November 13, 2024

Matt Reynolds

Senior Editor, Books

The Black Church Has Five Theological Anchors

Within evangelical circles, we are currently enjoying what might be called a “retrieval revival.” Many believers are working to retrieve parts of our Christian heritage for the sake of enjoying…

Tending and Keeping the Christian Past in an ‘Ahistoric Age’

You may have heard this story before: While studying the past at Oxford, an atheist scholar converts to Christianity. But this isn’t the story of C. S. Lewis. This is…

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But this isn’t the story of C. S. Lewis. This is the tale of Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, an Australian historian who was appointed as a research fellow at Oxford after earning her doctorate at Cambridge. There, she experienced “a discomforting realisation,” as she recalls in her new book, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age. “Every achievement merely landed me at the bottom of another ladder.”

Lacking “a larger narrative that might give me a normative vision of human flourishing, a transcendent grounding for morality, or even a means of addressing life’s ultimate concerns,” Irving-Stonebraker began to read theology and attend church as her academic career continued. While teaching in Florida, she observed Christians take Communion one Sunday morning to the sounds of a hymn whose “words and music took me out of Tallahassee, out of myself, and into a much larger story. . . . There seemed to be a purpose to human history and to time, after all.”

Her conversion overcame not only an atheistic worldview but also a larger sense of living “an ahistorical life.” Though she studied the past professionally, she hadn’t learned to see herself “as a part of any enduring historical communities that might help frame a deeper purpose for my life.” Instead, she had been formed by what she calls the “Ahistoric Age,” whose residents are unwilling to “think of ourselves as historical beings” and are virtually unable “to engage meaningfully with the past.”

As Irving-Stonebraker observes, becoming a Christian offered her “the ultimate story about a God who . . . pursued us by inhabiting time,” a story that “seemed to make sense of human history.” But it also carried a divine calling: “to tend and keep time, including the past. In short, we are to be a witness to the past, cultivate it, and keep uncovering the stories and ideas that comprise the history of the world.”

Tending the past (“uncovering the historical stories of people sometimes overlooked, bringing historical injustices to light, and recognising the sins of the past, including our own,” as Irving-Stonebraker puts it) and keeping it (“protecting and passing down historical knowledge and our heritage as Christians”) is not just the work of historians. Irving-Stonebraker describes stewardship of the past as the responsibility of all members of God’s common priesthood—which is to say, all believers.

This requires a broader definition of “history” than academic historians may find comfortable, but she suggests specific ways that professors, pastors, and parents alike can tend and keep the past.

A Historian’s Reckoning with the Past

Grant Wacker

Irving-Stonebraker brings to her book the skills of a gifted scholar. Her seamless integration of examples from history, theology, and literature testifies to the many ways that stewarding the past can further intellectual formation. Her particular studies in the history of science inform her larger project. In one instance, she cites Robert Boyle, a 17th-century Irish chemistry pioneer, whose notion of the scientist as “priest of nature” inspires her conception of Christians as “priests of history.” And her research into Francis Bacon’s views on colonial expansion illustrates how we can avoid reducing history to “ideological simplicity.”

Irving-Stonebraker is at her best when sharing stories­­—not just those of long-dead scientists and theologians but those of family and friends practicing stewardship of the past today. Hearing from someone with her background, an Australian Anglican who studies early modern Europe, broadens our view of the Christian story and reminds American readers that theirs is not the only nation that struggles with its complicated past.

Moreover, such anecdotes underscore Irving-Stonebraker’s argument that “we embed our identity in stories.” To postmodern people who feel adrift from the currents of history, storytelling about the past offers a powerful way to understand who we are—and whose we are.

Alas, Irving-Stonebraker waits until the very last pages of Priests of History to fully tell her best story: that of her own journey from atheism to Christianity. It was jarring, for one thing, to have the conversion narrative that began the book continue only in occasional snippets. Had she prioritized her story at the outset, Irving-Stonebraker could have given readers a more vivid impression of our modern alienation from history.

Instead, she opens with loud condemnations of a secular worldview that stresses creating our own identities by liberating ourselves from inherited traditions. If one problem with the Ahistoric Age is its tendency to reduce the past to sweeping generalizations, then the solution is not to make similarly unsubtle claims about the present. But Irving-Stonebraker falls into that trap when she issues broad-brush statements like this: “We believe that the past is merely a source of shame and oppression from which we must free ourselves. . . . We do not believe history has a narrative or a purpose.”

I don’t doubt that many people nowadays—as in previous eras—do find the past irrelevant, if they aren’t ignoring it altogether or looking at it through the lens of ideology. But early on in Priests of History, there’s far too little of the nuance, empathy, humility, and comfort with complexity that Irving-Stonebraker rightly associates with historical study at its finest.

Take, for instance, how she presents the global phenomenon of “protests about and tearing down of statues.” While Irving-Stonebraker acknowledges that these actions take place “against the backdrop of genuine injustices in the present, particularly the ongoing issues of racism,” she unfairly presents such protests as “a highly politicised approach to history in which people appear to care passionately about history’s symbols and what they represent” (italics mine).

The most famous example of this theme in the American context, debates over Confederate commemoration, is far more complicated. As historian Karen Cox has documented in her book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, “Lost Cause” memorials were themselves meant to impose a vision of white supremacy on African Americans who have protested such structures since they were erected. When activists promote counter-commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement—as when a bronze statue of John Lewis replaced a Confederate memorial in Decatur, Georgia, this summer—they are tending and keeping the past, not dismissing or distorting it.

Fortunately, most of the book’s later chapters warmed my historian’s heart. Here, Irving-Stonebraker strikes a good balance between revealing the problem of ahistoricism and pointing to its solution, showing how Christians can tell multifaceted stories of a complicated past. She shows, moreover, how to mine that past for religious practices that attest to our status as “historical beings” participating in God’s larger story of redemption.

While the overly broad claims of the book’s opening section left me wanting to make counterarguments and point out counterexamples, the more subtle details of the second and (especially) third sections convicted me of ways that I too am a historian living ahistorically.

Andrew Walls: Historian Ahead of His Time

Tim Stafford

But if Irving-Stonebraker’s critique of the Ahistoric Age is mostly persuasive, it’s also incomplete, leaving unexamined or underexamined two versions of ahistoricism that are particularly influential among some groups of Christians.

First, she doesn’t seem to realize the wide popularity of providential history within certain evangelical circles. Plenty of American believers are convinced that God has specially called and blessed the United States and continues to superintend its unfolding history.

This is certainly a way of finding identity in a story that claims transcendent meaning, but as many other Christian historians have long argued, such an interpretation of the past is deeply problematic on both historical and theological grounds.

Second, it’s dismaying that Irving-Stonebraker has so little to say about the ahistorical thinking that undergirds promises to “make America great again.” Perhaps this is less of a problem in Australia than it is in the US, but what CT editor in chief Russell Moore wrote in a 2016 New York Times piece remains true in 2024: “White American Christians who respond to cultural tumult with nostalgia . . . are blinding themselves to the injustices faced by their black and brown brothers and sisters in the supposedly idyllic Mayberry of white Christian America.”

