Angels, Worms, and Bogeys

The Christian Ethic of Pietism

Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781606080412
  9781498211925
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621893226
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

From their theological and devotional writings to their social and ecclesial practices, the fathers and mothers of Pietism boldly declared the ethical spirit of the Christian faith. This seventeenth-century renewal movement inspired a simple Christian ethic by connecting Christian character with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. They sought to cultivate these virtues by reading Scripture together, empowering the common priesthood of believers, and engaging in social and ecclesial reform toward the end of spreading the gospel. Pietism brought together faith and life, Word and deed, and piety and social reform in effort to get back to the basic belief in the power of God's Word to engender faith and to transform human life. This book celebrates Pietism's contribution by telling the stories of three early figures--Philipp Jakob Spener, Johanna Eleonora Petersen, and August Hermann Francke--as they attended to issues of class, gender, poverty, and education through the lens of scripture. In addition to clarifying what historians call "one of the least understood movements in the history of Christianity," this book challenges a religious culture that juxtaposes faith and social action, and it rehabilitates the Pietist heritage and its central role in the birth of Evangelicalism.

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Introduction: Angels, Worms, and Bogeys

“. . . the only thing that counts is faith working through love.”

—Galatians 5:6

The Story Begins . . .

J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings begins modestly: “This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages, a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”1 Hobbits, in Tolkien’s mythology, are a “variety” or “separate branch” of humans. From Hobbit-lore, we glean that Hobbits are hospitable and joyful, and they are good at both giving and receiving. They are also lovers of peace, adventure, and well-tilled earth.

We might describe Pietists in similar fashion, and were Hobbits real, they would likely be friends with Pietists. All humor aside, German Lutheran Pietists were in fact an odd breed, a “separate branch” of Christians, though that was never what they intended. If you were to look at a family tree of church history, you would find the Pietists branching off the Lutheran arm and extending toward the Moravians, the Free Church, Baptist General Conference, and the Evangelical Covenant. They have also cross-fertilized with the Reformed, Methodist, Mennonite, and even Roman Catholic branches.

This book is about the Christian ethic of Pietism. Pietism was a renewal movement that began in late seventeenth-century Germany. It was a significant movement in the Christian tradition that has been misunderstood and maligned for reasons that I will engage in the pages that follow. This book seeks to rehabilitate and understand the Pietist heritage and the central role it played in the history of Christian orthodoxy. Pietism was also vital to the origins of Evangelicalism and has much to offer Evangelicals in terms of an ethic that focuses both on Christian character and Christian practices.

While questions of when and how to mark the parameters of Pietism are quite interesting, this book is concerned with illuminating the character of the movement through the theological and social legacies of three of its earliest figures: Philipp Jacob Spener (1635–1705), August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), and Johanna Eleonora Petersen (1644–1724). These Pietists were church reformers who sought to take up the work begun by Martin Luther in the Reformation—to get back to the basic belief in the power of God’s Word to engender faith and to transform human life. In the words of German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, Luther’s vision can be summed as such: A reformation of life necessarily follows a reformation of faith.2 Basing their ethic on Gal 5:6, the Pietists said it a little differently: All that matters is faith active in love.

Ironically, retrieving the basics of faith and the core of the Reformer’s program made the early Pietists a minority in their Lutheran social and religious culture. They had strange theology, because they made the Bible the absolute and final authority over creedal formulations of the faith. They had unusual moral stances, because they so earnestly sought to scrutinize all of life in the light of Scripture. They were ecclesiastically disordered—they sought greater lay participation, priestly accountability, and small-group Bible studies. Though they thought themselves thoroughly Lutheran, in practice they were quite far from the Lutheran norm.

The making and shaping of Christian character was a key endeavor of the early Pietists, although they are not generally known for contributing to the history of the church in this way. Rarely do works in Pietism address questions of character and virtue. What kind of people do justice? What sort of character loves kindness? Which virtues move persons to walk humbly with their God? These questions are not the focal points of Pietist literature. And frankly, there is good reason for this gap in Pietist studies. Pietists are called individualistic, moralistic, and overly emotional. They tend toward spiritualism, mysticism, and other-worldliness. They cannot help but be, at times, rigid, separatist, and anti-intellectual. Such descriptors do not generally tempt us to raise questions of character because none of the qualities listed above qualify as a traditional virtue or excellence of character.

