Hermann Heinrich Grafe

Hermann Heinrich Grafe at a young age

Hermann Heinrich Grafe (born February 3, 1818 in Palsterkamp , today Bad Rothenfelde , † December 25, 1869 in Elberfeld ) was the founder of the first Free Evangelical Congregation in Germany, lay theologian and hymn poet .

Life

Adolescent years

Grafe was born in the old mill on Palsterkamp in the Teutoburg Forest . At that time, his birthplace belonged to the area of ​​the city of Dissen, today to the municipality of Bad Rothenfelde . He completed a commercial apprenticeship in Duisburg and in 1834 experienced an inner conversion to the Christian faith . According to his own statement, the reason for this was an intensive Bible study . He later wrote in his diary: “I have found the key to my whole life because I have found Christ.” From then on, personal conversion and being born again were subjects that counted as part of the substance of the gospel. Through his friend Eduard Neviandt, he met his family in Mettmann in 1838, where he met his future wife Maria Theresia Neviandt and visited the local pietistic community.

Further developments

In 1841 his professional training took him to Lyon in France . Here he got to know the Eglise évangélique de Lyon (Evangelical Congregation) founded by Adolphe Monod in 1832 . Because of the question of who was allowed to take part in the Lord's Supper, it was constituted as a free church independent of the Reformed Church . Only those who had personally decided to follow Jesus Christ could become members of this congregation . As a successor to Monod, who had taken over a chair in Montauban in 1836, the congregation found a stronger ecclesiological orientation, developed considerable missionary and social activity and emphasized the unity of Christians in the spirit of the Evangelical Alliance, which was formed a little later : “Essentially, unity, in the inessential freedom, in everything love ” . In the encounter with the teaching and the life of this community, especially with the awareness of the free and liberating grace of God, the cornerstone of his ecclesiology was laid for Count .

In search of the New Testament church

In 1842 Grafe returned to Germany and took up residence in Elberfeld, where he and his brother-in-law Eduard Neviandt set up a silk industrial company. At first he stayed with the local Reformed church, but for the sake of conscience he no longer took part in the Lord's Supper because he missed “that fellowship of believers” to whom “only the Lord's Supper is due”. On the question of the Lord's Supper, Count could see himself in harmony with the Reformed confessions, which - such as the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) - declare that "those who prove to be unbelievers and ungodly in their confession and life" are not admitted to the Lord's Supper because “otherwise the covenant of God will be reviled and his anger will be aroused over the whole community” (82nd question). However, Grafe temporarily took on a voluntary role as a representative or deacon, but disappointedly resigned his work in 1846 because of a compulsory collection of church tax, which he described as "unevangelical"; He wrote to the presbytery that he understood something else under an “apostolic-evangelical church”, namely a “community of believers”. As early as 1842 he had written from Lyon that he had gained the insight that it was “very wrong” for “believers to go to the Lord's table with unbelievers”. He wanted a church in which only believers would be members, as is the case in Lyon, Geneva, Lausanne and especially in England. In addition to the formative model of the Anglo-Saxon free churches, Grafe was referring to the free-church congregations (Eglises évangéliques libres) that had arisen in the wake of the western Swiss revival movement (Réveil) since 1817, with whose protagonists Auguste Rochat and Carl von Rodt he maintained close relationships.

Before the founding of an independent free church with an alternative concept to the regional churches, Grafe founded a spiritual lay movement, the so-called Evangelical Brothers' Association (not to be confused with the Swiss movement, which had the same name until 2009 ) together with other " awakened " people. who, in view of the church removal at the time of early industrialization, developed a strong evangelistic missionary activity that extended far across the Wuppertal to the Bergisches Land, the Hunsrück, Siegerland and Hesse and, in addition to revivals, also led to the formation of Christian communities. Since there were initially no baptisms and Lord's Supper celebrations within the Brotherhood , there was a break with Carl Brockhaus , who, under the influence of John Nelson Darby, began to set up independent Christian assemblies and invited to Sunday meal celebrations.

Before Grafe started a separate church plant, he tried to sound out with the Barmer Baptist church , which had existed since 1850 , whether a joint church could come about. He was guided by the desire that the believers who belonged to the one body of Christ should also belong to an external, visible church. He was completely in agreement with Julius Koebner , the Baptist pastor at the time, in the doctrine of baptism, in the “recognition of baptism according to or with faith” and in the “rejection of infant baptism”, but he wished for every Christian the individual and free decision in the baptismal question, because believers should not be separated by baptism. Köbner did not respond to Grafe's request, which has led to a parallel development of two free churches that are very close to one another in teaching and life.

Foundation of the Free Evangelical Congregation

On November 22, 1854, together with five other men, Grafe founded the Free Evangelical Congregation Elberfeld-Barmen, which, with its creed and its constitution, was based on the Geneva model of the Eglise évangélique libre (1848) and became the nucleus of today's Federation of Free Evangelical Congregations ( KdöR). Grafe and other people left the Reformed community of Elberfeld on November 30, 1854. In their letter of resignation, they justified their step by stating that it was not about temporary evils or poor practice in the church, but “about the basis of the existing people's church” . Since they were convinced of the necessity of personal faith in order to belong to Jesus Christ, they felt bound in their conscience to “not only confess this great evangelical principle with the mouth, but also to prove it with action” , that of personal faith in Christ is also the basis for belonging to the community. For them it was about the representation of the visible church, which should be as congruent as possible with the invisible, because if the "invisible church" consists of all those who believe from the heart, then the "visible church" should also be the local communities consist only of those who really profess their faith with their mouths and their lives. The church planters understood their separation and the formation of a dissident church as an “act of conscience” and in no way as sectarianism. They assured that despite all the criticism of the “dilapidated state or state church” , which had been exposed to considerable damage through the signature of 1848, they felt “ most intimately connected ” to all “ members of the body of Christ ” in all churches .

