The Expansion Of The Reformation In Europe
By the middle of the 16th century, Lutheranism had spread into the various principalities and kingdoms of northern Europe. The duchy of Württemberg, after the restoration of Duke Ulrich, adopted reform in 1534; its outstanding reformer was Johannes Brenz and its great centre Tübingen. Brandenburg, and its capital Berlin, embraced reform in 1539, and in that same year ducal Saxony, until then vehemently Catholic, changed sides. Elisabeth of Braunschweig also converted in 1539, but only after much turbulence did her faith prevail in the land. Albert of Prussia, whose wife was Danish and who was a member of the Polish Diet and grand master of the Teutonic Order, took a stand that was very significant for the north. He secularized the order and in 1525 acknowledged himself a Lutheran. In Scandinavia Denmark toyed with breaking with Rome as early as the 1520s, but it was not until 1539 that the Danish church became a national church with the king as the head and the clergy as leaders in matters of faith. Norway followed Denmark. The Diet of Västerås (1527) officially declared what had for some time been true, namely, that Sweden was an evangelical state. The outstanding Swedish reformers were the brothers Olaus and Laurentius Petri. Finland, under Swedish rule, followed suit. The reformer there was Mikael Agricola, called “the father of written Finnish.” The Baltic states of Livonia and Estonia were officially Lutheran in 1554. Austria under the Habsburgs provided no state support for the evangelical movement, which nevertheless gained adherents. In Moravia, as noted earlier, the Hutterites established their colonies under tolerant magnates.
The reform movement also spread into eastern Europe. Poland, though remaining predominantly Roman Catholic, acquired a large Protestant minority in the late 16th century, when the Danzig area and its German Lutheran population came under Polish control, and when a large contingent of the Bohemian Brethren migrated to Poland after the Habsburg ruler attempted their extermination. Several Polish nobles adopted their pacifism and wore only swords made of wood. In 1570 the anti-Trinitarian Socinians, named after their leader Faustus Socinus, flocked from Italy to Poland where they received asylum, perhaps merely because they were Italian, from the Italian queen of Poland, Bona Sforza. They flourished in Poland until dispersed by the Counter-Reformation and survived in small groups until the 19th century. Much more extensive was the Calvinist influx not only into Poland but into the whole of eastern Europe. This variety of Protestantism appealed to those of non-German stock because it was not German and no longer markedly French, as well as because of its revolutionary temper and republican sentiments. The Compact of Warsaw (1573) called the Pax Dissidentium (“The Peace of Those Who Differ”), granted toleration to Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Bohemian Brethren, but not to the Socinians.
In Hungary, the Turkish victory at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 brought about a division of the land into three sections, with the northwest ruled by the Habsburg Ferdinand, the eastern province of Transylvania under Zápolya, and the area of Buda under the Turks. Even before this date Lutheran ideas had made slight inroads in the German and Magyar sections of Hungary. Although Roman Catholicism would predominate among the Hungarian population, Calvinism made gains, and the anti-Trinitarians found a permanent home in Transylvania. The weakness of the government and the diversity of religion in this whole area made for a large degree of toleration.
On the other hand, the Reformation gained no lasting hold in Spain or Italy. In Spain this was primarily the result of the conflicts of the previous century, when Christians strove to achieve political, cultural, and religious unification by converting or expelling the unbelievers—the Jews and the Moors. The Inquisition was introduced in 1482 to root out all remnants of Jewish practice among the Marranos, the Jewish converts to Christianity. The non-Christian Jews were expelled in 1492. Then Granada fell and the same process was applied to the Moriscos, the Moorish converts, and the unconverted Moors, after a century, also were expelled. Because the process had thus far been successful, the pressures were relaxed, and Spain enjoyed a decade of Erasmian liberalism in the 1520s. But with the infiltration of Lutheranism, the machinery of repression again was brought into force.
