The Legacy of Pierre Jean de Menasce Adrian Hastings

ean Andre Moise de Menasce was born in , Switzerland. While extending his deep knowledge of Islam and J Egypt, in 1902 into one of its richest and most distin­ publishing a very useful bibliography of works on Arabic phi­ guished Jewish families. His father, Felix de Menasce, the head losophy in other than Oriental languages, his principal scholarly of the Alexandrian Jewish community, was also an Austrian activity was now in the field of , in which he baron. His mother was French. After studying at the French developed an expertiseparticularlyin earlymedievalMazdaism. School of Law in Cairo, he went on in 1921 to Balliol College, At the same time, he published a series of shortbutexceptionally Oxford, to read philosophy, politics, and economics. In Oxford perceptive missiological articles, several of them in the Neue he made many close acquaintances and friends, particularly Zeitschrift fUr Missionswissenschaft, which he helped found in through being a welcome guest at Garsington Manor, home of 1945 and which Stephen Neill later described as "the best mis­ LadyOttoline Morrell, amongthemT.S.Eliot andLadyOttoline's sionary research journal in the world."! Almost certainly there lover, , whose MysticismandLogic he translated was no one else in the at the time with a into French (Paris, 1922). From Oxford he went to the Sorbonne comparably subtle approach to the nature and dimensions of to spend a further year studying philosophy. In this period he missionary activity, yet it has to be said that these articles were ceased to be a religious believer. Instead he threw himself into relatively slight exercises with the single exception of his 1945 militant , and HaimWeizman made him secretary of the critique of Hendrik Kraemer's of mission. Valuable as Zionist Bureau in Geneva. they were, and worthwhile as was their reprinting inbook form De Menasce, however, soon returned to Paris, where he in 1967 entitled Permanence et transformation de mission, de underwent a decisive spiritual crisis. It was at this point that he Menasce's major contribution to missiology needs to be under­ madesomeof the centralfriendships ofhis life-withthe Thomist stood not as something apart from the study of religions, which philosopher , his Jewish wife, Raissa (both cameto occupyhimentirelywhenin 1948he movedbackto Paris converts from twenty years earlier), and, more than to teach for the next twenty-five years in the Ecole Pratique des anyone else, , an Islamist and author of the Hautes Etudes. Yet it was in itself an almost missionary move to phenomenal study of the Muslim mystic and martyr Husayn Ibn leave the protected intellectual atmosphere of the Catholic Uni­ Mansur Hallaj, which had been published in 1922. This new versity of Fribourg and work instead in the essentially secular circle of friends provided the human context within which de world of the Ecole Pratique, the very heart of francophone Menasce discovered God and Christ and, quite hurriedly, re­ learning. ceived baptism on May 19, 1926,and with it the additional name De Menasce was never very strong, and it was frequently of Pierre, though all his life he was known mostly as Jean. necessary to protect him from situations of strain, though for Massignon alone was present to witness that moment of su­ some years he was able to lecture at as well premesymbolicchange. It is worthnoting thatBertrandRussell's as teach in Paris. Fromthe early 1950she lived an almosteremitic Why I Am Not a Christian was published just one year later, in existence for much of the year in a charming little building, April 1927. Was he perhaps driven to write it by news of the formerly a hunting lodge of the Orleans family, at Neuilly in the Christian conversion of his brilliant young Jewish philosopher grounds of Dominican nuns who looked after him devotedly. friend? Here, not so far from the heart of Paris, he combined research, De Menasce, for his part, spentthe first months afterbaptism contemplation, and the visits of countless friends with a remark­ writing an exceptionally beautiful study of Jewish Hasidic holi­ able correspondence, of which extracts were published in a book ness, QuandIsrael aimeDieu (published only in 1931). It was, in soon after his death. As a linguist, he was almost incomparable, a way, his farewell tribute to the religion of his ancestors, but one so much at home in French, English, German, Arabic, Hebrew, feels thathe wasable to makeit onlyafterhe hadrediscovered the and Italian, together with a range of other ancient languages: God of Israel through the discovery of Jesus as Messiah. He also Greek and Latin, ancient Iranian, Pahlavi (), Ara­ returned to Egypt for two years, at the wish of his father, but in maic, and Syriac. Even that