian identity. Mühlenberg noted, As a result of [Zinzendorf s] activities and crude proceedings, such confusion and chaos were created that one can see neither beginning nor end. Things are quite confused now. 17 It is interesting to note, however, and perhaps in opposition to Granquist s narrative, that Mühlenberg s supervisors and Halle elders Gotthilf August Francke (son of one of the socalled fathers of Pietism in Germany, August Hermann Francke) and Friedrich Michael 13. Granquist, Lutherans, 39. 14. Ibid., 72. 15. Atwood, The Hallensians are Pietists, 164. 16. A. G. Roeber, The Waters of Rebirth: The Eighteenth Century and Transoceanic Protestant Christianity, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 79.1 (2010): 61-70. 17. Mühlenberg, Correspondence Vol. 1, 116.
7 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan Ziegenhagen knew full well of the situation of the congregations in Pennsylvania, but did not send a pastor to North America to help them specifically. According to Atwood, they did not do so until they caught wind of the Moravian s intention to set up missionary work elsewhere. While Granquist is correct in asserting that there was no organizational structure to the Lutheran congregations in Pennsylvania and the rest of the British colonies, Atwood, however, makes it explicit that Halle had a firm understanding of the trouble to be encountered in a colony ruled by a country not their own, which required religious organizations to function on a completely voluntary basis. 18 Furthermore, highlighting the global nature of the attention paid to North America, Atwood argues that Mühlenberg was sent to Pennsylvania not because Zinzendorf had already made missionary progress, as Granquist suggests, but because Halle feared that Zinzendorf would make in roads before [they] could establish a presence. 19 Mühlenberg s call was issued three months before Zinzendorf arrived in the colony. Atwood is claiming with this reference to Mühlenberg s call that the advent of religious choice was being created not only in North America, but globally because of aggressive Moravian ecumenical efforts. Seeing as Mühlenberg was well acquainted with Zinzendorf and the theology of Herrnhut from his younger years in Germany, Mühlenberg s presence in North America and his ministry of defense, as it were, I argue was conducted on nothing but theological grounds. What s more, these theological grounds were definitively different than they would have been otherwise in a European context, which implies that Mühlenberg and the Hallensians needed to adjust their theology of ecclesiology and ministry to fit this new North American model of membership. 18. Atwood, The Hallensians are Pietists, 168-9. 19. Ibid., 169-70.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 8 It should be noted that these two New World opponents both had sprung from the same teachings and innovations of Lutheran Pietists Philipp Jakob Spener and his intellectual heir August Hermann Francke. Stemming from these figures came the two schools of Pietism in question one from Halle, the other form Herrnhut. These two schools before and during the 1740s had already built worldwide networks to spread their particular understanding of Protestant theology. 20 Interestingly enough, the term Pietist which in Granquist and other contemporary historians parlance has become a neutral term, was in fact hurled by Zinzendorf at Mühlenberg and his Hallensian supervisor Ziegenhagen during their encounters in the early 1740s as the theological slander of works-righteousness. 21 Wellenreuther very helpfully notes the distinction between Halle and Herrnhut Pietism observing: [Mühlenberg] and Halle Pietism s concept of awakening was defined as a clearly structured gradual process that began with self-recognition of one s own sinful life, followed by a long atonement struggle that culminated finally in the acceptance of salvation. By contrast, awakening for Moravians and others within the large religious movements that swept North American and parts of Europe, emphasized an intensely spontaneous and emotional experience which was only gradually channeled into new forms of religious expressions. 22 Now, however, pietism seems to be a vague term used to denote those in the German Protestant tradition who asserted that one must be spiritually awakened in any sense through an inner experience of the awareness of sin which drives one toward redemption in Christ. In A.G. Roeber s article The Waters of Rebirth: The Eighteenth Century and Transoceanic Protestant Christianity he puts his finger on many of these theological issues that spurred on Mühlenberg in Pennsylvania at this time. Roeber as well argues that the international ecumenical effort of Zinzendorf and the Moravians is what in essence triggered Halle Lutherans 20. Hermann Wellenreuther, Introduction to The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century, x. 21. Roeber, Waters of Rebirth, 57-8. 22. Wellenreuther, Introduction, xi.
