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The Thirty Years' War
(1618-48) must be seen as one of the circumstances out of which the desire
for spiritual renewal emerged. Although modern historical research has
modified the exaggerated contemporary accounts of the war's effects, it is
unquestioned that distress was widespread and profound. In some places the
economy was reduced to barter, schools were closed, churches were burned,
the sick and needy were forgotten. Not unexpectedly spiritual and moral
deterioration accompanied the physical destruction. Drunkenness, sexual
license, thievery, and greed were the despair of faithful pastors and
earnest laymen. | |
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During the war some notable signs of renewal began to appear. There
reemerged, for example, an interest in the earlier devotional literature,
some of which reflected the pious mysticism associated with such names as
Johannes Tauler (c. 1300-61),
Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471),
and other German, Dutch, and even Spanish authors. The mystical tradition
had lived on into the Reformation century and found representatives in
Kaspar Schwenckfeld (1489-1561), Valentin Weigel (1533-88), and Jakob Böhme
(1575-1624). Although both Lutherans and Calvinists
opposed these mystics, many of their religious and theological ideas were
subsequently absorbed by orthodox theologians. (see also Index: Christianity) | |
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After the Peace of Westphalia
in 1648 that ended the war, Catholicism regained some territories from
Lutheran Protestantism: first, because the rise of toleration was somewhat
more rapid in Protestant countries than in Catholic lands and, second,
because Louis XIV identified French power with universal French acceptance
of the Roman Catholic faith. In 1685 he revoked the Edict
of Nantes and expelled thousands of Huguenots, who fled to England,
Holland, or Germany, much to the advantage of those countries. Several of
the French refugees became prominent in English religious life, and in
Prussia groups of them founded flourishing congregations known as the French
Reformed. In 1702 a determined group of Huguenots in the mountains of the Cévennes
in France, known as the Camisards,
rose in rebellion but was suppressed by military power two years later.
There was a further small outbreak of war in 1709. For a time the few
surviving Huguenot congregations met only in secret. They were led by Antoine
Court (1695-1760), who secured ordination from Zürich and
founded (1730) a college at Lausanne to train pastors. French Protestants
barely held out until the French Revolution, after which they had a revival. | |
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France gained Alsace
in 1648. This enabled Catholics to increase rapidly, and Protestants
decreased in strength. Strassburg, once one of the leading cities of the
Protestant Reformation, returned its cathedral to the Catholics (1681) and
became a town with a large Catholic population. Louis XIV ruled the Palatinate
for nine years and allowed the French Catholics to share the churches with
the Protestants; though he was compelled to surrender the country at the Treaty
of Rijswijk (1697) to the Holy Roman Empire, a clause (the Simultaneum)
of the treaty (added at the last moment and not recognized by the
Protestants) preserved certain legal rights and endowments of Catholics in
Protestant churches. As a result of France's greater power Protestant
authority in the Rhineland between Switzerland and the Netherlands
diminished. (see also Index: France) | |
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Another shock to Protestantism was the conversion of Augustus
II, elector of Saxony, to Roman Catholicism in 1697. It appeared as
though Protestantism was not even safe in its original home. The conversion
involved political motives; Augustus was a candidate for the throne of
Poland and was loyal to his new allegiance, assisting the Roman Catholic
Church in Poland and also, somewhat, in Saxony; but such assistance had no
effect on the Lutheranism of Saxony. | |
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The second half of the 17th century was at once the high age of
Protestant systematic orthodoxy and the age when the first signs of its
dissolution appeared. The axioms of the Reformation were worked out in a
great and systematic body of doctrine.
(see also Index: Reformed
church) | |
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The theologians defended and the pastors taught Luther's or Calvin's
dogmatic systems--relying also upon authoritative sources such as the Formula
of Concord (1577) in Lutheranism or the conclusions of the Synod
of Dort (1618) in Calvinism--which were extended and made into a
tradition. Even when the system was not of the ordinary Protestant
tradition, it was generally worked out in many volumes, based upon coherent
axioms, defended against all assailants, appealing always to reason and to
biblical authority and seldom to feeling or conscience. This age has
sometimes been known as the age of Protestant scholasticism.
But that pejorative term came from a posterity that would no longer accept
the axioms on which the systems were founded. These were the last scriptural
theologians before the period of the Enlightenment, when the understanding
of Scripture was altered. The old axioms were changed by Pietism, science,
and philosophy. | |
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Influences from English
Puritanism reached the
Continent through the translation of works by Richard Baxter (1615-91),
Lewis Bayly (1565-1631), and John Bunyan (1628-88). Most frequently read
were Baxter's A Call to the
Unconverted, Bayly's The Practice
of Piety, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress. | |
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Dutch Pietism, influenced by the Englishman William
Ames (1576-1633) whose Medulla
Sacrae Theologiae (1623) and De
Conscientia (1630) were basic textbooks for "federal theology"
and Puritan casuistry in England and New England, was represented by Willem
Teellinck, Johannes Coccejus, Gisbertus Voetius, and Jodocus van Lodensteyn.
Impulses from these men became a part of the reform movement that had
already appeared in German Lutheran circles and was to be known as
"Reform Orthodoxy." Older historians of Pietism, notably Albrecht
Ritschl, paid little or no attention to this reform phenomenon within
Lutheranism. Ritschl saw Pietism as an alien mysticism uncongenial to the
spirit of both Luther and the 17th-century theologians. More recent scholars
(E. Benz, M. Schmidt, H. Leube, F.W. Kantzenbach) have exposed the
Ritschlian prejudice and deepened the understanding of the role played by
such representatives of "Reform Orthodoxy" as Johann
Arndt (1555-1621) and Johann Dannhauer (1603-66). The "pectoral
[heart] theology" of these orthodox Lutherans found its highest
expression and widest audience in the writings of Arndt, who, rather than
Philipp Jakob Spener, can be called the "father of Pietism." His
chief work, Four Books on True
Christianity (1606-10), was soon being read in countless homes. Although
Arndt developed devotionally the unio
mystica (mystical union), a 17th-century Lutheran doctrinal addition to
the ordo salutis (order of salvation), the central Arndtian theme was
not that of mystical union. Rather, he stressed repentance, regeneration,
and the new life, and this was the very essence of Pietism. | |
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Alongside the orthodox piety of the 17th century one of the most
significant contributions to spiritual renewal was the rich treasures of
Lutheran hymnody. Examples
from this classical period of church song are the works of Philipp Nicolai
(1556-1608; "Wake, Awake" and "How Brightly Beams the Morning
Star!"), Paul Gerhardt (1607-76; "O Sacred Head Now Wounded,"
"O How Shall I Receive Thee," "Put Thou Thy Trust in
God"); and Martin Rinkart (1586-1649; "Now Thank We All Our
God"). | |
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The various streams of concern for renewal converged in the life and
work of Spener
(1635-1705). In 1666, after having earned his theological doctorate at
Strasbourg, he was called to be Senior of the clergy in Frankfurt am Main,
where he was soon distressed by the conspicuous worldliness of the city. His
sermons urged repentance and renewal, and each Sunday afternoon he held
catechism classes for both children and adults. This led to efforts to
revitalize the rite of confirmation, which, since the days of Martin Bucer,
had been practiced in the Church of Hesse (Frankfurt). (see also Index:
Germany) | |
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The origin of the so-called collegia pietatis(assembly of piety) has been traced to a sermon of 1669, in which Spener
exhorted the laity to come together on Sunday afternoon not to drink, play
cards, or gamble, as was the custom among Frankfurt's smart set, but to
review the morning's sermon and to engage in devotional reading and
conversation "about the divine mysteries." The next year, at the
request of a few parishioners, such meetings were held each Sunday and
Wednesday at Spener's home. Although some of the Frankfurt ministers, over
whom Spener was superintendent, took a dim view of the collegia
pietatis, the practice flourished and in time became a distinguishing
feature of the movement. Those who attended the conventicles were soon
called Pietists. | |
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In a relatively short time, Spener became a household name in Germany.
