A History of the Moravian ChurchHutton, J. E. (Joseph Edmund)
Religion
A History of the Moravian Church
Hutton, J. E. (Joseph Edmund)
Moravian Church -- History
From that time Frederick William I. was Zinzendorf's fast friend. He
encouraged him to become a Bishop of the Brethren. The Count was still
in doubt. For some months he was terribly puzzled by the question
whether he could become a Moravian Bishop, and yet at the same time
be loyal to the Lutheran Church; and, in order to come to a right
conclusion, he actually came over to England and discussed the whole
thorny subject of Moravian Episcopal Orders with John Potter, Archbishop
of Canterbury. The Archbishop soon relieved his mind. He informed the
Count, first, that in his judgment the Moravian Episcopal Orders were
apostolic; and he informed him, secondly, that as the Brethren were
true to the teaching of the Augsburg Confession in Germany and the
Thirty-nine Articles in England, the Count could honestly become a
Bishop without being guilty of founding a new sect. The Count returned
to Germany. He was examined in the faith, by the King's command, by
two Berlin Divines. He came through the ordeal with flying colours, and
finally, on May 20th, he was ordained a Bishop of the Brethren's Church
by Bishop Daniel Ernest Jablonsky, Court Preacher at Berlin, and Bishop
David Nitschmann {1737.}.
The situation was now remarkable. As soon as Zinzendorf became a Bishop,
he occupied, in theory, a double position. He was a "Lutheran Bishop of
the Brethren's Church." On the one hand, like Jablonsky himself, he was
still a clergyman of the Lutheran Church; on the other, he was qualified
to ordain ministers in the Church of the Brethren. And the Brethren, of
course, laid stress on the latter point. They had now episcopal orders
of their own; they realized their standing as an independent church;
they objected to mere toleration as a sect; they demanded recognition as
an orthodox church. "We design," they wrote to the Counts of Isenberg,
"to establish a home for thirty or forty families from Herrnhut. We
demand full liberty in all our meetings; we demand full liberty
to practise our discipline and to have the sacraments, baptism and
communion administered by our own ministers, ordained by our own
Bohemo-Moravian Bishops." As the Counts agreed to these conditions the
Brethren now laid out near the castle a settlement after the Herrnhut
model, named it Herrnhaag, and made it a regular training-ground for the
future ministers of the Church. At Herrnhut the Brethren were under a
Lutheran Pastor; at Herrnhaag they were independent, and ordained their
own men for the work. They erected a theological training college,
with Spangenberg as head. They had a pædagogium for boys, with Polycarp
Müller as Rector. They had also a flourishing school for girls. For
ten years this new settlement at Herrnhaag was the busiest centre of
evangelistic zeal in the world. At the theological college there were
students from every university in Germany. At the schools there were
over 600 children, and the Brethren had to issue a notice that they
had no room for more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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