To her credit, Irving-Stonebraker doesn’t want us to look at the past “through rose-tinted sentimentality.” Nor would she have us look away from “the horrific wrongs of history.” Chapter 7 introduces abolitionists like Mary Prince, Anne Hart Gilbert, and Elizabeth Hart Thwaites. And chapter 8 presents Frederick Douglass as “a model of how to engage with the sin of the past,” someone who called out the sources of injustice while holding out hope for redemption.

However, Irving-Stonebraker would rather celebrate Christian opposition to evils like white supremacy than examine Christian complicity in them. On balance, she spends far more time suggesting how Christians can keep or “guard” the past (holding to historic orthodoxy, retrieving past practices for discipleship, telling inspirational stories of Christian witness) than how they can tend it, which includes reckoning with noble and ignoble legacies alike.

Thankfully, many of today’s Christ-ian historians are modeling these virtues in their work. Sean McGever’s recent book Ownership, a nuanced account of slavery and 18th-century evangelicalism, is one example. Another is Malcolm Foley’s The Anti-Greed Gospel, an examination of “racial capitalism” due out in February 2025. So while I do recommend Priests of History as making a case for the Christian stewardship of the past, I would encourage readers to put Irving-Stonebraker’s writing in conversation with that of Christian historians more focused on tending to the parts of our past we might prefer to forget.

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He writes about Christianity, history, and education at his Substack, The Pietist Schoolman.

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Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill (Library of Religious Biography (LRB))

Gary Scott Smith (Author)

Eerdmans

255 pages

$30.99

Tellingly, we don’t hear the second verse, which turns from the United Kingdom to God’s kingdom: “We may not count her armies, we may not see her King; / Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering.” The Crown’s way of introducing Churchill may be one of the many liberties that series takes with British history, but it seems appropriate for a politician who was more devoted to his country’s system of government than to the doctrines of the church that Elizabeth still heads.

If you’re enough of a Churchill fan to have devoured Andrew Roberts’s magisterial 2018 biography and yet wanted to read more about religion than Roberts’s brief but trenchant discussion of that topic, you may want to pick up Gary Scott Smith’s short study Duty and Destiny: The Life and Faith of Winston Churchill, part of the Library of Religious Biography series from Eerdmans. (My own entry in the series releases later this year.) The book portrays a statesman driven both by duty to country and empire (“the service of my love”) and by what Smith calls “a profound sense of his own destiny.” Yet the answer to “who or what he believed determined his destiny—God or fate—is ultimately unclear.”

If not a groundbreaking work of original research, Duty and Destiny does manage, in Smith’s words, to synthesize “the many contradictory opinions expressed … by the army of Churchill biographers” about a story of faith that was “complex, colorful, and compelling.”

Unconventional Faith

Alas, only the first of those three adjectives consistently describes Smith’s book. While the writing is workmanlike, we can expect more eloquence and verve from a biography of such a master of the English language.

In addition, readers hoping for a conventional biographical structure may be frustrated that Smith’s telling of Churchill’s life story doesn’t start until chapter 3 or that so important a topic as Churchill’s marriage appears very late, in a chapter on his retirement years. But at least some of that scene setting is necessary, in part to orient American readers to the religious and political terrain of a country that Churchill believed to be a Christian nation, though not in the way many American evangelicals would understand that phrase. (Having previously published histories of religion in the American presidency, Smith does well at several points in Duty and Destiny to draw helpful contrasts between the unconventional faith of Churchill and that of his ally Franklin D. Roosevelt, a committed Episcopalian who was the subject of an earlier entry in Eerdmans’s religious biography series.)

Far less devout than William Wilberforce, Margaret Thatcher, and the other Christian politicians sketched in chapter 2, Churchill nonetheless staunchly supported the establishment of churches whose doors he rarely darkened (save for occasions like royal weddings) and drew freely on the language of Christianity. Indeed, Smith’s analysis is most complex and compelling when it turns to Churchill’s colorful use of religious rhetoric, a hallmark both of his “locust years” in the 1930s, when he cried out from his political “wilderness” like “an Old Testament prophet,” and during the Second World War, when speeches “peppered with references to God … citations and allusions to Scripture, and images of spiritual warfare between good and evil and light and darkness” sought to “inspire, comfort, and assure beleaguered Britons of their eventual triumph.” What such public communications say about Churchill’s private convictions is harder to determine, especially when he “had little to gain politically from revealing what he truly believed.”

Yet while Smith is surely right that “we will never know definitively what anyone believes in his or her heart of hearts,” readers can expect biographers to do more than catalogue the divergent opinions of previous authors. To his credit, Smith doesn’t shy away from one conclusion that will disappoint some of his Christian readers: For all his invocations of “Christian civilization” and “Christian ethics,” Churchill did not believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, a figure he mentioned just once, by Smith’s count, in five million words’ worth of speeches. At most, the prime minister did “precisely what his contemporary C. S. Lewis … insisted that people could not logically do: profess that Jesus was a great moral teacher while denying his claim to be God.”

While Churchill seemed to hold shifting beliefs about the existence of God, the nature of the afterlife, and the veracity of Scripture, his views on Jesus may have been fixed as early as the late 1890s. During his military service in India, a 23-year-old Churchill read skeptics like Edward Gibbon and William Winwood Reade, debated theology and metaphysics with fellow officers, and scorned Christian missions. (That last critique, at least, didn’t last long. Just over a decade later, as a rising young parliamentarian, Churchill praised missionaries like those who had made central Africans “clothed, peaceful, law-abiding, [and] polite.”)

If only Smith would have returned more often to India, whose control by Britain Churchill “fervently defended” long after that stance became “a major political liability.” He agrees that Churchill’s commitment to the Empire “has rightly been criticized as retrogressive, racist, repressive, and repulsive” and concedes that his imperialist values “seem to clash with Christianity’s emphasis on service, sacrifice, and racial and gender equality.”

But Smith is too quick to exonerate his subject for his treatment of India. I’m not sure Churchill deserves any credit for having “correctly predicted the strife between Hindus and Muslims” that attended the independence he opposed, given that he was one of those “British imperialists who strove to create animosity” between South Asia’s largest religious groups. Smith does note that Churchill “decried [Mohandas K. Gandhi] as a seditious Hindu holy man,” but that passing comment understates the British leader’s animosity toward a man he called “a malignant, subversive fanatic” and falsely accused of faking a three-week fast in 1943.

An Imperial Creed

Of course, that’s the same year that three million Indians starved to death under British rule. Smith quotes historian Arthur Herman’s conclusion that the Bengal famine “would have been far worse” without the British aid that eventually arrived, but he overlooks Herman’s more conflicted evaluation in Gandhi and Churchill: Confronted with “the greatest humanitarian crisis the Raj had faced in more than half a century,” Britain’s wartime leader “proved callously indifferent” and “irrational.” He was “resolutely opposed to any food shipments” at a time when ships were needed for military operations against the Axis powers. Disgusted that his boss seemed to view such humanitarian aid “as an ‘appeasement’ of” Gandhi’s independence movement, Churchill’s handpicked viceroy, Archibald Wavell, had to threaten resignation to change the prime minister’s mind.

