From Text to Ritual: Radical Pietist Approaches to Scriptural Translation and Protestant Diversity in Early America.

This article addresses how ethnic German translation practices, in both their linguistic and cultural dimensions, contributed to the pluralization of Protestant religious culture in colonial Pennsylvania. In doing so, it offers insights into the source and evolution of American religious diversity in the eighteenth century. It explores how radical German Pietists, struggling to establish themselves in a voluntary religious landscape, "Americanized" nonconformist religious practices by embracing recent (re)translations of scripture that departed from the Luther Bible and the King James Bible (KJV). The relationship between text and practice consisted of mutual influence and reflected, in important ways, the complex modes of translating scripture from one language into another. Focusing on the practices of baptism and foot washing as exemplars of this process, the essay argues that the Schwarzenau Brethren and the Ephrata Cloister utilized a hermeneutical approach in their disputations that made translation a core component of their efforts to reformulate, enact, and justify alternative religious practices. Their appeals to various German-language renderings of the Bible substantiated rituals that went against confessional and dissenting orthodoxies in British North America. This study illuminates the intricate processes of cultural exchange and transatlantic adaptation, revealing how texts not only shaped but were also influenced by the physical and political realities that drove the transformation of early American Protestantism in the eighteenth century. This article addresses how ethnic German translation practices, in both their linguistic and cultural dimensions, contributed to the pluralization of Protestant religious culture in colonial Pennsylvania. It offers insights into the source and evolution of American religious diversity in the eighteenth century. It explores how radical German Pietists, struggling to establish themselves in a voluntary religious landscape, 'Americanized' nonconformist religious practices by embracing recent (re)translations of scripture that departed from the Luther Bible and the King James Bible (KJV). The relationship between text and practice consisted of mutual influence and reflected, in important ways, the complex modes of translating scripture from one language into another. Focusing on the practices of baptism and foot washing as exemplars of this process, the essay argues that the Schwarzenau Brethren and the Ephrata Cloister utilized a hermeneutical approach in their disputations that made translation a core component of their efforts to reformulate, enact, and justify alternative religious practices. Their appeals to various German-language renderings of the Bible substantiated rituals that went against confessional and dissenting orthodoxies in British North America. This study illuminates the intricate processes of cultural exchange and transatlantic adaptation, revealing how texts not only shaped but were also influenced by the physical and political realities that drove the transformation of early American Protestantism in the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]