In Pursuit of Religious Freedom: Bishop Martin Stephan's Journey

by Stephan, Philip

  In spite of his new leadership role, all things were not well with Pastor Stephan. During this period of his life, the personal crisis of his health put some restrictions on his work. He suffered particularly from eczema and some kind of liver ailment, especially after 1832 when another set of twins died. Sometimes eczema has its roots in severe stress affecting the parasympathetic nervous system. At a deeper level, this skin disorder can be a symptom of continued physical and emotional stress; it can also be an indicator of depression, anxiety, and deeper emotional tensions.

  Under a physician’s direction, he used the baths at nearby spas several times a year for eczema relief. At the Augustinian baths near Radeberg, twenty miles from Dresden, Louise Guenther came to care for him voluntarily and daily wrapped the sores on his legs. He was told to take at least three to six months off to heal the skin disorder. However, neither his wife nor his daughters came to live there with him, although they visited him on occasion. During this time Martin seemed to distance himself from his family. He complained of hoarseness and needed to walk and remain quiet to rest his voice. Sleeplessness, which he had suffered since late childhood, caused him to stay up late into the night, often out walking. Frequently he walked just beyond the city to one of several vineyards that had inns to accommodate travelers, a place to eat and sleep. He would arrive late and remain there until the next day. Some suggested that these were quite fashionable places, although some inns catered to the “common man” serving lunches of soup and potatoes.

  Parishioners sometimes accompanied him on his walks, although it is not always clear whether they were encouraged to join him, walked with him uninvited, or simply happened to pass by the same way. Several testimonials insisted that these vineyard gatherings were not church functions; there was no budget for rooms or meals, and anyone who went to these inns paid his or her own way. Court records quoted the common phrase used by the congregation for these people as “hangers-on.” Today, we would call them groupies.

  The authorities, at the time of Stephan’s ministry, discouraged midweek conventicles. However, when St. John’s Bohemian Church was founded in the summer of 1650, the Dresden government and Elector John II had granted approval, without reservation, to hold conventicles in the Pastor’s house. This was part of an order of Prince John, dated May 15, 1650, allowing the Bohemians to use the new Chapel in St. John’s Cemetery for their services. Stephan, backed by the city council of Dresden’s confirmation of the seventeenth-century ruling, continued conducting the prayer and Bible study during the week. Many of these conventicles were conducted in his home or schoolrooms next to his living quarters. They were popular, attended by men and women, young and old, married and single. He also socialized with his friends, joining them in their homes for dinner. Occasionally religious books were found at these events, but that did not necessarily make them religious meetings. Much of Pastor Stephan’s whole life, including informal and social conversations, centered on theology or ecclesiastical practices, yet Professor Franz Delitzsch noticed that Stephan’s close friends also enjoyed his conversations about the arts, literature, and philosophy.

  The State completely controlled the church, and matters that were strictly ecclesiastical became issues for the legislature, the police, and the courts. With the revolution of 1830, the Saxon government was shaken up. The conservative prime minister Detlev Graf von Einsiedel, Stephan’s loyal friend and powerful protector, resigned from the cabinet of the Catholic king Anton I. Stephan’s life and ministry changed, and he was not alone; his situation reflected the factional tensions in Dresden society. Revolution was swirling about the city. Many were sensing the power of the rationalistic movement while other people were caught up in the desire for independence and freedom from the authoritarian regimes of the day.

  After a period of relative quiet, in 1830 accusations and rumors against Stephan again surfaced, some of them thought to have long since been laid to rest. The loss of Pastor Stephan’s advocate with the Saxon government, Detlev von Einsiedel, was first felt as the city prepared to celebrate the tercentennial of the signing of the Augsburg Confession of the Lutheran Reformation. The Catholic king Anton of Saxony and his Jesuit advisors prepared to block the Lutheran observation for fear it would become a protest against the Catholics. They issued a decree prohibiting the Lutherans from publishing any sermon or address without permission of the king’s council. They forbade any and all impassioned remarks against the Catholics. And they ordered the police to enforce this decree. A two-day celebration scheduled for Dresden included a parade and festive services. Police ordered that parades could only be held in the immediate vicinity of the churches. St. John’s congregation complied and held their festivities in the church and the cemetery grounds. Members of other churches who did not obey the police order were arrested.