This is no tangential matter for a religious biography of Winston Churchill. “Central to many key decisions of his life,” wrote Andrew Roberts, was “this belief that Britain and her Empire were not just political entities but also spiritual ones.” Smith quotes this observation as part of his survey of writings on Churchill in chapter 1, but he doesn’t adequately reckon with it. While he’s surely right to hesitate in ascribing many traditional Christian beliefs to Churchill, Smith would have done well to wrestle more with Roberts’s conclusion that “imperialism was in effect a substitute for religion. … In the absence of Christian faith, therefore, the British Empire became in a sense Churchill’s creed.”

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. His religious biography of Charles Lindbergh will be published by Eerdmans in August.

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Between the Swastika and the Sickle: The Life, Disappearance, and Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer

James R. Edwards (Author)

Eerdmans

344 pages

$4.02

Having first encountered Lohmeyer’s commentary on the Gospel of Mark in graduate school, Edwards’s interest was kindled on a 1979 visit to Greifswald, East Germany. A local pastor told him that “we cannot mention the name of Ernst Lohmeyer” in the city whose university Lohmeyer served as theology professor and president. As he began a decades-long research project, Edwards “joined the small company of people dedicated to remembering, recovering, and recording the life of Ernst Lohmeyer.”

His labors have resulted in a new biography, Between the Swastika & the Sickle: The Life, Disappearance, & Execution of Ernst Lohmeyer. I hope it finds an audience among many Christian readers, for whom Lohmeyer’s life should serve as both an inspiring and cautionary tale.

Deepest Trials

The story begins at the turn of the 20th century, in the home of a Lutheran pastor whose fourth son followed him into the clergy. Young Ernst concluded his 1912 ordination sermon with Jesus’ admonition that the “truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The liberating power of truth became a recurring theme in his life, forming him, as Edwards writes, “to follow a unique course in life as a scholar, leader, and witness.”

Though he continued to serve the church throughout his life, Lohmeyer found his primary calling as a scholar of diverse interests. The same year he was ordained, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the biblical concept of covenant, then adding a second dissertation, on scholastic philosophy, in 1914.

Carrying a Greek New Testament in his kit, Lohmeyer continued his studies even as he served in the German Army through the end of the First World War. Just weeks after his discharge, Lohmeyer finished a book on the role of smell in the Scriptures.

Edwards admits that this “may strike some readers as an exercise in academic irrelevancy,” and indeed, I fear that my summary thus far suggests one theologian writing about another theologian for the edification of still more theologians. But the story picks up momentum with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the religious response to the Nazi revolution.

Unfortunately, Edwards makes the confusing claim that “German Christians” accounted for “no less than three-quarters of German Protestants throughout the Nazi era.” If he means the supporters of the deeply anti-Semitic Deutsche Christen movement, who denied the Jewishness of Jesus and saw Hitler in messianic terms, it’s hard to credit his numbers. In editing her recent collection of German Christian documents, Mary Solberg stresses that the Deutsche Christen “were numerically never more than a minority within the Protestant church in Germany,” perhaps 600,000 out of over 40 million by the mid-1930s.

This is not to deny that most Christians in Germany supported Hitler’s regime, nor to minimize Lohmeyer’s courage and integrity in opposing such accommodation within the nation’s churches and universities. Rejecting the anti-Semitism of theologian Gerhard Kittel—a scholar of Judaism!—Lohmeyer penned a letter of support to the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, affirming “that the Christian faith is Christian only insofar as it bears the Jewish faith in its heart.” With fellow theologian Martin Niemöller, he condemned Nazi efforts to exclude “non-Aryans” from the Protestant clergy and supported ministerial candidates who belonged to the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. For Lohmeyer, Nazism was an Ungeist, “‘an antispirit’ that crippled all free intellectual inquiry.”

Such statements eventually made his position at the University of Breslau untenable. Before relocating to Greifswald in 1935, Lohmeyer preached on the Lutheran theme of Anfechtung, or “trials”:

If God were to snatch us out of trials we would then be tried in ways that would be endlessly deeper and greater than all the trials that we must endure in human circumstances. But, dear friends, even in the deepest trials the sound of his voice is perceptible, blowing over us like incense.

Those trials took new forms in the last years of Lohmeyer’s life, during active service in the Second World War. How, Edwards asks, did this “believing Christian of uncommon moral rectitude and courage” cope with his participation “in a military campaign on the eastern front that was conducted in flagrant violation of standards of international law”? Edwards concludes that Lohmeyer remained a man of high moral character, even as a Wehrmacht officer charged with administering captured Russian villages. But it was clear to Lohmeyer’s daughter, Gudrun, that her father “brought the shadows of the experience home with him.”

Lohmeyer threw himself back into academic work as the war ended and became president of the University of Greifswald. But his “ideal of an intellectually free Prussian university” clashed with the ideological goals of eastern Germany’s Soviet occupiers. He struggled to keep Greifswald from becoming what his wife, Melie, called “a more or less purely political instrument.”

On February 15, 1946, the same day he was to be inaugurated as president, Lohmeyer was arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Though Buber, Niemöller, and others pleaded for his release, Lohmeyer was executed on September 19, 1946. His family did not receive official confirmation of his fate until 1957.

A Surprising Resolution

If Between the Swastika & the Sickle is primarily a biography of Ernst Lohmeyer, it is secondarily a memoir of James Edwards, who occasionally notes parallels or connections between his subject’s experience and his own. Both stories testify to the importance of rigor, diligence, and clarity in scholarship.

The book is a “consummation of nearly two decades of effort,” Edwards reports, and it’s clear the research has been painstaking. In addition to reading Lohmeyer’s prodigious writings about biblical studies, theology, philosophy, and spiritual formation—a corpus that includes only two books translated into English—Edwards has drawn on archival materials, from the thousands of letters exchanged between Ernst and Melie to the records of the East German secret police, the Stasi.

It’s also evident that Edwards means his own style to echo Lohmeyer’s, whose scholarly writing was “characterized by . . . directness, precision, and descriptiveness, with not infrequent flares of imaginative and lyrical style.” Edwards’s most effective poetic device is proposing a Bach fugue as a metaphor for Lohmeyer’s life. The “voices” of Nazi and Communist totalitarianism ring harsh and dissonant, creating tension with “the original melody of his life, to be a biblical theologian.”

The “success of the fugue,” he writes, “depends on the resolution of the tension” between those voices. And the resolution of Lohmeyer’s story surprised me.

At first, I expected Edwards to conclude that Lohmeyer, in steadfastly playing his scholarly “melody,” embodied principles like those C.S. Lewis commended in his 1939 sermon “Learning in War-Time.” Encouraging students at Oxford not to suspend their studies for the war, Lewis insisted that Christians ought not to surrender themselves fully to the claims of any government or ideology.

Indeed, few understood the ongoing need for Christian inquiry, no matter the circumstances, better than Lohmeyer. A theologian who wrote a book on the Lord’s Prayer while serving on the Russian Front clearly knew what the German Christians didn’t: that “Thy kingdom come” referred to the reign of God, not the rule of any earthly regime. As a theology professor and university president under two types of totalitarianism, Lohmeyer was “required to render unto Caesar what belonged to Caesar without rendering to either [Nazis or Soviets] what belonged to God.” Edwards poignantly concludes that Lohmeyer “succeeded in the first contest, as he also did in the second—but success in the second came at the cost of his life.”

