ABSTRACT
Today very few of us worry about what “Lutheran” means; in the eighteenth century the German Pietist Henry Melchior Mühlenberg (1711-1787) was deeply concerned about the meaning of the term “Lutheran” in Pennsylvania, the colony founded by William Penn in 1681. By the time, Mühlenberg arrived in Pennsylvania in December 1742, it had become a veritable Sodom and Gomorra. Mühlenberg got a first taste of it on 30 December 1742, when in the house of John Stephen Benezet (ca. 1683-1751), a Philadelphia merchant, he met a Herr von Thurnstein who turned out to be Nikolaus Count Zinzendorf (1700-1760), his nemesis from Großhennersdorf.1 Großhennersdorf was a small Lordship close to Herrnhut, the seat of the Moravian Church. Between 1740 and 1742 Henry Melchior Mühlenberg had served as deacon at Großhennersdorf. In this and other instances I draw on material presented in greater detail in my study (Wellenreuther 2013a).
