In a provocatively titled 2005 book, Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom wondered Is the Reformation Over? Footnote ¹ While not presuming to answer their query, the present essay argues that a self-understanding of European Protestants inherited from the Reformation had to die in the 1740s in the process of giving birth to the rapidly spreading version of western Christianity that became known as evangelicalism. Protestants, of both the radical and magisterial sort had cherished since the sixteenth century a sense of themselves as the true, ancient, and apostolic church. The Reformation, however, in its theological, as well as its socio-political and economic dimensions, had long “left its heirs no settled comprehensive system, only with many unresolved questions of principle and usage, not least in decisions relating to the body.”Footnote ²

The birth of early evangelicalism both within and beyond Europe cannot be understood apart from the passing of a Protestant self-understanding as the ancient and apostolic church that had included sacramental and episcopal marks. Subsequent neo-confessional movements in various Protestant traditions, though important, could not resuscitate a self-understanding that had remained contested since the sixteenth century,” one whose key identifying metaphors since ancient times had been “the body of Christ.” During the 1740s Protestants—even the High Church liturgical Lutherans, Anglicans, and Reformed—spurred by transoceanic voyages of Moravians, helped to birth an evangelical self-understanding with global and long-lasting consequences. By analyzing a tightly woven trio of controversies triggered by voyages of Moravians across the Mediterranean, the Baltic, the North Sea and the Atlantic—over episcopacy and sacraments; sanctification and mysticism; and undenominational allures versus confessional loyalties—we can glimpse the transoceanic delivery rooms. Protestants emerged equipped to pursue the evangelical, mission-oriented and socially engaged version of western Christianity that seemed to herald a promising future.

To understand this seismic shift in the history of Protestant self-understanding, we need to attend to half-forgotten Moravian voyages. Scholars are familiar with connections of a transoceanic nature that linked “geography, trade, accumulated experience, and imperial origins” in Europeans' exchanges with the early modern world. Those very exposures and connections helped bring to a close long-standing arguments over what European Protestantism was, and was not.Footnote ³ Even the term “European” Protestantism is potentially misleading, since, as these voyages demonstrated, a Eurasian history had long shaped the older Protestant self-understanding that they were heirs of the ancient, apostolic church.Footnote ⁴

What caused the new self-understanding to emerge? Certainly, the Moravian voyages helped to focus the last engagement with the older understanding. Just as clearly, the decline in Protestant concerns for presenting a unified front in the face of a renewed and expansive Catholicism played its part. Within Protestant courts and chancelleries, new initiatives emerged that favored pragmatic political alliances that acknowledged confessional loyalties only in passing. By the 1740s reports of Protestant mission efforts in southeast India, the West Indies, and North America had circulated for a generation, and those who followed such accounts recognized the need for a clear self-understanding in the face of non-Christian populations and Catholic missionary successes. In the end, however, the indifference of many of the established church leaders combined with the renewed zeal of believers and reformers for experiential religion to create the opportunity of making susceptible recruits to successive waves of religious renewal. Evangelical promise of converted hearts and transformed behavior that recognized the social and economic realities of contemporary life accounts both for the emergence of the new self-understanding as well as for the stunted development of the new self-understanding within the still-powerful European churches.

The largely forgotten voyage of a Swedish Moravian to Constantinople was but the first of several in whose wakes German Lutheran pietists, Anglicans, and the fledgling Methodists found themselves unsettled. The altered Protestant understanding of themselves, in the opinion of some, “more than any putative triumph of science … helped accomplish the ‘secularization of the European mind.’”Footnote ⁵ No secularization, however, occurred. A further protestantization did. We can be pardoned for having missed the significance of the voyages; so did contemporary observers. The Unitas Fratrum, the “renewed” “Moravian Church” that emerged from Lusatia in the 1720s, remained a deceptively small group of Christians. They established footholds in the Levant, in India, the Caribbean, Russia, and the Americas—and included indigenous populations, free and enslaved. The Moravians, however, never amounted to more than some ten thousand persons during the crisis decade of the 1740s.Footnote ⁶ Moravian activities, however, far exceeded their modest numbers as they acted as the midwives who coached the controversies into the painful rebirth of Protestantism whose labors we can reconstruct. By reminding ourselves of how much European Protestant confessions had struggled without success to come to a consensus about episcopacy, worship, and sacramental holiness, we can better appreciate the 1740s turn to a different version of interior holiness, a subjective interpretation of biblical authority, and cooperation that transcended the confessional concerns that would characterize the evangelical future of Protestantism.

I. Episcopacy and Liturgical-Sacramental Holiness

The Swedish-born Lutheran convert, Arvid Gradin, played a pivotal role in the Mediterranean and Baltic Moravian voyages that focused renewed attention to the question of what Protestants meant by the Church. Specially chosen by Nicholas Count von Zinzendorf, the leader of the renewed Moravian Church, Gradin arrived in Constantinople in July 1740 to seek a meeting with the Greek Orthodox patriarch. The purpose of the meeting was simple enough: to secure Orthodox affirmation that the Moravians were a true, ancient, apostolic, episcopal church. Aware that the Greek Orthodox had rejected the Augsburg Confession in the sixteenth century, Gradin appealed to the Moravians' pre-Reformation ties to the martyred Jan Hus. The patriarch was pleased to learn that the Moravians accepted the original Greek version of the Nicean-Constantinopolitan creed without the Latin addition of the filioque. But upon hearing Gradin describe the Moravians as an episcopal church, he wondered why the Moravians boasted only two bishops among them. The patriarch may have incorrectly assumed from his own tradition that Moravians recited the original version of the ancient creedal symbol in worship, and details of Moravian services were not explored during Gradin's audience. Gradin, for his part, was shocked by the patriarch's suggestion that the most sensible step Moravians could take was to become Orthodox. Gradin's unhappiness led him to decline the patriarch's offer of a letter that affirmed Moravians to be a church. Upon Gradin's return, Zinzendorf could not disguise his annoyance with the Swede's clumsy diplomacy. His Swedish emissary had not sufficiently appreciated the strategic value the patriarch's letter held for coaxing recalcitrant Lutherans in the Holy Roman Empire to recognize Moravians as a true church. The Moravians did eventually embark on missionary activities in the Levant, but they would fail to convert either Christians or non-Christians within the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ⁷

The Constantinople voyage fell into obscurity among later Moravians who chose increasingly to forget their pursuit of non-Catholic episcopal affirmation of their self-understanding. Their ancestors, by contrast, regarded the event so highly that they commemorated the 1749 success in securing a private bill from the British Parliament by including Gradin's mission in the celebration. Three backdrop paintings demonstrated providential blessings on Gradin's journey to the East that preceded the eventual British Protestant recognition of the Moravians. The supposed triumph marked the end rather than heralding an affirmation of the older Protestant self-understanding Zinzendorf had hoped would spread under the protective shadow of the Moravians (fig. 1).Footnote ⁸

Fig. 1.

Johann Valentin Haidt (1700–1781), “The Act of Parliament of 1749.”

Instead, the Moravian–Orthodox conversations on the Bosporus turned out to reveal how the widening ripples of renewed debate about who Protestants were now spread in exchanges to the Baltic, across the North Sea, to Britain, and to the North Atlantic. A long-standing tradition among Protestant Europeans to understand themselves as the purer, primitive form of apostolic Christianity would now decline into the same obscurity as the commemorative painting. Protestant salvation of individual souls and whole societies had always depended on the ability to proclaim a clear connection between a pure gospel that affirmed unmerited and free grace, and a godly life led within a true, uncorrupted church. But the Moravian voyages brought into focus the disquietingly wide variety of opinions European Protestants continued to profess on such vital matters. Those diverse opinions did not, as some have mistakenly supposed, stand as markers on the road to “secularization.” That diversity should also make us wary of “reading religion as a form of veiled politics.” Rather, a new self-understanding accounts for the spread of a different kind of transoceanic European Protestantism over the next two centuries.Footnote ⁹

Slightly over a year after Gradin's voyage to Constantinople in the autumn of 1741, Johannes Steuchius, the Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, agreed, after initial reluctance, to receive a delegation of Moravians. After the conclusion of the Moravian Synod at Marienborn in the Holy Roman Empire across the Baltic, their leader, Gradin, disembarked at Stockholm. He counted on his facility in his native language and personal friendship with the bishop's son to improve the mission's chances for success. He had reasonable grounds for optimism. Zinzendorf had revealed his plan to Gradin as the former prepared to depart on an Atlantic voyage for Britain and North America. Laying aside temporarily his identity as a Moravian bishop, Zinzendorf intended to further his claim to be a Lutheran pastor while working in the British colonies. The Count, although eager to avoid antagonizing transplanted German Lutherans who had over time become deeply allergic to bishops, ordered Gradin to secure the Swedish hierarchy's recognition of the Moravians. Unlike the arguments he had been instructed to stress in Constantinople, here Gradin was to point to the Moravians' loyalty to the Augsburg Confession. In so doing, Gradin could prove that the Unitas Fratrum was not a heretical group as the Swedish bishops suspected. Zinzendorf knew that the archbishop needed to be reassured about the Augsburg Confession, the role of bishops, and the danger of pietism—the label that stood as a shorthand signal for too much reliance upon “works” of self-examination, spiritual struggle, and righteous behavior. The appeal to the Augsburg Confession's endorsement of bishops was intended to signal that the Moravians were a church, not a sect or a conventicle.