9 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan to take seriously the predicament of German immigrants in the North American British empire. 23 The fact remains, Roeber posits, that Moravians in North America never amounted to more than some ten thousand persons during the crisis decade of the 1740s. 24 Nevertheless, the mere existence of these and other undertakings on the part of the Moravians created an entirely new Protestant self-understanding during this time. Roeber s argument hinges on his assertion of a shaky post-reformation ecclesiology, which within Lutheranism played itself out in the Pietist-Orthodox tensions of the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Roeber notes that, Protestant salvation of individual souls and whole societies had always depended on the ability to proclaim a clear connection between a pure gospel that affirmed unmerited and free grace, and a godly life led within a true, uncorrupted church. 25 However, the Moravian voyages to Constantinople, Sweden and North America brought to the fore the uncomfortably diverse number of view points regarding grace, ecclesiology and the sacraments for Protestant leaders. This is not to mention the different sexual practices and attitudes toward gender that Moravians were alleged to have. The theological dispute concerning ecclesiology in the North American context of Moravian expansion can be teased out as one looks into the details of the conflicts between Mühlenberg and Zinzendorf in the first years of Mühlenberg s ministry in Pennsylvania. Zinzendorf s more successful relationships with Swedish Lutherans both in the British North American colonies, but also in Sweden, helps illustrate his emphasis on an episcopal ecclesiology and the way it affected his view of the sacraments as the center of the Moravian s ancient self- 23. Roeber, Waters of Rebirth, 40, 41. 24. Ibid., 42. 25. Ibid., 44-5.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 10 understanding. 26 In Moravian dealings with Swedish Lutherans they sought to appease Swedish doubts by appealing both the article of the Augsburg Confession pertaining to the office of bishops and denouncing what Zinzendorf called Pietists (i.e. Hallensians). In so doing, Zinzendorf felt confident he could establish the Moravian movement in the eyes of Swedish Lutheran bishops as a church among churches with an episcopacy and sacramental clout, instead of simply a Pietist sect or conventicle. 27 As has been noted above the North American context was one where religious authority was merely cultural and did not have the confessionalism of German states. Indeed, before Mühlenberg set up his Ministerium, the choice of to whom to submit belonged in reality to each individual congregation. Roeber notes that Mühlenberg and Zinzendorf s 1742 confrontation included important arguments over the Augsburg Confession, but these only revealed the deeper issue on the Count s mind. 28 In point of fact, Mühlenburg notes in a letter to Francke and Ziegenhagen in March of 1743 that after (symbolically) receiving the keys to the Philadelphia church he was competing for, he notices (also symbolically) that Zinzendorf had purloined something from us, namely, a church record book and a copper chalice 29 It seems that Zinzendorf may have conceded temporal authority to Mühlenberg, but felt that this did nothing in terms of Mühlenberg s sacramental efficaciousness, and retaining the Eucharistic cup was his way of rhetorically asserting his authority as a Lutheran pastor. As several scholars have noted during this conflict, Mühlenberg produced his letters of call to authenticate his ordination, which for some of the churches he ministered to, he simply 26. Ibid., 53. 27. Ibid., 45. 28. Ibid., 57. 29. Mühlenberg, Correspondence Vol. 1, 64.
11 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan wrote himself. 30 These documents, supposedly representing Mühlenberg s education and his ties to European institutions, was his primary method of convincing his congregations as well as secular Philadelphia authorities that he held true Lutheran legitimacy. 31 Zinzendorf s theological concern, however, went beyond a matter of pastoral authority, especially one linked to Halle which Zinzendorf disparaged as arch-pietists guilty of a theology of works. 32 Zinzendorf was interested not only with an episcopacy, one that Mühlenberg dismissed as an indifferent detail, but with sacramental means of grace and the implications of Mühlenberg and Halle s approach to sanctification and ministry. 33 As Roeber puts it, Zinzendorf appealed to episcopal oversight of church and sacraments where holiness, of the most forensic kind, was to be found. 34 Zinzendorf believed that the Pietism of Mühlenberg and its focus on spiritual struggle and conversion potentially threatened the key Protestant doctrine of justification by grace 35 It is feasible to argue that Mühlenberg s ascribing his authority to a letter of call is not specifically theologically charged, as Granquist seems to do. These actions, however, taken in light of Breen and Hall s article, along with other examples of Mühlenberg s appealing to religious and secular authority, I argue are quite theological insofar as they are ecclesiological. As has been noted several times, Mühlenberg needed to, in essence, fabricate his legitimacy in a context in which confessionalism was functionally meaningless. Zinzendorf appealed to the Augsburg Confession nearly as much as Mühlenberg did, and yet Mühlenberg refused to give 30. Atwood, The Hallensians are Pietists, 174. 31. Ibid., 170,174. 32. Roeber, Waters of Rebirth, 57. 33. Ibid., 71. 34. Ibid., 58, 54. 35. Ibid., 57.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 12 the Moravians the label of real Lutheran. 