Friday, September 26, 2025

It is the 26th of September 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

It’s been a minute since I had the opportunity to remind you that the famed Pennsylvania Dutch of the early colonies were not, in fact, Dutch. They were the Pennsylvania “Deutsch”- that is, “German” and perhaps this is best remembered by the fact that one of the earliest settlements in Pennsylvania was “Germantown,” the settlement of the so-called original 13 families that came across the Atlantic on the Concord from Germany in 1683.

And the man that made it happen, a German lawyer and Lutheran whose name is synonymous with the “Pennsylvania Dutch,” was Francis Daniel Pastorius, who was born on this, the 26th of September in 1651 in Sommerhausen in Bavaria. His father, Melchior, was a well-to-do Lutheran burgomaster, and this set him up for schooling in the local gymnasium and then across Germany at the Universities of Altdorf, Strasbourg, and Jena.

Pastorius would receive his doctorate in law and would practice law under his father in Windesheim, and then move with the family to Frankfurt. His life would change there, in the 1670s, in Frankfurt, when he befriended the local pastor Philipp Jakob Spener. It was here that Spener would write his “Pia Desideria,” a devotional that would kickstart the Pietist movement.

Pastorius would undergo a kind of religious awakening and would spend the early 1680s touring Europe and working as a tutor. He would join Spener’s Pietist movement and become friendly with the Quakers who found refuge in Frankfurt.

With his knowledge of the law, he was approached by a group of Quakers who asked if he would serve as the legal agent for the Frankfurt Land Company- a mixed group of Lutherans, Quakers, and Mennonites that wanted to purchase land from William Penn in the new world.  

Pastorius would sail ahead of the prospective immigrants on the ship America, which arrived in Philadelphia in August 1683. Pastorius negotiated with Penn for 15,000 acres northwest of Philadelphia, which would be settled as Germantown.  

Pastorius would serve as a member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly and would serve as a mayor, bailiff, and clerk of the town. In 1688, he drafted and co-signed the “Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery,” the first formal protest against slavery in North America and a landmark of religious dissent against the institution. The petition is striking in its use of satire and for mocking those who would claim to be fleeing persecution only to persecute others.

Pastorius has also been noted as the author of one of the more curious and impressive manuscripts in the colonies. It is a massive manuscript of commonplaces and collected writings called “the Bee Hive”. He uses the Enlightenment era's favorite analogy of a beehive for his collection of facts, figures, and a compendium of knowledge. Like a bee, he hopes to extract from a wide variety of sources and fonts to then bring them into a single, organized organism. It was a kind of early encyclopedia with natural sciences, the law, theology, and poetry. It runs to over 1,000 pages and is written in seven different languages. It is at the University of Pennsylvania, and they have made a very attractive digital version available to read for free.

Pastorius would found a school in Germantown known for teaching both boys and girls- something Luther had argued for but was rarely practiced. Germantown itself would become the center of German immigration into the new world and the development of Penn’s Woods as a center for religious diversity. His abolitionist stance and call for coeducation have made him a key figure in the history of the Pennsylvania Dutch and the blending of Lutheran and radical traditions. The Abolitionist and Christian apologist John Greenleaf Whittier would memorialize Pastorius with his poem “The Pennsylvania Pilgrim”. He would die in early 1720. Born on this day, Francis Daniel Pastorius was 68 years old.

 The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and some famous words from Ephesians 2:

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 26th of September 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by the number one member of the BeyHive- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who will just let you know the “BeyHive” superseded the “Beyontourage” for fans of Queen B- I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.