Long before the Reformation, western Christians struggled with at least four possible models of what the vexed term “church” meant. The claims of the papacy to be the absolute head and definer of what the church was and what it taught—summarized by the 1302 bull Unam Sanctam—had been contested by partisans of at least three other positions. Protestants found attractive the understanding of the church as the “congregation of the faithful” pioneered by Marsiglius of Padua, who had also insisted that there was no distinction among the ranks of ministers who should enjoy no coercive authority. Beyond the level of gathered local congregations, however, some Christians had worried about the need for a more universal authority to link local churches together, an arbiter competent to settle disputed teachings. In various forms, conciliarism—whose iconographic patron was Jean Gerson of Paris—understood the universal church in council to be the most ancient and apostolic manner of linking all Christian congregations. No one church could be self-sufficient; Rome was, after all, only a member, however venerable. This understanding roughly approximated that of the Eastern Orthodox who had long claimed that the Latins had excommunicated themselves by departing from this self-understanding. More radical Protestants, however, could draw upon William of Ockham's understanding. For Ockham, “The Church is real persons, not a real person. It is a sum of individuals, not a reality in its own right.” Rejected by the magisterial Reformers of the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican traditions, this radical understanding of the church regarding subjective, individual appropriation of God seemed to affirm what none of the other understandings did—that salvation could be had without overt membership in an identifiable church, no matter how much one quarreled over precisely where to locate it. Protestants of every stripe recognized that especially because of persecution, the “true” church could at times become hidden—but save for the most radical, most did not believe that it was unknowable, or invisible. In the aftermath of the religious wars of the seventeenth century, however, the renewal of the officially sanctioned Lutheran and Reformed churches and the experiments with both presbyterian and episcopal polities in England and Scotland left unresolved which of the understandings of church enjoyed the endorsement of European Protestants.Footnote ¹⁰

On October 16, 1741, that self-understanding still remained unclear. Intent on demonstrating the Moravian understanding of the church, Gradin presented the archbishop with his Latin history of the Brethren. He had completed this labor in preparation for his earlier embassy to Constantinople. Polycarp Müller and Bishop David Nitschmann had prepared a synopsis of Moravian history (also in Latin) prior to Gradin's departure. In it, they stressed the Moravian lineage from the martyred Jan Hus, invoked Luther's supposed approbation of the fifteenth-century Unitas, memorialized those persecuted by “papal acts of violence,” and summarized their diaspora from Bohemia to Poland and Prussia. Their recently deceased Berlin theologian and bishop Daniel Jablonsky, they pointedly noted, had been faithful to the Augsburg Confession. Through the Reformation's oldest confession, Moravians validated their Protestant self-understanding that stood unimpeachably in unbroken connection to the discipline and character of the ancient church. The awakening of both pagans and Christians had stirred up Satan's jealousy, papal harassment, and slander on the part of “un-Christlike Christians,” a not-so-obscure reference to the campaign against the Moravians then in full cry orchestrated by the German Lutheran pietist leader Gotthilf August Francke in Halle. To the Lutheran archbishop's suspicious queries, Gradin responded by pointing to Müller's and Nitschmann's argument that whenever the Moravians encountered “any Protestant church, we enjoy the great advantage of the episcopal office (bischöfliche Würde).”Footnote ¹¹

Gradin's rehearsal of Moravian self-understanding built on an attempt by Zinzendorf seven years before. After an encounter with the Swedish pietist Johann Conrad Dippel, Zinzendorf had sought permission to enter Sweden to promote his understanding of the renewed Protestant church. Although he apparently satisfied the doubts of the Swedish Lutheran Gregor Langemack at Stralsund, the king and the bishops of Sweden refused Zinzendorf's request. Zinzendorf had failed to convince the king that when Moravians came to a Protestant kingdom they—like his own Church and the Church of England—enjoyed “an advantage over all others.” Moravians refrained from insisting upon episcopacy because many Lutherans (despite their official confession) had come to oppose the office. That concession aroused suspicions that Zinzendorf was allied with Halle, and it ended his chances of entering Sweden.

Although the account of the 1741 meeting is Gradin's, (no Swedish version apparently survives) the Lutheran hierarch accepted Gradin's assurance that the Moravians were not preaching a doctrine of salvation by “works.” He pronounced himself happy with the history, and allowed Gradin access to Lutheran pulpits in the kingdom. Again, as in Constantinople, however, the Brethren did not seek, nor were they given, permission to celebrate a liturgy. In Sweden, the Mass using the agenda that had been given definitive form in the late seventeenth century was mandatory anywhere in the world Swedish Lutherans found themselves. That liturgy and all other sacramental rites approved by bishops remained for Sweden, as for Anglicans and the Orthodox, indispensable identifiers of a true, apostolic, primitive church.

Gradin artfully avoided the topic of worship and differing views of the sacraments and instead focused on Moravian understanding of the primitive Christian church, the role of the apostles, and the importance of bishops. He was apparently confident that the Swedes would be happy to hear that the Moravians affirmed the twenty-eighth article of the Augsburg Confession: “Consequently, according to divine right it is the office of the bishop to preach the gospel, to forgive sins, judge doctrine and reject doctrine that is contrary to the gospel, and exclude from the Christian community the ungodly whose ungodly life is manifest—not with human power but with God's Word alone. This is why parishioners and churches owe obedience to bishops.” Gradin was wholly unprepared for Steuchius's response. Steuchius, shrugging indifferently about the Moravian focus on ancient and apostolic polity, and content for the moment with their loyalty to the Augsburg Confession, nevertheless reminded Gradin that “one cannot really hold that the apostles and the first apostolic church actually possessed this or that form of organization.” In many ways, they had changed “from time to time depending upon circumstances.” Stunned, Gradin backpedaled, assuring Steuchius, that the Moravians understood that church order was not unalterable. But the conflation of the episcopal and presbyteral office—the understanding of Reformed and Lutherans in the Holy Roman Empire—unsettled Gradin, given Moravian self-understanding and the purpose of his mission. He needed from the Swedes what he had not succeeded in obtaining without conditions from the Orthodox—affirmation that the Moravians were a true, episcopally ordered apostolic church. If Uppsala would agree, then perhaps the Church of England would as well. He glumly reported that during the following meal he could not elicit any further substantive conversation. Only “indifferent matters” occupied the attention of his dinner companions.Footnote ¹²

The surprise Gradin received compels us to ask what Protestants understood to be the importance of bishops, liturgy, sacraments, and identification with the ancient, apostolic church. Since the sixteenth century, Protestants had been intent to prove that their teachings proclaimed a pure, scriptural Christianity flowing in unbroken doctrinal continuity from the time of the apostles. But it was apostolic doctrine—and preferably, a succession of bishops—they had identified as the link to ancient and unbroken apostolic church. Unfortunately, a majority of Europe's Catholic bishops had denounced Reformation prescriptions for remedying the Roman Church's maladies as novel, and hence, heretical. The Reformed tradition everywhere, and Lutherans within the Holy Roman Empire, insisted that scripture provided no clear line of demarcation between “overseers” and “elders” (bishops and presbyters.).

