I. The Magdeburg Edition in Context

The Magdeburg edition of Edwards's Faithful Narrative originated in Kloster Berg. Berg was a secularized monastery near the city of Magdeburg, where Steinmetz was the Lutheran abbot and worked as director of a Pietist school as well as managing an extensive publishing enterprise from 1732 until his death in 1762.Footnote ¹⁶ For the Prussian-ruled Duchy of Magdeburg he also served as general superintendent and Konsistorialrat (“consistorial councilor”). Before Steinmetz entered Prussian services, the Leipzig-trained theologian had served as a minister for the Lutheran minority in the principality of Teschen in Upper Silesia. There he had been responsible for a significant local awakening that led to his expulsion by the Catholic Habsburg authorities in 1730. With good reason, W. R. Ward has described this Silesian awakening under Steinmetz's spiritual leadership as an important catalyst for the larger Protestant evangelical awakening that swept through the Atlantic world over the next three decades.Footnote ¹⁷

Steinmetz and his school were closely affiliated with Pietist circles and institutions in Halle, the nearby capital of the Duchy, where the university and the famous Francke Foundations (founded in 1698) thrived under the sympathetic rule of Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm I (ruled 1713–1740). In frequent contact with Gotthilf August Hermann Francke (1696–1769), who had taken over the Foundations after his father's death in 1727, Steinmetz clearly was a “Hallensian” theologically and politically even if he attempted to stay out of any polemical debates or conflicts and took a mediatory position in the conflicts with Count Zinzendorf (1700–1760), with whom he had a long-lasting, if never entirely friendly, relationship.Footnote ¹⁸ While Steinmetz did not pen any major theological works, he was extremely productive as a compiler and editor of devotional literature, and frequently wrote lengthy introductions and annotated writings which he helped get into print.Footnote ¹⁹ Through his labors as editor, both for German translations of religious books from the English-speaking world, and, especially, for several widespread devotional journals, Steinmetz also became one of the most important interpreters of the revivals in Britain and its American colonies for a mainstream Pietist audience in the Holy Roman Empire.Footnote ²⁰

A corresponding member of the British Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Steinmetz commissioned translations of and prefaced numerous works by Anglophone evangelical writers before and after the edition of Edwards's Faithful Narrative, including several works by Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge's New Testament commentary The Family Expositor (4 vols., 1739–1756), and James Robe's A Faithful Narrative of the Extraordinary Work of the Spirit of God at Kilsyth, and other Congregations in the Neighbourhood near Glasgow (1742).Footnote ²¹ Among the many reviews and translations from English-language works in his journals, we also find a good number of texts from the colonies, most of which were connected to the revivals of the 1740s.

From 1735 onward, Steinmetz was editor-in-chief of the Sammlung Auserlesener Materien zum Bau des Reichs Gottes (“Collection of Selected Materials for the Building of God's Kingdom”) and its three subsequent incarnations under slightly different titles.Footnote ²² Besides the Sammlungen, of which each edition regularly sold around 2,000 copies reaching in total approximately 24,000 and 40,000 readers,Footnote ²³ Steinmetz also edited between 1737 and 1742 the Theologia pastoralis practica (1737–1758), a vocational journal for pastors. Each of these journals was essentially aimed at promoting experiential religion and practical piety by featuring or reviewing devotional literature and theological treatises, as well as by offering readers concrete models of godly living in the form of exemplary biographies and pious letters. At the same time, they provided news reports from foreign countries and churches, especially from the British world, which were seen as signaling the advancement of God's kingdom. Thus, the Steinmetz journals apprised their readers of the founding of the Methodist movement, the development of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, church-building among Lutheran emigrants to Georgia and Pennsylvania, the preaching tours of George Whitefield, as well as reporting on the different regional revivals in England, Scotland, and the colonies.Footnote ²⁴

Steinmetz first drew the attention of his readers to the developments in New England in 1738, when a news report in the Sammlungen mentioned a revival account just printed in London, reporting of a veritable “miracle of divine grace” in the colonial town of Northampton, which “would give pause to many people in our Germany, too, and would prove to be a blessing to them, if it would be made known in all of its circumstances.”Footnote ²⁵ Steinmetz then announced a German translation of the entire text, which appeared just in time for the Easter book fair at Leipzig that same year.Footnote ²⁶

While Jonathan Edwards's name does not appear on the front page (the identity of the author is only revealed in the translated preface by Watts and Guyse), Steinmetz's name and titles are featured very prominently, lending credence and an air of official approval to the content. He also contributed a forty-six-page introduction (dated April 18, 1738) to the edition and numerous annotations, which also suggests that the work was primarily intended for private, silent reading and not for devotional use in public. However, the actual translation, as becomes clear from a remark in the introduction, was done by an unnamed teacher at the school in Berg, where English was part of the curriculum, which was quite unusual for the time.Footnote ²⁷ Clearly, the translator was highly learned and had considerable experience. Like Steinmetz's journals, the book was obviously geared to more educated readers, especially pastors, with intellectual interests and literary taste, as well as to libraries. The translation of the Magdeburg edition was executed with great care and is highly refined. While the anonymous English teacher was faithful overall to the content of the original, he frequently opts for a nonliteralist, sometimes free-wheeling approach in terms of both grammar and diction. There is a discernible and quite successful effort to match the sentimental, often poetical quality of Edwards's language with a rhetorical register of eighteenth-century German that betrays the influence of Pietist poetry and the discourse of Empfindsamkeit. While the translator mostly took liberties with the original for stylistic reasons, he sometimes also attempted to soften some doctrinal differences with Edwards's Calvinism by subtle linguistic modification—a considerable accomplishment that required language skills as much as theological sophistication. Some examples for this will be discussed below in direct comparison with the Reformed translation.

The sophistication of the translation would have done much to facilitate the reception of the Faithful Narrative by taking the edge off of some of its cultural and religious “alienness.” Generally, Steinmetz approaches this “alienness” with a mixture of a lot of Pietist ecumenism and some mild Lutheran confessionalism. Already in the introduction, Steinmetz asserts his identity as a Lutheran theologian, while admonishing his audience not to get distracted from a fruitful reception of Edwards's work by focusing on doctrinal differences. Readers who might have qualms about him “advocating events as a glorious work of God that took place in a church that differs from ours in several teachings,” are told to rest assured “that I presently am and will continue to be heartily devoted to the truths that are asserted in our Symbolic Books in accordance with the Word of God.” But precisely because he was a good evangelical Christian, Steinmetz slyly adds, “he would be ashamed to set narrow bounds to the great God and redeemer in his universal grace.”Footnote ²⁸

Quite conscious of the Calvinist background of the American revivals, Steinmetz is obviously concerned that Edwards's Narrative “contained one thing or the other that with regard to the opinions reflected therein, the manner of writing, or the circumstances described, might not be pleasing to all readers.”Footnote ²⁹ On the one hand, Steinmetz thus presents his edition under the explicit assumption that, as the introduction puts it, “God has mercifully allowed our [Lutheran] church to teach more in accordance with Scripture on one or the other point.”Footnote ³⁰ On the other hand, he reminds his audience in the spirit of Pietist ecumenism that the invisible church of true believers transcends denominational lines and that true experiential religion and practical piety trumps superiority on the fine points of academic theology. On these grounds, he encourages readers to take an attitude of critical emulation that tests everything and holds fast to that which is good (1 Thess. 5:21–22).

By mapping out a reading strategy that seamlessly moves between confessional self-assertion and ecumenical openness, Steinmetz seems to have thought that his audience would mostly be able to come to terms with Edwards. He felt confident in presenting the text in unabridged form—with one minor exception, as will be discussed below. The preface and numerous, often very substantial, footnotes are meant to help readers further. The primary purpose of this preface and the footnotes is to address “what could be offensive in any way, or give rise to differing opinions or even agitate readers,”Footnote ³¹ but they also offer background information. Obviously expecting much curiosity about the churches in the American wilderness, the preface provides an extensive historical framework in which to position Edwards's narrative. Drawing mostly on Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Steinmetz gives a very sympathetic survey of New England's church history that explains the origins and the peculiar nature of American Puritanism with respect to its theology and especially its Congregational church organization.

When compared to churches at home, Steinmetz writes, the American Puritans, like their dissenting brethren in England, were closest to the German Reformed and thus divided from the Lutherans on numerous fine points of dogma and ecclesiology. But they have “from their first beginnings until the present been very determined (as we, thank God, are too) to pursue the Gospel of Christ and His reconciliation, the doctrine of justification by faith alone etc. as more than ethical teachings, and to show the souls from these right sources the way to true blessedness.”Footnote ³² What is more, New England history gave ample proof that Puritans practiced what they preached and had developed a church tradition animated by a lively, experiential piety and an ardent desire for holiness, in which there was much to admire or even emulate. Commenting on the Cambridge Platform, for instance, Steinmetz finds praise for its policy “regulating the admission of members into the community of the church”—a truly remarkable statement for a Lutheran superintendent that reflects the Pietist frustration with indiscriminate state churches.Footnote ³³

In this spirit of ecumenism Steinmetz points out that the Anglican Church as well as the English Dissenters on both sides of the Atlantic “have also been showing much love . . . to our church,” and draws his readers' attention to the many religious affinities as well as personal ties between New England Puritanism and Lutheran Pietism in the past. For this the “most honest and learned Matherus,” who delighted in the works of Johann Arndt and Philipp Spener and exchanged letters with August Hermann Francke and Anton Wilhelm Böhme, serves as his chief illustration. Indeed, even after the deaths of the older Francke and Mather, their sons, Gotthilf August and Samuel, had continued the exchange, and (as Steinmetz mentions) just two years prior to the publication of the Glaubwürdige Nachricht the Halle theologian Johann Heinrich Callenberg (1694–1760) had brought out an epistolary narrative of the Mather-Francke connection.Footnote ³⁴ With the help of Mather's Magnalia, Steinmetz is able to integrate for his readers the news of the Connecticut River Valley awakening into a coherent narrative of New England's religious history, in which the recent revival appears both as continuous with earlier flowerings of piety among the Puritan settlers and as a truly extraordinary spectacular and indeed surprising outpouring of the Spirit that fell into a period of general religious decline.

Against this background, Steinmetz then explicates his reasons for undertaking the translation and tells his audience why they should care about a local revival in a remote corner of the British Empire, especially since it happened in a church “that differs from ours in some theological teachings.”Footnote ³⁵ The work of God that they will hear about, Steinmetz assures his readers, unfolded “primarily through such truths that are common to the entire Protestant church” and its account “affirms not specific dogmas of one party or the other but the teachings which we also confess.”Footnote ³⁶ In scope and circumstances, however, the saving change wrought upon more than three hundred souls in and around the little town of Northampton over the course of just half a year constituted one of the most spectacular outpourings of the Spirit since the Apostolic age to be made public everywhere “for the purpose of converting people, of furthering the kingdom of God, and, ultimately, for the glorification of their mighty Lord and Redeemer.”Footnote ³⁷

Steinmetz was fully convinced of the authenticity of this awakening. He referred skeptical readers to the evidence cited by the reputable English ministers Guyse and Watts, who were in correspondence with many ministers from New England. Steinmetz's emphases on the genuineness and the magnificence of the awakening are also reflected in the German title. He chooses to translate “faithful narrative” as “glaubwürdige Nachricht,” signifying “credible news,” and thus emphasizes one meaning of the English word over other semantic facets such as “accurate” or “conscientious,” which would have been genau or gewissenhaft in German. At the same time he turns Edwards's “surprising work” into a “herrliche Werck,” which means “glorious work.” Steinmetz even comments on this later change in a footnote to the preface, saying it was done in recognition of the outstanding nature and grandeur of God's dealing with these American communities.

Changing the title from “a surprising work” to a “glorious work” also suggests that Steinmetz might have wanted to take down just a notch the heightened supernaturalism of Edwards's narrative. Generally, the abbot seems to have agreed with Edwards that an awakening was not like an ordinary human affair brought about by natural causes but God's doing through the agency of the Holy Spirit. He also went along with Edwards's belief that the devil would try to oppose such an extraordinary work of the Spirit. All of Edwards's assertions to that effect are faithfully translated into German. However, the way Edwards described and interpreted the abrupt ending of the Northampton revival, especially the direct assaults of the devil, seem to have caused the Magdeburg Pietist some uneasiness. Just before the narrative turns to the time after the Spirit had withdrawn its special influence from Northampton, Steinmetz inserts a footnote proclaiming—maybe with an eye to rationalist theologians at Halle—that no “halfway reasonable reader” should doubt that “the fiend would do everything in his power to hinder and stop such a glorious work of God. The church of God still stands in the battlefield and has to suffer such assaults by the evil one as are reported here.”Footnote ³⁸

Nevertheless, Steinmetz thought it wiser to spare his audience some of the dramatic particulars. The only substantial cuts made in the Magdeburg edition occur in this section of the text,Footnote ³⁹ reducing to a summary paragraph the two pages where Edwards writes in detail about the devil leading parishioners to commit suicide in the aftermath of the revival. As if to cushion the potentially disappointing, even off-putting effect of the narrative's ending, Steinmetz assures his readers in the same footnote (while adding a notable Lutheran touch) that “after the first general workings of grace in a place . . . such a standstill” was to be expected, “when many souls are revealed, who had been kindled by the first fire but did not give enough room to God's grace for a thorough conversion.” This was no reason to question either the authenticity of the awakening or to doubt that it produced any lasting fruits. After all, as Edwards credibly reports, the many “plants that our Father planted persist.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Although temporarily and locally confined, the outpouring of the Spirit over these American churches was for Steinmetz a sign of the advancement of God's kingdom toward the millennium. In the final phase of history more and more of such “latter-day rains” were to be expected, even though in academic theology many now denied that God continued to miraculously intervene in the present age at all. Steinmetz saw a special need for such examples of divine supernatural activities in Germany, which, according to him, was especially plagued by widespread skepticism and religious apathy. The introduction closes with a prayer in which Steinmetz beseeches the Lord to grant that this narrative may prove fruitful “in particular everywhere in our Germany” by awakening many, “especially in the Protestant churches from the slumber of sin and carnal security” by showing them “what your gospel can do if it mightily takes hold of people's souls.”Footnote ⁴¹

