Pietism  --General Information

Originally a German Lutheran religious movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, pietism emphasized heartfelt religious devotion, ethical purity, charitable activity, and pastoral theology rather than sacramental or dogmatic precision. The term now refers to all religious expressions that emphasize inward devotion and moral purity. With roots in Dutch precisionism and mysticism, pietism emerged in reaction to the formality of Lutheran orthodoxy.

In his Pia Desideria (1675), Philipp Jakob Spener proposed a "heart religion" to replace the dominant "head religion." Beginning with religious meetings in Spener's home, the movement grew rapidly, especially after August Hermann Francke (1663 - 1727) made the new University of Halle a Pietist center. Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf, a student of Francke's and godson of Spener, helped spread the movement. His Moravian Church promoted evangelical awakenings throughout Europe and in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. John Wesley and Methodism were profoundly influenced by pietism.

      --James D Nelson

A recurring tendency within Christian history to emphasize more the practicalities of Christian life and less the formal structures of theology or church order. Its historians discern four general traits in this tendency: (1) Its experiential character, pietists are people of the heart for whom Christian living is the fundamental concern; (2) its biblical focus, pietists are, to paraphrase John Wesley, "people of one book" who take standards and goals from the pages of Scripture; (3) its perfectionistic bent, pietists are serious about holy living and expend every effort to follow God's law, spread the gospel, and provide aid for the needy; (4) its reforming interest, pietists usually oppose what they regard as coldness and sterility in established church forms and practices.

The German Lutheran Church at the end of the seventeenth century labored under manifold difficulties. Its work was tightly confined by the princes of Germany's many sovereign states. Many of its ministers seemed as interested in philosophical wrangling and rhetorical ostentation as in the encouragement of their congregations. And the devastating Thirty Years War (1618 - 48), fought ostensibly over religion, had created widespread wariness about church life in general. To be sure, the picture was not entirely bleak. From Holland and Puritan England came stimulation for reform. And in German - speaking lands signs of Christian vitality remained, like the writings of Johann Arndt, whose True Christianity (1610) was a strong influence on later leaders of pietism.

But in many places these signs of life were obscured by the formalism and the insincerity of church leaders. This situation was altered by the unstinting work of Philipp Jakob Spener, known often as the father of pietism, who was called in 1666 to be the senior minister in Frankfurt am Main. There he appealed for moral reform in the city. He initiated a far - flung correspondence which eventually won him the title "spiritual counselor of all Germany." Most importantly, he also promoted a major reform in the practical life of the churches. A sermon in 1669 mentioned the possibility of laymen meeting together, setting aside "glasses, cards, or dice," and encouraging each other in the Christian faith. The next year Spener himself instituted such a Collegia pietatis ("pious assembly") to meet on Wednesdays and Sundays to pray, to discuss the previous week's sermon, and to apply passages from Scripture and devotional writings to individual lives.

Spener took a major step toward reviving the church in 1675 when he was asked to prepare a new preface for sermons by Johann Arndt. The result was the famous Pia Desideria (Pious Wishes). In simple terms this brief work examined the sources of spiritual decline in Protestant Germany and offered proposals for reform. The tract was an immediate sensation. In it Spener criticized nobles and princes for exercising unauthorized control of the church, ministers for substituting cold doctrine for warm faith, and lay people for disregarding proper Christian behavior. He called positively for a revival of the concerns of Luther and the early Reformation, even as he altered Reformation teaching slightly. For example, Spener regarded salvation more as regeneration (the new birth) than as justification (being put right with God), even though the Reformers had laid greater stress upon the latter.

Although these proposals constituted an agenda for reform and renewal, they also posed two difficulties which have ever been troublesome for pietism. First, many clergymen and professional theologians opposed them, some out of a concern to preserve their traditional status, but others out of a genuine fear that they would lead to rampant subjectivity and antiintellectualism. Second, some lay people took Spener's proposals as authorization for departing from the established churches altogether, even though Spener himself rejected the separatistic conclusions drawn from his ideas.

Francke had experienced a dramatic conversion in 1687, the source of his lifelong concern for evangelism and missions. Under his leadership Halle became the center of Protestantism's most ambitious missionary endeavors to that time. The university established a center for Oriental languages and also encouraged efforts at translating the Bible into new languages. Francke's missionary influence was felt directly through missionaries who went from Halle to foreign fields and indirectly through groups like the Moravians and an active Danish mission which drew inspiration from the leaders of pietism.

Another group under the general influence of Spener and Francke developed pietistic concern for the Bible within German Lutheranism at Wurttemberg. Its leading figure, Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687 - 1752), represented a unique combination of scholarly expertise and devotional commitment to Scripture. Bengel did pioneering study in the text of the NT, exegeted Scripture carefully and piously, and wrote several books on the millennium.

Influences radiating from Halle, Wurttemberg, and the Moravians moved rapidly into Scandinavia. When soldiers from Sweden and Finland were captured in battle with Russia (1709), pietist commitments migrated to Siberia. Pietism exerted its influence through Wesley in England. The father of American Lutheranism, Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, was sent across the Atlantic by Francke's son in response to requests for spiritual leadership from German immigrants. In addition, pietism also influenced the Mennonites, Moravians, Brethren, and Dutch Reformed in early America. The continuing influence of Spener, Francke, and their circle went on into the nineteenth century. A renewal of interest in Luther and his theology, the active evangelism of the Basel Mission and the Inner Mission Society of Denmark, the revivalistic activity of Norwegian Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771 - 1824), and the establishment of the Swedish Mission Covenant Church (1878) could all trace roots back to the pietism of an earlier day.