Although practices within the old Unitas remain unclear, Moravian “bishops” had always been vested with administrative and spiritual leadership. They were most commonly referred to as “Seniors,” chosen by lot and ordained by the laying on of hands. At no time did they exercise coercive authority; the founders of the Unity rejected any temporal power as part of the bishop's office. Although the source of Moravian episcopal validity lay in a clerical oligarchic selection, only bishops could ordain. The early Unity even sought confirmation of their historic connections to the ancient church by approaching Constantinople and a Waldensian bishop—an anticipation of what they again sought in Constantinople as the Renewed Unity in 1740. The last of the old bishops of the Bohemian–Moravian Unity who lived in exile in Poland, Johann Amos Comenius, like his predecessors in a priestly-episcopal oligarchy, ordained his own son-in-law, Peter Figulus, in 1662. Figulus's son, Daniel Ernst Jablonski (1660–1741) was ordained in 1699 to the post of senior for the Polish diaspora of the ancient Unity. Both Comenius and Jablonski had dedicated themselves to the union of the Protestant churches in Europe, but the insistence of the Unity on episcopal governance guaranteed both Lutheran and Reformed resistance within the Holy Roman Empire.Footnote ¹³

In 1593 the German Lutheran theologian Martin Chemnitz had sought to provide an argument that explained how Protestants could handle criticisms hurled by Catholic observers at such varied understandings of bishops and the church. If, Chemnitz postulated in the voice of a supposed opponent, “religion and faith are to be judged on the basis of antiquity, why, then, do we depart from the papistic religion, faith, and church, which can defend themselves by the pretext of many years?” It was not enough merely to cite scripture in response, Chemnitz asserted. The authority of the Bible lay beyond dispute for Protestants, but a sore point remained: who interpreted the scriptures correctly? “What is the true, ancient, and catholic sense of the Holy Scriptures?” Chemnitz rhetorically asked, rejecting the notion that “any new doctrine [is] to be set forth or new faith to be received in the church of God.”Footnote ¹⁴ But were bishops in council such authorities, or were they perhaps only to be thought of as representatives of the “congregations of the faithful”? The Augsburg Confession said clearly enough that bishops had the obligation to defend true doctrine—by the Word of God alone, of course—as did the Moravians. But Anglicans and Lutherans in Sweden did not hesitate to give bishops the authority to put such discipline into law. That a pastor had to be trained, called, and ordained under competent authority—for most European Protestants, ultimately the ruler of the political polity—was not disputed. But pastors, not bishops, remained the normal presiders at baptism and the Lord's Supper—the understanding of which Protestants also disputed.

Protestant understandings of episcopacy had remained so unsettled that by the early eighteenth century, W. L. Ward has concluded, that “in the Lutheran world Orthodoxy was a politics primarily of Saxony and secondarily of Sweden.”Footnote ¹⁵ The fierce defense of the Augsburg Confession in the former did not, however, conform to the understanding of that symbol in the latter realm. The Moravian voyages laid bare not only that disagreement over the pastoral office, the related issues of the sacraments, and the means to pursue and persevere in personal and communal holiness, but they also demonstrated that the concerns extended far beyond the two Lutheran territories. An older Protestant self-understanding that identified true bishops, sacraments, and liturgy as important elements of what it meant to be Protestant had tied Europe's dissenting Christians to the primitive, apostolic church whose true children they claimed to be. But Protestants had discovered that their self-understanding as the church did not emerge readily from subscription to a written confession, as the confessional strife of the late sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century demonstrated. The stalemate had frustrated Chemnitz, Comenius, and other Protestants who yearned for a cohesive front in the face of a reinvigorated and reformed Roman Catholicism. The bishops of Sweden's 1.4 to 1.5 million Lutherans, and Anglicans in England and Wales (perhaps 5.7 million), remained markers of this Protestant self-understanding, even measured against the dissent of Scotland and the Reformed and Lutheran bodies of the Holy Roman Empire. The Moravian attempt to enlist Constantinople's, then Uppsala's, and subsequently Canterbury's support triggered the last sustained,transoceanic Protestant discussion of this inherited self-understanding before it vanished.Footnote ¹⁶

Zinzendorf and David Nitchmann continued the Moravian tradition of seniors or bishops. The Renewed Unity had recently lost the Polish-born, Oxford-educated Daniel Ernst Jablonski, a firm defender of the Augsburg Confession, as the Gradin delegation reminded the Swedes. Without success, Jablonski, as the court preacher in Berlin had argued to both Lutherans and Calvinists that the episcopal office constituted a vital part of a truly scriptural, apostolic church in which he hoped (in vain) that a eucharistic agreement could bind together Lutherans, the Reformed, and Anglicans. His labors, however stillborn by his death, had made him a major European Protestant presence even before the Moravian renewal that began in the 1720s under Zinzendorf's leadership.Footnote ¹⁷ In Britain where the Moravians next took their transoceanic quest for episcopal validation, Jablonski counted many admirers within the Church of England. As a recipient of Anglican largesse, Jablonski had profited from charitable collections that created a scholarship at Oxford at the urging of the Unity's Senior Adam Samuel Hartmann in 1680. The Anglican Church enjoyed a resurgence of devotion to sacred space and liturgical performance in the last decades of the seventeenth century as Jablonski began his own labors, a renaissance that blossomed only to be caught “between a Catholic veneration of holy places and a radical Calvinist evacuation of church sanctity.” The resulting dilemma left the perplexed within the Church of England “propelled into wholly new domains of biblical study and innovative strategies of biblical interpretation.”Footnote ¹⁸ Those strategies paralleled the rise of the Moravians who clung to their understanding that the church of ancient and primitive origins and practice where the gathered congregations would hear the pure word of God truly proclaimed should include bishops.

If early evangelicalism appears by benefit of hindsight to have walked on unsteady infant legs, it did so because Protestants interested in spiritual renewal did not easily abandon the connection between the quest for the truly awakened soul's union with God and the piety of a community identified by bishosps and by Protestant sacraments. In most parts of the eighteenth century world, the Protestant church continued to be liturgical and sacramental in worship, and Anglicans, Swedish Lutherans, and Moravians remained episcopal on the crucial question of who guaranteed and perpetuated the community's worship life and self-understanding. The true church was visible—even if sometimes hidden from papal or state interference—where the Gospel was preached and sacraments celebrated. This Protestant understanding of the church (articulated in the sixth and seventh articles of the Augsburg Confession) resurfaced for examination in the 1740s. Hence, as consensus continued to elude European Protestants, undenominationalism bypassed the awkward question of what tied bishops to the ancient church, to fellow believers in the here and now, and to the vital issues of holiness now and salvation in the world to come.

Some observers of the Moravian voyages questioned whether Zinzendorf was honest in claiming to honor the Augsburg Confession's understanding of the church. His biographers have suggested (along with some of his contemporary critics) that he had been profoundly influenced by the radical “Philadelphian” understanding of a purely spiritualized, invisible church after a visit to Berleburg in 1730 and his meeting with the Swedish radical Johann Dippel. Confessing in 1720 to his early fascination with such neo-Ockhamite notions, Zinzendorf nonetheless rejected the Philadelphian dismissal of the various Protestant confessions as mere “sects.” The confessional traditions remained for Zinzendorf manifestations of the true church, and his acceptance of the old Unity's insistence on episcopacy demonstrated that he could never reconcile that acceptance with a purely spiritual or invisible understanding of the church and sacraments. His last show of willingness to dispense with episcopacy came in 1731 when he urged his Moravian followers to alter their historic identity and to be content to function within the established Lutheran Church of Saxony—to become, in short, a pietist renewal cell. His own son, however, in a famous incident, drew from the lot 2 Thessalonians 2:15 that admonished the Count to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught.” True to the ancient Unitas tradition, by 1743 Zinzendorf was no longer a Lutheran bishop for Moravians as he had once styled himself, but he reaffirmed the seniors' advisory spiritual role and their sole authority to ordain. He himself adopted the title Advocatus et Ordinarius Fratrum—leaving no doubt about where political and temporal power within the Moravian community was vested in its dealings with outsiders.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, whatever Zinzendorf's earlier ambivalence about bishops, Moravians remained clear on both the importance of the example of an episcopally ordered ancient church as the source of teaching, and their own worship practices that included foot washing, love feasts, and the celebration of the Lord's Supper.Footnote ²⁰ Now, for the last time in their history, Moravians, along with the fledgling Methodist movement, approached or seriously considered Orthodox Christian understanding of the importance of bishops, sacraments, and liturgy as the loci of transforming holiness in a truly ancient and apostolic church.Footnote ²¹

For subscribers to the Augsburg Confession, perhaps initially for John, and certainly for Charles Wesley, for High Church Anglicans, for a substantial number of the Reformed tradition, and for Moravians, the sacramental dimension of the Christian church—especially the importance of baptism and the Lord's Supper—remained indispensable reference points. The Moravian journeys triggered visceral reactions on the part of opponents, not merely because Moravians emphasized an emotive, experiential piety centered on the wounds of Christ. Nor did critics object primarily to their use of painting, hymnody, and incorporation of other cultures and languages in portraying and exemplifying their understanding of the ancient, apostolic church. But the Moravian voyages also forced reflection on the internal dimension of the bishop's and the sacraments' role in the reception and celebration of grace, a focus that in its turn demanded attention to just what that word “grace” meant and whether it was passively received or cooperatively pursued.