So it’s bracing to finish Between the Swastika & the Sickle and discover that Lohmeyer died unsure whether his career was actually a success. “It is now clear to me,” he began his last letter from prison to his wife, “that for more than twenty years I have followed the wrong course.” He confessed to Melie that his decision to “devote myself entirely to my work” had “pushed everything related to our love into second place.” In focusing so heavily on the study of God, he had “looked in many places and thought to find him where he was not.”

Reflecting on Lohmeyer’s final epistle, Edwards confesses, “He was now speaking to me, even for me. . . . This exceptional and versatile theologian names perhaps the chief danger that all who devote their lives to the study of theology inevitably face, which is to shift God from the subject of one’s life to the object of one’s inquiry, and thence to a mere idea.”

But here, too, I don’t think theologians are the only audience for Lohmeyer’s story. All Christian scholars risk faith stopping at the head and never reaching the heart and hands. And all those who call Jesus Lord, whatever their profession, need to beware what Edwards calls “the dangers imposed by the prevalence and power, both subtle and outright, of a score of modern isms,” including totalitarianism, militarism, and racism, but also, “especially today, egoism.”

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in Minnesota. He blogs at The Pietist Schoolman. Read an excerpt from Between the Swastika & the Sickle here.

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Yet Spener soon found “that almost everywhere there is something wanting” in an ostensibly Christian society that seemed to love God and neighbor too little. One could not look at what was left of Martin Luther’s reformation, he lamented, “without having quickly to cast [their eyes] down again in shame and distress.”

Timeline

1618 The Thirty Years War begins

1635 Philipp Spener born

1648 Peace of Westphalia

1670 Small group study begins in Frankfurt

1675 Spener, Pia Desideria

1705 Philipp Spener dies

1706 Pietist missionaries go to Tranquebar, India

1727 Beginning of Moravian revival at Herrnhut

But that severe judgment came in an otherwise hopeful book that would spark one of the greatest renewal movements in church history: Pietism. Thanks to a modest but powerful program of reform that inspired energetic followers, Spener would eventually rank just behind Luther in German religious history, the founding father of a movement commonly known as “the Second Reformation.” While Spener founded no new denomination, Pietism’s influence would stretch far in space—everywhere from South Asia to North America—and time, even to evangelicalism today.

Born into conflict

Philipp Jakob Spener was born in 1635, in the middle of the most devastating conflict to that point in European history: the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which caused the death of as many as one in four Germans. Though his home province of Alsace was largely spared, Spener would spend his life pastoring people still recovering from the demographic, economic, and spiritual effects of a war that had pitted Christians against each other.

Educated at the University of Strasbourg, Spener completed his doctorate in June 1664, the same day he married Suzanna Erhardt. Though drawn to the academic life, the young theologian accepted the call to Frankfurt, where he preached Sunday mornings in the Franciscan Church.

Much as he enjoyed the work, Spener grew dismayed by the spiritual condition of his flock. In one 1669 sermon, he warned that mere intellectual assent to doctrine and rote participation in formal religious life left his listeners little better than Pharisees. He longed for his parishioners to experience the “authentic Christianity” that the Lutheran mystic Johann Arndt had described 60 years before: “the exhibition of a true, living faith, active in genuine godliness and the fruits of righteousness.”

In 1670 a lawyer named Johann Jakob Schütz encouraged Spener to begin hosting a small group study of Scripture and devotional works. Every Sunday and Wednesday evening, about 15-20 men met with Spener in his study. “They longed,” he remembered, “to have some opportunity when godly-minded people could come together and confer with each other in simplicity and love.” Spener’s so-called collegia pietatis soon grew to 50 and then 100, a cross-section of Frankfurt society that included rich and poor, women and men, and even non-Lutherans. Similar conventicles began to gather in other cities of the Holy Roman Empire.

To our ears, the story sounds unremarkable. (Doesn’t every church have a small group ministry?) But that early conventicle hints at the subtle power of what became Pietism. Spener’s reforms were pastoral, practical, and easily adapted to different contexts. However radical they may have been at the time, they soon entered the religious mainstream.

Heartfelt desire

Likewise, Spener’s most famous book, Pia Desideria (1675), may seem unimpressive at first glance. A slender volume that was first published as a preface to some of Arndt’s sermons, Pia Desideria expressed Spener’s “pious longings” that church and society would yet experience “better times.” Its most influential section—a concluding set of six brief practical reforms—began by rehashing two ideas from Martin Luther.

First, a “more extensive use of the Word of God among us. What did our sainted Luther seek more ardently than to induce the people to a diligent reading of the Scriptures?” Not only in worship and preaching, but through personal and small group study, Spener hoped to return the Bible to the attention of ordinary Christians—not for the sake of biblical knowledge alone, but because God’s Word was “the powerful means” by which individual faith was “enkindled” and the church was reformed.

So second, Spener sought to revive Luther’s model of the church as a common priesthood. Not just ordained clergy, but all believers are “made priests by their Savior, are anointed by the Holy Spirit, and are dedicated to perform spiritual-priestly acts” like prayer, study, and teaching. While women in the original collegia pietatis had sat silently in a separate room, Spener nonetheless viewed them as priests. “In Christ,” he wrote in 1677, “the difference between man and woman, in regard to what is spiritual, is abolished.”

The first two of Spener’s proposals echoed Luther; the remaining four addressed a problematic legacy of Luther’s reformation. Splintered into competing confessions, Protestant churches seemed more concerned with policing doctrinal boundaries than attending to the spiritual needs of ordinary Christians. So as Spener continued his list of proposals, he paused to emphasize “that it is by no means enough to have knowledge of the Christian faith, for Christianity consists rather of practice.”

It became the core conviction of Pietism. Though a convinced Lutheran who affirmed the Augsburg Confession and taught Luther’s catechism, Spener knew that doctrine could become “dead orthodoxy”—and the pulpit and lectern could become “dumb idols”—if faith was not made active in love. “If we can therefore awaken a fervent love among our Christians,” he hoped, “and put this love into practice, practically all that we desire will be accomplished.”

Under the leadership of Spener’s leading disciple, August Hermann Francke, Pietists would put “love into practice” with astonishing energy. The Franckean Institutions in Halle published millions of inexpensive Bibles, produced and distributed medicine, cared for orphans, educated boys and girls of all social classes, and trained pastors, military chaplains, biblical scholars, and the first Protestant missionaries to India.

Moreover, if Christianity was more a lived faith than a set of doctrines, then even educational institutions should aim at transforming the whole person, not training the mind. Spener proposed that schools act “as workshops of the Holy Spirit,” where students would learn “that holy life is not of less consequence than diligence and study, indeed that study without piety is worthless.”

Even theological education should be practical, preparing pastors “to preach the Word of the Lord plainly but powerfully.” Anticipating the revivals of later centuries, Spener urged simple, unshowy preaching that aimed at the conversion of “the inner man or the new man, whose soul is faith and whose expressions are the fruits of life.” Spener never reported an epiphany of his own, but followers like Francke described powerful conversion experiences in widely read spiritual autobiographies.

