Friday, July 22, 2022

Perfectionists

 Kelpius took over for Zimmerman in the new world end of world project. But before that they were called Perfectionists, which is what Baumann and the Newborn were. Then Zimmerman changed perfectionists to illuminists and off we go, except this was the century before.

"In 1690 or 1691 Zimmermann went to
Erfurth where he completed his plan of organizing a Chapter of
Perfection which he intended to implement in the New World.
Influenced by the teachings of Johannes Tauler, Jacob Bohme, and
Spener, the Chapter sought to restore true piety to the existing
Church without creating a new religion.26

Thursday, November 13, 2014

1. I was seized by a shuddering or shivering

I, Matthies Baumann, now in America, was a poor day-laborer and helper in Lambsheim in Palatinate, in Europe. In June of 1701 I was seized by a shuddering or shivering like that of a man who has succumbed to a heavy sickness, and I gave myself over to God, and I was quit of the world so that I said to God that I would gladly die.

As I lay on the bed I no longer knew anything of myself and I was as one who would have passed on gladly, although then I knew nothing of this, as my wife tells me. On the fifth day I was beyond myself and I was drawn into heaven and I had word from God that I was to tell men that they should be converted for the last day was coming. And then I extended one call after another for a whole hour:

O ye children of men, be converted! The last day is at hand!
And my wife says that she thought that I was delirious. And when I stopped calling out I was soon beyond myself again for I heard Him say to me again:

Man thinks that he lives by the light of day, but he is turned about in night!
Then I asked, How are they to live? I was told, According to the New Testament. And this lasted for one day or fourteen, and the last time I was beyond myself it lasted for twenty-four hours and my wife says that she often thought that I was dead, that she did not know if there was any breath left in me. And she says further that I lay there for twenty-four hours moving neither hands nor feet, ever lying as if dead so that she was expecting the end momently and was waiting to put the shroud on me. Then however I came back to my body again and I was as sound without as within.

And I had a command from God to tell men to be converted. So I sent for the Reformed pastor (for at that time I bore the name Reformed) to come and tell me what it was that God had commanded me. But the pastor did not wish to come, saying that he was not feeling well. Then I remained in bed, but not for long. Matters were so good with me now as they never had been before all my life, and at this time God's goodness came over me, which has never changed since then, and I marveled what God had done for a miserable man like me. I entered the sickness an old man; I arose a new one. [The first one he sent for to tell to be converted was the Reformed pastor.]

2. I got up and went to the pastor's. I looked so badly that the children ran after me

I got up and went to the pastor's. I looked so badly that the children ran after me as they follow a courtesan and the people stared at me when I approached the parsonage. And when I arrived at the parsonage i did not knock but entered the house directly, [entering directly is his style] through the door into the drawing room. The pastor and his wife were frightened. He had just prayed for me in the church and here I come into his room like one of the dead.

I began by saying that God had sent me back into the world to tell men to be converted and that I soon would die. The pastor thought that I was out of my mind and handed me a world[ly] book which was to drive these ideas out of my head. This so hurt me that I only cried out and whined the more, saying that men did not comprehend what was for their own good, as I had been ordered to tell them.

When a man in his first birth wants to pray all sorts of thoughts enter him. I know, for I began the Lord's Prayer three or four times and could not bring it to God without other thoughts popping into my head. And now God has so made me that if I would think of the world God draws me away to the other side so that I cannot pull away from Him. As previously I could not come to God so now I cannot depart from Him.

As far as my sickness is concerned, it happened to me so that I might show you where I got whereof I write and teach. My doctrines are not from man or through man; God Himself has taught me; I am nothing else than a Christian

3. A Christian is born of God and he who is born of God cannot sin. And God therefore has sent me into the world to show men how they may come to Him again.

A Christian is born of God and he who is born of God cannot sin. And God therefore has sent me into the world to show men how they may come to Him again. What Adam lost Christ restored in me. Therefore can I write and speak about it. If he had not made me so I would be like other people who are yet in sin. For I too was in it but now I know why Christ has come into the world. Out of grace he made me free so that I truthfully can say that He who Christ makes free is free indeed.

And, as I had been told that man is to live after the New Testament, I shall explain the ground of the New Testament is this: I will put my law within them, reciting it in their hearts; and I will be a god to them, and they to me a people, no longer shall they have to teach their fellows, each instructing each, how to know the Eternal, for they all shall know me, both the great and the small. This is the testament I will make with them when their sins are taken away. Therefore Christ came into the world to free them from sin. This is the ground of the New Testament.

Christians without Christ

There are many people in the world who call themselves Christian who are all Christians without Christ. You have to understand that a Christian has to be born of God. And he that is born of God cannot sin; and you are sinners and shall remain sinners until the spiritual death. Is this not what the lord said to me: they think that they live in day but they are turned about in the night?

4. Come to me, all persons in the whole world, be ye pious or impious;

Come to me, all persons in the whole world, be ye pious or impious; if you be free from original sin then Christ has come into you. He who says that God has come into his flesh is an anti-Christ. Examine yourselves and where you do not find that Christ has come into you, and made you free of sin, do not then give yourselves out as Christians. [The biggest part of Baumann's corrective is against those who claim they are Christians, viz. that the church is the unregenerate.]

World Overwhelms

Listen to what you have to do! There is but one sin which Adam committed. He died unto God in spirit. And this is what all persons get from Adam: [not from Eve!] they have died unto God. This they could learn to know if they would learn something when they approach God in prayer. [that is, they could learn to know they have died to God because] Then the world overwhelms them so that they cannot keep to God as long as one Lord's Prayer lasts without other thoughts entering. [this fleeting concentration is an unusual proof of experience] Man is to love God with whole heart and with all his energies; he is dead unto God and still is to love Him! This he cannot do.

The natural man knows nothing of the life that comes from God. This is the sort of worship that all sects teach; they all say that man is to keep himself devout and become acceptable to God by a good life. I do not despise devout living, thinking it to be no good; devout living has to do with a Christian too! But a Christian knows that even a heathen can be a devout man. They do not know what original sin is. This is true! Christ came only for original sin. He said that he came into the world as a light and he who believes in Him shall not remain in darkness. Now, those who call themselves Christian and say they believe on Him and still remain sinners--all this is wrong and belongs to the first birth.

