Guds rike i Trankebar : pietistisk konfessionskultur under Trankebarmissionens första år: 1706-1714

Sammanfattning: God’s Kingdom in Tranquebar : pietist Confessional Culture during the Establishing Years of the Danish-Halle Mission: 1706-1714. The aim of this thesis is to study and describe the confessional culture as displayed by the missionaries Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719) and Ernst Gründler (1677-1720) during the establishing years of the Pietist Danish-Halle Mission in the Danish colony of Tranquebar in south-east India. This thesis primarily utilises the German language accounts provided by the missionaries in the first volume of the missionary journal Hallesche Berichte, as well as the apologetical and polemical document Apologia Epistolis Bovingianis written by the selfsame missionaries. In addition to the aforementioned sources, this thesis also utilises surviving nonprinted letters and the diary kept by Ziegenbalg and Gründler. The analysis is conducted via the utilisation of the theoretical concepts of confessional culture, as described by Thomas Kaufmann, and contact-zone theory, as proposed by Mary Louise Pratt, coupled with Birgit Emich’s suggestions toward a cultural understanding of actor-centred confessionality. By applying this tripartite framework, this thesis further suggests that one may establish a baseline for describing a displayed Pietist-missionary confessional culture on a micro-level in addition to the development of this confessional culture in contact with the perceived ”heathen”. The results of the analysis suggest that early Pietist missionary activity in Tranquebar was fueled by millenarian conceptions of a ”ruined Christianity” that the missionaries wished to reinvigorate by incorporating and refining the ”heathen”, who was perceived as more civilised and outwardly pious than European Christians, however lacking in both true faith and belief. The Pietist confessional culture in Tranquebar as such displayed both a ”hard core”, guided by Pietist notions of rebirth through faith, as well as a ”soft shell”, consisting of non-confessional Christian elements. In conjunction with Pietist concerns for practical piety and repentance struggle (Bußkampf) the missionary confessional culture displayed three stages of increasing confessionalisation and dichotimisation, arriving at a unified confessional culture that was highly critical of both Catholicism and Lutheran orthodoxy: (1) The missionaries would use and display common non-confessional Christian elements, shared with Hinduism, to entice converts: (2) Following this, the missionaries would spur the converts to embrace Pietist enlightenment and rebirth; (3) At the end of the process the converts were displayed as models of practical piety, leading by example and ”shining as a light” for Indian and Christian alike in connection with Pietist millenarian thinking.