An ecumenical impulse

Precisely because he understood Christianity to be a heartfelt faith lived out in love of neighbor, Spener also warned the readers of Pia Desideria to “beware how we conduct ourselves in religious controversies.” At best, angry arguments and heated polemics could produce an intellectual conversion, a faith without feeling. At worst, disputation and heresy-hunting would rub salt into the wounds of religious schism and warfare.

Though a Lutheran, Spener gladly borrowed ideas from Reformed devotional writers like Lewis Bayly and Jean de Labadie, and his collegia pietatis included Calvinists and Catholics. He wondered aloud if it might not be possible to bring about “a union of most of the confessions among Christians”—a goal inherited by his Pietist godson, Nikolaus von Zinzendorf, whose Moravian revival emphasized the “religion of the heart” and aspired to an ecumenical reunion of all Christians.

Alas, Spener’s later years of ministry were marked by conflict, and his followers experienced their own schisms. Lutheran scholastics accused him of discarding their traditions confessions, and he spent five frustrating years as the “court conscience” of Saxon rulers who chafed at Spener’s calls for religious rigor. He spent the last years of his life in Berlin, where the Prussian court was more receptive to the practical benefits of Christian renewal.

But other Pietists—including Schütz, the remarkable teacher and writer Johanna Eleonora Petersen, and the brilliant scholar Gottfried Arnold—were ready to break with religious and political authorities. While Spener urged renewal from within the state church, Radical Pietists began to separate into their own communities, some of which sought greater religious freedom in the New World. Others questioned not just “dead orthodoxy,” but even the core Lutheran doctrines that Spener affirmed up to his death in 1705.

But if Mark Noll is right that Pietism’s emphasis on personal experience and religious feeling helped weaken Protestant commitment to historic orthodoxy, Spener’s renewal also inspired the evangelical awakenings of the modern era. Most famously, an Anglican priest named John Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” after a Moravian meeting in London. His followers sang Pietist hymns, met in versions of Spener’s collegia pietatis, and shared their own stories of dramatic conversion leading to changed behavior.

In the early 1840s, a Methodist missionary to Sweden named George Scott helped spark a revival whose chief publication was called Pietisten. “The pietist,” wrote Scott and his Swedish partner, C. O. Rosenius, “is the one, who not only has the name, the semblance and the shell of godliness, but the very thing itself, the reality, the kernel, and is a living product of God’s word.”

As Scandinavian Pietists migrated to North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they founded new denominations, including the Evangelical Free Church of America and the Evangelical Covenant Church. To this day, the latter still celebrates how Philipp Spener “challenged the church to deeper spirituality” through “his call for widespread reading and study of the Bible; greater participation by lay people in the work of the church; simple, clear, and direct preaching geared to the needs of the people; and the abandonment of theological hair-splitting in favor of practical concern for living the Christian life.”

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. His most recent book is The Pietist Option: Hope for the Renewal of Christianity (IVP Academic, 2017).

Related Christian History issue:

Issue 10 – Pietism: The Inner Experience of Faith (1986)

The post Philipp Jakob Spener appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Pietist Option: Hope for the Renewal of Christianity

Christopher Gehrz (Author), Mark Pattie III (Author)

IVP Academic

144 pages

$13.28

In the spring, Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option tackled the question by channeling the wisdom of Saint Benedict, who established monastic life in the wake of Rome’s collapse. Evangelicals’ response was mixed, in part because Dreher’s vision carries high-church and magisterial assumptions that many evangelicals do not share.

Enter The Pietist Option, a new book by Christopher Gehrz (a historian) and Mark Pattie III (a pastor). Like Dreher, Gehrz and Pattie look to the past to figure out how to navigate the present. But unlike The Benedict Option, The Pietist Optionwill feel very familiar to evangelicals, even those who have never heard of Pietism before.

We often use the term pietism as linguistic shorthand for any inward-focused spirituality that is anti-rational or holier-than-thou. Gehrz and Pattie argue that historic Pietism is better understood as a set of instincts about the Christian life: that true knowledge of God cannot come apart from relationship with him; that the church has a divine call to pursue unity; that Christianity is both simpler and more demanding than we realize; and that the Resurrection calls us to hope.

First emerging as a reform movement within the Lutheran Church of the late 1600s, Pietism quickly spread to other churches, eventually influencing the Puritan, Baptist, Methodist, and Brethren traditions. Despite its reach, Pietism doesn’t leave a clear structural trail. “Suspicious of faith becoming too institutional or too intellectual,” Gehrz and Pattie explain, “Pietists did not generate the denominational structures or doctrinal documents that would have set up their movement for long-term survival.” Describing Pietism as yeast, they see it as a “timeless spirit” or “ethos” that brings out the potential of various traditions while leaving behind little trace of itself.

While evangelicals may not know the history of Pietism, we would quickly identify with its commitment to a personal relationship with God, biblical literacy, spiritual formation in small groups, and active lay ministry. “How goes your walk with Christ?” was a classic catch phrase of those early Pietists who believed that broader cultural change began in the hearts and lives of individual Christians.

So why Pietism now? In an age of radical individualism, wouldn’t a movement emphasizing personal faith and downplaying institutional structures exacerbate the problem?

Perhaps not. Gehrz and Pattie identify distinct parallels between current society and the milieu that birthed Pietism. One hundred years after the start of the Reformation, central Europe descended into the Thirty Years’ War, a bloody religious conflict that ultimately claimed eight million lives. In its wake, Gehrz and Pattie note that “competing churches [were] more concerned with maintaining doctrinal boundaries than encouraging evangelism, spiritual growth, or social reform.” It was into this context that Philipp Spener, the founder of Pietism, penned his 1675 classic Pia Desideria (Pious Desires).

While the evangelical church may not have resorted to physical violence, we have invested heavily in culture-warring, though with little to show for our efforts. As tempting as it is to want to pursue political or social reforms, Pietism suggests that change begins in our own hearts first, which in turn enlivens our political and social activity.

Of all of Pietism’s instincts, perhaps the most important are its emphases on hope and commitment to unity. Despite the bleakness of the Thirty Years’ War, early Pietists believed that the same power that had brought them from spiritual death to spiritual life could remake the world.

For Pietism to work, its focus on individual faith must happen in settings like mid-week prayer meetings and small groups. Here, in the intimate presence of our brothers and sisters, our personal encounters with God are confirmed (or corrected) and activated for the good of our neighbors.

Like any system of belief, the parts work in relationship to each other. Commitment to unity without a commitment to the authority of Scripture quickly leads to authoritarianism. Individual faith without commitment to unity ends up prioritizing personal needs above both Scripture and fellow believers. In this sense, Gehrz and Pattie’s thesis calls for a return to basics, embodying one of the key instincts of Pietism itself: The Christian life is both simpler and more radical than you know.

Hannah Anderson is a writer living in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of Made for More: An Invitation to Live in God’s Image (Moody) and Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul (Moody).

