Lecture 26: Pietists and the Turn to Experience
Because of the requirement of reÀ ective faith, Puritan faith is not necessarily
a form of certainty, but must strive to acquire certainty and assurance. The
“Westminster Confession” says believers may have a long, hard struggle
before they attain assurance of salvation. This helps explain the Puritans’
immense ethical seriousness and their insistence on righteousness. To
indulge in sin is to remove the evidence of the grace in your heart, and thus
undermines your assurance that you are saved.With Pietism, the turn to experience enters the Lutheran tradition in 17th-
century Germany. The beginning of Pietism is typically traced to Jacob
Philip Spener’s Pia Desideria (“Pious Desires” for a new reformation
of the Protestant church) in 1675.
Spener’s proposals were mainly about
increased learning of scripture by the
laity, including in small groups outside
the church service, later criticized as
conventicles. Spener’s book is serious
about the life of piety but says little
about emotion. Spener is a leading German Lutheran pastor concerned with
the pastoral failures of Protestant scholasticism. Spener draws on themes
from Johann Arndt’s powerful devotional work, True Christianity (1606).Protestant scholasticism is the theology that grew out of systematic attempts
to prove the truth and certainty of Protestant doctrine. Protestant scholasticism
is a university-based discipline—in 17th-century terms, a science—designed
to give a system of proofs of Protestant doctrine. Scholastic sermons were
not proclamations of the Gospel meant to change people’s lives, but proofs
of Protestant doctrine.Pietism is in large part a reaction against the aridity of Protestant
scholasticism. One of Spener’s key complaints was that Lutheran ministers
were mostly careerists, training at German universities to get a prestigious
pastorate, not by building up the À ock in faith but by skill in scholastic
reasoning. One of his key af¿ rmations was that the true theology required
not so much argumentation as piety. Later this was described as the contrast
between head-knowledge and the religion of the heart.Pietism is in large part a
reaction against the aridity
of Protestant scholasticism.