If my mainline seminary education was typical, very little is taught about Pietism. When I found a dingy copy of Pia Desideria at a used book sale while on vacation a few years after graduation, I recognized the title and its author, Philipp Jakob Spener, but could not remember much else. Reading it, I had the reaction that quite a few people still have. The book was obviously written centuries ago, and while it doesn’t have that “contemporary air” that reviewers are always finding in old books, some of what Spener addressed had direct application to our present situation.

And so began my interest in “the flowering of the German Lutheran Churchly Pietists” a period from 1675-1725, roughly spanning the careers of Spener and August Hermann Francke. I still await the awakening of fellow clergy and our professors to its benefits. There have been a few stirrings. Bethel had a conference on “The Pietist Impulse” in 2009, and a collection of articles was released in 2011 as The Pietist Impulse in Christianity. The label Pietism is tossed around a bit in social media, and I was even interviewed recently for a podcast, but for the most part, pietism is spoken of as a form of legalism, basically. We also hear that pietists are anti-intellectual, are all about having a religious experience, they don’t care about the Sacraments, and all sorts of things that I do not see in my historical research. Of course, the problem here is we are talking about is a movement spanning four hundred years, and radicals who really were “enthusiasts” are included under that label, but we should follow the advice that a movement is known by its broad middle and not its fringes.

Roger Olson and Christian Winn have attempted to explain how a “good word got a bad reputation” in the readable, historical and theological work Reclaiming Pietism. It will have to be seen if this 2015 offering from Wm. B. Eerdmans is up to the task of its title. After all, as they say, not even religious scholars in the United States today know what Pietism is. That is a little odd since the two most influential forms of Christianity here were Puritanism and Pietism. No American history course is complete without a segment on the Puritans, yet as Olson and Winn point out there is a good case to be made that Pietism was just as influential if not more so.

It is as if Pietism fell off the radar. When mentioned at all, it is a pejorative term. It may be surprising for Americans to learn that Pietism studies are taken seriously in Germany. They see, as we should, that it was important to their development. It is perhaps worth noting that the Wikipedia page for the former dean of Pietism research in America is in German.

In Germany in the 1980s and 1990s Martin Brecht and Johannes Wallmann had a long debate whether the movement should be dated from the time of Johan Arndt and include Reformed thinkers from Britain and the Netherlands, or if it was begun by Philipp Jakob Spener and properly understood as having Lutheran roots. Germans followed the papers from Brecht and Wallman with great interest and academics took sides. Only a handful of people here know anything about this.

If for no other reason than giving educators a resource to fill that blank, Reclaiming Pietism meets a need. However, since it is a clearly written, historical survey taking advantage of the work of Stoeffler from about fifty years ago and the more recent work of Douglas Shantz, Jonathan Strom and others, it may well excite even more research. Olson and Winn are leading scholars themselves in the new Pietism research, Winn having been a student of Donald Dayton at Drew concentrating in the work of the Blumhardts before teaching at Bethel University in St. Paul, and Olson having a long career as an educator and author, now teaching at Baylor.

Excerpts from the paper “The Petersens and the Silesian Kinderbeten Revival” by Eric Jonas Swensson.

Phillip Jakob Spener (1635 – 1705), known as the “Father of Pietism.”

Lutheranism is a tradition born out of a dispute within the Roman Catholic Church. The blooming of German Lutheran Pietism, 1675-1725, a period commencing with Phillip Jakob Spener’s Pia Desideria and ending with the death of his protégé August Hermann Francke, was a movement with less bloodshed than the Reformation, but nevertheless one of great upheaval. … Martin Brecht, one of the deans of German Pietist history, … said that he thought the future direction of Pietist studies would be how the Pietists were forerunners of the Pentecostal movement.

August Hermann Francke (1663 – 1727), pastor and professor of theology, leader of Lutheran Pietism.

