Protestant theology from the end of the Thirty Years War (1648) to the beginning of World War I (1914) was characterized by three major patterns of thought: the Enlightenment, Pietism and Romanticism. Although these movements appear to be moving in very different directions, I think of them as a braid. The three strands of thought twist around each other and interact in a variety of different ways.
Each strand contains a great deal of diversity within it, but in the beginning we must use generalizations, and leave the splitting of the hairs or the threads to a later time. So let's imagine a "typical" representative of each group. We'll call the Enlightenment person Edward, the Pietist, Polly, and the Romantic Rose.
Edward, Polly and Rose go to church. When they come home, you ask them, "How was church?" Edward will tell you about the internal logic of the sermon and the moral lesson derived from it. Polly will describe the fervor of the singing and how her heart was strangely warmed during the prayer time. Rose will describe the aesthetics of the architecture and the beauty of the liturgy, (Wow! That was quite a service!) Each strand is looking for something different in religion, consequently each is finding something different.
Now lets look to the windings of the braid:
And so we go, round and round. For Edward, what is wrong with the world is ignorance, the solution is education, which will lead to morality. For Polly, we are all lost until we are born again, and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, live lives of praise to God and service to others. For Rose, what is life without beauty? And a sense of connectedness - continuity with the past.
After talking about these three strands in a Lay Ministry class, one of my students came to the next session and said, "I taught an Adult Sunday School class this week, and all three views were in my class." Edward might be most comfortable in a Unitarian Church, Polly in a Pentecostal Church, Rose in a high-church Episcopal Church. But they are all in your church. Perhaps they are all in you?
Enlightenment
We must first consider the historical context. The next few generations after the Reformation were characterized by (1) a concern for doctrinal precision, and (2) religious wars.
The first characteristic, often called "Protestant scholasticism," placed emphasis on right doctrine, as if your standing before God depended on ascent to the proper doctrine. To this day there are denominations named "Church of the Augsburg Confession," "Church of the Heidelberg Catechism," and "Church of the Helvetic Confession," as if a doctrinal statement defined a church!
The Reformation period ended with a series of wars of Religion. France experienced eight Wars of Religion from 1562 to 1598. (That's right, eight wars of religion!) England experienced a Civil War 1642-1651, which ended where it began. Then they had the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 (so named by the winners), which established for good the English middle way. The Netherlands struggled through an Eighty Years War (1568-1648) for independence from Catholic Spain. The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) saw the powers of Europe fighting it out on German soil. No matter how noble the aims of a war, it will ultimately devolve into death, devastation, and decline of morality. All this done in the name of religion! This caused many to question the viability of a religion that could produce such suffering.
Reacting to the carnage of war, and inspired by the scientific revolution of the same period, the Enlightenment looked for a better way. They found it in Reason, not religion. Reason is what we can understand with the human mind, making use of all we can learn by the scientific method. The Enlightenment rejected as "superstition" all that could not be proven. The details (trivia) of doctrine were not worth fighting over. Religion was seen as a personal matter between the individual and God. Therefore one could not impose one's religion on another.
Some followed Enlightenment logic to the rejection of all religion; others tried to use Enlightenment reasoning to explain Christianity without reference to Revelation (the Bible).
Enlightenment beliefs can be summarized as follows:
One example: John Locke (1632-1704) in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) tried to present the truths of Christianity using Reason alone, without reference to the Bible.
Pietism
Pietism was another reaction to the dryness of Protestant Scholasticism and the moral desert of religious war. It also reacted against the skepticism of the Enlightenment. Philipp Jacob Spener (1635-1705), Lutheran pastor in Frankfort, Germany, published his platform for a new Reformation in Pia Desideria in 1675. His platform had five planks:
Pietists cared about feelings. They practiced acts of charity. They believed an emphasis on piety instead of polemics would build Christian unity. They believed in a devout, articulate and active laity. They practiced a strict personal moral code. Pietists could become self-righteous and judgmental. They could also be self-critical and compassionate.
Nicolaus Ludwig, Count Zinzendorf (1700-1760) turned the Moravian Church into a pietist denomination. John Wesley (1703-1791) organized Methodist classes within the Church of England. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) interpreted religious experience with the tools of Reason.
Pietists eventually made use of the mass meeting outside the church (revival) and placed emphasis on a "born again" experience. The activism of Pietists led to the Protestant Missionary Movement, and gave much energy to the Anti-Slavery Movement, the Temperance Movement and the Women�s Rights Movement.
Romanticism
Romanticism was a broad intellectual movement, expressed in many disciplines. Here we are only concerned with Romanticism in the Church. Romanticism, like the other movements, was a reaction to what had gone before.
Romanticism as a religious movement began in 1827 with the publication of a devotional book in England on the Church Year. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), a leader of the "Oxford Movement," eventually left the Church of England for the Church of Rome.
The Mercersberg Movement, in the Reformed Church of the U.S., early expressed Romanticism in America. John Williamson Nevin (1803-1886) criticized the psychological manipulation of revivalism in The Anxious Bench (1843), and advocated the "system of the Catechism" for quiet, slow growth into the faith through the community of the Church. Philip Schaff (1819-1893) in The Principle of Protestantism affirmed the continuity of Protestantism with Medieval Catholicism. The Mercersberg Movement promoted the church year, the development of liturgy using the resources of the universal church, and a high view of the status of the clergy.
Congregationalist Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) also criticized revivalism in favor of slow growth in faith within the faith community. In "A Dissertation on Language," he explained how all language was only an approximation of what it attempted to describe, therefore no creed was final. In short, our knowledge is incomplete and we live with mystery.
As the Nineteenth Century progressed, other movements of though developed: Liberalism, the Social Gospel, and Fundamentalism. Neo-Orthodoxy became the predominate mode of thought after World War I. But the three-fold braid of Enlightenment, Pietism and Romanticism is still with us, and still impacts the life of the Christian community.