Steinmetz's millennialist reading of Edwards's narrative was a source not only of joy and comfort but also of anxiety. Might not these reports be a hint, he asks in the preface, that “the Lord will finally remove his candle sticks from ungrateful Europe and will give to the American deserts the glory of Lebanon, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, which the eternal Love has offered to us for centuries but for the most parts in vain”? Surely, these apocalyptical allusions to Revelation 1:12–20 and Isaiah 35:2 are also part of a rhetorical strategy that, as Steinmetz himself puts it, was supposed to “shame in a salutary way one or the other of our nominal Christians . . . when he reads how the souls in the outer parts of the earth flock to their savior in heaps, while he has let Him call and knock in vain for so long.”Footnote ⁴² Still, Steinmetz does seem to have been genuinely worried that the relatively meager record of Germany's Lutheran churches in spreading the gospel, when compared to the small churches planted in the American wilderness with their tradition of Indian missions and inner-churchly revivals, might be all the more held against them by God, “since we have it [the gospel], here and there, in even richer and purer form.”Footnote ⁴³

If the Glaubwürdige Nachricht generally was intended for healthy provocation and pious inspiration, Steinmetz wanted Edwards to be read specifically as refuting what he regarded as a most pernicious delusion that had been induced by the devil and was now widespread in the state churches of Germany: the false belief that a rapid expansion of true Christianity through the working of the Spirit “not only on individual souls, but also on entire families and villages” was no longer possible in the post-Apostolic age.”Footnote ⁴⁴ On account of this false belief well-meaning preachers were often discouraged and formal Christians everywhere led into either self-complacency or despondency. Steinmetz was certain that “if one could look even into the hearts of the teachers, one would certainly find not a small number suffering from this disease, who are doing their work with a certain kind of despair, and consequently without faith and blessing.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Consequently, Steinmetz thought it absolutely imperative to publish this exceptional example of a modern mass conversion.

Some doctrinal issues notwithstanding, the conversionist theology written into Edwards's narrative also appealed to Steinmetz.Footnote ⁴⁶ During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Pietist theologians, not only in the Duchy of Magdeburg but in other Protestant territories as well, increasingly found themselves locked in a triangular battle that pitted them against both their old foes, the representatives of a strict confessional orthodoxy, as well as against a new Enlightenment rationalism. This latter trend was embodied most prominently at the University of Halle by the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754), who fought a prolonged battle for power with the Franckean faction, in which he was first driven from his position in 1723 and then later triumphantly called back in 1740 under the protection of the new king, Frederick the Great.Footnote ⁴⁷ In academic theology, at least, Pietism had passed its zenith in Halle and elsewhere, yielding influence to Wolffianism and eventually the even more radically rationalist school of Neology.

In this situation, Edwards's narrative was appropriated by Steinmetz to reinforce the Pietist cause from abroad. Edwards's theological interpretations of the Northampton revival basically supported what the Pietists from Arndt to Francke had always taught: the insufficiency of head knowledge in faith and the necessity of the new birth involving a personal, experiential appropriation of the gospel's saving truths. Against the orthodox and rationalist critique of Pietist conversionism, Edwards affirmed that faith was not just an intellectual affair but a radical reorientation of a person's affections toward God. While giving no certain indication of a saving faith, strong emotions were to be expected and accepted in such an existential revolution. Whereas the rising generation of Halle theologians such as Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706–1757) drifted toward Wolffianism and emphasized the harmony of revelation and reason, the reports of the colonial minister backed the older Pietist party in denying the accessibility of saving truths to the corrupt mind of natural man. Steinmetz took particular delight in that part of the Faithful Narrative where Edwards tells how men of reason and great learning suffered an especially devastating “legal humbling” (that is, the realization of their sinful inability to keep the divine law and find justification in the eyes of God by their own merits) in the first phase of their conversion, during which they felt all their wisdom come to naught and became babes in Christ crying for succor. This provided Steinmetz with the occasion for a footnote, in which he expresses his wish that Edwards would “give pause to unconverted and carnally minded scholars” and convince them

Clearly, Steinmetz's language here approvingly echoes Edwards's conviction that the new birth was a transformation of man's entire nature through the power of the Holy Spirit, endowing converts with a new sense of seeing and being that sets them apart from the unconverted.

What Steinmetz's editorial and translational policy communicated to his readers was a basic agreement between the Puritan-evangelical conversion morphology, as accentuated by Edwards, and the Lutheran ordo salutis, as it had been reinterpreted by Halle Pietism. On the one hand, the model of conversion that Edwards employed in representing the experiences of his congregants was relatively flexible and allowed for substantial differences in individual processes of conversion, which would have made it easier for Lutheran Pietists to accept it. On the other hand, by Steinmetz's time the Lutheran Pietist understanding of the Bekehrung or conversion had already approximated the Reformed tradition to a degree that made such a convergence possible. This approximation had begun with Francke himself, who, based on his personal experience, believed that, after a more or less extensive and emotionally intensive period of legal humbling and a struggle of contrition and bitter repentance (the Bußkampf in Lutheran terminology), converts would reach a decisive existential crisis, which he called Durchbruch (literally “breakthrough”), leading to regeneration through faith in Christ. Francke held that even if Christians were genuinely reborn with the help of the Spirit, they would continue to be subject to the onslaughts of sin, temptation, and doubt (Anfechtungen), and they would still experience the pangs of remorse. But in opposition to Lutheran orthodoxy, he and his followers believed that after this turning point the saving faith of the reborn was essentially secure and a steady growth in their godliness was to be expected.Footnote ⁴⁹ With this sharp division between the unconverted and the converted state, which departed from the orthodox understanding of Luther's simul justus et peccator, Halle Pietism came close to Reformed teachings—even though important differences remained—on the perseverance of the saints as well as the progressive sanctification of their lives.

The Steinmetz edition reflects this theological development and pushes it forward through several translational choices. In a number of places, where Edwards speaks of “conversion” to denote the moment of crisis, this is rendered by the German text in Franckean terminology as Durchbruch. The continuing doubts and temptations of some of Edwards's converts are referred to as Anfechtungen.Footnote ⁵⁰ When Edwards speaks of converts who found assurance of salvation in their new faith, Steinmetz decides to have these passages faithfully translated into German and present them without any critical comment, thereby ignoring traditional Lutheran reservations. Likewise, the claims that Edwards makes about the extraordinary growth in godliness among his converts are not modified or reframed in any way.

More important to the abbot than Edwards's theology was his account of a successful conversion-oriented ministry, which ought both to inspire Pietist pastors to foster an awakening in Germany and provide them with valuable practical lessons. Yet this recommendation of Edwards's ministry was not made without some qualifications. Already in the preface Steinmetz notes that on some occasions the otherwise godly and righteous Edwards had taught according to the peculiar teachings of his church, causing him to make dangerous mistakes that could have led to the loss of those souls, if God in his mercy had not prevented it.Footnote ⁵¹ A case in point for Steinmetz was the part of the Faithful Narrative in which Edwards reports how he relentlessly preached to the unconverted about man's complete helplessness and God's sovereign power to reject sinners according to His arbitrary will. Here the Lutheran Pietist notes in an extensive footnote that such preaching was too “legalistic” and not “evangelical” enough, as it might bring many into tearful repentance over their sins but did not help them enough to place their trust in Christ, as it downplays an essential dimension of the gospel: God's infinite mercy and universal grace. While God could, of course, rightly reject all unregenerate men in keeping with the standards of divine justice, He did not want sinners to perish; indeed, He desired everyone to undergo conversion and live. Only if the desire of a merciful God for man's redemption is adequately emphasized in preaching, Steinmetz argues, can souls not only be “brought more readily into repentance but also to a more profound willingness to persist and be content in the work that follows”; only then will “seeds . . . be planted in their heart from which faith, the main part in the whole business of salvation, is more likely to grow.”Footnote ⁵²

Underlying this criticism of Edwards's evangelizing strategies were the closely intertwined doctrinal issues of limited atonement and double predestination. With regard to these two core teachings of Reformed theology (according to which Christ's atoning death on the cross was effective only for a limited number of the elect, freely chosen by God for eternal salvation and called in due time to faith, while the remainder were predestined for eternal damnation), Steinmetz obviously thought that an explicit renunciation was appropriate. Following Edwards's almost triumphant assertion that some parishioners, in response to his preaching, not only had felt an overwhelming conviction that God should and would throw them into hell at any moment but that sometimes they wished that God would do so for His glorification, Steinmetz inserted the one footnote that comes close to being polemical. The delusion under which pastor and people labored here “undoubtedly flowed from the teaching about the election and rejection of men in accordance with a sovereign decree of God, which was still retained among the Puritan congregations of New England.”