There are two logical reasons for the gap in studies in Christian ethics. First, Pietism is awkward, unsystematic, and difficult to define. As a movement, it splintered off quickly—making its footprint in church history both simple and complex, subtle and powerful. Moreover, they have been poorly caricatured. Reasons for this vary, but a large factor is the contentious manner that influential historical theologians, such as Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889) and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), engaged Pietism in their writings.3 Their critiques of Pietism included charges of extreme mysticism, separatism, and legalism—charges that still hold sway. Other notable thinkers have taken similar stances. Friedrich Engels described it in the following way:

One only has to visit a Pietist forge or shoe repair shop. There sits the master, next to him at his right the Bible, at the left—frequently at least—the whiskey bottle. Not much work is going on. Most of the time the master reads the Bible, occasionally takes a drink, and now and then sings a hymn with his workers. Yet the main thing going on is criticizing the neighbor.4

The inadequate accounting exists largely because Pietism has many trajectories, and, like many movements in the history of the church, the early forms differ greatly from the later expressions. Pietism is no exception. However, as is the case for most caricatures and stereotypes, partial truth lurks somewhere in the shadows of these descriptions. Ironically, in the case of Pietism, the partial truths of these descriptors are useful and, as I shall illuminate, they actually point us to Christian character in new and fresh ways. For example, descriptions of the “other-worldly” nature of Pietism can mask the virtue that actually lies within it. Being described as other-worldly can mean that one is not aware of the realities of life on earth and therefore does not attend to its problems. This brand of other-worldliness precludes social consciousness. But a more in-depth look at a kind of other-wordliness that is embedded in a deep sense of hope reveals a virtue that paradoxically inspired the Pietist movement not only to develop their social consciousness but to respond to social ills. Such examples point to the fact that while Pietism may be unsystematic and unwieldy, their Christian ethic is full of theologically innovative and ethically rich practices.

The second possibility for the gap in Pietist ethics is the inability to imagine how intense readers of Scripture could also engage in moral activism. The Pietists were known for spending much time gathered around the Word. Moreover, their writings chronicled their experiences of conversion and new life in Christ—not the ways they were socially active. The writings that did concern ethics seemed rule-based, such as some of Francke’s work. There also exist biases against the social reaches of Pietism. These biases are due, in part, to Pietism’s Lutheran theological commitments and the perception that Luther’s two-kingdom doctrine—that separated the spiritual kingdom of love from the earthly kingdom of the sword or politics—had no real integrated Christian social ethic. Nevertheless, I will show in the pages that follow that the Lutheranism operative in Pietism along with the Pietist emphasis on faith, hope, and love directly counter negative presuppositions about the moral contours of Pietist theology. Moreover, the primary avenue for understanding the subtle moral contours of Pietism requires us to connect their theological commitments to the witness of their characters.

In recent years, German scholars and church historians have done far superior work in studying Pietism. This book supports and engages the clarifying historical work of such American church scholars as Gary Sattler, K. James Stein, Dale Brown, and Jonathan Strom in celebrating the many contributions of Pietism. In addition, this book continues the theological trajectories of theologian C. John Weborg. In a significant article on Pietism and the Christian vocation, he writes of some of the treasures of the Pietist’s understanding of doctrine and life.5 In sum, he concludes that for the Pietists, doctrine and life are inseparable. Doctrine is meant to give life—it is to be embodied in Christian living and give shape to our identity. On the flip side, Christian life-practices frame the ways that we talk about God. For example, the practice of reading Scripture with the aid of the Holy Spirit offers faithful people rich insights into such doctrinal questions as: Who is God? Who are we? What is the Trinity? What does it mean to take baptismal vows? What happens when we die? Why celebrate the Lord’s Supper? Further, the explanation of these questions shapes how we then care for one another in the face of death or how we offer hospitality to others through food.