5. Man simply and merely must be a poor sinner as he ignores God and knows Him not; he is to love Him and God is to be his treasure and yet he is dead to Him.

Man simply and merely must be a poor sinner as he ignores God and knows Him not; he is to love Him and God is to be his treasure and yet he is dead to Him. And all this in fact shall make him into a poor sinner, for it is said: Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Man is to become a poor sinner just because of original sin. Therefore he should pray ceaselessly that God will give Himself unto him and reveal Himself unto him and take up His abode in him and regenerate him. [he should pray unceasingly, however he cannot focus to the end of the Lord's Prayer!] If God does not first show Himself to man, and come to him, man cannot love Him.

As far as the outer evil life is concerned, man dares not pray; all he can do is to live devoutly and this he can do if he but will. But if I am to love God and if I know Him not it si necessary that I first pray that He make Himself known unto me so that I may come to love Him. [this was not Baumann's case. He was overwhelmed by something he did not seek. Religious literature is filled with the travail of those who have sought God, Charles Finney's agonies come to mind, but that is not the instance of irresistible grace that happened to Baumann] If someone were to write me that I should love him, and if I had never in my whole life seen him, I would know nothing more bvasic than to reply that he should first come to see me so that i could get toknow him, otherwise it would be impossible to love him. Although I see other persons around and cannot approach those whom I do not know, how much less will I be able to love God, because died unto Him and I am Adam's child?

With the body we cannot sin before God, only before people and other creatures; [quoted in Chronicon as the proof of Baumann's error] this the judge can correct. Adam did not do evil with the body; he performed spiritual sin; he died to God. And Christ announced a spiritual righteousness and warned us against spiritual sin. We have to hold as sin the spiritual sin we have inherited.

Men say: Christ has taken sin away. This is true as far as I am concerned. He who finds himself so is as Adam was before the fall; as I am. Christ took no sins away but God spoke through Him in no other way than He speaks through me. If Christ had taken sins away He would not have said: strive to get through the narrow door, for I tell you, many will try to get in and not be able. Here you hear that He has not taken sin away but just announced what we have to do to gain the new birth. if He had taken sin away it would not be necessary for us to strive to become blessed. [This is obviously confused as he contradicts what he says above. It is important to verify the translation.]

6. Christ announced the will of God to the people of that time in the same way that I announce it to people in these times, how they may be quit of sin.

Christ announced the will of God to the people of that time in the same way that I announce it to people in these times, how they may be quit of sin. He is the first-born among the few brethren of this time. Man must be ever dying until he comes with Christ to the Cross, dying to his first nature. Just as Christ felt pain outwardly in His flesh, so I must feel it in my mind. And insofar as man holds it sinful that he forgets [137] God, so he will ever be a poor sinner and can pray without ceasing. The fault is his for he is ever forgetting God.

But this is not how people think about sin. They commit sin. They pray about it. Then, man thinks, God is merciful, He forgives me. Then the pain passes, he believes, until he sins again with something bad. And this goes on as long as he lives and he never comes to God or to the new birth. If you would be blessed you have to go the way which God lets be announced through me, otherwise you shall not become holy. He who does not thus humble himself before God, as I write here, can never come to peace.

Allo people want to look at Christianity from the outside and they are far blinder than the Jews because they boast of Christ and do not share Him anymore than Jews and heathen. And they know nothing about the inward ground, and this is the great blindness. It is not meaningless that I heard it said, when I was enraptured, "man thinks that he lives by the light of day, but he is all turned about in the night." He who beasts that he is a Christian and does not find complete change within him, as I write I am, he is an anti-Christ. He who wants to see a Christian must look within himself, or he shall not find one. Christ's congregation is invisible; it is a spiritual congregation. What I announce cannot be seen with these carnal eyes nor heard with these carnal ears. Everything is of the spirit. He who has ears, let him hear, he who can understand it, understands.

A Christian has one death behind him and he has come into life and is resurrected with Christ and now dwells with Him in the heavenly places. There are only two kinds of people in the world: one from Adam, the other from Christ. When a person is born he stands in Adam's fall, however devout he may be. As long as a person still fears God he stands in Adam's fall. Before Adam had eaten of the fruit of the tree he did not fear God, rather he loved Him and had fellowhip with Him. And as Adam was before the fall, so have I been made--and better! For Adam gained God as an enemy and I shall keep Him as my Friend to all eternity. Satan could not have done better for his kingdom than to create denominations. When one leaves one denomination and goes into another and still remains as pious as before, he deems that he is closer to the kingdom of God than before: A thousand denominations may come along and be as holy as they will and think they cannot fail; they have the best and all others are false--all this strengthens the devil's domain because all denominations are sinful and stand within his domain. Withe their mouths most pious confess that they are poor sinners; and this lasts their entire lives; but in their hearts they are Pharisees.

Listen to what the Master says: Two men went to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-gatherer. The Pharisee prayed by himself and thanked God that he was not evil like the rest of men and like the tax-gatherer. But the tax-gatherer beat his breast and said: "O God, have mercy on me for my sins!" he tax-gatherer went home accepted rather than the other man. Here you hear that he was quit of sin. And when you too find yourselves like the tax-gatherer, then shall you likewise go to your houses accepted like the poor tax-gatherer or else all your speech is lies when you say you are poor sinners. Only that counts before God which comes from Him. You pray that God's Kingdom is to come among you and that His Will is to be done on earth as in heaven. This has been fulfilled in me. the kingdom of heaven is within me. And God's Will is that I again have what died in Adam; he died unto God!

Now as God's spirit bears witness in my spirit, God has become quickened [138] within me again. No one knows this except he who has the new birth from God. People think that they are Christians and if they but live devoutly they will come to Heaven; but the poor people do not know that they are dead to God. When a person becomes sick he thinks if only he had not done this or that he could die in peace. This comes about because people know no better nor are they taught any better.

7. Ye poor people! Christianity is not something as you think which can be taught, as all denominations in the world seem to think.

