Thursday, June 15, 2023

It is the 15th of June, 2023. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org, I’m Dan van Voorhis.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Our church isn’t doing anything new, rather, we are going back to the original source and making a course correction on a church that has lost its way”. 

Hint: *whispers* it’s everybody.

Whether or not they are actually doing that is a conversation for another place and time- but please realize that every church has its “times are changing, how should we” moment. And we have seen this in the Modern world in both America and in Europe in the 1800s. Europe saw the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of the mid-century. Americans saw the vast expansion westward.

In Europe, the older protestant denominations were remolded- especially in the German lands as a pan-protestant group. This left many of the “confessional groups” that wouldn’t abide by the flattening of distinctions to flee to the new world where the frontier afforded them space (if not some economic troubles and the question of conforming to the new “American” way or not”).

And on this same frontier, we see the blossoming of the Baptist churches and the Methodist churches. These were less hierarchical than the older church bodies, perceived as more democratic and embracing the vibrant camp-style worship that flooded America during the 2nd Great Awakening at this time.

Enter one of the more significant characters in the history of the Methodist church and in the German-speaking churches: Wilhelm Nast, who was born on this, the 15th of June in 1807 in Stuttgart, then in the kingdom of Württemberg. Destined for some kind of ministry he attended schools in Stuttgart and Württemberg- his roommate in seminary was David Friedrich Strauss, later amongst the most famous, or infamous proponents of higher criticism and someone who denied that Jesus was divine based on his reading of the so-called “historical Jesus”. 

Nast was troubled by this theology and decided that he couldn’t enter into the Lutheran ministry (meaning he would have to pay back his school that had been paid for). Temporarily giving up the idea of theological work, he immigrated to the United States in 1828. By 1832 he was a librarian and instructor in German at West Point. He had met a Methodist family and became fond of their reading of Martin Luther. He would eventually work at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he was invited to a Methodist meeting. It was at this time that the Western Christian Advocate- a Methodist journal, called for work to be done amongst the growing German immigrant population.

Nast believed that the Methodist appropriation of Martin Luther would be welcome amongst German immigrants- at least, some of them. He saw the emphasis on personal holiness as not foreign to Luther. Echoing Luther, he wrote that “God stands ready at all times to enact with humanity, and because of which we may receive forgiveness from sins…in and for the merits of the Lord Jesus.” He saw the democratic church as more in line with Luther’s “priesthood of all believers” and saw the commitment to Scripture and the supernatural as a welcome rebuttal of the liberal Lutheran state church many were fleeing in Germany.

His work translating the Methodist Book of Discipline, the Articles of Religion, and “General Rules” of Methodism into German- and then into portable pocket formats for itinerant preachers on horseback led to the rapid growth of this new German Methodist group.

The group was so successful that by 1844 Nast decided to go himself and send missionaries back to Germany and the surrounding countries that had begun to allow for “free churches.” He saw Methodism and Lutheranism as a united force that could rescue continental Christians from the rationalism he himself fled.

He stressed “connection,” an early word for “denomination” that stressed loose ties based on shared theology as opposed to a state structure or overbearing bishops. This would be a popular distinction in British evangelical and American contexts. He would be perhaps best known as the popular periodical “Der Christliche Apologete”- the Christian Apologist (and producing periodicals was in the Nast blood- his grandson, Conde Nast, would be found among other magazines Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Home and Garden).

Many who fled Germany to America brought German Lutheranism and kept it- but for many, they saw the new move to the new world as a time for reform and saw Nast as the harbinger of a new Reformation- uniting Reformation theology and an American sense of individualism and a democratic impulse. Whatever your own thoughts on the issue, no one can deny the significance of Wilhelm Nast- the father of German Methodism in both America and then in sending missionaries back to Europe. Wilhelm Nast, born on this day in 1807, died in 1899 at the age of 91.

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Hebrews 3 (a short one):

5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that would be spoken later. 6 Christ, however, was faithful over God’s house as a son, and we are his house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 15th of June 2023, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man whose forebears probably weren’t Nast people…that’s some German Hatfield and McCoy stuff- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man, who, if you’re wondering, the smoking of the pork ribs went terribly- I essentially made bone-in beef jerky.  I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.