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Title: | The Berlin Mission Society and its Theology: The Bapedi Mission Church and the Independent... |
Authors: | Poewe, Karla Heyden, Ulrich van der |
Year: | 1999 |
Periodical: | South African Historical Journal |
Issue: | 40 |
Period: | May |
Pages: | 21-50 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | missionary history Pedi Religion and Witchcraft History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02582479908671347 |
Abstract: | The Berlin Mission Society was founded by various groups of Christians from the eastern provinces of Prussia. It had its roots in Romanticism and Pietism, the two main (religious) streams of the time. Romantic scholars took the Prussian awakening in a scientific and speculative direction. Practising Pietists took it in a practical and ascetic direction, one that harnessed men's organizational skill for religiously inspired self-help schemes. Against this background, the article describes the events leading up to the formation of the independent Pedi Lutheran Church in South Africa and the role in these developments of the Berlin Mission's director from 1865 to 1894, Hermann Theodor Wangemann (1818-1894) and his son-in-law, Johannes Winter (1847-1921), missionary of the Berlin Mission Society in Transvaal. Wangemann's visible church, with Prussian rituals and regulation, and Winter's idea of Christianity that was taking on aspects of Pedi thought, structure, and culture, were two contradictive approaches, which resulted in tensions and conflicts between missionaries and national helpers. It was especially helpers close to Winter who played a crucial role in the founding, in 1890, of the Pedi Lutheran Church. Ref., sum. |