Kinderbeten The Origin, Unfolding, And Interpretations Of The Silesian Children’s Prayer Revival

Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars

140

Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

Eric Jonas Swensson, Kinderbeten: Te Origin, Unfolding, and Interpretations of the Silesian Children’s Prayer Revival (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2010). xxvi + 100 pp. $16 paper.

In 1707 the central European province of Silesia experienced a proliferation of Kinderbeten — informal meetings in which children aged four to fourteen met to pray. According to contemporary sources, these prayer gatherings were remarkable. Te tone of a Kinderbeten was repentantly intense; it was orderly, combining songs, psalms, and Bible reading as well as prayers; it took place “under the open sky” rather than in churches; and it seemed to happen spontaneously, without the leadership of any adult, to say nothing of a duly ordained Lutheran clergyman. Kinderbeten gatherings sprang up in many parts of Silesia, and at times could attract thousands of children. And then, mysteriously, within a few years the Kinderbeten phenomenon disappeared, but not before leaving a mark on the Pietistic movement in Silesia and elsewhere, and giving church historians something to ponder.

Joseph Eric Swensson is an American Evangelical Lutheran pastor who takes this move- ment seriously. His short book Kinderbeten expresses his historical interest, but also his sense that history is alive and can aﬀect the ways that Christians think and pray today. Swensson’s Pietistic commitments are deep. He is not only concerned to restore Pietism to what he considers its rightful place the Lutherans’ narrative; he also wants Pietistic prayer to be retrievable, and to contribute to the way that Lutherans pray today. To this end, in this book he surveys the deep Silesian religious roots of the Kinderbeten; he discusses the practices that were evident in the movement’s brief eﬄorescence; and, at greater length, he describes the debate between Silesian Lutheran leaders who wrote treatises that attempted to crush or honor it.

Te debate in part has to do with the origins of the Kinderbeten. Te most prominent Silesian Lutheran of the era, Caspar Neumann, reported that the children began by copying the public prayers of the Swedish army. Silesia, with its deep Protestant traditions, had suf- fered under Hapsburg rule; in collaboration with the Counter-Reformation, the Hapsburgs had closed over a thousand Lutheran churches, had attempted to force Silesians to convert to Catholicism, and had led the province’s Lutherans to various forms of survival — by meeting surreptitiously in homes, as many rural people did; or by making statesman- like deals with the Hapsburgs, as Neumann did. When in 1707 the Swedish Lutheran King Leo XII sent troops to Breslau to enforce the Silesians’ treaty right to worship as Lutherans, Neumann was relieved and also, he reported, the local children were impressed. As the Swedish troops said their daily prayers in the public squares, so also could the local children. Neumann did not, however, like what he saw as the children went on to pray independently — this seemed “resistant,” “riotous,” “enthusiastic,” even “Quakerish.” So he assigned to them two churches in Breslau, where Lutheran clergy could supervise their prayers. And in 1712 he cooperated with the Catholic authorities in a decree which restricted Pietistic practice in Silesia.

Swensson takes issue with Neumann, whose writings in his view have maligned the Kinderbeten movement and minimized its impact. He draws upon two of Neumann’s contemporary Lutheran writers, both of them Pietists. J.A. Freylinghausen sought to prove the authentic Lutheran character of the children, answering Neumann point by point; and

1

Book Reviews / Pneuma 33 (2011) 109-169

141

J.W. Petersen, in Te Power of the Children, placed the children in a larger context, both historical and apocalyptic. But Swensson attempts to go beyond the theologians. In anony- mous Gründliche Nachrichten he ﬁnds reports by a dozen contemporaries who observed the praying children. In two pages Swensson conﬂates these accounts, giving a fascinating, if generalized, picture of the movement. And his conclusions are very diﬀerent from Neu- mann’s. Te movement began, not in cities and towns when children mimicked Swedish troops at prayer, but in the Silesian mountains, where children had learned to pray in their families at a time when the authorities had closed their churches. In this setting the meeting of children for prayer in small groups, without clerical supervision, whenever and wherever possible, was normal; and the sequence of songs, prayers, psalms of repentance, Bible read- ings, and “children lift[ing] their hands together upward and sing[ing],” was an extension of the prayer life to which they were accustomed, all of it rooted in unimpeachable Lutheran orthodox belief. It was this prayer “from the mountains” that spread to the towns and cities when something uncanny unleashed “the power of the children.”

Te story as Swensson tells it is convincing. Te resilient lay piety of the Silesians, rooted in the well-established prayer and devotional practices of families and not dependent on clerical leadership but fueled by “Bush-preachers,” is worth celebrating and studying. Swensson is especially eﬀective in unpacking the controversies that the Kinderbeten unleashed among the Silesian Lutherans. I longed for a longer book. Swensson’s study would proﬁt from a clearer narrative: if, thanks to Swensson, there is relative clarity about when the Kinderbeten gatherings began, it is less clear how they lost energy and when they ended. I also wanted more analysis of the documents reporting the Kinderbeten gatherings. Te Gründliche Nachrichten must invite statistical and geographical analysis, and produce speciﬁc examples of the movement’s practices and possibly a tell-tale event or two; a two- page conﬂation seems a missed opportunity. Te haste with which the book must have been produced is indicated by the promise of engravings (“ﬁgures 1 and 2”) which somehow were not included. And the book contains unusually numerous bibliographical and proof- reading errors.

But Swensson has produced a valuable book that opens the window to yet another move- ment, viewed as evil by the prominent and overlooked by church historians, in which God works. Trough humble, powerless people like the betende Kinder who meet in risky faith to worship God, God delights to act. Swensson is aware of the signiﬁcance of his topic, and repeatedly he invites others to ﬁnd the sources that enable further research into the lay- people who are “equally interesting” to Zinzendorf.

Reviewed by Alan Kreider

Professor of Church History and Mission (retired) Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary Elkhart, Indiana

[email protected]

2