A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century by Paul Peucker

Abstract

A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century. By Paul Peucker. [Pietist, Moravian, and Anabaptist Studies.] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2015. Pp. xvi, 248. $84.95. ISBN 978-0-271-06643-1.)In early 1749, the charismatic founding leader of the radical Pietistic Moravian Church, Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, was shocked to discover that some influential members had carried his innovative theology too far into territory he called after Luke 22:31-Satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. Since then, historians of the Moravian Church have almost always skirted the Sifting as irrelevant or embarrassing. At best historians have reinterpreted the Sifting according to their own sensibilities. In these retellings, religious practices of the Sifting focused on Blood-and-Wounds theology and were a brief diversion in the early history of the barely twenty-year-old Moravian Church. Paul Peucker is the first to focus squarely on the Sifting in a superbly researched, forthright study of every imaginable source, from every possible angle, especially emphasizing the perspectives of contemporaries, quite different from those of later historians.Much of this study is about the sources. In the aftermath, Moravian leaders tried to destroy any sources documenting Sifting practices. Peucker discusses what survives in chapter 10. This reviewer read this chapter first, because destruction of sources is an important part of the story and shapes what Peucker can do. Given how much was destroyed, it is amazing how much he was able to uncover. Thankfully, it was impossible to eliminate every remnant, and through masterful detective work, Peucker is able to create a remarkably complete picture of the Sifting. He compares surviving Moravian sources with each other and with the vehement antiMoravian publications that soon proliferated. Written either by outsiders or apostates, their credibility has generally been questioned by scholars, but Peucker's comparative analysis proves these antagonistic writings to be accurate.Peucker argues that practices during the Sifting were extensions of Zinzendorf's theology, which encouraged playfulness and adoption of feminine traits to achieve childlike and womanly submission toward Christ, worship of Christ's wounds as sources of nurture, and bridal union with Christ, whereby the believer's feminine soul (die Seele in German) joined mystically with Christ as bridegroom. …