As with A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century, Paul Peucker has once again brought his scholarly focus to a question that has vexed Moravian historiography for centuries. In Herrnhut: The Formation of a Moravian Community, 1722–1732, he addresses the question of continuity between the Unitas Fratrum, which nearly ended following the 30 Years War, and the fledgling Moravian Church in Herrnhut. Peucker's answer to this question comes less by addressing the question directly, but by convincingly investigating Zinzendorf's Philadelphian ideas and showing that Zinzendorf used the idea of the Unitas Fratrum to mask his Philadelphian project. Indeed, in his Prologue, Peucker quotes Zinzendorf saying that this is what he had done.
Peucker's deep dive into Moravian archival sources in Herrnhut and Bethlehem, PA (and beyond) brings to the surface key passages from congregational records, diaries, letters, and reports. While taking seriously the later accounts and explanations of what happened earlier in the first decade of the Herrnhut community, which have certainly exerted an influence on subsequent Moravian historiography, Peucker privileges the documents written closer to the events by the actual participants. He lets the sources speak for themselves as they reveal the thoughts and aspirations of Count Niklaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, his religious friends, and the refugees that populated the burgeoning village of Herrnhut.
While much current scholarship on the Moravian Church has sought to broaden and demythologize the understanding of Moravian work throughout the world, especially critiquing Eurocentric interactions with indigenous and enslaved populations, Peucker's work focuses on the earliest ideas and arguments that shaped the community that sent these representatives out from their Saxon village into the broader world.
Peucker's analysis of Zinzendorf's thoughts in light of the broader religious movements of Philadelphianism and Pietism shows how Zinzendorf worked within the historical framework the Unitas Fratrum (and the reinterpretation of this framework) to bring about his earlier Philadelphian goals. Peucker's thoroughly footnoted work investigates the role of crypto-Protestants and their supporters in the Hapsburg lands of Moravia and Bohemia and their influence on the settlers who made their way to Herrnhut. He also notes the importance of Zinzendorf's relationship with other members of the Brotherhood of Four (and several of their spouses) and how their waxing and waning agreements with Zinzendorf and his plans impacted Herrnhut and its relationships with their initial hosts, the village and parish of Berthelsdorf.
Peucker's work reveals the debates in the Pietist and Philadelphian movements over the importance of rituals and worship within the established churches (or avoiding them) and their relationship to the development of faith within the true believer. Therefore, not surprisingly, debates over the role of confession played a key role in Herrnhut and Berthelsdorf, and Peucker demonstrates that the resurfacing of these debates in 1727 (after a supposed resolution of the arguments in 1725) exerted a significant influence during the period leading up to the important August 13, 1727 experience. Furthermore, he demonstrates that the “lovefeast,” rather than being initially the fruit of that reconciling and renewing experience in August, was a term that carried multiple meanings and had different applications for some time before coming to mean—not the Eucharist, but rather—the simple meal that Moravians used to celebrate events in the life of the congregation and its members.
Central to Peucker's arguments is his analysis of the relationship between the Herrnhut Statutes of 1727 and Zinzendorf's translation of Comenius’ historical accounts of the Unitas Fratrum. Peucker show that Zinzendorf translated Comenius rather creatively, and at times manipulatively. Peucker then argues that Zinzendorf did this to convince the inhabitants of Herrnhut that they were providentially recreating the older, but forgotten until their recent recovery, expressions of Christian community created by their spiritual forebears in the Unitas Fratrum. This “discovery” brought about by these creative translations helped galvanize support for Zinzendorf's Philadelphian plans by masking them under the name of this older tradition. In addition, this mask helped Zinzendorf and the Moravians negotiate the complicated legal and theological landscapes of the state churches recognized under the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which were further exacerbated by the shifting and uncertain relationship of pietist theology and practice with the Lutheran Church and the requirements of the Augsburg Confession.
Herrnhut, like Peucker's earlier work, A Time of Sifting, challenges the standard histories of the Moravian Church written in English by unflinchingly looking at the documents of the time to look at the actions and beliefs of those most engaged in the creation of this new Moravian Church. Herrnhut offers the needed foundational work for a significantly revised understanding of the founding and development of the Moravian Church. On one hand, Herrnhut upholds the contention of the Bishops Hamilton in History of the Moravian Church: The Renewed Unitas Fratrum 1722–1957 that for a period Zinzendorf exerted a huge influence on the formation of the Herrnhut community, but it refutes their arguments that that influence, when it faced a series of challenges, was replaced by a return to the ideals of the Unitas Fratrum (which the community could not do because those ideals had never been a part of the community). In the end, Peucker concludes the Herrnhut was the manifestation of Zinzendorf's Philadelphian thinking rather than a step in the continuous and perilous journey from the Unitas Fratrum to the Moravian Church.