is not a complete list. He suffered a 1930 he entered the Paris province of the Order of St. Dominic major stroke in 1959and another in 1969,each of which severely and was ordained priest in 1935. For him those were years of incapacitated him for a time but from both of whichhe struggled intenseassimilationbothof Thomisttheology andof the Catholic back, even relearning speech and continuing his studies. An spiritual and mystical tradition. important volume on the Mazdean worldview (Le troiseme livre du Denkart) was published in 1972 only a year before his death. Scholar of Religions A humane Thomist by training, friendship, and conviction, he shared the theology and philosophy of his friends Charles From 1936 to 1948 de Menasce was professor of the history of [ournet and Jacques Maritain. Fully at ease with the best of religions and of missiology at the in Catholic biblical scholarship of the time, he edited and translated the Book of Daniel for the Bible deJerusalem (1955). The security Adrian Hastings is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theology and of the faith he had come to embrace left him with little desire to Religious Studies, University of Leeds, U.K., where, until his retirement in September 1994, hewas professor of theology andhead of the department. He question traditional Catholic theology from within in the way haswrittenextensivelyonAfrica,includingtheOxfordHistoryoftheChristian that in the 1950s the proponents of the so-called nouvelle theologie Church volumeThe Church in Africa, 1450-1950. He worked in Uganda, werebeginningto do. De Menascealways insisted thatmissiology Tanzania, andZambia (1959-70), andwasprojessor ofreligious studiesin the was a section of ecclesiology, but he remained perhaps less Universityof Zimbabwe, Harare (1982-85). critical than he might have been of, say, the ecclesiology of

168 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH [ournet, the Swiss theologian and former colleague at Fribourg continued, sharplyenough, "These autarchies all speakthe same who was later to be created a cardinal by (pope) Giovanni language, using identical terms to defend values which strive in Montini. Perhaps it is only with postconciliar hindsight that a vainfor diversity.'? But he did notstop there, suggesting instead, Catholic is likely to find such work-immensely much better as with a remarkably prophetic insight, that the very upsurge of it was than the standard textbook ecclesiology of the preconciliar nationalisms that might frequently close the door for Western period-unsatisfying, still too institutional and too confident in missions could also open it for new missionary movements its answers as to what the church really is or should be. If de deriving from the young churches themselves. "I was recently Menasce ever felt like that, he did not say so. While in his final informed of the apparently defeatist remarks of a missionary years he refused to give way to the almost anticonciliar revulsion returned from Central Asia, but his conclusion was stupendous: of some of his friends, he did share some of their nostalgia for the 'Itis the Chinesewho mustbe the apostles of these peoples.' That preconciliar church as he had known it at its very best. He was not far from Maritain's mood in Lepaysan de la Garonne. Essentially, however, his mind was so engaged in the intel­ Nationalist movements that lectual and spiritual frontiers separating the great religious tra­ ditions of the Middle East that he had not the time to engage it closed the door for Western extensivelyin other areas, where, for most of his life, it could only mission could also open it have encountered ecclesiastical frustration. Once baptized, he never again felt the temptation to rush into things like a fooL As for new indigenous a convert and an irenic contemplative by nature, he remained a missionary movements. particularly loyal Catholic, but since his heart lay in an explora­ tion of the intellectual interrelationship and spiritual intercommunion of the great religions, his closest friends and seemsto me a profoundobservation.... The daymustnotbe long colleagues were people equally deeply engaged in that same delayed when we shall see Hindu priests occupying themselves enterprise-inparticular,Islamistslike Massignon,Louis Gardet, with the salvation of the primitive tribes of India, Annamite the Franciscan Abd El-jalil (a Moroccan convert from Islam), and priests with that of the Thos, Chinese priests with Central Asia."? the Egyptian Dominican scholar George Anawati. It was to this Brief as this ten-page article was, it shone with a perception of remarkable group of people that de Menasce most clearly be­ world history and of how, within the postwar period and the longed, scholars whose intellectual work was inseparable from imperialist debacle, mission could be transformed and restruc­ an intense spiritual life. tured. It suggests an eye more far seeing than almost any other Massignon, in all the awkwardness of his exasperatingly at work in the 1940s. uncompromising commitment to interreligious understanding, was the group's primary prophetic figure. Fiercely devout as Response to Kraemer well as formidably learned, his commitment to the Arab world brought him not only to demonstrate in the streets against Two years earlier he had published in the NeueZeitschrift of 1945 France's Algerian policy but also to embrace it liturgically by an analysis of Hendrik Kraemer's Christian Message in a Non­ leaving the Latin for the Melkite, Greek Catholic Rite, whose Christian World, the specially commissioned text of the Interna­ liturgy was now in Arabic and in which, despite being married, tional Missionary Council for its Tambaram conference in 1938. he was able to be ordained a priest, in Cairo in 1950. But behind Kraemer, both an experienced missionary in Indonesia and an Massignon stood the no less prophetic figure of Charles de academic,representedneo-conservativeProtestantismat its most Foucauld, by whom in early life he had been much influenced. authoritative and unyielding, in his insistence upon the total Louis Gardet was not only a scholar of Muslim theology, he was otherness of "biblical realism" from all that the world religions also a Little Brother of Jesus, the society founded in the 1930s by had to offer. For him they werebasically an expression of human Pere Voillaume to live according to the spirit of de Foucauld. sin, even, and indeed especially, in that which appears most Jacques Maritain himself, when old and a widower, joined the spiritual and transcendental within them. Kraemer's theology Little Brothers. De Menasce's final missiological article, a short proved very far from acceptable to most of the participants at piece for the International ReviewofMissions in 1967entitled "The Tambaram. However, in its stark reaction to the liberal Protes­ Contemplative Life and the Missions," harks back quite em­ tantapproaches to otherfaiths thathadappearedso prominently phatically to the missionary significance of de Foucauld. It was in previous decades, it had swung around to become the polar in a real sense de Foucauld who invented the missiological opposite, not only to the latter but also to Catholicism. Indeed, tradition to which he belonged. in good Barthian manner, he very explicitly rejected the Thomist I first encountered de Menasce when, sometime early in "gratia non tollit sed perficit naturam." 1954, I read an article of his entitled "Nationalism in Mission The reply of de Menasce, politely but firmly analyzing the Lands" that he had published in 1947 in the Neue Zeitschrift. theology of Kraemer with extensive extracts from his text, repre­ Rereading that article forty years later, it still seems to me a quite sents-at least for that period-a very rare piece of genuine remarkably fresh and penetrating discussion of Afro-Asian na­ Catholic-Protestant dialogue. Here was the most subtle Catholic tionalism, written in the year of India's independence, when missiologist of his time confronting the greatest of Protestant missionaries, for a large part, were trembling negatively enough missiologists. De Menasce had, as he said in commencing his at what fate the victory of nationalism might everywhere bring article, "read, re-read and meditated over four years Kraemer's to their work. In rejecting that mood of gloom, however, he was 'great book.':" Its finest pages had given him great pleasure. It bynomeanstrying-asmanyliberalChristiansinevitablywere­ had, indeed, a "captivating" character. The analysis de Menasce to jumpsimplisticallyonto the nationalistbandwagon,a "hyper­ made of it was, then, anything but hasty, and its seriousness was trophied patriotism. .. no more to be encouraged when it is at once recognized. Henri de Lubac included large sections in his Chinese or Indonesian than when it is French or German." He Lefondement theologique des missions, and it is likely that, across de

