PIETISM AND THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN EVANGELICALISM
IN THE FIRST CHAPTER OF Renewing the Center, Stanley Grenz summarizes his view of how evangelicalism has changed. Eighteenth-century evangelicals had an understanding of the gospel characterized by “convertive piety” and “experimental religion.” While experimental religion is the outworking of one’s faith in practice, convertive piety is “the vision of faith that sees a personal experience of regeneration through the new birth coupled with a transformed life, rather than adherence to creeds and participation in outward rites, as the essence of Christianity.” By the mid-twentieth century, however, many evangelical theologians had augmented “the traditional interest in gospel proclamation with another, decidedly cognitive concern, namely, the desire to maintain correct doctrine.”1 Thus, to the material principle of the early evangelicals the more recent evangelicals added a formal principle,2 correct doctrine, and these more recent advocates see the two principles as together constituting the genius of the movement or, in Grenz’s view a worse case, the formal becoming the material. Grenz believes that the additional principle altered the historic meaning of evangelicalism, and his book, among other things, calls for a return to what he sees as the original understanding of the movement. This paper attempts to test the Grenz hypothesis: did evangelicalism begin with its material principle in the place of honor, and was it the case that later evangelicals changed the movement by adding and overem-phasizing the formal principle? An introduction details the Grenz view, after which we will look at the Pietism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by studies of Methodists, Lutherans, and other religious groups in the United States.
INTRODUCTION: GRENZ’S VIEW OF HISTORY
Evangelicalism started in the Protestant Reformation, particularly with Luther’s emphasis on justification by faith, but especially in Calvin’s separation of sanctification from justification. However, there is not a single line from the Reformation to later expressions of evangelicalism, for while “the theological trajectory that gave it birth may have begun in the Reformation, it underwent twists and turns, permutations and augmentation, during its journey from the sixteenth century to the present.” The rise of Puritanism and Pietism in the seventeenth century and their confluence in the eighteenth century is the more immediate source of evangelicalism. These two movements—emphasizing a personal conversion experience, the life of sanctification, and assurance of one’s election—constitute traditional evan-gelicalism, and what occurred to evangelicalism by the twentieth century was an aberration from the eighteenth-century beginnings. Those beginnings will fare much better in a postmodern, post-theological world than will the twentieth- century version.3
Though Puritanism “was without a doubt the single most powerful molder of the ethos and theology of the evangelical movement,” evangelicalism drew equally from German Lutheran Pietism. These two “kindred spirits” saw themselves as completing the work of the Reformers, the Pietists for example arguing that the Lutheran reformation had been only partial. Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), one of the founders of Pietism, was convinced along with his followers that, more than head knowledge and adher-ence to outward forms, the essence of Christianity “is a personal relationship with God expressed in a life that reflects God’s will. And this idea, in turn, became the central hallmark of the Pietist movement.” Thus, writes Grenz, “[w]hereas the major issue of the Reformation had been the origin of faith, in Pietism the focus shifted to the outcome of faith, as Pietists elevated the new birth to center stage.”4
A series of consequences followed from moving the new birth to center stage. One was a shift from the Reformers’ emphasis on what God does for his people to an emphasis on what God does within his people. This led to a move in soteriology from justification as the foundational doctrine to regeneration as the foundational doctrine. In turn, two other consequences fol-lowed. “The older Protestant theology had generally spoken of salvation as an objective given. . . . The Pietists, in contrast, highlighted the subjective, the inner nature of salvation.” And second, “the locus of true Christianity shifted from baptism to personal salvation.” While some of this may have been subtle, the overall effect was an “unmistakable shift” which, when completed in the context of the eighteenth-century British and New England revivals, “marked the genesis of the evangelical movement with its focus on the gospel of the new birth.”5
Armed with this basic interpretation—evangelicalism has roots in the Reformation, its immediate forebears are Puritanism and Pietism, and its advent is really only in the eighteenth century—in the next several chapters Grenz proceeds to describe what went wrong. In the nineteenth century the formal principle, especially scriptural authority, gradually replaced the mate-rial principle. Begun by the Princeton Theology, this replacement influenced the fundamentalist movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and its successor, the new evangelicalism that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Grenz writes from the late-twentieth century vantage point: “[u]nder the influence of this understanding of the movement’s formal principle, its material principle became not so much the gospel itself but what mid-century evangelical theologians saw as the basic doctrines of the Bible.”6 This was new, as Grenz sees it, for the older evangelicals “were generally in agreement that the Bible is inspired by God. Nevertheless, like their Pietist forebears, they were not particularly concerned to devise theories to explain the dynamics of inspiration. Further, evangelicals displayed a remarkable fluidity of opinion about the ins and outs of inspiration.” Further, “the evangelicals who emerged from the awakenings exhibited little interest prior to the 1820s in elaborating precise theories about biblical infallibility or inerrancy.”7 But later in the nineteenth century, Scripture emerged as the central “fundamental,” which “had the effect of transforming the ethos of the evangelical tradition of the purveyors of convertive piety from that of a gospel-focused endeavor that viewed the Bible as the vehicle of the Spirit’s working to that of a Bible-focused task intent on maintaining the gospel of biblical orthodoxy.”8
What happened to the subjective as primary and the doctrinal as secondary during this long period when the formal principle came to dominate?The older view did not die, but was preserved in various parts of the larger evangelical movement, particularly in those influenced by Pietism: John Wesley and the Wesleyan, the Methodists in general and the Holiness groups in particular, and perhaps the Pentecostals. An apt illustration of this is how Grenz views the relationship of current theologians Millard Erickson and Clark Pinnock to Pietism. Erickson, he says, “never lost sight of the gospel-centered and Pietist influenced nature of evangelicalism,” and “retained enough of the Pietist heritage of the Swedish Baptists to maintain the practical aspect of theology.” However, “in the waning years of the twentieth century, as Erickson picked up the mantle of [Carl F. H.] Henry, he seemed to be drifting to the right.”9 This rightward drift was the stress on doctrine as primary, on the scholastic as opposed to the experiential. By contrast, Clark Pinnock, rather than turning to Henry, rediscovered the “Pietist impulse,” which has allowed him “to greet the postmodern emphasis on the particular and experiential, for he saw these developments as boding well for an ‘evangelical pietism.’ . . . And it is here above all that his contribution as a catalyst for a rebirth of centrist evangelical theology may be found.”10 Erickson, given his background, could have retained his pietism but chose not to; Pinnock the “scholastic,” upon discovering pietism, made the crucial choice to embrace it.
Other writers offer support to this general picture. And some argue that the original evangelicalism not only did not die but remained alive and well during the era of aberration described by Grenz. For example, William J. Abraham argues that greater voice should be given to the Wesleyan ingredient in evangelicalism, agreeing with Grenz that the twentieth century saw a move away from the longer evangelical history.11 Donald Dayton goes a step farther, contending that the Wesleyan view has been the predominant one over the history of American evangelicalism. Dayton asserts that while the “Reformed paradigm,” with its strong emphasis on order and doctrinal clarity, was dominant among twentieth-century evangelicals, this was really a recent development, and the Wesleyan/Arminian view is actually the long-term understanding of evangelicalism. What Dayton has sometimes described as the “Pentecostal paradigm” means that rather than having a closed set of features, evangelicalism is an innovative, fluid, radical movement with much fuzzier edges than the Reformed view allows.12 In one of his recent discussions he sees three paradigms for evangelicalism (in effect splitting the Reformed paradigm in two): the Lutheran/Reformation one emphasizing jus-tification by faith and the other sixteenth-century solas, the pre-fundamen-talist Wesleyan movement rooted in the eighteenth-century evangelical revival, and the post-fundamentalist neo-evangelicalism which emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. Of the three, “the most useful and historically appropriate way of using the word ‘evangelical’ is, I believe, according to the second or Wesleyan paradigm—what I would call classic evangelicalism.”Evangelicalism is “basically Wesleyan even beyond the boundaries of Methodism as such.”13
Whether Grenz would fully agree with this last contention, the issues before us are several in number: Is it the case that Pietism stressed the experiential as its material principle, and the doctrinal as at most only a formal principle? Is it the case that such a relationship characterized the eighteenth-century revivals, John Wesley and his American followers, and groups like American Lutherans and Pentecostals? Is it the case that the long dominance of the Reformed tradition reversed the relationship, and as a consequence encouraged the loss of the central meaning of evangelicalism? One of the primary questions in all these issues has to do with the nature and role of Pietism, the movement this chapter specifically addresses. Puritanism and other sources of evangelicalism will appear only here and there tangentially.14
CLASSICAL PIETISM
Dale Brown’s Understanding Pietism, cited positively by Grenz and others, provides a helpful survey of early Pietism. Admitting that Pietism has had a number of interpretations and manifestations, and specific names such as Reformed Pietism, Radical Pietism, Moravianism, English Evangelicalism, Methodism, and the Great Awakening, Brown notes that his study “will primarily use the name Pietism in the more narrow sense and apply specific labels when referring to kindred movements.” But even in the narrow sense there are multiple sources of Pietism. “The early Pietists espoused continuity with Luther and reform orthodoxy.” But it is also the case that the “genesis of German Pietism owes much to the Reformed tradition, particularly to its Puritan strands.” Two other sources are Anabaptist and mysticism, though the latter “has been overemphasized by some historians.”15
And what of the doctrinal matters in Pietism? Pietists were reacting to a “dead” Lutheran Orthodoxy, which orthodoxy sprang in part from conflict in the sixteenth century with Calvinists and Jesuits, but it’s also true that Luther’s “insistence on correct doctrine was no doubt an impetus to the rise of Lutheran Orthodoxy.” From a positive standpoint, “this movement toward Orthodoxy can be viewed as faith seeking understanding, the necessity for a young and growing Lutheranism to define itself amid political maneuverings and theological cleavages.” Furthermore, even in the seventeenth century, “Orthodoxy retained a reform party and some who shared Luther’s suspicion of philosophy.” Therefore we need to keep in mind “that many of the caricatures and criticisms of Orthodoxy by Pietists were directed more against its extremes and degenerations than against its solid center and finest representatives.” Negatively, the Pietists “claimed that correct doctrine did not seem to make a difference in the morality and lives of all those who possessed it.” Did this lack of making a difference lead to making doctrine a secondary consideration? Apparently not, for “it is interesting that in later eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manifestations of conservative Protestantism, one often finds the merger of what had previously been the sharp opposing strands of Orthodoxy and Pietism.” We can conclude from this that instead of seeing Pietism as a modification of Lutheran teaching, and a deemphasizing of doctrine, it may equally be seen as augmenting (or sup-plementing) doctrine.16
Pietists are noted, of course, for their ethical and practical concerns, but Brown also sees “underlying theological presuppositions. . . . Pietist mentors accepted Luther’s order of salvation which began with his central theme of justification by grace through faith. They adopted Luther’s critique of any attempt to work out our salvation apart from Christ. . . . This focus on practical Christianity may be indicative that Pietism fostered no theology of its own; however, the emphasis on practice, exegesis, and mystical appropriation of the grace of God often assumed and represented certain theological presuppositions.”17
Having attempted in his first chapter to answer the general question, What is Pietism? Brown spends the major part of the book treating the two founders of Pietism, Spener and Francke, to discover “the theological presuppositions which undergirded their practical activities,” and to “examine the validity of the charge of subjectivism in the major areas of ecclesiology, exegesis, ethics, experience, and eschatology.” As for Spener, he “repeatedly professed to be a rechtglaubig (‘orthodox’) Lutheran in complete agreement with the teachings of the church and the Formula of Concord ‘in all articles and points.’” Though accused of unorthodoxy, Francke on several occasions was cleared of the charge. Still, there were important differences between the Orthodox (also in historical studies called the Scholastic) Lutherans and the Pietist Lutherans, for despite the “protestations of true Lutheranism on both sides, a fundamental cleavage evolved between later Lutheran Orthodoxy and German Pietism.”18 But was the cleavage a matter of experience versus doctrine?
