Zinzendorf’s teaching on mystical marriage frames union with Christ in explicitly nuptial, often erotically inflected terms: believers (male and female) are the Bride, Christ is the heavenly Bridegroom, and even marital sex can be a “liturgical” experience of union with him.[1][2][3][4][5]
## Mystical marriage as theology of union
– Zinzendorf develops a bridal‑mystical soteriology in which the believer’s highest identity is as Christ’s Bride, united to him in a bond of intimate love; this shapes Moravian devotion, hymnody, and communal self‑understanding.[5][1]
– His son Christel’s later excesses (the “Sifting Time”) build on this theology: mystical marriage to Christ is taken with radical literalism in gender and erotic imagery, forcing Zinzendorf to rebuke abuses while not fully retracting the underlying nuptial paradigm.[2][6][7][1]
## Sexuality, marriage, and union with Christ
– Drawing on radical Pietist debates, Zinzendorf argues that sex is legitimate for Christians only if purged of lust; in that case, “sex became a divine, sacramental act,” a concrete locus for experiencing union with Christ.[3][1]
– Peucker summarizes: Zinzendorf “taught his followers to have sex without lust during which they were able to **experience the union with Christ**,” so marital intercourse is construed as an enacted sign of mystical marriage to Jesus.[1]
– From the mid‑1740s he speaks of “procurator marriage”: the husband stands as Christ’s representative, the wife as the church, so their marital relationship dramatizes and participates in the Christ–church mystical marriage.[4]
## Gender, soul, and bridal identity
– To handle “male marriage with Jesus,” Zinzendorf teaches that “every soul is feminine (*anima*) and that at death the male body would be shed,” enabling even men to imagine themselves as brides of Christ in an intensely sensual manner.[2][5]
– This is pushed further in Christel’s infamous 1748 ceremonies declaring single brethren to be “sisters,” a performative extension of Zinzendorf’s mystical‑bridal theology into social and gender identity.[6][1][2]
## Crisis and later correction
– In practice, this mystical‑marriage framework contributes to the “Sifting Time,” when some Moravians come to believe that union with Christ can be experienced not only in marital intercourse but also in extramarital sex, a development Zinzendorf condemns in his 1749 reprimand.[7][5][1]
– Later Moravian piety retains bridal language but significantly tones down eroticized and experimental applications, returning more closely to mainstream Lutheran patterns while still affirming intimate union with Christ.[8][7][1]
For teaching, you can present Zinzendorf as radicalizing the classic bridal‑mystical trope: union with Christ is imagined as a deeply affective, bodily, and nuptial reality, whose theological power and dangers are both on full display in the Sifting crisis.[3][5][1][2]
Sources
[1] A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety … https://www.psupress.org/
[2] Book review: Paul Peucker, A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and … https://blog.blakearchive.org/
[3] [PDF] Ehereligion”: The Moravian Theory and Practice of Marriage as https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/
[4] ‘The Moravian Brethren: A New Community for a New Age’ by… https://censamm.org/blog/the-
[5] A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety … https://www.academia.edu/
[6] A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety … https://discovery.researcher.
[7] Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth … https://academic.oup.com/ahr/
[8] A Time of Sifting | Moravian Church in America Bookstore https://store.moravian.org/
[9] A time of sifting. Mystical marriage and the crisis of Moravian piety in … https://www.cambridge.org/
[10] A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety … https://www.jstor.org/stable/