In Italy sectarian and heretical movements had proliferated throughout the Middle Ages. But one by one they had been crushed or absorbed by the church. Furthermore, the Reformation failed to take hold in Italy because of the tradition of moral preaching by the friars. Another consideration was that the new religious orders—the Capuchins, Theatines, and Jesuits—tapped into currents of popular spirituality while gaining papal favour. The new orders became a mighty force in counteracting Protestant infiltration, which nevertheless did take place. Venice was a centre, with its branch house of the Lutheran banking family of Fugger, and so was Lucca. At Naples the Spanish mystic Valdés, though not a Protestant, expounded a Catholic reformist piety, and some of his followers were attracted to the movements coming from beyond the Alps. Calvinism gained a hold, but the Roman Inquisition, as above noted, was established in 1542, and those with Protestant leanings either made cloisters of their own hearts, went to the stake, or crossed the mountains into permanent exile. Ironically, the most radical theological views of the Reformation were those propounded by the Spanish and Italian anti-Trinitarians.
Protestant Renewal And The Rise Of The Denominations
The setting for renewal
Survival of a mystical tradition
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was the background for the intensification of a desire for spiritual renewal. Although historical research has modified the exaggerated contemporary accounts of the war’s effects, it is unquestionable that distress in central Europe 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. Spiritual and moral deterioration accompanied the physical destruction.
During the war notable signs of renewal appeared. For example, interest in earlier devotional literature developed, which reflected the pious mysticism of 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 Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1561), Valentin Weigel (1533–88), and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Although both Lutherans and Calvinists opposed the ideas of these mystics, they adopted many of their religious and theological ideas.
Catholic recovery of Protestant territories
After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 ended the last of the so-called wars of religion, sectarian competition continued and Catholic powers hoped to regain territory from Lutheran Protestantism. For example, 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. French refugees became prominent in English religious life, and in Prussia they 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 were 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.
France gained Alsace in 1648, which decreased Protestant numbers in that Reformation stronghold. Strasbourg, 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 following the War of the Grand Alliance, a clause (the Simultaneum) of the treaty (added at the last moment and not recognized by the Protestants) preserved certain legal rights for Catholics in Protestant churches. As a result of France’sgreater power Protestant authority in the Rhineland between Switzerland and the Netherlands diminished.
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.
Protestant scholasticism
The 17th century was at once the high era 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, based on the notion that the Christian faith was best defined by its doctrines.
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. Protestant theological systems of all variety were worked out in many volumes, appealing always to reason and to biblical authority and seldom to feeling or conscience. This period is known as the age of Protestant orthodoxy or scholasticism. But that pejorative term came later when the axioms on which the systems were founded were no longer accepted. 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.
The rise of Pietism
The influences of 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.
Dutch Pietism influenced by Englishman William Ames (1576–1633), whose Medulla Sacrae Theologiae (1623; The Marrow of Sacred Theology) and De Conscientia (1630; On Conscience) were basic textbooks for federal or covenant 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.” Important representatives of Reform Orthodoxy were 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 may well 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 stressed the notion of the unio mystica (mystical union) between the believer and Jesus, a 17th-century Lutheran doctrinal addition, the central Arndtian theme was not that of mystical union but stressed repentance, regeneration, and new life, which would become the essence of Pietism.
Alongside the orthodox piety of the 17th century, among the most significant contributions to spiritual renewal were 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”).
Pietism in the 17th century
The various streams of concern for renewal converged in the life and work of Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705). In 1666, after earning his theological doctorate at Strasbourg, he was called to be superintendent of the clergy in Frankfurt am Main in the principality of Hesse, 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 Hesse.
The origin of the so-called collegia pietatis (assemblies of piety) has been traced to a sermon of 1669, in which Spener exhorted the laity to come together on Sunday afternoon to review the morning’s sermon and to engage in devotional reading and conversation “about the divine mysteries” instead of meeting to drink, play cards, or gamble. In 1670, at the request of his parishioners, such meetings were held each Sunday and Wednesday at Spener’s home. Although some of the Frankfurt ministers, over whom Spener was superintendent, denigrated the collegia pietatis, the practice flourished and became a distinguishing feature of the movement. Those who attended the meetings were soon called Pietists.
