The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1675-1750 · Germany
German Pietism - Spener, Francke, Halle
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About This Movement
In 1675 a Lutheran pastor in Frankfurt, Philipp Jakob Spener, published a short book called Pia Desideria arguing that correct doctrine correctly preached was not enough. Christians needed to meet in small groups, read Scripture together, and expect their lives to change. What followed was less a new church than a renewal movement inside the Lutheran state churches, and its centre became Halle, where August Hermann Francke built an orphanage that grew into a complex of schools, a printing house and a Bible institute, funded by donations and tied to correspondents across Europe, Russia, India and North America. Pietism gave German Protestantism the conversion narrative as a genre and a great body of new hymnody, and through Halle's graduates it launched one of the first organized Protestant missions sent out from Europe, when Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau sailed for the Danish trading post at Tranquebar in South India in 1706.
Sources
- Spener, Pia Desideria (1675; trans. Tappert, Fortress, 1964), with the collegia pietatis practice it launched (primary)
- Francke's conversion narrative (1690/91 Lebenslauf) and works; the Halle institutional record - orphanage reports (Segensvolle Fusstapfen, 1701ff.), the global correspondence network, Canstein Bible Institute records (primary) — The Halle archives (Franckesche Stiftungen) are largely untranslated from German.
- Johanna Eleonora Petersen, The Life of Lady Johanna Eleonora Petersen, Written by Herself (1718; trans. Becker-Cantarino, Chicago, 2005); lay conversion-narrative compilations (Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen, 1698-) (primary) — Women's and lay voices; part of the movement's own conversion-narrative genre.
- Freylinghausen, Geistreiches Gesangbuch (Halle, 1704; expanded 1714) (primary) — Hymnody in actual use - household and conventicle piety in its own medium. Available only in German.
- Douglas Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism (Johns Hopkins, 2013), with W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (CUP, 1992) (secondary)
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Continental Protestant Europe' (Lehmann), with 'Evangelical awakenings in the North Atlantic world' (Ward) (reference) — Strong fit: Lehmann is a Pietism specialist.