October 1997 169 Lubac, [ournet, and others, de Menasce's work at this point and a well-argued assertion of the implausibilities to be found in flowed pretty directly into the teaching of the Second Vatican alternative systems of belief. Council on world religions, twenty years later. In the argumentation of the Skand-Gumanik Vicar and the His central criticism of Kraemer was one of negativity. rather earlier Denkari, whose important third book he at last Kraemer's theology throughout flows from a great No-a No to published in translation and commentary in the final year of his sin, whichhe sees as engulfing the world. De Menasce's theology life, de Menasce recognized something of universal value. Here, flows, on the contrary, from a great Yes to God , to creation, to and especially in regard to the central issue of the interpretation nature, and to all the ways in which grace brings nature back to of evil, he contended that "Mazdaism touches upon universality God. On no point do they disagree more emphatically than on and holds its place within the discordant ensemble of mysticism, which Kraemer sees as "one of the most sublime but which speak a common language, make equal use of reason and dangerous fruits of naturalist monism," something dangerous tum when need be even to philosophical concepts."! Whatin the even in Christianity because it substitutes, according to him, an end his scholarship produces is not a sense of the bewilderingly intellectualismfor the voluntarist and prophetic character of true remote otherness of a tenth-century Iranian religious apologist biblical religion. A friend of Massignon was not likely to sit quiet but rather of a real proximity to one's own central concerns. to that. As de Menasce pointed out, over this and much else Here, as everywhere, the sensitivity and precisionofde Menasce's Kraemer, in excluding the human at its best, was in fact under­ analysis of discordant religions, as of discordant Christian the­ mining the whole sense of the incarnation. Where Kraemer ologies, did not lead him to a final pluralistic contention that claimed thateach religion is essentially totalitarian, allowing one "anything goes" but, on the contrary, to a strengthened convic­ to take nothing from it unless one takes everything, de Menasce tion that a rationally defensible truth can and must be sought. suggested instead that the onlyreally totalitariansystemis God's On Daniel and Augustine De Menasce's theology The Book of Daniel is one of the more eccentric inclusions within the Bible. Its story set in Babylon, its atmosphere and even in part flows from a great Yes to its vocabulary that of Babylonian court culture, its theme is one God, to creation, and to all of confrontational miracles and apocalyptic prophecy about world history. That is obvious enough. What seems less appar­ the ways in which grace ent to the commentators is that it is a very missionary book­ brings nature back to God. perhaps the most overtly missionary work in the whole of the Old Testament-in that so much of it is about unswerving public witness to Hebraic monotheism given within a different, and truth, from which every other system does, like a heresy, take polytheistic, culture. Both for Iranian and missiological reasons, parts that remain essentially reassimilable within Catholicity. de Menascecould notbutfeel at home in a workin which is found Again and again de Menasce stresses how much that is stimulat­ the sort of intellectual confrontation, if not exactly dialogue, ing can be found in Kraemer's pages. He is always the generous between two religious and theological systems that he delighted dialogist, but he is also here, more than anywhere else in his in: the assertion of a unitary faith within a thoroughly pluralistic writings, an acute theologian. What comes across from his religious context. His translating and editing of Daniel for the analysis-more clearly, perhaps, than in any other work of Bible de Jerusalem in 1954 was the natural contact point at which missionary literature-is the profundity of the contrast between his ownscholarship could contribute directly to biblical study. It an intrinsically Catholic and an intrinsically Protestant under­ fitted him. standing of the rela tionship betweenna ture and grace, a relation­ So, too, did the publication in 1956 of a truly remarkable ship upon which the whole nature of missionary work must article"Augustin manicheen," the last of his writings we will depend. consider. It was, again, his natural contact point with patristics, but it is valuable for us precisely because it focuses once more Mazdean Apologist uponthe relationship betweentwo systemsof belief-inthis case Catholic Christianity and -and conversion from The principal scholarly achievement of de Menasce in 1945, the one to the other. As de Menasce himself suggests, patrologists year the war ended, was not, however, the response to Kraemer have often failed to take Augustine's nine years of committed but the publication of his translation and commentary of the Manichaeism seriously enough. He came to the subject as a Skand-Gumanik Vicar(The decisive solution of doubts), a ninth­ Mazdean scholar and one might perhaps have expected him to century work of Mazdean apologetics. The scholarly core of de argue, like some others, for an "Oriental," more or less Mazdean, Menasce's work had become the study of Iranian religion, par­ character to Augustine's