Post-Reformation
Frankfurt / Dresden / Berlin, Germany
Pietism
Also: Philipp Jakob Spener
The founder of Pietism. Born in 1635 in Alsace, along the Rhine between Germany and France. In 1675 he published Pia Desideria, and, as Olson notes, many historians date the beginning of Pietism itself from its publication. In 1691 he moved to Berlin as pastor of the Lutheran Church of St. Nicholas, where, Olson records, he helped the young leaders of Pietism spread the movement in Germany and Scandinavia. ⭐ He died in Berlin in 1705 — at his own request, Olson records, he was buried in a white robe and a white coffin, as a symbol of his hope for himself and for the future of the Christian kingdom in heaven.
Below: first his own position, then the church’s verdict — kept separate. A rejected opinion keeps equal weight here.
His own position
⭐ What he did was not to set up another theory of justification but to move the center of gravity. Olson: Pietism sought to join justification with personal conversion, and regeneration with a truly sanctified life. ⚠ See how much this weighs on this thread: from Luther to the Formula of Concord, the quarrel was over whose righteousness it is and how it is counted; with him the question became whether a person has really experienced this. The disagreement was not resolved; it was moved.
His diagnosis was aimed at the actual state of the state churches of his day — critics said, as Olson reports, that those churches had sunk into a dead orthodoxy of baptismal regeneration, clericalism and Constantinianism. Pietism also, Olson notes, openly condemned an overemphasis on doctrinal correctness that neglected spiritual experience, and its rallying cry, in Olson's rendering, was: better a living heretic than a dead orthodoxy!
The church’s verdict
Never condemned, but intensely controversial — Olson records that in the end Spener was forced to leave Frankfurt because of the controversy; he later became court preacher in Dresden, and finally fell out of favor with that worldly prince. ⚠ The critics' charge weighs heavily on this thread and must be recorded as it stands: they held that Pietism's stress on experience and holiness was, as Olson puts it, 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 — it is measured with the same ruler as the charge laid on Menno, and the one laid on Wesley a hundred years later. From Menno to Pietism to Wesley, this side of the thread was measured by the same sentence three times.
Principal works
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Pia Desideria 1675
Pia Desideria; full title Pious Desires, or Heartfelt Longing for a God-Pleasing Reform of the True Evangelical Church, with Some Simple Christian Proposals toward That End. ⭐ Three centuries after it first appeared, it is still in print
Threads he belongs to
Justification
Aftermath Counterclaim ⭐ He did not set up another theory; he moved the center of gravity — the question changed from whose righteousness is it? to have you really experienced it?