  During the same month the Book of Concord celebration was held, and the French Revolution of July 1830 erupted. It pitted the middle class against the monarchy and state religion and was felt in cities all across Europe and rekindled antichurch sentiments. This multinational revolution of individual dignity reverberated in Dresden also:

  In Dresden, the people took possession of the police station, drove away the soldiers and even caused the King to temporarily leave the city The mob stoned the home of von Einsiedel, set fire to a building in Pastor Stephan’s garden and caused all kinds of annoying mischief.

  After the restoration of law and order, it was not found expedient to remove the members of the police department which had injected themselves into office during those hectic days of September, 1830. It will be necessary to remember this change in the membership of Dresden’s police department if we wish to understand the sudden change of the police toward Pastor Stephan especially after the resignation of Pastor Stephan’s powerful protector and friend, Detlev von Einsiedel.1

  For a time there was little harassment or complaint about Stephan’s preaching, the midweek devotional services, or his defense of Luther’s teaching and the Lutheran Confessions. The first public attacks on Stephan’s ministry by the press had come already in 1821 from the Correspondent from and for Germany. At that time an anonymous writer had accused Stephan of sectarianism and mysticism in his ministry. This critical theme continued in 1833 when several newspapers launched a flurry of attacks on Stephan. These charges ranged from insinuations about Stephan’s personal life and improper behavior to rumors of people going crazy as a result of this “enthusiastic” preaching. Stephan’s parishioners were called all kinds of names including monsters, snakes, enemies of the state, and so on. The Bohemian preacher was accused of foul teaching that turned good people into useless and dangerous citizens.

  At this point some members of St. John’s Church joined Stephan in this crisis of conscience. They defended the integrity of Stephan’s name and ministry by publishing a lengthy pamphlet titled Confession of Faith of St. John’s Congregation in Dresden and also a Refutation of the Charges against the Congregation and Its Pastor Made in Recent Public Prints, 1833. After listing charges and accusations, the writers found no proof of false doctrine, of breaking laws of the land, or of creating lunacy in the minds of the hearers. The authors of the pamphlet found the accuser’s charges to be groundless and frivolous. The testimony in support of their pastor is moving:

  We declare most firmly and positively, before God and man that we have never heard any other doctrine from our pastor but that which is in full accord with the Word of God, the Old and New Testaments. He does declare in all simplicity and plainly the full counsel of God concerning our Salvation, the Law and the Gospel. He shows us how to repent and obtain forgiveness of sin, how to live a Christian life, patiently suffer, joyfully to hope and how to die a blessed death. What the pious Elector, John the Constant, his fellow believers and his successors [believed], to be its rule and guide in its other confessional books what all the Lutheran Church following the sainted Dr. Martin Luther has believed and confessed before Emperor and Diet that does our pas
tor, the Rev. Martin Stephan, teach, believe and confess. He is a faithful preacher bound by the religious oath which the ecclesiastical government in Saxony demands of every Lutheran clergyman.2

  The authors of the St. John’s Confession of Faith disposed of the accusations in the first fifty pages of the booklet. They carefully refuted the charges against their pastor of spreading doctrines dangerous to men’s minds and to the security of the state. When the charges of false teaching were not successful in stopping Stephan, local pastors attacked Stephan’s personal life. Authors of St. John’s Confession of Faith then considered the fairy tales bolstered which these charges. These tales simply rehashed the slanders started ten or fifteen years prior, in 1816–1820, but which had been proven false by court investigation.