In a relatively short time, Spener became a household name and Spener was called “the spiritual counselor of all Germany” because of his writings and extensive correspondence. Most significant was the publication in 1675 of his Pia Desideria (Pious Desires), the first part of which reviewed the low estate of the church. Spener charged civil authorities, who had been de jure heads of the church since before the Peace or Augsburg (1555), with irresponsible caesaropapism (the doctrine of state control over church). He likewise flayed the clergy, many of whom he regarded to be scandalous and self-seeking, often confusing assent to “true doctrine” with faith. The laity, 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, he declared. 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:
- 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.
- 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 fellows.
- 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.
- 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.
- Theological education must be reformed. Professors must see that future pastors are not only theologically learned but spiritually committed.
- Finally, preaching should have edification and the cultivation of inner piety as its goal.
The book received popular acclaim. The clergy, however, felt threatened by the implications of the program’s emphasis on the laity even though Spener meant to focus on the clergy. Theology professors resented Spener’s criticism of their teaching and advocacy of curricular reform. Spener responded by emphasizing the collegia pietatis.
He faced further difficulties, however, because the conventicles became divisive and abrasively Donatistic (Donatism was a heresy from the early church that held that priests must be morally pure or the sacraments would not be valid), developing into “little churches within the church” (ecclesiolae in ecclesia). To stem separatism and unorthodox attitudes, Spener wrote tracts on 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 its worship services and sacraments was wrong.
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 controversy, 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. While in Dresden he wrote Impediments to Theological Study (1690), which was hardly calculated to win friends at the famous University of Leipzig, and made the acquaintance of a young instructor, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who became his successor and the second great leader of Pietism.
By 1691 Spener welcomed a call to Berlin 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.
Spener’s years in Berlin were not without bitterness. The conflict between Protestant Orthodox theologians 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.
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 February 5, 1705.
Meanwhile, Francke became the central figure of Pietism. While a student at Leipzig, he engaged in group Bible study and was one of the organizers of a collegium philobiblicum(assembly of Bible lovers), which was dedicated largely to the scholarly rather than devotional approach to the Scriptures. A religious experience in 1687 led Francke to make conversion, which was traditionally characterized by a severe penitential struggle and commitment to holy living, the norm for distinguishing true Christians from unbelievers. Francke’s Pietism stressed 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, the 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 hospital. All of this gave Halle and Franckean Pietism an energetic and activist character, particularly since Francke believed that religious reform and societal reform went hand in hand.
18th-century Pietism in central Europe and England
One of Francke’s institutions in Halle was the paedagogium (1698), a boarding school for the sons of well-to-do parents who lived at a distance. Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf (1700–60), the godson of Spener, who attended the Halle boarding school from 1710 to 1716, was greatly influenced by his godfather and then by Francke. At the age of 14 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.”
By 1721 Zinzendorf had settled down on his estate (Berthelsdorf) near the Bohemian border, where he organized believers into a nonseparatist ecclesiola in ecclesia, which denied the Halle Pietists’ demand for penitential remorse as a mark of “heart religion.” Zinzendorf formulated the slogan that came to be of great importance in the history of revivals: “Come as you are. It is only necessary to believe in the atonement of Christ.”
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,” Zinzendorf gave up his position in the Saxon civil service and welcomed other Moravian refugees, who, like him, had been influenced by Pietism. Zinzendorf soon organized the colony of Herrnhut into the community of the Bohemian Brethren. They were not to separate from the Lutheran Church of Saxony and would attend services in the village church at Berthelsdorf and call upon the local pastor for ministerial acts. They regarded 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 (“Unity of the Brethren”). Although Zinzendorf received a license as a minister in 1734 and three years later was consecratedbishop, he left Herrnhut under pressure from the Saxon government in 1736. He did evangelical work in western Germany, England, and North America, where he established important missionary centres in Germantown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He returned to Herrnhut in 1749 and presided over the Church of the Brethren until his death in 1760.
The influence of the Moravians on the Evangelical Awakening in England was significant. By 1775 there were 15 Moravian congregations in England, and at one of these John Wesley, founder of Methodism, had his famous “Aldersgate Street Experience” (1738). His conversion experience occurred while he was listening to a Moravian preacher reading Luther’s Preface to the Romans. As Wesley noted later,
Joining the Moravian society in Fetter Lane, London, Wesley also journeyed to Hernnhut to learn 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 associated with Wesley, his brother Charles, and George Whitefield.
