February 02, 2018

130 Missionaries, Adventists, and Mormons (Five Hundred 14)

46 minutes

The 1800s was an exciting time for Christianity in America. At the same time that secularism and liberal Christianity made huge gains, several renewal movements occurred throughout the land, including the Second Great Awakening. In this episode you learn about the birth of the Protestant missionary movement with the Moravians and the Baptists, how the various Adventist denominations got their start, and last of all the most successful made-in-America religion–Mormonism. These thumbnail sketches will help you understand a number of groups that are still around today.

This is lecture 14 of a history of Christianity class called Five Hundred: From Martin Luther to Joel Osteen.

All the notes are available here as a pdf.

—— Notes ——

Pietism (late 17th c. to 20th c.)

Movement within Reformed and Lutheran countries (happened during Enlightenment)

1675 – Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) published Pious Desires

The earnest and thorough study of the Bible in private meetings

Laity should share in the spiritual government of the Church

Knowledge of Christianity must be attended by the practice

A sympathetic and kindly treatment of Christians of other groups

Universities should give more prominence to the devotional life

Rather than pleasing rhetoric, preach to implant Christianity in the inner man

Emphasized inner life and conversion

Millennialism (Pietists had millennialist leanings)

Continued baptizing infants but de-emphasized it in favor of conversion experience

Halle in Saxony established as center of Pietism

Moravians (Unitas Fratrum)

Descendants of the 15th Hussites; persecuted during 30 years war in Bohemia

In late 17th c., they went to Poland; 18th c. they went to Saxony

1722 – Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760), a Pietist who attended school at Halle (godson to Spener) gave the Moravians land which became the community of Herrnhut

1731 – Some Moravians went to the coronation of the King of Denmark.

1732 – Johann Leonhard Dober (1706-1766) chose David Nitschmann (1695-1772) as his travelling companion; petitioned the Danish government for passage to St. Thomas in Virgin Islands

Teaching them about God and how to read and write

In less than a century, the Pietist Moravians sent 300 missionaries throughout the world and baptized some 3,000 converts.

Moravian motto:

“In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; and in all things, love”

Today, around 825,000 members worldwide (largest concentration is in Tanzania)

Modern Missions

1792 – William Carey (1761-1834) published An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens

Used the best available geographic and ethnographic data to map and count the number of people who had never heard the gospel

“It is inconsistent for ministers to please themselves with thoughts of a numerous auditory, cordial friends, a civilized country, legal protection, affluence, splendor, or even a competency. The flights, and hatred of men, and even pretended friends, gloomy prisons, and tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger, and thirst, nakedness, weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly encouragement should rather be the objects of their expectation. Thus the apostles act

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By Sean P Finnegan

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