⭐ The closing event of this thread — the quarrel was not resolved but moved: from is righteousness imputed or infused? to is that question still the main point?
The issue
How is being counted righteous related to whether a person has truly experienced conversion and lives a holy life?
Claim
The Pietist side: as Olson puts it, Pietism sought to join justification with personal conversion, and regeneration with a truly sanctified life. They diagnosed the state churches of the day as sunk, in Olson's account, into a dead orthodoxy of baptismal regeneration, clericalism and Constantinianism, and they openly condemned an overemphasis on doctrinal correctness that neglected spiritual experience. Their rallying cry, in Olson's rendering: better a living heretic than a dead orthodoxy! ⚠ Zinzendorf pushed this furthest. As Olson gives his words: once truth becomes a system, one loses the truth. He put Christian experience and devout feeling at the center of true Christianity, Olson records, and pushed formal theology and doctrine out to the edges.
Counterclaim
The side of Lutheran orthodoxy: ⚠ critics, Olson records, held that this was a sly rejection of the Lutheran teaching that the Christian is always at once saved and still a sinner. ⭐ Notice the shape of this charge — if, after justification, we must still look at whether you have really changed, then the sentence at once righteous and a sinner is hollowed out: anyone can be asked at any moment have you really been born again? — and that is exactly the kind of self-examination Luther once tried to escape in the monastery. ⚠ We do not judge whether the charge holds; we only point out that it is the same ruler used twice elsewhere on this thread: Menno (16th century) and Wesley (18th century) were both measured by the same sentence.
What was at stake for salvation
What the two sides guarded meets for the third time on this thread: Pietism feared that justification would become empty words that change no one (the same fear as Menno's and Trent's); Lutheran orthodoxy feared that the conscience would once again be held hostage by one's own performance (the same fear as Luther's and the Formula of Concord's). ⭐ A hundred and fifty years on, the two sides still feared the same two things.
Aftermath
⭐⭐ This shift shows why this thread has no settled answer even now — it was not ended by a ruling; it was walked around. Trent in 1547 and the Formula of Concord in 1577 each gave their own side an answer, and neither recognized the other; a hundred years later, Pietism moved the whole question somewhere else. ⚠ And moving it did not settle anything either: from Menno to Spener to Wesley the same charge appeared three times, which shows that both sides of this thread have always been there.
⚠ The date our source gives: Pia Desideria was published in 1675, and many historians, Olson notes, date the beginning of Pietism itself from that day. The book, he adds, is regarded as the classic work of Pietism; it has been translated into several languages, and three centuries after it first appeared it is still in print.