Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness

Christopher B. Barnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138260993
• eBook ISBN: 9781317109174
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Religión

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that Pietism is 'the one and only consequence of Christianity'. Praise of this sort - particularly when coupled with Kierkegaard's significant personal connections to the movement in Christian spirituality known as Pietism - would seem to demand thorough investigation. And yet, Kierkegaard's relation to Pietism has been largely neglected in the secondary literature. Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness fills this scholarly gap and, in doing so, provides the first full-length study of Kierkegaard's relation to the Pietist movement. First accounting for Pietism's role in Kierkegaard's social, ecclesial, and intellectual background, Barnett goes on to demonstrate Pietism's impact on Kierkegaard's published authorship, principally regarding the relationship between Christian holiness and secular culture. This book not only establishes Pietism as a formative influence on Kierkegaard's life and thinking, but also sheds fresh light on crucial Kierkegaardian concepts, from the importance of 'upbuilding' to the imitation of Christ.

PART I
Kierkegaard and Pietism

Chapter 1
The Origin and Development of Pietism: A Selective History

Defining ‘Pietism’

This is the first of three chapters that collectively intend to establish Søren Kierkegaard’s relationship with the Pietist movement. Each of these chapters will comprise a particular, though not exclusive, way of approaching the matter. While this opening chapter aims to provide a general orientation to Pietism, its successors will focus on Pietism in the Danish context and on Kierkegaard’s reading of Pietist literature respectively. At the conclusion of the third chapter, it should be clear that Pietism constituted a key part of Kierkegaard’s historical and literary background, although the question of its impact on the Dane’s authorship will be postponed largely until the second part of this study.

Before getting started, however, it must be said that presenting an overview of ‘Pietism’ is, in scholarly terms, a perilous undertaking. A survey of the secondary literature reveals that what one commentator means by ‘Pietism’ may not correspond to another’s use of the term. This disparity has to do with the difficulty of settling on the parameters necessary for a definition of ‘Pietism’. In a recent text, Carter Lindberg illustrates this point by way of a debate between two leading scholars, Johannes Wallmann and Martin Brecht.

As a ‘strict constructionist’, Wallmann insists that ‘Pietism’ properly signifies the movement launched by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) in the late seventeenth century. He stresses that the label ‘Pietist’ did not achieve currency until the 1680s, when it first was applied disapprovingly to Spener and to his followers, yet subsequently taken up by them as denoting one ‘who studies God’s Word / And also leads a holy life according to it’.1 In light of this fact, Wallmann considers Spener ‘the normative figure for understanding Pietism’.2

Brecht, meanwhile, takes a far more expansive approach to the issue. For him, it is insufficient to limit ‘Pietism’ to Spener and to his immediate heirs, for such a restriction at once overemphasizes Spener’s novelty and deemphasizes the array of expressions meriting the name ‘Pietism’. Thus he claims that the true originator of the Pietist movement was Johann Arndt (1555–1621), whose devotional writings spawned a ‘transnational and transconfessional phenomenon’ within Protestantism that extended all the way into the twentieth century.3 On this reading, Spener’s efforts amount to a significant interpretation of Arndtian piety, but hardly can be said to exhaust Arndt’s influence.

It is doubtful that this debate, as exemplified by Wallmann and Brecht, will be resolved in the near future. Consequently, Eric Lund’s advice seems apt: ‘Since scholars are far from reaching a consensus about the defining characteristics of pietism, it is important to recognize the merits of both points of view.’4 Still, this study cannot proceed without a working definition of ‘Pietism’. If only for the sake of clarity – rather than as an attempt to sort out the larger scholarly problem – the following query must be addressed: does ‘Pietism’, in this work, strictly denote Spener’s movement, or is it an indicator of a phenomenon spanning confessional, geographical and generational divides?

Kierkegaard determines the answer to this question himself. It is highly germane that his own understanding of what he calls Pietismen was capacious. As he writes in an 1850 journal entry:

Yes, indeed, pietism (properly understood, not simply in the sense of abstaining from dancing and such externals, no, in the sense of witnessing for the truth and suffering for it, together with the understanding that suffering in this world belongs to being a Christian, and that a shrewd and secular conformity with this world is unchristian) – yes, indeed, pietism is the one and only consequence of Christianity.5

This passage demonstrates that Kierkegaard does not confine ‘Pietism’ to the era or to the brand of Spener. In fact, it will become evident later that he does quite the opposite, for it was precisely the so-called ‘Halle Pietism’ of Spener and, in particular, his successor, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), that moved Arndtian piety in the moralistic direction repudiated here. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, elucidates in Practice in Christianity, Pietism is rooted in the example of Christ himself and in his attack upon the superficial legalism of the Pharisees. Wherever Pietism is found, its stress on genuine inwardness collides with the ‘established order’.6

Already, then, it is clear why this study cannot use ‘Pietism’ in Wallmann’s restrictive sense: Kierkegaard himself does not do so. To this point, however, one might counter that the expansiveness of Kierkegaard’s understanding of ‘Pietism’ virtually drains the term of historical specificity – a flaw that, accordingly, would seem to demand an ahistorical, purely conceptual treatment of ‘Kierkegaard and Pietism’. Why, one might add, even discuss the historical Pietists at all, given Kierkegaard’s refusal to equate their particular efforts with ‘Pietism’ as such? It is with this query that Kierkegaard’s relationship with the Moravian Brethren comes into play. As will be detailed in Chapter 2, Kierkegaard’s family had roots in the communal piety of the Moravians and, by association, their leader, Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf (1700–60). Furthermore, as a youth, Kierkegaard himself attended the weekly meetings of Copenhagen’s Moravian community – also known as the Brødremenighed [‘Congregation of Brothers’] or the Brødresocietet [‘Society of Brothers’] – who maintained a meeting hall in the city centre. This relationship helps to determine what ‘Pietism’ means in this study. Though similar in several respects, the Moravians are not to be confused with Halle Pietists, especially as regards their dealings with the establishment. And yet, for scholars such as Brecht, Lindberg and Peter Erb, they constitute one of the key expressions of the ‘polygenetic’ devotional movement of ‘Pietism’.7 Hence, inasmuch as ‘Pietism’ is understood as a multifarious phenomenon, inclusive of groups such as the Moravians, it is both prudent and essential to underline Kierkegaard’s historical connections to it.

Still, if Kierkegaard was linked to Pietism by way of the Moravian Brethren, then why not limit the discussion to ‘Kierkegaard and the Moravians’? Does not the more general term ‘Pietism’ cloud the matter, not only because it invites controversy, but also because it fails to do justice to the uniqueness of Moravian life and thought? This question would be more persuasive if Kierkegaard’s relation to Pietism could be reduced to his interaction with the Moravians – something that would be possible, however, only at the expense of Kierkegaard’s interest in and admiration for a strand of literature valued across the Pietist movement. Indeed, as F. Ernest Stoeffler contends, a shared emphasis on the praxis pietatis is what enables talk of a unitary ‘Pietism’.8 Despite differences between, say, Halle Pietists and Moravians, it is nevertheless true that both groups stressed the inculcation of pious habits and practices. Stoeffler adds that these habits and practices assumed a number of forms: hymn-writing, social outreach, pastoral care, ecumenical endeavours and, finally, the reading ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations to Kierkegaard’s Works
• Preface
• PART I: KIERKEGAARD AND PIETISM
• PART II: HOLINESS IN ‘THE PRESENT AGE’
• Bibliography
• Index