ABSTRACT
When Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf took leave of his Pennsylvania followers in January 1743, he left them with some advice that typified his approach to religious matters. He admonished those preparing to work in Penn’s colony that “no church-system should be instituted,” at the new town of Bethlehem “but rather what is blessed and useful from week to week and from month to month should happen.” Residents should vary their practices periodically, he advised, so as to prevent theological rigidity and to do nothing to hinder the ecumenical spirit he hoped they would foster in the region. “If you, for example, baptize in the name of the father, son, and the holy ghost, as is our practice,” he continued, “and someone says that when one is not baptized with those words, it is not a true baptism, then the next person to be baptized should be done in the name of Jesus, … so that one shows expressly and above all that all such forms and ways of speaking are not the true matter.”1 Zinzendorf’s strivings for union among Christians in the mid-eighteenth century created practical problems for his church and frustrated other religious leaders; the improvised and changing nature of Moravian institutions that grew out of the community’s almost slippery flexibility and its frequently unexpected pragmatism have left an equally confused legacy for modern scholars. The Brüdergemeine is often the best example of a particular phenomenon and simultaneously in uneasy relationship to all other representatives of whatever trend is under the microscope. This is particularly true for the study of Moravians in America, where the dominant fields of inquiry have tended to emphasize certain aspects of the group’s history while obscuring others. The chief consequence for the specific community Zinzendorf addressed on that chilly night, the future leaders of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, has been to misread the nature of the town’s relationship to its religious work, its communal economic system, and the connections between those two vital aspects of the community’s history.