One of the claims made about Pietism is that it shifted the doctrine of justification by faith (with its juridical emphasis) from its central role in Luther and the Lutheran Orthodox to regeneration (a biological metaphor) as the center. This shift may be characteristic of some later manifestations of Pietism, but not so for Spener. “Spener felt that the Johannine and Pauline metaphor of regeneration represented a completion and an enhancement rather than a replacement of the equally biblical metaphor of justification.” Though still early on in his book, Brown at this juncture gives a summary of what the book does: “Spener and his followers opened the door for many manifestations of Protestant individualism; nevertheless, they did attempt to maintain a balance between their understanding of God’s objective activity in Word and Sacrament and their stress on the individual and corporate human appropriation of Word and Sacrament.”19
The objective and the subjective elements noted in the previous quota-tion become a leitmotif in Brown’s book and, by implication, the heart of the views of the founding Pietists. In understandings of the nature of the creeds and symbols, the nature of the church, the Bible, sanctification, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the nature of the world, there is a constant both/and quality among the early Pietists. In the midst of his chapter on “Doctrine and Life” Brown states the two sides: “the leaders of Pietism professed orthodoxy. They did not desire to disparage doctrine; they insisted that doctrine encompass life. Spener’s concern was that the interests of pure doctrine and Gottseligkeit [“godliness”] be preserved equally and at the same time.” Citing Max Gobel, Brown agrees that Spener was “as much the enemy of heresy as he was the enemy of ungodliness.”20
A test case for the Pietists and their views on doctrine, specifically the doctrine of Scripture, is Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752). Alan J. Thompson notes that Pietism in general, and often Bengel in particular, are seen by later writers as espousing “a ‘person-oriented’ view of inspiration that allowed for errors in the text; a ‘limited’ view of inerrancy that allowed for errors in Scripture with regard to history, geography, and chronology; [and] a reluctance to equate the word of God with Scripture.” It follows from these notions that Pietists argued for partial inspiration, and they helped prepare the way for the rise of textual criticism.21 Thompson’s thorough study calls into question each of these assertions. In the lengthy preface to his work as well as in his detailed comments on selected biblical passages, Bengel “repeatedly draws attention to the truthfulness, perfection, purity, and unimpaired nature of the original manuscripts in part (words, syllables, and even letters) and in whole (including historical narrative), as the written word of God.”Bengel “is one Pietist (and a significant one) who cannot be claimed as an ally in opposition to evangelical formulations of the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture.” Citing other studies as well as his own, Thompson concludes that the doctrine of inerrancy was not a novelty introduced by Reformed theologians in the nineteenth century; rather, “Bengel’s belief as a Lutheran Pietist in the inerrancy of the ‘original autographs’ falls within a broad tradition that stretches throughout the history of the church.”22
Brown’s book recognizes important differences between the Pietists and the Orthodox in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany, but with-out seeing the differences as experiential versus doctrinal. A quite different picture of Pietism, drawn against the background of the rise of the New Evangelicalism after World War II, emerges in a study done by C. John Weborg. “Pietism and evangelicalism are critiques—pietism of orthodoxy, whether Lutheran or Reformed; and evangelicalism of both fundamental-ism and liberalism. Pietism has sought the life and liveliness of faith, evangelicalism more the truth of faith.” Even though Weborg is referring to the “new evangelicalism” of recent decades, he is seeing Pietism as a contrast-ing movement different over time from evangelicalism, rather than saying that recent evangelicalism has lost some original Pietist influence. Part of the contrast is in ecclesiology, which “has not received its due in pietism studies.” If it had, the charges of inwardness and subjectivity “would have been mitigated to some extent. I argue that pietism seeks a sociological apologetic for the gospel, where coherence is looked for between Scripture and life.”23 More telling, “Pietism offers caution to the American revival tradition with which it is often identified.” Pietists certainly had a strong belief in conversion, but not to the extent of making it “a discernible moment of decision.” This may derive in part from the Lutheran doctrine of baptism, in part from “organic and biological language [which] tends more toward process than to decisive moments,” and in part from what Weborg has developed in the article, a phenomenology of religion that did not specify the when, before, or after of conversion. “More interest was expressed in living faith and its fruit than in the nature and time of its beginning.” 24 In Weborg’s view, Pietism and evangelicalism are really separate movements, rather than the former being influential in creating the latter.
What we have in Brown and the other studies is a picture of Pietism that shows a shift in emphasis, and a theology that develops with it, but not a move away from doctrine nor even a move away from an interest in doctrine, including the doctrine of Scripture. For the Lutheran Pietists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the various confessions are still in place. More radically in Weborg is the contention that Pietists may not have been interested in doctrine, but this lack of interest means they are not one of the con-stitutive foundations for evangelicalism. Egon Gerdes walks a middle way: for the Pietists, “the ordering of life is more fundamental than the ordering of doctrine.”25 But as we have seen, for the Pietists doctrine still needs to be “ordered.”