Ye poor people! Christianity is not something as you think which can be taught, as all denominations in the world seem to think. They think that they can teach their children to be as they are--and this they can, too! But Christians cannot. Christians may tell their children where and how man ma come to God but the child must find out himself that he is blind else God cannot make him see. He himself must be sure that he is lost before the can seek the true way. Each person himself must go through the narrow gate and along the small way. This way is not as people usually thinks. They think that through outer persecution, or by being despised, or that a person cheerfully bears all things, or by enduring all things from others for the sake of religion--this they think is the small way by which they mean to get to heaven! [this is a parody, somewhat true of Mennonite beliefs] But the small way and narrow gate of a Christian is this: to be condemned unto death so that he also says: "My God, why has Thou forsaken me?" He has to destroy the poor tabernacle and lift up the Cross! Listen how you have to go the narrow way!

You must discover that you lack God in your heart and you must call upon the unknown God that He shall make Himself manifest within you so you can come to love Him. Then you will go the narrow way and if you remain steadfast God soon will let you feel it and you no longer will doubt what the narrow way is. And still it will happen to you that you say, as Christ said, "My God! Why has thou forsaken me?" You will think that God does not want you, that you are finished and must perish! Then you will know and experience what the narrow way is and you will say that never in your whole life have you ever had greater pain than now. this is the time when life and death contend. If man then remains constant and thinks that even if he be lost he still will not forsake God then, presently, God will bear him anew and take up His abode in him.

Then, when man has come from death into life, what God has done to him he will announce to all. Then he will know what Christ's regeneration is. You think you are newly born. One thinks he became so when he was baptized as a child, another thinks the became so when he was baptized as an adult and has become somewhat more devout than when he was a youth, a third thinks that he has to keep righteous as the Scripture says and he busies himself day and night to keep these things, and if he keeps one he breaks another and so he is nothing else than a poor sinner. And if he breaks nothing he still has no guilty conscience before God, he does not know how often he hails in word and thought and is a sinner before God. Still he believes that he is better than he who does evil and he thinks that he can become blessed like another, thus living in false hope. In sum, people believe than they are right and they do not believe than man can experience God here in the flesh, that man can become sure and certain that he can sin no more. So God may call as much as He wants, men still stay choked up and do not believe. He that has ears to hear, let him hear!

When you, dear reader, examine yourself and do not find it as I here write than you believe that I must be in error and you think that I lie and you ask God to protect you form such pride. Also you will say: Test all spirits and see whether they be of God. Those of whom this was said were free from sin. A person still unregenerate and in sin cannot test spirits as he is in darkness. If he wants to rest his heart he will find the devil as god: I shall give you better advice! His mind must change from the world to God and he must think that he has to see whether he can see, and become seeing, so that he may know wherefrom each one comes. Then may he test! Before the new birth all that man does is blind. You think you are Christian and re-born; but you all have a rotten redeemer who cannot properly cleanse you. He is not from heaven but from below. the true Redeemer is from above; therefore also He can free you from sin.

Now listen, you teachers who teach people, what poor human beings you are! God does not select any from among the denominations, no matter what name they bear. All in the world stand in one condition before God. Although one denomination may appear better than the other, all are outside of God. Where a true spirit teaches, he knows where he comes from: his doctrine, which God reveals to him proceeds into the inner man and points to the true Source.

And when hearers have ears to hear they believe what has been said in the spirit and they keep themselves to God and as soon as the listener experiences an appearance of God thereafter the Spirit need say no more. Where Christ is the teacher no human beings are needed. Christ says: "My sheep hear my voice." Human doctrines last only until man becomes Christian, then he has another teacher. You think you are Christian; yet you still let yourselves be taught. John says: "the unction you received remains within you", and you really need no teaching from anyone. I do not write that you need no teachers; you do need teachers to tell you where God is to be found. But the teachers first must have found Him themselves. When a blind man shows someone the way they both fall into the ditch. And so the whole world is misled; they teach (and learn) more and more and never come to knowledge of truth. So with them all learning is nought.

8. I also believe in a congregation here in this world which is not made of patches and chips but which is made holy and righteous.

I also believe in a congregation here in this world which is not made of patches and chips but which is made holy and righteous. Those yet in sin have no part with those who are redeemed as long as they do not cleave to God. Dogs keep outside! They may look as pious as they want, they still will not get to heaven for only that gets to heaven which comes from heaven and that is Christ. And he who does not beget Christ within him never will get to heaven, be he as pious as he may.

Here I show you only what I have received from the Grace of God and I tell you what a Christian is so each one may examine himself and see how he stands and whether Jesus is his Redeemer and has redeemed him. He who will test what I here teach about God will find that what I say is truth. All of God's will is contained in this writing, the entire ground of Old and New Testaments. To read books in order to find the way to heaven is vain. Most o f those who have written books were themselves not redeemed. If you do want to read, they read the prophets, how they foretold how God in the last days would raise up His own people. The same is true of the New Testament.

It is written that no unclean thing shall enter the New Testament; and again that the Lord will judge when He shall say, Come here, ye righteous, and ye sinners, go ye to damnation. Seek ye all the time your Redeemer and ye shall find Him and become inwardly certain that this is God's voice which now goes forth among men. And when he through such evil people, bears such great love to them and us (and perhaps you) then you surely will believe that God speaks through me. And all those who have tasted the sweetness of God will have to say that this is truly God's Spirit and not of man.

For these 22 years I have had to say where peace was to be found wherever I was among men. But men love darkness more than light, they will not believe. John says: the withered and unbelieving are cast into the fire; therefore all is based on faith. He who believes and is not constrained to doubt, he shall come to speak of great miracles which God can do. He who does not believe may read all books and hear all the preachers who do not speak or write as God's voice here is given forth. All of them preach and write books out of the night. As long as a person has not yet been redeemed from sin he had not been sent by God to teach; he is of night and would teach the day. This he cannot do. From where a person is sent, that manner he has in him. I have been sent by God and He has made me from from sin. Now, they say that God has sent them, and they are sinners! Sin is of the devil! John says: the devil sins from the beginning. This is why the son of God appeared: to destroy the devil's work. Now hear! He who is yet in sin, in him Christ has not yet destroyed the devil's work; also, he comes from the devil too! You must look to the ground on which all depends and you have to say that you have never read a book in your whole life like the present writing. In this the will of God is fashioned, what God would have from man. When man yields himself to God He does not throw up his sins to him; He just says: Come, I will refresh you; I will give peace to your souls. When a person gains this new witness God teaches him what he is to do outwardly. He knows himself and God directs him. He who has been so made that the law has been written in his heart no longer needs to fear that he will do evil. God has made him a person who lives according to his law and keeps it.