Until his death in 1869, Grafe exercised a decisive influence in the community, in which he also served as a senior elder for several years. “The guiding motif of Grafe's thought and action was the unity of the children of God, which transcended all church boundaries and which was not called into question by the planting of the church itself. He strove for an alliance church that was open to all sides, to whose Lord's Supper every member of the body of Christ had access. "

After free communion communions and independent congregations had emerged in other places, in 1874 22 congregations of related denominations were formed while maintaining their autonomy, which later became known as the Federation of Free Evangelical congregations.

In 1855, Grafe was able to persuade the theologian Heinrich Neviandt, a brother of his wife, to give up his vicariate in the regional church and become a preacher of the Free Evangelical Community. A son of Grafes by the name of Eduard studied theology, became a professor at the Bonn Theological Faculty and went down in history as a “liberal” theologian.

In addition to his job and community work, Grafe was committed to social responsibility in Elberfeld poor relief, chaired the board of directors of the municipal orphanage in Elberfeld and founded a "city mission" in Wuppertal, which was dedicated to workers, single people, the poor, children and families .

The last years of Grafe's life were overshadowed by frequent illnesses that led to his early death. His grave is in the Free Church cemetery in Wuppertal .

spirituality

Grafe was intensively self-taught with classical, historical, theological and edifying literature. In addition to the biblical languages ​​Greek and Hebrew, he had learned Latin, English and above all French, which benefited his multiple trips to Switzerland and France. Between 1851 and 1865 he wrote eight diaries, which he programmatically entitled “Signs of life or self-studies” and whose purpose he described as “self-exercise of my mind for self-knowledge and self-development” . They provide insights into his inner life, his theological, philosophical and psychological thoughts, his religious struggles and his poetic and lyrical talents. The latter showed up in poems that came to be known as church songs.

Grafe's beliefs were shaped by various influences. He said of himself: "I am reformed in the doctrine of salvation, independent in the community constitution and a pietist in life ." The influence of Gerhard Tersteegen's mysticism should also have been not insignificant . Although Grafe had theological reservations about mysticism, there are statements in his diaries that are clearly related to Tersteegen's Christ mysticism. This proximity of Grafes and the organizations and communities he initiated to Teerstegen's spirituality is also evident in the fact that the "pilgrims 'hut" set up by Tersteegen as a gathering point for the quiet in the country in Heiligenhaus near Velbert was transferred to the Count and the Evangelical Brothers' Association about a hundred years after it began has been. Those in charge obviously had the impression that the brother association would continue the establishment in the spirit of its founder.

literature

• Walther Hermes : Hermann Heinrich Grafe and his time. Bundes-Verlag, Witten 1933.
• Hartmut Lenhard: The unity of the children of God - The way HH Grafes (1818–1869) between the brother movement and Baptists . R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1977.
• Hartmut Lenhard: Hermann Heinrich Grafe . In: Evangelisches Gemeindelexikon . R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1986, ISBN 3-417-24082-4 , p. 235.
• Wolfgang Dietrich (ed.): An act of conscience. Memories of Hermann Heinrich Grafe (= history and theology of the free evangelical communities. Volume 1). Bundes-Verlag, Witten 1988.
• Wilfrid Haubeck, Wolfgang Heinrichs, Michael Schröder (Hrsg.): Signs of life - The diaries of Hermann Heinrich Grafes in excerpts . SCM R. Brockhaus, Witten 2004, ISBN 3-417-29606-4 .
• Hartmut Weyel: “On the terrain of free grace”. Hermann Heinrich Grafe (1818–1869). Life path and sign of life of a Protestant church planter; in: H. Weyel: The future needs a past. Lively portraits from the history and prehistory of the Free Evangelical Churches , Vol. I (= History and Theology of the Free Evangelical Churches. Volume 5.5 / 1). SCM Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2009, pp. 145–181.
• Friedrich Wilhelm Bautz :  Count, Hermann Heinrich. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 2, Bautz, Hamm 1990, ISBN 3-88309-032-8 , Sp. 283-285.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermann Heinrich Grafe in the catalog of the German National Library
• Texts by Hermann Heinrich Grafe in the voice of faith

swell

1. ↑ Hartmut Weyel: Evangelical and free. History of the Federation of Free Evangelical Congregations in Germany (= History and Theology of the Free Evangelical Congregations. Volume 5.6), SCM Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2013, pp. 19–23.
2. ↑ Hartmut Lenhard: Hermann Heinrich Grafe, in: Evangelisches Gemeindelexikon , R. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1986, p. 235.
3. ^ Hermann Heinrich Grafe: Diary IV, November 6, 1855; quoted from: Hartmut Weyel: The future needs a past. Lively portraits from the history and prehistory of the Free Evangelical Churches. SCM Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2009, p. 31
4. ↑ Hartmut Weyel: The future needs a past. Lively portraits from the history and prehistory of the Free Evangelical Churches. SCM Bundes-Verlag, Witten 2009, p. 43, which in turn refers to: Heinrich Neviandt: Memories from the life of ... businessman Hermann Heinrich Grafe. In: W. Dietrich (Ed.): An Act of Conscience. Memories of Hermann Heinrich Grafe Bundes-Verlag, Witten 1988, p. 186.