  The most salacious of these accusations involved a letter written years earlier in 1814 to the superintendent of the state church by a former housekeeper of Stephan’s, a Ms. Walter. In it she alleged that she was pregnant by Pastor Stephan. She left Stephan’s service and went home to Haber where she lived and where she had met Stephan some four or five years earlier when he was pastor there. She went on to claim that she gave birth to Stephan’s son in 1815. Stephan sent Mr. Hausmann, an elder from the Haber church, to visit Ms. Walter. After being questioned, she confessed that someone put her up to it, and that the charges were totally untrue. She asked Mr. Hausmann to express her deepest regret. She was approached by a certain Mr. Novak (called a “Bohemian”) who convinced the organist of St. John’s Bohemian Lutheran congregation, a Mrs. Janek, and her son to persuade Ms. Walter to submit this false testimony. The charges by Walter were dismissed in 1814. However, they were raised again in the 1830s attacks.3

  On May 28, 1835, Dr. Carl Christian Seltenreich, superintendent of the Saxon Consistory overseeing the pastors, went out of his way to declare, “I know of no charges of phantastic [sic] errors or immoral crimes in the meetings of Pastor Stephan.” Koepchen quotes Ludwig Fischer, a contemporary writer who made a thorough study of the entire documentation regarding Stephan’s ministry in Dresden: “There was nothing immoral about these religious meetings of the Stephanists, nor was anything smacking of libertinism intentionally done.”4

  NOTES

  1 William Koepchen, “Pastor Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838” (unpublished ms., St. Louis: Concordia Historical Institute; New York: Stephan Family Archives, 1935), 25. Graf Detlev von Einsiedel was the king’s right-hand man. He was prime minister of Saxony and served from 1813 to 1830.

  2 Koepchen, “Pastor Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838,” 28, 29.

  3 Amtsakten, Anhang B [Office of Official Acts, appendix B], vol. 3, transcrib. Kurt Spillner, trans. John Conrads (St. Louis: Concordia Historical Institute; New York: Stephan Family Archives), 283.

  4 Koepchen, “Pastor Martin Stephan and the Saxon Emigration of 1838,” 34.

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  Legal Charges Filed, 1837

  Following the resignation of von Einsiedel as the Saxon prime minister and the revolutionary events of September 1830, the policemen who inserted themselves into power remained in place. The crisis with the local pastors and the Saxon Consistory would not go away. With von Einsiedel out of the government, the attitude of the Dresden Police Department toward Pastor Stephan changed drastically from support to suspicion and surveillance. They were intent on bringing him in line with the desires of the consistory. “The city council, in conjunction with its police department made it their special duty to find some cause, be it ever so trivial and unfair, to bring Stephan and his associates into judicial inquiry.”1

  The first arrest of Stephan involved the violation of the prohibition against conventicles, or midweek religious meetings. The pastor was visiting friends. During this visit it is likely the conversation included religious topics, because that seems to have been one of Pastor Stephan’s chief interests, and the Nitzschke family were members of St. John’s church. Koepchen’s description leaves little doubt that the police were on a mission to show Stephan in violation of religious meetings outside the Sunday services.

  The first encroachment of the police upon Stephan and his followers was made during the evening of February 1, 1836, at the home of Carl Nitzschke, an accountant in the Royal Porcelain Warehouse in Dresden. Mr. Nitzschke had invited Pastor Stephan, Mr. John Guenther, his daughter Louise, and the widow Johanna Christine Beimann for a social visit on that day. They were sitting around the table eating cakes, when suddenly the police sergeant, Christian Potzschke, entered and accused them of holding a “conventicle,” an illegal meeting for worship. This was most emphatically denied by all persons present. The four guests, however, were ordered to leave Nitzschke’s home at once. In court, Sergeant Potschke graciously testified that all five people were properly dressed, but that he saw a copy of Sekkendorf’s “History of Lutheranism” on the table, a certain sign that these persons were assembled for worship and not for sociability.2

