Pietism and the Great Awakening

A religion of the heart

After the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the Lutheran churches of Germany had sound confessions and learned theologians. Yet to Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), a Lutheran pastor in Frankfurt, it seemed that for many ministers and people faith had shrunk to knowing correct doctrine and attending church. From about 1670 he gathered believers in his home to read and talk over Scripture together, and in 1675 he published Pia Desideria, ‘pious wishes’ Spener, Pia Desideria. He meant these gatherings not as a way out of the church but as little churches within the church, to renew it from inside.

Spener's short book made a handful of proposals. Let the whole Bible be read more widely by the people, in homes and in meetings, not only heard from the pulpit. Let Luther's teaching that all believers are priests be practised, as Christians teach, admonish and pray for one another. Let it be taught that Christianity is not a matter of knowing but of doing, above all of love. In controversy with other churches, seek the truth by prayer, example and love rather than by winning arguments. Train ministers in godliness as well as learning. And let sermons aim to build up the inner man. The priesthood of all believers rests on Peter's words calling the whole church "a royal priesthood" (1 Peter 2:9).

Spener's younger friend August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), pastor and professor at the new University of Halle, opened an orphanage in the 1690s. It grew into schools and a press that printed Bibles cheaply, and Halle-trained men were among the first Protestant missionaries to south India in 1706. The Pietist scholar Johann Albrecht Bengel later wrote New Testament notes that Wesley drew on heavily, as the app's guide to Wesley's notes explains.

Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), schooled at Francke's Halle, welcomed onto his estate Moravian refugees, heirs of the Bohemian Brethren who traced their faith back to Jan Hus. They named their village Herrnhut, ‘the Lord's watch’. In 1727, at a communion service, the community experienced a deep reconciliation and renewal; that year they began a round-the-clock watch of prayer, kept in turns, which as the story is told lasted about a century. In 1732 they sent their first missionaries, to enslaved people in the West Indies.

Pietism's gifts were real. The Bible went back into ordinary hands, small groups of mutual care revived, and Protestant missions began in earnest. So were its risks. Stressing the heart, some made light of doctrine and truth, judged others by their own experience, or drew apart from the church into circles of the godly. Orthodox Lutherans warned of exactly this. Friedrich Schleiermacher, schooled among the Moravians, would later locate religion above all in feeling, a story that continues in The Enlightenment and modern theology.

The Great Awakening: Edwards and Whitefield

In the 1730s and 40s revival swept both sides of the Atlantic: Americans call it the Great Awakening, the British the Evangelical Revival. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Congregational pastor at Northampton, Massachusetts, published an account of the awakening that came to his town in 1734–35, and it was read far and wide. He was a Calvinist theologian of rare depth who wrote often of the beauty and holiness of God.

Yet he is remembered above all for one sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield (now in Connecticut) in 1741 Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. God, it warned, holds the sinner over the pit much as one holds a spider over a fire, and nothing but his hand keeps the sinner from falling. But the sermon does not end in threat. It ends with an appeal: the door of mercy stands wide open now, so flee to Christ. According to an eyewitness, the crying out of the congregation grew so loud that Edwards could not finish.

Meanwhile George Whitefield (1714–1770), a young priest of the Church of England, found many pulpits closed to him and in 1739 began preaching in the open air, to coal miners near Bristol and soon to vast crowds. He crossed the Atlantic again and again, preaching from Georgia to New England; Benjamin Franklin recalled reckoning that his voice could reach tens of thousands. Above all Whitefield preached the words Jesus spoke to Nicodemus: "no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again" (John 3:3). Jesus told Nicodemus that this birth is the Spirit's work, not ours, and added, "Do not be amazed that I said, ‘You must be born again.’" (John 3:7).

John Wesley, who shared in the revival, wrote in his note on this verse that "an entire change of heart as well as of life was necessary" for the blessings of Christ's kingdom Wesley, and that if being born again meant only reformation of life, the Lord would have revealed nothing new and only clouded what was already plain. Whitefield the Calvinist and Wesley the Arminian disagreed sharply over predestination, but on the new birth they spoke with one voice. Wesley's story continues in Wesley and the Methodist movement, and the doctrine itself is taught in the doctrine course's lesson New birth and the indwelling Spirit.

Telling true religion from false

Revival brought shadows too. Some itinerant preachers denounced settled ministers as unconverted; some treated outcries and fainting as sure signs of the Spirit. Critics such as the Boston minister Charles Chauncy dismissed the whole movement as enthusiasm, and churches split between its friends and its foes. Edwards himself was dismissed by his Northampton congregation in 1750 after a dispute over who should be admitted to the Lord's Supper. He went on to preach to Native Americans at the frontier town of Stockbridge, and in 1758, weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), he died after an inoculation against smallpox.

Edwards neither rejected the revival nor excused everything in it. In A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746) he argued that "true religion, in great part, consists in holy affections" Edwards, Religious Affections. By affections he did not mean passing moods but the strong inclinations of the heart: love for God, hatred of sin, delight in Christ. He took as his text Peter's words:

Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with an inexpressible and glorious joy,

1 Peter 1:8

Then he drew careful distinctions. How intense a feeling is, what it does to the body, how fluently a person talks about religion: none of these, he said, proves that it is true or false. The surest sign of grace is its fruit in Christian practice. Jesus said, "By their fruit you will recognize them" (Matthew 7:16-20), and Paul names that fruit: "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Galatians 5:22-23).

Pietism and the Awakening reminded the church that faith cannot stay in the head, that we must be born again, and that true grace moves the heart and bears fruit in life. They also showed what happens when feeling and experience drift from the truth of Scripture. That the same Edwards who most warmly defended religion of the heart also tested it most strictly is perhaps the lesson of the age. On turning to God, see also What is repentance?

Practice