JOHN WESLEY AND THE METHODISTS
Since it was John Wesley and the Methodists who were the major “carriers” of Pietism in America, we will look at them in some detail, then address several other groups more briefly. The Great Awakening in America was called the Evangelical Revival in England, and John Newton (1725–1807), the one-time slave trader who wrote “Amazing Grace,” illustrates much of the British experience of early evangelicalism. “Newton and his contemporaries did not use the word ‘evangelical’ very often, but they used the word ‘Gospel’ (usu-ally with capitalized initial) to the same effect as a ubiquitous prefix of approval.” So there were Gospel clergy, Gospel sermons, Gospel conversation, and sinners rejoiced to see Gospel light. The central emphasis in the eighteenth century was upon conversion, and in Newton’s Authentic Narrative we see “how an evangelical version of the self was shaped by the central theme of personal conversion.” Though Newton was a Calvinist, he saw him-self as a “middleman” among the various groups in the Evangelical Revival, all of whom had “a common experience and understanding of the gospel [which] formed the basis for identifying those who were regarded as within or without the evangelical milieu (the ‘Gospel world’), whether from the Established Church or Dissent.”26
Party elements like periodicals came soon enough (the first one, Gospel Magazine, or Spiritual Library, Designed to Promote Religion, Devotion, and Piety, from Evangelical Principles, appeared in 1766, and embraced both Dissenters and Churchmen), but at the time “evangelical” was less a party word and more a theological term. Newton “chiefly emphasized human depravity, Christ’s atonement, and sanctification by the Spirit and the Word. . . . John Wesley offered a similar reduced creed of essentials in 1764:
original sin, justification by faith, and holiness. These were evangelical basics.” Like other Church of England ministers Newton subscribed to the Thirty-nine Articles, but it was theology and conversion that made an evangelical. At times in his correspondence he inquired about those who were “awakened clergy,” i.e., had had a conversion experience. How did Newton and others recognize those awakened clergy? It was “their common belief in a simple but supernatural gospel, their common experience of climactic con-version, and their common commitment to a style of preaching aimed at ‘awakening’ sinners in their need of the gospel.” Their commonness did not prevent quite different theologies, of course; Hindmarsh has a convenient summary of four “[d]istinct theological positions maintained during the Evangelical Revival,” ranging from Evangelical Arminianism to High Calvinism, which underscores the variety of evangelicals.27
Newton is important in demonstrating the common characteristics of persons in the Evangelical Revival, among them John Wesley, but of course Wesley was much more influential. Having noted above Wesley’s reduced list of creedal essentials, it is worth pointing out that this list did not constitute his whole creed. Thomas Oden contends that Wesley’s Twenty-five Articles (based on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles) “are older than Wesleyan theology by two centuries,” and “stand in the moderate center of the Protestant confessional tradition. . . . The Articles intend to preserve the unity of the body of Christ and guard against false, unscriptural teaching.”28 Oden quotes approvingly, “[t]he theology of American Methodism is essentially that of the Anglican Church in all things which according to that Church and the general consent of Christianity are necessary to theological orthodoxy or the doctrines of grace, unless the entire omission of the histor-ically equivocal Seventeenth Article on ‘Predestination and Election’ be con-sidered an exception.”29
But what of Wesley’s famous “catholic spirit” sermon, preached in 1750, at times summed up with his phrase “if your heart is as my heart, give me your hand”? Both Oden in a 1994 book and H. O. Thomas in an article published in the Fall 2001 issue of Wesleyan Theological Journal address the question. Wesley distinguished between essentials and opinions. Aware of criticism that Methodists were simply “enthusiasts,” i.e., guilty of making opinions into essentials to the loss of the genuine essentials, Wesley assured a recipient of one of his letters in 1745 “that no singularities are more, or near so much, insisted on by me as the general, uncontroverted truths of Christianity.”30 This means that the “catholic spirit” is exercised in the con-text of the orthodox faith, for as Oden says, “Wesley distinctly rejects doc trinal latitudinarianism and sets out [in the sermon] the doctrinal core assumed in the catholic spirit.”31 The doctrinal core includes God and his attributes, providence, Christ, justification by grace through faith, and the Holy Spirit and the Christian life. Where is the Bible in all this? It is the source of the doctrinal core.32 Thomas summarizes for us: “[i]mplicit evangelical faith which already presupposed certain experiential and objective theological realities was the pre-understanding for Christian union of those with differing ‘opinions.’”33
Thus, as innovative as Wesley may have been in some regards, the innovations did not include moving away from, nor muting, orthodox Christianity. In a book replete with all kinds of theological debate and discussion, Richard P. Heitzenrater says Wesley “was not hesitant to accept radical manifestations of the work of the Holy Spirit, but he was also cautious enough to measure such experiences by biblical norms to test their authen-ticity. Although he allowed for extraordinary gifts of the Spirit, Wesley was prone to emphasize the ordinary gifts—love, peace, joy. Although his aim was to reform and renew the Church, the limits of his reverence for ecclesial authority and order were determined as much by his understanding of the Early Church as by the rules of the Church of England.”34
Not only that, it is also the case that Wesley was involved in a number of doctrinal disputes. Heavily influenced early on by the Moravians, Wesley nevertheless came to believe that their emphasis on “stillness” doctrine was wrong. Stillness meant that until someone had assurance of full faith the per-son ought to remain “still”—abstaining from the means of grace, such as the communion service, until the assurance came. Wesley argued for degrees of faith, and the use of the ordinances like baptism and communion to strengthen one’s faith, even contending that communion was a “converting ordinance,” not just a “confirming” ordinance. The conflict reached the point in 1740 where Wesley and the Moravians broke permanently over the issue.35 Another major problem was the Whitefield-Wesley rupture over predestina-tion, symptomatic of a larger Calvinist-Arminian dispute. Wesley’s 1740 sermon on “Free Grace,” followed by Whitefield’s open letter on the subject early in 1741, brought the predestination issue to a head and produced a divi-sion at Wesley’s Foundery Chapel. Though the two men did cooperate on later occasions on a personal level, they never reconciled on the issue, and their respective proponents formed sides in the revival. In later phases of the Calvinist controversy, at different times in the 1750s through the 1770s, the acrimony reached a high level on both sides. It seems fair to conclude that Wesley had a strong interest in doctrine, his “catholic spirit” modified by doctrinal issues.36
In a 1999 article on Wesley’s relation to both Puritanism and Pietism, Scott Kisker asserts that “Wesley’s heritage is not Puritanism [per se], but a type of experiential piety which found expression in certain wings of English Puritanism.” Therefore it’s a mistake to think that Wesley was theologically close to Puritan Calvinism. What he was close to were Puritans like Richard Baxter, who “[t]hough not ambivalent toward systematic theology, . . . felt no compulsion to tow the line on Reformed orthodoxy.” Pietistic Puritans like Baxter are the ones to whom Wesley was drawn, and then only to their pietistic side. To show this, Kisker notes that of “the Puritan authors Wesley reprints, all with the exception of John Fox [sic] were active in the time that . . . pietistic Puritanism was coming to the fore.” Absent a detailed study of the thirty authors Kisker lists, to draw this general connection is dubious at best.37
But, even granting Kisker’s general point that Wesley was selective in his reprinting of works, surely the very act of selecting was based (at least in part) on theological considerations. And Kisker supports this inference in dis-cussing some of Wesley’s other theological concerns. Wesley tied together Pietist perfectionism, Puritan moralism, and the devotionalism of the mystics “within the structure and doctrine of the Church of England.” In spite of Moravian influences Wesley “did not adopt a form of Lutheranism, nor did he adopt the evangelical Calvinism of the revivalists with whom he began out-door preaching.” He broke with the Moravians over the “[i]ssues of sancti-fication, and particularly of the role of works in salvation.” “Despite shared history, contacts, and spiritual experiences, the conflict over doctrine between Whitefield and Wesley began early.” Wesley’s Predestination Calmly Considered (1752) “offers a very negative, and not necessarily ‘calm,’ view of Calvinism.” In all these matters it appears that Wesley too was “not ambivalent toward systematic theology.”38
On the American scene, evangelicals made their presence felt up and down the colonial seaboard in the eighteenth century. Besides the obvious names, George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards, many were active in the years during and following the Great Awakening, including Methodists. Already in North Carolina by the 1760s, says Richard Rankin, the new lights, as the evangelicals of the mid-eighteenth century were called, “anxiously sought a sensi-ble experience of conversion, which they understood to be a spiritual rebirth that indicated that God had rescued them from sin and death.” This shared experience became a social bond, enhanced by the belief that “endowed the convert with a new set of holy affections” with which to live. In contrast, non-evangelical Anglicans “understood religious affections to be a natural endowment that only needed to be cultivated within the church to come to fruition, not a supernatural quality that was transplanted at the moment of conversion as for evangelicals. . . . The power of evangelical preaching was the main attraction. Methodist ministers delivered sermons with authority and convic-tion because they knew what it meant to be ‘born again.’”39
Dee E. Andrews says that until his death in 1770, Whitefield dominated the evangelical networks in America, “effectively excluding Wesleyan influence and preserving a distinctly Calvinist tone to the American revivals.” But in the 1760s Methodists began arriving, and they soon were to change the tone. The dominant features of the American Methodists were “experimental” religion, revival as the primary means to produce the experimental reli-gion, and “missionizing,” i.e., preaching the gospel at every opportunity. Nor was doctrine absent: “Dwelling on the Christian doctrines of original sin, redemption through Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, free will, justification, and final judgment as well as the perfectionist emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s transformation of the emancipated heart, Methodist preaching, like that of other evangelical movements, impressed its hearers as inspired oratory.”40
Philip N. Mulder’s very recent study of evangelicalism in the South among Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists shows this same theological concern, though from another angle. Mulder contends that the eighteenth-century awakenings produced a New Light religion, stressing conversion, and ecumenical in intent. But, in contrast to what most studies say, he believes that New Light religion was not the same as evangelicalism. His study of Baptists and Presbyterians shows “how they adapted the techniques of awakening for their own purposes, and it traces how Methodists, founded in the awakenings, fell into the same pattern in their pursuit of converts.” The adaptation constitutes the creation of evangelicalism. The ecumenism ideal held until the Revolution, but once the common ecclesiastical enemy, the Church of England, was removed, the three denominations turned to inter-group com-petition. Denominational issues actually began in the eighteenth-century awakening for Baptists and Presbyterians, for they each developed pro- and anti-New Light factions. These internal separations were more or less healed in that era, but once the post-revolutionary period began, all three denominations set about distinguishing themselves from one another. “In their con-temporary preoccupations with each other, they substituted the new term, ‘evangelical,’ as they transformed New Light concern for the universal into obsession with the particular.” Clearly, we are looking here at both rituals and doctrine, the very things that Grenz says were so muted by the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century evangelicals. Even the “comparatively ecumenical” Methodists (with no pre-awakenings history to cloud the ecumeni-cal ideal) “would stumble in the post-Revolutionary era of evangelicals.”41
While we can question whether Mulder is correct in saying that evangelicalism, rather than deriving from the awakenings, is a movement that made use of awakenings for denominational purposes, after reading his and Kisker’s studies it is difficult to rule out concern for doctrine and rituals among the evangelical denominations. Contrary to Grenz and others, then, doctrinal matters are present from the beginning, even in what many say is among the most pietistic of the denominations, the Methodists.