Through his writings and extensive correspondence, especially with men in
high places, Spener came to be called "the spiritual counselor of all
Germany." Most significant was the publication in 1675 of his Pia
Desideria (Pious
Desires). The book's first
part reviewed the low estate of the church. He charged civil authorities,
who since before the Peace of Augsburg (1555) were the de jure heads of the
church, with irresponsible caesaropapism
(doctrine of state control over church). He likewise flayed the clergy, many
of whom were scandalous and self-seeking, often confusing assent to
"true doctrine" with faith. The laymen, too, he claimed, were not
blameless. Drunkenness must not be excused as a German peccadillo;
prostitution, adultery, fornication, homosexuality, thievery, and assault
must be rooted out lest people lose God's promised salvation. The second
part of the work reminded readers of the possibility of better conditions in
the church: ". . . we can have no doubt that God promised His church
here on earth a better state than this." When the full number of
heathen (Gentiles) had been brought in, God would even convert the Jews. But
the fulfillment of these hopes was not to be achieved by sitting with folded
hands. Part three, therefore, set forth a six-point reform program: | |
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1. The Word of God--the whole Bible, not merely the pericopes (biblical
texts used in a set sequence in worship services)--must be made known widely
through public and private reading, group study (conventicles
under the guidance of pastors), and family devotions. | |
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2. There should be a reactivation of Luther's idea of the priesthood
of believers, which included not only the "rights of the
laity" but also responsibility toward one's fellow men. | |
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3. People should be taught that Christianity consists not only in
knowing God's will but also in doing it, especially by implementing the
command to love one's neighbour. | |
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4. Religious controversies with unbelievers and heretics unfortunately
may be necessary. If they cannot be avoided, they should be entered
prayerfully and with love for those in error. | |
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5. Theological education must be reformed. Professors must see that
future pastors are not only theologically learned but spiritually committed. | |
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6. Finally, preaching
should have edification and the cultivation of inner piety as its goal. | |
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Initially the Pia Desideria was
received with enthusiasm and given wide acclaim. Some clergymen, however,
felt threatened by the implications of the reform program's emphasis on the
laity. Professors resented Spener's criticism of scholastic theology and
advocacy of curricular reform. Spener's response was to emphasize more and
more the collegia pietatis.
Contrary to Spener's wishes the conventicles in time became divisive and
abrasively donatistic (referring to the Early Church heresy that held that
priests must be morally righteous or the sacraments would not be valid),
tending to develop into "little churches within the church" (ecclesiolae in ecclesia). In an attempt to stem separatism and other
questionable attitudes, Spener wrote tracts that expounded the doctrines of
the spiritual priesthood (1677) and ecclesiology (1684). In the latter he
argued that despite the faults of the church its teachings were not false
and separation from services and sacraments was wrong. | |
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Spener's influence had spread widely by 1686. In many circles, not least
among the nobility, he was praised and imitated. In other quarters his
emphases produced vigorous and, in many instances, unjust criticism. Weary
of opposition and controversies, Spener accepted a call to be the court
chaplain in Dresden, where he was soon disillusioned by the unresponsiveness
and vulgarity of the court and the hostility of the pastors in this
stronghold of orthodoxy. Two items of special significance from the Dresden
period should be noted: (1) There he wrote his Impediments
to Theological Study (1690), which was hardly calculated to win friends
at the famous Saxon University of Leipzig; (2) there, too, he made the
acquaintance of a young instructor, August
Hermann Francke (1663-1727), who was to become in a sense Spener's
successor and the second great leader of Pietism. | |
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By 1691 Spener welcomed a call from the elector of Brandenburg, who soon
brought in other Pietists, opened his domain to persecuted French Huguenots,
and made Berlin a strong spiritual centre, thus taking religious leadership
away from rival Saxony. All of this was enhanced by the founding of a new
university at Halle (1694), the theological faculty of which became, with
Spener's and Francke's influence, the academic centre of Pietism. (see also Index:
Halle-Wittenberg, Martin Luther
University of) | |
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Spener's years in Berlin were not without bitterness. The conflict
between Orthodoxists and Pietists had mounted to a high pitch. The
theological faculty at Wittenberg, for example, charged Spener with 284
deviations and prayed that God would save "our Lutheran Zion" from
the ravages of pietistic heresies. | |
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During his last years Spener collected and edited several volumes of his
papers (Theologische Bedencken),
continued his friendship with and support of Francke at Halle, and,
significantly, served as a sponsor at the baptism of Nikolaus
von Zinzendorf, who was to lead evangelical Pietism in a new
direction. Spener died on Feb. 5, 1705. | |
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Meanwhile, Francke became the central figure of Pietism. During his
student years at Leipzig he had been engaged in group Bible study, being one
of the organizers of a collegium
philobiblicum (assembly of Bible lovers), dedicated largely to the
scholarly rather than devotional approach to the Scriptures. A religious
experience in 1687 led Francke to make conversion--characterized
by a severe penitential struggle and commitment to holy living--the norm for
distinguishing the true Christians from unbelievers. Francke's Pietism,
going beyond the spirit of Spener, came to stress a legalistic and ascetic
way of life. Under Francke's leadership (he became professor in 1698) Halle
became famous not only for its university but for the many "Halle
institutions" that sprang up: an orphan asylum with affiliated schools,
a publishing house and Bible institute, a Collegium Orientale Theologicum
(Oriental College of Theology) for linguistic training of missionaries, and
an infirmary that the medical faculty welcomed as compensation for the
university's lack of a clinic. All of this gave to Halle and Franckean
Pietism an energetic and activist character. | |
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One of Francke's institutions in Halle was the paedagogium (1698), which was intended for the education of boys
whose well-to-do parents lived at a distance. Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von
Zinzendorf (1700-60) attended the Halle boarding school from 1710 to 1716.
Having been drawn earlier to Spener, his godfather, Zinzendorf was now
greatly stimulated by Francke. As a 14-year-old lad he organized the
"Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed," whose youthful members
pledged themselves to reach out in ever-expanding love to "the whole
human race." (see also Index:
United Kingdom) | |
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By 1721 Zinzendorf had settled down on his estate (Berthelsdorf) near
the Bohemian border, where he brought believers together in a nonseparatist ecclesiola
in ecclesiawhich
denied the Halle Pietists' demand for penitential remorse as a mark of
"heart religion." Zinzendorf formulated the slogan that came to
play such a great role in the history of revivals: "Come as you are. It
is only necessary to believe in the atonement of Christ." | |
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A small band of Moravian exiles took refuge on his estate in 1722.
