Hopes for Better Spouses by Roeber A. G.;

Author:Roeber, A. G.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Published: 2013-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Moravians, the Church, and Marriage

As Christian Thomasius lay near death in September of 1728, his servants declined a request from a supplicant begging for an audience with the great man. Frustrated in his attempt, Nikolaus Count von Zinzendorf nonetheless wrote to Thomasius on the day before he died in Halle that “my love and respect for you was always great and I possess an entirely unpartisan veneration for one of the first bulwarks of the truth in the German empire.”1 Soon to suffer exile from Saxony in that same empire, Zinzendorf would also now contribute a massive new impulse to the debates over the nature and meaning of marriage as new currents in theological anthropology began to swirl through European Protestantism. In his exaltation of human erotic love, Zinzendorf may well have been aware that Thomasius himself appeared to have understood erotic love and friendship as partaking of the same moral virtue.

Perhaps more ominously, at least in the opinion of Zinzendorf’s opponents, the count may also have believed that Thomasius held that even unmarried persons could engage in erotic love, although since homosexual liaisons were forbidden by law, perhaps the same prohibition applied — at the discretion of the prince — as with polygamy or polyandry. But as Thomasius himself had earlier argued, by “law” he meant the law of the prince, since he had spent much of his life denying that there was a “natural” or “biblical” law in which to ground such teachings.

The question of how men and women related to one another, whether genuine friendship between them was possible, and what implications such a question held for the marital relationship intensified in the 1730s. The leader of the recently renewed Moravian Brethren would play a large part in those debates. His own struggle with marriage, sexuality, and the teachings of the Reformation that he had imbibed in his student days at Halle now led to increasingly frequent confrontations with other alumni and admirers of the renowned center.2

Few students of Christianity today claim deep familiarity with the Unitas Fratrum, but they may recognize the Moravians, as they are more commonly known, for their success in Protestant missions. Moravian advances in establishing congregations from Greenland to South Africa during the eighteenth century alarmed their European critics. Never numbering more than perhaps 10,000 European souls in the eighteenth century, this group that claimed continuity with the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, who died at the stake in Constance in 1416, agitated the already contentious Protestant debate over marriage into acute crisis in the 1740s. No more than the Lutherans with whom they claimed affinity, however, did the Moravians intend for such a debate to occur. At first, the ambitious plans of Zinzendorf for pan-Protestant cooperation ruffled the feathers of the recognized European confessions, and by the late 1730s some of his speculations about Trinitarian doctrine appear to have alarmed still others.

These dogmatic and ecclesiological critiques, however, included almost from the outset attacks on Moravian teachings about sexuality and marriage.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.