THEOLOGICAL TENETS AND MOTIVES OF MISSION: AUGUST HERMANN FRANCKE, NIKOLAUS LUDWIG VON ZINZENDORF
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Abstract
Besides political and economic factors, a fundamental change in eschatological expectations was crucial for the inception of missionary work in Lutheran Protestantism. Spener’s new eschatological orientation within Lutheran theology provided important impulses for the missions of Halle and Herrnhut. His programmatic formulation of “hope for better times for the Church here on Earth” opened a window of opportunity and thus urged action in the present. August Hermann Francke’s interpretation of eschatology led to a comprehensive general reform that had its point of origin in Halle, and included missionary work among many other measures. In Herrnhut, the millenarian expectation raised by Spener came also to embrace a Philadelphian concept of a gathering of the pious from all denominations in a then beginning eschaton (the end time).