Looking upon this event as an opportunity to realize his cherished project
of "the Mustard Seed," he gave up his position in the Saxon civil
service and welcomed other Moravian refugees. They, like Zinzendorf, had
been primarily influenced by Pietism and had only a hazy idea that their
ancestors were Hussites. Zinzendorf soon organized the colony, now called
Herrnhut, into the community of the Bohemian Brethren. They were not to
separate from the Lutheran Church of Saxony. They would attend services in
the village church at Berthelsdorf and call upon the local pastor for
ministerial acts; but they were to look upon themselves as "the
salt" of the earth, an ecclesiola
from which "heart religion" would be disseminated throughout
Christendom. Under Zinzendorf's "superintendency" the Herrnhut
Brethren became more and more a distinct church, the reborn Moravian
Church, or Unitas Fratrum. Although Zinzendorf received a license as
a minister in 1734 and three years later was consecrated bishop, he left
Herrnhut under pressure in 1736, traveling in western Germany, England, and
America. The chief centres of his missionary work in Pennsylvania were
Germantown and Bethlehem. He returned to Herrnhut in 1749 and presided over
the Church of the Brethren until his death (1760). | |
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The influence of the Moravians on the Evangelical
Awakening in England was significant. By 1775 there were 15 Moravian
congregations in England, and it was in one of these that John
Wesley, founder of Methodism,
had his famous "Aldersgate
Street Experience" (1738) as he was listening to a Moravian
preacher reading Luther's Preface to
the Romans:
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while he was describing the change
which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart
strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ . . .; and an assurance
was given me that he had taken away my
sins." | |
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He allied himself with the Moravian society in Fetter Lane, London, and
the same year journeyed to Hernnhut to learn at first hand about the people
to whom he owed so much. Although Wesley later parted from the Moravians,
his initial experience of saving grace in the company of the Brethren shaped
the wide-reaching evangelical movement that associated the names of the two Wesleys
(John and Charles) and George Whitefield. | |
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A slightly different type of Pietism appeared in Württemberg, where
Spener had established relations with Swabian churchmen. Avoiding the
extremes of Franckean Pietism, it accepted conventicles but opposed all
temptation to separatism and sought an evangelical, as opposed to
legalistic, sanctification of life in the congregations. Interested in
academic theology and a scholarly study of the Scriptures, the leader of Württemberg
Pietism, Johann Albrecht Bengel
(1687-1752), was a pioneer in textual criticism and biblical, in
contradistinction to systematic, theology. His Gnomon
Novi Testamenti(1752;
"Interpretation of the New Testament") was widely distributed in
the Lutheran and English world; a fresh approach to the Bible by its
emphasis on Heilsgeschichte (the
history of salvation). | |
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Radical Pietism always lurked beneath the surface of Evangelical
Pietism. The appeal to mystical and emotional experiences and the depiction
of the church as "unholy Babylon" were common characteristics of
Radical Pietism. Difficult to trace historically because of a tendency to
flare up spontaneously, it can nevertheless be divided into two main forms.
The first was a fanatic sectarianism in which ecstatic and visionary
elements were dominant. A favourite doctrine was chiliasm (referring to the
thousand-year reign of Christ at the end of history), in which the apocatastasis (the eventual salvation of all men) played a large
role. Somewhat different but still under the first rubric were the
"inspired congregations," whose inspiration was expressed in
convulsive physical phenomena accompanied with glossolalia,
"speaking in tongues." The second main form was
"separatistic" or "nonchurch" and emphasized the "inner
light." Because the "inner light" and human reason
were often identified, the advocates of "Spiritual Pietism" tended
to move toward Rationalism (see below). Chief among these men were Gottfried
Arnold (1666-1714), Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734), and Gerhard Tersteegen
(1697-1769). (see also Index: Christianity,
millennium) | |
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As in Germany, the age of orthodoxy in the Dano-Norwegian kingdom had
its deeply spiritual side, which came to expression in men like Bishop Jens
Dinesen Jersin (died 1632) and Holger Rosenkrantz (died 1642), both of whom
taught the necessity of pious living. Also, as in Germany, the "reform
orthodoxy" was evidenced in hymns, especially those of Thomas Kingo
(1634-1703). Pietism, as such, arrived in Copenhagen at the turn of the
century and was welcomed, strangely enough, by the unpietistic king Frederick
IV. It was during his reign (1699-1730) that the royal chaplain, the
German R.J. Lütkens, was able to give status to pietistic pastors and
to win the King for the cause of missions in India. The King initiated a
search for missionaries
and, finding none in his domain, he turned to Germany, where Lütken's
contacts brought about the connection with two young Halle-trained Pietists,
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1683-1719) and Heinrich
Plütschau (1678-1747). Ordained at Copenhagen in 1705, these men
became the founders of the famous Tamil mission at Tranquebar, India, and
stimulated foreign mission interest among the Halle Pietists. To this period
belongs the Christian work among the semipagan Sami (then known as Lapps) in
northern Norway carried on
by the Norwegian Pietist Thomas von Westen. Another Norwegian, Hans Egede,
became the pioneer missionary in Greenland. King Christian
VI, known as the "Pietist on the throne," gave support to
numerous pietistic causes: an orphan home and schools modeled after Halle, a
missionary institute, and even conventicles (the 1741 decree permitted them
only under pastoral leadership). The name of Erik
Pontoppidan, court preacher at Copenhagen and later bishop of Bergen
in Norway, was to have enduring significance largely because of his
excellent exposition of Luther's catechism, entitled Truth
unto GodlinessVirtually a national reader for many generations, especially in
Norway, this "layman's dogmatics" combined Law and Gospel,
orthodoxy and Pietism, in such a manner that its power persisted into
20th-century American Lutheranism. | |
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Original royal opposition to Pietism in Sweden
was softened only after Francke personally visited King Charles XII on his
Russian campaign. Meanwhile, Swedish students at Halle returned to their
homeland imbued with Francke's ideas and practices. Following the defeat of Charles
XII at Poltava in Russia (1709), thousands of Swedish prisoners of
war were quartered in Siberia. Many sought comfort in religion under the
leadership of a Swedish Pietist, J. Cederhielm. Correspondence with Halle
and the writings of Francke and Arndt produced a strong pietistic movement
in the prison camps from which only 5,000 of the original 30,000 captives
were able to return to Sweden by 1724. The zealous returnees carried their
pietistic convictions back to Swedish parishes. In a short time both church
and government looked upon Pietism as a threat to national unity. The result
was the Conventicle Act of 1726, which retarded Pietism and held Swedish
church life to conventional forms for the next century. Finns as well as
Swedes had followed Charles XII to defeat. Those who returned from Russia
were the apostles of a religious awakening. For a time the literature of
Pietism was influential, but due to the Conventicle Act of 1726 (Finland
was partially a Swedish domain), its role was somewhat limited. (see also Index:
hymn) | |
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Meanwhile, Pietism came to the Russian-occupied Baltic states, where it
experienced greater freedom than under the Swedes. From the foreign quarter
of Moscow, inhabited mainly by German Lutherans, the work of Francke reached
Peter the Great and some of his government ministers. | |
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In 1703 three pastors from New Sweden on the Delaware River ordained
Justus Falckner, a Halle-educated Pietist, for service among the Dutch
Lutherans in New York. Most of the Dutch Lutherans were of Pietist
orientation, as were the many Germans from the Rhineland and Southern German
valleys. These "Palatines," who settled in New York and
Pennsylvania, and the famous refugee Salzburgers, who settled in Georgia,
came via London where the Pietist court chaplain M. Ziegenhagen assisted
them on their way to America.
Accompanying the Salzburgers were two Francke-selected pastors, J.M.