No one should understand this writing as if I condemned anyone. I have just shown what God has done o me and what He asks of man. Had He not given it to me out of Grace, I then would be as you for I too knew no better. There will be many who will say that I am proud, this the Pharisees also Called Christ when He said that God was His Father and that He knew God. He who has not Christ's Spirit is not His own. The stranger this writing is to a person, the farther he is from God. For no one in the old state will fully understand it because it is written in the new. God calls many persons to repentance but many people go in by a crooked by-way and want to grow into it by an outwardly pious life. And then they grow high-minded and think that heaven cannot fail them. Yet they are so far from God as if they were in evil ways. When God calls a person to repentance he must keep himself from everything except the unknown God that He may let Himself become known unto him. Further, he dare not think, for example, how this or that scriptural phrase is to be understood. Rather, he should always think: how does this apply to me? I believe that I have come to know God before I die and so I shall cleave to Him as ling as I live. Here all disputation ends and Satan can do no more with such a man because he wants only God. Were God to cast him into hell he would bear it with patience. When a person lives in [143] this condition God surely will bear him anew and he will know why Christ came.

9. I have written all that a person has to do if he is to gain the best and never depart therefrom. Why God's Voice seems strange to you is because you stand in the first birth.

I have written all that a person has to do if he is to gain the best and never depart therefrom. Why God's Voice seems strange to you is because you stand in the first birth. You think you cannot fail; you have been born again; if you only live devoutly you will go to heaven; you may be as devout as you wish, you are still a sinner. Right you are! A person may be as devout as he wishes--in his self-centered piety--he is still a sinner. But God dwells in a Christian, therefore he can sin no more. He who has not Christ's Spirit is not His own. Noting is wanting to this person except the new birth--and that is everything. As they do not have this they know nothing of the Kingdom of God; they may be learned, literarily, as they will, the heavenly sense is foolishness to them and they cannot comprehend it.

He who contradicts this writing saying that it is not right, contradicts not me but God. This is not my doings, but God's. Let no one think that I have written this out of my understanding and foolishness. Rather God does this in me because He gladly would have men dwell with Him. So the love of God drives me to it; I write and speak at God's command what His Will is. Nor let anyone think this new doctrine. This is the doctrine which Chris st brought into the world. The dear God gave it tome out of Grace. And because you are still in the first state which you got from Adam this seems to be new doctrine to you. If you come into the new birth you will not say that this is new doctrine but yo9u will say that you now no longer believe for you have heard the Lord Himself. This is how I write, and a lot more, so I cannot bring it to light as it stands. For no one knows it except he who receives it. It is written that they all shall be taught of God, and this is fulfilled in those who have been born again. He no longer needs human teachers. When God comes into a person he no longer hungers and thirsts, he is everlastingly satisfied by God so he does nothing but praise and honor God. Rather, he does not do it but God's Spirit does it in him.

All that Christ and His apostles commanded has become vast idolatry. What people think the best has become the vilest. First, baptism. Here a person is taught for the most part that when they receive it they are Christian. Second, the Holy Communion. Here a person believes, when he goes to it and says or thinks that his sins are evil, even then he does not mean to forsake them, that he is better off than if he had not gone. third, church attendance. Here a person thinks that if he dutifully goes to church, listens attentively, he is better than if he did not go. Fourth, prayer. If he does something bad he prays to God and then, he thinks, God is gracious to him again. Fifth, devout living. Here he thinks that if he just lives devoutly he will die blessedly. Sixthly, giving alms to the poor. Here he thinks that if he give alms to the poor he will get a great reward in heaven. If he knew he would get nothing thereby, he would give much less. Seventh, fasting. Here many think that if they injure the flesh, eating and drinking noting, they are acceptable to God.

These are the seven ideas which people have about worship. All this is an abomination before God. Still, it is the best that they mean to do and it only serves the devil. Now I shall give you the truth about these seven points, how they count before God.

First, baptism. This was signification or oath that a person renounced the world and accepted God. The is that on which I, from my childhood days, have put my mind and where my satisfaction rested. This is the whole with whom each person has wiled away the time of his life. He has been born so as to take the world as his treasure, and now he signifies to God that he has died to Adam. When he is baptized he no longer has the freedom to put his mind into the world; he has promised himself to another Lord. Then the devil soon comes to him and says: see, you have sworn yourself to God and yet your mind is centered on the world, as before. Then a person has nothing else to do but to pray that God will baptize him with fire, or make him new born--it is the same. Fire-baptism makes the Christian and I may cite as an example for when He had been baptized [144] the devil tempted Him. And He answered the devil and bowed Himself in deepest humility to God; so shall we also do. As the devil attacked Him, so he attacks. This follows true baptism.

Second, Holy Communion. It is necessary that this be celebraed every day so that I recall the baptismal covenant and wait for the coming of the Lord. This is the baptism of fire, to hold communion with Him and He with me. I shall keep communion with Him: I die to Him. This is the best communion.

Third, church-going. When a Christian teaches and can say how God has redeemed him, how he dwells in fellowship with God, and how he acquired the new heart and spirit; when he is in possession of all that the prophets have written about all the Lord purposes for His people in the last tiems; then he needs no sermons for he is taught by God Himself. Then one Christian may teach Christian how he shall humble himself before God so he may gain God. So hearers have to go the narrow way too, as Christ went. This is true church-going.

fourth, prayer in spirit and truth. i have to feel in my heart that I need God; He must be my treasure; and I cannot come to Him when I want to, so I displease Him. Therefore must I pray only for God Himself. This is praying in spirit and truth.

Fifth, devout living which counts before God is something other than what people believe. All that a person does before conversion he does to go to heaven. He has a wicked heart and yet wants to be devout; and this is an abomination before God. Christ says: a good tree bears good fruit and and evil tree evil fruit. Therefore he would say: see to it that you become a good tree, that is that you keep yourself to God and see whether God will receive you in Grace and make you newly born. He says: no good tree can bear evil fruit. This means that a new-born person cannot sin. Also, plant an evil tree and the fruit will be evil. That means that good and evil are within you. You have inherited the knowledge of good and evil; you are to be either good or evil. No person can be good unless he be newly born; and no pserson can be completely evil as long as he lives, for some good remains even after Adam's fall. If man still did not retain some good in him he could not be newly born.
When you are made good then the good tree can bear good fruit by itself. This is the true devout life.