When black Methodists chose to separate from white Methodists early in the nineteenth century, one of the matters they did not separate on was Methodist belief. Both the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), founded in 1816, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion (AMEZ), founded in 1821, stayed with Methodist teaching. For the AMEZ, “Zion’s founders adopted, with only minor modifications, the Book of Discipline, Twenty-Five Articles of Religion, and the ecclesiastical structure of the mother church.” For the AME, “[t]he Discipline, Articles of Religion, and General Rules of the Methodist Episcopal Church were adopted as their own, except that the office of presiding elder was abolished.”42
Moreover, doctrinal concerns were also evident in the Methodist-dominated holiness movement. Melvin Dieter, noted holiness historian, sees the holiness movement as “a unique and distinct composite of the development of American evangelicalism.” In the pre-Civil War era holiness created “a new emphasis in American revivalism by applying the logic of revivalism to the special promotion of Wesleyan perfectionism.” In the years after the Civil War, holiness became a permanent emphasis “in the thought and life of all of evangelical Protestantism around the world.” Dieter subscribes to the notion that holiness had both a Puritan and a Pietist background, “the ‘puritan’ element generally used to denote the revivalists’ concerns for morality, conduct, and the reform of the church and society according to the laws of God; ‘pietist’ is used to refer to their concern for individual Christian expe-rience, centering in both conversion and sanctification—all under the direct and personal guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.”43
How the holiness movement changed from an attempt at leavening all the churches, beginning with its “natural” home, the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC), to a series of holiness associations related to holiness revivalists and eventually to the creation of a number of separate holiness denomi-nations is a complex story.44 But by the 1880s tensions between holiness advocates and their opponents within the MEC had reached an impasse. By the next decade the MEC had “moved beyond” Wesley’s holiness teaching:
Supported by a radical transition in the scholarship in its theological institutions in the last decade of the century, the [ME] church turned to the new and green pastures in more modern teachers and theologies. The legacy of entire sanctification, with whatever modifications may have been made to it during the course of the American deeper life revival, was now being surrendered, in large part, to the holiness movement; it had become difficult for the tradition to survive within its original Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church South home.45
Beginning in 1880 several new Wesleyan holiness denominations were formed, accompanied by the establishment of schools where holiness teach-ing could be freely stressed. Most of the new denominations retained an affinity with Methodism in articles of faith and in structure. And some holiness organizations stayed in the ME church. The events are recounted by Timothy L. Smith, a Church of the Nazarene historian, in a lengthy article in the three-volume history of Methodism published in 1964. Smith blames the rift in part on “a rural and more radical phase of the holiness revival” that appeared after 1875, with independent holiness organizations, associations, and evangelists, which led to the option of “come-outism” in relation to the MEC. This was aided by bishops who feared the separatist tendencies of the holiness movement, and rebuffed some of the holiness pleas for more emphasis on Wesley’s perfection doctrine. In turn, on the anti-holiness wing, two books appeared, one in 1888 and the other in 1895, questioning the whole belief about second blessing or perfection. This, compounded by a growing liberal tendency in the denomination’s schools, meant that “Methodist leaders in both the North and the South witnessed a growing disruption of fellowship in their communions which they seemed powerless to halt.”46 The holiness groups broke from the parent bodies largely over doctrinal issues.
As we have seen, Grenz says that there was “little interest” in matters of precision about biblical infallibility and inerrancy before 1820. A recent study of Reformed thought shows the interest to be far more than “little.” Ernest Sandeen, in his The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970), had argued that inerrancy was a late-nineteenth-century creation, particularly of two Princeton Seminary professors, A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield. And since inerrancy is a hallmark of fundamentalism, then fundamentalism is an aberration from Reformed thinking. But Ronald Satta’s recent article disputes this view and shows clearly that inerrancy was a concept in place well before this time. Thus, despite Sandeen’s (and others who follow the idea) notion that there is a split between the Princeton Theology and earlier Reformed think-ing, such is not the case. For example, both Archibald Alexander and Charles Hodge, predecessors of Warfield and A. A. Hodge at Princeton, taught inerrancy. Also, “both the ancient and Reformation church traditions possessed a well-defined, carefully articulated and often passionately defended doctrine of biblical authority (which included inerrancy) centuries before the Princetonians promulgated it.” This in turn suggests that “regarding the doctrine of biblical authority, Fundamentalism, rather than perverting main-stream Christian orthodoxy, actually extends it.”47
And what was true of the Reformed was also true of the Methodists, even though some have argued that Methodists did not subscribe to inerrancy, that inerrancy was a peculiarly Reformed theology approach to the biblical text. A very recent paper by Daryl E. McCarthy looks at a number of nineteenth-century American Methodist theologians to test the validity of the assertion. He sees the beginning point of Methodist discussion on scriptural authority in the eighteenth century in the “unequivocal stand for the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture by John Wesley, Adam Clarke, and Richard Watson—the triumvirate which formed the fountainhead of Wesleyanism.”48
Proceeding from this base, McCarthy cites the writings of seven nineteenth-century Methodist theologians. Four of the seven—Samuel Wakefield, Thomas Ralston, Miner Raymond, and Randolph S. Foster—clearly defend the doctrine of inerrancy. Wakefield, whose Complete System of Christian Theology (1869) was the first major Wesleyan systematic theology to appear after the long domination of Watson’s Institutes, set the tone:“Affirmation of divine inspiration of Scripture is based on the belief that by God’s power the Scriptures were ‘infallibly preserved from all error.’”Ralston’s 1876 Elements of Divinity, Raymond’s 1877 Systematic Theology, and Foster’s 1889 Evidences of Christianity agree.49
Daniel D. Whedon’s Statements: Theological and Critical (1887) marks the first move away from the high view of Scripture, but it was not a large move. He distinguished between “matters of faith and practice” and “secular or historical fact.” But even here he argued that while a biblical writer might be discovered in a mistake in the latter, and we are still waiting for such an occurrence to be proved, the authority of the text still stands over us. Thus he “wants to maintain the actual inerrancy of Scripture, while granting the theoretical possibility of errancy without disturbing Scripture’s infallibility.” So Whedon left unresolved the matter of what to do with “an errant revela-tion from an unerring God of truth.”50 McCarthy says that John Miley’s Systematic Theology (1894) is the transition, writing that he “advocated a looser, more dynamic theory of inspiration” and, significantly, “was careful not to affirm any type of inerrancy.”51 The full change comes with Milton S.
Terry who, in the course of several publications between 1883 and 1907, gradually moved from denying that there were errors in the biblical text to accepting that view. In Biblical Dogmatics (1907) Terry arrives at his final judgments: we should “oppose and drive away, so far as we are able, the dogma of verbal inerrancy of the records. . . . the dogma of verbal inerrancy is inconsistent with existing facts, extravagant in its assumptions, and mischievous in its tendency to provoke continual controversy in the church . . . and is a positive hindrance to the rational study of the Bible.” We should reject the idea that the Bible is the Word of God, which statement is true “only in a loose and inaccurate way of speaking,” as a synecdoche.52
The change in views on inerrancy described in McCarthy’s paper took place in the context of the increasing biblical and theological controversies in Methodism as the denomination, both North and South, moved toward liberalism. “But the drift was irreversible. In the first twenty years of the new century, official Methodism moved away from many traditional Wesleyan doctrines. The Bible came to be understood merely as Heilsgeschichte. Affirmation of biblical inerrancy was not only inessential; it was positively harmful.” Wesleyanism began with inerrancy in the eighteenth century, and most Wesleyans maintained it in the nineteenth century. It is simply not the case, as some contemporary Wesleyan scholars maintain, that inerrancy was a Reformed theological belief and “has no part in authentic Wesleyan- Arminianism. We have seen that the historical evidence clearly refutes such an allegation. It is in the best of Wesleyan tradition that Wesleyans and Methodists today affirm alongside their Calvinist, Reformed, Pentecostal, Baptist, and Anabaptist brethren, ‘The Bible is the inerrant and infallible Word of God.’”53
OTHER GROUPS
Most Lutherans who came to America brought Pietism with them. To get at a part of that experience, we will concentrate on two “moments” in American Lutheran history, one in the eighteenth century and the other in the nineteenth. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787), often seen as the patriarch of American Lutheranism, arrived in Pennsylvania in 1745, bringing with him a particular expression of Lutheranism, one that mediated between Orthodoxy and Pietism.54 “It was this synthesis that Muhlenberg brought to the American colonies, where it served effectively to differentiate the church of the Augsburg Confession from other emerging Christian denominations and where it was applied for the ‘cure of souls’ within his congregations.”The symbols of Lutheranism—the Augsburg Confession, the Formula of Concord, the Smalkald Articles and the Small Catechism—and the “focus-ing his understanding of Christian piety on Luther’s understanding of Baptism as a daily dying and renewal” form the context for his Pietism. When parishioners inquired about the “‘exercises of piety,’ Muhlenberg urged on them daily reading in the Bible, the Small Catechism and Arndt’s True Christianity. ” The experience element in the Christian life was focused on the “Pauline dynamics of law and Gospel, sin and repentance, flesh and Spirit, the two kinds of righteousness, rebirth through water and the Spirit in the new life of Holy Baptism.” Thus, Muhlenberg was “a self-consciously con-fessional theologian, trained in the dogmatics of Orthodoxy, who deliberately affirmed a moderate Pietism in the service of an inclusive Lutheranism that he believed embodied the outlook of Luther and the Lutheran Reformation.” The combination of Orthodoxy and Pietism was used “to lay the foundations of Lutheranism in North America.”55
Muhlenberg’s synthesis was not to hold, however. His encounters with more rigidly Orthodox and more rigidly Pietist opponents had diminished by the 1750s, to be replaced with concern over the rise of rationalism, and its potential for a marriage not between Orthodoxy and Pietism but between rationalism and Pietism. After his death, “the confessional stance of the Pennsylvania and New York ministeriums collapsed . . . between 1790 and 1815.” As a result, “Pietism in America rapidly lost its confessional and doctrinal content. The theory that informed praxis pietatis was now largely a minimalistic, scripturally based, protestantized theology (sometimes with a rationalist overlay) that in its emphasis on sin and salvation focused on the atonement.”56
In the mid-nineteenth century the contest between Lutheran Orthodoxy and Pietism reemerged, in the form of a debate between Samuel Simon Schmucker of Gettysburg Seminary and Charles Porterfield Krauth of the seminary in Philadelphia over the question of theological authority.57 Both Schmucker and Krauth, at their respective schools, took oaths of office (each of the men being the author of the oaths). The oaths were similar in many regards, but a major difference was that the word “fundamental” appears in the Gettysburg statement as a qualifier to the full subscription to the confessions, while there is no qualifier in the Philadelphia document. This difference is reflected in how the two teachers approach the biblical texts. On evidences, especially for the Bible’s claims, “Schmucker is confident of the rationality of the biblical claim, available to all open and willing to see it. Krauth places his confidence of verification of that claim ultimately in the person come to faith.” On the use of the Bible, both men taught their students a proof-text method, but Krauth asked the students to look also for the “system” in the Bible expressed by Lutherans in the confessions. Therefore, though “the Bible is of central and supreme authority for both, that authority is not threatened by confessional subscription for Krauth the way it was for Schmucker.”58 Krauth summarizes his position: “The pure creeds are simply the testimony of the true Church to the doctrines she holds; but as it is the truth they con-fess, she, of necessity, regards those who reject the truth confessed in the creed, as rejecting the truth set forth in the Word.”59
Schmucker saw himself as heir to the Pietist tradition, “a faithfully Lutheran tradition. When attacked by the rising confessionalist party, he interpreted the attack as directed against this whole tradition and defended himself by showing adherence to it.”60 But his publication of the Definite Synodical Platform of 1855 as the basis for the various Lutheran synods in the General Synod, with its announced “rescension” of the Augsburg Confession, was more than the confessionalists could take. Twelve years later the General Synod Lutherans divided over the Platform, a breach not healed until fifty years after that. American Lutherans had a variety of attitudes about and kinds of Pietism, and they configured them differently in relation to the confessions. It seems clear that a single approach—that all Pietists were “open” on the confessions, and all Orthodox were “closed” to Pietism—does not sufficiently allow for the variety of views in the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.
