Fred van Lieburg, ed. Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2006. vi + 324 pp. EUR 39.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-8053-3592-8.

Reviewed by Lucinda Martin (Center of Excellence "Enlightenment-Religion-Knowledge," Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
Published on H-German (July, 2008)

Confessionalism and Pietism: Two Contested Terms

"Up to this very hour, nobody has been able to give a real definition of Pietism"--this according to the pietist patriarch, August Hermann Francke, in a 1706 letter to a friend.[1] Francke would probably not be surprised to learn that contemporary scholars are still arguing about just what constitutes pietism. Traditional church historical research, most of it written by German Lutheran theologians, has long understood it as a reform movement within the German Lutheran Church. More recently, scholars from other countries and disciplines have expanded its definition considerably. Some historians point to the rich cultural and social aspects of pietism, especially the contributions of radical, non-Lutheran pietists (although the designation "radical" is contested). Other scholars see pietism as a cousin--or child--of other European religious movements and have objected to definitions that emphasize national borders. Still others emphasize contributions by women and the laity that were neglected in treatments centered on an elite male, university-educated, clergy. Little consensus surrounds pietism's definition--its geographical boundaries, its theological and social characteristics, and even its time span are all disputed. The field's current rapid growth hampers attempts to provide a definition. Taken together, the range of essays in this volume suggests that the definition is in the process of expanding even further.

Scholars traditionally dated pietism's origins to the third quarter of the seventeenth century in Germany. This collection is drawn from a conference held in the Netherlands in 2004, the first of three organized by a group of scholars from the Netherlands, Sweden, and North America, all countries where pietism was influential. But even scholars accustomed to this wider picture may be startled to find essays by Salvador Ryan and Raymond Gillespie treating religious upheavals in early-seventeenth-century Ireland as part of the pietist movement. In the past, few scholars have dated pietism so early, and even fewer have extended it to Ireland. Other authors in this volume, like Janis Kreslins, expand not the geography of the movement, but its religious boundaries, using the term to describe religious feeling rather than a social or religious movement. In general, however, many contributors seem to understand pietism as a synonym for what W. R. Ward has called the "Protestant evangelical awakening," a social and religious revival movement in the Atlantic World in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[2] Arne Bugge Amundsen's offering, "A Separatist Movement in Norway around 1650," fits this pattern. Whether pietism was one (German?) part of the "awakening" that Ward refers to, or whether it is simply another name for this international movement, is yet another question facing scholars.

The selection of contributors similarly seems to reflect a move away from Germany. Germans wrote only three of its seventeen contributions: the conclusion by Hartmut Lehmann, an essay by Jürgen Beyer on pietism in Estonia, and a contribution by Claus Bernet on radical pietist attempts to build a "heavenly Jerusalem" on earth. Additionally, only Beyer's and Bernet's essays are written in German, a state of affairs that seems significant given the past dominance of that language in this subfield, although German scholarship on pietism is still going strong. Thus, this collection highlights just how much interesting research is taking place outside Germany. Of course, a number of its essays do treat "classic" German pietism. Jonathan Strom's essay on pietism in the town of Dargun, for example, offers valuable insights on pietism as a popular religion, not just as a reform movement. Strom analyzes the employment of the very important concepts of the penitential struggle (Bußkampf) and conversion (Bekehrung) in Dargun. He shows how townsfolk connected pietist beliefs to superstitions and belief in magic. More local studies like this one, which rely on original records and tell the stories of real people, are badly needed. Douglas Schantz's essay, "Politics, Prophecy and Pietism in the Halberstadt Conventicle," also examines a local situation. The essay's main topic is the impact of religious literature on the Halberstadt pietists and authorities' reactions. Research on the book market and reading habits is one of the most promising areas of research on pietism and on the eighteenth century in general.

Besides offering fascinating information on pietists' libraries, Schantz's article is also one of the few in the collection to address explicitly the issue of "confessionalism" announced in the volume's title. Admittedly, this term is equally contested: it usually refers to rulers' attempts in the post-Reformation period to use territorial church institutions for social control of their subjects. Scholars have seen confessionalism as a precursor to modern political and social organization and have identified it as a key factor in the centralization of the early modern nation-state. In recent years, however, critics have increasingly pointed out the flaws in this model: research about confessionalism often focuses on institutions and not on everyday cultural practices; it fails to take into account the considerable heterogeneity often present within a confession; and it is difficult to apply to popular religious movements.