Nevertheless, Steinmetz recommended the New England minister as a sound and effective preacher of the new birth, generally worthy of imitation.

What Steinmetz praised in particular was the way in which Edwards combined an experiential, emotionally appealing preaching style with sound and substantial theological argumentation. Edwards is represented as an example of teaching Protestant theology in a rational way, without being reductively rationalistic in any way. He was obviously seen as a good antidote to both the theological scholasticism of a “dead orthodoxy” and the new liberal rationalism. Also, with a view to other aspects of pastoral work, Steinmetz holds up the Faithful Narrative as a very useful work that, through its many case studies, demonstrates how much attention successful revival ministers had to pay to the various circumstances and personalities of individual parishioners whose conversion processes might play out in very different ways. While the Faithful Narrative made it clear that each potential convert might require specific forms of guidance and help, it also provided some general “dos and don'ts” about how to manage a revival without smothering it.Footnote ⁵⁴

Even though Edwards preached the necessity of the new birth with great vehemence and urged his flock to set aside all worldly concerns, at the same time he had been, as Steinmetz repeatedly notes, very careful to curb emotional excesses and enthusiasm. Of course, some converts had undergone intense experiences of terror and joy with bodily symptoms such as weeping, laughing, fainting, and even complete bodily debilitation before the breakthrough of conversion.Footnote ⁵⁵ Edwards's report showed that such phenomena were probably inevitable in an awakening but could be controlled. In so doing, he had made scripture his ultimate arbiter. Much to Steinmetz's approval, he dismissed any private visions that exceeded or contradicted biblical revelation. Except for two cases at the tail end of the revival, none of the Northampton converts had become guilty of spiritual pride, slid into antinomianism, or embraced any heterodoxies.

If the Faithful Narrative assured its readers that Northampton had remained undisturbed by Baptists, Quakers, or other “sectarian” groups, such assertions would have been of utmost importance to Steinmetz and his target audience of “churchly” Pietists, who were very anxious about separatism. This was a reflection of their theological convictions, but was also due to the fact that separatism often provided the powers that be with a rationale to suppress all Pietist activities. In the German context of the 1730s, moderate Lutheran Pietists like Steinmetz would have worried about individual Radical Pietists and their followers, such as Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649–1727) and Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724), Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), Johann Konrad Dippel (1673–1734), and Ernst Christoph Hochmann von Hochenau (1669/70–1721), as well as the subversive potential of Zinzendorf's Moravians.Footnote ⁵⁶

Virtually all Pietists dreamed of a pure church, and most saw the forming of conventicles or private religious meetings for prayer, devotion, and bible study as an essential means toward the realization of this goal. Yet there were important differences. Very broadly speaking, the majority of more moderate Pietists in German-speaking territories understood their conventicles as ecclesiolae in ecclesia, as little churches within the church, working to convert the unregenerate masses and reform the state churches from within. The more radical groups, by contrast, believed that the state churches were beyond redemption and that the elite of true believers should separate themselves from the corrupt majority. Radicals thus rejected the authority of ecclesial institutions and unconverted ministers and stayed away from public worship in the official churches. For them, conventicles and the networks of like-minded believers effectively became their new religious homes. In some cases, attempts were made to form actual independent churches, as with the Schwarzenau Brethren, who eventually migrated to Pennsylvania.Footnote ⁵⁷ Because they perceived conventicles as hotbeds of separatism, threatening both the ecclesial and the social order, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century the governments of many German-speaking territories, including the Pietist-friendly Prussia, frequently resorted to temporary Konventikelverbote (“ban on conventicles”) for certain regions, which, of course, also affected more moderate circles.

Since private religious meetings, in accordance with the Puritan tradition, play a major role in Edwards's account of the Northampton revival, Steinmetz could use the edition of Edwards's Faithful Narrative to intervene in the German debate over conventicles. For Steinmetz, Edwards's narrative powerfully illustrated that religious gatherings in private homes were a legitimate and desirable feature of church life, which by no means had to lead to separatism. Indeed, as Steinmetz points out at the very beginning of his introduction (as well as in several subsequent footnotes), Edwards's narrative teaches that “public worship alone is not enough, but that souls have to edify themselves in private too, and peacefully come together in their homes as much as in the temple, if divine grace is to spread in a town and more souls are to join the community of the redeemed every day.”Footnote ⁵⁸ There was really nothing objectionable or dangerous about conventicles if these meetings were supervised by competent clergy and undertaken with an understanding that they complemented rather than replaced public worship. “One should not prohibit or disturb them,” Steinmetz's argues, “but keep them in good order and seek to protect the souls from any kind of enthusiasm.” And, perhaps with a view to his own successes as a revival preacher in Upper Silesia, he added that experience had taught “in many places that when this had been observed, the damage that so many feared had not arisen from these meetings but instead they had served the advancement of the kingdom of God.”Footnote ⁵⁹

A key issue in the controversies between moderate Pietists, the more radical groups and their orthodox opponents in Germany was the Lord's Supper. Radicals frequently cited the admission of the unconverted to the Lord's Table as a central reason for abstaining from public worship. Moderates often spoke in favor of stricter examinations, and Reformed Pietists in particular called for “fencing the table” as a means of church discipline. Again, the publication of Edwards's revival account served as a vehicle for Steinmetz to enter this debate. On the one hand, the preface announces that the Connecticut River Valley awakening demonstrated that “no separation from public worship or other means of grace (to which even some well-intended souls are prone these days) was necessary, if souls are to be introduced to an earnest and true Christianity, and brought to a completion [of their] salvation.”Footnote ⁶⁰ At no point had the unity and order of the established church been disturbed in Northampton. On the other hand, Steinmetz used Edwards's description of how the Lord's Supper was administered in Edwards's congregation as an occasion to comment in a lengthy footnote and speak critically on this matter with a view to the Lutheran state churches.

Edwards reported how he readmitted numerous congregants to the table after receiving satisfactory assurance of their conversion, even though Northampton had abandoned the traditional New England practice of public examination under Solomon Stoddard. At this point in the text Steinmetz added a footnote: “Oh that such church constitutions would be adopted in many places and not everyone be so carelessly admitted to the Lord's Supper! How much danger and distress of souls could be prevented by this.”Footnote ⁶¹ Obviously the Halle Pietist thought that more regulation would not only cause many unconverted to change their ways and thereby help to purify the church, but also remedy one of the main causes for separatism. It is not entirely clear whether Steinmetz meant to praise the traditional New England admission tests here or the way things were done in Northampton since Stoddard's pastorate. Nor is it clear how he thought an examination should be adopted into the Lutheran state churches, but he probably was thinking of treating confirmation as a serious examination of faith. In any case, he was unaware of the irony involved in applauding one of the features of New England church policy that had consistently caused the most problems and one that would also lead to Edwards's dismissal from Northampton when he attempted to reinforce the tests that his grandfather had relaxed.