The turn of the century in 1900 saw the rise of Pentecostalism, a movement viewed by some as in the Pietist tradition, not so much in the formal sense of direct links to seventeenth-century Pietists as in approach, empha-sizing experience over doctrine. An excellent recent study is Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture (2001), by Grant Wacker, an evangelical historian with sympathy for the movement.61 Wacker, who calls the Pentecostals “radical evangelicals,” says four streams converged to create the movement. First, that which “emphasized heartfelt salvation through faith in Jesus Christ,” a notion dating back to the Great Awakening. “Late- nineteenth-century evangelicals perpetuated both the ideology and the experience of the new birth with little change. Like their forebears, they made it the nonnegotiable marker that divided Christians from non-Christians.” The second stream, Holy Spirit baptism, flowed from three tributaries: Wesley’s notion of entire sanctification, the Oberlin perfectionism that appeared prior to the Civil War, and the Keswick movement, dating from 1875—each stressed a postconversion experience, though the Wesleyan doctrine seemed more to emphasize purity and the other two power. Added to this was the emphasis on divine healing that can be traced to mid-nineteenth century proponents in Switzerland, Germany, and Britain who contended that healing was in the atonement. Finally, dispensational premillennialism’s emphasis on the imminent return of Christ was the fourth stream. To these streams was added speaking in tongues as an evidence that one had been baptized by the Holy Spirit, the idea particularly developed by Charles Parham as a necessary component in one’s spiritual development: conversion, sanctification, tongues.62
In the three main theological subgroups in Pentecostalism—Wesleyan trinitarians, Reformed trinitarians, Oneness believers—“virtually all converts would have said that legitimate authority rested finally in the Bible, in the doctrines the Bible contained, and in the Holy Spirit’s direct communi-cation of biblical and doctrinal truths. The key point here is that all three sources of authority—Bible, doctrine, and Holy Spirit—served as interlock-ing components in a single mechanism not subject to historical change.” As the “first and final authority” Pentecostals had “an abiding conviction that the Bible had been preserved from errors of any sort—historical, scientific, or theological.” Even though the earliest statements of faith used phrases like “all sufficient rule for faith and practice,” did this mean, asks Wacker, “that early pentecostals harbored doubts about the Bible’s plenary accuracy? Or did it mean that they presupposed it so completely it never occurred to them to raise the question? The evidence, taken in context, strongly suggests the latter explanation.” Their approach to understanding the Bible was “[r]igorous literalism—hard and unforgiving—[which] served as an ethic for daily life.” Though the Pentecostals did not do much work on systematic theology until the 1950s and later, partly because of the lack of seminary train-ing and because of a lack of emphasis on writing theology, “the simple reason was the supposition that the Bible’s words explained themselves.” Nor has this stopped, says Wacker in his epilogue: “Biblical inerrancy and wooden literalism hovered as close to the ground at century’s end as they did at the beginning.”63
As to doctrine, Wacker speaks for the Pentecostal view, saying that “the Bible’s teachings should be articulated carefully and defended vigorously. True Christianity began not in the froth of exuberant emotion but in the bedrock of correct thinking.” And just how fluid were the Pentecostals? “The evidence for pentecostals’ determination to exact goose-step conformity in matters of doctrine is so voluminous it is hard to understand how the contrary notion ever arose.” That some of the doctrinal debates centered on relatively smaller issues cannot be doubted, but that doctrine was centrally important cannot be denied. At times, this meant turning on other apostolics (as early Pentecostals sometimes called themselves), or other evangelicals, certainly on the liberalism of mainline Protestantism, on Roman Catholics, and on new religious movements like Christian Science and Mormonism. There were lots of foes to deal with.64 Pentecostals eagerly sought the experiences of the spiritual gifts, but they did so with doctrine intact.
Where does fundamentalism stand in the mix of evangelicalism? In Joel Carpenter’s view, fundamentalism is one more “era” in evangelicalism’s his-tory. There was the Methodist era in the first half of the nineteenth century, the holiness era in the latter half, then the fundamentalist era—soon, he believes, to be supplanted by the Pentecostal-charismatic movement creating its own era. Of course during each of the “eras” the name given to the era does not capture all that was going on. To take one example, the Methodist era was not exclusively Methodist in nature; in a parallel way, the fundamentalist era was not exclusively fundamentalist. Carpenter points out that Nazarenes and other holiness groups, Missouri Synod Lutherans, and Pentecostals, all of whom subscribed to the fundamentals of the faith (and some were also strict separationists), had disagreements with fundamentalists, even when fundamentalism “dominated”:
So it went with other groups of evangelical or conservative Protestants who were by their own recognition and affiliation something other than fundamentalist. These many nuances of difference and a relative lack of fellowship (or even contact, in some cases) characterized the American evan-gelical mosaic of the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless, fundamentalism was probably the most broadly influential American evangelical movement in the second third of the twentieth century; its ideas, outlook, and religious “goods and services” penetrated virtually all of the other movements and traditions.65
Thus, rather than viewing fundamentalism as an aberration, it can just as well be seen as a subset of the larger movement called evangelicalism, one more example of the rise and fall pattern that “adds another kind of thematic unity to the history of modern evangelicalism. The story adheres not only because there have been some central or ‘classic’ touchstones of belief and outlook, or because of the continuing dynamic interplay with the evolution of modern society, but also because of this recurring [rise and fall] motif.” Switching metaphors, Carpenter says evangelicalism is more like a kaleidoscope than a mosaic, which means that no one paradigmatic viewpoint “can make sense of the whole career of modern evangelicalism.”66
And, lest we forget, fundamentalism had its own healthy share of concern about what some see as quintessential Pietist interests: sanctification and the development of the Christian life. The Keswick movement is the chief example here. With antecedents in evangelicalism prior to and after the Civil War, Keswick formally began with meetings held in Keswick, England in 1875. Stopping short of the Wesleyan view of “entire sanctification,” and the eradication of the propensity to sin, the Keswickians emphasized the over-coming and victorious Christian life: sin cannot be eradicated, but it can be more than suppressed; it can be counteracted. In the 1880s and 1890s this view came to prevail among many non-Wesleyans in the fundamentalist movement.67 By the 1920s “Keswick holiness teaching was thoroughly integrated into the fundamentalist network of Bible schools, summer conferences, and faith missions.” Its tie-in with missions was particularly powerful, for “[n]ot only did the ‘surrendered life’ ethos permeate the independent faith missions . . . but the very act of fully surrendering one’s will and all claims to one’s life seemed to fundamentalists to point to the mission field.” Beyond that, a generation of people were influenced by the devotional writings of widely read authors who “conveyed visions of love, truth, beauty, and holiness with considerable literary artistry.”68 Fundamentalism, too, had its warm piety side.
CONCLUSIONS
First, rooted in the Reformation, Pietism was a movement to “complete the Reformation” by emphasizing the importance of sanctification in the life of believers. A conversion experience, followed by “experimental religion,”were its hallmarks, but not to the diminishing of an interest in doctrine.
Second, “Pietism” is a term that covers multiple expressions, from close-to-orthodoxy groups to more free-wheeling groups less interested in doctrine.For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is safe to say that Spener, Francke, and those immediately influenced by them saw orthodox doctrine as a given; they were not just “oriented toward” doctrine; doctrine was foundational.
Third, on the American scene in particular, most Methodists, most Pentecostals, and some Lutherans married Pietist influences with interest in doctrinal orthodoxy. The view that a formal principle, correct doctrine, was added by nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicals to augment and even fundamentally alter the material principle, convertive piety, cannot be sustained. Both principles were there from the beginning.