Boltzius and I.C. Gronau, who naturally shaped the spiritual life of the
Georgia settlement. Zinzendorf's visit to America (1741-42) led to a clash
between his type of Pietism and that of Halle, represented by Henry
Melchior Mühlenberg (1711-87). The victory belonged to Mühlenberg,
who became the organizing genius and spiritual leader, later called
"The Patriarch of American Lutheranism." | |
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The first signs of a Rationalist movement, which was to have as powerful
an influence on Protestantism as the Pietists had had, may be traced back to
those few who at the end of the 16th century attacked Calvinism on grounds
of reason. In Leyden, the
Netherlands, Jacobus Arminius
(1560-1609) reacted against Calvinist doctrines of predestination
(God's foreordaining men to heaven or hell). Though anyone not a Calvinist
after a time came to be called Arminian, there were groups so designated in Holland
and England that had members who were more marked by their use of reason in
theology than by their opposition to Calvin. In England the enemies of such
liberal theologians gave them the name Latitudinarians.
The so-called Latitudinarians sought to maintain church unity based upon a
few fundamental articles of faith and otherwise to allow for a wide
diversity of doctrine, polity, and ways of worship. Their best
representatives were the Cambridge
Platonists--philosophical theologians at Cambridge (c.
1640-80)--who claimed that reason is the reflection of the divine mind
in the soul. (see also Index: Arminianism) | |
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During the 17th century philosophy, hitherto considered a handmaid to
theology, was expanded beyond the limits of Aristotelian philosophy and the
Bible and--partly due to natural science and partly due to the reflections
of thinkers from Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and René Descartes
(1596-1650) onward--developed its independence. The successes of science,
especially to be noted in the work of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727),
persuaded many men of the power of reason and, by 1680, of the necessity
that all things be tested by reason, including even those realms of the
conscience or spirit that hitherto had been thought inaccessible to reason.
The signs of the age of Rationalism were the rapid decline of belief in
witchcraft; the slow and painful rise of a belief in toleration; a more
widespread symbolic comprehension of conceptions like heaven and hell; and
the recognition of the small size of the planet Earth within the universe.
On the Continent Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) and G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716),
and in England John Locke (1632-1704), were regarded as the philosophers of
the age. Among the German theologians Christian
Wolff (1679-1754) of Halle approached theology almost as if it were a
form of mathematics, seeking for a truth that would be incontrovertible
among all reasonable men. Under prompting from Pietists of Halle, he was
expelled from Prussia in 1723. But before Wolff's death Rationalist
theologians had displaced the Pietists in control of Halle University and
had made it the centre of Rationalist theology among Protestants. (see also Index: science,
philosophy of) | |
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In England the same trend among the disciples of John Locke issued in
the Deists (especially John Toland, 1670-1722) for whom Christianity was
never mysterious and was understood only as a republication of the natural
religion of the human race. Like Wolff and his disciples the English Deists
had no permanent influence on the history of Protestantism, except by
forcing the theologians to answer them and thereby to treat the philosophy
of religion with seriousness. The most important of all the answers to the
Deists lay in the work of Bishop Joseph
Butler (1692-1752), whose sermons and Analogy
of Religion formed the most cogent defense of the basis of Christian
philosophy known in that age. (see also Index:
Deism) | |
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Rationalist theology, contemporaneous though certainly not in harmony
with Pietism and evangelicalism,
began to modify or even destroy the traditional orthodoxies--i.e.,
Lutheran or Calvinist--of
the later Reformation. The Rationalist theologians insisted that goodness in
God could not be different in kind from goodness in men and therefore that
God cannot do what in a man would be immoral. Though for the most part they
accepted the miracles of
the New Testament--until
toward the end of the 18th century--the Rationalists were critical of
miracles outside the New Testament, since they suspected everything that did
not fit their mechanistic view of the universe. | |
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Similar to the Pietists in Germany was the evangelical, or Methodist
(named from the use of methodical study and devotion), movement in England
led by John Wesley. While a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, Wesley
gathered a group of earnest students of the Bible about him, made a
missionary expedition to Georgia, and became a friend of the Moravians. Like
the Pietists he laid much emphasis upon the necessity of conversion
and devoted the remainder of his life to evangelistic preaching in England.
He did not intend any separation, but the parish
system of the Church of England as then organized was incapable of
adjustment to his plan of free evangelism and lay preachers. In 1744 Wesley
held the first conference of his preachers; soon this became an annual
conference, the governing body of the Methodist societies, and was given a
legal constitution in 1784. The Methodist movement had remarkable success,
especially where the Church of England was failing--in the industrial
parishes, in the deep countryside, in little hamlets, and in hilly country,
such as Wales, Cumberland, Yorkshire, and Cornwall. In 1768 Methodist
emigrants in the American colonies opened a chapel in New York, and
thereafter the movement spread rapidly in the United States. It also
succeeded in French-speaking cantons of Switzerland. | |
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The Methodist movement seized upon the elements of feeling and conscience
that Protestant orthodoxy had tended to neglect. It gave a renewed and
devotional impetus to the doctrines of grace
and justification and to the tradition of moral earnestness, which had once
appeared in Puritanism but which had temporarily faded during the reaction
against Puritanism in the
middle and late 17th century. In England it slowly began to strengthen the
tradition of free churchmanship though for a century or more many English
Methodists believed themselves to be much nearer the Anglican Church from
which they had issued than any other body of English Protestants. It enabled
hymns--hitherto confined
(except for metrical Psalms) to the Lutheran churches--slowly to be accepted
in other Protestants bodies, such as the Church of England, the
Congregationalists, and the Baptists. The evangelical movement of the 18th
century produced several of the most eminent of Christian hymn writers,
especially Philip Doddridge (1702-51) and Charles Wesley (1707-88). | |
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Though John Wesley himself had not been Calvinist, in Wales the
Methodists retained both the name and the theology of Calvinistic
Methodists. In the United States Methodism made even more rapid progress. | |
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Churches in the 13 colonies of the American states practiced the
Congregational or Baptist church polity on a scale not known in Europe. The
small Anabaptist groups
had required evidence of faith, and this sometimes meant public testimony to
the experience of conversion. In the larger congregations of America a
similar testimony--because it was given to a wider circle--became more
evident, more solemn, and at times more emotional. The pastors of the
Calvinistic tradition of New
England, trying to escape from the religion of forms and to seek the
religion of the heart, gave unusual stress to the necessity for an immediate
experience of salvation.
Pastors found that under certain conditions a wave of emotion could sweep
through an entire congregation and believed that they could here observe
conversion and its subsequent issue in a better life. The movement owed
something to the German Pietist T.J. Frelinghuysen (1691-c. 1748) and something to John Wesley's colleague George Whitefield
(1714-70). The chief mind at the beginning of the Great
Awakening, however, was that of an intellectual mystic rather than of
a conventional Calvinist preacher. Jonathan
Edwards (1703-58) was the Congregational pastor at Northampton in
Massachusetts, where the conversions began in 1734-35. In the middle years
of the 18th century waves of revivals
and conversions spread through the colonies. Though the revivals were led by
Congregationalists and Presbyterians, many small, independent, Bible-centred
groups, which often professed allegiance to Baptist teaching, came into
being because of the revivals. As Wesley in England and Zinzendorf in
Germany had been forced to carry their new methods outside the established
churches of their lands, so too were the American revivalistic leaders. | |
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The movement was not native to America. But the conditions of the
American frontier gave this kind of evangelicalism a new vigour, and from
America it permanently influenced the future development of Protestantism.