18th-century Pietism in Scandinavia and America
Denmark-Norway
The age of orthodoxy in the Dano-Norwegian kingdom, as in Germany, had a deeply spiritual side, which was manifest in the hymns of Thomas Kingo (1634–1708) and the teaching of Holger Rosenkrantz (died 1642) and Bishop Jens Dinesen Jersin (died 1632). Arriving in Copenhagen at the turn of the century, Pietism was welcomed, strangely enough, by the unpietistic king Frederick IV (1699–1730), whose royal chaplain, the German R.J. Lütkens, approved of the pietistic pastors and won Frederick’s support for missions in India. The king sought out missionaries in his kingdom but found none. He then turned to Germany, where, through Lütken’s contacts, he discovered two young Halle-trained Pietists, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1683–1719) and Heinrich Plütschau (1678–1747). Ordained at Copenhagen in 1705, they became the founders of the famous Tamil mission at Tranquebar, India, in 1706. The Tamil mission stimulated interest among the Halle Pietists in evangelical work including the Norwegian Pietist Thomas von Westen’s mission to the Sami (then known as the Lapps) in northern Norway, and the Norwegian Hans Egede’s pioneering evangelical work in Greenland. King Christian VI, moreover, was known as the “Pietist on the throne” because he supported an orphan home and schools modeled after Halle, a missionary institute, and even conventicles (a 1741 decree permitted them only under pastoral leadership). Erik Pontoppidan, court preacher at Copenhagen and later bishop of Bergen in Norway, made a lasting contribution with his Truth unto Godliness, a commentary on Luther’s catechism that combined law and the gospel, orthodoxy and pietism. Virtually a national reader for many generations, especially in Norway, this “layman’s dogmatics” continued to influence American Lutheranism into the 21st century.
North America
In 1703 three pastors from New Sweden on the Delaware River ordained Justus Falckner, a Halle-educated Pietist, for service among the mostly Pietistic Dutch Lutherans in New York. Many German Pietists emigrated to North America—often traveling through London, where they were helped by the Pietist court chaplain M. Ziegenhagen—including those from the Rhineland and southern Germany who settled in New York and Pennsylvania and from Salzburg who settled in Georgia. Accompanying the Salzburgers were two pastors selected by Francke, J.M. Boltzius and I.C. Gronau, who 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 of the American community and was later called “The Patriarch of American Lutheranism.”
Rationalism
From the early days of Christianity, some theologians had argued that Christian truth could be vindicated by reason. In the early 17th century a number of theologians, including the Latitudinarians in England, began to emphasize the use of reason. Their best representatives were the Cambridge Platonists—philosophical theologians at Cambridge (c. 1640–80)—who claimed that reason was the reflection of the divine mind in the soul.
During the 17th century the successes of science, especially the work of Sir Isaac Newton(1642–1727), persuaded many people of the power of reason and of the necessity to test all things by reason. The German thinker Christian Wolff (1679–1754) of Halle approached theology as if it were a form of mathematics, seeking a truth that would be incontrovertible for all reasonable people. 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 in German Protestantism.
In England the same trend among the disciples of John Locke (1632–1704) led to the rise of Christian Deism, which held that Christianity was a new version of the natural religion of the human race. The English Deists permanently influenced Protestant thought by forcing 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 traditional Christianity on the basis of science and philosophy.
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. Rationalist theologians insisted that goodness in God could not be different in kind from goodness in humans and therefore that God cannot do what in an individual would be immoral. Although 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.
Evangelicalism in England and the Colonies
Methodism
The evangelical, or Methodist (named from the use of methodical study and devotion), movement in England led by John Wesley was similar to the Pietist movement in Germany. While a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, Wesley organized a group of earnest Bible students, made a missionary expedition to Georgia, and became a friend of the Moravians. Like the Pietists he emphasized the necessity of conversion and devoted much of his life to evangelistic preaching in England. He did not intend any separation, but the parish system of the Church of England 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.