Manichaean religion. In fact he does ticularly of Mazdaism in its last major phase following the just the opposite. He suggests quite brilliantly that what held Muslim conquest of Iran. Remote as this must seem from the Augustine within the Manichaean Church for so long was most concerns of contemporary mission, for him it was not so. On the probably precisely its Christocentric piety and, even, its very contrary, it helped rather to provide a vantage point, indepen­ "catholicity" in terms of geographic spread-so very different dent of the three-branched "Abrahamic" tradition (Christianity, from the localized Church of Donatism. What made him aban­ , and Islam), of still one other of the major underlying don his long-held commitment was the intellectual conviction, traditions of the Middle East, from which to interpret the whole arrived at via Neoplatonism, that dualism was a metaphysical play of interreligious connectedness and dissidence. The fasci­ error. Passionate as Augustine was by temperament, his conver­ nation of the Skand-Gumanik Vicar lay precisely in its carefully sion both to Manichaeism and from it was essentially a matter of argued critiqueof lslam,Judaism,Christianity,and Manichaeism the reason, while his piety and his conception (as apart from his too. Herewasthe presentationof the case for a moderate dualism practice) of morality changed relatively little. This is not what

170 I NTERNATIO NAL B ULLETIN OF MISSIONARY REsEARCH many of us imagined,butit is extremelyconvincing. He achieves missiologists who pay much attention to what is written in it by a sensitive examination of texts, including the then recently French. But a certain fastidiousness in scholarship as in life, discovered Manichaean Psalm-Book (by which he was fasci­ something verging on contempt for the fashionable and the self­ nated: I remember his taking it off his bookshelf when I visited publicist, as also an awkwardly wide spread of publications, him in 1956 and reading from it with great delight). The many of them quite short, have made him an almost forgotten Christocentric devotional life experienced as a Manichee, Au­ figure, even perhaps in the field of , to which he gustine saw subsequently, de Menasce explains, as a "stolen made in point of fact a quite massive contribution in his translat­ good,"6 now to be restored to its place of true belonging, the ing and analysis of major texts. Yet, if he wrote very little of a Catholica, where alone it could refind its full meaning. formally missiological nature after moving back from Fribourg Augustine's conversion from Manichaeism to Catholicism to Paris, the publication of Permanence et transformation de la is, or can be, a key datum in a missiology that would understand mission in 1967, during the last phase of his life and despite the reality and possibility of conversion from one large vision of things to another-a subject always close personally to de Menasce. But in his analysis of whathappened,he bothmanages Other faiths contain to give a more positive and attractive picture of Manichaeism, almost from the inside, than we are normally given, and uses it elements which can and as an implicitillustrationof his thesis, as arguedagainstKraemer, must be recognized and that any other faith than the Christian is not totalitarian but retained in the process of contains certain pierres d'aiienie/ elements great or small (in this . case very great, despite the absurd follies of its cosmology) that conversion. can and must be recognized and retained across the process of conversion. profound ill health, demonstrates his continuing concern for the De Menasce's Love for lithe Other" understanding of mission, especially in regard to the relation­ ship between Christianity and the great religions and cultures of The Book of Daniel, Augustine's Confession, the Skand-Gumanik East and West. As regards the cijvide between "East" and Vicar, Kraemer's "great book," and, to add one more example, "West," as an Alexandrian Jew, Oriental and Westerner, an the Hasidic texts that constitute the latter halfof QuandIsrael aime Iranian scholar and a Paris Dominican, Jean was and felt himself Dieu such as "Dialogue between a Hasid and a Rabbinist," to belong to both and neither. His exceptionally sensitive under­ constitute a remarkable range of texts throughwhich de Menasce standing of "the other" in the history of religions had, however, was exploring with both rigor and sympathy the nature of the brought him not at all in the direction taken later by John Hick or interface between religions at their best. His preference is to dig Wilfred Cantwell Smith. On the contrary. He had no hesitation deep at specific points where both spirituality and the funda­ as to the final divine sovereignty within human religion of the