Fourth, specifically on the Scriptures, it seems clear that belief in an inerrant Bible was not a teaching that began only in the nineteenth century. Such a belief is fundamental for J. A. Bengel, the most noteworthy Pietist Bible scholar of the eighteenth century; was present in the beginnings of the Wesleyan movement; was prevalent among Methodists for most of the nineteenth century; was integral to the holiness movement and its denominational spin-offs; and was a given among the majority of Pentecostals.
Overall, the views of Grenz and those who agree with him on both the nature and role of Pietism in the evangelical movement need significant revision. In terms of the history component, “renewing the center” needs serious rethinking.
1 Stanley J. Grenz, Renewing the Center: Evangelical Theology in a Post-Theological Era (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2000), 17, 53.
2 A material principle is that of which something is made, its basic constituent; in Grenz’s view, evangelicalism is made of “convertive piety” and “experimental religion.” A formal principle is that which acts upon the material and produces changes in the “something,” but without the loss of the material principle. Grenz asserts that the (later) addition of correct doctrine as a formal principle alters the understanding of the nature of evangelicalism, leading to a distorted picture of evangelicalism’s beginnings and the course of its history. Contra Grenz, this chapter argues that both convertive piety and an emphasis on correct doctrine were constituent of evangelicalism from its beginnings.
3 Ibid., 33. Compare Douglas Jacobsen, a professor at Messiah College very much interested in creating a “new center” that will transcend the old “two-party system” of conservatives versus liberals, who argues that Pietism “refers to any form of Christian faith that values conversionistic faith and warm-hearted spirituality more than it does doctrinal precision and/or ecclesiastical orderliness.” Also, “[t]he Pietistic completion of the Reformation centered on the subjective side of faith—the lived experience of faith.” Jacobsen hopes that Pietism can play an important role in revitalizing the ecumenical movement (Douglas Jacobsen, “Pietism and the Postmodern Context of Ecumenical Dialogue,” Ecumenical Trends 29 [February 2000]: 1-10). The quotations are from page 1.
4 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 40, 42. Grenz’s sometime coauthor Roger Olson, The Story of Christian Theology: Twenty Centuries of Tradition and Reform (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1999), asserts that doctrine was integral to the thinking of Puritans, who were “basically Calvinistic in theology” (494), “thoroughly and persistently Calvinistic” (498), and who “proclaimed the absolute sovereignty of God and the total depravity of humanity” (498). In his section on Jonathan Edwards, a premier figure in the Great Awakening in America, Olson says Edwards’s theology “was a hybrid of Calvinism and pietism in that it was not so different from classical Puritan thought, although the pietist emphasis on religious feelings is more pronounced in Edwards than in earlier Puritan divines” (505). The hybrid is shown in that the “three main consistent marks” (505) of Edwards’s theology are his emphasis on the glory and freedom of God—“[n]o theologian in the history of Christianity held a higher or stronger view of God’s majesty, sovereignty, glory and power than Jonathan Edwards” (506)—“the depravity and bondage of humans” (507), and “the affections as the ‘anthropological center.’ . . . the core of human personality out of which identity and actions flow” (508). The last mark certainly has affinity with the Pietist emphasis on “convertive piety” (indeed, Edwards strongly advocated “experimental religion”), but given these three marks, it is difficult to see how Edwards and his Puritan forebears can be understood as other than having a very strong interest in the formal principle of correct doctrine. Therefore, this paper will focus on Pietism in its Lutheran expression, and leave to one side what is at times called “Reformed Pietism.”
5 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 42, 43. “This vision of the faith that focuses on personal regeneration rather than on outward rituals as the key to a changed life has continued to dominate evangelical theology to the present” (44). Whatever the background and influences, Grenz sees the eighteenth century as “the advent of evangelicalism” proper (45).
6 Ibid., 54. Grenz is still emphasizing this contrast at the end of the book, where he advocates a “generous orthodoxy,” which asserts that “even while the church is oriented toward doctrine, its focus must always remain the gospel. The great insight of the Pietists in the context of Lutheran Orthodoxy was that doctrine is not the be-all and end-all of the Christian faith” (343).
7 Ibid., 65. In a 1998 article Grenz summarizes the relation between doctrine and life by asserting that the “language evangelicals use is, of course, theological. And the theological statements we use are crucial because they facilitate our experience; they even make this experience possible. But in the end, it is the shared encounter—more so than the theological deposit that defines and nurtures it, and therefore is instrumental to it—that forms the foundation of our common identity” (“An Agenda for Evangelical Theology in the Postmodern Context,” Didaskalia 9 [Spring 1998]: 4, emphasis added). Four years later he used similar language: “right doctrine has a role to play in the transformation of heart and life. . . .[it] is important insofar as it plays a role in the transformation of heart and life”; therefore, “the truly evangelical spirit acknowledges that doctrinal formulae will always have a type of provisionality to them”(“Die Begrenzte Gemeinschaft [“The Boundaried People”] and the Character of Evangelical Theology,”Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 45 [June 2002]: 310, emphasis added).
8 Grenz, Renewing the Center, 84. Just before this, Grenz captured the trajectory in a single sentence:“By perpetuating the fundamentalist struggle against liberalism as waged on the terms set out by the Princeton theology, the new evangelical theology oriented itself to questions of propositional truth, in contrast to the issue of one’s relationship with God characteristic of classical evangelicalism” (ibid.).
9 Ibid., 133.
10 Ibid., 150. Grenz contends that “seeds of divergence lie deep within the heart of neo-evangelical theology. . . . This is exemplified by Millard Erickson’s move from young innovator to establishment statesman and by Clark Pinnock’s odyssey from young establishment apologist to theological pilgrim” (151).
11 William J. Abraham, The Coming Great Revival: Recovering the Full Evangelical Tradition (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 11-26. For the longer view Abraham offers the Wesleyan version of the evangelical tradition as “a refreshing alternative to the standard models [Reformed] of the evangelical heritage currently available” (56). Citing several strands to the genius of Wesley, Abraham says that “Wesley’s significance as a theologian rests fundamentally on his ability to hold together elements in the Christian tradition that generally are pulled apart and expressed in isolation.” This means that “Wesley cannot be tamed by placing him in the categories of the fundamentalist paradigm” (57).
12 Dayton’s view can be found in several places: two chapters in a book he edited with Robert K. Johnston, The Variety of American Evangelicalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), “The Limits of American Evangelicalism: The Pentecostal Tradition” (36-56); and “Some Doubts About the Usefulness of the Category ‘Evangelical’” (245-251); “‘The Search for the Historical Evangelicalism’: George Marsden’s History of Fuller Seminary as a Case Study,” Christian Scholar’s Review 23 (September 1993): 12-33 (plus a rejoinder, 62-71); “Interview with Donald Dayton: Are Charismatic-Inclined Pietists the True Evangelicals? And Have the Reformed Tried to Highjack the Movement?” Modern Reformation 10 (March/April 2001): 40-49.
13 Dayton, “Interview,” 41. Dayton had earlier written “that the ‘age of Methodism’ in American life (usually the century from 1820 to World War I) is roughly equivalent to the ‘age of Evangelicalism.’ I would argue that what happens in Methodism is thus determinative for our interpretation of American evangelicalism as a whole” (Dayton, “‘The Search for the Historical Evangelicalism,’” 14).
14 A convenient catalogue of Puritan piety is Jerald C. Brauer, “Types of Puritan Piety,” Church History 65 (March 1987): 39-58. Brauer cautions against making too close a connection between Puritanism and Pietism: “F. Ernest Stoeffler attempted to subsume English Puritanism under the term pietism by developing an indefensible distinction between so-called polemical English Puritans and pietistic Puritans” (40). What Brauer characterizes as “evangelical piety” among Puritans is closest to the thinking of the Continental Pietists, with of course the Reformed doctrinal base as a given. See note 3, above, for further explanation for not including Puritanism as a major component of this chapter.
15 Dale W. Brown, Understanding Pietism, rev. ed. (Nappanee, Ind.: Evangel, 1996), 15, 16. The literature on Lutheran Pietism is voluminous and conflicted. I have tried to avoid extremes in interpretation in the use of sources, and while using Brown for the general exposition, I cite other sources in the notes. Though both have been faulted in some regards by critics, a beginning for the study in English is two books by F. Ernest Stoeffler: The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971 [original edition, 1965]), centering on Reformed Pietism more than German Lutheran Pietism; and German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973). Stoeffler summarizes the central features of Pietism by asserting that “[e]arly Pietism had its roots in the Protestant Reformation, adhered faithfully to its basic doctrinal norms, and tried to keep alive its spiritual dynamic,” was “a major reform movement, the influence of which made itself felt in various phases of Protestantism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” and beyond, and its “four characteristic emphases, the experiential, perfectionistic, biblical, and oppositive, have to a greater or lesser degree penetrated all Protestantism, and are still discernible elements in present-day American Christianity” (Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 23). Taxonomies of Pietism abound, a useful one the fourfold division—natura pietatis, collegia pietatis, praxis pietatis, reformation pietatis —laid out in Egon Gerdes, “Theological Tenets of Pietism,” The Covenant Quarterly 34 (February/May 1976): 25-60.
16 Brown, Understanding Pietism, 19, 20. Brown notes that though “Spener coveted for the Lutherans the almost blameless lifestyle of nearby Mennonites, he disagreed in certain matters of doctrine” (18). In support of a doctrinal presence even later, Vernon P. Kleinig says that “[f]idelity to the Lutheran symbols was by no means as dead in the eighteenth century as the historical textbooks would lead us to believe” (“Confessional Lutheranism in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 60 [January/April, 1996]: 97).