At first, Moravian celebrations of the Lord's Supper were so impressive and so central that they won the admiration of Anglican, Swedish Lutheran, some German-Lutheran, and even Roman Catholic observers. But initial approbation quickly dissolved into acrimony as Europe's Protestants asked what Lutherans, “pietists,” Moravians, Methodists or Anglicans actually believed about the consequence of sacramental worship. Did it matter if a bishop presided over such events? Did baptism or the Lord's Supper actually “change” the recipient, or were these acts merely declaratory statements (to use the theological jargon of the day) that reflected a “forensic” judgment on God's part that the sinner was now legally “justified” (but not really changed)? Reformed theologians favored a spiritual understanding of communion, but they affirmed that increasing sanctification of the elect resulted; strict Lutherans insisted upon an actual, physical presence of Christ in the elements but fiercely defended the forensic understanding. They argued that the communicant received a seal upon a justified standing before God, but most balked at the claim that the sacrament accomplished a growth in holiness. The pietists within Lutheranism insisted on a harrowing self-examination and appearance before a truly awakened Lutheran pastor before approaching the Lord's Supper. But their emphasis upon the recipient being truly “converted” and “reborn” (and possibly growing in holiness) struck critics as smacking of works-righteousness and an unacceptable mixing of sanctification with justification. Anglicans included High Church devotees of the sacrament as the means of grace, such as the Wesleys, but the Lord's Supper remained a seldom-celebrated memorial symbol for the more Reformed within the Church of England. Moravians affirmed a spiritual presence, as did the Reformed, who did not confess a physical presence of Christ in the elements and emphasized complete passivity in receiving marks of God's favor. These disagreements left the potential communicant uncertain whether a process of sanctification of the converted had been deepened and whether such corporate acts were really all that important relative to the person's standing with God.Footnote ²²

As a result, European and non-European Protestants alike during the 1740s increasingly took the inward turn we identify with the emphasis on a biblically founded conversion and heartfelt piety in directions that bypassed these unresolved questions. That turn did not necessarily imply that evangelicalism in its infancy disagreed with the older Protestant tradition about the need for worship and the pursuit of holiness. But the willingness to give up on trans-confessional reconciliation of such widely divergent understandings began to replace a dying Protestant self-understanding. We would be mistaken to assume that the emerging emphasis upon a biblical, evangelical identity meant that those still clinging to apostolic, confessional, and sacramental emphases shared nothing in common with the emerging self-understanding. The pursuit of holiness in a Protestant community of belief remained a shared objective. Agreement on what the church itself was and just how holiness was received or achieved, however, remained elusive.

II. Mysticism and the Religion of the Heart

Not surprisingly, the turn to the converted heart appealed not only to a key memory of Martin Luther's own experiential struggles but also drew upon even more ancient and venerable Christian convictions. Protestants had long relied upon a late medieval “heart-centered” spirituality they (correctly) believed Catholicism had marginalized. The mystically inclined opposition to scholastic, Aristotelian explanations of how body and spirit were related informed Protestants focused on the grace of God as free gift and good. Medieval reflections on the restoration of the image and likeness of God in fallen humanity held open the door to those intent on pursuing holiness of life now, as well as enjoying the fullness of grace in the life to come. But the emphasis on heartfelt conversion raised its own troublesome questions. On the one hand, the “objective” justification by grace through faith might be compromised if too much emphasis upon the sinner's pursuit of holiness was not tempered by the conviction that God, not human effort, saved. Even worse, by the eighteenth century, an increasing tendency among Protestant theologians to “impose boundaries on the bodily” had threatened the entire cardio-centric mystical tradition they inherited from the medieval church. Protestants had to fight to avoid reducing the importance of the conversion of the heart “to the status of a spiritual metaphor.” Worse still, by the eighteenth century, leading thinkers in the Protestant world found “the Christian soul problematized but the flesh an object of intensified disquiet and discipline … [that led elites to preoccupy] themselves with the elevation of the mind, that is, with a consciousness which, while distinct from the theological soul of the Churches, was equally distanced from gross corporeality.”Footnote ²³

Quarrels about bishops and pastors, and sacraments, quickly and inevitably raised questions about the relationship to and stewardship of individual and communal holiness and the means of grace. Personal, internal transformation lay at the heart of a trans-historical, trans-cultural identity reclaimed by Protestants from the ancient Christians, rescued from innovative papists. For conservative Lutherans, and for many Anglicans and Methodists, any discussion of interior piety “demanded expression in an ordered and exterior piety, and through a rootedness in the liturgy of the church.”Footnote ²⁴

In the midst of those unresolved questions about holiness of life, the renewal movement known as pietism had by the late seventeenth century further intensified disagreements. No definition of this renewal movement that had sought the rekindling of Protestant energies by the 1670s on the Continent adequately summarizes its complex set of positions and anxieties. The Swedish bishops, as Gradin knew, were not convinced that a reform of the state churches from within—the early stated objective of the pietist movement—could, or should, be advanced without attention paid to the liturgical worship and sacramental piety. Pietists, in their concern about a conversion of the heart and in their prescription for renewal of both individuals and communities, paid less and less attention to the sacraments as the movement developed and spread. Church pietists' disinclination to emphasize sacramental piety alarmed opponents because the partisans of renewal demanded evidence of a transformed heart in observable behavior. That demand, for critics, was evidence enough that pietists displayed an unwarranted confidence in individual human activity, one that smacked of the dreaded “synergism” or cooperation with grace. Pietist focus on spiritual struggle and conversion potentially threatened the key Protestant doctrine of justification by grace (a wholly unmerited gift) even among those Protestants who found that free grace delivered through objective means—the sacraments administered by evangelical bishops and pastors. But pietism, that to some degree influenced both Moravians and Methodists, did not cause such debates, itself developing and becoming transformed as a more evangelical Protestantism began to emerge by the 1740s. Pietism had emphasized “the religious experience of the individual … the representatives of an intensified holiness placed at the center of their faith the genuine renewal of humanity, the recovery through holy living of the image and likeness of God lost through the Fall.”Footnote ²⁵ As the new understanding of evangelical Protestantism took shape, intensified holiness and the renewal of the individual and society would receive increased attention; the focus on the image and likeness of God, would not.

For the Methodist movement, heartfelt religion had also begun rooted in sacramental mysticism. Charles—but not his brother John—maintained that focus in his hymnody, which was in turn influenced by strains of Orthodox Christian mysticism. John, by sharp contrast, though initially impressed by the Moravians he encountered in London, and with Arvid Gradin himself after a 1738 meeting in Germany, opted by 1741 for a struggle that included keeping commandments, vigilance, self-denial, taking up the cross, prayer and fasting, and “close attendance on all the ordinances of God” in the striving for “perfection in love.” John Wesley may not have understood Gradin correctly when the latter urged him to “repose in the blood of Christ,” that is, to remain wholly passive in the acceptance of grace. Gradin and Zinzendorf disagreed with Wesleyan “methods,” regarding them as wholly incompatible with the affirmation of justification by faith. The struggle for union with God that depended on sacramental participation for Charles described neither John's version of heart religion nor the mysticism of the Moravians, from which John distanced himself by the 1740s.Footnote ²⁶

