Pietism

From the head to the heart

After the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) the German Lutheran churches had sound confessions and learned theologians. Yet to Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), a pastor in Frankfurt, the faith of many seemed to stop at knowing doctrine and attending church: "having a form of godliness but denying its power" (2 Timothy 3:5). He gathered believers in his home to read and talk over Scripture, and in 1675 his Pia Desideria proposed ways to renew the church: more Scripture among the people; the priesthood of all believers put into practice; teaching that Christianity is not knowledge only but love in action; charity rather than victory in controversy; and ministers trained in godliness as well as learning Spener, Pia Desideria.

Be doers of the word, and not hearers only. Otherwise, you are deceiving yourselves.

James 1:22

At the centre of Pietist faith stood the new birth (see regeneration): not justification only, but becoming a new person who loves God and neighbour. Spener saw his gatherings not as a way out of the church but as a ‘little church within the church’, renewing it from inside.

Love and mission

August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), at the new university of Halle, opened an orphanage in the 1690s that grew into schools and a Bible press, and Halle trained some of the first Protestant missionaries to south India. Count Zinzendorf (1700–1760) welcomed onto his estate at Herrnhut the Moravian Brethren, heirs of Jan Hus, who from 1732 sent missionaries far abroad. In 1738, at a meeting of a society in Aldersgate Street, London, shaped by the Moravians, John Wesley recorded, "I felt my heart strangely warmed" Wesley, Journal. So Pietism became one of the roots of Methodism, of evangelicalism and of Protestant missions. A similar stream ran through the Dutch Reformed churches, and the devotional books of the Puritans were read by German Pietists too.

Gifts and dangers

Pietism put the Bible back into ordinary hands, revived small groups of mutual care, and set faith to work through love: "What matters is faith expressing itself through love" (Galatians 5:6). Orthodox Lutheran theologians saw dangers too, and some proved real: stressing the heart and experience could make doctrine and the sacraments seem secondary, turn one's own experience into a test of others' faith, and draw the devout away from the church into circles of their own. The Pietists answered that they did not want less doctrine but living doctrine. Today ‘pietistic’ is sometimes used for a faith kept private and withdrawn from the world, which is far from a movement that built orphanages and sent missionaries.

Sound doctrine and a warm heart are not enemies. The story is told more fully in the lesson Pietism and the Great Awakening.