Matthias Baumann (1675-1727). A Call to the Unregenerate World : Perfectionists

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

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Introduction

Matthias Baumann (1675-1727) was a prophet against the church. He wrote Call in 1723, about 22 years after the experience he reports. It wasn't it printed in Philadelphia by Bradford or Franklin, but was sent to Germany. The ms. was received at the printer in 1730 and published 1731, probably by his associate Philip Kulhwein. Baumann, died 1727. Baumann visited Conrad Beissel in 1721 who accounts this visit in Chronicon, giving eye witness of Baumann's debates in Philadelphia in Call. Written as an ongoing journal from year to year from extensive notes used to guide its writing Chronicon was published in 1786, but which reads as accurate and veracious.

Baumann was a Dadaist stinging into consciousness. It’s probably not safe to write about the Newborn even after they’ve been dead 300 years, whose attitude is as if they were founding an anarchic caliphate, but then it’s hardly safe to write about any virile religion. Partisans will stir. That extends from the Seventh Day Baptists of Conrad Beissel to the German Reformed precursors of the United Church today. Proponents were supercharged. The doings of Matthias Baumann did not comply with religious and social expectations. It's a little dangerous to sting the masses.

Baumann more or less affronted Ben Franklin, Conrad Beissel, Muhlenberg, magistrates, Zinzendorf, and John Phillip Boehm in a theatrical controversy like Gulliver’s fictional yahoo throwing excrement from the trees. Swift is a symbolic Pennsylvanian, and we can't stop short of calling Gulliver’s travels an allegory of the Journey to Pennsylvania.

Bauman’s religious views were exaggerations of the theology of the new birth. He was judged sincere by Conrad Beissel’s Chronicon (18), but his followers were tavern philosophers and road preachers, merchants of a liberine naturalism. Baumann offended all Pennsylvania religions in a time when extremes were a norm. Conrad Weiser burned the Heidelberg Catechism and death threats among believers (from Zinzendorf against Weiser) were as common as modern charismatic TBN fringes. [See Pennsylvania Lawless.]

Baumann had an experience that visionaries continue to copy, caught up to the third heaven.Like moths drawn to the flame they have trouble returning to earth. We have already discerned the part Conrad Reiff and Arnold Huffnagel played in the New Born report of Gottlieb Mittelberger. Conrad Reiff married the daughter of Philip Kuhlwein, brother-in-law of Matthias Baumann and ended up inheriting Baumann’s lands, given first to Kuhlwein.

That whole section of Oley was known as enemy territory. Muhlenberg has five references, as late as 1755, of lawlessness in Oley long after others say the New Born were dead.

The character in Mittelberger who gets up and mocks the crowd with raving sarcasm and mockery, or the tavern philosophy of the libertine Philip Gehr upbraided by Muhlenberg are good examples.

A more analytical account given in the lost work of Weiss, pastor of the infamous Reiff church is the first report about the Newborn (1729) and the second extant publication of press of Andrew Bradford. Weiss quotes the New Born farmer as celebrating manure as his deity. You would have to go all the way to England to hear such talk today. Pennsylvania lawlessness was a fertile ground for such ideas. Preachers were less than farmers, Mittelberger complained. The outlaws threatened to burn the preachers, crash the weddings, disrupt the services. There was as little law and order as there was duly ordained religious structure, till about 1750.

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)

From Nancy Cardoso Pereira. The body as a hermeneutical category (2002):

"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]

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 on the Newborn: The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania 1708-1742 p 73f.

John Joseph Stoudt. Count Zinzendorf and the Pennsylvania Congregation of God in the Spirit:The First American Oecumenical Movement, 1940. m. Baumann. in Church History, Dec 1940 http://www.jstor.org/pss/3160914

Friday, July 22, 2022

Perfectionists

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