I found this really interesting, delightful in fact, because it is something I always suspected; however, this is significant because it was made by the main editor of Pietist studies. That Pietists were Pentecostal is not a recent discovery, it is actually basis of the charges against the Charismatic movement made nearly thirty years ago, one made in a book by a Lutheran historian, Dr Carter Lindberg, who said that the Spiritualists of the time of Luther, the Spener-Francke Pietists and the participants in the Lutheran Charismatic Revival were all cut from the same cloth.¹ Lindberg’s book is interesting, but it is problematic. In my opinion he is correct in making the connections; however, it is obvious that it is an attempt to discredit both Pietism and Pentecostalism. Clearly there is much more work to be done on the subject, but it is work which may have to wait as there is very little interest in the subject by scholars of Lutheranism and little interest in anything involving Lutheranism outside of Lutherans. …

The Petersens

Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649 – 1727).

German historian and Pietist scholar Emmanuel Hirsch called Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649-1727) and Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644-1724) “two of the most fascinating representatives of Pietist fanatics.”⁵ Johann studied theology, philosophy, and poetry at leading German universities Gießen, Rostock, Wittenberg, Leipzig and Jena. He was pastor at Hannover in 1677, was quickly made Superintendent and Hofprediger (court preacher)  in Eutin (1678), in 1686 he returned to Rostock for the Doctor of Theology degree, in 1688 he returned to being a Superintendent until 1692 when he was in trouble again for his teachings. Besides being a “fanatic,” which of course, is all in the eyes of the beholder, Petersen was a respected man of letters who was a professor of poetry, which at that time meant teaching composition of poetry in Latin. Petersen was respected by intellectuals such as Leibniz, who suggested he write a long poem on the history of the world up to its consummation. The year 1692 proved to be the only time he was “fired” for his beliefs, and he spent the next thirty five years free to study, pray and write under the patronage of pious nobles. Peterson forms an important link between Spener and Radical Pietists for historians.⁶ Radicals were those who left the Church so they had some freedom to engage in speculative theology, and while they must be viewed individually, all were motivated by millennialism. Hans Schneider wrote, “In dealing with radical Pietism, it is impossible to miss the fact that the great significance eschatology was afforded in Pietism only increased in Pietism’s radical representatives. For some figures and groups, it almost became the focal point of their theology and piety.”⁷

Eric Jonas Swensson’s paper, “The Petersens and the Silesian Kinderbeten Revival,” was originally presented at the 2011 Society for Pentecostal Studies convention held in Memphis, Tennessee.

Jonathan Phillips, Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (London: The Bodley Head, Random House, 2009), 424 pages, ISBN 9780224079372.

Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia—and How It Died (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 315 pages, ISBN 9780061472800.

If you would read back-to-back, as I did recently, the two books reviewed here, one by a historian of the Crusades and another by a Church historian on the Eastern Church, you will surely broaden your knowledge of world history and gain a surprising perspective on both ecumenism and the prospects of peace with religious extremism.

Both of these books are a good overview of the battlefield called “jihad” by Muslims and “Crusade” by Christians and contain insights into the mistakes made as well as ways people have been successful in working together, though the mistakes far outweigh what went right. Jonathan Phillips is the expert on Crusades history and European medieval secular and religious politics, while Philip Jenkins addresses religious matters in-depth.

If we might borrow from Socrates’ saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” we ought to grasp that no movement in the history of humanity was either simple or pure. Phillips does a good job of sustaining the point that both the call to Crusade by popes and the response from the nobles and people was a mixture of sincerely held religious beliefs and the desire for success, power and wealth. Moderns like to say that the Crusades show what is wrong with religion and the Church, but leave out (probably from ignorance) that the Crusades began with a request from Christians in the Middle East, not a European desire for a blood frenzy. However, what Pope Urban II in 1095 decided to do with the appeal from Emperor Alexius of Constantinople and each and every occasion for “taking the cross’ until the reconquest of Granada in 1492 was a mixture of piety and pride resulting in the waste of human lives as well as multiple failures in the goals they hoped to achieve. For example, what the Emperor had in mind was a special forces team of perhaps 300 knights but what happened was one of history’s first carefully orchestrated international public relations campaigns, resulting in an army of tens of thousands of princes and peasants on a long march to Jerusalem. The misdeeds and missteps along the way are well known, but Phillips’ research is highly informative and I learned a great deal. As he points out, it is amazing that those in the First Crusade were successful at all, yet they were the most successful of all.