  The arrest of Stephan at Nitzschke’s home on February 1,1836, was the talk of Dresden. Friends of Stephan and Nitzschke were outraged and alarmed by this interference in church matters by the police. A number of friends and parishioners were subpoenaed by the court to testify about these conventicles (midweek services), and judging by the testimony, the questions ranged far from the event of February 1. Among those subpoenaed was theological candidate Poeschel. He testified on February 23, 1836, that he and other theological candidates had authored the St. John’s Con fession of Faith, and that he had sent a copy to the court chaplain D. Ammon. He acknowledged that he had left the University of Leipzig and returned home to Dresden where, upon hearing of Pastor Stephan, he began attending worship at St. John’s including the mid-week meetings. He testified that he used to join Pastor Stephan in his evening walks around Dresden but had not for the last three years. He stated that the rent for the room in the Ober-Loessnitz Winery was paid by those who took part in the evening walks to the winery. He confirmed that there was no common treasury for these expenses and each paid his or her own share. Poeschel also mentioned that these evening walks were for enjoying the fresh air and sometimes Stephan would join in the walk. Sometimes the walks would last late into the night because Stephan could not sleep until the early morning.

  After this examination, Dr. Carl Seltenreich, superintendent of the consistory which monitored church matters and discipline, wrote a letter dated February 22, 1836, to the police, the court, and the city council stating,

  Reviewing the former charges and complaints made against Pastor Stephan, it cannot be denied that the authorities have been very indulgent and ignored many things. It could be of value to survey all the Stephanistic abnormalities; but of late many things have changed.

  Seltenreich lists assemblies and persons no longer available for such a survey. He goes on to complain,

  If Pastor Stephan would only conduct his devotional meetings at a proper time, there could be little criticism, but his evening and night walks must be disapproved of, for they have not only the appearance of evil, but lead inevitable to all kinds of excesses.

  No less offensive are Pastor Stephan’s yearly visits to his ministerial friends, where he, as has happened, administered Holy Communion, and admitted communicants, who were not members of that congregation.

  In the end Seltenreich gave up a little sadly. He left the problem in the hands of the court and the city council. “How to get at the bottom of all these irregularities, how, when, and where they are to be investigated and found out, I must leave to your discretion, and hope that the latest happening may have given an opportunity to stop further incidents.”3

  The suspicious tone of this letter is a marked departure from Dr. Seltenreich’s letter nine months earlier, in which he stated categorically that he knew of no charges of “errors or immoral crimes in the meetings of Pastor Stephan.” The political tension increased and was running high.

  On March 14 and 16, Candidates Carl Welzel and Theodor Brohm were summoned
to the court to give evidence regarding these evening meetings and walks. Both men testified to the character and to the theology of Martin Stephan. They attended Pastor Stephan’s services and were members of St. John’s. Welzel and Brohm stated in their deposition that Pastor Stephan used books in the devotional meetings like John Arndt’s Sermon on Martin Luther’s Catechism as well as Luther’s sermons and some of Stephan’s own sermons. Welzel and Brohm acknowledged that they had helped write the Confession of Faith pamphlet of the congregation defending St. John’s and their pastor, even though they were not listed as major contributors.

  Brohm specifically spoke to the issue of Stephan’s evening walks and made it clear that these walks were social events and not religious meetings. They were scheduled for Wednesday afternoons and evenings, and those who went with the pastor rested and lunched at an inn where they rented a room. The inn of Weidel’s Vineyard in Ober-Loessnitz and the inn of Boerner’s Vineyard in Hofloessnitz were commonly visited. These walks and visits were attended by men and women in Pastor Stephan’s pastoral care.4 When specifically asked, Brohm explained they were held late in the evening because Pastor Stephan often did not sleep until after midnight. He chose this later hour to exercise and socialize with his friends. Brohm was directed to name these friends and he did so, including himself, Welzel, Wege, Nitzschke, Jaeckel, Grieffenhahn and sister, Renner, Guenther and his son and daughter Louise, August Voelker and wife Wilhelmine, teacher Hellwig, and others. However, none of these people regularly joined these walks and meetings every week.