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On a centenary poster outside St Paul's Cathedral: "Lest we forget." On a simple wooden cross in a Belgian field, placed by English footballers where their ancestors turned No Man's Land into a makeshift pitch during the famous Christmas Truce of 1914: "Lest we forget." On tens of thousands of gravestones in Commonwealth cemeteries, where other words failed grieving families given the option of writing an epitaph: "Lest we forget."

At first glance, the phrase can seem rote, unnecessary. Surely a world war—fought by 65 million people and involving far more—cannot pass from the memory of anyone who experienced it, or heard about its glories and horrors second hand. Nor from the collective memory of a community broken, defined, or otherwise affected by it.

And yet, we forget. Time marches forward, carrying our attention with it. The complicated riches of contemplating the past don't stack up against the urgent needs of the present and the terrifying anxieties or tantalizing possibilities of the future.

So like the poet Laurence Binyon, watching the first Tommies cross the English Channel in 1914, people for a hundred years have pledged themselves against their nature:

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

That vow has been renewed again for the war's centenary. The BBC plans over 2,500 hours of TV and radio programming, and the British and French governments have jointly budgeted €65 million ($70 million) for commemoration. Australia's public and private sectors plan three times that much spending, though a lackluster public response so far has led one historian to warn of "Gallipoli fatigue."

(Not surprisingly, given such figures, the line between commemoration and commerce has blurred. Early in our tour of the Western front, our young Belgian guide worried that too many of his countrymen were trying to make a few euros off of centenary-related tourism. "That's not memory," he muttered.)

By comparison to what's happening in Great Britain, Europe, and Australia, the commemorative effort in the US has been relatively muted. Perhaps it will grow once we hit 2017, but even so, the US World War One Commission receives no taxpayer support. It will have to rely on private donors to raise the $25 million budgeted for the centerpiece of its commemorative efforts: a national memorial in Washington, DC.

Now, it's not like there are no WWI memorials in this country. In fact, there are thousands of them: statues and stones, plaques and parks, flagpoles and football stadiums. (The Chicago Bears, Texas Longhorns, and Nebraska Cornhuskers are just a few of the teams whose gridirons commemorate American losses from 1917-1918.)

And it's not like there's no national WWI memorial in this country. That's in Kansas City, where the Liberty Memorial has towered over the city since 1926 and is now fused with the National WWI Museum.

But there's no national WWI memorial in the capital city. London has the Cenotaph. Paris has an eternal flame at the Arc de Triomphe. Even Ottawa has a granite arch made famous in 2014, when its unarmed guard was killed by a gunman en route to the country's parliament. Meanwhile, Washington has had to settle for a relatively obscure statue of General John J. Pershing. (Raise your hand if you knew that it stands in a park across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House.)

That despite the fact—as the Commission's website rather huffily points out —that World War I took more American lives than the Korean War and Vietnam War combined: "Yet while those who fell in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in World War II, are honored and remembered with memorials on the National Mall, no such recognition is given to the veterans of World War I."

From 350 designs submitted last summer, the Commission selected five finalists. But while a winner will be announced on January 20th, a glance at the commission's vision and design goals suggest that "We will remember them" is easier said than done.

Even the Commission acknowledges that designing a new national memorial a hundred years after World War I is a "daunting but exciting challenge." Most practically, what's now Pershing Park must remain a park. According to the design goals, the memorial "should be designed primarily as open space," and it "should recognize and relate to its urban context" and "play a part in public and private activity patterns in the immediate area."

That goal is neither new nor impossible. One of the most striking American WWI memorials is Victory Memorial Drive (dedicated 1921), a 3.8-mile section of Minneapolis' Grand Rounds Scenic Way that passes through 200 acres of green space. It's an early example of a "living memorial," one that meshed seamlessly with Theodore Wirth and Charles Loring's grand vision of an urban park system. Referring to the now-replaced elms shading the road, the Army officer who spoke at the dedication promised that "as these trees grow, so will memories of these men and women who died in the cause of liberty grow through all generations." Likewise, my favorite of the five finalists for the new memorial in Washington—Maria Counts' "Heroes' Green"—incorporates 116 Gingko trees (one per thousand American servicemen killed) and 16 Tulip Poplars (one per million total lives lost worldwide) in its attempt to "[blend] memorial, park, and garden into a new type of public space."

But Counts' lovely design would run up against the same challenge as Victory Memorial Drive: it can't have taken more than a generation before Minneapolitans started driving, biking, jogging, and walking their dogs along that road without turning a single thought towards the 568 men of Hennepin County who died in the Great War. It's not a uniquely American problem. While we were at London's Hyde Park Corner last January, Sam noticed that the New Zealand war memorial—a series of free-standing bronze girder—is designed so that it intrudes on the jogging path, forcing some degree of attentiveness from runners who otherwise breeze past the site's three other WWI-related structures.

Even assuming that Washington's new memorial can "recognize" but not disappear into its urban context, it must still provoke a certain paradoxical kind of remembering in those who take notice. Most fundamentally, says the Commission, the memorial "should honor and commemorate the service of American forces in World War I with sufficient scale and gravity that the memorial takes its place within the larger network of memorials and monuments situated on and around the National Mall." The first two verbs in the charge are deceptively straightforward. But as the design goals clarify, the memorial must at once "honor the heroism and valor" of all Americans who "served, fought, and died" in the war and "commemorate the tragedy and magnitude of loss suffered" by the nation. It's a tall order to mix national glory with national sorrow. Or shame.

In the most generous reading possible, American valor brought the war to a conclusion in time to keep the number of combatants killed from surpassing ten million. (Another five or six million civilians perished.) But to what other end? In order to justify anything like an alliance with European democracies that did not hold democratic elections until after Armistice—and certainly didn't put the cynical expansion of their empires to a vote in the Middle East and Africa—Woodrow Wilson had to rise to Lincoln-like heights of idealistic rhetoric. But how can a nation build a memorial to a "war to end all wars" when three succeeding 20th century wars are being commemorated within walking distance? That the only Wilson Memorial in Washington is a bridge across the Potomac hints at the failure of his plans for a world "made fit and safe to live in."

And there are multiple heroisms and tragedies to remember. Will the memorial honor the valor of the pacifists, progressives, socialists, and labor leaders whose dissent risked imprisonment, unemployment, and ostracism? Will it repent of the nativism unleashed against German-Americans and other "hyphenates"? With the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial just a mile to the southwest, will a WWI memorial specially commemorate the African-American soldiers who fought in a Jim Crow military, defending rights abroad that they couldn't exercise at home? Diversity would join National Pride among the four themes organizing the hundreds of photographs comprising STL Architects' "American Family Portrait Wall." The bronze pillars of Johnsen Schmaling's "Plaza to the Forgotten War" would support cast glass monoliths "inscribed with intimate letters from servicemen and women torn between hope and despair." (Perhaps there will be space for a few bitter words from W.E.B. DuBois: "For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality and devilish insult—for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight … .")

Even if it avoids the nakedly patriotic bombast of Washington's World War II memorial (just over a decade old now), the WWI memorial faces what may be its most daunting challenge: it must be "timeless"—not just free from faddish elements but "meaningful for future generations" who will presumably have even less emotional connection to 1914-1918 than the present generation.