17 Brown, Understanding Pietism, 21, 22.
18 Ibid., 28, 29. The debate between Francke and Halle on the one hand and the Orthodox establishment on the other hand, at three points—1692, 1695–1700, and in the second and early third decades of the eighteenth century—led to conclusions that the Pietists were orthodox in belief (James O. Duke, “Pietism Versus Establishment,” The Covenant Quarterly 36 [November 1978]: 3-16). Duke catalogues the Orthodox worries. On the question of faith and piety, “the Christian proclamation was at stake; [in Pietism] one no longer preached Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected, now one preached one’s personal experience of Jesus”—a potentially dangerous subjective element. On the issue of the Scriptures and piety, “must one be pious before reading the Scriptures in order to understand them or must one understand the Scriptures in order to become rightly pious?” On the church and ministry, symbolized in the conflict over the confessional, “[t]he Orthodox felt bound by conscience to grant absolution freely. By this means they witnessed to God’s unconditional pardon. The Pietists felt bound by conscience to grant forgiveness cautiously. By this means they witnessed to God’s uncompromising righteousness” (ibid., 13, 14, 15).Scott Kisker, “Radical Pietism and Early German Methodism,” Methodist History 37 (April 1999): 175188, supports this assessment of Francke and others as he draws a distinction between “church-related Pietism” and “radical Pietism.” Citing Martin Schrag, Kisker says “[c]hurch-related Pietists, such as the Spener-Halle movement, worked within the framework of orthodox Protestant theology, and established churches” (175). For radical Pietism, Kisker quotes Chauncy David Ensign: “[t]hat branch of the pietistic movement in Germany, which emphasized separatistic, sectarian and mystical elements, particularly those originating in Boehmenism” (175). Jakob Boehm (1575–1624), a lay theologian, “was influential throughout the seventeenth century, especially in spiritualist and quietist circles” (175 n. 3).
19 Brown, Understanding Pietism, 30. “Rather than repudiating doctrine as ineffective for life, the Pietists felt that there should be a reformation of both doctrine and life. On many occasions Spener agreed with his orthodox colleagues concerning the necessity of fixed doctrinal forms and the insufficiency of the good life without correct belief” (31). Where he disagreed strongly with the Orthodox was on the question of the church’s infallibility (ibid.). For an emphasis on reformation of life from the Orthodox side in the seventeenth century, see Craig J. Westendorf, “The Piety of the Orthodox in Seventeenth-Century Postille Literature,” in Lutheranism and Pietism: The Lutheran Historical Conference: Essays and Reports 1990, ed. August R. Suelflow (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992). Postilles were collections of sermons given on the traditional pericopes of the church year.
20 Brown, Understanding Pietism, 59. On doctrine, for example, “Spener and Francke held tenaciously to the dogmas of original sin and the human incapacity to do good” (60). Brown gives a general summary at the end of his book: “We have seen how they professed a mediating position between dogmatic rigidity and emotional warmth, faith and works, law and gospel, justification and sanctification, judgment and love of the world. They desired a corrective rather than a revolutionary movement. Reformation rather than separation constituted their ecclesiastical goal, though they often empathized with a Radical Pietist mood which considered the church to be Babel” (90). Roger Olson agrees about doctrine: “The classical Protestant Pietists such as Spener, Francke and Zinzendorf and their followers were conservative in theology” (Story of Christian Theology, 488).
21 Alan J. Thompson, “The Pietist Critique of Inerrancy? J. A. Bengel’s Gnomon as a Test Case,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 47 (March 2004): 76. My discussion here is based on the Thompson article, which cites a significant number of authors espousing the view described in the quotation above.
22 Ibid., 87, 88. Thompson arrives at these conclusions after, among other matters, study of Bengel’s hermeneutical method, rationale for textual criticism, analysis of specific texts, discussion of the historical portions of the Scripture, and harmonization of Scripture (passim).
23 C. John Weborg, “Pietism: Theology in Service of Living Toward God,” in The Variety of American Evangelicalism, 161-183. The quotations are from 161, 164. Later, Weborg says, “[i]t may be the case that [the new] evangelicalism has more to do with classical pietism than pietism with evangelicalism” (174).
24 Ibid., 178.
25 Gerdes, “Theological Tenets,” 37. An object lesson from the Orthodox point of view was the relatively rapid loss of orthodoxy at Halle. Founded in 1692 under Pietist influence, it “very early incorporated rationalism into its faculties and its theology, first mixing rationalism with Pietism, and then promoting rationalism itself, especially after 1740 when Christian Wolf returned to the faculty” (Robert F. Scholz, “Henry Melchior Muhlenberg’s Relation to the Ongoing Pietist Tradition,” in Lutheranism and Pietism, 50).
26 D. Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English Evangelical Tradition Between the Conversions of Wesley and Wilberforce (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 1, 15, 115.
27 Ibid., 116, 117-118, 124. Bebbington says that conversion was, in the eighteenth century, the most emphasized of the characteristics of evangelicalism. Hindmarsh agrees, noting that “in the first generations of the evangelical movement, the immediate experience of God’s grace came first” (D. Bruce Hindmarsh, “‘I Am a Sort of Middleman’: The Politically Correct Evangelicalism of John Newton,” in Amazing Grace: Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States, ed. George A.Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1993], 17-18).
28 Thomas C. Oden, Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Francis Asbury Press, 1988), 99, 100, 106; Oden charts a comparison of the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Twenty-Five Articles and the Augsburg Confession (101-103). A recently published volume, “Heart Religion” in the Methodist Tradition and Related Movements, ed. Richard B. Steele (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2001) confirms Oden’s emphasis. Steele says in the introduction, “we must underscore the fact that an authentically Wesleyan theology does not reduce Christian faith to religious emotion. On the contrary, it regards faith as ‘a cord of three strands,’ a dynamic complex of three distinct and equally necessary ways by which a Christian stands related to the living God. These we shall call ‘right belief,’ ‘right conduct,’ and ‘right passion’ [more technically, orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy].” On the first, Wesley expected his followers “to regard the Christian Scripture as the preeminent source of God’s self-revelation, and to accept the doctrines of orthodox Christianity, as summarized in the ecumenical creeds, as the hermeneutical norms for rightly understanding and applying the biblical message” (xxii; emphasis his). A differing view is Ernest F. Stoeffler, “Pietism, the Wesleys, and Methodist Beginnings in America,” in the work he edits, Continental Pietism and Early American Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1976), who dismisses the importance of the Articles of Religion for American Methodists because the Articles “contain nothing specifically related to the religious dynamic of historic Methodism. They simply indicated to the fathers of the movement that Methodism is not severed from the stream of the historically continuous religious self-understanding of Christians” (197). By contrast, Wesley’s Standard Sermons and his Notes Upon the New Testament are much more important, and Stoeffler attempts to make the case they are heavily influenced by Pietism (196-206).
29 Abel Stevens, History of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States of America, 3 vols. (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1864–1867), 2:206, cited in Oden, Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition, 106.
30 Cited in H. O. Thomas, Jr., “John Wesley: Conception of ‘Connection’ and Theological Pluralism,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 36 (Fall 2001): 96.
31 Oden, Doctrinal Standards, 97.
32 Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1994), 55-64; note the series of statements on page 56.
33 Thomas, “Conception of ‘Connection,’” 98.
34 Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 319.
35 See the account, among other places, in Warren Thomas Smith, “Eighteenth Century Encounters:Methodist-Moravian,” Methodist History 24 (April 1986): 141-156. Though the break was made in 1740, recurring stillness problems “did not disappear. For years there were local outbreaks and periodic purgings” (Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism [Nashville:Abingdon, 1993], 204).
36 The Whitefield-Wesley split is recounted often; a handy summary of it is in Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, 198-202. Rack also discusses the later Calvinist controversies (ibid., 450-461).
37 Scott Kisker, “John Wesley’s Puritan and Pietist Heritage Reexamined,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 34 (Fall 1999): 266, 270, 270-271. Wesley was famous for reprinting the writings of others, implicitly approving the writings unless he stated demurrals about some points. An interesting study of Wesley reprinting, with demurrals, several works of a noteworthy Calvinist is Charles A. Rogers, “John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards,” Duke Divinity School Review 31 (Winter 1966): 20-38.
38 Kisker, “John Wesley’s Puritan and Pietist Heritage Reexamined,” 266, 275, 277. It is true that Wesley in one of his writings said only a “hair’s breadth” separated him from Calvinism at some points, but the “some” turns out to be the matter of salvation by grace, and even that is modified by Wesley’s view of free will (278).
39 Richard Rankin, Ambivalent Churchmen and Evangelical Churchwomen: The Religion of the Episcopal Elite in North Carolina, 1800–1860 (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 3, 31.
40 Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 31, 78. She gives virtually the same list when commenting on an 1809 book by Methodist James Snowden: the Methodists were marked by “their straightforward doctrine, encompassing the basic Christian teachings (as seen through the prism of Wesleyan interpretation) of original sin, justification by faith, the free agency of the believer, the free grace of God, and the second conversion of holiness” (237).
41 Philip N. Mulder, A Controversial Spirit: Evangelical Awakenings in the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5, 8, 9. By the time of the Second Awakening, “[c]ompetition and differentiation became the essential element of evangelical religion. . . . Earlier New Lights had been content to spread the gospel of active Christianity, but evangelicals had a more specific calling” (136). In Mulder’s hands the New Light versus evangelicalism pattern prevails throughout American Christianity’s history (170-171).
42 On the AMEZ, see Larry G. Murphy, J. Gordon Melton, and Gary L. Ward, eds., Encyclopedia of African American Religions (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 9. On the AME, see Emory Stevens Bucke, History of American Methodism, 3 vols. (New York: Abingdon, 1964), 1:606.
43 Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.:Scarecrow, 1996), 8, 9; the Puritan and Pietist quotation is on page 12 n. 25.
