Herrnhut dispute in Graubünden
The Herrnhuterstreit in Graubünden marks the largest religious dispute in the Evangelical Reformed Bündnerkirche since its existence. This took place in the second half of the 18th century in the Free State of the Three Leagues and ran between the pietists herrnhutischer embossed on one hand and the Reformed Orthodox other.
Beginning
A first polemical pamphlet appeared in Chur in 1759 . It was a copy, translated into German, of a warning from the Amsterdam Council of Churches against the activities of the Pietists, namely the supporters of Count Zinzendorf . They were accused of violating church unity and a language that was inadequate to the Bible.
course
The clashes were fought particularly intensely as party battles at the annual meetings of the Graubünden Synod . On the Orthodox side did by special sharpness and uncompromising Jacob Pernisch the minister in apparent Samedan in the Upper Engadine and Vice Dean of the church Federal was. On the occasion of a funeral oration on March 5, 1773 for a Peter Planta who died as a youth , he had a. a. exclaimed: "May God grant that the absurd Savior of the Pietists may disappear from the pulpits ..."
On the part of the Pietists, pastor Christian Ziegerer , who worked in Grüsch and was later dismissed as Moravian, wrote a pamphlet for the synod that took place in Safien in 1768 . In it he speaks of a “so-called Christianity” that is “so utterly corrupt in teaching and life”.
In 1775 the state authorities called a religious talk in Chur. This ended with a report approved by the Evangelical Session of the Bündner Bundestag and the majority of the Protestant communities, the "Parere" ("directive"), which allows the individual pastors to read Herrnhut books and deal with Herrnhut-minded colleagues It is forbidden to pass on to church members and calls for church unity.
The compromise was subsequently not accepted on the Orthodox side. This was followed by serious disagreements at the synods in Chur in 1775 and in Sent in the Lower Engadin in 1778 , where the Orthodox party temporarily separated and met independently. In Sent, the Pietist majority party was also denied access to the village church on a day of meetings by farmers armed with pitchforks.
The End
The Orthodox prevailed for a short time when the "Parere" was abolished in 1778 and a candidate vow became mandatory, in which the "Herrnhut (sect)" was expressly sworn off.
In 1785, however, the vows of the candidates for the pastor's office in Graubünden were revised again. It now read in a generalized form: they have to «vow that they do not want to be devoted to or committed to any foreign sect, it may have names as it wishes, insofar as it teaches differently from what is according to the Bible and the Helvetian denomination » . Since the Moravians were now anchored in the people of Graubünden, they did not see themselves as a “foreign sect”, so that both parties could live with the all-round face-saving formulation.
Varia
It is a curiosity that Jakob Pernisch maintained good personal contact with his neighbor Gian Battista Frizzoni in Celerina / Schlarigna , who belonged to the Moravian parliamentary group, after hard arguments at the end of his life and attested to his pietistic-inspired hymnbook that “he had not found any article which would be inconsistent with the divine revelation contained in the Holy Scriptures ».
literature
- Peter Niederstein: Graubünden Church History Part 4: The Last Three Centuries. Preservation and transformation , Chur 1987, there pp. 57–60
- Johann Andreas v. Speaker: Cultural History of the Three Leagues in the 18th Century . Edited v. Rudolf Jenny, extended edition d. Neu-Edition, Chur 1976, pp. 355-370, 673f. u. 741f.
- Holger Finze-Michaelsen: The Moravians in Graubünden. Controversy about church renewal in the 18th century , in: Unitas Fratrum 33, 1933, pp. 5–34