Hostility to Zinzendorf

If the eccentric Lusatian Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–60) was not an evangelical it would be hard to know how to classify him; but he tested the boundaries of evangelical accommodation to the limit, and the torrent of abuse that he encountered in the press, which amounted to a major literary industry, was by no means all from predestined opponents on the side of Lutheran Orthodoxy. And all this notwithstanding that the Renewed Unity of the Brethren which he launched from his estate at Herrnhut acquired an honourable place in the history of Protestant missions, and generated some of the most dramatic of all religious revivals in the former Swedish territories east of the Baltic. For this there were two main reasons. The first was that the great puzzle for the count's biographers was his extraordinary capacity to combine a great ability to make a good first impression with an even greater inability to keep the loyalty of men of independent mind. Even two of the men who did come through this stringent test, Spangenberg, who at the end of Zinzendorf's life took control of the community and rescued something from the spiritual and financial morass into which Zinzendorf got it, and the Baron von Schrautenbach, one of his eighteenth-century biographers and admirers, bore witness to the toll it took. Spangenberg admitted candidly that ‘I cannot deny that to me his addresses often appeared paradoxical and his methods of business extraordinary.