In the towns and new cities with moving populations, Protestantism found
methods that became a feature of evangelical endeavours to reach the
unregenerate or the unchurched crowds of the coming industrial cities. | |
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The American Revolution
and the French Revolution
changed the history of Western society and within it the history of the
Protestant movement. The American Constitution, with its inferred separation
of state and churches,
owed something to the spirit of free churchmanship that had been inherited
from colonial days, something to the religious mixture of immigrants
continually arriving from Europe, something to the reaction against the
"Church and King" alliance that prevailed in Britain, and
something to the secular spirit of the Enlightenment. With the French
Revolution and Napoleon, the idea of the secular state became an ideal for
many European liberals, especially among the anticlericals in Roman Catholic
countries. The American pattern was probably more influential than the
Napoleonic in Protestant Europe. The Protestant states of Germany,
Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, and Scotland, which were
all accustomed to established Protestant churches, for a time met no strong
demand anywhere for disestablishment. In all those countries the members of
the free, or dissenting, churches were able to secure complete toleration
and civil rights during the 19th century, but in no Protestant country was
the formal link between state and an established
church totally broken during the 19th century, except in Ireland
(1871) and in Wales (1914-19), where the Church of England was a minority.
At least as an outward and historical form, however, established churches
remained in England, Scotland, and all the Scandinavian countries. | |
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Early in the 19th century the greatest acts leading to reunion since the
Reformation were initiated. During the later 17th century the states of
Europe--especially as they allowed more than one denomination--moved slowly
toward toleration for all men as long as they were good citizens. The
Christian leaders, especially of the new Rational, or Latitudinarian,
school, sought to show that the doctrines that divided Protestants from each
other (if not Protestants from Catholics) mattered less than the truths upon
which they agreed. Among the Lutheran and Reformed, the German theologian George
Calixtus (1586-1656) already had sought to prove their essential
unity by showing that the doctrines that divided them were not essential to
faith. A Scotsman, John Durie
(1596-1680), traveled from England to eastern Germany and from Sweden to
Switzerland on practical endeavours to persuade churchmen to unite. In 1631
the Huguenot Synod of
Charenton (France) agreed to accept Lutherans who married Reformed or were
godparents, without compelling them to abandon their special beliefs, on the
ground that there was a sufficient agreement in the essential gospel between
the Lutheran and Reformed. Lutherans (except for Calixtus and his school)
could not take this view. Neither Calixtus nor Durie had much influence.
Leibniz and the French Roman Catholic bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet
(1627-1704) corresponded about the possibility of union between Catholics
and Protestants, but in vain. In Prussia, with a mainly Lutheran population
and a dynasty of Reformed princes, the policy of reconciliation became more
effective. In 1708 King Frederick
I built a "union-church" in Berlin, with the Lutheran Catechism
and the Heidelberg Catechism side by side on the altar. In 1817, in a
Prussia stimulated by the national revival that followed the fall of
Napoleon (1815), King Frederick
William III (1770-1840) used the third centenary of the Reformation to unite
the Lutheran and Reformed of Prussia by royal decree (the Prussian
Union), and despite resistance the union was slowly accepted by the
majority of Prussian congregations. Other, though not all, German states
succeeded in uniting their Protestant communities about the same time. Many
of the more conservative Lutherans, rejecting the Prussian Union, emigrated
to the United States. | |
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Before and for some time after 1815 an awakening occurred in Germany as
a reaction against the Enlightenment.
In philosophy, literature, and music it found expression in German Idealism
and Romanticism. In the
congregations the reaction took the form of Pietism. Pietistic orthodoxism
and biblicism continued to live on among "the quiet in the land."
Some solitary thinkers with pronounced religious interests sought to
preserve and awaken genuine Christianity and to point out the banality of
the Enlightenment. Among these was Johann
Georg Hamann (1730-88), a theologian given to brilliant paradoxical
thought, who understood Luther's theologia
crucis (theology of the cross) better than any other 18th-century
person. Matthias Claudius
(1740-1815) was another representative of the antirationalist mood of the
dawn of the 19th century. Johann
Friedrich Oberlin (1740-1826) mixed his biblicistic piety with a
concern for social missions. J.A. Urlsperger (1728-1806) sought to promote
piety by organizing the Christentumsgesellschaft ("A Society for
Christianity"), the German counterpart of the British Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge. Out of it grew the Basel Mission Society.
G.C. Storr (1746-1804) and J.F. Flatt (1759-1821) represented the "Old
Tübingen school" of biblical Supernaturalism. | |
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It was in such a climate that the revival of Pietism occurred. Many of
the people involved in it were not interested, at least in the beginning, in
reviving former confessional differences. They were satisfied with being
known as "Christians" or "evangelicals." But in time
some of these new Pietists, influenced by Romanticism's admiration for the
past, began to assert the need of linking their pietistic interests with the
traditional confessional heritage of the church. True religion (Pietism),
they argued, is really Lutheranism properly understood. Thus beginning with
a renewal of heart religion (Pietism), they came to a neoconfessionalism. | |
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There were three discernible "schools" in this revival of
Lutheranism. "The Repristination Theology" (i.e., restoration of earlier norms) made the 17th-century orthodoxy
normative for the interpretation of Martin Luther and the confessions, and
it fought the rising historical-critical approach to the Bible by affirming
the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of the original manuscripts
(autographs) of the Scriptures. Ernst
Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802-69) was the champion of this school of
"Old Lutherans." A second group, the Neo-Lutherans, felt that the
Repristinationists, though not basically wrong, needed correction and
improvement especially in their view of the church, the ministry, and the
sacraments. These Neo-Lutherans ("high churchmen"), influenced by
Romanticism, were the German
counterpart of the Oxford Movement in England. Chief exponents were August
Vilmar (1800-68) and Wilhelm Löhe (1808-72), the latter having strong
influence in American Lutheranism. The third group, the so-called Erlangen
school, rejected Rationalism, Repristination, and Romantic catholicizing of
the church. They asserted that theology must see the relationship of faith
to history, thus providing a new setting for understanding both the Bible
and the Lutheran confessions. Chief representatives were Gottfried Thomasius
(1802-75) and J.C.K. von Hofmann (1810-77). | |
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The Spener-Francke tradition of Pietism survived the age of Rationalism
in Denmark by being nurtured here and there by pietistic pastors and
congregations, especially in rural Jutland. The rebirth of Danish spiritual
life and the conquest of Rationalism in the first half of the 19th century,
however, came not from Pietism but from the religious and cultural impact of
N.F.S. Grundtvig
(1783-1872) and Søren
Kierkegaard (1813-55). Both of these men were profoundly religious
and at times may have sounded like Pietists, but neither had any essential
sympathy for Pietism. Grundtvig was in fact definitely opposed to Pietism,
while Kierkegaard, though stressing "the individual" and his
existential involvement in the truth, found little time for Pietism as such.
The actual renaissance of Pietism in Denmark was associated with the Inner
Mission Society (established in the 1850s) and its leader Vilhelm
Beck (1829-1901), who, deeply influenced by Kierkegaard's Øieblikket ("The Present Moment"), brought some of his
emphases into the church that Kierkegaard so bitterly criticized. | |
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Nineteenth-century Pietism in Norway may be seen in three episodes: (1)
the life and work of Hans Nielsen
Hauge (1771-1824), (2) the pietistic confessionalism of Gisle
Johnson (1822-94), and (3) the conflict over liberal theology (c.