Two encounters—one in London, the other in Philadelphia—separated only by months and yet another transoceanic voyage—revealed the disappearing sense of the church that had cautiously endorsed sanctification in sacramental holiness. On September 3, 1741, as Gradin was preparing his voyage to Sweden, Zinzendorf met John Wesley in the Gray's Inn Gardens in London in an abortive attempt to patch up relations with the emerging Methodist movement. Zinzendorf's question to Wesley guaranteed the failure of the meeting. The Count asked Wesley why he had no bishop to whom he was answerable. But the question about the Methodist movement's relationship to the episcopate sprang from a deeper concern. Zinzendorf had become agitated about what Wesley thought happened in this life regarding union with God in the sacraments of the church. Zinzendorf had already rejected notions of a process of sanctification, insisting upon a passive acceptance of unconditional and (apparently) irreversible grace. Moravians rejected the pietist Busskampf, or conversion struggle, Zinzendorf even hinting that the ethical strictures of the law had been abolished for the elect. Moravians increasingly stressed the most “forensic” interpretation of justification, claiming that the believer was wholly, passively dependent upon the grace of God—the very point on which Gradin had reassured Steuchius in Uppsala. John Wesley had moved beyond a concern for justification “into the area of spiritual experience,” in which his explanation of the doctrine of perfection that lay “at the center of his spirituality” and of which his essay A Plain Account of Christian Perfection stood as a summary. His focus remained slightly different from his brother Charles's (and the Eastern Orthodox) understanding of mystical union achieved through a lifetime of repentance and sacramental reception. Complete transformation to perfection for John Wesley remained a matter of the Spirit's work, independent of sacramental reception.Footnote ²⁷

Zinzendorf reiterated his own position, this time in Philadelphia near the end of his trans-Atlantic voyage to North America. He met the Göttingen-educated and Halle-trained Lutheran Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg on December 30, 1742. Their acrimonious argument appeared to revolve around the question of which European authorities rightfully oversaw pastoral activity among Lutherans. The question of who guarded the correct understanding of the Augsburg Confession revealed the deeper issue on the Count's mind. Mühlenberg produced letters that authenticated his ordination and call to three Pennsylvania congregations, thus resolving his legal standing under British law in Pennsylvania. Zinzendorf's primary concern, however, went beyond the question of who had sanctioned his opponent's pastoral role in North America. Zinzendorf had made good his claim to be a Lutheran pastor by taking possession of the chalice used in the Lord's Supper. He maintained that both Frederick Michael Ziegenhagen, Halle's representative in London, and Mühlenberg were not true Lutherans, but “arch-pietists,” guilty of a theology of works. The Count swore to inform the Anglican archbishop upon his return to Britain that the key Protestant teaching on justification had been destroyed by Halle's heterodox teaching. Zinzendorf appealed to episcopal oversight of church and sacraments where holiness, of the most “forensic” kind, was to be found.Footnote ²⁸

These clashes over grace and holiness made clear to Moravians, Lutherans, and Anglican-Methodists how multivocal European Protestantism remained when queried about the transformative possibilities of sacramental grace. In the more dominant Reformed tradition that shaped the Anglophone North American versions of Protestantism, the sanctification of the elect in the annual preaching and communion cycles also began to wane. Late seventeenth-century New Englanders, and more recently-arrived Scottish immigrants, had earlier cultivated various versions of sacramental piety. During the 1740s those practices and that focus disappeared. Gilbert Tennent's preaching emphasis on the “sacramental seasons” that had marked his early ministry, shifted by 1746 to appeals to interior transformation alone, absent any focus on sacramental grace.Footnote ²⁹ Jonathan Edwards, after maintaining a respectful silence in honor of his deceased grandfather, provoked the crisis of his life in 1748 when he rejected Solomon Stoddard's belief that “baptism, and the Lord's Supper, were not merely testimonial signs of a grace already felt and publicly acknowledge by the believer, but rather effectual means by which God might communicate grace to the believer.” For some in the New World's Reformed tradition, the rejection of sacramental grace interiorized faith to an unacceptably subjective degree. But those who objected could not reverse the flow of opinion within the Reformed tradition that mirrored the direction of increasingly evangelical streams within the Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, and Moravian communities.Footnote ³⁰

Protestant instincts to transcend disagreements over sacramental, liturgical grace and holiness received additional propulsion from the nature of baroque Catholicism. Although Catholic faithful did not commonly receive the Eucharist weekly, nonetheless, “integral to the mass, part of most processions and pilgrimages, central to the sacraments of confession and communion, and present at each believer's deathbed, the body and blood of Christ remained fundamental to Catholic practice and self understanding.” Of special importance within the Holy Roman Empire, where Protestant pietism grew in strength and numbers, “the Eucharist maintained its place at the center of the Catholic cult and Tridentine norms were generally followed across Germany.”Footnote ³¹ Confronted by renewed Catholic consensus and renewed emphasis upon sacramental grace, believers searching for an unambiguous understanding of their condition before God abandoned the mystical tradition of cardio-centric renewal and sacramental transformation of the believer (whether understood as one of a small “elect” or as one among a broader spectrum of humanity blessed with the free gift of grace). Attempts to link heart religion to a sacramental cultus within the church shifted to the emphasis on hearing or reading sermons of the converted, Bible reading, and engagement with the reform of personal and social behavior.

III. From Confessional Self-Understanding to Foreign Undenominationalism

Confessional Protestant self-understanding had frustrated seventeenth and early eighteenth-century attempts to present a united Protestant face to Catholicism. But the competing confessions had nonetheless provided identifiable issues around which attempts at trans-confessional discussions had to focus. By the 1740s, however, a more undenominational Protestant self-understanding managed to avoid further impasse by emphasizing biblical authority, experiential, individual conversion, and in some places, orchestrating a series of international revivals that in the long run had a deeper impact outside of Europe than within its geographic boundaries. The context for the growth of such undenominational Protestantism flowed from the undeniable fact that the Protestant confessions now found it increasingly difficult to chart for themselves—or for adherents overseas—a significant role in the public future of the European state as the older, perceived menace of an aggressive European Catholicism began to wane.

Most students of early modern European Christianity recognize the problematic nature of the term “confessionalization.” The term has been viewed with considerable skepticism when applied to persons and places outside the Holy Roman Empire. Historians of England, and later Great Britain, continue to disagree on whether England, or Britain, ever was a “confessional state.”Footnote ³² The entire discussion can appear irrelevant to historians of North America where Protestant establishments were weak and innocuous, and never very confessional.

Philip Benedict's concept of “weak confessionalization” provides a helpful insight for understanding the birthing of an evangelical Protestant future within and beyond Europe. Benedict suggests that formal confessional loyalties of the sort appealed to in the Moravian–Lutheran–Anglican–Methodist quarrels could no longer provide the basis for continued continental Protestant self-understanding absent resolution of the deeper historical disagreements that had long frustrated a united Protestant front against Catholicism.Footnote ³³ Weak confessionalization, however, allows us to grasp how loyalty at the local level to a specific form of Christianity could intensify, or be used to block opponents, even as, paradoxically, the geographically and historically deeper self-understanding of ancient and apostolic Protestantism articulated by official confessional voices became increasingly incoherent. By the 1740s Protestant theologians themselves began loosening their understanding of European politics as confessional, though “they feared that their catholic opponents still looked at the world through confessional spectacles.”Footnote ³⁴ For example, as Moravians endeavored to achieve recognition as an ancient and apostolic Protestant church, Lutheran Saxons in Transylvania could vigorously defend their own understanding of sacramental piety and religious art to re-enforce their communal self-understanding even as a less-confessionally focused Protestantism began to emerge within, but especially beyond, Europe.Footnote ³⁵

When Gradin first struggled to carry out Zinzendorf's orders to secure recognition of the Moravians in the face of both Swedish suspicion and Halle's enmity, France, Spain, and Prussia stood arrayed against Britain, Austria, the United Provinces, and Piedmont-Sardinia. By the end of the decade, confessional self-understanding that once informed Europe's diplomats blurred or vanished. The grandmastership of the Order of the Golden Fleece, Francis I's right to be recognized as Holy Roman Emperor, the conquest by British-American Protestants of the fortress of Louisbourg that was then returned to France by 1748 demonstrated how negligible the old self-understanding had become among the powerful in the calculus of a new Europe. Diplomats charged to move to national experiments with a new international order only glanced at religious confessions. Gradin's voyages occurred just as Protestant interest declined in maintaining an international sense of continuity with confessions that had once linked altar and pulpit to a prince. For European believers, the 1731–1732 expulsion of the Salzburger Protestants had appeared to confirm the need for Protestant princes who would protect the followers of the true gospel. That event, however, marked the beginning of the end, not the future, of Protestant self-understanding.Footnote ³⁶