In Europe, our students come across two solutions to the problem. First, and most frequently, they see that memorial designers equated "timeless" with "old" and borrowed ideas from the civilizations of antiquity. The former Western Front bristles with obelisks erected in honor of divisions in the British army. In Saint-Quentin over 8,000 German soldiers are buried in the shadow of a Greek temple. The grandest American WWI monument in Europe is a double colonnade at Château-Thierry. It's not unlikely that Washington will soon add yet another neo-classical structure to its cityscape, with the "timeless architectural language" of Devin Kimmel's "Grotto of Remembrance" (designed so as "to fit the new memorial into the largely traditional context of its already grand historical setting") still in the running for the overhaul of Pershing Park.

But other WWI memorials followed the drift of most postwar art into abstraction. While the German graves at Saint-Quentin are guarded by two warriors who resemble Achilles and Hector more than the gaunt figures of All Quiet on the Western Front, the most famous statues to adorn any military cemetery are the modernist forms holding vigil at Roggevelde (two bereft parents designed by Käthe Kollwitz, herself a bereft parent) and Langemark (Emil Krieger's four mourning soldiers). Other memorial designers opted for the timelessness of geometry. In addition to the massive, interlocking arches of the Monument to the Missing at Thiepval, Sir Edwin Lutyens contributed the most iconic memorial of the war: the Cenotaph.

In the judgment of Jay Winter, the leading historian of Great War commemoration, "Lutyens the geometer" created a "work of genius … a form on which anyone could inscribe his or her own thoughts, reveries, sadnesses. It became a place of pilgrimage, and managed to transform the commemorative landscape by making all of 'official' London into an imagined cemetery." The Cenotaph was reproduced throughout the British Empire, from Cape Town to Hong Kong, but it's hard to imagine anything quite like it being placed next to the seat of executive power in the capital of this particular former colony.

It doesn't seem that anything too much like the stark angles of the Vietnam Memorial will win the day either. Among the finalists, Joe Weishaar and Sabin Howard come closest with "The Weight of Sacrifice," whose darkened bronze "walls gradually slip into the earth drawing their wisdom with them." But those surfaces would be covered with reliefs and inscriptions, since one of the WWI Commission's design goals had long since ruled out the other element that makes Maya Lin's work so distinctively timeless: "The Memorial shall not list names of individual servicemen and women who served or were killed in World War I."

No doubt, there are problems with a roll of honor. Even if space could be found at Pershing Park on which to list all 116,516 of the dead, the new memorial is (appropriately) meant to honor the millions who served. And it's not clear that a dark wall listing fallen doughboys will ever produce the tears I once saw on the face of my father, when he found the name of a former high school classmate who had perished in Vietnam. Can such a roll of honor be "meaningful for future generations" when, from its very beginning, there's almost no one left who knows the people named?

Yet the world's largest new WWI memorial—pending the completion of the one in Washington—features almost nothing but names. Dedicated in November 2014 near the village of Ablain-Saint-Nazaire, the Ring of Remembrance is composed of five hundred bronzed sheets of stainless steel naming the 579,606 French, German, British, and other soldiers who died during the war in northern France. Critic Jonathan Glancey likens it to Lin's Vietnam Memorial and Lutyens' monument at Thiepval, which lists over 70,000 Commonwealth troops: "what you see is not so much sublime architecture, but all those names carved in heartbreaking profusion." According to architect Philippe Prost, the circle of names is "synonymous with unity and eternity. Unity, because the names form a sort of human chain, and eternity because the letters are joined without an end, in alphabetical order without any distinction of nationality, rank or religion."

His mention of religion is noteworthy, given that the Ring of Remembrance is mere meters away from the basilica of Notre-Dame de Lorette. Standing at the center of France's largest military cemetery, that church bears words from David, written for Saul and Jonathan but repurposed to grieve the nearly 40,000 soldiers buried on the grounds: "Your glory, O Israel, lies slain upon your high places! How the mighty have fallen!" (2 Sam. 1:19). Crosses mark most of those graves, but a small contingent of Muslim colonial soldiers from North Africa occupies a separate corner of the cemetery, their distinctive headstones angled towards Mecca.

While Prost's ring is made for a post-Christian Europe and may even be read as a laïque rebuff to the older site up the hill, there is something profoundly sacred about the commemorative act of naming. Consider the German cemetery at Langemark. Krieger's statues look at a mass grave containing the remains of nearly 25,000 men, with name after name filling basalt blocks on the grave's perimeter. Almost a third of those buried in the Kameradengrab are still unidentified. But they are not forgotten. Inscribed at the base of the grave are biblical words of reassurance: "I have called you by name, you are mine" (Isa. 43:1).

Long after the newest, grandest monument loses our attention and we return to our forgetting, to be named is to be—as thousands upon thousands of British gravestones testify simply—"Known unto God." Long after stone and marble symbols of national greatness have crumbled into ruin, reminders that every earthly kingdom falls, a simple list of names evokes the ancient claim of eternity that is found in every Commonwealth cemetery: "Their name liveth for evermore" (Sirach 44:14).

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He blogs at The Pietist Schoolman, pietistschoolman.com.

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Reclaiming Pietism: Retrieving an Evangelical Tradition

Roger E. Olson (Author), Christian T. Collins Winn (Author)

Eerdmans

204 pages

$19.12

45 minutes. In a session on the origins and definition of evangelicalism. (And even that comment came and went without much follow-up.)

All of which came back to mind as I read a book meant to remind evangelicals and those who study them what Donald Dayton, W. R. Ward, and others have already demonstrated: that evangelicalism grew out of German Pietism as much as Puritanism, Wesleyanism, or any of its other sources. And that a Pietist ethos continued to awaken, revive, and renew Christianity well beyond Germany and well after the 1700s.

Still more urgently, however, Roger Olson and Christian Collins Winn’s retrieval of the Pietist tradition is needed because it “offers contemporary evangelical Christianity a resource for its own renewal” at a precarious moment in that movement’s history.

But let me recommend the book before I have it solve all of evangelicalism’s problems. Collins Winn and Olson have provided the best introduction to Pietism available in a single volume. (Full disclosure: both contributed chapters to a book on Pietism and higher education that I edited recently for InterVarsity Press.) Whatever the inevitable limitations of any attempt to survey so big a topic in so short a book, Reclaiming Pietism is an accessible, provocative work that will help evangelicals and other readers to rediscover a religious ethos that did not begin with Philipp Jakob Spener or end with August Hermann Francke.

While the chapters on those prototypical figures (and their often mystical precursors) are well-done, they largely recite a story that’s been told many times since Ernest Stoeffler and Dale Brown first energized English-language Pietism studies in the 1960s and 1970s. More valuable are the chapters that go beyond Spener and Francke, starting with the one that sketches Radical, Moravian, and early Württemberg Pietism. (Nikolaus von Zinzendorf is central to this account of Pietism, almost as prominent as Spener and Francke in an overview of Pietist “hallmarks” and “the only one to translate his Pietist vision of the church into a sustainable model.”) The survey of Pietism in America leans heavily on a 1976 collection commissioned by Stoeffler but also weaves in research on Brethren and American Lutheran expressions of the ethos. It’s followed by a lively exploration of Pietist wrestling with modernity that introduces casual students to Johann Christoph Blumhardt, his son Christoph, and the little-known August Tholuck and Johann Hinrich Wichern.