Since pietism encompassed both popular religious developments and ecclesiastical innovations, approaches to religious history that emphasize confessionalism have proven problematic. In some cases, pietism challenged traditional hierarchies; in others, rulers were able to manipulate pietism to their own ends. Mary Noll Venables thus considers the case of Ernst the Pious of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Ernst used religion to control his subjects, but he also thought that subjection to Christian discipline was in their best interest. Ernst blamed the wars, plagues, and natural disasters of the day on a lack of religious rigor in his kingdom. God, he believed, was punishing the wicked. Venables thus shows that in this instance, the political and the religious were "inseparably entwined" (p. 102).

Despite the shortage of explicit treatments of the theme of confessionalism, a number of essays nonetheless attempt to bridge the gap that many scholars see between these concepts. For example, David B. Eller's discussion of the recovery of the love feast in German pietism addresses persisting worries in German society about the number, performance, and worthy reception of the sacraments. Although the confessional churches of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clearly thought that they had satisfactorily answered Anabaptist criticisms of the sacraments, continued concerns about these matters fed the energies of pietism. Other essays sketch a transition between the terms via closer examination of the period between the end of the Reformation and the beginning of pietism. In doing so, they lay out many of the discourses that eventually contributed to pietism. Willem J. Op't Hof discusses the heritage left to pietism by medieval monasticism, especially the notion of a life structured by devotional exercises. Similarly, Craig Atwood traces three major currents in pietist thought to earlier sources. He shows that the classically pietist notions of separatism, ecumenism, and pacifism all have deep roots in the communities of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren of the confessional age. Atwood's essay also reveals older eastern European sources for the pietist stress on practical Christianity, as well for the pietist conviction that religious belief must be voluntary.

Given Pietism's indebtedness to diverse cultural traditions, it is hardly surprising that the movement encompassed so much variety. Several essays in this collection thus interpret specific cultural and social manifestations of pietism. Johan de Niet, for example, investigates pietist missions to the sick in the Dutch Republic. In visiting the ill, pietist lay ministers not only spread their religion, but also their beliefs about sickness, death, and preparation for the afterlife. Ultimately, the work of these lay ministers influenced pastoral care in the state churches, and even more importantly, probably led to improved care for the elderly and ill. Clergy from the state church and lay ministers competed for souls, even of the most lowly--pietists made a point of visiting prisoners, for example. De Niet's essay represents the tip of the iceberg in research on pietism and medicine. Much work remains to be done on pietist ideas about healing the mind and body as well as experiments in developing medicines and charitable institutions to care for the sick.

Regarding such cultural phenomena, nearly every essay in this volume refers in some way to the importance of "suspicious books" (p. 242) in the transfer of pietist ideas. In his essay, Peter Vogt moves beyond such observations to explore the role that pietist autobiographies played in the community. With the story of an individual's "rebirth" at their core, such autobiographies provided evidence that a person had been "born again"--the primary criterion for inclusion in the pietist community. Vogt extends his discussion to the relationship between confessionalism and pietism when he notes that the Latin term, confessio, refers primarily to a personal declaration or testimony: "Whereas Confessionalism is marked by the centrality of creedal statements, Pietism represents a shift from creedal statements to the importance of personal testimonies" (p. 310).

In his conclusion, Hartmut Lehmann provides a concise, critical review of the different theories that scholars have offered to explain the rise of pietism. The refreshing clarity and simplicity of his explanations defy the complexity of the issues at stake. The broad range of issues, geographical locations, and time spans dealt with in this volume reflect the difficulty in sorting out the parameters of pietism. Attempts to classify and define pietism often go awry. In this sense, the four sections of this volume ("Tradition," "Implementation," "Communication," "Imagination") are confusingly titled and include essays that often seem unrelated. Given the state of the field, however, such problems may have been inevitable, and the editor admits that the groupings have been made "somewhat experimentally" (p. 4). In general, however, the essays in this volume make valuable contributions to scholarship on pietism and the early modern world. Furthermore, the collection of these diverse essays in on volume makes a bold statement: although the boundaries of pietism remain unclear, these authors believe that they surely extend beyond the German Lutheran Church.

Notes

[1]. My translation. The original: "Niemand hat bis diese Stunde eine wahrhaffte Definition geben können / was denn der Pietismus sey[.]" In Erhard Peschke, ed. August Hermann Francke: Streitschriften (Berlin: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1981), 217-230.

[2]. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Citation: Lucinda Martin. Review of van Lieburg, Fred, ed., Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14754

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