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Reviews of Books
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Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem.
By
Craig D. Atwood
. Max Kadeb German-American Research Institute Series. (University
Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 283.
$37.50.)
Reviewed
by
Katherine Carté Engel
, Texas A&M University
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Scholars of subjects as diverse as backcountry slavery and Pennsylvania's Indian relations have combed the scrupulous records left behind by the Moravian community. To date, however, the beliefs that spurred the German-speaking community into so many different quarters have been left largely unexamined within an early American context. In this new work on the town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Craig D. Atwood delves into these beliefs by foregrounding the colorful and often gory theology of the group's founder, Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, a theology that inspired religious enthusiasm as well as controversy with its Christocentric "blood and wounds" emphasis. Zinzendorf 's ideas, Atwood argues, animated and supported Bethlehem, the Moravians' key settlement in North America, during its twenty-year communal period (1741–1762). Indeed, for Atwood "Bethlehem was the embodiment of Zinzendorf 's vision" (p. 7). |
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Community of the Cross attempts three related tasks. First, it aims to reintegrate Zinzendorf 's vivid and experiential religion into the study of a community that has been, for the most part, left in the hands of social historians less interested in what Bethlehem's residents believed than in how their communitarian society functioned. Second, by making Zinzendorf the central figure of a town in which the count spent only a few months, Atwood illustrates the tightly organized and transatlantic nature of the Moravian community and shows how one of the most creative branches of German pietism—itself one of the most dynamic religious movements of the eighteenth century—took root in North America. Last, and perhaps most important for scholars of early American religion and early modern pietism, Atwood challenges the notion that Zinzendorf 's most exuberant religious expressions were part of a short-lived and unpopular phenomenon (particularly in America) and that the so-called Sifting Time they represented ended in 1749 when the community moved away from its obsession with the "juicy," "purple," and "cavernous" side wound of Christ and toward more orthodox Protestant worship (p. 326). |
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Atwood argues that Zinzendorf was the prime mover of all things associated with the Brüdergemeine (as the Moravians called themselves), even in America, downplaying the influence of other leaders (most notably Bethlehem's August Spangenberg) and minimizing the difficulty of maintaining an international religious society in an era when imperial war and ocean voyages made communication problematic. Emphasizing instead Zinzendorf 's ideology as the centerpiece of the Moravian community, the book's first three chapters describe the group's European context and the development of the count's unique approach to Christianity. Although Atwood notes that the group's initial members were refugees descended from the fifteenth-century Hussite Unity of the Brethren, he argues that the renewed community of the eighteenth century "did not re-create the old Unitas Fratrum" (p. 25). Instead, Zinzendorf combined the pietist emphasis on making Christianity "a more vital presence in society and in individual lives" (p. 28) with his own nonrational approach to religious understanding, in which the unmediated experience of Christ—the central figure of the Trinity for the Moravians—formed the foundation of all religious knowledge. |
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