Sexual Theology
Zinzendorf's theology was sometimes controversial to contemporaries. He encouraged followers to visualise Christ's wounds in great detail (‘so moist, so gory’, as he described them), and his sermons included exhortations to imaginitively ‘enter into’ these wounds and drink from them. His ‘obsession’ with Christ's wounds was linked the eroticism of his language – in particular the spear-wound in Christ's side which he and the community called the Seitenhölchen (‘little side-hole’). This was tied to his wish to overcome the traditional shame which was attached to sexual organs and acts:
What in the Bible is mentioned an hundred, and more than an hundred Times, but on Account of the Fall, by Reason of Deprivation, is call'd by the hideous name Pudendum; this he (the Saviour) has changed into Verendum, in the proper and strictest sense of that Word: And what was chastised by Circumcision, in the Time of the Law, is restored again to its first Essence and flourishing State; 'tis made equal to the most respectable Parts of the Body, yea 'tis on account of its Dignity and Distinction, become superior to all the rest; especially as the Lamb would choose to endure in that Part his first Wound, his first Pain...
Some modern writers have seen something pathological in Zinzendorf's intense psychoerotic meditation on the wounds and the body of Christ, while others have pointed out that such practice ‘allowed the members of the society to sublimate a variety of personal drives and fears to the mystical realm for the good of the Gemeine and its mission’. At any rate it is clear that for Zinzendorf the fact of intercourse, properly entered into between husband and wife, was a transcendent act and an important religious symbol which prefigured the union of a sinner with the Saviour. Zinzendorf's emphasis on the "blood and wounds" is not that different from hymns that are sung today without second thought: "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee."
It was his son, Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf who took his father's teachings on the relationship between sexuality and spirituality to an extreme. Christian Renatus lived at a special community built by Ludwig east of Frankfurt/Main, Germany, called Herrnhaag, The Lord's Grove, where he led the Single Brethren's Choir composed of the unmarried men in the Congregation. Excessive use of sexual imagery, combined with questionable theology of "playing in the Lord," came to mean that the young men did little work and came to look down on those who were in the mission field laboring for the Kingdom instead of spending every moment adoring the Savior. Ensuing scandal and near-financial ruin forced Ludwig to chastise his son, bringing him to England. Casimir Count of Isenburg-Buedingen demanded the submission of the Moravians of Herrnhaag to himself, and that they reject their allegiance to the elder Zinzendorf. The entire community rejected this demand, leading to the closure of Herrnhaag beginning in 1750-53.
Read more about this topic: Nicolaus Zinzendorf
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