Sixth, almsgiving to the poor. Christ says, what you have done unto the least of these my brethren you have done unto me. Christi's brethren are those who have been newly born and who can sin no more. When a person gives something to those who still are sinners then nothing is to be expected therefrom. If, however, one does good to someone, believing that he is a brother of Christ, then he give vitality for him to become a brother of Christ. He shall not remain unrewarded but shall gain the new birth. This is the best almsgiving.

Seventh, he who finds that God is wanting within him, and who is truly ill in spirit, he will bring himself to fast so that he cannot eat. Christ said, He came only for the sake of the sick. This is true fasting.

SOURCE: The tract was printed in Berleburg, 1730, and reprinted in the Pietist periodical edited by Dr. Carl, Die Geistliche Fama Stück vi, 1731, pp. 9-12. All Scriptural references have been omitted. (Translated, J.J.S.)

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Beissel and Baumann

From Chronicon Ephratense (1786): "There arose about that time [1721] a people in the neighborhood of Oley in Berks County, who called themselves the Newborn, and had one Matthias Baumann as their founder. Their profession was that they could not sin anymore. In a pamphlet of 35 pages, 8vo, printed in Germany, and entitled "A Call to the Unregenerate World," it sounds wonderful to hear Baumann say, on page 13: 'Men say that Christ hath taken away sin; it is true in my case, and of those who are in the same condition in which Adam was before the fall, as I am,'--where he places himself by the side of Adam before his fall. And on page 16 he makes a still bolder leap when he says: 'As Adam was before the fall, so have I become, and even firmer.' But what provoked people most was what he says on page 12: 'With the body one cannot sin before God but only before men and other creatures, and these the Judge can settle,' from which they drew dangerous conclusions. They boasted that they had only been sent by God to confound men, a work which they also diligently carried on during ten years, so that their disputations at market times in Philadelphia were often heard with astonishment, where also Baumann once offered, in order to prove that his doctrine was from God, to walk across the Delaware river.

In their journeys through Conestoga, where they here and there found acceptance, they finally also came to the Superintendent, [Conrad Beissel] where Baumann commenced about the new birth. The Superintendent gave him little satisfaction, telling him to smell of his own filth, and then consider whether this belonged to the new birth; whereupon they called him a crafty spirit full of subtility, and departed. It was ob served that from this time on they lost all power to spread their seductions any further, which finally died out with their originators. The Baumann spoken of died about the year 1727. He is said otherwise to have been an upright man, and not to have loved the wrold inordinately; but Kuehlenwein, Jotter, and other followers of his were insatiable in their love of the world." (16-18. Translated by Max Hark, 1889)

"For many centuries the importance of the body, of matter, has been devalued. Importance has always been given to the human "soul" or, in another generalizing view, a person's place in the socio-political structure and the economy. But history shows that the body has always been the main locus of the oppression and appropriation of women, as it has also been with other oppressed groups (for example indigenous and black peoples): this has been done through rape, aggression, denial, abuse, manipulation, idealization. For this very reason, the body cannot be considered as a mere side-issue in any reading of the Bible which asks questions about gender relations. Life and death manifest themselves through the body. Restoring the physical body to its rightful place is a fundamental part of our affirmation of a real and sensual life." [restoration of the body, resurrection of the body] Nancy Cardoso Pereira. The body as a hermeneuticalcategory

Religious arguments as rhetoric are as taken with the sensational as broadcast news. The most quoted statement of Baumann subsequently is that "those who are in the same condition in which Adam was before the fall, as I am." What he could mean other than drama is anybody's guess since what Adam was before the fall is a tad speculative. Try Adam on Venus in Perelandra.


See Sachse, The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania 1708-1742 on the Newborn, p 73f.

John Joseph Stoudt. The First American Oecumenical Movement, 1940. m. Baumann. in Church History, Dec 1940
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3160914

Newborns in the Cradle of Liberty, Oley 1720—

In Sachse, German Sectarians, I, 209
 Newborns in the Cradle of Liberty, Oley 1720—Revised /Dec 2011

The Philadelphia Snort

“Philadelphians snort that a building in Boston—Faneuil Hall, should be called “the cradle of liberty” just because James Otis gave a fiery anti-British speech there in 1761. How can you compare that to a city where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States were drafted, debated, revised, and signed—both in a brief period of eleven years?” Gary B. Nash 

The Newborn of  Oley are more about politics than religion. The sweet and bitter ideas of founder Matthias Baumann, Newborn founder from Lambsheim, charmed and antagonized his time. His followers put these views into practice with such gracelessness and rancor they underwrote the formation of liberty. Newborns squalled all the way from Oley and Berks County into Philadelphia. Die Neu-geboren focused  on “confounding men.”  starting Baumann's  “principle [in 1705] that magistrates had no authority in matters of conscience, an early instance of separation of church and state” (Stoudt. Sunbonnets 51). The extremes of speech with which he challenged social order in Pennsylvania became beliefs transferred to a state that prepared guarantees for all citizens of their rights of free speech and practice.

This virulence, combined with its toleration, contributed mightily to the notion of liberty that entered Jefferson's language in his writing, but Baumann’s ideas also confronted the prejudice of Gnostic oriented sects against the body, that is against women. Finally, his “hallucinatory perfectionism” was influential in later revivals of Charles Finny, and the rise of evangelicalism, all of which marks out a territory of the Newborn far greater in influence that their number.


1. Freedom of Speech
Call dates itself by twice referring to 22 years since Baumann had a mind numbing overwhelming experience in 1701. Ad hominium attacks against him then and since pass over in silence that he had carried his dream before magistrates and into the new world, defending it charismatically before all comers, writing a defense that attracted strong minded intelligent men whose families grew large and prosperous in America, Kuhlwein, Joder, DeTurk, Schenkel, Yoder, Reiff, LeDee and others who acted  in a public manner.