The neglect of Pietist ethics is not merely a gap in the scholarly literature. More importantly, the neglect is a gap in the story of the Christian people. Why read the about Pietist ethics? For this one simple reason: they represent a faithful account of rigorous Christianity, and Christian ethics is fundamentally about rigorous Christianity. Pietist ethics are accessible to all branches of the church, in large part because the life of the movement lies in their commitment to the church’s common source—the Word of God as it engenders the response of faith, hope, and love. This one simple thing makes the Pietists worth reading about.

Angels, Worms, and Bogeys?

“Angels, Worms, and Bogeys” playfully frames key aspects of Pietists ethics—but not as analogies. The trilogy is not exactly “faith, hope, and love,” but, strangely, angels, worms, and bogeys offer insight into the three theological virtues because they show how Pietism has been interpreted and what Pietism has to offer. The first two, angels and worms, refer to Gary Sattler’s book on Pietist anthropology—their understanding of the nature of human beings.6 In his book, Sattler notes the movements in the history of Christianity that have placed major attention on human beings’ relationship to God. The idea of Christ living in the individual is the core of the Christian faith, and this shift re-situates the function of creeds and doctrines as the only way to know God. Pietism, which grew out of Lutheranism, was an example of a movement that valued a personal relationship with God. Sattler notes that for movements such as these, “God-talk and anthropology are inseparable.”7 The focus on the human condition in relation to the Creator fostered a preoccupation with sin, and drove Pietists such as August Hermann Francke to designate human beings as “nothing but, or . . . even lower than, a worm.”8 Likening human beings to worms marked the depths of the human condition in relation to God.

Beyond Sattler’s work and Francke’s designation, I chose worms because they represent the depths of Pietism in our historiography. Pietists loved biological metaphors for describing the Christian life. Those familiar with Pietism might enjoy retaining the designation “worms” because it describes their attentiveness to their environment well. Pietists are like worms not only because they had the courage to confront the effects of sin in human beings but also because they were able to transform the environment of the church. By digesting God’s Word and allowing it to penetrate their lives, Pietism revived dead dirt and turned it into living soil. The soil they helped create became the environment from which social engagement, lay participation, and missionary activity increased. The soil they renewed helped grow the priesthood to be a body deeply grounded in a life-giving faith.

Angels, on the other hand, signify the heights to which humans can aspire when they are born anew. According to Sattler, the flip side of Pietist anthropology is that when we envision the soul as it was created to be, namely renewed in God’s image, we have a window into the true nobility of humans.9 This nobility is higher even than the angels, and we experience it when we are continually transformed and regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit. While tendencies toward perfectionism existed in some aspects of Pietism, they were merely tendencies. Pietists were not really perfectionists. They were interested in human flourishing as it came about in the context of God’s intention in creation. New birth and new life in Christ was God’s intention for creation and, hence, the most good and noble portrayal of human beings.

I also chose angels because they represent the heights of Pietism in our historiography. Pietism affirmed the loftiest aspects of the Christian faith. They did not simply talk about the excellences of faith, love, and hope—they lived faithfully, lovingly, and hopefully. My colleague, C. John Weborg, often walks our students through the Great Thanksgiving. When he gets to the point when we proclaim the mystery of faith—Christ has died! Christ is risen! Christ will come again!—he stops. The room is silent. Head bent humbly, all the while looking his students straight in the eye, John asks, “Now, do you believe it?” Christians recite many things in a given day, week or month. The question is whether we believe what we say and we say what we believe. The Pietists sought to bring these together in ways that had lofty expectations and mystical qualities. In t...

Table of contents

• Angels, Worms, and Bogeys
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Angels, Worms, and Bogeys
• How Should We Believe?
• How Should We Live?
• How Should We Hope?
• Conclusion: Faith, Hope, and Love
• Epilogue: A Word to the Evangelical Covenant Church
• Bibliography