An Introduction to German Pietism


Book Description

An up-to-date portrait of a defining moment in the Christian story—its beginnings, worldview, and cultural significance. Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award of the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College An Introduction to German Pietism provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism. The Pietists can be credited with inspiring both Evangelicalism and modern individualism. Taking into account new discoveries in the field, Douglas H. Shantz focuses on features of Pietism that made it religiously and culturally significant. He discusses the social and religious roots of Pietism in earlier German Radicalism and situates Pietist beginnings in three cities: Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle. Shantz also examines the cultural worlds of the Pietists, including Pietism and gender, Pietists as readers and translators of the Bible, and Pietists as missionaries to the far reaches of the world. He not only considers Pietism's role in shaping modern western religion and culture but also reflects on the relevance of the Pietist religious paradigm of today. The first survey of German Pietism in English in forty years, An Introduction to German Pietism provides a narrative interpretation of the movement as a whole. The book's accessible tone and concise portrayal of an extensive and complex subject make it ideal for courses on early modern Christianity and German history. The book includes appendices with translations of German primary sources and discussion questions.




German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion


Book Description

August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.




A Companion to German Pietism, 1660-1800


Book Description

A Companion to German Pietism offers an introduction to recent Pietism scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic, in German, Dutch, and English. The focus is upon early modern German Pietism, a movement that arose in the late 17th century German Empire within both Reformed and Lutheran traditions. It introduced a new paradigm to German Protestantism that included personal renewal, new birth, women-dominated conventicles, and millennialism. The “Introduction” offers a concise overview of modern research into German Pietism. The Companion is then organized according to the different worlds of Pietist existence—intellectual, devotional, literary-cultural, and social-political.




An Introduction to German Pietism


Book Description

An up-to-date portrait of a defining moment in the Christian story—its beginnings, worldview, and cultural significance. Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award of the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College An Introduction to German Pietism provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism. The Pietists can be credited with inspiring both Evangelicalism and modern individualism. Taking into account new discoveries in the field, Douglas H. Shantz focuses on features of Pietism that made it religiously and culturally significant. He discusses the social and religious roots of Pietism in earlier German Radicalism and situates Pietist beginnings in three cities: Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle. Shantz also examines the cultural worlds of the Pietists, including Pietism and gender, Pietists as readers and translators of the Bible, and Pietists as missionaries to the far reaches of the world. He not only considers Pietism's role in shaping modern western religion and culture but also reflects on the relevance of the Pietist religious paradigm of today. The first survey of German Pietism in English in forty years, An Introduction to German Pietism provides a narrative interpretation of the movement as a whole. The book's accessible tone and concise portrayal of an extensive and complex subject make it ideal for courses on early modern Christianity and German history. The book includes appendices with translations of German primary sources and discussion questions.




German Radical Pietism


Book Description

Explores major figures, movements, and ideas that relate to radical German Pietism in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Also details Pietism's role in the formation of modern religious communities, such as Quakers, Brethren, and precursors to modern United Methodism.




Pietism in Germany and North America 1680-1820


Book Description

This collection explores different approaches to contextualizing and conceptualizing the history of Pietism, particularly German-speaking Pietistic groups who migrated to the British colonies in North America during the long eighteenth century. Emerging in the seventeenth century, Pietism was closely related to Puritanism, sharing similar evangelical and heterogeneous characteristics. The importance of Pietism in shaping Protestant society and culture in Europe and North America has long been recognized, but as a topic of scholarly inquiry, it has until now received little interdisciplinary attention. Offering essays by leading scholars from a range of fields this volume provides the first overview of the subject, helping to situate Pietism in the broader Atlantic context, and making an important contribution to understanding religious life in Europe and colonial North America during the eighteenth century.




German Neo-Pietism, the Nation and the Jews


Book Description

This book focuses on the national conceptualization of Judaism and Jews by German neo-Pietists from the early Restoration (1815) until the New Era (neue Ära, 1858-1861), at which point Prussia and other German states embarked on a liberal course. The book demonstrates how a certain understanding of nationalism by Awakened Christians, who were associated with political conservatism, was applied to themselves as belonging to a German nation, and correspondingly to Jews as members of a distinct Jewish nation. It argues that this kind of nationalization by neo-Pietists–among them theologians, intellectuals, and members of the agrarian aristocracy–was interwoven with their religion of the heart, and drew on a tradition of a community of kinship established by the earlier German Pietism since the late seventeenth century. The book sheds new light on the accommodation of nationalism by German Pietist conservatives, who so far were considered as opponents of the national idea. At the same time, it shows that their posture towards Jews was not merely anti-Semitic. It emerged from a specific religious-national synthesis, and aimed at an alternative solution to the Jewish Question, other than emancipation, in the form of Jewish national political independence.




Pietism and the Sacraments


Book Description

Considered by many to be one of the most influential German Pietists, August Hermann Francke lived during a moment when an emphasis on conversion was beginning to produce small shifts in how the sacraments were defined—a harbinger of later, more dramatic changes to come in evangelical theology. In this book, Peter James Yoder uses Francke and his theology as a case study for the ecclesiological stirrings that led to the rise of evangelicalism and global Protestantism. Engaging extensively with Francke’s manuscript sermons and writings, Yoder approaches Francke’s life and religious thought through his theology of the sacraments. In doing so, Yoder delivers key insights into the structure of Francke's Pietist thought, providing a rich depiction of his conversion-driven theology and how it shaped his views of the sacraments and the church. The first in-depth study of Francke’s theology written for an English-speaking audience, this book supports recent scholarship in English that not only challenges long-held assumptions about Pietism but also argues for the role of Pietism’s influence on the changing religious landscape of the eighteenth century. Through his examination of Francke’s theology of the sacraments, Yoder presents a fresh view into the eighteenth-century ecclesiological developments that caused a rupture with the dogmas of the Reformation. Original and vital, this study recognizes Francke’s importance to the history of Pietism in Germany and beyond. It will become the standard reference on Francke for American audiences and will influence scholarship on Lutheranism, Pietism, early modern German studies, and eighteenth-century history and religion.




Pia Desideria


Book Description

This classic work, first published in 1675, inaugurated the movement in Germany called Pietism. In it a young pastor, born and raised during the devastating Thirty Years War, voiced a plea for reform of the church which made the author and his proposals famous. A lifelong friend of the philosopher Leibnitz, Spener was an important influence in the life of the next leader of German Pietism, August Herman Francke. He was also a sponsor at the baptism of Nicholas Zinzendorf, founder of the Moravian Church, whose members played a crucial role in the life of John Wesley.




Pietists


Book Description

Pietism, with is origins in late 16th- and early 17th-century German Lutheranism, emphasized conversion, union with Christ, and importance of Scripture. This volume is the most comprehensive collection of Pietist writings available in English.