1875-1908). Hauge was a layman theologically untrained but at home in
the Bible, Luther's catechism, and the works of Arndt, Pontoppidan, and
Kingo. Converted in 1796, his sense of mission eventually produced a
national revival. Hauge and Haugeanism, though sharply critical of the
established church, became an example of conventicle Christianity within the
framework of the state church. Arrested no fewer than 10 times for violation
of the long-neglected Conventicle Act of 1741, Hauge's final imprisonment
lasted from 1804 to 1811. Although he thought of himself solely as a
religious awakener, Hauge and his movement contributed to the sociopolitical
revival in Norway through the influence of laymen who had been trained in an
activistic type of Pietism. A characteristic feature of Haugeanism was its
concept of a person's daily work as a divine calling. Imitating Hauge's
example, many Haugeans became successful businessmen, shippers, and farmers. | |
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The second figure in Norwegian Pietism gave his name to a revival that
occurred in the 1850s, the Johnsonian Awakening. Influenced by the German
"Erlangen school," Johnson was joined on the theological faculty
in Christiania (Oslo) by a staunch Hengstenbergian Repristinationist, C.P.
Caspari, a converted German Jew. The Johnsonian Awakening, unlike the
lay-oriented Haugean movement, was consciously directed toward pastors and
church leaders. It produced powerful lay organizations that promoted inner
and foreign missions. | |
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The third phase of Norwegian Pietism was manifested in the conflict over
theological liberalism
during the last quarter of the 19th century. Increasingly the
university-oriented Norwegian intellectuals--clergy and lay--were drawn
toward liberal positivism, historical relativism, and progressive optimism,
the whole structure of which was based on natural science and biblical
criticism. The orthodox Pietists of the Johnsonian school led the attack on
the liberal professors now dominating the theological faculty. By the turn
of the century the idea of establishing a faculty independent of state
control and supported by the faithful in the congregations was born. This
was realized in 1908 when the Menighetsfakultetet (the Congregational
Faculty) was created. | |
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Like Norway, Sweden was visited with a variety of pietistic movements in
the 19th century. The first was militant revivalism in northern Sweden,
where Moravian Herrnhuters interested in Lapland missions merged their
enthusiasms with those of pietistic Lutherans and together were called the
"Old Pietists." Lay conventicles, encouraged by some clergymen,
emphasized devotional reading of the liturgy, the Bible, and Luther's and
Arndt's sermons. The movement, called the Läsare ("The
Readers"), soon came under attack, resulting in the emigration of a
group under Erik Jansson to Bishop
Hill, Ill. A second revival in the first half of the century was
associated with the name of Henrik Schartau (1757-1825), who was pastor and
dean at Lund, Swed. What distinguished Schartauism as a revival movement was
its strong churchly character. It was catechetical, liturgical, orthodox,
and anti-conventicle. Yet its profound piety produced an awakening in
southwest Sweden, the results of which were still noticeable in the 20th
century. The third revival occurred toward the middle of the century under
the leadership of Carl Olof
Rosenius (1816-68), a lay preacher strongly influenced by George
Scott, an English Methodist evangelist. Rosenian Pietism, or the "New
Evangelism," as it was called, made much of "objective
justification," appealing to sinners to "Come as you are."
Again, as in Denmark and Norway, a healthy inner mission society was one of
the fruits of revival, the National Missionary Society. Following the death
of Rosenius, leadership came into the hands of Paul Peter Waldenström
(1838-1917), whose subjective views of the atonement led to the formation of
the Swedish Mission Covenant Church (1878). (see also Index:
Moravian church) | |
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Generally speaking, the two Swedish universities, Lund and Uppsala,
represented high and low churchism respectively. The latter viewpoint
influenced Parliament to allow the Church of Sweden its own Convocation
(1865) with lay representation. | |
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The great 19th-century German and Scandinavian immigration began in
1839-40. The first Germans to arrive were "Old Lutherans" from
Prussia whose original pietistic impulses had given way to a high-church
confessionalism of the Hengstenbergian and "New Lutheranism" line.
Colonies of about 1,000 "Old Lutherans" under J.A.A. Grabau
settled in the vicinity of Buffalo and others in and around Milwaukee. They
were the forerunners of the Buffalo Synod (1845). Saxon immigrants, under
Martin Stephan and Carl F.W.
Walther likewise arrived in 1839 and settled near St. Louis to become
by 1847 the Missouri Synod. Stephan had practiced conventicle
Pietism in Germany and had influenced Walther and others in this direction.
Walther and other Missouri Synod leaders later moved to a staunch
confessionalism that left little room for conventional Pietism. The
Norwegians, who also arrived in 1839, were almost entirely of the Haugean
persuasion, one of their first leaders, Elling Eielsen (1804-83), being an
extremely legalistic lay follower of Hauge. Most of the subsequent waves of
immigrants were sympathetic to Pietism, the laity inclining toward
Haugeanism, the clergy towards Johnsonianism. The Danish immigrants, fewer
in number, eventually split over the question of Pietism. The anti-Pietists,
or Grundvigians, were known as "the Happy Danes," while the
pietistic, inner-mission disciples of Beck were denominated "the Sad
Danes." The Swedish-Americans reflected "Läsare" and
Rosenian Pietism initially, but after the Evangelical Lutheran Augustana
Synod was formed in 1860 it soon began to evidence a churchly type of
Pietism that perhaps could be traced to Schartauism. | |
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The great Protestant advance depended in part on the existence of the
secular state and toleration. As late as 1715 the Austrian
government had denied all protection of the law to the numerous Hungarian
Protestants. But after the French Revolution the few survivals of this old
church-state unity were rapidly whittled away. Even in countries in which
one church was established, all churches were given some form of protection;
Protestant groups could spread, though slowly and under difficulty, in Spain
or Italy. Even in tsarist
Russia, which did not recognize toleration, Baptists obtained a foothold
from which they were to build the second largest Christian denomination of
Soviet Russia. Wherever western European and American ideas were
influential, Protestant evangelists could work fairly freely, especially in
the colonial territories of Africa and India. (see also Index:
religious toleration) | |
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Though the secular state thus helped Protestant (and Roman Catholic)
expansion and variety, it also confronted all churches with urgent new
problems. The American pattern, in which the state must have no
constitutional connection with religion, stemmed as much from the old
Congregational tradition as from the ideas of the Enlightenment and was
never antireligious in intention. It was influential among the older
churches of Europe. In Protestant countries where state and church had been
in alliance since the Reformation the effect was twofold: the state became
more neutral in its attitude toward the leading denominations of its
territory; and the state church pressed harder toward independence from all
forms of state control. Lutheran Germany produced a strong movement toward
independence in the mid-19th century. In Scotland the evangelical movement
demanded independence from the state in the appointment of ministers to
parishes, and when this was refused by the courts and by the government,
nearly half the Church of Scotland (1843) under the leadership of Thomas
Chalmers (1780-1847) left the established church to found the Free
Church of Scotland. The two churches continued side by side (until
their eventual reunion in 1929). In Switzerland a Reformed theologian,
Alexandre-Rodolphe Vinet (1797-1847), pressed for the separation of church
and state and in 1845 founded the Free Church. | |
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In England the move toward independence in a state church was a feature
of the Oxford Movement,
founded by John Henry Newman
(1801-90) in 1833. Here the movement took a course unique in Protestantism.