The Newborn habits of American revivalism inculcated liberty by their theatrics. Religious primitivism and charismatic behavior mark all frontiers, and the newborn were at the forefront of  mystical nihilism, radical pietism and religious primitivism. So strongly individualistic in the overthrow of formula the peace loving spirit of all the groups of Philadelphia that made liberty possibleThat said, it was the deep abiding and the Newborn the best occasion of their testing.

The later freedoms of the Declaration and Constitution were nurtured most among the most outrageous sects and religions of early Philadelphia.

This article was written at the request of an editor, but not published, but it seems from the evidence that the Newborn Baumannites might be credited for contributing to American thought much outside their usual due.

Freedom of conscience went unnoticed in Pennsylvania except among the participants. Early Pennsylvania was a lawless place, but whether as a haven of extreme liberty or religious plurality in a golden age  the victor gets to declare.

Any window on 1720-1730 pre-revolutionary Philadelphia  is worth seeing through. It cannot help but focus what became significant later. Issues of religion were a whole lot more than religion, encompassed politics, science, art. There are not that many of these windows. The longer you look through them the more you see, not that a list is forthcoming, but the themes are undeniable, liberty being foremost. So something that first appears small can enlarge our understanding. (from Jacob Reiff)


2. The Rights of Women

 not so unlike that manuscript included at the end of he Music of the Ephrata Cloister where the writer takes up the first tract in support of animal rights attributed to Ludwig Hocker Brother Obed of the Ephrata Cloister, 95f. He does so also for the rights of women, but this had been a cause of Cornelius Agrippa in Nobilitate & Præœcellentia FÅ“minei of 1529,  The Nobility of Woman.

In addition to provoking liberty from their scurrilous speech,  Baumann’s idea of the sinless body implicitly supported the rights of women against the unworldly pietistic sects. Baumann incensed his opponents with the statement that “with the body one cannot sin before God.” The pietists’ fear of the body had extended to women in a kind of Gnostic transference which symbolized a fear of the flesh. Women were blamed for  male sexuality. Such prejudice extended to marriage, which Conrad Beissel of Ephrata called a refuge of the carnal minded. Baumann’s vindication of woman must be seen against the idea of woman symbolizing the unfaithful in the Gnostic world, a temptation to man to sin in the flesh. Baumann turns this view on its head when he says the body is not capable of sin.

The body enabled sin for Beissel who believed every aspect of existence tainted with the flesh, so that the "good [that] sought to possess them" (Chronicon Ephratense 129) must be protected from "too much of the good [falling] into their natural life." He urged spiritual and physical virginity upon his followers. This natural life Beissel  called "man-power" (Chronicon 130) or the "selfish possession" of the good. Such medievalism overhung his  core belief that marriage was "a house of correction for carnal minded persons" (Chronicon 147). The  eminent editor of Chronicon, Peter Miller, expanded this notion to the effect that "who does not know that carnal intercourse stains not only the soul, but also weakens the body, and renders the voice coarse and rough; so that the senses of him must be very blunt who cannot distinguish a virgin from a married woman by her voice. Much concerning the fall of man can be explained from the voice" (161). Baumann’s notion of no longer sinning with the body struck at the heart of those theologies that posited sin as a cause for instruction and strong leadership. If sinless there was little  reason for such outer rituals toward redemption. A person could just live as they saw fit, which they did anyway, but with guilt.

Pennsylvania pietists believed the new birth was a regeneration leading to changed life, unworldly. Baumann  however said that “Christ’s congregation is invisible” (138) and “everything is of the spirit” (138). The Newborn hijacked the new birth and made it antagonistic to those beliefs.  Baumann's "perfection" of sinlessness constituted a massive internal revelation from which the "babe" could not fall. But when Baumann disputed with Quakers and all comers on the courthouse steps of Philadelphia, he did it with humor, promising he would walk on the Delaware river. He did not say if this would be in winter, on ice. When Baumann visited Beissel’s  “solitary residence” at Conestoga (c. 1721) that most famous comeuppance given him was as much a revelation of Beissel as it was correction of Baumann. Beissel said of Baumann's idea of freedom from sin, that “Adam did not do evil with his body” (Chronicon 137), was contradicted by his own stink (literally) and repudiated Baumann's sinlessness. Beissel’s demons would later allow him to seduce other men's wives with promises of spiritual intercourse, so physical sinlessness would of course much offend him (Chronicon 17).

3. Perfectionism and Humanitarianism

The cults of Perfectionism begat John Rogers in Newport about 1674. The Rogerenes were "the last of the English revolutionary sects and the first of the indigenous American perfectionist sects" (John L. Brooke. The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844, 48)

Nature is freedom and law restriction, but liberty tries to reconcile nature and law, the personal with the social. Or put another way law is a form of enforced Perfectionism which opposes humanitarianism, which allows for imperfection. Philadelphia Quakers sought purity (law) in their shunning of the world (nature), which compromised the Quakers’ humanity, says Daniel Joseph Boorstin,  “To  avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the humanity of criminal laws.”(Daniel Boorstin 11).

But many Pennsylvania groups shared Quaker and Gnostic suspicions on the body and were willing to sacrifice humanity for the perfect pursuit of purity.  Count Zinzendorf (1799-1760) was both an autocrat and a sensualist. John Phillip Boehm (1683-1749) was a fanatic in all his personal polemics. He terrorized every reformed pastor, from Weiss and Peter Miller, who was pastor of a Reformed church in 1730, to pastors Rieger, Lispsky and Goetschy. Printer Christopher Sauer (1695-1758) was wildly partisan, blaming Beissel for heresy and overturning the English language movement. It is no surprise Baumann’s followers were fanatics who carried their own hypocrisies to an extreme. Sinlessly they met in taverns on Sunday and mocked the believers in their churches. Sinlessly they made creeds and beliefs a bedrock of their anti-hypocrisy, and instituted their own anti-Calvinisms as abominable, as though they were latter day prophets: “filthy!” they proclaimed like Isaiah,  “they are all gone out the way!”