mental structure of thought is most revealable. Implicitly, at Christianity of the Catholica. least, a missiological dimension is never very far from what he A modern text in which he took great delight, seeing in it was doing, but behind both his studies in the some expression of his own lifelong experience of the unified and the specifically missiological pieces is a commitment to the diversity of incarnate divinity, is G. K. Chesterton's magnificent primacy of love-a discerning love for other religions in their poem "Ubi Ecclesia." othernessbutalso the requirement of Christianlove still to go out Our Castle is East of the Sun evangelistically to the other. Love remained for him the driving And our Castle is West of the Moon force behind mission. It was the subject of the first chapter of The Bridge called Both-and-Neither ... Permanence et transformation and of some of the finest lines of its And a Fool walks blind on the highway final chapter written in 1964, near the end of the Second Vatican And finds it soon. Council. De Menasce gently pled that, despite a rightful shame about the often arrogant missionary evangelization of the colo­ It is not included within Chesterton's Collected Poems but was nial era, it would be a failure in love "to be silent on principle,"8 printed separately and is little known. I heard it first when Jean to banish the apostolate to the mind. read it to me and I was so thrilled by it that I included it as an It is not very surprising that Jean de Menasce is little known introductory piece to the symposium I was editing at the time, in missiological circles, sad as it maybe. Perhaps todayhe is little The Church and the Nations (London and New York: Sheed and remembered in any circles other than those of his surviving Ward, 1959). Perhaps nothing else in English expresses quite so friends. As regards the English-language world, he published well the ecclesiological and mystical missiology of Jean de next to nothing in English, and few are the anglophone Menasce.

Notes------­ 1. Stephen Neill, A HistoryofChristianityin India: TheBeginnings toA.D. (1902-1973) sur les missions et sur le Mazdeisme," Neue Zeitschrift 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 512. fur Missionswissenschaft 30 (1974): 167. 2. Jean de Menasce, Permanence et transformation de la mission (Paris: 6. PierreJean de Menasce, "Augustine manicheen," in FreundesgabefUr Editions du Cerf, 1967), p. 161. Ernst Robert Curtius (Bern: Francke, 1956), p. 92. 3. Ibid., p. 164. 7. Ibid., p. 87. 4. Ibid., p. 102. 8. De Menasce, Permanence et transformation, p. 174. 5. Quoted in V. Python, O.P., "L'oeuvre du Pere de Menasce O.P.

October 1997 171 Bibliography

Permanence et transformation de la mission (Paris: Editions du Cerf) De Menasce's other writings include QuandIsrael aimeDieu (Paris: appeared in 1967 with a preface by Cardinal Charles [ournet. The first Librairie PIon, 1931); "Le problems religieux de l'Etat de Israel," Cahiers nine chapters were first published between 1939 and 1947, the tenth sioniens, August 1949, pp. 184-96; Arabische Philosophie (Bern: Francke, being written especially for the book. So far as I know, only two of de 1948); TheBook ofDaniel, in the Bible deJerusalem (Paris: Editions du Cerf, Menasce's writings have ever appeared in English: "Nationalism in 1954); and "Augustin manicheen," in Freundesgabe fUr Ernst Robert Missionary Countries," Worldmission 5 (1954): 267-78, first appeared in Curtius (Bern: Francke, 1956), pp. 79-93. the NeueZeitschriftfUrMissionswissenschajt in 1947 and constitutes chap­ A selection of de Menasce's letters was edited by R. Rochefort, La ter 9 of Permanence (it was translated into English by my sister, Cecily porte sur lejardin(Paris: Cerf Paris, 1975). There is a lengthy, though still Hastings, while I arranged for it to appear in Worldmission); and "The incomplete, bibliography in P. Gignoux and A. Fazzali, eds., Memorial Contemplative Life and Missions," International Review of Missions 56 Jean de Menasce (Louvain: Impr. orientaliste Louvain, 1974). Other (1967): 330-37. studies of his work include V. Python, O.P., "L'oeuvre du Pere de De Menasce's three principal Mazdean publications are Une Menasce O.P. (1902-1973) sur les missions et sur le Mazdeisme," Neue apologetique mazdeene duIXesiecle: Skand-Gumanik Vicar, lasolution decisive Zeitschriftjur Missionswissenschaft 30 (1974):161-72; Marcel Henry, O.P., des doubtes (Fribourg: Librairie de l'Universite, 1945), Une encuclopedie "Menasce (jean de)," Catholicisme 8 (1979): 1148-50; and Raymond mazdeene, le Denkart (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), and Darricau, "Menasce (jean de)," Dictionnaire de Spiriiualite 10 (1980): Letroisieme livredu Denkart (Paris: Publ. Orient. de France, 1972). 1108-9.