It asserted independence by emphasizing all the Catholic elements within the
traditional heritage of Protestantism and so created a school of thought
that, though remaining within a Protestant Church, came close to repudiating
the Protestant tradition as it was then commonly understood in Europe and
America. Newman himself became a Roman Catholic in 1845 and was made a
cardinal in 1879. Under the leadership of the survivors the Oxford Movement
brought about a transformation in the worship, organization, and teaching of
the Church of England
within the traditional polity of an established and Protestant church. The
remarkable sign of this change was the revival from 1840 on of nunneries and
from 1860 on of monasteries. (see also Index:
monasticism) | |
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In German Lutheranism, under the influence of Pietism, Theodor
Fliedner (1800-64) established in 1836 a "mother-house" for
deaconesses that became a model for the many successor diaconate orders in
Germany, Scandinavia, and the United States. These were the first such to
appear in Protestant communities since the dissolution of monastic
communities during the Reformation. In the mid-20th century France produced
a celebrated community at Taizé devoted to ecumenical prayer and
study. (see also Index: Taizé
community) | |
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On the whole the trend was always, though slowly, toward a free church
in a free state. A few powerful conservative theorists, especially Friedrich
Julius Stahl (1802-61) among German Lutherans, strenuously defended one
version or another of the old link between throne and altar and the
necessity for a single privileged church if revolution or rationalism were
to be avoided. These theorists were usually viewed, however, as survivals
from a past age. Much more powerful and contemporary were the theorists who,
in resisting the trend toward denominationalism and pluralism, saw the
church as the religious side of the nation and therefore wanted to broaden
its doctrines and liberalize its polity. In England Frederick Denison
Maurice defended the established church upon these liberal lines; and in
Denmark, more easily because the population was so largely Lutheran, N.F.S.
Grundtvig shrank from every form of denomination or confessionalism and
wanted to make Christianity the spiritual aspect of Danish national life.
Grundtvig's movement had extraordinary success; but Denmark, and to a lesser
extent Sweden and Norway,
were exceptions to the trend. The older Protestant churches steadily moved
farther away from the state and unsteadily but gradually secured more
autonomy in their organization. | |
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Since the 16th century the two centres of Protestant political power had
been Germany and England. With German unity effected under Prussia and the
rise to world power of Britain, the political force of Protestantism was
stronger during the 19th century than at any time since the Reformation. But
about 1860 it began to be clear that a third force was emerging in the
United States. After 1820 American frontier conditions helped to extend the
variety of Protestant forces, and denominations such as the Disciples
of Christ, formed in 1832 from revivalist groups, arose. These
Protestant denominations in time extended their influence beyond America.
Many of the immigrants to America were Catholic, and in time the largest
single denomination in the United States was to be the Roman Catholic. But
the tone of American leadership and culture remained Anglo-Saxon, liberal,
and Protestant. Many Germans and Scandinavians, usually of the Lutheran
persuasion, emigrated to America, and American Lutheranism expanded until it
became a centre of Lutheran life and thought of a weight equal to the
original homes of Lutheranism in Germany and Scandinavia. Because the
Lutheran leadership came largely from European pietistic groups, the
American Lutheran churches tended to be more conservative in theology and
discipline than the churches in Germany. The element of revivalism in
American Christianity continued throughout the 19th century and helped the
concept of a personal Christian faith to penetrate deeply into the American
way of life. | |
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With the background of European strength in Germany and Britain, with
the rising strength of the United States, and with the longest period of
peace that Europe had ever known, the Protestant churches entered their
greatest period of expansion. Confronted at home by the new cities, they
developed social services on a scale hitherto unknown, such as in hospitals,
orphanages, temperance work, care of the old, extension of education to the
young and to working adults, Sunday schools, boys' and men's clubs in city
slums, and the countless organizations demanded by the new city life of the
19th century. Abroad they carried Protestantism effectively into all those
parts of Africa that were
not under French or Portuguese influence, so that in southern Africa the
Bantu became largely a federation of Protestant peoples. In India
British and American missionaries steadily increased the strength of the
newer Indian Christian churches. In China
Christianity had been hitherto confined to the seaports and the survivors of
Roman Catholic missions in the 17th century; but now a variety of
evangelical groups, mostly financed from England or America and led by the
China Inland Mission (founded 1865), created congregations deep in the
interior of China. Japan
had been closed to Christianity since 1630, and after its reopening in 1859
American and British missionaries created Japanese Christian churches.
American missionaries developed Protestant congregations in the countries of
South and Central America. All of the main Protestant
denominations--Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Congregationalists,
Baptists, Methodists--developed into worldwide bodies, and all suffered
strain in adjusting their organizations to meet these extraordinary new
needs. | |
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One of the most prominent features of Protestantism in the 19th century
was the development of revivalist methods to meet the needs of an industrial
and urban society. Although many urban poor seldom went to church, they
listened to evangelical preachers in halls or theatres, or on street
corners. Methodists and Baptists, familiar with revivalistic methods, made
many strides forward, especially in the United States. Their efforts were
not confined to reaching the working class. The English Baptist Charles
H. Spurgeon (1834-92) secured a large audience in London and helped
to make the ministry of
Protestant dissent very powerful. His mission was for the most part to the
educated rather than to the urban poor. For the lowest end of the social
scale, a former Methodist preacher, William
Booth (1829-1912), and his wife, Catherine,
created in east London the agency of evangelism that was known from 1878 as
the Salvation Army. They
directed their mission to the men on the street corners, using brass bands
and even dancing to attract attention. They differed from the Methodist
revivalist tradition, from which they had sprung, by their belief in the
necessity of a strong central government under a "general"
appointed for life, and by abandoning the use of sacraments. At first they
met much hostility and even persecution, but by the end of the 19th century
the Salvation Army had securely established its place in British life and
had become a worldwide organization. | |
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In Sweden a Methodist preacher influenced Karl
Olof Rosenius (1816-68), who introduced revivalism into Swedish
Lutheranism. He and some disciples also were influenced by the movement that
stemmed from Zinzendorf. Though there were links with Pietism,
the new movement was quite unlike the little groups of Pietism. The Pietists
wanted to gather men to salvation out of the world, whereas the Bornholmers
(as they later came to be called in Denmark because of a famous episode in
evangelism on the island of Bornholm) wanted to declare salvation to the
world. The movement had effects in Norway and Denmark and in the Lutheran
Church--the Missouri Synod in the United States--but never became as
separate as the Salvation Army. | |
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In the United States the development of revivalism was particularly
marked in the expansion of the moving frontier. The memory of the Great
Awakening (c. 1725-50) was always
powerful, and in halls of cities as well as in the camps of the west,
revivalistic preaching methods were effective. Protestantism was
exceptionally strong because, in many cases, immigrant groups found in
religion that link with their historic past that secular society could not
for the time give them. Famous evangelists appeared to meet the need of the
cities, especially Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) and Dwight Lyman
Moody (1837-99). | |
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Thus, some of the evangelistic power in Protestantism of the 19th
century was drawn away from the traditional churches of the
Reformation--Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican--and tended to create new
forms of church life and new organizations. These almost always used lay
preachers, were far more concerned with bringing the individual to conversion
and little concerned with church order, and were sometimes content if they
could draw a soul to Christ without worrying if it were drawn into a
historical Christian community as understood since the Reformation.