As Gradin had emerged from his audience with Steuchius, he sought out allies among sympathetic countrymen. He paid special attention to two brothers who would soon succeed Steuchius as archbishop: the irenic polymath Eric Benzelius the Younger, and his conservative younger brother, Jacob. Gradin considered his encounter with the latter too delicate to commit to writing. He tersely noted “I visited him” (at Gothenburg). He then vigorously inked out several lines before sending his report back to Herrnhut. By contrast, Gradin praised Eric Benzelius, the bishop at Lindkoping, as “a very dear man who studied with Doct[or] Anton, Breithaupt, the old Prof. Francke, and other such men of God; who knows how to treasure their worth, and who is kindly disposed to the Brethren.”Footnote ³⁷

Gradin's memory of Protestant cooperation had been the young Eric Benzelius's actual experience when, as a student, he lived through Sweden's hesitancy about trans-confessional cooperation. Tentatively endorsing this at one point in the seventeenth century, Sweden's bishops later re-enforced the self-understanding of Swedish Lutheranism by insisting upon correct worship and obedience to their determination to protect the faithful from false doctrine. Benzelius's father managed to contain the yearnings of the pious for union with God within the liturgical worship tradition of the realm. Steuchius's father, Mathias, had been the architect of the laws that tied a religion of the heart to the liturgy and the bishops' shepherding role. By the 1720s the Swedish Church moved within the Riksdag to craft a punitive code of law aimed at extirpating pietist conventicles. Re-enforced in 1735, the laws' censorship provisions did not stop at the border of formal confessional subscription. The writings of German-language pietist authors, including those of Philip Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke, were banned as well.

No painting commemorates Gradin's appearance in Sweden, and for good reason. Shortly after meeting the Moravians, Archbishop Steuchius died, succeeded by Eric Benzelius the Younger. The Moravians thought they had every reason to rejoice since the new bishop's studies at Wittenberg and Halle made him a potential intermediary with the antagonistic Lutheran pietist center. As an added bonus, Benzelius was thought (erroneously) to be sympathetic toward the Church of England. Moravian failure to understand that the older, trans-confessional understanding of Protestants was dying is not surprising. The bewildering rapidity with which Sweden adopted a rigorous episcopal-sacramental profile, only to assume a guise that welcomed the Moravians before turning on them with bared teeth challenges our comprehension as much as the shifting winds that blew over the Baltic and the North Sea unsettled Gradin.

Late seventeenth-century contacts between Halle's August Hermann Francke and his list of some forty Swedish friends included the younger Benzelius. But Halle fell under the scrutiny of the Swedish bishops who harbored deep suspicions about the Prussian center. Daniel Jablonsky tried unsuccessfully to promote an episcopal polity in Brandenburg and Prussia, an ecclesial change repugnant to confessional Reformed and Lutheran clergy, and to August Hermann Francke. Jablonsky continued to hope that the Swedish monarch's decision in 1705 to give protection to Reformed congregations heralded the trans-confessional future for which Jablonsky had labored all his life. Jablonsky maintained a steady correspondence with the inspector of the bookstore at the Francke Foundations in Halle, but by 1711 his contacts ceased. Although he occasionally exchanged letters with the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury William Wake until 1736, Jablonsky never came to know the rising personalities in the Anglican episcopacy, Edmund Gibson and Thomas Secker. Nor did this younger generation of Anglican bishops cultivate or value the relationships with Halle or Sweden that Wake had assiduously pursued.

The Swedish hierarchs intensified their suspicions of Halle, reserving judgment on the Moravians because, as Johannes Steuchius confessed in 1741, he knew less about them. He knew Halle, however. When August Hermann Francke was elected corresponding member of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in London in 1701, he chose Jakob Böhme to serve as chaplain to Lutherans at the Court of Saint James. Böhme scandalized the Swedes: he had never been ordained by other pastors, much less by a bishop. Böhme—so it was rumored—was responsible for encouraging the itinerant pietist tailor Johann van Dieren in the British colony of New York to the dismay of Justus Falckner, the German-Lutheran pastor in New York, and his Swedish colleagues.Footnote ³⁸

Had Gradin studied the history of the German-speaking parish of Saint Gertrude in Stockholm, he might have been forewarned against the bishops' bewildering shifts toward and against trans-confessionalism. Saint Gertrude's had received its charter in 1571 from King Johann III who encouraged the German-speaking merchants to call their own pastor and to use collections and bequests under the direction of Kirchenvorsteher to build their church on the grounds of the Dominican cloister. King Charles in 1598 instructed the German congregation to put control of its affairs in the hands of six elders; to that command were now added six “Beisitzer” and twice the number of Vorsteher. The king's Calvinist sympathies had guaranteed control exercised by an elite group of merchants, both Reformed and Lutheran.

Confirmed by Gustavus Adolphus in 1612, St. Gertrude's privileges were renewed in 1646 by Queen Christina. The elders—elected for life terms—exercised real authority alongside the two Vorsteher. But the crown tightened episcopal and priestly control in 1690. It imposed a six-member committee to act as a senate over the elders and to settle differences between laity and clerics. The senior pastor was now listed first before the elders and Vorsteher in all proceedings. Eric Benzelius the Elder had crafted the new ecclesiastical law code of 1686, and St. Gertrude's pastors who served after its implementation suffered because of their connections to Halle. Georg Johan Conradi began preaching five years after the king had appeared to soften his stance in 1705, urging his reluctant bishops toward increased correspondence with German theologians and students. Benzelius protested, warning the monarch that Halle was the source of Lutheran heterodoxy. Conradi did nothing to allay the archbishop's suspicions, issuing sharp polemics against the hierarchs who had him expelled in 1721, severing the fragile tie between Halle and Sweden.Footnote ³⁹

Mathias Steuchius approved the expulsion, concentrated his attention upon missionary efforts among the Lapplandians, and oversaw the passing of the 1726 anti-conventicle act. His son Johannes, the man who greeted the Moravians in the autumn of 1741 guided the Riksdag's 1735 act re-enforcing censorship laws and mandating strict enforcement of the 1726 act. By suppressing even the most innocuous Swedes interested in heart religion and the conversion struggle, the bishops drove underground and radicalized many who turned their attraction to the non-liturgical emphasis on interior conversion and now flocked to hear Moravian preachers. Gradin was aware of recent events but was caught unawares as the pendulum arc between confessionalism and cooperation swung with increasing speed when the Benzelius brothers, Erik, Jacob, and Henrik, became archbishops in 1742, 1744, and 1747.Footnote ⁴⁰

Eric Benzelius personified the death of the older trans-confessional self-understanding. Born in 1675 as one of eight sons, he followed his father who had spent two years in the 1660s visiting universities at Copenhagen, Paris, Oxford, Leiden, and several in the Holy Roman Empire. Beginning his own career as librarian at the University of Uppsala, the younger Benzelius imbibed learning at Wittenberg and Halle and was consecrated bishop of Linkoping. From there he was named Archbishop, though he died before his consecration. The brother-in-law of Emmanuel Swedenborg, Benzelius was a dedicated Cartesian, corresponding with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz on the importance of founding a Swedish academy of science modeled on the Royal Society in London. Benzelius enjoyed the friendship of the latitudinarian Anglican bishop Gilbert Burnet and expressed interest in uniting the Anglican and Lutheran churches.Footnote ⁴¹ But an alliance between the two Protestant Episcopal churches faltered on the predictable confessional differences over the sacraments that Benzelius declared insuperable. By 1736 he informed Ernst Salomon Cyprian, a later Lutheran critic of Moravian liturgical innovations, that “The Anglican Church is more favorably inclined toward Calvinism than to our Evangelical Church.” It was best, he concluded, not to write any more on this sensitive issue.Footnote ⁴²

Benzelius's early correspondence expressed warm regard for his Halle professors. He waxed poetic in a 1698 letter to Johann Andreas Schmidt of Helmstedt about Joachim Justus Breithaupt whose colloquium he had attended. A 1699 letter to Burchardt Gotthelf Struve at Jena underscored his regard for the man who joined a faculty that, in 1712, Benzelius applauded for having appointed the illustrious man. He referred to the “celebrated Dr. Francke” in another. But by the 1720s, Benzelius befriended the conservative Hamburg pastor, Johann Christoph Wolf, who dominated the pulpit at Saint Catherine's until his death in 1739, and correspondents in Wittenberg, Leipzig, and other anti-pietist strongholds. In 1727 he bewailed the state of the Swedish Church, blaming its faltering condition on the “fanatics” who followed Johann Dippel, the very man Zinzendorf had so admired. Benzelius refrained from tracing the roots of Dippel's fanaticism back to Halle. The Swedish Riksdag was not as reticent.Footnote ⁴³ By the time of Francke's death in 1727, direct correspondence between Sweden or via London had declined sharply,Footnote ⁴⁴ and Benzelius remained interested in Halle's activities, but beyond, not within, Europe. He eagerly read the Tranquebar reports from Danish and German missionaries who continued to write, and at such a distance, remained unaware of Benzelius's sudden death, asking to be remembered to him “with most humble respect.”Footnote ⁴⁵

