The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1690s-1815 · Germany, then Pennsylvania
Radical Pietism & the Brethren (Dunkers, Ephrata)
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About This Movement
Where mainstream Pietism stayed inside the Lutheran church, a radical wing walked out of it — separatists who held that the true church had fallen away centuries earlier and that no state establishment could be mended. In 1708, at Schwarzenau in the little county of Wittgenstein — one of the few German territories that would leave separatists alone — eight of them baptized one another in the river Eder and became the Brethren, joining Pietist inwardness to Anabaptist convictions: baptism only for believers, plain living, and refusal of the sword. Persecution pushed them to Pennsylvania from 1719, where they became one of the first German-speaking religious cultures in colonial America; and where one of them, Conrad Beissel, founded the celibate community at Ephrata, which produced its own austere music, its own hand-lettered Fraktur manuscripts, and a sisterhood, the Roses of Saron, who wrote and sang their own hymns.
Sources
- Alexander Mack, Rights and Ordinances (1713) and Basic Questions, with the Schwarzenau (1708) accounts, in Durnbaugh (ed.), European Origins of the Brethren (1958) and The Brethren in Colonial America (1967) (primary) — The movement's own documents, in the standard English documentary editions.
- Gottfried Arnold, Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (1699-1700), with Hochmann von Hochenau's confession (1702) (primary) — Radical Pietism's historiographical manifesto and separatist matrix. Untranslated in full.
- Chronicon Ephratense (1786; trans. Hark, 1889), with Ephrata's registers and Beissel's writings (primary) — The community's own history, written in an insider, hagiographic style.
- The Ephrata sisterhood (Roses of Saron) writings, the convent's Fraktur and music manuscripts, the Turtel-Taube hymnbook (1747) (primary) — A women's spiritual community documenting itself in text, script, and song. Held in archives at the Ephrata Cloister and Winterthur.
- Jeff Bach, Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata (Penn State, 2003), with Durnbaugh's historical scholarship (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7: nearest coverage in 'Continental Protestant Europe' (Lehmann) and Ward's awakenings chapter (reference)