The Methodist movement seized upon the emotional and spiritual conscience that Protestant orthodoxy neglected. It revived the doctrines of grace and justification and renewed 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. Hymns—hitherto confined (except for metrical Psalms) to the Lutheran churches—were accepted in other Protestants bodies, such as the Church of England, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists as a result of the Methodist movement, which produced some of the most eminent hymn writers, such as Philip Doddridge (1702–51) and Charles Wesley (1707–88).
The Great Awakening
Churches in the 13 American colonies practiced the Congregational or Baptist church polity on a scale not known in Europe. Anabaptist groups required evidence of faith, which sometimes meant public testimony of the conversion experience. Larger American congregations required a similar testimony that was more solemn and at times more emotional. Calvinistic pastors in New England, seeking the religion of the heart, gave unusual stress to the necessity of an immediate experience of salvation. Pastors found that a wave of emotion could sweep through an entire congregation and believed that they could here observe conversion that resulted in a better life for the converted. These traditions and growing dissatisfaction with rationalism and formalism in religious belief and practice led to the Great Awakening, a revivalist movement of the first half of the 18th century. 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 mid-18th century, waves of revivals and conversions spread throughout the colonies. These revivals, although led by Congregationalists and Presbyterians, resulted in the formation of many small, independent, Bible-centred, Baptist groups. American revival leaders, like Wesley in England and Zinzendorf in Germany, were forced to practice their ministry outside the established churches.
The movement was not native to North 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.
Legacies of the American and French Revolutions
The American Revolution and the French Revolution changed the history of Western society as well as the history of the Protestant movement. The American Constitution, with its implied separation of church and state, was influenced by the spirit of free churchmanship from colonial days, the religious mixture of immigrants continually arriving from Europe, the reaction against the “Church and King” alliance that prevailed in Britain, and the secular spirit of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution and Napoleon made the idea of the secular state 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 places 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. At least as an outward and historical form, established churches remained in England, Scotland, and all the Scandinavian countries.
The revival of Pietism
Germany
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a reaction against the Enlightenment occurred in Germany. In philosophy, literature, and music it found expression in German Idealism and Romanticism. Indeed, a number of religious thinkers sought to point out the banality of the Enlightenment and to preserve and awaken genuine Christianity. 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.
It was in such a climate that the revival of Pietism occurred in many German congregations. 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 gradually these new Pietists, influenced by Romanticism’s admiration for the past, began to assert the need to link their 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.
There were three discernible “schools” in this revival of Lutheranism. “The Repristination Theology” (i.e., restoration of earlier norms), led by Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg (1802–69), made 17th-century orthodoxy normative for the interpretation of Luther’s teachings and fought the rising historical-critical approach to the Bible by affirming the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. A second group, the Neo-Lutherans, felt that the Repristinationists or “Old Lutherans,” though not wrong, needed correction and improvement especially in their view of the church, the ministry, and the sacraments. These Neo-Lutherans, influenced by Romanticism, were the German counterpart of the Oxford Movement in England. The chief exponents of this group were Wilhelm Löhe (1808–72), who had great influence on American Lutheranism, and August Vilmar (1800–68). The third group, the so-called Erlangen school, rejected Rationalism, Repristination, and Romanticism and asserted a theology that recognized 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).
North America
The great 19th-century German and Scandinavian immigration that began in 1839–40 included many “Old Lutherans” from Prussia whose original pietistic impulses had given way to a high-church confessionalism. Colonies of about 1,000 “Old Lutherans” under J.A.A. Grabau settled in the vicinity of Buffalo, New York, and others in and around Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They were the forerunners of the Buffalo Synod (1845). Saxon immigrants under Martin Stephan and Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther also arrived in 1839 and settled near St. Louis, Missouri, 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, and one of their first leaders, Elling Eielsen (1804–83), was an extremely legalistic lay follower of Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824), a Norwegian Pietist who criticized the established church and stressed daily work as a divine calling. The Danish immigrants, fewer in number, eventually split over the question of Pietism. The anti-Pietists were known as “the Happy Danes,” while the Pietists were called “the Sad Danes.” Swedish Americans adhered to various forms of Pietism.
The era of Protestant expansion
Toleration
The great Protestant advance depended in part on the existence of the secular state and on toleration. As late as 1715 the Austrian government had denied all protection of the law to Hungarian Protestants. After the French Revolution, however, 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 protection; Protestant groups could spread, though slowly and with 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.