Turning to the reception of the Glaubwürdige Nachrichten, we can say that, although no further German editions of Edwards's narrative were printed during the eighteenth century, the first one seems to have been well received. At the Halle archives there are several letters suggesting that Edwards's narrative was taken as another striking example of the advancement of God's kingdom, to which the Halle-sponsored activities in the New World and India were also contributing. As such an example, the tract was also distributed by Gotthilf August Francke to financial supporters of the Halle missions abroad.Footnote ⁶² An even stronger indication of success is the fact that Steinmetz continued to pay significant attention to the New England revivals in his journals. Obviously, Edwards's narrative had resonated with his readers and there was demand for more. After 1738, the journals continued to monitor further developments in British North America through whatever sources were available to Steinmetz. In 1740 the twentieth volume of the Verbesserten Sammlung featured a letter by Isaac Watts (dated January 21, 1740) reporting about Northampton that “even though the extraordinary movement of people's hearts through the Holy Spirit did not last more than half a year, those who were converted at the time now lead lives worthy of the Gospel, and this in all of the cities and towns in which they can be found.”Footnote ⁶³ Thus, the German Pietist audience was assured that the American revivals, which had been presented to them as one of the great wonders of the age, had not turned out to be a mere flash in the pan. Steinmetz's readers never learned about Edwards's rather embarrassed assessment of the state of religion in Northampton in the post-Awakening years, and his browbeating of his congregants for their quick backsliding.

Between 1740 and the early 1750s, the Sammlungen frequently reported on the new wave of large-scale revivals in the English-speaking world and offered reviews and digests or even serialized full translations of Anglophone evangelical texts, including more than two hundred pages worth of material from the colonies alone. Among the American authors whose works were reviewed or provided in digest form in the Sammlungen are Samuel Blair, Gilbert Tennent, and Samuel Davies. Contrary to the assumption that the Faithful Narrative was “the only work of Edwards ever published in Germany,”Footnote ⁶⁴ Steinmetz also provided his readers with more extracts from Edwards's writings. In 1745, the second and third volume of the recently-launched Closter-Bergische Sammlung featured a consecutive series of translations of tracts and letters together with editorial comments which together formed something akin to a special issue on the current religious situation in the British colonies. In accordance with his own sympathies and interests, as well as that of his English informants, especially Watts, Steinmetz exclusively selected sources written by moderate or “churchly” representatives of the “New Light” or “New Side” camp, and thereby painted a very homogenous, fairly one-sided and overall extremely positive picture, largely excluding both rationalist critics and reports of enthusiasm or separatism.

The second volume Closter-Bergische Sammlung also features excerpts from Edwards's Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1743). After a brief summary of Edwards's 378-page defense of the revivals,Footnote ⁶⁵ a five-page excerpt from the first part is translated, in which the American theologian undertakes an overall assessment of the New England awakening and its consequences so far. Steinmetz main interest in citing Edwards clearly was to show that there was indeed a great awakening going on, which was a great work of God and had already produced a large “soul harvest,” with lasting and blessed fruits.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the third volume Steinmetz included a key apologetic text of Congregational New Lights and the closest thing he could find to an official endorsement of the revivals by the established church of Massachusetts: The Testimony and Advice of an Assembly of Pastors (1743).Footnote ⁶⁷ Steinmetz found this carefully balanced and critically-aware pro-revivalism of The Testimony so congenial to his understanding of churchly Pietism that he offered his readers a full-length translation, complemented by twelve more letters by moderate New Lights, including two each by Gilbert Tennent and Benjamin Colman, and one by Jonathan Edwards.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1745, this extended German translation of The Testimony was also published as an independent booklet and marketed as a continuation of Edwards's Faithful Narrative (another indication of its success with German readers!) and accordingly entitled Fortsetzung der Glaubwürdigen Nachricht von dem herrlichen Wercke Gottes (“Continuation of the Credible News of the Glorious Work of God”).Footnote ⁶⁹ Fitted with a sixteen-page introduction and some explanatory footnotes (largely drawn from Steinmetz's editorials in the journal), the Fortsetzung was meant to show Pietist pastors how their American colleagues had managed to curb separatist and antinomian excesses that unfortunately had cropped up during these massive new revivals. It recommended their rational circumspection and discernment in dealing with the turmoil and the unhappy side-effects of the mass conversions as well as the ecumenical solidarity across denominational lines between different factions of Congregationalists and Presbyterians. “Among the aspects worthy of imitation about the conduct of New England's ministers in the recent events in their congregations,” he tells his readers in the preface of the Fortsetzung,

The last piece to appear in the Sammlungen on the American awakenings was a 1753 review and German summary of Samuel Davies's State of Religion among the Protestant Dissenters in Virginia (1751).Footnote ⁷¹ But in 1756, Steinmetz's other journal, the Theologia Pastoralis Practica, ran a serialized translation of Jonathan Edwards's Life of David Brainerd (1749).Footnote ⁷² This final undertaking in Steinmetz's work as a mediator of British revivalism, and Jonathan Edwards in particular, reveals once more what attracted the abbot to these texts and why he did so much to disseminate them. Edwards's Life of Brainerd, like the Faithful Narrative, demonstrated the need for converted and dedicated pastors, who combined learning and discipline with heartfelt piety and practical zeal for evangelization. German ministers would, therefore do well to follow the model of these “moderate” New England revivalists in order to navigate a way for the ships of their churches between the Scylla of dead orthodoxy and rationalism, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of Radical Pietism, on the other. To state and church officials in particular he sought to communicate that they should not fear or even suppress whatever spiritual stirrings might be taking place in German congregations.Footnote ⁷³ With the right kind of ministry, popular revivals were possible within established churches and without necessarily creating havoc. For similar, but by no means identical, reasons, Edwards's Faithful Narrative was also taken up by German Reformed Pietists.

II. The Solingen Edition in Context

The second translation, entitled Erweckliche Nachricht auß Nordhampton in Neu-Engeland, (“Edifying News from Northampton in New England”),Footnote ⁷⁴ was produced in Solingen by a bookbinder and publisher named Johann Schmitz (1706–1771), who was part of a network of Reformed Pietists. The city of Solingen at the time belonged to the Duchy of Berg, which was a territory on the Lower Rhine ruled by the Catholic house of Pfalz-Neuburg that also ruled the adjacent Duchy of Jülich as well as the Electoral Palatinate in the south of the Empire. While religious treatises protected the existence and basic rights of the Lutheran and Reformed churches in the confessionally mixed territories of Berg and Jülich, the Catholic government in Düsseldorf was indifferent or sometimes openly hostile to the interests of the Protestant ecclesial bodies, both organized in synodal fashion. Since the second half of the seventeenth century, Pietism, especially Reformed Pietism, had spread widely along the Lower Rhine and into Westphalia. Influenced by and in close contact with the Dutch Nadere Reformatie, German Reformed Pietists, such as Theodor Undereyck (1635–1693) and Samuel Nethenus (1628–1707), had preached new birth, individual sanctification, and communal reform in these areas, and helped establish the tradition of organizing conventicles of “true believers.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In some territories of the Lower Rhine and Westphalia area, synods sympathetic to moderate Pietism tried to incorporate aspects of the reform agenda into their church life. But everywhere Reformed as well as Lutheran synods constantly appealed to their territorial governments to have the more radical groups suppressed with the help of local magistrates. In Berg most of these calls went unheeded, unless public order seemed to be in danger.

