Pietists and Moravians

Dead orthodoxy?

After the Reformation, Lutheran and Reformed churches spent a century defending and defining their doctrine against Catholics and each other. This age of "Protestant orthodoxy," or Protestant scholasticism, produced massive, precise works of theology. It was not lifeless. Bach's music, after all, came from Lutheran orthodoxy. But many felt that faith had become a matter of believing the right doctrines, attending church and receiving the sacraments, while hearts remained unchanged. The devastation of the Thirty Years' War left Germany spiritually exhausted.

Already in the early 1600s, the Lutheran pastor Johann Arndt wrote True Christianity, calling for a faith that changes life, drawing on medieval mystics. It became one of the most popular devotional books in Germany.

Spener: "Pious Desires"

The father of Pietism was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), a Lutheran pastor in Frankfurt. In 1675 he wrote a short preface to a new edition of Arndt's sermons. Published separately as Pia Desideria ("Pious Desires"), it proposed six reforms:

1. More extensive use of the Bible, including in small groups.
2. Putting into practice the Priesthood of all believers: lay people should study and minister.
3. Christianity is not just knowledge but practice, especially love.
4. In religious controversies, show love toward opponents rather than just winning arguments.
5. Train ministers in personal piety, not just academic theology.
6. Preach to build up faith, not to show off learning.

Spener had already started small groups that met in homes for Bible study and prayer, which he called collegia pietatis ("gatherings for piety"). His opponents mocked his followers as "Pietists," and the name stuck. The small-group idea, a "little church within the church" (ecclesiola in ecclesia), became a lasting feature of evangelical Christianity.

Pietism emphasized:

• New birth (Wiedergeburt): a personal experience of conversion and regeneration.
• Devotion to Jesus: warm, emotional love for the Savior, expressed in hymns.
• Holy living: often with strict standards about entertainment, dancing and theater.
• Active love: care for the poor, education and mission.

Francke and Halle

Spener's younger colleague August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) had a dramatic conversion in 1687. Struggling to write a sermon while doubting God's existence, he prayed in desperation and was flooded with assurance and joy. As professor at the new University of Halle in Prussia, he turned the town into a Pietist powerhouse.

Starting with a few coins found in a poor box, he founded in 1695 what became the Francke Foundations: an orphanage, schools for poor and rich children, a teacher training college, a pharmacy, a printing house producing cheap Bibles, and a publishing center. By his death over 2,000 children were in his schools. The Prussian kings, impressed by his efficiency and loyalty, supported him. Halle also became the training center for the first Lutheran missionaries. In 1706 the Danish king sent two Halle graduates, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, to the Danish colony of Tranquebar in southern India. They were among the first Protestant missionaries anywhere. Ziegenbalg translated the New Testament into Tamil.

The “religion of the heart”: how the revivals were connected

Zinzendorf and the Moravians

In 1722 a small group of refugees arrived at the Saxon estate of a young Pietist nobleman, Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). They were descendants of the Unity of the Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), the radical Hussite church of Bohemia and Moravia (see The Late Medieval Crisis), persecuted since the Thirty Years' War. Zinzendorf, Francke's godson, let them build a village on his land, which they called Herrnhut, "the Lord's watch." Other religious refugees joined them, and quarrels broke out.

Zinzendorf moved to Herrnhut and organized the community. Then, on 13 August 1727, during a Communion service, the community experienced what members described as an outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Disputes melted. They began a continuous prayer watch, members taking turns hour by hour, day and night. It continued unbroken, it is said, for one hundred years.

Zinzendorf's theology centered on intense, emotional love for Jesus, especially his wounds, the "religion of the heart." He was eccentric and sometimes extravagant, but he was a man of large vision. He coined the phrase "I have one passion: it is He, only He."

The first Protestant mission movement

In 1731, at the Danish king's coronation, Zinzendorf met an enslaved man from the Danish West Indies, Anton, who described the suffering of enslaved Africans who had never heard the gospel. In 1732 two Moravians, a potter and a carpenter, sailed to St Thomas in the Caribbean, reportedly willing to become slaves themselves if necessary to reach the enslaved. It was the beginning of an astonishing movement. Within a few decades this tiny church of a few hundred families had sent missionaries to:

• Greenland and Labrador (the Inuit),
• Native Americans in Pennsylvania and Ohio,
• Surinam and the Caribbean,
• South Africa (the Khoikhoi),
• Ceylon, India, the Arctic and beyond.

Moravian missionaries typically supported themselves by their trades and lived among the people. By 1760 the Moravians had sent out more missionaries than all other Protestants combined in two centuries. Historians often call them the first Protestant church to treat mission as the responsibility of the whole community.

A Moravian and John Wesley

The Moravians had one more huge impact. In 1736, sailing to Georgia, a young Anglican clergyman named John Wesley was caught in a terrible Atlantic storm. While the English passengers screamed in terror, a group of Moravians calmly sang hymns. Wesley asked one of them afterward whether he had been afraid. "I thank God, no," came the reply. "Were your women and children not afraid?" "No, our women and children are not afraid to die." Wesley realized he lacked their faith. Back in London, at a Moravian-influenced meeting in Aldersgate Street in 1738, his heart was "strangely warmed" (see John Wesley and the Methodists). The flame of German Pietism had jumped to England.

Catholic movements of the heart

Catholicism experienced parallel struggles over grace and inner religion.

• Jansenism: The Dutch bishop Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) wrote a massive book on Augustine, stressing human sinfulness and the absolute power of God's grace, close to Calvin in some ways. His French followers, centered at the convent of Port-Royal near Paris, were austere, intense and anti-Jesuit. The brilliant mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) defended them in his witty Provincial Letters. His unfinished Pensées ("Thoughts") is one of the great works of Christian thought: "The heart has its reasons which reason does not know." After a mystical experience in 1654, Pascal carried a note sewn in his coat: "God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars... Fire." Popes condemned Jansenism, and Louis XIV destroyed Port-Royal in 1710.
• Quietism: Teachers like the Spaniard Miguel de Molinos and the Frenchwoman Madame Guyon (1648–1717) urged total passive surrender to God in inner prayer. The gentle archbishop François Fénelon defended her and was censured. Quietism was condemned, but Madame Guyon's writings were later loved by Protestant Pietists and Methodists.