Historians have long studied the relationship between pietism and the Enlightenment, that rationalistic and humanistic movement which flourished during the eighteenth century and which contributed to the eventual secularization of Europe. They have noted that pietism and the Enlightenment both attacked Protestant orthodoxy, that both asserted the rights of individuals, and that both were concerned about practice more than theory. The crucial historical question is whether pietistic anti-traditionalism, individualism, and practicality paved the way for a non - Christian expression of these same traits in the Enlightenment. The fact that pietism remained faithful to Scripture and that its subjectivity was controlled by Christian beliefs suggests that, whatever its relationship to the Enlightenment, it was not the primary source of the latter's skepticism or rationalism.

A further historical uncertainty surrounds the tie between pietism and the intellectual movements arising in reaction to the Enlightenment. Striking indeed is the fact that three great post enlightenment thinkers, the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, the literary genius Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and the romantic theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, had been exposed to pietism as youths. It is probably best to regard pietism as a movement that paralleled the Enlightenment and later European developments in its quest for personal meaning and its disdain for exhausted traditions. Yet insofar as the heart of pietism was captive to the gospel, it remained a source of distinctly Christian renewal.

Even beyond Protestantism, pietistic elements can be seen in contemporary Roman Catholicism and Judaism. The Jansenist movement in seventeenth century France stressed the concern for heart religion that Spener also championed. The work of Baal Shem Tov (1700 - 1760) in founding the Hasidic movement in Judaism also sought to move beyond orthodox ritual to a sense of communion with God.

An overall evaluation of pietism must take into consideration the circumstances of its origin in seventeenth century Europe. Whether in its narrow German usage or its more generic sense, pietism represented a complex phenomenon. It partook of the mysticism of the late Middle Ages. It shared the commitment to Scripture and the emphasis on lay Christianity of the early Reformation. It opposed the formalism and cold orthodoxy of the theological establishment. And it was a child of its own times with its concern for authentic personal experience. It was, in one sense, the Christian answer to what has been called "the discovery of the individual" by providing a Christian form to the individualism and practical - mindedness of a Europe in transition to modern times.

Mark A Noll
(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)

Catholic Encyclopedia -Pietism

www.cob-net.org/pietism.htm

In his Unparteiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of the Church and Heretics) of 1699 he showed that dogmatic orthodoxy had not necessarily produced Christian character in its adherents, and that, on the other hand, the heretics had frequently been more sincere and genuine in their devotion than had their persecutors. His work was in many ways an exaggeration of its own central thesis, but Arnold did open up new lines of inquiry into the development of Christian ideas and institutions.

The modern attempt to understand ancient heresies in their own terms, rather than as distortions of orthodoxy, owes much to Arnold and thus to Pietism. He also helped to make the history of noninstitutional religion a proper subject for study, thus opening the way for church history to become a history of the Christian people rather than merely of prelates and theologians. Nor was Arnold's importance restricted to ecclesiastical history. Through his work and that of his colleagues, Pietism helped to liberate historical scholarship generally from the dominance of confessional polemics and to make possible the flowering of historical study in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The significance of Pietism for the history of philosophical thought is less obvious, but no less important. It must be remembered that many of the leading figures in the history of German Idealism began their intellectual development as students of theology—and this meant a theology strongly tinged with Pietism. Thus it has been suggested that “the whole of Kant's moral philosophy might almost be described under the title of one of his last books as `religion within the bounds of reason alone.' For him religion is primarily the Christian religion purified” (Paton, p. 196). And this interest in a “religion purified” is one that may well be traced to Kant's early training in Pietism.

As Arnold Bergstraesser has suggested, Goethe “concurred with the pietists in their criticism of the established churches.... The vision of an evangelical communion of `those good and wise to the highest degree' was to become the nucleus from which his ideal of a good society developed... and the pietist emphasis on the conduct of life rather than upon doctrine was in accord with his inclination toward tolerance” (Bergstraesser, p. 36).

This is not to claim that Goethe was a Pietist, nor that Pietism was the sole source of his religious convictions. But much of his outlook on man and society can be read as a kind of secularized Pietism, in which the central emphases of Pietism remain but its specifically christocentric foundation has been replaced by a humanitarian ideal. A similar “afterglow” of Pietism may be seen in other literary figures.

There is, for example, some reason to believe that Johann Christoph Friedrich Hölderlin, who was a student of theology at Tübingen, owed some of his religious sensitivity not only to the classicism that was his chief inspiration, but also to the Pietism in relation to which he developed his identity as a poet and a thinker; the later poems of Hölderlin make it clear that he continued to be fascinated by the figure of Christ, as he had learned to know it through his early Christian upbringing and his theological study.

In the field of education, the influence of Pietism was not only great, but deliberate. As noted earlier, one of the six goals set forth in Spener's Pia desideria had been the reform of theological education, and Francke had made his most lasting contribution in the schools he established. Like the historians and philosophers referred to in the preceding paragraphs, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi began as a student of theology, and some students of his pedagogical theories have seen in them the evidence of this early interest.

By most standards, Johann Bernhard Basedow must be counted a son of the Enlightenment rather than of Pietism; yet his affinities with Comenius and his concern with education as a means of developing the integrity of the individual suggest that Pietism, albeit in its more radical forms, may have been a factor in his thought. In a more general way, Pietism is evident in the educational development both of Europe and of North America, especially in the nineteenth century.

Implicit in much of that development is a stress upon personal commitment that bears a distinct family resemblance to the Pietist preoccupation with individual conversion. And since so much of elementary education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was in fact controlled by churches under the dominance of Pietism, it seems a safe generalization to suggest that Pietistic Protestantism has had a share in nurturing the moral presuppositions of many nations.