The first wave of separatism that swept the region in the late seventeenth century had been part of the larger movement created by the chiliastic teachings of Jean de Labadie (1610–1674), a Jesuit turned Reformed spiritualist, who urged the formation of a pure church of the elect. In the early years of the eighteenth century the famous Philadelphian mystic and itinerant preacher Ernst Christoph Hochmann von Hohenau also frequented the area, including Berg, where he repeatedly preached in Solingen.Footnote ⁷⁶ Under the influence of Hochmann von Hohenau several local groups of Reformed Pietists formed separatist conventicles. Soon they came into contact with radical circles that had adopted the practice of believer's baptism. The center of this New Baptism (Neutäufertum) was in the nearby County of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, a minor territory whose ruler offered toleration to persecuted Pietists from all over the Empire. There in the village of Schwarzenau Alexander Mack (1679–1735), founding father of the modern Church of the Brethren in the U.S., baptized his first followers by immersion in 1708. From Schwarzenau the Baptist movement spread to several places in Berg, among other areas. In 1717 a small group of awakened souls, who had formerly adhered to the Reformed church in Solingen, rebaptized themselves. Six of these men were consequently sentenced by the Düsseldorf government to hard labor for life, but released to neighboring Krefeld after four years, and from there the first group of Brethren then migrated to Pennsylvania in 1719.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Pietist network of the mid-1730s to which the bookbinder Schmitz belonged never embraced re-baptism, but they were not unsympathetic to the desire to escape the Babylonian captivity of the state church. Most of those with whom Schmitz associated in the region did not openly separate from the official church but considered it grievously unreformed, frequently stayed away from public worship, and preferred private devotions among like-minded souls. Schmitz's house was one gathering place for local Pietists, where bible study and prayer meetings were held. His most prominent friend was the famous Reformed mystic, preacher, and hymn writer Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769) in Mühlheim an der Ruhr, a city in the neighboring County of Mark that was under Prussian rule. Schmitz published and distributed Pietist literature, including a number of Tersteegens works.Footnote ⁷⁸ Both Schmitz and Tersteegen also had friendly contacts with some of the remaining Solingen Baptists in Krefeld.Footnote ⁷⁹ Their network extended far beyond the Lower Rhine, however, and included not only awakened circles in all parts of the Empire and the Netherlands,Footnote ⁸⁰ but also in British North America. Christoph Sauer in Germantown, Pennsylvania, for instance, corresponded with Tersteegen and published some of his works for the American market.Footnote ⁸¹ Moreover, Tersteegen and Schmitz were in touch (if not wholly sympathetic) with the most global of all Pietist communities, the Herrnhuter or Moravians, which might also explain why the copy of this translation was found in Herrnhut. The Moravian connection might also be one reason why the Faithful Narrative reached the Pietists of the Lower-Rhine area so quickly, but it might also have been sent there from Pennsylvania.Footnote ⁸²

Interestingly enough, the Erweckliche Nachricht that Schmitz published is a translation of Colman's 1736 abridgment. We can only speculate as to the exact origins of this independent German edition and the identity of the translator. All we have to go by is a one-page preface by an anonymous editor, presumably Schmitz himself. Apparently, by the time the Solingen publisher brought out the booklet, a manuscript translation (or several) of the original text had already been circulating in the Pietist circles with which Schmitz was involved, as the preface states that “God-loving friends had read it with great pleasure,” and sent it to him, while “others had heard about it and had a great desire to read it.”Footnote ⁸³ It was probably also Schmitz who added the title, for the original appendix had none. Not only the misspelling of the author's name on the title page—he is referred to as “Jonathan Edwardt”—but some small mistakes,Footnote ⁸⁴ and the erratic, sometimes misleading, rendering of the names of places and persons,Footnote ⁸⁵ suggest that this booklet was done rather hastily and probably not by someone with an academic background or orientation who cared about getting the details right. Nor, in contrast to the Magdeburg edition, was it primarily produced for an educated audience of pastors or for libraries.

If Steinmetz chose to introduce Edwards with a hefty preface, packed with historical, contextual, and theological background knowledge, the translator and editor of the Solingen edition obviously were not concerned about the contexts from which the original had emerged, nor did they think that their audience would want any such explications. Clearly the text was intended, first and foremost, for devotional use in local contexts by people who belonged, at least in part, to the lower ranks of society. In his brief introduction to the original, Benjamin Colman mentions that Edwards's letter had been read out to great effect during a religious meeting of John Guyse's congregation in Hertford, England. We have every reason to believe that the Solingen Pietists also engaged in similar practices of collective, public reading. As the preface of the Solingen booklet explains, a print edition had been undertaken because demand for the manuscript translation was so widespread that further dissemination through hand-written copies would have been too burdensome, and many who wanted to have it could not write. Thus the editor regarded it as his duty to contribute to the building of God's kingdom by making the American revival narrative more widely available.Footnote ⁸⁶ In contrast to the translation executed in Berg, the Magdeburg edition provides an expedient but rather rough-hewn translation that follows the original wording as closely as possible. In addition to the few, rather insignificant blunders mentioned above, it contains many clumsy constructions and awkward phrases that are mostly due to this hyperliteralist approach.

The title also indicates the two main devotional purposes it was meant to serve. As with Steinmetz, Edwards's narrative is offered to the German audience as a piece of edifying news that provides a spectacular example for how the living God miraculously intervenes to save sinners even in the remotest corners of the world, thus heralding the global advancement of His kingdom. Secondly, the account of the Northampton revival was meant as a timely admonition and inspiration for earnest German Christians.Footnote ⁸⁷ More specifically, the circle around Schmitz seems to have regarded Edwards's text as a model script for what an authentic awakening should look like, both at the level of individual conversion and at the level of communal reformation. The preface explicitly mentions that the content had been approved of by experienced souls (erfahrenen Seelen). In contrast to Steinmetz, the translator and editor of Solingen edition saw no need to be apologetic about or distance themselves from anything Edwards had written. Neither did they attempt to modify any of the fine points of his theology by strategic cuts or free translations, with one notable exception. The Solingen edition edits out an entire paragraph in which Edwards, in the context of assessing the fruits of the revival, gives an account of the policy of admission to the Lord's Table in and around Northampton, as it had been defined under Solomon Stoddard.Footnote ⁸⁸ Apparently, the Reformed Pietists around Schmitz did not approve of the practice reported by Edwards that communicants “include almost all our adults,” and that “it is not the manner here, as in many other churches in the country, to make a relation of experience of a work of conversion” the precondition for partaking in the Lord's Supper. Even though Edwards asserted that a great many of the communicants came to experience a saving conversion during the revival, the fact that they had been accepted as full members of the church before they were was seen as something offensive, which was better not publicized. After all, indiscriminate admission to the Lord's Table was one of the main grievances that Reformed Pietists had with their established churches, and many favored “fencing the table.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Ironically, then, the translator of the Solingen edition censored Edwards for describing the system of “Stoddardism,” which he himself viewed very critically.