36 Even Mühlenberg s appeal to the Augsburg Confession in light of Zinzendorf s accusations of his Halle Pietist leanings serves only as a rhetorical way of linking himself in the minds of his congregants to the types of ecclesiological reasoning that they would have encountered in their home territories in Europe. Indeed, while Roeber is less severe in his assessment of the fragmentation of religious identity in North America, he nevertheless posits that there was a potent residue of the European confessional politics at play with the German immigrants which helped Mühlenberg win debates concerning Protestant self-understanding beyond European shores. 37 The Moravian Brethren functioned quite effectively for Mühlenberg as a foil to define himself against in more ways than ecclesiological. Mühlenberg was a sort of resourceful, conservative traditionalist who was able to cajole German immigrant communities into accepting him. He convinced them to put away their previous allegiances to Zinzendorf and Moravian leadership owing to discourses on sexual practice and gender as well. In an article titled Jesus Is Female: The Moravian Challenge in the German Communities of British North America Aaron Fogleman makes a convincing argument that in contrast to the ecclesiastical debates, sexuality and gender were equally as divisive between Moravians and Halle Lutherans in Pennsylvania. Moreover, Fogleman takes a decidedly acerbic tone when he asserts that Moravians threatened gender norms and traditions that were crucial components of mainstream Protestant belief systems. 38 Certainly, Fogleman is correct in his presentation of the erotic and atypical metaphorical language concerning the persons of the Trinity in Moravian tracts, illustrations, preaching and hymnody. Providing that Fogleman is also correct in 36. Atwood, The Hallensians are Pietists, 180. 37. Roeber, Waters of Rebirth, 71. 38. Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge in the German Communities of British North America. The William and Mary Quarterly Vol 60 no. 2 (2003): 300.
13 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan highlighting the fact that the use of female imagery for Christ was neither new in the history of Christianity nor unique in North America, he locates the ferocious resistance to the Moravian s metaphors by Halle Pietists as being representative of the same struggles of fragmented liberal conscience alluded to above. 39 Fogleman s arguments are concerned less with theological integrity than they seem to be with defending modern sexual ethics and pluralism, but they nonetheless in accord with Breen and Hall illustrate that state and religious authorities, as well as private individuals, during this time needed to wrestle with issues regarding gender and sexual practice as well. 40 Despite the fact that Atwood dismisses Fogleman, asserting there is little evidence to support [the] claim that the Moravian s unorthodox attitude toward gender and sexuality was the catalyst for religious conflict in colonial Pennsylvania, there is something to pay attention to when it comes the way Mühlenberg and other Lutherans found themselves in line with more traditional metaphors for God and sexual practices. 41 Fogleman asserts that patriarchal authority in the family was central to Lutheran and Reformed theology and social practice. Therefore, German Lutherans and Calvinists in the North American colonies were hostile to Moravians because they were perceived as altering the norms and boundaries of gender and sex. Whether these issues alone drove the conflicts between Mühlenberg and Zinzendorf seems unlikely, but is certainly up for debate. Regardless, these nonconforming views and practices became fodder for defamation. 42 39. Ibid., 315. 40. Ibid., 321. 41. Atwood, The Hallensians are Pietists, 162. 42. Fogleman, Jesus is Femail, 300-1.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 14 Merry Wiesner-Hanks elaborates in detail the formation of these norms and boundaries of patriarchal authority in her monograph Christianity and Sexuality in Early Modern World: Regulating Desire Reforming Practice. Wiesner-Hanks astutely emphasizes that Protestant theology, especially Hallensian Pietism, saw good works as the fruit of saving faith and one s sexual activities and those of one s neighbors after the Reformation continued to be important in God s eyes, and order and morality were a mark of divine favor. Indeed, she notes that previous authoritative cultural norms regarding sexuality and gender relations though they were changed by Luther and his followers by the abolishing of monastic and clerical celibacy were more difficult to break with than the meaning of key rituals and papal ecclesiology. 43 She notes that Luther affirmed sexuality because sexual desire was natural and created by God [and] it was a central part of marriage. Though marriage was not a sacrament for Lutherans it was however the cornerstone of society, the institution on which all other institutions were based. 44 Wiesner-Hanks book does much to point out that the issues which divided the Moravian and the Lutheran communities in British North America were both theological and social, and that Protestantism, most often affiliated confessionally with German states, historically favored theologies which advocated social and political order. In her work she describes the nonconforming practices of Zinzendorf and the Moravian Brethren, and she ascribes these practices to theological positions of Zinzendorf. She notes for example that 43. Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in Early Modern World : Regulating Desire Reforming Practice, (Florence, KY: Routledge, 1999), 61. 44. Ibid., 62-3. See also William Lazareth, Luther On The Christian Home: An Application of the Social Ethics of the Reformation, (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960).