What’s most remarkable is that Olson and Collins Winn can range so widely and yet convincingly maintain that they’re still talking about Pietism. Acknowledging that there is ample disagreement about “who counts as a Pietist,” they suggest the existence of a “mere Pietism” that is better understood as an ethos than a movement, one “amenable to different flavors” as it is expressed in different contexts by different individuals.

It’s an approach that bends but never breaks. Contested figures usefully complicate the story while still reiterating the core set of distinctives, “what [Pietism] shares in common not widely emphasized in the same way elsewhere.” So without getting bogged down asking whether Friedrich Schleiermacher counts as a Pietist of a higher or any other order, Collins Winn and Olson let him underscore what’s distinctive about Pietism: the emphases on piety, feeling, and community that Schleiermacher retained from his Moravian upbringing, and the fact that his Christ (“shrouded in mist,” according to one member of the pietistic German Awakening) was not “the living, risen Jesus” whom Pietists “encountered in the event of faith.”

This method carries the book as far as the last half-century, where we find that theologians Donald Bloesch, Stanley Grenz, and Jürgen Moltmann owed significant debts to Pietism. In the process, Olson and Collins Winn stretch the boundaries of their definition far enough to bring Quaker spiritual writer Richard Foster into the fold (“whether or not Foster would label himself a Pietist, he soaks in and exudes a Pietist ethos”).

Out of the understandable need to rescue their subject from its despisers, the authors do invite a familiar critique whenever “mere Pietism” becomes “true” or “real Pietism.” I suspect that Douglas Shantz may continue to complain that Olson writes the history of Pietism via a “return to a near-pristine beginning” that “ignores the contrary evidence of Pietist behaviors, conflicts, and failings in the real world.”[1] But our authors are aware of what happens when “Pietism [is] allowed to lean deeply into its own pathologies.” By turns, even its best representatives can be legalistic (Francke, critiqued here by Søren Kierkegaard), so self-assured as to seem arrogant (Zinzendorf), overly emotional (Zinzendorf again), compromised by political entanglements (Wichern), given to embarrassing precision in their eschatology (Johann Albrecht Bengel), and ambivalent about the role of women in the church (most, including Spener).

For that matter, yes: they are almost all men. (Here Shantz’s own Introduction to German Pietism, which includes a full chapter on gender, usefully complements Reclaiming Pietism.) That’s one reason that Collins Winn and Olson would have done well to find room for a fuller discussion of the pietistic evangelicalism of 19th-century Scandinavia and its enormous diaspora. As it is, the Norwegian Hans Nielsen Hauge—who appointed women like Sara Oust to preaching and leadership positions in his movement—is mentioned only in passing, as are Carl Olof Rosenius and Paul Petter Waldenström, leaders of a Swedish revival best known for the hymns of Lina Sandell.

But that’s a minor complaint offered by someone who belongs to a church founded by one group of pietistic Swedish immigrants and works at a university founded by another. There’s little doubt that Olson and Collins Winn have succeeded in retrieving an important source of evangelicalism. Their book is a must-read, both for those who already “lean more toward the Pietist-Pentecostal paradigm [of evangelicalism] in terms of practice [but] know little to nothing about Pietism as a historical movement and spiritual ethos” and for their evangelical cousins “who, apart from Pietism, tend to fall into dead orthodoxy.”

In the end, the primary goal here is nothing so small as winning Pietism a quicker mention in an academic conference or convincing readers to think twice before rhyming Pietism with quietism. Collins Winn and Olson write about Pietism as Pietists, “[offering] this book to the glory of God and the renewal of the church of Jesus Christ,” especially the evangelical part of that body.

At a historical moment when too many evangelicals are either abandoning or winnowing the movement, Olson and Collins Winn have hope for better times, if only evangelicals would come to share their belief “that Pietism points toward a way of doing Christian theology that is more authentically evangelical than alternatives” (emphasis mine).

What is more “authentically evangelical” about Pietism? Consider Pietists’ relationship with the Bible, a “steady devotion” to which gave David Bebbington one-fourth of his famous “quadrilateral”—and fractious debates over which continue to set evangelicals against each other. Pietists affirm the authority and inspiration of Scripture and emphasize the importance of its study by clergy and laity, individuals and groups. But they “loved the Bible not because it contains propositional truths about God to feed the mind, but because it is the principal medium for the Christian’s relationship with God, helping to guide and develop a deep intimacy between the Christian and God.”

Not to say that Pietism “[wishes] to empty the cognitive dimension of Christian faith of its importance; it wants only to put it in its proper place—as servant of God’s main purpose, which is to transform us into Christ-like persons.” As informed by Pietism, doctrine “should be ministerial rather than magisterial,” never “put on a pedestal and venerated.” Evangelical theology influenced by Pietism “avoids useless speculation” and debate over non-essentials in favor of a more “irenic and ecumenical” approach that is “informed and guided (never governed) by prayer and devotion.”

Of course, one thing these and other hallmarks of the Pietist ethos have in common is that they “are always in danger of being lost and forgotten,” leaving Christianity “always in danger of falling back into dead orthodoxy.” Perhaps this volume will help to rescue forgetful evangelicals from such a loss and such a fall, for as fragile and fleeting as the Pietist ethos can be, it endures because it is splendidly adaptable—as capable of reinvention in response to our own “crisis of piety” as in centuries before.

Christopher Gehrz is professor of history at Bethel University; he blogs at pietistschoolman.com.

1. Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013), p. 289.

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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The Pietist Impulse in Christianity Edited by Christian T. Collins Winn, Christopher Gehrz, G. William Carlson, and Eric Holst (Pickwick)

“Pietist,” “pietistic”: when we encounter these terms at all, they typically come dripping with condescension and scorn. This collection serves as a corrective. In addition to a cluster of pieces on “Continental German Pietism” (rightly the longest of the book’s eight parts), there’s a section on “Wesley the Pietist.” And I was particularly glad, as a longtime member of the Evangelical Covenant Church, to see the essays on “Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Trans-Atlantic Scandinavian Pietism.” The volume concludes with a lovely bit of Catholic bridge-building by Emilie Griffin.

John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination Thomas Gardner (Baylor University Press)

The conception of Thomas Gardner’s book is brilliant. He works his way attentively through the Gospel of John, with recourse to poems that engage directly with John’s text or with its salient themes. Gardner’s company of poets includes canonical figures and contemporaries as well. The result is a reading of John that will draw you “deeper and deeper into the claim that Jesus is life itself–that through his death his Father offers life to the world.”

What I Hate: From A to Z Roz Chast (Bloomsbury USA)

The title of Roz Chast’s new book of cartoons may be slightly misleading. She gives us a list of “concerns,” things that make her anxious. (“I am an anxious person,” she tells us, from “a long line of anxious people.”) So what we have here is a delightful miscellany of “phobias, fears, loathings.” Some are expected (Elevators, Heights, Quicksand); others will perhaps come as a surprise (Balloons, Jell-O-1-2-3, Spontaneous Human Combustion). In all cases, A to Z, anxiety is transmuted into absurdity. No prescription required.

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