Otherwise, however, the Solingen edition wholeheartedely embraced Edwards's revivalist-oriented Calvinism. The translation faithfully carries over Edwards's strong emphasis on God's absolute sovereignty and free grace, on the one hand, and human natural depravity and passivity in the salvation process, on the other. For example, in rendering into German a passage where Edwards describes how his parishioners praise “the gloriousness of the way of salvation, the wonderful, free, and sovereign grace of God,” the two translations reveal subtle but significant differences. The Solingen edition has “von der Herrlichkeit der Art der Heiligmachung, von der wunderbaren unumschränckten freyen Gnade Gottes,” thus rendering Edwards's adjectives “free and sovereign” with the equally strong “unumschränckt,” which literally means “unbound.” The Magdeburg edition chooses to describe God's grace with the adjectives “free and mighty” (“von der Vortrefflichkeit des Weges der Erlösung, der wunderbaren, freyen und mächtigen Gnade Gottes”), which is not as strong and de-emphasizes the Calvinist implications of the arbitrariness of God's will.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similarly, when Edwards speaks again in Colman's abridgement about “the way of salvation by the free and sovereign grace of God,” the Solingen edition, careful not to miss an adjective, has “von dem Weg der Seligkeit durch die freye und unumschränckte Gnade Gottes,” whereas the translator for Steinmetz opts for “aus freyer Gnade,” that is, “from free grace” for the identical formulation in the Faithful Narrative. Footnote ⁹¹ As a Lutheran, Steinmetz did not wish to emphasize quite as much the independence of God's grace from any human decision or effort, because this might have implied an affirmation of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination. There are other, similar instances, where Steinmetz undertakes such minor modifications to highlight the universality of God's grace instead.

Even the German title of the Solingen edition, as we saw above, foregrounds that it is God who chooses to lead sinners out of their misery into a life in Christ. The Solingen edition closely holds to Edwards's Reformed interpretation of free grace as implying a “limited atonement,” as well as to Edwards's understanding of the morphology of conversion. If a person is chosen by God's sovereign grace it will prove irresistible, and the new birth affected by the Holy Spirit will enable a progressive and irreversible “sanctification” of that person's life. Thus Edwards reports of “a young woman that had been one of the greatest company-keepers in the whole town, in whom there appeared evident a glorious work of God's infinite power and sovereign grace; a newly and truly broken, sanctified heart.” The Solingen edition faithfully carries it: “Man konte an ihr nun klahrlich das herrliche Werck der unendlichen Macht und freyen Gnade Gottes erblicken, nemlich ein wahrhaftig zerbrochenes geheiligtes neues Herz.”Footnote ⁹² Steinmetz puts a slightly different, distinctly Lutheran Pietist, spin on this passage, emphasizing that God freely offers His grace to all who would truly believe in the redemptive work of the Son, but also that the regeneration affected in conversion still left souls vulnerable to sin and backsliding, even if they have assurance of their saving faith. Steinmetz thus calls it “a glorious work of the infinite power and mighty hand of God” (“ein herrliches Werck der unendlichen Macht und gewaltigen Hand Gottes”), “that God gave her a new heart, which was truly broken and made better” (“daß ihr Gott ein neues Herz gegeben, welches rechtschaffen gebrochen und gebessert worden”).Footnote ⁹³

While Steinmetz felt he had to ease the reception of the Faithful Narrative for his primarily Lutheran audience, to the Reformed Pietists around Schmitz Edwards seems to have represented an almost ideal combination of Calvinist orthodoxy with an experiential, conversion-oriented religious practice which, however, stopped short of open separatism. Edwards's text would have confirmed their decision not to follow the way of the New Baptists, and given them hope that, in cooperation with awakened ministers, revivals might be possible even within the established Reformed church. We know that in 1737 the Lutheran pastor of Solingen, Johann Gangolf Wilhelm Forstmann (pastor from 1732–1757), in cooperation with his like-minded Reformed colleague Johann Goebel (pastor from 1724–1742), had supported private religious meetings attended by both Reformed and Lutherans, who came together for bible reading, prayer, and worship. At these meetings, which we know Schmitz attended (some of which were even held at his house), lay people of both sexes and from all ranks of society took an active role in the devotions, and itinerant Moravian preachers were invited. In the late summer of 1737 the Moravian Martin Dober had evangelized for four weeks. Close upon his heels, Ludwig Friedrich Graf zu Castell-Remmingen (1707–1772), cousin of Zinzendorf and a fellow worker for the cause, visited the area of Solingen and the nearby town of Elberfeld (today part of Wuppertal) and conducted several meetings with more than a hundred people over the course of four days. The evidence suggests that a local awakening occurred in Solingen in September 1737 as a consequence of the activities and Schmitz was a part of it.Footnote ⁹⁴ There is no hard evidence, but it is certainly possible that a manuscript version of the Edwards translation was read at these meetings before it was put into print the next year.

The Solingen group walked a fine line between an inner-churchly reform movement and the more radical Pietism that was still simmering in the region. Just at the time that Schmitz published Edwards, a new separatist community with antinomian tendencies had formed in Elberfeld around the prophetess Anna vom Büchel (1698–1743), who claimed to have received revelations instructing her to gather the elect (whom she took it upon herself to identify) in a philadelphian society to prepare for the return of Christ.Footnote ⁹⁵ One might rightly speculate that Schmitz's edition of Edwards in the following years was also undertaken with the specific purpose of stoking the fires of revivalism, on the one hand, while also keeping people from sliding into fanaticism, on the other. As with Steinmetz's edition, this version of Edwards's narrative would have reassured them that a mass awakening did not have to descend into enthusiasm and fruitless “Babel storming,” and would have provided them with a blueprint for how to manage an inner-churchly revival so as to maintain social and ecclesial order. The Solingen edition would have reassured its target audience that the kind of religious meetings they had held were not only legitimate and in accordance with Reformed orthodoxy, but even a necessary catalyst for an awakening, if handled properly. Although he was an official clergyman, Edwards did not represent conventicles as a threat to the church at all, but rather represented his congregants' increasing participation in such meetings, in addition to official services, as a means toward and a measure of the revival's progress.

Alarmed by continuing complaints by the Reformed consistory and the general synod, the Catholic government in Düsseldorf did not care to make any fine distinctions between moderate and radical revivalism. Viewing the Solingen activities as a menace to social order, it cracked down hard on the Pietist conventicle. Already in September 1737 Graf zu Castell-Remmingen, his retinue, and some local affiliates were arrested by a band of 150 soldiers, taken to Düsseldorf for interrogation and then expelled. In Solingen, the town justice, with the help of the magistrate, carried out several investigations over the next three years. We have records that show that in 1737 and 1740, Schmitz together with other men from Solingen, was summoned for examinations because of his attendance at revival meetings and his distribution of Pietist literature. Schmitz and the other men produced an “exculpation” in which they, supported by an attestation of their orthodoxy from their pastor and consistory, declared “that we have been cleared of all suspicion of separatism, are loyal to the Reformed religion and communicant members thereof.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Apparently, Düsseldorf continued to be concerned about the formation of sectarian groups in Solingen and surroundings. So in June 1740, the government of Jülich and Berg implemented a strict Konventikelverbot (“ban on conventicles”) that would remain in place for a decade. In 1742 the Prussian government, which ruled the neighboring County Kleve, followed suit and outlawed private religious meetings as well. These measures effectively smothered the Solingen awakening and forced the persisting Pietists of the area to abandon any public exercise of their faith.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus by 1740 Edwards's tract would have become “underground literature” circulating among the diehards, who used it for private devotion and dreamed, we might imagine, of that faraway land, where the revivals had spread unhindered.