Becoming All Things to All People: Early Moravian Missions to Native North Americans Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier

n the fall of 1744 Governor George Clinton of New York and shame for my countrymen, that I have seen the Governor I forwarded to the Board of Tradein London-withoutany and Assembly of New York have passed an Act of Assembly explanatory comment-the New York Assembly Act of Septem­ [against the Moravians].... This incivility and inhuman usage ber 21, 1744.1 The act officially closed the Moravian Mission to must not be attributed to the whole English nation.... I am sure the Mahicans at Shekomeko, a settlement close to the northwest­ an English Parliament would never have done so, except ... in ern Connecticut border in the British colony of New York, and such time of anarchy and confusion as unhappily beset England compelledthe Moravianmissionaries to leave. If CountNikolaus in the last century, when bigoted and hot headed Calvinistic von Zinzendorf, in his capacity as sponsor of the Moravian preachers ..."4 Following the same line as Hutten, Zinzendorf church, had not requested an explanation, most likely the act exploited an old tension between religious dissenters and the would have gone unnoticed. Londongovernmentandmadethe Calvinist-Presbyterianclergy But Zinzendorfprotested, charging that Presbyterian clergy responsible for the New York troubles. and their adherents were engaged in the persecution of the In response, the London authorities asked the governor to Moravian missionaries. He argued that religious persecution in presentreasons for the action," In 1746Clintonreplied that the act the Americas was a particularly grave matter since many of the had been adopted because (1) itinerant preachers had caused people who emigrated to the Americas were in search of reli­ ecclesial as well as family divisions. (2) The act constituted a gious freedom. No one-and especially not the Native Ameri­ measure against Spanish agents who infiltrated and subverted cans, Zinzendorf contended-should be hindered from joining the colonies. (3) The Moravians had been too closely related to whatever Protestant denomination he or she might choose.' Whitefield,who whilein America, Clintonalleged, had collected Earlier in 1744,when the act was discussed in the New York incredible sumsof moneyto fill his ownpockets. (4)Referring to Assembly, several of its members had been in open disagree­ Zinzendorf's conciliatory stance on religious matters, the gover­ ment. Assemblyman George Thomas, for example, felt it was nor objected that the Moravians did not clearly distinguish unjust and silly. Judge Thomas Jones expressed his displeasure between Protestants and Catholics. (5) Clinton was afraid that by sarcasticallylabeling it "the PersecutionAct." And assembly­ the continuousinflux ofMoraviansettlerswouldsoonoutbalance manRichardStillwellshouted,withunrestrained venom, "Hang the English subjects. (6) Their teachers were simple illiterate them as your fathers hanged the Quakers.'? On December 23, artisans. (7) Particularly irritating was their relationship to the 1744, James Hutten wrote to Count Zinzendorf from England, Native Americans; the Moravians not only resided with the "May it please your Lordship ... it is with sorrow, and vexation, native people, they even intermarried with them. (8) This gave rise to the suspicion that they would seduce the Native Ameri­ cans from their fidelity to the government. (9) The Moravian Karl-Wilhelm Westmeier is Professor ofMissiology andTheology at thePuerto missionaries had even threatened the government with their Ricoextension campus oftheAllianceTheological Seminary, Nyack,NewYork. hold on the Native Americans, intimating that the native people He worked as a missionary in Colombia for twenty-one years. This essayis would follow them wherever they went. (10) The Moravians adapted from theauthor's"Evacuation of Shekomeko and the EarlyMoravian prevented Clinton's enlisting the Native North Americans in his Missions toNativeNorthAmericans,"inStudiesinthe Historyof Missions, army, which was especially detrimental in times of war (i.e., vol. 12 (Lewiston, N.Y.: EdwinMellen Press, 1994). during King George's War, 1744-48).6

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