There are some that would say private faith has no place in the public sphere. Historian Eddie L. Hyatt shows this was not what America’s Founders believed, and urges all Americans to recapture their vision that linked faith and freedom together.

In a meeting with Delaware Indian chiefs in 1779, George Washington commended them for their request that their youth be trained in American schools. He assured the chiefs that America would look upon them “as their own children” and then said,

You do well to wish to learn our arts and our ways of life and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are. Congress will do everything they can to assist you in this wise intention.

Washington’s freedom in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with this Indian tribe was normal for the founding generation for such freedom was rooted in the original American vision. This original vision was brought here by the Jamestown settlers of Virginia, the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England, the Baptists of Rhode Island, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and other Christian reform groups who were drawn to this land with a proactive vision burning in their hearts.

The Original American Vision

Indeed, the original American vision was for a land of individual liberty and a place from which the Gospel would be spread to the ends of the earth. America’s Founders were not shy in expressing this vision for they believed, that in this world, real freedom could only be realized in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

John Adams, circa 1815, portrait by Gilbert Stuart.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

This link between freedom and the Gospel was expressed by America’s second president, John Adams, just two weeks before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. In a letter to his cousin, Zabdiel, a minister of the Gospel, Adams wrote, “Statesmen, my dear sir, may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion [Christianity] and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles, upon which Freedom can securely stand” (Hyatt, Pilgrims and Patriots, 174).

Adams was not expressing anything new or novel for the idea of freedom rooted in the Gospel of Christ was a common American belief brought here by the very first European immigrants to this land. Consider the following quotes.

“From these very shores the Gospel shall go forth, not only to this New World, but to all the world.”
Rev. Robert Hunt, April 29, 1607, as he and the Jamestown settlers, who had just landed at Cape Henry, gathered in prayer around a large oak cross they had brought from England.

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.