The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg in the Eighteenth Century

edited by Hermann Wellenreuther, Thomas Muller-Bahlke and A. Gregg Roeber

Book cover: The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg in the Eighteenth Century

Extent: 445 pages

Publisher: Harrassowitz Verlag

Subjects: Religious Studies

Series: Hallesche Forschungen

Series volume number: 35

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2013)

ISBN: 9783447069632

6.65 x 9.45 inches

Price: $109.00

Out of stock

Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg (1711-1787), born in Einbeck, Lower Saxony, and sent as Lutheran pastor by Gotthilf August Francke, Director of the Hallesche Stiftungen, in 1742 to Pennsylvania, is considered the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in the United States. The essays presented in The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg in the Eighteenth Century analyze the world and achievements of the German pastor. In order to evaluate Muhlenberg’s accomplishments as well as his failings, the first five contributors focus on Muhlenberg’s time in Europe and especially on his educational and religious experiences in Einbeck and in Halle as well as his theology studies at Gottingen and his times in Halle as teacher that shaped his later experiences in the US. In Pennsylvania, Muhlenberg had to confront a legal framework different from Europe, with fierce political infighting that pitted Lutherans and Anglicans against Peace Churches and pastors with attacks from within their own congregations and the Pennsylvania German press dominated by the hostile Saur family. In these difficult and then revolutionary times, Muhlenberg came to conclude that a “great gulf” had opened between the Old World he remembered and what he experienced in the New World. With the adoption of a Kirchenordnung (congregational constitution) of 1762 by several Lutheran congregations, the religious and then the secular worlds of governance shifted dramatically for the transplanted European Lutherans. The Declaration of Independence stripped his connections to Pietistic Germany and the strong-willed pious and Pietistic Lutheran Pastor died in 1787 in a world dedicated to establishing a new secular constitutional order.

  • Edited by Thomas Muller-Bahlke
  • Edited by A Gregg Roeber
  • Edited by Hermann Wellenreuther