Wednesday, September 10, 2025

It is the 10th of September 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

It’s the week of mailbag episodes as I continue my Reformation tour with GTItours, and I’m trying to clean out, to some extent, my inbox of your questions about the history of the church and Hailey in Spokane, Washington- there in Eastern Washington. It’s the home of both Bing Crosby and Father’s Day. 

Hailey wrote because she heard a show years ago where I discussed the history of “Pietism,” and it came up in her church history class, and she was a little confused. Hailey explained what she believed her professor was saying, and I’ll respond to that very briefly by saying that it was a fine broad definition, but it’s really tricky (trust me, I spent my twenties and my doctoral studies trying to crack that nut).

It has become shorthand, in Lutheran circles, for what H.L. Mencken wrote about “Puritans,” that is, it is something like “the sneaking suspicion that somewhere someone is having fun”. 

“Oh, they are just pietists,” or a version of that, is certainly something I have heard in Lutheran contexts, and it’s kind of like nails on a chalkboard.

Pietism was a specific movement that began in the Lutheran Church in the 17th century and had a key theological emphasis and an important sociological aspect.

The name to go to is: Phillip Jakob Spener- the Lutheran who was inspired by Johann Arndt, a Lutheran devotional writer who lived from 1555 to 1621. It was a Lutheran movement- so there was a connection to the Lutheran Confessions, but with an emphasis on the devotional and sometimes mystical aspects of the Christian life over the speculative (and they would be very fast to show you how they believe this to be compatible with Luther’s teachings).

The sociological aspect is the conventicle- the “church within a church” or what we might think of today as a “small group”. Yes, you would have public worship, but then you would get together for prayer and Bible study separately as well. This didn’t go well with some who saw these as possibly problematic- places where heresies could run wild without a trained pastor's guidance, places for dissent… all could be threats, I suppose, and so “conventicles” tended to be banned in Lutheran regions. You will find “conventicle acts” throughout history to ban these.  

“Piety,” of course, is just a word that means “giving God what he is due” or “acting and believing properly in light of Divine guidance,” nothing inherently heretical, of course. Just as the “Puritans” wanted to “purify” worship… nothing wrong with that intrinsically, but we’ll need to go on a case-by-case basis for analyzing what’s being done.

Let me give you one bite-sized thought here, too, without getting too deep in the philosophy of it all. Words are tools. Yes, this can get deep- but I mean “we use words to signify things and when they start to signify other things we need to either abandon them or understand that meanings can change. Consider words like “awesome” or “gay” and you know what we are talking about… you could be the person who says “technically…” but that can get tiresome.

But “technically,” Pietism is a 17th-century movement within the Lutheran Church that sought to emphasize the devotional and mystical elements WITHIN the Lutheran confessions. Some came to ditch the Lutheran Confessions- we could call them the “radical pietists,” but then it can get fuzzy. We do well to learn our “ists” and “isms” and then realize that they are just trying to get at something- to signify an emphasis and, in this case, describe a sociological phenomenon- the Conventicle.

In the world of what we might call “confessional” Christianity, we see an emphasis on propositions that can be affirmed or denied. Making distinctions at this level is MUCH easier and there are many who work in this world (many fine scholars here and associated with 1517) and then you get the historian whoo spent his time chasing ‘emphases’ and ‘sociological phenomena” like ghosts to come out on the other side with the answer: “it’s complicated” [but those conversations are sometimes the most fun to wrestle with].

Keep wrestling, Hailey, and enjoy your church history class…

 

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and a famous story from Luke 18:

18 A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

19 “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. 20 You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

21 “All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said.

22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

23 When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

26 Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?”

27 Jesus replied, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

  

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 10th of September 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man neither accused of being radical nor a pietist… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who realized that Hailey might be at my sister's alma mater, so I put her question on my sister's birthday- Happy Birthday to my big sister Sarah… I’m  Dan van Voorhis. 

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.