On any occasion of assembly, outside churches, during sermons and at funerals, the newborn in their cups mocked and satirized the public beliefs of every fellow cultist, sectarian and religious. There is no record of newborn piety anywhere else but in this public mockery or in taverns taking beer as communion. Separated from all semblance of tolerance it was a lifestyle that grew thin quick. In New England they’d have been stoned. If the Newborn were tolerated in this barbarism anyone could be, but the long lasting social effects of the Newborn in the birth of liberty also influenced later American religion: “Matthias Baumann’s hallucinatory perfectionism had important consequences: it helped inspire the many ‘holiness revivals’ of the nineteenth century in both Europe and America and left traces in modern American evangelicalism” (Bernard Bailyn 157).

As a result of their extreme beliefs the Newborn also dramatically confronted the overt occultism of the sects who yoked primitive biblical devotional language with an allegorical remake of the nature of man. The Newborn  put to flight those renaissance pictographs of the spiritual bride. There is no new moon braying among them or disciple anointing talk, just rancor and  parody, satire and rigor. These were applied across the board against all religiousity, including the Rosicrucianism of the mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and  the mystics of the Wissahickon. The Newborn rejected outright every form of sectarian and denominational worship. So when those “extraordinary physical manifestations occurred—some quacked like ducks, some brayed like jackasses,” (Sunbonnets, 51), and descriptions of the Fall occurred  in mysterious quaternaries, they heaped them with scorn.

The denominations were as much offended with Baumann’s sinlessness as the sects. The spiritual stink for them of such talk was  Baumann’s arrogating spirituality to himself,  but it is pointless to debate  the Newborn theology of lawlessness in Oley.
4. --Acceptance of the body, liberty of speech, perfectionism were all wrapped up together in Newborn life.

Die Neu-geboren was an anti church. They “boasted they had only been sent by God to confound men” (Chronicon Ephratense 17). Matthias Baumann’s call to examine the spirit as the cause of sin instead of the flesh confronts the first Gnostic delusion that fell into the material realm, and confirms Dante climbing out, entering Paradise, in “this glorious and holy flesh (Paradiso, XIV, 45).  The spirit made the choice, said Baumann. The body is incapable of sin without the spirit the way a car does not sin when the operator fails to brake. The Newborn took spiritual sin as the motive of their Call to confound and confront men even if St. Paul confronts both in his filthiness of the flesh and spirit (II Cor 7.1). What indeed is a doctrine of the flesh?

The Newborn held baptism in contempt with communion and church attendance because “Christ’s congregation is invisible” (Stoudt, Baumann 138). “Everything is of the spirit,” said Baumann (138), but when he said he could not sin in the body, his opponents said he claimed he could not sin at all. What he actually said was that sin was of  the spirit. Of course his tract in its plain speaking has as many inconsistencies as those of other battling shepherds, John Philip Boehm, George Michael Weiss and Conrad Beissel. The light and shadow of Call are part of Baumann's confounding the world. In the light that emerges from his coruscations extremes define the question; if this then that! Newborn beliefs were so big they could not contain Newborn ideas and became disbeliefs.

 Standing against visibility Baumann’s followers enacted shadow services outside conventional churches at worship, and in taverns, mocking and mimicking the evangelism of the time with scatological preaching that would not pass the censors of Saturday Night Live. The excesses reported by Mittelberger are parody (see Journey to Pennsylvania 45, 83-86). Henry Muhlenberg accounts the more sober side of  facetious Newborn rhetoric (Journals, I, 138-139) with their evangelistic picketing (I, 146, 357) and mock services held in taverns on Sunday mornings (I, 352). The first licensed Reformed preacher in Philadelphia, Rev. George Michael Weiss, found farmers not pastors performing their doctrines in The Preacher  traveling about in the American Wilderness (1729).  Matthias Baumann, founder of the Newborns left one work, A Call to the Unregenerate (Berleberg, 1731). The marks of infamy were their fame.

The Newborn were champions at holding their neighbors in contempt. Believing they were free from sin they could hardly mistake, which is how they underwrote  free thought, because they presented to society the dilemma to either forcibly suppress them or tolerate them. Liberty cannot exist without this tolerance, so it is also a mark of the generosity of Pennsylvania culture that they were tolerated. If the newborn could mock all sacred  beliefs of their neighbors and be tolerated then their liberty was great indeed. To show how noxious this can be, compare the birthers of today who challenge the president’s nativity or the people who show up at funerals to protest government wars (Westboro Baptist Church, of Topeka, Kansas has picketed at the funerals of 500 soldiers nationwide since June 1991.). The newborn practiced even greater offenses, which freedom of speech was ultimately licensed into the constitution.

 God Falls Into My Mind

All parties derided the Newborn, in part to evade their own malfeasance, but it is too easy to discredit Matthias Baumann as a bipolar menace in his so-called ravings. Called an hallucinatory perfectionism because of the way its founder came to his beliefs, he fell into a coma for some days, or weeks. His wife thought him dead and he had no memory of the event except to say that he had been transported to heaven, caught up like St. Paul, who also says little of the experience (II Corinthians 12. 1-4). He returned to earth changed. Whether this happened once or twice, in five or fourteen days, and whether he was arrested in 1702 and 1705 or 1706,  in 1709, when a handful of Baumann relatives and friends emigrated to Pennsylvania and settled in Oley, Pennsylvania, Baumann followed in 1714.

He says himself “I entered the sickness an old man. I arose a new one.”  (translated by John Joseph Stoudt in  the Historical Review of Berks County, Fall, 1978). Baumann repeats that before this he could not concentrate on saying the Lord’s Prayer long enough to avoid being interrupted by errant thought four times over, but after God fell into his mind, as he puts it (Stoudt, 137) he could not be distracted. He would have been hospitalized, drugged and shocked in later times. There are plenty of analogues besides psychosis in the religious ecstasy of the saints, the visions of Blake and in the supernatural ramblings and astrologies of them all. But unlike Jacob Boehme the shoemaker, acclaimed for alchemy and psychology, translated not to heaven but to English (by William Law, 1764). Baumann put no structure on his visions. He lacked a system, merely conceptualized that the inner world trumps the outer, that sin is of the spirit not the flesh, that beliefs, realities are internal, that outer practices of devotion  contravene the truth of the inner. How he knows this of course questions the sincerity of his own motive since he judges piety, but “Christianity is not something as you think which can be taught” (Stoudt, 142).

