Pietism
PIETISM. Pietism has been and remains an identifiable religious orientation within the churches of the Reformation. As the name indicates, it emphasizes the life of personal piety according to the model it finds in the primitive Christian community. By doing so it has hoped to complete the Reformation, which, in the judgment of many of its adherents, has never become a movement to reform the religious life of individuals. The roots of Pietism are found, on the one hand, in the mystical spirituality of an earlier day and, on the other, in the writings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, as well as other reformers such as Caspar Schwenckfeld and the prominent Anabaptists.
It is difficult to fix precisely the boundaries of Pietism, either in terms of chronology or distribution. While scholars have associated Pietism largely with Lutheranism, it has been customary to date its beginning from the publication of Philipp Jakob Spener's Pia desideria in 1675, two years after which his followers were referred to as "Pietists." The present tendency, growing out of a great deal of recent research, is to expand the term so as to include what is now widely perceived as the same development within other communions, notably the Reformed, as well as Protestants who questioned the need for any kind of church affiliation because they found a lack of religious devotion and ethical urgency within the churches of the day.
This page contains 201 words.
Pietism article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,967 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Pietism Article