III. Conclusions and Prospects

While they might not have made the transition to seeing Edwards as a great systematic theologian in the manner in which, for example, his Scottish admirers did, diverse circles of German Pietists nevertheless appreciated and appropriated his Faithful Narrative and other revivalist writings as a part of a larger enthusiasm about the awakenings in the British Empire. Lutheran as well as Reformed, these circles were more intimately woven into transatlantic communication networks with Anglo-American evangelicals than historians have acknowledged. For these circles, the translation of Anglophone devotional literature was a crucial means by which to interpret what was happening in their own congregations in the horizon of global religious developments, and to see revivals at home and abroad “as parts of a single God-inspired phenomenon.”Footnote ⁹⁸ While both texts thus evince that German Pietism very much partook in the emergence of a transatlantic evangelical consciousness, they simultaneously show how the formation of such an ecumenical identity was complicated by persisting confessional and regional differences. Moreover, the two German translations of Edwards's narrative illustrate that the meaning of these revivals as part of a larger Protestant evangelical awakening was negotiated not only among Anglo-American evangelicals but also among Continental Pietists.

Did this fascination with Edwards and Anglo-American revivalism persist, one might finally ask? And what long-term influence, if any, would Edwards's work have had among respective German-speaking audiences? To provide a substantial answer to these questions much more research needs to be done. It seems that interest indeed continued through the latter part of the century and beyond, although in different form. In the second half of the eighteenth century, church history in the German-speaking territories evolved both as an academic discipline and as a popular genre with a surprisingly global outlook. Especially, but not exclusively, in the Pietist-oriented branch of church history, the various missionary efforts in British North America and the colonial revivals were often mentioned as important events, with Edwards featured as a central protagonist. For instance, Johann August Christoph von Einem (1730–1810), a Pietist Lutheran minister at Genthin (northeast of Magdeburg) and former pupil of Steinmetz's school at Berg, published a popular two-volume church history of the eighteenth century (1776–1778),Footnote ⁹⁹ which has an extensive chapter on the Americas that also offers a glowing report of the “Great Awakening” in the British colonies. Here von Einem largely draws on Steinmetz's journals as well as translations of Edwards's works (including the excerpts from Some Thoughts) to demonstrate God's marvelous work of redemption in the present period.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Less Pietistic and less enthusiastic but still very positive is the short treatment of the awakening and Edwards (again based on Steinmetz's journals) in the three-volume church history of the eighteenth century (1784–96) by the Lutheran minister of Heilbronn (southwest Germany, near Stuttgart), Johann Rudolf Schlegel (1729–1790).Footnote ¹⁰¹ While these two widely read works seem to suggest that Edwards found a place in the emerging German narratives about the global expansion of Christianity in the eighteenth century, its continuity with nineteenth-century academic church histories or the popular world histories of Christianity is unclear. My preliminary research rather indicates that over time the Connecticut River Valley awakening appeared less significant to German historians, while George Whitefield and especially the Methodist movement of John and Charles Wesley were seen as more important figures of the eighteenth-century revivals.Footnote ¹⁰²

This does not mean, however, that Edwards completely disappeared from view during the early nineteenth-century resurgence of Pietism in many German-speaking territories, which after the Napoleonic Wars then evolved into the great Erweckungsbewegung (revival movement). The intellectual leaders of the emerging German revival movement were no less connected with the world of Anglophone evangelicalism than the previous generations of Pietists and also paid significant attention to the fresh flurry of religious activities in the newly founded United States that we associate with the term “Second Great Awakening.” A dominant concern of the Erweckunsgbewegung was foreign mission. As historians have long pointed out, the German foreign missionary movement was very much influenced by Anglo-American models and contacts with evangelical revivalism, which, however, still await comprehensive study. The Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft (German Christianity Society), founded in 1780 on the model of the English Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge by the Halle-trained Lutheran Pietist Johann August Urlsberger (1728–1806),Footnote ¹⁰³ was of central importance for the development of nineteenth-century German revivalism. The Christentumsgesellschaft quickly spawned numerous new organizations, of which three gained special prominence: the German Tract Society (1802), the German Bible Society (1804), and the Missionary Society in Basel (1815), all of which were closely affiliated with their English and American equivalents.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With numerous local chapters and spin-outs, associated missionary and charitable organizations, these societies constituted a transregional web that tied together pious circles across ecclesiastical divides in German-speaking territories and also the Atlantic world. After 1846 the transatlantic orientation of German Pietists and “free church” groups (that is, the newly founded German Baptist and Methodist churches) also found expression through their lively participation in the Evangelical Alliance. All of these activities brought forth an ever-expanding print universe of its own with countless journals and myriads of devotional publications. These vast archives have yet to be systematically searched for traces of Edwards, but my preliminary impression is that the Northampton minister was now displaced as the iconic American gospel worker of the eighteenth century by the man whom he had helped to immortalize: David Brainerd. Between 1830 and 1863 there were at least seven German editions of different translation of the biography Edwards wrote entitled Life of David Brainerd, often in association with biographies of John Eliot.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In other words, Edwards was still being widely read by nineteenth-century German audiences, but it was mostly versions of the Life of David Brainerd rather than his revival narratives or theological works, and there seemed to have been less interest in the original author of the biography. In none of the German versions were readers informed in any detail about the connection between Brainerd and Edwards or the life and work of the latter. Likewise, Edwards is occasionally mentioned as David Brainerd's associate or as a missionary to the Indians at Stockbridge in some of the popular global histories of mission, but so far I have not found references to his work as an evangelist in such works.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Overall it appears the interest in Edwards the revivalist had faded and Edwards the theologian had never established himself among nineteenth-century German audiences.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This audience was more excited about the early history of foreign missions in America. It is a remarkable complication of this conclusion that in 1860 a reprint of Steinmetz's Glaubwürdige Nachricht appeared in Basel—by whom, for whom, and for what purposes still need to be determined.

For the twentieth century, not even tentative conclusions can be offered. After the two World Wars, German Pietist and free church groups quickly opened up again to international influences—especially to American evangelicalism, which, like American culture as a whole, promised to many liberation from problematic traditions and the possibility of reinventing oneself through “self-Americanization.” For these German Christians, this transformation involved a re-definition from pious evangelische Christen in the older, more comprehensive sense of the word meaning Protestant Christians, to evangelikale Christen as an adaption of the American concept of evangelical Christian, which U.S. evangelists such as Billy Graham brought to Europe in the late 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In this context, interest in Edwards, especially his Life of David Brainerd, revived, as evinced by several German editions since 1959.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Still, the “Edwards Renaissance” after World War II in the U.S. and the continuing wave of enthusiasm for Edwards the theologian among American evangelicals have not carried over into Germany, even though some new interest in Edwards as a devotional author is detectable today. A German translation of Religious Affections and a selection of Edwards's evangelical writings have recently been put out by conservative Christian publishers. Also, Ian H. Murray's pious biography was recently translated into German.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But all of these fascinating instances of cross-cultural translation will have to be scrutinized much more closely by future scholarship in the fledgling field of “Edwards Studies” in Germany.