 Christians Without Christ

A majority of Newborn practices after Bauman’s death in 1727 read right out of his plan of action for these “Christians without Christ,” Christians in quotes, or the unregenerate in A Call to the Unregenerate World  (Ein Ruf an die Unwiedergebohrene Welt, written 1723). The faux evangelist in the back of a manure wagon mocking Oley farmers (Mittelberger 45) is following Baumann’s seven points, holding that “all denominations are sinful’ (Stoudt 138), and “all that Christ and his Apostles commanded has become vast idolatry” (Stoudt 144). Baumann ridiculed the hypocrisy of outer worship held sacred by churches and sects. His Call  reads like an invective against the Pharisees who think that “if you only live devoutly you will go to heaven” (Stoudt 144).  He calls this “self-centered piety” with the paradox that “God dwells in a Christian, therefore he can sin no more.” And “he who is born of God cannot sin” (Stoudt 137), which seems to say that because he cannot sin that being devout is a sign that he is sinning.

So all signs of devotion to him were sin. He numbers seven axioms of these disbeliefs and says that “is the doctrine that Christ brought into the world.” Self centered piety is a proof of sin because “when God comes into a person…he does nothing but praise and honor God. Rather, he does not do it but God’s Spirit does it in him.” (Stoudt 137) If this equivocates the doer from the deed that is the paradox, to call it so, because all that is seen is the deed,  the motive of the doer is unknown, whether acting out of God or selfishness. Thus with baptism, communion, church attendance, prayer, devout living, alms giving and fasting, the doing of the deed, he said, betrayed the outer act against the inner. Hence “all that Christ and His Apostles commanded has become vast idolatry…the best has become the vilest” (Stoudt 144). The societal malignancies of these people, who seem so out of sorts, were easy targets for their antagonists to discredit.

Muhlenberg, the most balanced voice of the time, gave a contemporary explanation of Newborn theology: "this sect claims the new birth which they receive suddenly through immediate inspiration and heavenly visions through dreams and the like. When they receive the new birth in this way, then they are God and Christ Himself, can no longer sin, and are infallible. They therefore use nothing from God's Word except those passages, which taken out of context, appear to favor their false tenets. The holy sacraments are to them ridiculous and their expressions concerning them are extremely offensive" (Journals I, 149, June 10, 1747).

Heavenly visions and inner light preoccupy what Muhlenberg learns of the old man who disturbed Philip Bayer's funeral: "this was the basis of his authority: one night, many years ago, he saw a light in his room. He claimed that this light revealed to him that he was a child of God, that the magistracy, the ministry, the Bible, sacraments, churches, schools, etc. are of the devil, that all men must be like him, etc" (Journals, I, 357-358). This smacks as much of ergot poisoning as illumination. The conflict of the inner and outer raised deep psychological issues for a Pietism that rejected formalism on one hand for a reviving of the spirit on the other. This pendulum came full swing in Baumann’s seven laws rejecting outer form, but he opposed all the theology of the time in saying the body was not the cause of sin,

5. Dada

Resisted in the new world as he had been in the old, Baumann provoked the second extant printed book in Pennsylvania, The Preacher, / traveling about in the American Wilderness/ by George Michael Weiss (1729) [Der IN DER AMERICAN SCHEN WILDNUSZ]. As is often the case the back story of these affairs rivals the main tale, for Weiss not only wrote this title, but also the first book about the Indians in the wilderness (1741). Weiss was not alone in resisting the Neu-geboren since nearly every other religious figure of the time did so, from Beissel and Boehme of the 1720’s to Muhlenberg and Zinzendorf in the 1740’s. The Newborn, never more than a few hundred, overtook more  powerful groups in influence out of all proportion to membership. Reformed apostle Boehm compares it with much larger groups,  “all sorts of errorists, as Independents, Puritans, Anabaptists, Newborn, Saturday-folks, yea even the most horrible heretics, Socinians, Pietists, etc. (Letter of 1728, Life and Letters 161). Mittelberger does the same in 1756, “Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics, Quakers…Dunkers, Presbyterians, Newborn…” (Journey 54).

It is hard to  judge them fairly from the words of their enemies, almost the only other source being a letter of May 14, 1718 written by his follower Maria De Turk where she says, “I cannot sin any more.” This is the crux of the affair, the cause of newborn mockery of other beliefs and the revulsion against them in turn. Sure, Baumann was no longer a force after his death, as his critics say in every breath, along with mentioning that he was a day laborer, or that maybe if there had just been a good asylum none of this would have happened, but it needs to be said that Baumann’s visitation at the birth of Liberty in America  prefigured the whole Dada movement of the 1920’s in Paris, to hold up to scorn the everyday affairs of men thus to provoke them into consciousness, which became by the 21 century public philsophy in the dissolution of  all boundries whether religous, social, geographical. All values dissolved into a melting pot merged identities, the opposite of Dada intent. So it goes.

Notes:

Bernard Bailyn. British Academy, 2007. The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions. http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/tfiles//151p135.pdf

Daniel Joseph Boorstin. The Americans, the colonial experience. New York: Random House, 1958. “To  avoid taking oaths, Quakers sacrificed the humanity of criminal laws.”(Daniel Boorstin, 11).

Chronicon Ephratense. Ephrata, 1786. Translated by J. Max Hark, Lancaster, 1889.

Mittelberger, Gottlieb. Journey To Pennsylvania. Edited and Translated by Oscar Handlin and John Clive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.

Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Translated by Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein. Fortress, 1958. Reprinted by Picton Press, Camden, ME.

The Life and Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm. Edited by the Rev. William J. Hinke. Philadelphia: Sunday School Board of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1916.

Motherwell, Robert. tr. The Dada Manifesto, in Dada Painters and Poets, NY: 1951.
Gary B. Nash http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/essays/cradle-of-liberty/

Pendleton, Philip E. Oley Valley Heritage, The Colonial Years: 1700-1775. Birdsboro, PA: The Pennsylvania German Society, 1994. [The general details of the Newborn are well stated here. Pendleton also gives Maria DeTurk’s letter of 1718 in full]

John Joseph Stoudt. “Matthias Baumann.” Historical Review of Berks County. Fall, 1978. [a translation of Baumann’s Call to the Unregenerate]

John Joseph Stoudt. Sunbonnets and Shoofly Pies. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1973