44 And in regard to that natural home: “In 1876, American Methodism, in spite of being divided in its organizational structure, was predominantly of one voice in its theology. The evangelical Arminianism which it had received from John Wesley guided the main stream of Methodist preaching” (Gerald O.McCulloch, “The Changing Theological Emphases,” in History of American Methodism, 2:593).McCulloch goes on to survey the changes in Methodist theology in the decades following the Civil War, culminating in two famous heresy trials shortly after 1900 (594-599).
45 Dieter, Holiness Revival, 256.
46 Timothy L. Smith, “Controversy and Disruption,” in History of American Methodism, 2:618, 626; Smith lists the schools (624-625). A recent summary of Nazarene belief is Wes Tracy and Stan Ingersol, What Is a Nazarene? Understanding Our Place in the Religious Community (Kansas City, Mo.: Beacon Hill, 1998): “Nazarene beliefs are founded first of all in the Bible and classic Christian doctrines. Our Articles of Faith descend from the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England as amended and abridged by John Wesley into the Twenty-five Articles of Methodism” (16). The Nazarene Articles of Faith and statements on The Church (161-165) include reference to the “plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures . . . inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation” (161). The first of the Wesleyan spin-offs was the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), dating to 1880. Earlier separations had created the Wesleyan Methodists (1843; since 1968, the Wesleyan Church) and the Free Methodists (1866); in both cases the holiness component was only a part of the background to the divisions.
47 Ronald F. Satta, “Fundamentalism and Inerrancy: A Response to the Sandeen Challenge,” Evangelical Journal 21 (Fall 2003): 66-80. The quotations are from page 80. Satta cites George Marsden’s influential work as accepting the Sandeen thesis. On earlier inerrancy, see the comment by Roger Olson, Story of Christian Theology: “The Westminster Confession is thoroughly Calvinistic with a distinctly Puritan spin. It emphasizes the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture” (497).
48 Daryl E. McCarthy, “Inerrancy in American Methodism During the Nineteenth Century,” unpublished paper read at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Atlanta, November 2003.
49 Ibid. McCarthy quotes Ralston on verbal inspiration: “The very words, as well as the thoughts [emphasis his] were inspired by the Spirit; [t]he Bible is the ‘Word of God.’ What the Bible says, God says, what the Bible declares to be true is true” (3). Raymond wrote similarly, the Bible “is pure from any admixture of error and is an authoritative rule of faith and practice . . . what it says, God says” (4).And Foster: “We must claim for it, therefore, that it is true in its original deliverances, its recitation of facts, and its historical statements from beginning to end; and true in its doctrines and ethics assumed, implied, and enunciated on a fair principle of interpretation” (6).
50 Ibid., 5.
51 Ibid., 7, emphasis his.
52 Ibid., 10, 11.
53 Ibid., 12, 13.
54 Robert F. Scholz, “Muhlenberg’s Relation,” distinguishes among five expressions of Pietism—Spenerian, Wurttemberg, Radical, Halle, Moravianism—and shows that there are common elements among them: “Although many motifs and emphases can be found within these several forms of Pietism one stands out first and foremost—repentance. The concern for genuine repentance that Luther introduced with his attack on penance and the Roman Catholic penitential system in the 95 Theses. . . .Other characteristics common to all the above-mentioned forms of Pietism are praxis pietas, personal spiritual awakening, study and use of scripture, revitalization of congregational life, a tendency to democratize life and an ethical concern” (44, 45). Scholz places Muhlenberg in the Spenerian category, “a form of moderate Lutheranism with Orthodox and Pietist elements that eschewed radical Pietism and its separatist conventicles but had room for nonseparating collegia pietas. Its Pietism was distinct from Halle Pietism, being traceable to Arndt and Spener, yet open to Halle’s considerable influence” (46). For a contrary, and minority, view that contends Muhlenberg did not mediate a position between Orthodoxy and Pietism, see Paul P. Kuenning, The Rise and Fall of American Lutheran Pietism: The Rejection of an Activist Heritage (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1988), 33-46.
55 Scholz, “Muhlenberg’s Relation,” 47, 48, 54. Scholz’s final words show the combination:Orthodoxy supplied a scholastic analysis of the order of salvation; Pietism promoted a hermeneutic for the scriptural interpretation of faith as repentance-centered, focused simultaneously in both justification and sanctification. Muhlenberg’s difficulty with Orthodoxy was the rigid separation of justification and sanctification . . . which compartmentalized religious experience; his rule shift to bring the two into proximity was, from the perspective of his practical theology, a pastoral necessity for which he found precedence in Luther (66 n. 66).Johann Arndt’s True Christianity (1606) is viewed by a number of scholars as presaging Pietism, and Arndt is seen as the “father” of Pietism; Scholz calls him “prepietistic” (42).
56 Ibid., 51. This loss of interest in, and to some extent opposition to, the confessions is shown in a study by James Lawton Haney, “John George Schmucker and the Roots of His Spirituality,” in Lutheranism and Pietism, 67-95. J. G. Schmucker (1771–1854) is the father of Samuel Simon Schmucker.
57 This summary of the debate follows Verlyn O. Smith, “Theological Authority in S. S. Schmucker and C. Porterfield Krauth,” in Lutheranism and Pietism, 99-118.
58 Ibid., 107.
59 Cited in ibid., 107, 107-108. Strikingly, Smith contends that Schmucker’s thinking is more in line with the Enlightenment-rationalism stress on empiricism, and Krauth closer to the idealism of the nineteenth century, almost the reverse of what one would expect philosophically of the two men (110-113).
60 Ibid., 114.
61 Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Raised in a Pentecostal family, now a member of an evangelical but not charismatic United Methodist Church congregation, Wacker says, “in many ways my heart never left home. Pentecostals continue to be my people. I embrace many of their values” (x). It perhaps goes without saying that Wacker is looking at classic Pentecostalism, but there was a use of the term by some in the late nineteenth century which did not connote speaking in tongues. “None of the groups which became a part of the Church of the Nazarene accepted glossolalia as a genuine spiritual gift, and the adjective ‘Pentecostal’ in the name of the denomination became so confusing that it was officially dropped by the General Assembly in 1919” (W. T. Purkiser, Called unto Holiness: Volume 2: The Second Twenty-Five Years, 1933–58 [Kansas City, Mo.: Nazarene Publishing House, 1983], 24).
62 Wacker, Heaven Below, 2; the streams are briefly described, pages 2 and 3; on Parham, see page 5. On healing, see Donald Dayton, “The Rise of the Evangelical Healing Movement in Nineteenth-Century America,” Pneuma 4 (Spring 1982): 1-18.
63 Wacker, Heaven Below, 70, 73, 74, 76, 266.
64 Ibid., 76, 77; the debates are described on pages 178-184. The Pentecostal denominations had their own statements of faith; e.g., the Assemblies of God (AG), provoked in part by the trinitarian controversy, arrived at its “Statement of Fundamental Truths” in 1916, reproduced in William Menzies, Anointed to Serve: The Story of the Assemblies of God (Springfield, Mo.: Gospel Publishing House, 1971), 385-390.If anything, doctrinally, “the AG has become more precise since [its founding in] 1914,” says noted AG historian Edith Blumhofer, “Assemblies of God,” in Dictionary of Christianity in America, ed. Daniel G. Reid et al. (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1990), 87.
65 Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 237, 9; elsewhere Carpenter says the fundamentalist era is the second quarter of the twentieth century, then almost immediately states it was most influential from the 1920s to the 1960s (237).
66 Ibid., 238. That fundamentalism was not an aberration is confirmed by Kirsopp Lake in Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925): “It is a mistake, often made by educated men who happen to have but little knowledge of historical theology, to suppose Fundamentalism is a new and strange form of thought. It is nothing of the kind: it is the partial and uneducated survival of a theology that was once universally held by all Christians. How many were there, for instance, in the Christian Churches, in the eighteenth century, who doubted the infallible inspiration of all Scripture? A few, perhaps, but very few. No, the Fundamentalist may be wrong; I think that he is. But it is we who have departed from the tradition, not he” (cited in N. M. de S. Cameron, “The Logic of Infallibility: An Evangelical Doctrine at Issue,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology I [1983]: 39-43, at page 40); see also John Fea: “While there is a tendency to treat fundamentalists as extremists or ecclesiastical outcasts, for the most part they make up a unique part of the American evangelical tradition and should be understood in that light” (“Understanding the Changing Façade of Twentieth-Century American Protestant Fundamentalism: Toward a Historical Definition,” Trinity Journal 15 [NS] [1994]: 199; Fea has a helpful analysis of the extensive historical literature on fundamentalism in his “American Fundamentalism and Neo-Evangelicalism: A Bibliographic Survey,” Evangelical Journal 11 [Spring 1993]: 21-30).
67 A standard description of the Keswick movement, emphasizing the Keswick method, is Steven Barabas, So Great Salvation: The History and Message of Keswick Convention (Los Angeles: Revell, 1952).George F. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) situates Keswick among the evangelical spirituality systems (72-80), and describes the debates about the Keswick approach (94-101).Among Pentecostals, some groups were Wesleyan, others were Keswickian.
68 Carpenter, Revive Us Again, 81, 82, 85. Even the Princeton Theology was not without its piety. See W. Andrew Hoffecker, Piety and the Princeton Theologians: Archibald Alexander, Charles Hodge, and Benjamin Warfield (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1981). On Hodge, consult the carefully nuanced Mark A. Noll, “Charles Hodge as an Expositor of the Spiritual Life,” in Charles Hodge Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of His Life and Work, ed. John W. Stewart and James H. Moorhead (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 181-216.