15 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan Zinzendorf asserted that shame about Jesus or Mary s sexual organs was a denial of the full humanity of Christ. 45 These theological convictions, perhaps, can bring this discussion back to the criticism of Granquist s history by Noll. Noll writes, While the development of Lutheran theology is not unimportant in [Granquist s] book, it focuses most attention on what happened when the statechurch establishmentarian descendants of Lutheran Christendom encountered the unregulated confusion of the United States free exercise of religion. 46 If what has been argued above is at all correct this very establishmentarianism of Mühlenberg was in fact a theological and rhetorical innovation used to create authority and the semblance of confessional identity in a religious atmosphere that revolved around the choice of laity. It seems the weakness of Granquist then in Noll s view is Granquist s inability or refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of Lutheranism s opponents whether Moravian, itinerant, or non-hallensian and the theological work Mühlenberg had to do in order to win the day. 47 When Granquist makes statements denouncing Mühlenberg s opponents because they did not recognize his official call to the congregations from the European church officials, he perhaps shows signs of the tendency for American Lutheranism to believe too easily its own historical narrative. 48 Noll s desire for a more theologically complex narrative of Lutherans in America could be aided by the methodologies of scholars like Roeber, Breen and Hall who seem to have no ideological skin in the game. These scholars together assert that there was a climate in the British colonies of itinerant preaching which allowed for possibilities for self- 45. Ibid., 65. 46. Noll, A Good Time for Looking Back, 317. 47. Granquist, Lutherans, 73. 48. Ibid.
RESONANCE: A RELIGIOUS STUDIES JOURNAL 16 fashioning. 49 Owing to this development, as well as the drastic change in context that German Lutherans experienced traversing the Atlantic, Mühlenberg was successful not because his call was simply official and he was the talented middle-ground negotiator. 50 He was successful because he was able to effectively construct a theological rhetoric of establishmentarian confessionalism that did, in the end, garner trust not only from his three assigned congregations in Pennsylvania, but from his fellow clergymen as he moved forward to create the pivotal Ministerium of Lutherans in America. It seems no coincidence that the issues of sexuality and ecumenism which proved to be so decisive in Mühlenberg and Zinzendorf s conflict in the 1740s continues to provide the ostensibly insurmountable barriers between Lutherans in American today. At the risk of waxing poetic (or polemic) it seems that what could help the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America moving forward would be to look to their past with neither self-blinding aggrandizement nor shame, but with a sober eye toward the theological convictions which have animated their political, social and ecclesiological concerns within American liberalism. Bibliography Atwood, Craig. The Hallensians are Pietists; aren t you a Hallensian? Mühlenberg s Conflict with the Moravians in America. In The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century. Editors Hermann Wellenreuther, Thomas Müller-Bahlke, et al. Halle, DEU: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2013. 159-196. Breen, T. H. and Timothy Hall. Structuring Provincial Imagination: The Rhetoric and Experience of Social Change in Eighteenth-Century New England. The American Historical Review 103.5 (1998): 1411-1439. 49. Breen and Hall, Structuring Provincial Imagination, 1433. 50. Roeber, Waters of Rebirth, 75-6.
17 Joshua Nicholas Sullivan Fogleman, Aaron Spencer. Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge in the German Communities of British North America. The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 60 No. 2 (2003): 295-332. Granquist, Mark. Lutherans in America: A New History. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015. Lazareth, William. Luther On The Christian Home: An Application of the Social Ethics of the Reformation. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960. Mühlenberg, Heinrich Melchior. The Correspondence of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, Vol. 1. Edited and translated by John W. Kleiner and Helmut T. Lehmannm. Camden, ME: Picton Press, 1993. Müller-Böhlke, Thomas. The Significance of Großhennersdorf for Mühlenberg s Formation. In The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century. Editors Hermann Wellenreuther, Thomas Müller-Bahlke, et al. Halle, DEU: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2013. 83-96. Noll, Mark. A Good Time for Looking Back: Mark Granquist s Lutherans In America: A New History. Lutheran Quarterly 29, No. 4 (2015): 315-323. Roeber, A. G. The Waters of Rebirth: The Eighteenth Century and Transoceanic Protestant Christianity, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 79.1 (2010): 40-76. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Christianity and Sexuality in Early Modern World : Regulating Desire Reforming Practice. Florence, KY: Routledge, 1999. Wellenreuther, Hermann. The World According to the Christian People in North America around 1740,. In The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century. Editors Hermann Wellenreuther, Thomas Müller-Bahlke, et al. Halle, DEU: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2013. 99-141.