caa a22 4500 388090731 CHVBK 20180307125250.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199912 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/3170208 doi S0009640700085735 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/3170208 Atwood Craig Craig Atwood is the Starbuck Assistant Professor of Religion at Salem College, and chaplain of the college. The Mother of God's People: The Adoration of the Holy Spirit in the Eighteenth-Century Brüdergemeine [Elektronische Daten] [Craig Atwood] "Lord God, now we praise you, you worthy Holy Spirit! The church in unity honors you, the mother of Christendom. All the angels and the host of heaven and whoever serves the honor of the Son; also the cherubim and seraphim, sing with a clear voice: ‘Divine majesty, who proceeds from the Father, who praises the Son as the creator and points to his suffering.' ... Daily O Mother! whoever knows you and the Savior glorifies you because you bring the gospel to all the world.” These lines are from the Te Matrem, a prayer to the Holy Spirit that for nearly thirty years was a regular part of worship for a German Protestant group known as the Brüdergemeine. The Brüdergemeine, commonly called the Moravian Church today, was an international religious community that developed an elaborate and creative liturgical life for its carefully regulated communities. The Brethren's intense devotion to the suffering of Christ is the most famous aspect of their worship, but in the mid-eighteenth century their leader, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, actively encouraged the Brüdergemeine to worship the Holy Spirit as the mother of the church. Surprisingly, though, this aspect of Zinzendorf's theology has been largely overlooked or downplayed by historians and theologians in the past two hundred years. When it has been discussed, it has been dismissed as a brief aberration or experiment that was discarded after the so-called Sifting Time (Sichtungzeit.) The Sifting Time was a period of liturgical and social excess in the community, the details of which remain quite obscure. The Brethren used the word Sichtungzeit to refer to a time when the community was in danger of becoming a fanatical sect. Dates for the Sifting Time range from a high of 1736-52 to a low of 1746-49, but the most common dating is 1743-50. This article will show that the use of maternal imagery for the Holy Spirit was not a tangential or quixotic aspect of Zinzendorf's theology, but thrived for more than thirty years and was, in Zinzendorf's words, "an extremely important and essential point ... and all our Gemeine and praxis hangs on this point.” Copyright © American Society of Church History 1999 Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture Cambridge University Press 68/4(1999-12), 886-909 0009-6407 68:4<886 1999 68 CHH https://doi.org/10.2307/3170208 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/3170208 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Atwood Craig Craig Atwood is the Starbuck Assistant Professor of Religion at Salem College, and chaplain of the college NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture Cambridge University Press 68/4(1999-12), 886-909 0009-6407 68:4<886 1999 68 CHH CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge