A. G. Roeber - What The Law Requires Is Written On Their Hearts Noachic and Natural Law Among German-Speakers in Early Modern North America

What the Law Requires Is Written on Their Hearts: Noachic and Natural Law among
German-Speakers in Early Modern North America

Author(s): A. G. Roeber
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 883-912
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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What the Law Requires
Is Written on Their Hearts:
Noachic and Natural Law among German-
Speakers in Early Modern North America
A. G. Roeber
IN June of 1747, Johann Martin Boltzius, the Lutheran pastor at

Ebenezer, Georgia, detailed for his superiors in Europe the fate of a
German-speaker who had attempted to draw the Cherokees away from
their alliance with the British by an appeal to natural law. During Joseph
Watson's expeditions among the Cherokees in 1741, the Englishman had
encountered a Saxon, Christian Gottlieb Prieber. After law studies at
Leipzig, Prieber had emigrated to North America and found his way west to
the indigenous peoples of the Mississippi River Valley. There he attempted
to incite his hosts to war against the invading Europeans for violating the
Indains' natural rights. For his trouble, Boltzius dryly observed, Prieber "was
despised by even the Indians" for "his beliefs, conduct, ethics, and dress."
Kidnapped by the Creek Nation, Prieber was sold into British captivity.
James Oglethorpe imprisoned the German-speaker on the island of
Frederica, where he died.1
Precisely why Prieber's "beliefs, conduct, ethics, and dress" upset those
he was trying to enlighten, Boltzius did not explain. The ambivalence with
which the story must have been read by Europeans mirrored a profound cri-
sis in European thinking about whether all peoples were bound by certain
empirically valid concepts of civic order rooted in a natural law. The emerg-
ing secular jurisprudence Prieber had studied, pioneered by the Dutch
scholar Hugo Grotius and adumbrated by the German scholars Samuel
Pufendorf and, more recently, Christian Thomasius, insisted that interna-
tional civic order could be constructed without reference to Christian scrip-
ture or revelation. If Prieber's former Leipzig classmates read of his fate, they
might have concluded that the basic precepts of natural rights were not yet
A. G. Roeber is professor of early modern history and religious studies at The

Pennsylvania State University. He thanks Richard Ross, Mark Hdberlein, the participants at the
Pennsylvania State-Max Kade German-American Research Institute Conference on "Jews and
Pietists in Dialogue in Enlightenment America," and the William and Mary Quarterly referees
for comments and suggestions.
1 George Fenwick Jones, ed., Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in
America ... Edited by Samuel Urlsperger, ii (Athens, Ga., I989), 76, I48 n. I3.
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LVIII, Number 4, October 200i
884 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
clear to the "savages" of the New World. Alternatively, they might have
applauded the Cherokees' integrity for honoring diplomatic commitments to
their British allies.2
For the Protestant pietist opponents of Thomasius at the Francke
Foundations in Halle with whom Boltzius was associated, this secularized
notion of "natural rights" held ominous implications. Did the Native
Americans act out of a dim sense of conscience and duty, thus rightly despis-
ing the misguided secularist Prieber? Boltzius certainly seemed to hint at this
in noting the proper contempt for Prieber's "beliefs" that the Cherokees
exhibited. But if Indians acted out of conscience, how could their con-
sciences have been so properly enlightened since they were pagans and knew
nothing of the one true God and only dimly perceived the obligations of
civic order, as well?
This incident and the differing ways Europeans plausibly read it provide
us with the opportunity to glimpse an anguished early modern Atlantic
debate over the question of the "law written on the heart" and German-
speakers' encounters with Jewish and pagan contemporaries. That the rever-
berations of a German university debate over the sacred or secular
understanding of natural law should be heard in far-off Georgia should not
surprise us because the Atlantic world's Protestant pietist inhabitants had
already recognized in their Jewish neighbors' traditions how critical this
debate would be in their New World encounters with non-Christians. At
first glance, we might think these early modern German-speaking Protestant
pietists and their Jewish neighbors had little to say to one another about a
"law written on the heart." If Protestantism stood for anything, it insisted
on the absolute necessity of salvation from the misery of sin by grace alone,
through faith alone, apart from any works of "law." In both official theology
and popular piety, the Law of God revealed his will and was accessible only
through sacred scripture. That law not only revealed his will but also con-
demned and harassed the sinner. If it also functioned in a distant "third use"
as a guide to behavior, this was only true if the person using it understood
and accepted revelation in the first place. What possible use did laws given
to Noah and his sons, recorded in Genesis 9:1-17, have in this understanding
of the human condition if Jews did not accept Jesus of Nazareth as the one
who had fulfilled the law? The plight of pagans, those "outside the law," was
even more dire.
Jewish commentators might also have doubted the value of exchanges
on this subject with gentiles. For Jews, the commands given to Noah and his
sons after their rescue from the deluge were revealed truth and laid down a
clear set of requirements: to establish a society based on laws; to prohibit
idolatry; to prohibit blasphemy; to prevent the careless taking of human life;
2 The confrontation between Thomasius and the pietists at Halle has a long historiogra-
phy; for an elegant summary of the arguments and a perspective on polemics in the context of
an emerging theory of communication, see Martin Gierl, Pietismus undAu/kldrung: Theologische
Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des i7. Jahrhunderts (Grttingen,
I997), 424-69.
NOACHIC AND NATURAL LAW IN EARLY AMERICA 885
not to tolerate adultery, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality; to prevent rob-

bery; to avoid eating the limb torn from a living animal. These seven basic
laws, applicable only to the people of the Covenant, had become the focus of
a written tradition by the second century of the Common Era. The body of
writings (the Tosefra) that commented on Noachic law began gradually to
extend the applicability of the Noachic commands.3 Much later not before
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Jewish commentators who followed
Maimonides firmly maintained that gentiles also had to observe these laws.
Maimonides believed that this was so not because humans could reason
themselves toward the right conclusions, but rather because revelation at
Sinai had codified them into the Decalogue. Maimonides assumed that non-
Jewish access to the universal truths expressed here brought obligation in its
train. Instead, as some critics pointed out, gentile persecution of the people
of the Covenant raised serious questions about whether the term "righteous
gentile" was perhaps an oxymoron. What difference did it make if gentiles
occasionally behaved as if trying to follow the commands given to Noah and
his sons in the covenant relationships detailed in Genesis 9? Their blasphe-
mous persecution of God's chosen people, especially as Christianity became
a tolerated, then the official, public religion, more than canceled occasional
lapses into decency.
Covenant language inherited from the writings of ancient Israel, how-
ever, had forced early Christians to reflect on where the bounds lay that
obligated them to observe Torah but excused them from the attendant
requirements and explications of the Law. Only a radical minority in
Christianity believed that the Decalogue did not apply to Christians at all.
Considerable doubt surrounded the question of what glimmers of an origi-
nal, unspoiled nature remained in all humans after the Fall. Those doubts
increased, and adherents of Christianity demanded clarity on the question as
more gentiles converted, bringing with them anxious concerns about the fate
of pagan ancestors and relatives who did not know Torah at all. Augustine of
Hippo, especially, in trying to work out some notion of human conscience,
distanced himself from Epicurean philosophers. These pagans had scorned
the idea of justice as an end of human life and denied the political instincts
of humankind or the significance of conscience. Augustine clearly defended
the centrality of revelation, first to ancient Israel and, latterly, through Jesus
of Nazareth to Christians. He firmly rejected the notion that all humans
enjoy an innate moral sense. Conscience in the most elevated sense operated
only in baptized Christians, and the "law written on the heart" for Augustine
remained primarily a matter of civic order. Even the dim sense pagans might
have of a God had become distorted, he believed, and hence, so did their
ability to discern rightly who the true God was and, consequently, what he
3 See, in general, J. Budziszewski, Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law
(Downers Grove, Ill., I997), 202-07. On the Tosefta (meaning "addition" to Mishnah commen
tary or sometimes including laws that are not in the Mishnah at all), see Menachem Elon,
Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles Ha-Mishpat Ha-Ivri, 4 vols., trans. Bernard Auerbach
Melvin J. Sykes (Philadelphia, I994), 3:I052-53, I078-82.
intended as the proper destiny of humans. Gradually, Christian consensus of

a sort began to take shape, partly formed in arguments with Jewish commen-
tators. Indeed, Christians decided, the Decalogue's commands were identical
with a kind of universally valid set of principles. But Christians increasingly
argued that these were rational and could be discerned by empirical observa-
tion of the world and human behavior; these principles governed all human
life, and they were timelessly valid. Medieval Christians concluded that the
universality of Noachic law and the Decalogue's contents could be seen in
what the former Pharisee Saul of Tarsus had summarized in writing as the
Apostle Paul to the Christian church at Rome: "When Gentiles who have not
the law [that is, Torah] do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to
themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the
law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears wit-
ness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them."4
By the sixteenth century, the question of conscience how it existed in
all humans and what relationship it had to those who knew divine revela-
tion had to be engaged even more energetically. For, as inheritors of
Augustine, the German reformers Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon
and their contemporaries had to explain why they did not find the medieval
consensus of the Western, or Latin, church on the question of a natural law
consonant with their recovery of the doctrine of justification by faith alone,
apart from the works of the Law. That explanation necessarily demanded
reflection on the Jews and on the question of what fate God had decreed for
pagans, as well.
Early modern European contacts between Jewish and pietist Protestant
correspondents and thinkers prepared German-speaking Christians and Jews,
Sephardi and Ashkenazi, for further exchanges on such questions in North
America. As newcomers there, where Africans and Native Americans now
lived as real neighbors, not as distant abstractions, Protestant Christians
urgently needed clarity in their dealings with non-Christians. The sense of
urgency was less marked among the small and scattered groups of Jewish set-
tlers. At times, German Protestants appeared to believe, like most Jewish
commentators, that a law written on the heart was confined solely to a
"civic" law or law of nations. But the more urgent question that disturbed
German pietists did not focus on the issue of mere civic responsibility and
the right ordering of society. More pressing was the problem of conscience.
4 Some translations suggest that for "by nature," "instinctively" or "by the light of nature"
reflects the Greek better. Rom. 2:14-I5. See Ernest L. Fortin, "The Political Implications of St.
Augustine's Theory of Conscience," Augustinian Studies, I (I970), I33-52; Krister Stendahl, "The
Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," Harvard Theological Review, 56
(i963), I99-2I5; and Johannes Stelzenberger, Conscientia bei Augustinus: Studie zur Geschichte der
Moraltheologie (Paderborn, I959). Stendahl argues plausibly that Paul was utterly uninterested in
issues of personal conscience and attributes to Augustine the role of "the first to express the
dilemma of the introspective conscience" (203). For a different reading that conflates Paul and
Luther and denies any role to natural law in their perspectives, see Markus Barth, "Natural Law
in the Teachings of St. Paul," in Elwyn A. Smith, ed., Church-State Relations in Ecumenical
Perspective (Pittsburgh, i966), II3-5I.
Gradations emerged incrementally along a theological spectrum that

precluded a consistent German Protestant answer to the queries Jewish com-
mentators had been asking for generations: what is the law written on the
heart? to whom does it apply? Moravian pietists by the eighteenth century
believed that natural law remained a relatively bright beacon among the
pagan nations. Lutherans since the Reformation had cautiously agreed that it
existed, but thought the beam of light a dim one, and most Lutheran theol-
ogy confined its existence to those legal and rational norms essential for
organizing a society or a polity. For the most part, they demurred that it was
capable of enlightening conscience about God and his will. More Calvinist-
influenced Germans regarded natural law as little more than an almost-dead
ember, generating little light or heat.
As German-speakers encountered both Jews and non-Europeans in
North America, a second set of gradations emerged from those contacts and
ruminations on them. They developed a racial/ethnic hierarchy in their
assessments of the nations of the world, in which promptings of natural law
barely moved Africans, perhaps more strongly shaped certain Native
American peoples, and were surely present among the Jews who enjoyed the
blessings of Torah. But Jewish rejection of Christianity seemed to Christian
observers almost the paradigm of bad conscience and a wholesale assault on
the concept of reasonable conclusions drawn from reflection on the law.
Jewish refusal to give such assent deepened the anxiety over what the "law
written on the heart" could possibly mean.
Just how these two sets of gradations intersected and what theological
warrant emerged from German-language speculation on a graded racial hier-
archy, this article seeks to examine. By the end of the eighteenth century,
debates on the issue of conscience and the emergence of a secularized inter-
national law altered the ways in which German pietists thought about the
many peoples of the world and whether some notion of conscience informed
them all. Because of their inability to answer clearly what the "law written
on the heart" was and why it seemed to manifest itself differently in a variety
of peoples, pietists of all sorts usually found themselves unable to connect
individual conscience easily to social or political issues. Their quandary
allowed many to turn their backs on the diverse peoples who had originally
been moved by the warmth of Protestant German religious sentiment.
The recovery of Aristotle via the Islamic scholars such as Averroes by the
Swabian Dominican theologian Albertus Magnus and his brilliant disciple
Thomas Aquinas did challenge fundamentally the inherited Augustinian pes-
simism on the dignity of a civic order. Nor did Aquinas quite share the
Augustinians' equally dim view about the light of conscience in individual
humans. Peter Abelard sketched the counter-argument Aquinas would
adumbrate more fully: that both piety and reason compel the conclusion
that "those who strove to please God according to their best lights on the
basis of the natural law would not be damned for their efforts." By the
I400s, Jean Gerson agreed with this insight and coupled to it an assertion of
conciliarist or collective "rights" to govern the Christian church. Gerson's

arguments amounted to a quasi-defense of what later generations recognized
as individual, or subjective, rights and provided a serious basis for the dig-
nity of secular political life.5
Why the medieval recovery of Aristotle by Western theologians seemed
to threaten the centrality of Augustine's conviction that all truly good works
depended on God's free grace ("prevenient grace") first is a question that has
generated massive commentary. Whether Luther really understood Aquinas's
or the later scholastics' teachings on natural law has also been fiercely con-
tested by experts. It seems clear to some scholars that Luther only had access
to Aquinas's youthful work and the commentary of later scholastics in the
tradition of nominalism. In fact, Thomas had stoutly denied that by nature
the unaided intellect could know, for example, that the true God was
Trinity. That knowledge came only through grace. At best, human intellect
"could know the existence of God, and even the supreme goodness of God."
The anxiety of the reformers focused, however, less on debates over knowl-
edge of God. Behavior of humans, and what relationship linked good behav-
ior to grace, occupied them far more. Where medieval consensus had
emphasized "faith active in love," Luther insisted that the truer message of
Paul had been "faith living in Christ," which again seemed to minimize the
activities of humans-however well-intentioned-toward doing good. For
Luther and Melanchthon, the burning question remained not whether
human reason could arrive at some recognition of God by studying nature.
Rather, for Luther, as for Augustine, sin was in the will. The human crisis
lay not in its somewhat diminished capacity for intellection, but in its utter
5 See, variously, David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: An Historical and
Constructive Study of the Noahide Laws (New York, I983), and "The Mind of Maimonides," First
Things, 90 (I999), 27-33; Aaron Lichtenstein, The Seven Laws of Noah, 2d ed. (New York, i986
Steven Schwarzschild, "Do Noachites Have to Believe in Revelation?" Jewish Quarterly Review,
52 (i962), 297-308; Jaroslav Pelikan, The Growth of Medieval Theology (600-i300) (Chicago,
I978), 255 (Abelard quotation); and Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on
Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, ii50-1625 (Atlanta, I997), 207-26, on Gerson.
Tierney's major disagreement on the origins of the concept of natural rights is with Richard
Tuck. See Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, I979); for
an example in the North American context of an affirmation of Tuck's point of view, see James
H. Hutson, "The Emergence of the Modern Concept of a Right in America: The Contribution
of Michel Villey," American Journal of Jurisprudence, 39 (I994), I85-224. For a useful summar
of I7th- and i8th-century Reformed developments, see Daniel Westberg, "The Reformed
Tradition and Natural Law," and William Edgar, "A Response," both in Michael Cromartie,
ed., A Preserving Grace: Protestants, Catholics, and Natural Law (Washington, D. C., and Grand
Rapids, Mich., I997), I03-I7, II8-30. On the problem of Luther and the scholastic tradition, see
also Sigurd Martin Daecke, "Gott der Vernunft, Gott der Natur und persdnlicher Gott.
Naturliche Theologie im Gesprdch zwischen Naturphilosophie und Worttheologie," in Carsten
Bresch, Daecke, and Helmut Riedlinger, eds., Kann Man Gott aus der Natur erkennen? Evolution
als Offenbarung (Freiburg/Basel, Vienna, I992), I35-54, and Wolfgang Maaser, "Luther und die
Naturwissenschaften-systematische Aspekte an ausgewahlten Beispielen," and Dino Bellucci,
"Gott als Mens: Die 'aliqua physica definition' Gottes bei Philipp Melanchthon," in Gunther
Frank and Stefan Rhein, eds., Melanchthon und die Naturwissenschaften seiner Zeit (Sigmaringe
I998), 25-4I, 59-7i.
inability to will to confess God rightly and to do good accordingly, even if

intellectually perceiving him dimly.6
Members of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardi diasporas arriving in
North America in the eighteenth century left no written commentary
demonstrating conclusively how they interpreted Noachic law. Indeed, not a
single written reflection on the topic of Noachic law penned by a Jewish
immigrant arrival in North America is known to exist. Some Jews may well
have held to a narrow and strict sense that matched, roughly, the pessimistic
fate for humans beyond the law and revelation that Augustine and Luther
discerned from their Christian perspective. Indirect evidence suggests that
most did not. Some Jewish commentators had expressed the opinion that the
seven Noachic commandments provided keys to an emerging law of nations.
Especially among some Sephardi writings, this more inclusive and hopeful
vision may have accompanied later migrants to New Netherland and North
America former exiles from Portugal and Brazil arriving via Amsterdam.
The Sephardim in Amsterdam had participated in mercantile networks that
bound them to both Hamburg and London. Before i632, no Jewish courts
existed in Amsterdam, and Jews in that community had become deeply
familiar with gentile courts and Christian beliefs at the very time the Dutch
overseas trade empire began to flourish. Their exposure to a highly cos-
mopolitan set of mercantile exchanges with both Roman Catholic and
Protestant neighbors tended to create among the former Portuguese who
moved between Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, and Frankfurt-am-Main a
fairly tolerant and broad view of "righteous gentiles," their capacity for act-
ing according to conscience, and their emerging law of nations.7 Some
Jewish commentators, even in this irenic tradition, regarded Catholicism as
idolatrous, and those who did could not regard a Catholic as righteous.
Their Dutch- and German-speaking Protestant neighbors agreed wholeheart-
edly, though perhaps allowing for the odd but wholly exceptional possibility
of a righteous papist.
Both Catholic and Calvinist commentary with which the Jews of
Amsterdam were familiar started from the same premise. An all-just God
revealed glimpses of his awesome majesty in an ordered creation where the
6 Pelikan, Growth of Medieval Theology (600-i300), 284-93, quotation on 287; Heiko A.

Oberman, "'Justitia Christi' and Justitia Dei'. Luther and the Scholastic Doctrines of
Justification," in Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early
Reformation Thought (Edinburgh, i986), I04-25, quotations on i20.
7 On these background issues, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation:
Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, Ind., I997), 25-75, and
Gaon, "Some Aspects of the Relations between Shaar Hashamayim of London and Shearith
Israel of New York," 3-I3, and L. Hershkowitz, "Some Aspects of the New York Jewish
Merchant in Colonial Trade," IOI-I7, both in Aubrey Newman, ed., Migration and Settlement:
Proceedings of the Anglo-American Jewish Historical Conference ... July 1970 (London, I97I). More
generally, see Jacob Rader Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492-i776, 3 vols. (Detroit, I970).
On Jewish experience with Dutch courts, see Edward Fram, "Jewish Law from the Shulhan
Aruknh to the Enlightenment," in N. S. Hecht et al., eds., An Introduction to the History and
Sources ofJewish Law (Oxford, i996), 360; on European Jewish exchanges among the large mer-
cantile centers, see David Novak, "Modern Responsa: i8oo to the Present," ibid., 379-95.
laws written into it were accessible to observation and reason, at least in

part. Catholic commentators believed the Fall in the Garden of Eden had
left reason and free will maimed but operative-into which grace could be
"infused" and through which the law of nature could be discerned. Some
were willing to speculate that the mere intention to do good among pagans
indicated that God operated outside the normal bounds of revelation, and
the Christian church.8 But for Augustinian Calvinists, the central doctrine
of the utter depravity of humankind and the bondage of the will compelled
denial that grace could work through nature, and hence, the very notion of
natural law as it applied to conscience was repugnant to scriptural revela-
tion's centrality. Anglican commentators such as Thomas Hooker found
themselves under attack when they affirmed even a modified natural law
teaching they saw in Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and other sixteenth-
century theologians.9
Especially among more rigorous seventeenth-century English-speaking
"puritan" Calvinists, a fideist tradition that drew from Tertullian and late-
medieval nominalists emphasized God's revealed law, one not accessible to
reason. Such authors tended to be interested in the legal knowledge resting
on rational observation and deduction that might form the basis for a godly
society. But William Ames, in his essay on Conscience, spoke for many when
he wrote that some relics of natural law perhaps remained in human hearts
"like to some dim aged picture. . . . [but] therefore is there nowhere found
any true right practical reason, pure and complete in all parts, but in the
written law of God," alluding to Psalm II9:66. The political use of the law of
nature found guarded Protestant endorsement, but all Protestants, in varying
degrees, struggled with the question of whether individual conscience, in the
truest sense, existed apart from explicit, individual appropriation of the
knowledge of the law, revealed solely through the Gospel.10
8 For a survey of the vast literature on the Roman Catholic debates over the nature of
indigenous Americans and human nature, see William Pencak, "The Sign of the Indian in
Late Scholastic Hispanic Thought, the British Counter-Example, and the Practical
Consequences," Communication and Information Sciences Review, vols. I/2 (forthcoming). A
particularly sharp indictment of Christianity's relationship to slavery is Forrest G. Wood, The
Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth
Century (New York, i990); more nuanced views of the complicated relationship of slavery
practices and biblical beliefs are available in the special issue on "Constructing Race," William
and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 54 (I997), esp. Benjamin Braude, "The Sons of Noah and the
Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern
Periods," I03-42.
9 W. J. Torrance Kirby, "Richard Hooker's Theory of Natural Law in the Context of
Reformation Theology," Sixteenth Century Journal, 30 (i999), 68I-704; on Calvin, see Susan E.
Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought ofJohn Calvin
(Grand Rapids, Mich., I995).
10 "Teach me good judgment and knowledge [i.e., "practical knowledge"] for I believe in
thy commandments"; William Ames, Conscience (London, i639), Question 8; the more extensive
treatment is Ames, De Conscientia et ejus jure vel casibus libri V (Amsterdam, i630). Ames's
teacher, William Perkins, authored a similar treatise with similar conclusions; see William
Perkins, i558-i602: English Puritanist, ed. Thomas F. Merrill (Nieuwkoop, i966), 8, containing
both of his works on casuistry, "A Discourse on Conscience" and "The Whole Treatise of Cases
NOACHIC AND NATURAL LAW IN EARLY AMERICA 89I
Puritan theologians thus placed great emphasis on education and train-

ing, insisting that humans possessed of natural reason were obligated to
order both private life and society as the expression of faith. Such right
ordering depended in turn on a right anthropology, the right knowledge of
one's self and the hopeless condition in which humanity existed. The puritan
emphasis on practical reason drove them, whether they liked it or not, to
consider whether natural law applied to the heathen and their societies as
well as to Christians and Jews who knew God's revealed law. Absent empiri-
cal proof that a natural law as found in the Decalogue functioned among
indigenous Americans or Africans, puritans were not particularly interested
in those societies and cultures.1" Moreover, for all Reformed in the seven-
teenth century, the threat of revived Catholic influence via Spanish scholas-
tics such as Luis de Molina intensified anxiety about natural law thinking in
general. 12
Among German-speakers, the confrontation with a natural law, or
Noachic tradition, reflected some of the same tension between radical faith
and a proper role for human reason as was reflected in the English-speaking
world. But Lutheran, Moravian, and German Reformed theologians did not
subscribe to the predestinarian rigor of Calvin and some of his followers
among the Scots or the English. German-language descriptions of Africans,
North American Indians, and Jewish neighbors in America reveal the strug-
gle these continentals engaged in as they tried to maintain the central
requirement that the Gospel be preached and heard, yet maintain some
of Conscience": "Let Atheists barke against this as long as they will: they have that in them that
will convince them of the truth of the Godhead, will they nill they, either in life or death."
Perkins denies that the Jews were responsible for spreading revelation before the coming of
Christ, since "the conference and speech of Jewish merchants with forrainers was no sufficient
meanes to publish the promises of salvation by Christ to the whole world: first, because the
Jewes for the most part have alwaies bin more readie to receive any new and false religion than
to teach their owne: secondly, because the very Jewes themselves, though they were well
acquainted with the ceremonies of their religion, yet the substance thereof, which was Christ
figured by externall ceremonies, they knew not" (i6). On the evolution of casuistry and the
indebtedness of Puritan divines to the Roman Catholic tradition, see Merrill's introduction, xi-
xv, and, for the impact of casuistry upon English legal doctrine and theory and the tension with
Reformed theology, Edmund Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, i988), introduction, i-II, and Margaret Sampson, "Laxity and Liberty in
Seventeenth-Century English Political Thought," ibid., 72-II8, esp. 78-96; on the English reli-
gious context, see Jonathan Wright, "The World's Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity
during the English Reformation," Sixteenth Century Journal, 30 (I999), II3-33.
11 The above summarizes a vast literature on this topic, elegantly surveyed in John
Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, i560-i640
(Cambridge, i986), 4I-78; on the I7th-century English search for a "language of nature" and the
growing recognition that this search signaled a recognition of the lack of ordered natural princi-
ples, see Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge,
I998), I85-265; for the New England context, see Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at
Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, i98i).
12 See Richard A. Muller, God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought ofJacob Arminius:
Sources and Directions of Scholastic Protestantism in the Era of Early Orthodoxy (Grand Rapids,
Mich., i99i), i6i-66, and, on the connection to legal doctrine, James Gordley, The Philosophical
Origins of Modern Contract Doctrine (Oxford, i99i).
aspects of pre-Reformation natural law teaching. In part, that struggle came

from careful observation of mores and habits among "others" that sug-
gested, at least at times, that a law written on the heart understood as con-
science might really exist among those not yet apprized of Christian
revelation.
We do not know if the Swiss Reformed pastor Johann Joachim Zibly
knew of Christian Prieber's death two years after Zibly's ministry in
Savannah began in 1745. Zibly faced the challenge posed by the questions
surrounding God's will for the Jews and pagans that Boltzius's account of
Prieber's death had opened for Europeans. Zibly had become well
acquainted with a Portuguese-Dutch Jewish member of the d'Acosta family,
who in turn had corresponded with a "learned Jew in New York."13
D'Acosta presented Zibly with his New York friend's interpretation of
Isaiah 7:14 "Behold a [young woman or virgin, that is, almah] shall conceive
and bear a son." Predictably, Ziibly defended the Septuagint Greek text,
which Jews in the diaspora had used, to vindicate the Christian application
of the text to Jesus of Nazareth's birth to the Virgin Mary.
More significant was Zibly's irenic observation that "a mind that seeks
nothing but truth, can not be displeased, because others are of a different
Opinion, and I will do Your unknown friend the Justice, that his Letter
appear'd to me candid and gave no mean opinion of his Abilities and
Sincerity." Zibly asked d'Acosta to convey to the New York scholar the
tor's "true Regard for your whole Nation" as well as Zibly's "Confidence
and friendship, which it shall be my Care never to become undeserving of."
After presenting his philological arguments, the Swiss Reformed cleric
observed how Christianity "is professedly built on the Sacred Writings of the
old Testament." What struck Zibly was the appropriateness of a virgin birth to
distinguish the Messiah from "the universal Corruption of Nature." For Zibly,
it would appear that very little, or nothing, remained "in nature" that could
lead gentiles to the truth. For, he wrote, "we Christians . . . were once not a
people . . . [but] were brought to the Knowledge of the Lord of Israel . . . we
poor Gentiles never knew anything of God, we were not blessed with that
Revelation You Jews had." For Ziibly, the Jews were "our elder Brethren,"
though he could not account for the fact that "the Veil of Moses" had not
yet been removed so that the Jews, too, could see "the Glory of God shining
in the Face of Jesus Christ." 14
13 Quotation in Henry Melchior Mihlenberg, The Journals of Henry Melchior Miihlenberg,

trans. and ed. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, I942-I958),
2:685. On ZUbly, see Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial
British America (Baltimore, I993), i69, 300-oi, and Randall M. Miller, ed., "A Warm and
Zealous Spirit": John J Zfibly and the American Revolution, A Selection of His Writings (M
Ga., I982), I-27. As of this writing, I have not been able to determine which of the d'Acostas
ZUbly knew. On the family's arrival in New Amsterdam, see L. Hershkowitz, "Some Aspects of
the New York Jewish Merchant in Colonial Trade," in Newman, ed., Migration and Settlement,
IOI-I7.
14 ZUbly's letter survives in two variant forms, both available at the Lutheran Archives
Center PM 95A I774-I775; Mihlenberg mentions but does not reproduce the letter in Journals,
2:685 n. I.
Zibly's contemporary Johan Hendricus Goetschius exhibited the same

impatience with notions of a natural law. In a fiery 1742 sermon, the Swiss
Reformed preacher swept aside with contempt the Athenians' altar to "THE
UNKNOWN GOD," since they could not know God's revelation in scripture
and thus were "so darkened by their submission to idolatry that they also
missed the end of the law of nature." That law, Goetschius believed, allowed
observation of a created world, by which one would come to the right con-
clusion that one personal God exists and that worship is due him alone.
Why, however, if pagans could inductively draw this lesson from empirical
observation of the natural world, did Athenians and other heathens remain
mired in "idolatry"? By way of answer, Christian theologians could assign
the majority of humankind to perdition and avoid blaming God by subscrib-
ing to the doctrine of double predestination. With far more uncertainty,
non-Calvinists began to speculate on whether perhaps some people simply
acted in bad conscience, even when both natural reason and revelation were
accessible to them. Since relatively few German-speakers subscribed to dou-
ble predestination, the puzzle of conscience emerged with increasing fre-
quency to disturb their observations on the obvious lapse between accessible
observation of the natural world and its laws and patently wrong belief and
behavior. German pietists of various theological hues had to confront the
puzzle of conscience as they interacted with their Jewish neighbors, fellow
"so-called" European Christians, or pagan Africans and Native Americans.15
German-speaking Christians rarely acknowledged openly their indebted-
ness to Jewish teaching and commentary as a source of their understanding
about natural law. Certainly, among the German- and Dutch-language publi-
cations actually printed in North America, not a single title reveals such an
acknowledgment. Some German- or Dutch-language Jewish works printed in
Europe may have found their way into libraries of pastors such as Zubly, but
the surviving records do not confirm this. In the catalogue of "mostly
German" (but including Dutch and Latin) books offered for sale in
Philadelphia in 1769 by Heinrich Muller, about a dozen texts provided
instruction in Hebrew, or reviewed Jewish history, or engaged in polemics on
why the Jews had not yet been successfully converted. One offering explicitly
compared the condemnation of ancient Israel for its unfaithfulness to the
godless "Sodomitic" nature of modern Germany. But no direct evidence in
the form of scholarly texts survives to show North American Jewish and
Christian engagement with this key question of Noachic or natural law.16
15 For the sermon text, see Randall Balmer, ed., "John Henry Goetschius and The
Unknown God: Eighteenth-Century Pietism in the Middle Colonies," Pennsylvania Magazine of
History and Biography, II3 (I989), 595; Goetschius is here drawing on the passages in Paul's
Letter to the Romans, i:i9-2i: "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because
God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they
are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks
to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened."
16 [John Henry Muller], Catalogus von mehr als 700 meist Deutschen Blichern . . .
(Philadelphia, I769). The polemics included Direr's Hof/nung Israels, oder: Beweis, daf? vor dem
Indirectly, however, German-speakers struggled with this dilemma.

They were forced to reflect on their own gentile status vis-h-vis the Jews as
they confronted the "heathen" with whom they had contact in North
America. Although scholars may be correct to point out that European
awareness of the "other" began with the rise of the Jewish ghettos in
medieval Italy, Christians could not regard the Jews, possessors of genuine
revelation, as the equivalent of the heathens. Rather, it was the Christian
recognition that the Jews really did possess genuine revelation that intensi-
fied Christian bewilderment about Jewish rejection of the later revelation of
the God of Israel in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The same could not be
said of those nations "without the law." Did they "know" somehow what
God expected, at a minimal level, from them as individuals, and possibly as
nations? 17
German-speaking Christians disagreed in answering this question.
Zibly, and the Reformed in general, tended to minimize the survival of a
law of conscience. Indeed, among the Dutch Reformed of New Netherland,
Adriaen van der Donck believed that the Indians possessed "less knowledge
of good and evil than we have and are also less sinful." Van der Donck's
basis for this somewhat remarkable theological opinion lay in his observation
of Indian women in childbirth who, he thought, suffered less, and "since
labor pains are not natural, but are a punishment for sin imposed on the first
mother," the conclusion was an obvious one.18 How many Dutch and
German Reformed shared van der Donck's perspective, we do not know.
Certainly, even German Reformed preachers who rejected Calvin's doc-
trine of double predestination paid scant attention to the law written on the
heart. Philip Wilhelm Otterbein, credited as the founder of the United
Jingsten Tage das Grofl des Jfidischen Volks soil bekehrt werden and Gerson's Inhalt
Widerlegung des Jfidischen Thalmuds; the monitory use of Israel's history is Johannes Jacobu
Beckius, Grfindlicher Bericht, wer daran Ursach, daf? zur Zeit des Alten Testaments das Judenth
und zur Zeit des Neuen Testaments Deutschland, zum zehnfachen Sodom worden; Hoburg's
Deutsch-Evangelisches Judenthum surveyed the converted. I note I7 titles of the 700 touching on
some aspect of Hebrew or Jewish history or theology, mostly in German with two Dutch titles.
Whether these titles were purchased, and by whom, surviving evidence does not indicate. For
more details on German- and Dutch-language books, see Roeber, "German and Dutch Books
and Printing," in Hugh Amory and David Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America, vol. I:
The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, I999), 298-3I3. The entries under "con-
science" in the English Short Title Catalogue deal overwhelmingly with liberty of conscience in
religious matters, scandal, scruples, courts of conscience, but not on the dilemma under exami-
nation here. Lutheran lists of books either ordered from Halle or loaned by colleagues reveal lit-
tle systematic assessment of the Noachic tradition; in I776 Johann Christoph Kunze loaned
Mihlenberg the younger cleric's copy of a second edition of Johann David Michaelis,
Mosaisches Recht, 6 vols. (Frankfurt-am-Main, I775-I780), on which, however, Miihlenberg
makes no comment; see Journals, 2:76i.
17 See Robert Bonfil, "Aliens Within: The Jews and Antijudaism," in Thomas A. Brady,
Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds., Handbook of European History, I400-I600:
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vols. (Leiden, I994), i:263-302.
18 Adriaen Cornelissen van der Donck, "Description of New Netherland, i653," trans.
Diederik Goedhuys, in Dean R. Snow, Charles T. Gehring, and William A. Starna, eds., In
Mohawk Country: Early Narratives about a Native People (Syracuse, N. Y., i996), II4-I5.
Brethren movement, preached in 1760 a sermon at the Germantown

(Pennsylvania) Reformed Church that began flatly: "By nature we are in a
completely desperate condition. We are without God and children of wrath
...destitute of all godly light. . . . Man is so deeply mired in corruption
that he does not by nature even recognize it." Otterbein admitted that fear
of death could drive some toward the fear of God, but in a "slavelike" man-
ner. In this sense, "each person still has a fear of God unless his conscience
has been stilled by extinction." For Otterbein, the Jews had exhibited this
kind of slavish obedience in their legalistic "observances" but lived "in a con-
stant, slavelike fear of death." Among pagans, Otterbein found even less evi-
dence of conscience. 19
Lutheran and Moravian theologians, far more than their Reformed
counterparts, drew on patristic traditions that hinted at the survival of con-
science. Luther explicitly affirmed the existence of natural law, observing
that law books would be unnecessary if it were obeyed. For, he argued,
humankind "carry along with them in the depth of their hearts a living book
which could give them quite adequate instruction about what they ought to do
and not to do. . . . All nations share this common ordinary knowledge. . . . I
feel in my heart that I certainly ought to do these things for God, not because
of what traditional written laws say, but because I brought these laws with
me when I came into the world."20
German-speaking Moravians might well have agreed with Luther here,
and they drew the most optimistic conclusions about the survival of a law of
conscience among the heathen. While Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf's
indebtedness to natural law thinking remained somewhat inchoate, his
instructions to Moravians about to engage the unconverted in Russia reveal
19 Otterbein, "The Salvation-bringing Incarnation and the Glorious Victory of Jesus

Christ over the Devil and Death . . . ," in J. Steven O'Malley, ed., Early German-American
Evangelicalism: Pietist Sources on Discipleship and Sanctification (Lanham, Md., I995), I9-4I, q
tations on i9, 22, 23, 24.
20 Luther's quotations here are taken from a variety of his lectures, cited in Paul Althaus,
The Ethics of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia, I972; orig. pub. i965),
25-35, quotations on 26-27, n. I2; see also Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person: Conscience in
Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther (Leiden, I977), I54-56, 223-38, for Luther's concept of
natural conscience or synteresis. I have commented elsewhere on Luther's negative feelings about
canon law and lawyers; see Roeber, "'He read it to me from a book of English law': Germans,
Bench, and Bar in the Colonial South, I7I5-I770," in David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely,
eds., Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the South (Jackson, Miss., I984), 202-28. Scholars dis-
agree vigorously about whether Luther's insistence in his essay "The Bondage of the Will" that
God is a "hidden God" precluded or at least made inconsistent his apparent natural law beliefs.
Some conclude that he denied utterly the concept of synteresis. For this perspective, see Alister
E. McGrath, Justitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine ofJustification, 2 vols. (Cambridge,
i986), 2:I7-20. For the most recent summary of counter-arguments, see Antti Raunio, "Natural
Law and Faith: The Forgotten Foundations of Ethics in Luther's Theology," in Carl E. Braaten
and Robert W. Jenson, eds., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand
Rapids, Mich., i998), 96-i24, and William H. Lazareth, "Response to Antti Raunio, 'Natural
Law and Faith,"' ibid., I25-28. That Luther interpreted the Genesis passages as a reference to
the "law of nations," with perhaps some norms for universal individual conscience, one can see
in his Lectures on Genesis, in Pelikan, ed., Luther's Works, vol. 2: Lectures on Genesis, Chapters
6-14 (St. Louis, i960), I3I-42.
his confidence in a universal sense of conscience. The same instructions

informed Moravian missionaries among Native Americans or Africans. On
the one hand, deeply influenced by the Lutheran pietism he had imbibed at
Halle, Zinzendorf insisted on the importance of the preached word
announcing a gospel of forgiveness. But he also warned that Christians made
two major mistakes in dealing with pagans: they said too much about the
doctrine of God and too little about forgiveness, or they tried to explain too
soon and through "rational" discussion trinitarian theology before making
clear the love God had for all humans. In addition, "truth" was no abstrac-
tion but what every person could "feel" as the result of experienced, existen-
tial confrontation with everyday life. The specifics of Christian belief-the
Trinity, the doctrine of salvation via the cross-had to wait while one
watched the workings of the "heart" and "feelings" to confirm what the hea-
then already knew-that there was a God.21
Zinzendorf's followers extended these convictions to their work among
enslaved Africans in the Americas. But Moravian beliefs in the existence of a
law written on the heart suggested logically to their critics that such convic-
tions would lead to an attack on the enslavement of fellow Christians. After
initial successes in the Caribbean, Zinzendorf felt compelled to reassure anx-
ious Danish settlers that no implicit attack on the law of slavery flowed from
Moravian convictions about the law of conscience.22 Zinzendorf and his col-
leagues passed over in silence the embarrassing disjunction between natural
reason and conscience that brought the enslaved to God and the persistence
of social and political conditions that seemed to conspire against the preach-
ing of the Gospel. Testimony documenting the conversion of Africans to the
Moravian faith confirmed the prior existence of a kind of faith that had
emerged from their natural condition, though perfected, after hearing the
Gospel. Thus, the "Memoir of Abraham," an African who died in 1797,
noted that after his birth among the Mandingo in Guinea, this man
"through diligent praying . . . established a religious way of thinking hims
though this was mixed with heathen superstition." On being recaptured after
an initial attempt to escape from slavery in North Carolina, conscience man-
ifested itself in Abraham "of his own free will . . . admitt~ing] that he ought
to be punished" before he experienced conversion.23 Yet affirmation of con-
science prior to conversion did not lead Moravians to develop a full-blown
21 See the discussion in Hermann Wellenreuther and Carola Wessel, eds., Herrnhuter
Indianermission in der Amerikanischen Revolution: Die Tageblicher von David Zeisberger, I772 bis
i78i (Berlin, I995), 56-58. The examination of the texts on natural law used at Halle and which
informed not only Zinzendorf, but Lutheran clerics in North America, cannot be undertaken
here. I treat this issue in the work from which the present essay is taken. For a useful survey of
various problems in natural law theory, see Pauline C. Westerman, The Disintegration of Natural
Law Theory: Aquinas to Finnis (Leiden, i998), esp. 77-227, for early modern developments; the
Spanish-Roman Catholic struggles have been most recently interpreted in Anthony Pagden, The
Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge,
i982), esp. ii9-200.
22 Jon F. Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North
Carolina, I763-I840 (Chapel Hill, I998), 33-55.
23 "Memoir of Abraham," trans. Erika Huber, ibid., 309-I0.
critique of political and social regimes engaged in unconscionable abuse of

Christianized Africans.
Indeed, despite early optimism about African conscience, Moravians still
harbored considerable doubts about the existence of conscience in non-
Christians. David Zeisberger's preaching to German Moravians in Pennsylvania
in October 1772 exhibited a rather odd interpretation of a passage in Paul's
Epistle to the Romans (11:25-27) that refers to a partial hardening of Israel's
hearts until the gentiles are converted. Passing over the relationship between
Jews and gentiles one might have expected here, Zeisberger instead empha-
sized the blindness "in which humans live by nature, so much so that they are
not in the position even to think what is good," a conclusion that dismissed
natural and Noachic law wholesale.24 Zeisberger concluded that Europeans
displayed a shocking lack of conscience when he observed that many whites
could read scripture, knew what God's will was, and were therefore all the
more guilty for not fulfilling it-a failure they manifested in their mistreat-
ment of Indians. The Indians who did not know God could, in this line of
reasoning, plead ignorance as their excuse. Further, Zeisberger, in holding up
the converted Indian settlements, contrasted the drunkenness, murder, theft,
lies, and deceit among the unconverted with the Moravian Indian towns,
remarking that one especially felt the reign of Satan while living among the
unconverted Indians, among whom the persistence of pagan beliefs and prac-
tices seemed very slow to vanish.25
If direct contact by German-speaking Moravians with both African
Americans and Native Americans produced ambivalent conclusions about
whether a law of conscience existed among them, this was even more the
case among German Lutherans. Moreover, Lutheran assessments of their
Jewish-European counterparts also seldom reflected Zibly's positive assess-
ment of the Jewish "nation." In part, this stemmed from the questionable
interpretation of Luther by those who subscribed to the Lutheran
Confessions. The "Two Kingdoms" doctrine developed by Luther admitted
some persistence of universal conscience, affirmed that political and legal
reasoning existed for ordering society and government, and largely left unde-
veloped a corresponding sense of personal responsibility for public life. The
realm of politics was left to the princes, of whom Luther had little good to
say. This disjunction between the clear obligations of individual conscience
(understood to be the province of the Gospel) and social and political life
(the law) bequeathed a legacy of quietism that also had disastrous conse-
quences for the affirmation of an integrated natural law tradition among
later Lutherans. Where Reformed theologians agreed with their Roman
counterparts about the role of the law as an expression of God's love and his
24 Wellenreuther and Wessel, eds., Herrnhuter Indianermission, io6 (entry for Oct. 6).
25 Entries for Sept. 20, I773, June 23, July 3, I774, Oct. 23, I780, ibid., I70-72, 209, 2I5,
537. The image of darkness associated with satanic and, by implication, Native American condi-
tion is explored in James H. Merrell, "Shamokin, 'the very seat of the Prince of darkness':
Unsettling the Early American Frontier," in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds.,
Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, I750-I830 (Chapel
Hill, i998), i6-59.
will for organizing society, Luther refused to make such a connection, seeing
here a confusion of law with the freedom of the Gospel. No critique of
Christian failure to deal "righteously" with Jews or pagans could easily flow
from this disjuncture.26
Miihlenberg first encountered enslaved Africans in 1742. His journal
accounts reveal his doubt about the degree to which a law of conscience
existed among them. Although Mihlenberg never reduced his thoughts to a
systematic conclusion, one can discern a hierarchy in his assessment of how
the law of conscience worked among "others." Africans occupied the bottom
rung of this ladder of nations, with North American Indians exhibiting a
clearer understanding of both the existence of God and the obligation to
treat others as one would wish to be treated. Jews stood near the top, being
the most like Christians, yet also-like "so-called Christians"-had the least
excuse for misbehavior because they enjoyed the knowledge of Torah.
Mihlenberg thought enslaved Africans retained a special degree of "sav-
age spite and cunning trickiness, like the gypsies in Europe" because they
understandably "cherish[ed] a secret rancor for having been snatched from
their homeland and sold into everlasting slavery in a strange land." But the
chances of bringing them to the knowledge of the true God were slim, much
"like writing Hebrew text with points and accents on coarse blotting paper."
Miihlenberg rejected Moravian methods of conversion, which appealed to
the emotions, firmly believing that all humans were possessed of a "rational
soul" and had to come to, or perhaps already were possessed of, a modicum
of knowledge, not "blind, sensual feeling . . . [but] every man ought to have
at least some knowledge of the commonest attributes of his soul and parts of
his body." Although Miihlenberg baptized and married a number of Africans
during his ministry and never denied at least a portion of "natural" knowl-
edge of good and evil among Africans, his skepticism remained largely
unchanged. Recounting the conversion of a slave hanged for murdering a
black child, he referred to the guilty party as ignorant, "totally blind," and
"had never even heard of the existence of a God." Initial contact with slaves
in 1742 had convinced Miihlenberg, after questioning several, that "they
knew nothing of the true God," yet his condemnation of the "so-called
Christians [who] lead a more evil life than the heathen" was even more
severe. 27
26 The literature on the "Two Kingdoms" problem is vast and complex; for a brief sum-
mary, see Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property, 72-75, I77-78, 294, 30I-02.
27 MUhlenberg, Journals, 2:638, 675, 683-84, 7, I2, s:58. Miihlenberg's apprehension of a
hierarchy of races and degrees of awareness of a law of conscience seems approximately that
detailed for i8th-century Europeans influenced by environmentalism; see Bernard W. Sheehan,
Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, I973), I-44.
That clergy did not necessarily construct a demonized view of Africans while still probably sub-
scribing to the environmentalist hierarchy of peoples is argued forcibly in Daniel A. Cohen,
"Social Injustice, Sexual Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Constructions of Interracial Rape
in Early American Crime Literature, I767-I817," WMQ, 3d Ser., 56 (I999), 48I-526. Despite hi
apparent rejection of an appeal to sentiment, MUhlenberg, like pietists in general, recognized a
role for emotion in religious teaching. The intricacies of these distinctions take us too far afield
from the purposes of this article.
Neither Miihlenberg nor many of his congregants regarded the indige-

nous peoples of North America as falling directly within the scope of
Lutheran missionary work. Yet, in scattered remarks, Mihlenberg noted
interactions between Indians and Europeans, from New York to Georgia,
with a distinctly different and higher assessment of a law written on Indian
hearts from what he had failed to discern among Africans. His views on
Native Americans remained cautious and at times laced with negative allu-
sions to European paradigms of borderland heathens. Remarking on the
capacity of conscience in the revolutionary republic to honor donors' chari-
table gifts, Mihlenberg believed a "civilized, not to say Christian, nation"
would do so, lest it be thought a people comprised of "Indians, Negroes, or
Cossacks. "28
From conversations with his father-in-law, Conrad Weiser, and the
South Carolina German-speaker Michael Kalteisen, who informed him
about life among the Cherokees, Miihlenberg concluded that the indigenous
peoples of North America really did possess a profound sense of conscience.
At the same time, he was horrified at the cruel tortures Indians imposed on
their captives and expressed his disgust with Indian theft from Europeans
even after the signing of treaties. This seeming lack of rectitude fit awk-
wardly with the admirable qualities of natives he listed for his Halle superi-
ors. Kalteisen informed the Pennsylvania pastor that the Cherokees, before
European contact, had "lived and acted simply in accord with the code of
nature; they were sober, chaste, truth-loving, just, industrious, loyal toward
one another. . . . They believe in a good god who grants and gives to them
everything that is good." The Cherokees maintained a house of refuge in
their villages for "their aged, sick, and helpless people," were "very hos-
pitable to those who are allied with them," and possessed a deep sense of rec-
titude. If anyone lied or broke a promise, "they refuse ever again to repose
confidence in him."29
Weiser's boyhood experiences among the Indians of New York and his
later service to Pennsylvania as translator and arbitrator provided
Mihlenberg with additional information and ground for reflection. Like his
son-in-law, Weiser genuinely admired certain aspects of Indian life. But just
as clearly, he perceived degrees in the law of conscience possessed by non-
Europeans.30 In relating Weiser's own conclusions, Mihlenberg noted for
his Halle superiors that Weiser deemed the Indians "very wise and shrewd in
natural things and, though they do not possess the art of writing, they have
the faculty of knowing and remembering many events of the distant past
because they have been diligently handed down and preserved by oral tradi-
tions." Miihlenberg believed linguistic barriers accounted for difficulties in
conveying some of the truths of Christianity and concluded that "at best one
28 MUhlenberg, Journals, 2:714 (I775).

29 Ibid., 2:573 (I774). For more on Kalteisen, see Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property,
220-23, 23I-33, 237-38.
30 On Weiser's mixed attitudes, see Merrell, Into the American

Pennsylvania Frontier (New York, i999), 203, 222-23, 29I-92.
is able to express with their phrases a natural theology and the historical
truths of the Word of God."31
After a decade in North America, Mihlenberg recounted a Swedish pas-
tor's summary of work among the Indians. The account testified to natural
law and the value of natural theology, he thought. But a wrong-headed
account of the Swedish endeavor was "so distorted by deists" that divine rev-
elation had been dismissed in favor of mere natural religion. Mdhlenberg
concluded for those who had asked his opinion of the account that "experi-
ence gives certainty, but if one sticks to theory alone, one is quickly felled."
Ask any woman who has suffered the pangs of childbirth whether this does
not comport with the words of Genesis, he suggested. Miihlenberg even
referred deist scoffers at natural theology to Noachic law without explicitly
acknowledging Romans 2:I4: "let them pay heed to their hearts and disposi-
tions. Accusing and excusing thoughts are present in man's conscience."32
The horrors visited on German-speakers in the western settlements of
Pennsylvania during the Seven Years' War gradually hardened Mihlenberg's
own heart about Indians' conscience. He openly sympathized with the set-
tlers, though condemning the Paxton rioters and the murderers of Indians in
Lancaster. In recounting the captivity of the Leininger family, originally
from the imperial city of Reutlingen, Mihlenberg struggled to understand
why some whites chose after years of captivity to remain with the Indians.
No account of natural law could explain this for him, and he compared such
misguided folk to the "children of Israel who so easily deserted the true God,
mixed with the heathen, and adopted their customs." The law of conscience
should have told them better, but it appeared that "fallen human nature"
attached itself to the "humane masters" in the wilderness. Moreover, "experi-
ence also testifies that, whether people be high or low, educated or ignorant,
they would rather live for themselves and their sinful passions than for Him
who died and rose again for them." Alone among the captives, the eighteen-
year-old Regina could be identified because she still could recall from mem-
ory and sing a hymn. On opening a German Bible, she read how Tobit, in
the time of Shalmaneser, king of the Assyrians, "though he was a captive
among strangers, yet did he not fall away from God's Word." For
Miihlenberg, it was not the presence of an abstract universal natural law
the impact of Christian educational institutions, Regina's youthful memory
exercises, and the centrality of a revealed word that explained her rescue.33
31 MUhlenberg, Journals, i:i67.

32 Ibid., I:323 (I752). The possible universal identity of women experiencing menstruation
and childbirth as a "natural" bridge across cultures is explored in Jane Merritt, "Creating
Common Communities: Mahican, Delaware, and German Women in i8th-century
Pennsylvania," paper presented at OIEAHC Annual Conference, June 2-4, I995; see also
Merritt, "Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the
Pennsylvania Frontier," in Cayton and Teute, eds., Contact Points, 60-87.
33 Tobit i:2. On the reaction to the Lancaster murders and the Paxton Riots, see
MUhlenberg, Journals, I:728, 2:18-24; for his account of the captivity of the Leiningers, ibid.,
2:202-04, quotations on 204, 205. The captivity narrative can be found in entry 219, Karl John
By the 1770s, Mhhlenberg relented somewhat, as he revealed in an

exchange with one of the leaders of the Six Nations. Their conversation at
the home of Samuel Weiser turned to issues of natural theology and con-
science. While rejecting the Indian's notion of minor gods, Mihlenberg
admitted that one should not be surprised to "hear such tomfoolery from a
heathen, for even in Christendom one seldom finds a poem, composed in
the advanced taste, which is not padded with similar heathen stuff-muses,
nymphs, dryads, lyres, and wood-pipes." They agreed about the "confusion
and corruption in human nature," and Mihlenberg pleased his counterpart
by concluding that "clothes do not make a man virtuous, even less that they
make man acceptable in the sight of God; only an upright heart does this."
But Mihlenberg confessed his own inadequacy to find words in the
American's own tongue to explain that "without redemption the uprightness
is inadequate."34
Younger Lutheran pastors, such as J.H.C. Helmuth, Miihlenberg's own
sons, and Johann Christoph Kunze, developed little that was new in their
assessment of the law of conscience among indigenous Americans. Among
the younger generation, only Kunze finally suggested that missionary work
among the Indians would be preferable to attempting to convert the hard-
ened hearts of transplanted Germans and indifferent English-speakers. But
no such missionary effort emerged among Lutheran or Reformed German-
speakers in the eighteenth century.35 In part, energies needed for such an
enterprise would be invested instead in the battle against a more secular
vision of natural religion that threatened confessional Christianity's insis-
tence on natural theology rooted in revealed scripture. Pastor Helmuth
played on old anglophone fears in this contest. British authorities had feared
during the Seven Years' War that German settlers might defect to the French
in the contested western areas of European settlement. Helmuth again
demanded support for a charity school scheme from the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania. If German-speakers were not instructed in their own language,
he warned, the influence of the frontier would manifest itself, and instead of
becoming civilized members of the new republic, they would instead "easily
turn Heathens or Indians."36
Richard Arndt et al., eds., The First Century of German Language Printing in the United States of
America, 2 vols. (Gbttingen, I989), I:II5. For the incident and related attacks at Penn's Creek
and colonists' turning on all Indians in a sharp decline in willingness to contemplate a "com-
mon nature," see Merrell, Into the American Woods, 225-36, 276-30I.
34 Mihlenberg, Journals, 2:437-38 (I770).
35 On Kunze, see Roeber, Palatines, Liberty, and Property, 330, 4I7; on Helmuth's observa-
tions regarding the Jews, see below. Kunze estimated that a German-Lutheran missionary effort
could be mounted among the indigenous peoples in New York for around ?400, which would
cover the support for a missionary, a candidate assistant to learn the indigenous language, a stu-
dent prepared for preaching in New York, and a variety of costs associated with letter writing,
printing, and securing further support. See his "Plan zu einer Indianermission" accompanying
the Oct. 27, 1789, letter to Halle in Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 4D2 Philadephische
Briefwechsel, 1781-1790, pp. 71-76, quotation on 75.
36 On Helmuth's efforts, and this argument, see Roeber, "The von Mosheim Society and
The eclipse of natural law thinking among younger Lutherans proceeded

hand in hand with fears that "natural theology," if misunderstood, would
align Christians with their Enlightenment enemies' roseate views of "natural
religion" whose adherents needed no harangues about the law to afflict their
already enlightened consciences. The defense of conscience that required
revelation to function properly was not abandoned lightly, however. At a
funeral sermon preached in 1789, Helmuth still proclaimed that "man is the
noblest work of God" and that all humans seek happiness, which lay in the
knowledge of God that could come by "attentive Contemplation of his
works," completed only through study of scripture.37 This approach-
admitting that the law written in the heart also allowed access to at least
some knowledge of God through observation of a created order-had long
been defended by at least some Lutheran theologians. In examining a
prospective candidate for ordination, Mihlenberg put this question to Peter
Mischler in 1769: "How can you prove that there is a God? Answer: From
the Bible. But if hostile persons will not grant the validity of the Bible, how
can you prove it? Answer: From creation."38 By the 1780s, this proved to be
an increasingly dangerous approach. By the 1790s, Helmuth took direct aim
at the "enlightened" attitudes of Americans, but especially at the "so-called
Christians" whose appalling behavior "make[s] the church of Jesus smell so
bad to the Turks, heathens, and Jews."39 In the process, outreach to the
American Indians, never a high priority among the German-speaking
Lutherans, declined into nonexistence.
As the largest group of German-speaking gentiles in North America,
German Lutherans also drew upon the longest history of exchanges with
their Jewish counterparts. Halle-trained clergy brought to America a deep
familiarity with efforts to convert both Jews and Muslims. Founded with the
support of a pietist benefactor, Halle's Callenberg Institute had invested
major publishing efforts in the form of dialogues and conversion experiences
in hopes of converting especially European Jews to the Lutheran faith.
Lutheran reflections on conscience forced reflection on the knowledge of
Torah, which nevertheless did not lead Jews to accept Christianity.40
the Preservation of German Education and Culture in the New Republic, 1789-1813," in Henry
Geitz, JUrgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst, eds., German Influences on Education in the United
States to i9i7 (New York, 1995), 157-76, quotation on i62.
37 Helmuth, "Sermon preached at Kingsess at the Funeral of Adam Geyer Nov. i5th 1789,"
unpublished ms., Lutheran Archives Center, Philadelphia, PH 48 G 5.
38 Miihlenberg, Journals, 2:408; see also ibid., 55, where in 1764 Mihlenberg already wor-
ries that the "so-called deists, or the swept and garnished scorners of the Scriptures . . . are so
blind that they do not understand theologia naturalis, much less the simple ABC of a higher rev-
elation."
39 Helmuth, Betrachtung der evangelischen Lehre. .. (Germantown, 1793), 325; for the con-
text of his remarks, see Roeber, "von Mosheim Society and the Preservation of German
Education," i65-76, and "J.H.C. Helmuth, Evangelical Charity, and the Public Sphere in
Pennsylvania, 1793-1800, PMHB, 121 (I997), 77-100.
40 On the importance of Halle's Callenberg Institute, see Christoph Bochinger, "J. H.
Callenbergs Judaicum et Muhammedicum und seine Austrahlung nach Osteuropa," in Johannes
Transplanted German villagers brought with them memories of having lived

together with Jewish neighbors in the territories of the German southwest.
The legal protection of Jewish communities by local princes had actually
intensified the collective identity of all Jews in a distinct territory and regu-
larized exchanges between the Jews and Christians in the villages. German
pietist memories of their Jewish neighbors, therefore, largely operated within
carefully constructed boundaries that rarely allowed for direct exchanges
except in matters of trade. In effect, German-speaking Jews and Christians
lived in parallel villages, almost exactly as German- and English-speakers, for
example, led parallel lives in towns such as Lancaster in eighteenth-century
Pennsylvania.41
Those same boundaries had kept alive a kind of folk-wisdom of preju-
dice and rarely questioned suspicion of Jews as clever and, at worst, unscrupu-
lously rapacious traders, moneylenders lacking in conscience in their
dealings with Christians. Even among more radical separatist pietists, who
tended to view aggressive missionary work among the Jews with distaste, lit-
erary evidence suggests a firm persistence of well-established prejudices that,
in degrees we can only dimly document, made their way across the Atlantic.
In the larger cities such as Augsburg, older imperial privileges that kept the
Jews from becoming permanent residents of the city were very much in place
at the time of the German migrations to North America.42
The struggle to understand what God had in mind for the Jews could
only be advanced for German clerics by reliance on European texts. The
Latin and German translations of John Lightfoot's Horde Hebraicae et
Talmudicae illustrated their cautious assessment of the Jews. This seven-
teenth-century commentary that drew on the Talmud had received German
Wallmann and Udo Strater, eds., Halle und Osteuropa: zur europiischen Ausstrahlung des
hallischen Pietismus (Tubingen, 1998), 331-48. Bochinger's unpublished Habilitationsschrif
the Institute ("Abenteur Islam. zur Wahrnehmung fremder Religion im Hallenser Pietismus des
i8. Jahrhunderts," Universitat Miinchen, I996) is not presently accessible to readers but should
be published shortly.
41 On the "parallel villages," see Sabine Ullmann, "Der Streit um die Weide: Ein
Ressourcenkonflikt zwischen Christen und Juden in den Dorfgemeinden der Markgrafschaft
Burgau," in Mark Haberlein, ed., Devianz, Widerstand und Herrschaftspraxis in der Vormoderne:
Studien zu Konflikten im suidwestdeutschen Raum (i5.-i8. Jahrhundert) (Constance, 1999), 99-136,
who argues that episodic violence or vandalism of Jewish cemeteries at the village level largely
seems to have been carried out by "outsiders" and only rarely between members of these "paral-
lel" villages. See also Ullmann, Nachbarschaft und Konkurrenz: Juden und Christen in Dorfern der
Markgrafschaft Burgau I650 bis I750 (Gottingen, 1999)' 458-72.
42 See J. Friedrich Battenberg, "Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen judischer Existenz in der
Friihneuzeit zwischen Reich und Territorium," in Rolf Kiefgling and Ullmann, eds.,
Judengemeinden in Schwaben im Kontext des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1995), 53-79, and Wolfram
Baer, "Zwischen Vertreibung und Wiederansiedlung: Die Reichsstadt Augsburg und die Juden
vom 15. bis zum i8. Jahrhundert," ibid., 110-27. On the radical pietist literature, see Hans-
Jirgen Schrader, "Sulamiths verheifgene Wiederkehr: Hinweise zu Programm und Praxis der
pietistichen Begegnung mit dem Judentum," in Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler, eds.,
Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprachige Literatur vom i8. Jahrhundert bis
zum Ersten Weltkrieg ... (Tiibingen, 1988), 71-107.
translations at Leipzig in i675 and again at Dresden and Leipzig in 1742.

Helmuth, one of the German-speaking clergy in Pennsylvania, owned a copy
and used the text in his own exegetical work. Lightfoot's explication of the
text in Romans that Zeisberger had preached on in Pennsylvania (Rom. II)
revealed his belief that it was "very agreeable to reason and Scripture" to
conclude that the "Jewish nation, as to the more general and greater part of
it," had already been "blinded before such time as our Saviour manifested
himself in the flesh." By comparison, the gentiles, though confused and
vain, were the more likely to "earnestly expect and wait for . . . a kind of
manifestation of the sons of God within and among themselves."43
Mihlenberg shared Lightfoot's pessimistic assessment of the potential
for Jewish conversion. Despite Miihlenberg's youthful encounter with two
pietist missionaries from Halle who were working among the Jews of Europe,
the young Gdttingen student showed little ongoing interest in this field of
missionary work, expressing instead a preference for overseas labors among the
pagan peoples of India.44 In this relative skepticism about the potential for
Jewish conversions, the German-speakers of North America differed signifi-
cantly from, for instance, English-speaking dissenters. Increase Mather had
sharply criticized Lightfoot for his failure to appreciate the record of European
Jewish conversions and the probability of an imminent Second Coming.
Although Miihlenberg dutifully recorded the false reports from Europe that
Moses Mendelssohn had become a Lutheran in 1782, he rarely indulged in
chiliastic hopes for Jewish conversion and the end of history.45
The puzzle over God's plans for the Jews could not remain an abstract
theological or speculative issue in the North American context, however. In
trying to plant a church in a pluralist and volatile society largely devoid of
continental European institutions, Mihlenberg recounted an exchange with
young children in 1747. The incident revealed just how real, in everyday life,
such questions could become and why transplanted German village memo-
ries and texts were engulfed by even more perplexing exchanges with non-
Christians in North America. In explaining the necessity of belief and
43 I use here the English translation published as Lightfoot, A Commentary on the New
Testament from the Talmud and Hebraica, Matthew-i Corinthians, intro. R. Laird Harris, vol. 4:
Acts-I Corinthians (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1997), 157, 159. On Helmuth's use of Lightfoot in his
Betrachtungen der evangelischen Lehre . . . (Germantown, 1793), see Roeber, "J.H.C. Helmuth:
An Interpreter of Lutheranism in the Early Republic," in James W. Albers and David J.
Wartluft, eds., Interpreting Lutheran History: Lutheran Historical Conference Essays and Reports, 1
(i996), I-i9.
44 See MUhlenberg's description of his student days, conversion, and encounter with the
two Halle missionaries in 1737 in journals, I:4-5.
45 Mather, "A Dissertation Concerning the Future Conversion of the Jewish Nation;
Answering the Objections of the Reverend and Learned Mr. Baxter, Dr. Lightfoot, and Others . . ."
(London, 1709); the London imprint suggests the heated debates that necessitated this, the sec-
ond edition of the work which appeared first in Boston in i695. On the Mathers' chiliasm and
Jewish conversion, see Robert Middlekauff, The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan
Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (London, 1971), 179-83. For Miihlenberg's entry on Mendelssohn, see
Journals, 3:500.
baptism (Mark i6:i6) as the prerequisites for salvation, Miihlenberg asked

his young charges if "the Jews and heathen be partakers of the salvation
promised in this passage, as long as they continue in unbelief and are not
baptized?" The children dutifully responded, as they had been catechized,
"No." An older Lutheran woman, however, listening to the exchange told
the pastor later that "her heart wept" because, she said, the Jews "are after all
the kinsmen of our Lord and the heathen have been given unto Him for an
inheritance." Mihlenberg hastened to assure her that her reading of scripture
was right; that the Jews were indeed the Lord's kin, but salvation, while it
had come from the Jews, was now open to all. Not satisfied with this assur-
ance, she pointed out that all over the world thousands existed who "have
been living in darkness for centuries and yet are unable of themselves to
come to the light without God."46
Mihlenberg agreed that although Jews had enjoyed the chance to accept
the Gospel and rejected it, one was not allowed to conclude that "these
thousands and thousands of poor souls be lost because their fathers sinned."
Our own understanding is "small, meager, imperfect, and fallible," and
righteousness with God is balanced by mercy. Mercy is greater than the
demand for judgment. It is true that the "Jews and Gentiles . . . are still
resisting Him," but God is untiring and "will do unto us men neither too
much nor too little but what is exactly right." His parishioner, he concluded,
should continue to pray for the Jews and the heathen: "I do it, too, for it is
our duty and universal love demands it." Prayer, however, did not necessarily
bring in its train confidence in imminent conversions.47
This exchange reflected German pietists' struggle in a multiethnic and
racial setting to account for why the Jews were still not converted. Faced
with a genuine variety of peoples and circumstances in a non-European con-
text, they had to ask more specifically than had Europeans just what con-
science demanded of them and what behavior conscience's existence in
non-Christian neighbors should also produce. Moreover, the question of
conscience brought inevitably in its train the even more uncomfortable one
that a Native American put to the governor of Georgia when asked why
Indians still stole from those with whom they had signed a treaty: "You
Englishmen have a great fortress (i.e. prison) in your towns. You lock your
thieves in chains. You set up two trees and put a crossbeam between them.
You have ropes and you hang your thieves, and still, with all this fuss, you
cannot stop your people from robbing and stealing. How much less can we,
who do not have such means and instruments!"48
The Native American here probed the open wound created by pietist
fascination with the connection between belief and behavior and the resul-
tant deliberations on conscience and the law written on the heart: why
reflect on the status of the law among Jews or pagans when European
46 MUhlenberg, Journals, 1:125-26.

47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 2:680, recounts the exchange during his 1775 visit to Georgia.
Christians behaved so badly? Not only Miihlenberg's letters and journals,

but also those of Boltzius in Georgia and all surviving documents of pietist
writers are laced with disparaging remarks about "so-called Christians"
whose behavior belied the probability of a saving faith and certainly gave no
evidence of an active conscience pointing to a "law written on the heart."
The pietist demand for a close correspondence between faith and action
naturally drove them to intense examination of outward evidence of inward
conviction, with predictably bitter reflection on their fellow Europeans. Yet,
this very concern for close correlation between conscience and behavior,
when they encountered North American Jews, resulted in a very cautious
assessment of conversions. Pastor Friedrich Handschuh, two years after his
arrival in Philadelphia, encountered a woman who had spent nine years at
the Ephrata commune with her now-deceased husband. Both were former
Jews, and she begged for baptism for her two children. Examining her, he
admonished her to return a week later when he would test her again before
committing himself to baptize the children. Handschuh's fear of Jewish
scoffing at Christian rites revealed itself at another baptism in an English-
speaker's house. Five Jewish women attended and comported themselves so
piously that he would not, he reported, have believed them to have been
Jews had he not been so informed later.49
When Jacob Daniels begged Mihlenberg and Charles von Wrangel, the
Swedish pastor, for baptism, the German pastor was openly skeptical. In
part, his surprise stemmed from the fact that Daniels had come to
Philadelphia from the Danish Lutheran colonial settlement in the
Caribbean. If the Danes had hesitated to baptize Daniels, Mihlenberg may
well have wondered why he and his Swedish friend were now being
approached. For, Miihlenberg wrote, "many instances of imposture in cases
of this kind" had been the cause of scandal. The fear that a false conversion
would lead to Laster (roughly, scoffing, especially at the sacraments and the
claims that Jesus was the Messiah) surfaced repeatedly in pietist correspon-
dence, fearfully applied to Jewish neighbors and potential converts.50
Daniels's conversion in 1765 had followed by one year the Swedish provost
von Wrangel's exegesis on why the "Jewish Church" had hardened their
hearts and continued to do so.51
As early as 1747 Mihlenberg had effectively dismissed Jewish North
Americans in his writings to Halle, opining that "there are only a few Jews in
this country and these few may fairly be counted amongst the practical athe-
49 Nachrichten von den vereinigten Deutschen Evangelisch-Lutherischen Gemeinen in Nord-

america.... (1787), 2 vols., ed. W. J. Mann, B. M. Schmucker, and W. Germann (Allentown,
Pa., i886; Philadelphia, 1895), i:6o, 542.
50 MUhlenberg did baptize Daniels; Journals, 2:266-67. For Jacob Daniels see Kurt Aland
et al., eds., Die Korrespondenz Heinrich Melchior Miihlenbergs: Aus der Anfangszeit des deutschen
Luthertums in Nordamerika, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1990), 321-23; compare Mihlenberg, Journals,
2:25i-67.
51 See Miihlenberg, Journals, 2:I-2 (Jan. 1764). By "Jewish Ch

Jewish Christians, but the "Old Testament" Church of ancient Israe
ists," in whose company Mihlenberg also numbered many "so-called

Christians." An unnamed Philadelphia Jewish merchant associate of
Heinrich Schleydorn had rejected the latter's offer of writings on Jesus as
Messiah with the biting observation: "No. The foremost gentlemen in the
city with whom I associate, men who are called Christians, say themselves
that their Messiah was an imposter. Give the books to them; I have no time."
Mihlenberg seems to have been particularly upset that the so-called
Christians not only gave bad examples to Jewish neighbors, but even seduced
them into "atheism," as he explained in a later entry. French Huguenots,
persecuted in Europe, once arrived in America, had also grown "indifferent."
This was no exception, but common, and "Christians" had "become as badly
entangled in the subtleties of the world as the most cunning Jew." The iden-
tification of specious Christians with possibly insincere Jews seemed to
haunt Miihlenberg's struggle to explain what happened to the law written,
apparently not too indelibly, in their hearts.52
German pietist concern about mere outward religion surfaced in Israel
Israel's request for a copy of his 1746 baptismal record. Mihlenberg com-
plied, but not before rehearsing Israel's background, his "Father being a Jew
outwardly."53 Mihlenberg could never bring himself to believe as clearly as
Lightfoot intimated in his commentary that God had abandoned his Jewish
children to universal hardness of heart. But he reacted with heightened
alarm at the growth of a quasi-universalist response to the question of salva-
tion he discerned among a younger generation of Lutheran pastors. North
American conditions now threatened to derange sound theological assess-
ment of how the law and the Gospel functioned. Both in the ancient world
and in Europe, Christian theologians had speculated about God's infinite
love and his capacity to save even those people who died without knowing
the Gospel, or those who had rejected it. Yet such questions remained purely
speculative, and neither Orthodox, nor Roman, nor Protestant churches
endorsed universal salvation as tenable doctrine.
In Mihlenberg's opinion, William Kurtz, one of the younger Lutheran
clergy laboring in North America, began to reflect too much exposure to
American pluralism. The leading pastor of the Ministerium was aghast to
hear that Kurtz, at a meeting of Lutheran clergy, had opined that "the Jews
have their Torah and Talmud, the Mohammedans have their Koran, and if
we did not have our Bibles, we should have nothing at all; we should be
worse off than they."54 Kurtz's response to Mihlenberg's agitated inquiry
52 Ibid., 1:139, 144 (i747).

53 Ibid., 3:587 (1784); see also 584 identifying Michael Israel and the baptism in New
Hannover; Israel Israel was by this date living in New Castle.
54 Ibid., 3:584, 586-87, 669 (quotation)-70. The speculative theological concept of apocata-
stasis, or restoration of all sinners to God, was identified with the heretical positions of Origen
and never accepted in ancient Christianity; it survived, however, in Cappadocian theology and
was still the topic of speculation, as Kurtz's ruminations confirm. For the ancient context, see
Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the
Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven, 1993), 8i, io6, i6i, 324-26. The revival of
revealed that the younger man had indeed speculated about the behavior of
the Apostles and the continuing influence of St. Paul's pharisaical back-
ground on his letter to the Romans. The older pastor indignantly asked
whether Kurtz had imbibed such lunatic notions from some poisoned well
in America, since he could not possibly have learned such speculative non-
sense from his professors and theological fathers in Halle.55 Completely
taken aback by the older cleric's accusations, Kurtz hastened to assure his
colleague that he had never publicly taught universal salvation and that even
privately he was less inclined than formerly to speculation on the topic.
As the American Revolution broke upon North America, Mihlenberg
struggled increasingly against his fear that a people only partially christian-
ized, and perhaps inclined to believe notions of universalism such as Kurtz
had indulged, would now be ruled by deists and atheists. While his initial
remarks in 1776 expressing fears that the new constitutional order only
included such potential enemies as "practical atheists, pretended Deists,
Naturalists, and scoffing Philistines," his fear of hypocrisy and dissimulation
increased month by month. Gratified that the new oath of loyalty to
Pennsylvania at least demanded acknowledgment of a God and the inspira-
tion of "the Old and New Testaments," Mihlenberg opined by October of
that year that these had been included, because otherwise the new govern-
ment "would have nothing on which to swear in Jews and Christians."56
Confidence in a law written on the heart declined as the violence of
warfare intensified and the beliefs of some Americans in mere natural reli-
gion were made manifest, agitating the aging pastor. Moreover, the issue of
conscience, formerly framed by questions of individual behavior among both
Christians and non-Christians in regard to the consequences of revealed
truth, now transmogrified into a more agonizing dilemma. Were Christians
acting according to conscience if they failed to uphold a lawfully constituted
Christian civil order-the primary area of Protestant natural law reflection?
Could the rebellion of American colonists and their potentially heathen
regime be in conscience the object of Christian loyalty? After struggling with
uncertainties about the possible existence of conscience and honesty in Jews,
Africans, and Native Americans, German-speaking pietists now refocused on
transplanted Europeans' covenantal oaths of loyalty to fellow European
Christians. Privately, Mihlenberg expressed his growing conviction that
Christians in America would be ruled by "Jews, Turks, Spinozaites, Deists,
perverted Naturalists, etc."57 He seemed in 1777 to agree with an Anglican
interest in "universalism" in late i8th-century America has been traced in Ronald Schultz, "God
and Workingmen: Popular Religion and the Formation of Philadelphia's Working Class,
1790-1830," in Ronald Hoffmann and Peter J. Albert, eds., Religion in a Revolutionary Age
(Charlottesville, 1994), 125-55.
55 The handwritten copy of MUhlenberg's letter to Kurtz and the latter's response as
translated and cited here (Apr. 21, 1784, and May 2i, 1785) are in the Lutheran Archives Center,
Philadelphia: PM95 A/ #24 1783-1785.
56 Miihlenberg, Journals, 2:717 (quotation), 741-42, 748 (quotation).
57 Miihlenberg to C. E. Schultze, Oct. 2, 1776, in Aland, ed., Korrespondenz, 4:739-45,
quotation on 740.
divine's warning to Jews-and to disobedient North American Christians-

that they had to give loyalty to heathen and Christian rulers since all author-
ity came from God. But Mihlenberg took no comfort from this and asked
plaintively "what, then, should we do?"58
Three major consequences flowed from the dilemmas natural law think-
ing produced among German-speakers in North America. First, the failure of
pietist theologians to decide whether and how a law of conscience operated in
all peoples may well have encouraged legislators and constitutional theorists
to pursue the separation of secular laws regulating social behavior from
explicitly Christian metaphysical roots. That separation seemed to enlight-
ened commentators as an escape from the "age of conscience" and was hailed
as a coming of age for the law. With few exceptions, German-speaking
pietists did not exercise a significant role in framing the positive laws and
constitutional frameworks of the emerging North American republic, in part
because they could not endorse this reduction of conscience to procedural
aspects of equity or purely pragmatic interests of civic order. Indeed, the final
wording of the First Amendment omitted James Madison's original wording,
which had implied that the "rights of conscience" would not be "infringed,"
because those rights were thought to be rooted in religious conviction.
Precisely what religion and what connection bound conscience to public pro-
fessions of faith the revisers of the amendment declined to specify.59
Second, German-speaking pietists retained an inherited skepticism about
the potential for Jewish conversions. They accorded these Europeans the top
rank in a hierarchy of nations with whom they had long been in contact.
Despite some agreement that the civic dimension of natural law as understood
by Christians and the Noachic law, at least as Christians understood it as
derived from the Jews, provided a basis for a law of nations, little clarity had
emerged for pietists about why Jews in conscience still rejected Christianity.
Third, German pietist theology and thought could provide no convinc-
ing answer to Mihlenberg's agonized query about the problem of private
conscience and political resistance. Neither Reformed, nor Moravian, nor
Lutheran pietists could abandon their conviction that the law written on the
heart still flickered with the light of God's original intent for humans.
Agreement ended there. True, legal reasoning and observation could con-
struct ordered political and social existences. The ambivalence and tension
built into western theological categories-profoundly influenced by legal
terms and a quest for precision-faltered when faced with the hard cases of
58 MUhlenberg, Journals, 3:55-56, for summary of the Rev. Thomas Pyle's exegesis of Rom.
13 and Miihlenberg's struggle with conscientious dissent from the Revolution; see also Roeber,
Palatines, Liberty, and Property, 304-o0.
59 See, on this point, David Saunders, Anti-Lawyers: Religion and the Critics of Law and State
(London, 1997), 21-29, 112-23, 142-53; on the Bill of Rights wording, see Elwyn A. Smith, "Religion
and Conscience in Constitutional Law," in Smith, ed., Church-State Relations, 243-71, quotation on
245. For the broader context that informed Madison's own convictions, see Jack N. Rakove, Original
Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, i996), 310-14.
9IO WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
conscience and human behavior created by genuine cultural encounters.

While many Roman Catholic theologians and some Calvinist thinkers recov-
ered a measure of confidence in the ability to link universal law written in
the heart with social and political justice, despite the challenges of deism and
political upheavals, German-language pietists contributed relatively little to
these endeavors.60
The profound doubts pietists had learned to internalize about behavior
and conscience in Jews, in pagans, and especially in professed Christian
believers provided a peculiar style of legal and theological thinking. Pietists
rarely became confident crusaders in the removal of Native Americans from
ancestral lands. That same hesitancy and the relatively higher esteem in
which they held Native Americans, however, simultaneously bequeathed a
quietist response to the scandal of slavery. The lower esteem in which con-
science had been thought to operate among Africans surely added both to
pietist doubts and to their acquiescence in the "peculiar institution" despite
occasional attacks by individual German-speakers. The same pietist hesitancy
to affirm a universal acting conscience based on natural and legal reasoning
could not account for the legitimacy of laws and religious insights generated
in non-Christian cultures or contexts. Nor did German-speakers in gen-
eral-and even the Moravian missionaries in particular-seem equipped to
work with such traditions and to see in them consistently at least pale reflec-
tions of a law written on the heart and discernible by disciplined, reasoned
observation.6'
German-speaking pietists encountered Anglo-American legal and reli-
gious traditions in addition to those of non-Europeans, which only vaguely
resembled the divisions between the public and private law of their home-
lands. Within the first half century of massive German-speaking migration,
adjustment to secular law had been more or less successfully negotiated. But
the theological inheritance of a complex and highly controverted natural law
tradition received no institutional incarnation and was applied with but
indifferent success to the dilemmas that arose from encounters with a variety
of peoples and customs. The dim light of natural law went into eclipse not
only because of questions that arose about the existence of individual con-
science in Jews and pagan nonbelievers. The challenge of political resistance
confronted pietism with the gulf that had long separated individual con-
science and conviction from the clear teaching of pietists of all stripes that
60 The classic work on the connection of Western legal tradition to the "papal Revolution"
of 1050-1150 is Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal
Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). The obvious objection to this statement is the profound
influence of pietism on Immanuel Kant; no known connections tie his legal philosophy to late
i8th-century North American developments. See M. J. Detmold, The Unity of Law and
Morality: A Refutation ofLegal Positivism (London, 1984), 6-7, 54-55, 78-82, 115-22, 133, 155.
61 The notion of a legal "style" is borrowed from Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kotz,
Introduction to Comparative Law, 2d ed., trans. Tony Weir, vol. I: The Framework (Oxford,
1987), 68-69, by which they mean the historical development, predominant mode of thought,
institutions, sources of legal authority, and ideology of a legal system.
NOACHIC AND NATURAL LAW IN EARLY AMERICA 9II
the true Christian's first obligation in the civic realm was obedience to estab-
lished political and social authority.62
The death of the Saxon Prieber at Frederica in 1747 for his "beliefs, con-
duct, ethics, and dress" had signaled how ambivalently German-speakers
could read that incident. Perhaps Prieber could have been hailed as an early
martyr in his call to the Cherokees for political resistance, a call he grounded
in the natural law teachings he had learned at Leipzig. Eighteenth-century
German-speaking pietists in post-Revolutionary North America, however,
lived in a political culture in which the fascination for "the laws of nature
and of nature's God" declared a liberation from relying too specifically on
Noachic or Christian natural law. That process had left behind the
"Protestant natural law thinkers schooled in German and Dutch federalism"
as decisively as it uncoupled individual conscience from a comprehensive
theory of law rooted in a divine presence.63
God's workings, according to both Noachic and natural law experts,
while mysterious, were manifest in nature. The promptings of conscience
constituted, in varying degrees, part of the evidence of the natural world,
according to varying German pietist interpretations. While James Wilson
and other anglophones struggled to conceptualize notions of "higher" law,
neither German nor Jewish thinkers played any role in those debates.
Instead, as natural theology came increasingly to be the province of their
deist enemies, pietists ceased their eighteenth-century ruminations. Their
wrestling with the problem of the "law written on the heart" was consigned
to oblivion among their religious descendants.64
As nature and positive law both became subjects of confident rationalist
systems, the God of Noah and Paul receded into ever more private and sub-
jective realms of religious sentiment. Religious revivalism in the nineteenth
century could trace some of its heritage from German pietism's emphasis on
the importance of sincerity and heartfelt religion. But connections between
the promptings of conscience and broader themes of the law that were dis-
cernible in all peoples vanished. That absence also obscures the earlier strug-
62 On this limited "steering" capacity of legal traditions and accompanying critiques of

Berman's theses, see Lew Bjarup, "The Concept of Revolution," in Zenon Bankowski, ed.,
Revolutions in Law and Legal Thought (Aberdeen, 1991), 22-30, and Adam Czarnota and Martin
Krygier, "Revolutions and the Continuity of European Law," ibid., 90-ii2.
63 See Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, "The Concept of Rights in Christian Moral
Discourse," in Cromartie, ed., A Preserving Grace, 143-56, quotation on 152, and more exten-
sively, O'Donovan, Theology of Law and Authority in the English Reformation (Atlanta, i99i); on
Thomas Jefferson's indebtedness to natural law thinking, despite his aversion to orthodox
Christianity, see David Thomas Konig, "Principia Jeffersonia: Thomas Jefferson and the
Natural Law Tradition," unpublished paper delivered at the American Society of Legal History
annual meeting, Princeton, Oct. 21, 2000; I am grateful to Prof. Konig for permission to cite
the paper here.
64 For Wilson and German-American struggles to apply the obligations of a "higher" law
to charitable obligations, see Roeber, "The Long Road to Vidal: Charity Law and State
Formation in Early America," in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many
Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, 2001), 414-41.
gle of German pietists to engage the thorny issue of a universal "law written
on the heart" in their endeavors to arrive at an understanding of their
African-American, Native American, and Jewish neighbors.

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What the Law Requires Is Written on Their Hearts: Noachic and Natural Law among

German-Speakers in Early Modern North America

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is collaborating with

IN June of 1747, Johann Martin Boltzius, the Lutheran pastor at

A. G. Roeber is professor of early modern history and religious studies at The

not to tolerate adultery, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality; to prevent rob-

intended as the proper destiny of humans. Gradually, Christian consensus of

Gradations emerged incrementally along a theological spectrum that

conciliarist or collective "rights" to govern the Christian church. Gerson's

inability to will to confess God rightly and to do good accordingly, even if

6 Pelikan, Growth of Medieval Theology (600-i300), 284-93, quotation on 287; Heiko A.

laws written into it were accessible to observation and reason, at least in

Puritan theologians thus placed great emphasis on education and train-

aspects of pre-Reformation natural law teaching. In part, that struggle came

13 Quotation in Henry Melchior Mihlenberg, The Journals of Henry Melchior Miihlenberg,

Zibly's contemporary Johan Hendricus Goetschius exhibited the same

Indirectly, however, German-speakers struggled with this dilemma.

Brethren movement, preached in 1760 a sermon at the Germantown

19 Otterbein, "The Salvation-bringing Incarnation and the Glorious Victory of Jesus

his confidence in a universal sense of conscience. The same instructions

critique of political and social regimes engaged in unconscionable abuse of

Neither Miihlenberg nor many of his congregants regarded the indige-

28 MUhlenberg, Journals, 2:714 (I775).

30 On Weiser's mixed attitudes, see Merrell, Into the American

31 MUhlenberg, Journals, i:i67.

By the 1770s, Mhhlenberg relented somewhat, as he revealed in an

The eclipse of natural law thinking among younger Lutherans proceeded

Transplanted German villagers brought with them memories of having lived

translations at Leipzig in i675 and again at Dresden and Leipzig in 1742.

baptism (Mark i6:i6) as the prerequisites for salvation, Miihlenberg asked

46 MUhlenberg, Journals, 1:125-26.

Christians behaved so badly? Not only Miihlenberg's letters and journals,

49 Nachrichten von den vereinigten Deutschen Evangelisch-Lutherischen Gemeinen in Nord-

51 See Miihlenberg, Journals, 2:I-2 (Jan. 1764). By "Jewish Ch

ists," in whose company Mihlenberg also numbered many "so-called

52 Ibid., 1:139, 144 (i747).

divine's warning to Jews-and to disobedient North American Christians-

conscience and human behavior created by genuine cultural encounters.

62 On this limited "steering" capacity of legal traditions and accompanying critiques of

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