Zinzendorf and the refugee community
Count Zinzendorf and the Moravians
Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf is a Pietist Saxon nobleman who at twenty-two years old allows a small group of Moravian refugees to settle on his estate at Berthelsdorf. The settlement is called Herrnhut — the Lord's Watch.
Zinzendorf does not plan what happens next. He plans to run his estate and be a good Christian nobleman. What happens instead is that the community grows, fractures, nearly destroys itself — and then is remade in the communion service of August 1727 into something that will reshape the history of Protestant mission.
Zinzendorf's theology is warm, affective, Christ-centered in a way that is almost startling next to the systematic theology of Orthodoxism and the intellectual rigors of Calvinism. He puts the wounds of Christ at the center of everything. He writes hymns — over two thousand of them — about the blood of Christ with an intimacy that later generations will find excessive and earlier generations found transformative.
He is not a systematic theologian. He is a pastor of refugees who discovers that the most fractious, most divided, most argumentative community can be held together by a common love for Jesus — not by agreement on every doctrine, not by shared ethnic identity, not by common practice, but by the shared experience of the grace of the crucified one.
His experiment at Herrnhut is the proof of concept for every ecumenical community that follows: unity is possible where there is genuine love for Christ, even without uniformity of doctrine or practice.
“I have one passion: it is he, and he alone.”
— Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, attributed, c. 18th century
“He is before all things, and in him all things are held together. He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.”
I have one passion: it is he, and he alone.
Zinzendorf's community was fracturing over doctrine and practice and ethnic identity. He did not resolve the theological disputes — many of them were real and remained unresolved. He redirected the community's attention to the one thing they all shared: the love of Christ.
In him all things hold together. Not in agreement about him. In him.
The unity Zinzendorf discovered is not the unity of people who agree about everything. It is the unity of people who love the same person — a unity that can survive significant disagreement about secondary things because the primary thing is shared.
What would it mean to let your love for Christ be large enough to hold people you disagree with?