Although the secular state contributed to Protestant (and Roman Catholic) expansion and variety, it also confronted all churches with the challenge of redefining their role in secular society and their relationship with the state. The American pattern, in which the state must have no constitutional connection with religion, 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 adopted a neutral 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 the right to appoint parish ministers without state interference. The refusal of this demand by the courts and government led to a schism when Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) formed the Free Church of Scotland in 1843 with nearly half the members of the Church of Scotland. The two churches continued side by side until their 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.
In England the drive for the independence of the state church was a feature of the Oxford Movement, led by John Henry Newman (1801–90) in 1833. That movement, unique in Protestant history, asserted its independence by emphasizing all the Catholic elements in the Protestant heritage and came close to repudiating the Protestant tradition. Newman himself became a Roman Catholic in 1845 and was made a cardinal in 1879. Under the leadership of the survivors, the Oxford Movement transformed 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.
On the whole the trend was toward a free church in a free state. A few conservative theorists, especially the German Lutheran Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–61), strenuously defended the old link between throne and altar and the necessity for a single privileged church to prevent revolution and rationalism. Other theorists saw the church as the religious side of the nation. In England Frederick Denison Maurice defended the established church along these lines; and in Denmark, more easily because the population was so largely Lutheran, N.F.S. Grundtvigshrank from every form of denomination or confessionalism and wanted to make Christianity the spiritual expression 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.
The rise of American Protestant influence
Since the 16th century the two great Protestant powers had been Germany and England, but by 1860 a third force emerged in the United States. After 1820 American frontier conditions contributed to the growth of Protestant denominations such as the Disciples of Christ, which formed in 1832 from revivalist groups. Many immigrants to America were Catholic, and in time Catholicism would be the largest single denomination in the United States, but the tone of American leadership and culture remained Anglo-Saxon, liberal, and Protestant. Moreover many German and Scandinavian Lutherans emigrated to America, and American Lutheranism expanded until it rivalled Germany and Scandinavia as centres of Lutheran life and thought. Because Lutheran leadership came largely from European pietistic groups, American Lutheran churches tended to be more conservative in theology and discipline than the churches in Germany.
The spread of missions
As European and to a lesser extent American power grew in the 19th century, the Protestant churches entered their greatest period of expansion. Confronted at home by new industrial cities, they developed social services on a scale hitherto unknown, including 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 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, hitherto confined to the seaports and to the remnants of Roman Catholic missions in the 17th century, expanded deep into the interior because of the work of the China Inland Mission (founded 1865) and other evangelical groups that were financed from England or the United States. 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.
Revivalism in the 19th century
One of the most prominent features of Protestantism in the 19th century was the development of the camp revival to meet the needs of an industrial and urban society. Although the urban poor seldom went to church, they listened to evangelical preachers in halls and theatres, or on street corners. Methodists and Baptists, familiar with revivalistic methods, made great strides, especially in the United States. Their efforts were not confined to reaching the working class. The English Baptist Charles H. Spurgeon (1834–92) accepted a ministry to the educated and secured a large audience in London. William Booth (1829–1912), a former Methodist preacher, and his wife, Catherine, established an evangelical mission for the poor in east London that was known from 1878 as the Salvation Army. They directed their mission to the people on the street corners, using brass bands and even dancing to attract attention. They differed from the Methodist revivalist tradition in their belief in the necessity of a strong central government under a “general” appointed for life. They also abandoned the use of sacraments. At first the Salvation Army faced much hostility and even persecution, but by the end of the 19th century it had securely established its place in Britain and had become a worldwide organization.
Karl Olof Rosenius (1816–68), influenced by Methodist preaching, introduced revivalism into Swedish Lutheranism. Although Rosenius was also influenced by Zinzendorf and Pietism, his new movement was quite unlike the little groups of Pietism. The Pietists wanted to bring men to salvation from 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 for the world. The movement had influence in Norway and Denmark and even in the United States.
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) remained powerful in the 19th century, and revival meetings took place in cities as well as in the western camps. Famous evangelists emerged, including Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) and Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99), to lead revivals in American cities.