With his death, Moravians fell under severe attack, and those repercussions extended to British North America as well. Eric Benzelius's younger brother Jacob became archbishop and launched a full-scale campaign against Moravians, one continued after his death in 1747 by his younger brother Henrik.Footnote ⁴⁶ Oversight of the Swedish Church in its former North American colony had passed directly into the hands of the archbishop in Uppsala in 1735,Footnote ⁴⁷ and memories of the itinerant Van Dieren's activities in New York still lingered, dooming not merely trans-confessional but even intra-confessional cooperation.Footnote ⁴⁸

Swedish Lutheran clergy, subsidized by stipends from the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, had served Church of England parishes in North America but only rarely congregations of German-speakers. Pastor Andreas Rudman, ordained in 1696, had presided over the ordination of the Halle graduate Justus Falckner under an extraordinary one-time bestowal of Swedish royal and episcopal authority in November of 1703. But Falckner's ordination was unique, no harbinger of confessional solidarity between Swedish and German Lutherans.Footnote ⁴⁹ Instead, Swedish and German Lutheran, Anglican, and Moravian relationships were steered by “deep-seated ideological and religious differences between the two Lutheran churches,” an extension of the failed attempts within Europe to come to terms with the issues that had long divided Protestants. Nor was the later absorption of Swedish Lutherans by Protestant Episcopalians in North America predestined. Eric Benzelius's doubts about Halle were more than matched by his dislike for the Church of England's Reformed tradition. An alliance between Swedish Lutherans and Anglicans grew ever more unlikely during the 1740s. The North American failure to unite Swedish with German Lutherans was shaped by Gradin's initially successful voyage to Sweden. Swedish episcopal suspicion remained focused upon Halle as the bishops concluded that the university and the Francke Foundations, despite surface adherence to the Augsburg Confession, promoted a suspect brand of the faith.Footnote ⁵⁰ Anglicans who had earlier expressed their hopes that episcopal polity would be adopted by Protestants on the Continent now hardened hopes into demands in the voice of Thomas Secker. His insistence upon a sacramental, episcopally governed Church beyond Europe flew in the face of what was already emerging from the birth pangs of evangelical Protestantism.

Secker's February 1741 sermon in London before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel gave Moravians reason to think that their appeal to episcopacy and trans-confessional cooperation Gradin would make six month later in Uppsala would fall on favorable ears. Instead, this former dissenter whose meteoric rise would end with his becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, wanted Anglican, not Moravian, bishops in North America, and he said so. He lamented the 1749 Act of Parliament, asking why Moravian bishops should be recognized, but no one consecrated an Anglican bishop in North America.Footnote ⁵¹ Despite the real growth in an Anglican numbers, North America had remained a source of worry to the hierarchy. Liturgical worship languished as the anguished Thomas Dell informed the Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, Secker's patron: “What will your Lordship say, when the inferior officers here are as deficient in Chh. Duties as the meanest, & are especially wanting, in my Parish I mean, in the duties of the Sacrament, nor will be made conformable to the Liturgy of the Chh, so as to bear a part in its service either by proper gestures or responses, & those who bear the denomination of Xtians, are 10 times worse than infidels.” A decade later, Anglican Commissary James Blair did little to improve matters as the Aberdeen Scot did not incline toward sacramental piety for the antidote to doctrinal or behavioral laxity. Blair, like Dell, lamented the spread via “our masters of ships” of “Infidelity” but confined his prescription to the vague hope: “by the pains of Your Lordship and other learned men have taken … that they will make no great progress in their atheistical designs.”Footnote ⁵²

German Lutherans arriving in increasing numbers in North America by the 1740s had neither commissary, nor dean, nor bishop, and harbored inherited suspicions of these offices and of pastoral discipline over access to the Lord's Supper. Swedish Lutheran hierarchs, recognizing confessional disagreements with Anglicans, doubted their fellow subscribers to the Augsburg Confession, first on the Continent, then in North America.Footnote ⁵³ In the Delaware River Valley of North America, the reverberations from the Moravian success in Sweden provoked a violent counter-reaction by 1745 that doomed trans-confessional cooperation among transplanted continental Protestants. Long-standing aspirations of Swedish merchants and their German-speaking counterparts for union between Swedish and German-speaking Lutherans vanished for good. Despite surface appearances, the relationship between the Church of England and the Swedish Lutherans remained tense. The Swedish dean who arrived in the wake of the conflict, Carl Wrangel, would remain critical of the Anglicans, maintain a deep personal friendship with German Lutheran pastor Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, and denounce the Moravians.Footnote ⁵⁴

Swedish Lutheran-turned-Moravian Lars Thorstensson Nyberg later claimed that he had been warned by the Lutheran Archbishop prior to own his departure for North America to be on his guard against the “ungodly Hallensians.” Another Swedish Lutheran pastor voiced his opposition to Swedish–German cooperation in North America by appealing to practical difficulties—too many Germans had arrived; too much Swedish property would fall under others' control; too few people spoke both languages. His objections underlined how inadequate confessional subscription had become to overcome the actual experience of worship that for the Swedes remained sacramental with rituals stipulated by bishops intent on preserving true doctrine. German-speaking Lutherans did not feel at home with the Swedish Agenda of 1691 that made visible the sacramental centrality of worship and left no doubt that ordination could occur only with specific royal and episcopal warrants. Lutherans from the Holy Roman Empire could not contemplate a restoration of episcopacy increasingly insisted upon by Anglicans without implicitly conceding that Catholic critics had been right all along, and risking the rise of Protestant bishops who might wield temporal power to boot.Footnote ⁵⁵

By the late 1740s, Anglican High Churchmen dominated the bishopric of London, and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The SPCK, so important in its connections to Halle, had in contrast, been shaped by its lay members. Episcopal governance never emerged as an issue because the society's basic purpose—the reformation of society by education—had rendered cooperation with Francke's objectives relatively easy. But the Church of England increasingly regarded episcopal governance as a non-negotiable identifying mark of Protestant self-understanding. They had tolerated the Holy Roman Empire's Lutherans making do with mere superintendents but wondered now with increasing frequency why the Germans did not avail themselves of episcopal ordination at the hands of the Swedes—or themselves.Footnote ⁵⁶ Henry Melchior Mühlenberg confronted this question in Pennsylvania and refused to concede that episcopacy was anything other than a perhaps desirable but nonetheless “indifferent” detail of church polity.Footnote ⁵⁷

Mühlenberg's position reflected his university training and the weakened but still potent capacity of European confessional politics to influence debates over Protestant self-understanding beyond European shores. The theological faculty at the University of Göttingen, Muhlenberg's alma mater, remained insistent upon unqualified subscription to the Augsburg Confession as the marker of Lutheran self-understanding, even as their counterparts in Sweden found common subscription inadequate to address Swedish–German Lutheran disagreements in North America. Göttingen in 1749 refused to bestow a doctorate upon an Anglican “on the grounds that to confer such a dignity on a man who did not subscribe to the Augsburg Confession would damage the reputation of the place.” In England, Anglicans, not unlike their Swedish counterparts increasingly “believed that what mattered about the English Church was what distinguished it from the continental churches, and they could never really swallow either the political or religious consequences implied by the coalition politics of the Grand Alliance against France.”Footnote ⁵⁸

IV. Implications

The later successes of European Protestant missions overseas bypassed these concerns that had once sustained debates about the content and profile of a primitive, apostolic church. The older self-understanding had taken seriously the possibility of a protestant episcopate and shared communion that would vindicate Protestant claims in the face of a vigorous challenge thrown down by a reformed post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism to be the historic church. Despite the partial extension of confessional-state church traditions and structures beyond the shores of Europe, increasingly the model of the church that appealed to Protestants abroad (and to a lesser degree within Europe) appeared to be Ockham's, composed of “real persons” whose real “experience” of the holy was non-sacramental. The more radical thinking about the church traditionally associated with Anabaptists and Spiritualists actually bore fruit beyond the bounds of those societies, and “later revivalistic movements inherited … the Anabaptist focus … not so much [upon] the inward experience of the grace of God” but in their sense of the sacral that did not depend upon ritual, sacramental means of grace nearly as much as association with like-minded individuals and groups grounded in biblical knowledge. This kind of Protestant emerged as someone dedicated to “renewal in character and conduct,” who increasingly could carry the potential for social and political transformation into the reform movements Protestantism became identified with in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁹

The fragmentation of early evangelicalism lamented by W. R. Ward reflected its stunted growth within Europe but not its adolescence abroad. Awakenings and revivals, in specific European locales and in a “promiscuously Protestant environment” of North America became new instruments wielded by itinerants even as Europe's institutionalized emphasis upon “doctrine, creedal formularies, and orthodox liturgies” intensified within Europe itself and thus retarded the growth at home of the evangelical child whose emergence from infancy we have been scrutinizing.Footnote ⁶⁰ The turn inward of the old SPCK after the 1740s, for example, encouraged Protestants abroad who had been the objects of attention to develop their own resources as the society “placed itself firmly in England and hardly concerned itself with the world beyond Calais.”Footnote ⁶¹ Paradoxically, the transoceanic voyages of the Moravians had made major contributions to the increasing patterns of better-informed Europeans who enjoyed improved geographic knowledge and received news of religious awakenings, revivals, and disputes in correspondence, networks of communication, and increased awareness but whose inherited church structures partially impeded the impact of this evangelical turn. The foreign successes of the burgeoning Methodist movement, the Moravians, and pietist-inspired continental Protestants in subsequent awakenings and revivals, proved to be of global consequence. This evangelical profile of Protestantism beyond Europe makes more sense, however, if we first acknowledge the 1740s transoceanic voyages and what can seem to be petty, repetitive, and never-ending Protestant disputes over the understanding of the church. By the 1740s, a Protestant rebirth that emerged from the demise of an older self-understanding meant that the pursuit of holiness shifted to the experiential, and to biblically based exhortations to change behavior, in already transplanted Protestant cultural groups, through revival-inspired transformations of the individual soul in like-minded, non-confessional groups. The consequences for the kind of Protestantism that grew beyond the shores of Europe were momentous.Footnote ⁶²

Various neo-confessional movements persisted, as did the formal tie of several churches to European courts. But to the extent that they endured, those movements remained marginal and did not shape the later self-understanding of Protestantism unless such groups adopted for themselves at least parts of a more evangelical self-understanding. Moravians continued to consecrate seniors, but they gave up on asking that other Protestants recognize the importance of that office and emphasized increasingly the priesthood of believers far more than the importance of the episcopal office.Footnote ⁶³ A willingness to rely on bishops as administrators of the burgeoning Methodist movement, though important, did not help to reconcile the confused and contradictory voices that had once called for trans-confessional episcopal and sacramental cooperation, but whose discord had degenerated into cacophony in the wake of the 1740s Moravian voyages.Footnote ⁶⁴

The pietist movement itself, originally focused on the goal of internal renewal of the older Protestant churches, took for granted at least some role for sacraments, the medieval cardio-centric mysticism, and a disciplined struggle for re-birth. But it was itself altered by transoceanic voyages that by the end of the eighteenth century made the once-ferocious debates over justification versus sanctification appear quaint and dated. Protestants of every variety may have continued to insist that theirs was a faith based on scripture alone, and that faith was a pure gift of unmerited grace. In fact, they expected to experience, and in some degree to participate actively in, a religion of the heart that emphasized individual, personal conversion, as well as choosing to whom they would listen, and with whom they would associate.Footnote ⁶⁵

Even if we concede the triumph of neo-Ockhamite Protestant associations of the pious, some have rightly questioned whether even free church missionaries who began to flourish abroad in the later eighteenth century avoided any more than did their established church counterparts becoming agents of European imperialism. The version of Protestantism that began to emerge in the 1740s among Moravians, Methodists, and pietists alike was one marked especially by their efforts beyond the European continent to spread the Gospel via the “contribution of education through schools and colleges. Christianity, especially in its Protestant forms, was a religion dependent on literacy which alone made it possible for converts or others to read and study the Bible … however, it is particularly important to remember that those who ran … [schools] were quite unable to prevent non-Europeans from exploiting mission education for other than religious ends.” Non-European Protestants learned to hear and to read the Bible but turned the language of their newly found faith to their own purposes and understandings not always in conformity to the understandings of their European elders. That process would eventually be recognized as inevitable, and perhaps the best vindication of their spiritual parents who had themselves entered the world upon the death of the older self-understanding of Protestantism that had preceded them.Footnote ⁶⁶

Twentieth-century analyses of Protestant capacity to change culture and behavior have rightly emphasized the primacy of change in belief. Protestants had to confront “three levels of culture: behavior and rituals, beliefs, and worldview” before they were mature enough to spread a message beyond Europe. Pietist and evangelical focus on change in behavior rooted in biblicism complete with an expanded role for a (predominantly male) laity emerged with the demise of a Protestant self-understanding that had once worried about bishops and sacraments, remnants of medieval mysticism, and confessional purity that had once even been willing to look to the Orthodox East for affirmation.Footnote ⁶⁷

The half-forgotten transoceanic voyages that had sought contacts with the Orthodox Patriarchates, however, disappeared for good. Danish–German pietist conversations with the Orthodox in Tranquebar, exchanges between the Orthodox and Moravians in Egypt and Turkey, or interest by Halle's theologians in Greek and Russian Orthodox, all collapsed in mutual frustration. Europe's Protestants could not affirm Orthodox understanding of the church in which sacramental participation was part and parcel of a life-long process of converting the heart that led to transformed behavior that in turn led to union with God. Nor would the model of the universal church meeting in a general council (still the Orthodox manner of dealing with contested teachings) play a role in the new Protestant self-understanding. Contacts with the Orthodox vanished after the 1740s when a land journey by Gradin to Russia ended badly with his imprisonment by the Empress Elizabeth. There he languished before finding his way back to a transformed Protestant landscape.Footnote ⁶⁸ Because of the stalemate that developed within European Protestantism over how to resolve conflicting understandings of the ancient and apostolic church, Protestant interest in how and whether a believer could achieve the restoration of the image and likeness of God also became marginal. Those fascinated by that possibility turned to the characteristics of humanity itself, and proponents, in a richly ironic turn, became spokespersons for the rationalist “religion of the learned.” Anglicans who supported the overtly confessional Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and increasingly saw their role as part of a “sustained and conscious construction of empire,” remained unhappy with the “irregularity” of Lutheran ordination. Long negotiations in India that had allowed Halle's Lutheran clergy to serve in rare instances as Anglican priests were subjected to blistering criticism. The position paper on the problem, however, was quashed in favor of undenominational Christianity that in fact, served the purposes of empire, even while partially vindicating evangelical refusal to be trapped in never-ending quarrels about episcopacy and the stillborn attempts at confessional trans-cooperation.Footnote ⁶⁹ The infancy of a confessionally blurred Protestantism that greeted itinerant ministers and a laity devoted to “an experience of conversion that expanded the possibilities for self-fashioning” occurred during the 1740s because of the transoceanic birth pangs whose discomfort we have followed.Footnote ⁷⁰ The unraveling of the earlier self-understanding had been provoked by the transoceanic journeys of Gradin, Zinzendorf, the Wesley brothers, and European Protestant clerics in the Ottoman Empire, Europe, North America, and India.

The older European Protestant self-understanding that had invoked the ancient, apostolic church did not inform much of Protestant witness beyond Europe. Two centuries later, as the “global South” Christians (often led by Bible-centered evangelical bishops and even pentecostals edging toward the use of the episcopal title) now assert themselves, their diverse and fluid understanding of Christianity is nonetheless commonly marked by the focus on the experiential—in physical and spiritual healing, the casting out of the demonic, and knowing how to deal with persecution, the prescriptions for which are all firmly rooted in biblical texts. This “next Christendom,” too, will have to confront the question of self-understanding. The death of the European Protestantism created by the Reformation simultaneously birthed its heir two and half centuries ago.Footnote ⁷¹ Recognizing the transoceanic context in which this profound change occurred can profitably deepen our attempts to understand and interpret the subsequent history of Protestantism accordingly, and possibly, its future trajectory.