Consequently they developed a tendency, not common before the Pietist
movement, to identify Protestantism with individualism in religion. Because
the evangelistic endeavours subsequently produced separate organizations,
the separate denominations and the varieties of Christianity that still
called themselves--and with justice--Protestant were rapidly increased. | |
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The secular state allowed or even stimulated the Protestant churches to
establish further and powerful varieties of religious groups. Among radical
Protestants several important groups or new churches emerged, and several of
them were apocalyptic, owing their origin to expectations of the Second
Coming of Christ. In Britain appeared the Plymouth
Brethren, founded in 1827 by John Nelson Darby (1800-82), who
separated themselves from the world in preparation for the imminent coming
of the Lord. The Catholic
Apostolic Church, formed in 1832 largely by the Scotsman Edward
Irving, likewise prepared for an imminent coming. Apocalyptic groups and
sects were successfully established in the United States, probably because
of the absence in new areas of any settled or habitual church polity. The Seventh-day
Adventists were founded by William Miller (1782-1849) of New York,
again with an expectation of an immediate end of the world. Though not
self-proclaimed Protestants, the Mormons
(Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints), founded by Joseph Smith
(1805-44), came out of a parallel waiting upon the end. Another set of
groups arose from the revival of faith healing, the most important being the
Christian Scientists,
founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), who set up her first church
in Boston. (see also Index: secularism,
apocalypticism, revivalism) | |
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Attacks on the churches during the 19th century (and after) were
twofold: social and intellectual. Rapidly growing cities and industry
created a proletariat estranged from religious life. Many of the political
leaders, especially in Europe, claimed that the churches were bulwarks of
that order of society which must be overthrown if justice was to be secured
for the working class. Some of the earlier forms of socialism
were atheistic or at least deistic and suspected free churches as fiercely
as they suspected an alliance between altar and throne. Social and economic
thinkers, such as Karl Marx (1818-83), argued that religion was the opium of
the people, that it bade human beings to be content with their lot when they
ought to be discontented. | |
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In response to such views, in nearly every European country, Catholic or
Protestant, there came into existence groups of "Christian
Socialists," who believed (at least) in the doctrine that
workers had a right to social and economic justice and that a Christian
ought in conscience to work toward those political conditions that would
achieve more social justice for them. Except for these basic views the
Christian Socialists
varied greatly in their outlook and ideas, whether political or theological.
Adolf Stöcker (1835-1909), a court preacher in Berlin, was an
anti-Semitic radical politician; and Charles Kingsley (1819-75), a clergyman
novelist in England, was a warmhearted conservative who deeply sympathized
with and understood the working class. The most profound of all the
Christian Socialists was Frederick
Denison Maurice (1805-72), a theologian of King's College in London
until he was ejected in 1853, then a London pastor, and finally a professor
of moral philosophy at Cambridge. | |
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But in England and America the radical wing of Protestants--especially
Baptists and primitive Methodists--did as much for the workers' religion as
the intellectual leadership of a few Anglican theologians. In some cases the
endeavours made Socialist parties possible for the Christian voter; in
others they persuaded Christian voters or politicians--without actually
voting for a Socialist party--to adopt policies that led toward a welfare
state. Nevertheless, they made Christians more conscious of a social
responsibility. In America the Social Gospel excited much influence in the
churches at the end of the 19th century, and its most influential leader was
a Baptist, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918). Whereas in Catholic countries
political parties arose that especially appealed to Christian voters and
often used the word Christian in their name, in all the Protestant countries
all political parties needed to appeal to Christian voters, and few avowedly
secular parties had political success. | |
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Besides political, social, and economic criticism, Protestantism was
encountering an intellectual onslaught on Christianity. There were thinkers
who declared that the advance of science and of history proved the Bible,
and therefore Christianity, untrue. The question of biblical
criticism was first posed in the German universities; i.e.,
whether a man might be a Christian and even a good Christian though he
held some parts of the Bible to be not true. This became the great question
for Protestantism, if not for all Christendom, in the 19th century. On the
one hand Protestantism stood by the Bible and declared that the truth of God
came from the Bible. On the other it rested in part on a fundamental
conviction of the liberty of the human spirit as it encountered the Bible.
Protestantism was thus seldom friendly to the tactic of meeting argument
merely by excommunication or by the blunt exercise of church authority. The
theological faculties of German universities, being state faculties and not
church institutions, suffered much internal stress, but they arrived at last
at the conviction that reasoned criticism--even when it produced conclusions
opposed to traditional Christian thinking--should be met rather by
refutation than by way of authority. Thus German Protestantism showed at
length an elasticity, or open-mindedness, in the face of new knowledge,
which was as influential in the development of the Christian churches as the
original insights of the Reformation. Owing in part to this German example,
the Protestant churches of the main tradition--Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican,
Congregational, Methodist, and many Baptist communities--adjusted themselves
relatively easily (from the intellectual point of view) to the advances of
science, to the idea of evolution, and to progress in anthropology and
comparative religion. (see also Index: Anglican Communion) | |
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In such a flux of ideas, with the Protestant tradition seemingly under
attack from Protestants, there was naturally a wide variety of approaches,
both in philosophy and history. There was an opinion, represented by the
German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel
(1770-1831), that Christianity should be restated as a form of Idealistic
philosophy. This view was influential for a time in Germany and afterward
among Oxford philosophers of later Victorian England. Such restatements were
subjected to destructive attacks, of which the most powerful were published
by the Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard, chiefly because such reasoned philosophy failed
altogether to account for the depths and tragedies of human existence. An
earlier opinion sought to base the justification of Christian faith in the
religious feelings commonly found in humanity. A German philosopher, F.D.E.
Schleiermacher (1768-1834), sought to infer the Christian and
biblical system of thought from an examination of human religious
experience. Schleiermacher's attempt had much influence on Protestant
thought. Throughout the 19th century the appeal to religious experience was
fundamental to liberal Protestant thinking, especially in the attempt to
meet the views of modern science. Probably the most important of the
successors of Schleiermacher was Albrecht
Ritschl, who wholly rejected the ideas of Hegel and the philosophers;
he distinguished himself sharply from Schleiermacher by repudiating general
religious experience and by resting all his thought upon the special moral
impact made by the New Testament on the Christian community. Between 1870
and 1918 the Ritschlian school was one of the leading theological schools of
thought within the Protestant churches. (see also Index:
idealism, Existentialism) | |
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Meanwhile, scholars made long strides in the study and exposition of the
Bible. Freed from the necessity of defending every one of its details as
historical truth, professors at Protestant universities were able to put the
books of the Bible into a historical setting. This made an important
difference in the study of the New Testament but was a revolution so far as
the Old Testament was concerned, where the entire earlier accepted
chronology was changed. German Rationalist or Hegelian historians were the
first to study the problems with freedom. Ferdinand
Christian Baur (1792-1860) of the University of Tübingen applied
the methods of Hegelian philosophy to the documents of the New Testament,
which he conceived to be products of the clash between the Jewish Christians
led by Peter and the Gentile Christians led by Paul. This theory, known as
the Tübingen theory, soon receded in influence; but in aid of this
theory Baur expounded the texts with such ability as to make his study a
landmark in the study of the Bible. Among a large number of excellent
biblical students, Joseph Barber
Lightfoot (1828-89) of Cambridge finally demolished the Tübingen
theory by showing the 1st-century origin of most of the New Testament texts;
and Adolf von Harnack
(1851-1930) of Berlin by the end of the century summarized the results of a
century that was revolutionary in the area of biblical study. (see also Index:
historical criticism) | |
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