The evangelical movement in Protestantism of the 19th century moved away from the traditional churches of the Reformation—Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican—to create new forms of church life and new organizations. These new institutions used lay preachers and were more concerned with individual conversions than with church order or church affiliation. Consequently, they developed a tendency, not common before the Pietist movement, to identify Protestantism with individualism in religion. These evangelical activities produced separate Christian organizations that still called themselves Protestant.
The secular state allowed and in some cases stimulated further growth among the Protestant churches. Apocalyptic expectation of the Second Coming of Christ contributed to the emergence of a number of important radical Protestant groups and churches. In Britain in 1827 John Nelson Darby (1800–82) founded the Plymouth Brethren, 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 the second coming. Apocalyptic groups also formed in the United States. The apocalyptic prophecies of William Miller (1782–1849) in the 1840s led to the formation of the church of the Seventh-day Adventists. The Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), founded by Joseph Smith (1805–44), emerged from similar expectations of the imminent 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.
New issues facing Protestantism in the 19th century
Churches and social change
Attacks on the churches during the 19th century (and after) were both social and intellectual. Rapidly growing cities and industry created a proletariat estranged from religious life. Many political leaders, especially in Europe, claimed that the churches were bulwarks of a society that must be overthrown if justice was to be secured for the working class. 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.
In response to such views, in nearly every European country, Catholic or Protestant, there came into existence groups of “Christian Socialists,” who believed that workers had a right to social and economic justice and that a Christian ought to work toward achieving social justice for them. Except for these basic tenets, however, the political and theological views of Christian Socialists varied greatly. Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909), a court preacher in Berlin, was an anti-Semitic radical politician; 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 dismissed in 1853. He then became a London pastor, and finally a professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge.
But in England and the United States the radical Protestant denominations—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 their social responsibility. In the United States the Social Gospel had great appeal for the churches at the end of the 19th century, and its most influential leader was a Baptist, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918).
Biblical criticism
Protestantism, and Christianity in general, also encountered an intellectual onslaught from thinkers who declared that the advance of science and of history proved the Bible, and therefore Christianity, untrue. The great issue for Protestants and all Christians in the 19th century was the question of biblical criticism; i.e., whether a person could be a Christian and even a good Christian though he held some parts of the Bible to be untrue. On the one hand, Protestantism stood by the Bible and declared that the truth of God came from it. On the other, Protestantism rested in part on a fundamental belief in 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, where the question of biblical criticism was first raised, 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 by refutation rather than by authority. Thus German Protestantism showed an open-mindedness in the face of new knowledge that was influential in the 19th century. 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.
In such a flux of ideas, with the Protestant tradition seemingly under internal attack from liberal Protestants, there was naturally a wide variety of approaches, both in philosophy and history. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) proposed that Christianity should be restated as a form of Idealistic philosophy. This view was influential both among German thinkers and Oxford philosophers of later Victorian England. This approach, however, was subjected to critique, the most powerful of which was published by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who argued that philosophy failed to account for the depths and tragedies of human existence. An earlier opinion sought to justify Christianity on the basis of the religious feelings commonly found in humanity. The influential German theologian F.D.E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) attempted to infer the Christian and biblical system of thought from an examination of human religious experience. 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 to Schleiermacher was Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), 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 Protestant thought.
Meanwhile, scholars made great strides in the study and exposition of the Bible. Freed from the necessity of defending every one of its details as historical truth, university professors put the books of the Bible into a historical setting. German biblical scholars, many of whom were influenced by Hegel, were the first to use the new approach freely. Ferdinand Christian Baur(1792–1860) of the University of Tübingen applied the methods of Hegelian philosophy to the books 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 Baur’s commentary on New Testament texts remained a landmark in the study of the Bible. A number of excellent biblical scholars appeared after Baur, including Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828–89) of Cambridge who demolished the Tübingen theory by showing the later 1st-century origin of most of the New Testament texts. Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) of Berlin vastly enlarged the understanding of early Christianity. Insisting that the simple message of Jesus had been obscured by church dogma, he defined the essence of Christianity as love of God and neighbour. Harnack’s work also summarized the results of a century that was revolutionary in the area of biblical study.
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