"Surely God Does Nothing w/o First Revealing It to His Servants the Prophets"

[parthens]

“Surely the Lord GOD will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.” (Amos 3:7)

Not long after the rise of Protestantism arose the German Pietists, who believed that the basic values of the Reformation had not gone far enough. Luther’s Protestantism majored on study and belief in scholastic theology, whereas the Pietists proposed that Christianity is something to be lived, experienced, and demonstrated. In 1735, in the Province of Pennsylvania, near Phildelphia, a group of German Pietists established a community of 40 devotees, whom the locals called the “Hermits of the Ridge”, led by Johannes Kelpius. In an interesting CS Journal article from April, 1887, author H. E. C. describes Kelpius as “a young scholar and mystic, of great piety and spirituality, who was drawn to the New World by his religious faith.”

The article continues:

“Kelpius and his followers were earnest and enthusiastic students of the Bible, but more particularly of the Gospels and the Apocalypse. They were rigid moralists, having turned their backs upon the world and its allurements, pursuing in their wilderness retreat a systematic study of the sacred Word . . . . [T]hey were manifestly governed only by a deep and serious purpose to learn and live the spiritual teachings of the Bible. By their piety, meekness, and simplicity, they made a deep impression upon the religious life of Pennsylvania, many traces of which are yet seen.”

Kelpius emphasized that Christianity is something that must be practiced, not simply believed; in so doing, cleaving to God in every detail of one’s life, in every deed, thought and feeling, it should follow, as a normal Christian experience, that death be overcome, as exemplified in the lives of the immortals, Enoch and Elijah.

The article continues:

“The primary purpose [!] of this sect in coming to the ‘wilderness’ of Pennsylvania was that they expected there to find or have revealed to them the Woman of the Apocalypse, — the ‘Woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and twelve stars on her forehead. She who had fled to the wilderness.’ [Emphasis added.] It is said that their reasons for coming to Pennsylvania were that from many events and signs, — in which the Thirty-years’ War, the newness of the country, its peculiar situation, etc., cut an important figure, it was believed America was the place for the coming of the ‘promised one,’ the ‘Deliverer.’

“While their hopes and expectations were not realized within the time and in the manner looked for, we who observe the present signs of the times can readily see that they had caught fore-glimpses of coming events that may well be said to have been prophetic. Truly in the ‘wilderness’ of America has appeared the ‘promised one,’ the ‘Deliverer,’ and rejoiced should we be who are privileged to see that ‘glad day so long foretold,’ and for the coming of which so many devout hearts have longed and prayed.”

God grant that I, who am living this very moment in the day that the prophets of old could only wish for and, more recently, that the Pietists saw as yet from afar, may walk with God worthy of it, never taking it for granted. Amen.

[DaleW]

Thank you for this post!
It reminds me of the following information gathered for a previous Bible Study.

Regarding Mary Baker Eddy’s place, Rev. G. A. Kratzer has some very interesting notes in connection with the book of Revelation, chapter 12, verse 6.

Verse 6. “And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and three score days.”

“Coincidently with the disappearing of pure spiritual truth from the activities of the visible world, the love of pure truth, divine love, the ‘woman,’ disappeared, for the most part, from the world of men. Such sense of truth and love as they had was adulterated, after the second or third century, with belief in material powers, love thereof, and with reliance upon material means for healing the sick, etc. When Jesus, near the commencement of his ministry, was not active in the visible world, preaching and healing, but was absent from the stage of active affairs for a period of forty days, he was spoken of as being ‘in the wilderness.’ There is no probability that he was in an unpopulated place during this period, but he was simply ‘withdrawn from the world,’ withdrawn from material sense into spiritual sense. Likewise this ‘woman,’ this spirit of divine love, is represented as being ‘withdrawn from the world,’ and so ‘in the wilderness’ from the standpoint of the world’s activity, for ‘a thousand two hundred and threescore days.’ As before mentioned in these Notes, this is the period or length of time repeatedly spoken of by St. John as the period during which the dragon, or evil, is to have marked and undoubted ascendency in the mental realm and in the world, so far as men are concerned.*

“*It is interesting to note that one Bible commentator has described this period as a period of 1,260 ‘years’ lasting ‘from A. D. 606, when the Pope of Rome was, by Phocus the Emperor, constituted the universal Bishop of the Christian church, to A. D. 1866’ (The Self Interpreting Bible.) This commentator does not call attention to the fact, and probably did not know, that 1866 was the date when Mrs. Eddy discovered Christian Science, that reappearance of pure spiritual truth in the world, which undoubtedly presages the early fall of the dragon and of all those human institutions, organizations, and forms of government which derive their power largely from the dragon. Coincidently with the reappearing of the pure spiritual truth among men, the ‘woman,’ the love of pure truth, divine love, comes out of the wilderness, out of the ‘place prepared of God’ for her temporary protection, and becomes active again on the stage of human affairs.”

(Taken from pp. 254-255, Revelation Interpreted by Rev. G. A. Kratzer)

[Susanne]

Thank you so much for this post, parthens, which brought me to tears. And thank you Dale for the follow-up. I am grateful to learn about this important history.

[Author]

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