Philipp Jakob Spener

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Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) was the German Lutheran theologian usually named as the father of Pietism, the renewal movement that pressed for a Christianity of felt inward devotion rather than doctrinal correctness alone. He was born on 23 January 1635 at Rappoltsweiler (Ribeauvillé) in Upper Alsace, raised in a devout Lutheran household marked by the older edifying literature, and trained in the strict scholastic Lutheranism of his day. He came to think that the established church had won its arguments and lost its warmth — orthodox in its confessions, cold in its congregations. That diagnosis, and the slender program he hung upon it, would do more to reshape Protestant religion than its author can have foreseen.

Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), the Lutheran theologian regarded as the father of Pietism — engraved portrait, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Formation: the schoolman who wanted more than school

Spener studied at Strasbourg from the early 1650s under the formidable confessional theologian Johann Conrad Dannhauer, a master of the polemical, system-building Lutheranism that the Reformation had hardened, over the century after Luther, into a rigorous edifice defended against Rome, against Calvin’s followers, and against rival Lutherans with the fine instruments of scholastic theology. Dannhauer was the kind of professor Spener revered, and historians have read him as the model for the ideal learned-and-pious teacher sketched later in the Pia Desideria. Spener took his doctorate at Strasbourg in 1664 with a study of a passage from the Revelation of John, and on the day of that promotion married Susanne Erhard, daughter of a Strasbourg patrician.

The formation was not only academic. On a study journey his illness forced a stay in Geneva, where he encountered Jean de Labadie, a former Catholic priest then preaching the necessity of personal engagement with the Bible and a felt regeneration; the degree of Labadie’s mark on him is debated, but the encounter set before the young scholastic a model of religion lived rather than merely defended. Spener absorbed, too, the older German devotional stream — above all Johann Arndt, whose True Christianity (Wahres Christentum, from 1605) had already made the case for a faith of the inner man, and behind Arndt the medieval German mystics Arndt had read. The man who emerged was a thoroughly orthodox Lutheran who had come to suspect that orthodoxy, by itself, did not produce Christians.

Frankfurt and the colleges of piety

The free imperial city of Frankfurt am Main, where Spener served as Senior and began the collegia pietatis — engraving by Matthäus Merian the Elder, 1646, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

In 1666 Spener was called to the free imperial city of Frankfurt am Main as Senior, the head of the city’s Lutheran ministry — a young man set over an established clergy. The turning point came there. Around 1670, at the urging of parishioners (the Frankfurt jurist Johann Jakob Schütz prominent among them), he began gathering small groups in his house to read scripture, pray, and speak about the conduct of the Christian life. These were the collegia pietatis, the “colleges of piety” that gave the movement one of its names. They met on Sundays and Wednesdays; they admitted men and women, rich and poor; and they put the Word of God into lay hands and lay mouths rather than reserving it to the pulpit and the lecture hall. What began with a dozen or so grew, over the following decade, into something a city could not ignore.

In March 1675 Spener wrote a preface for a new edition of Arndt’s collected sermons. Expanded and published on its own, it became the Pia Desideria, or “Pious Desires,” the closest thing Pietism has to a founding document. Its complaint was lodged from inside the house rather than at its gate: the Reformation had reformed doctrine, but not yet the life that doctrine was meant to produce.

The Pia Desideria: a diagnosis and six remedies

The little book moves in three parts. First a survey of the corrupt conditions of the church, taken estate by estate — the civil authorities, the clergy, and the common people each indicted for their share of the decay. Then the argument that better conditions are genuinely possible, against the counsel of despair. And then the heart of it, six concrete proposals for renewal, which in Theodore Tappert’s standard English rendering run as follows:

• a more extensive use of the Word of God among Christians, including reading of scripture in the home and in the gathered collegia;
• the establishment and diligent exercise of the spiritual priesthood — the Lutheran doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, recovered from a clerical monopoly so that every Christian bears responsibility for the faith of neighbors;
• the insistence that it is not enough to know the Christian faith, since Christianity consists rather in practice — a faith done, not merely debated;
• care in the conduct of religious controversies, waged (where they must be waged at all) in love and with a view to winning the erring rather than defeating them;
• a reform of the schools and universities so that they again become nurseries of a living and not merely a learned ministry, training preachers in piety as much as in scholarship;
• and a reform of preaching, so that the sermon aims at the conscience and the inner man — at edification and the awakening of living faith — rather than at the display of erudition.

Running through the whole is a single wager: that the converted, felt rebirth of the individual believer, issuing in changed conduct, is the thing the church most lacks and most needs. Spener held that conversion should be a datable inward event and that knowledge of God worth the name shows itself in altered life.

The orthodox countercharges

These were claims his orthodox opponents heard as a slide away from the public, shared truth the confessions were written to guard. Three charges recur. The first was subjectivism: a religion relocated into private feeling and the renewed self, they warned, would loosen the church’s hold on doctrine held in common. The second was works-righteousness — a suspicion that Spener’s stress on visible holy living tilted toward making conduct, rather than grace, the ground of salvation, against the Lutheran insistence that the believer is justified by faith alone. Spener answered that he meant fruit, not root: holy living as the evidence of a faith already given by grace, never its price. The third charge was separatism, and here the critics had a real grievance to point to. The household gatherings drew particular suspicion as a church within the church, an ecclesiola in ecclesia answerable to no pulpit — and some of the Frankfurt circle did in fact drift toward separation, withdrawing from the public ministry of word and sacrament in ways Spener himself disowned. He never wanted a secession; he wanted the existing church to come alive in the people who held it. But the conventicle proved harder to govern than to gather, and the suspicion of the schoolmen was not wholly without ground.

Dresden, Berlin, and the reach of a quarrel

In 1686 Spener left Frankfurt to become first court chaplain at Dresden, the senior pulpit of Lutheran Saxony, at the personal wish of the Elector John George III. The post soured quickly. Spener took the office of the prince’s confessor in earnest and rebuked the elector for his manner of life; the elector took offense at the fearless conscientiousness of his chaplain, and the relationship never recovered. Spener would not resign, and the Saxon government hesitated to dismiss him outright. In 1691 a way out was arranged: the Brandenburg court, prompted by the Saxon resident at Berlin, offered him the provostship of St. Nicholas (the Nikolaikirche) in Berlin, with the rank of Konsistorialrat. There, under the protection of the Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, whose interest in sheltering the movement was as much political as devotional, Spener passed his last years defending Pietism against charges of heterodoxy while it spread through the German territories.

The Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas Church) in Berlin, where Spener served as provost from 1691 until his death — photograph by Superchilum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The quarrel followed him. In 1695 the theological faculty of Wittenberg, the citadel of high Lutheran orthodoxy, formally drew up a long bill of alleged errors against him — by the most-cited count, two hundred and sixty-four — a measure of how dangerous the establishment judged this most churchly of reformers to be. From Berlin Spener also lent his weight to the founding of the new university at Halle (chartered in the mid-1690s), which under his younger ally August Hermann Francke would become the institutional engine of the movement. He died at Berlin on 5 February 1705, having asked, the tradition holds, to be buried in white rather than black, as a sign of hope rather than mourning.

What he set in motion

His own writing, beyond the Pia Desideria, was largely pastoral and occasional: catechetical works, and above all the great collections of his correspondence and counsel published late in life as the Theologische Bedenken (“Theological Reflections,” from 1700), with a further volume issued after his death — the deposit of a lifetime spent answering, letter by letter, the practical questions of how a Christian life is to be conducted. He was not a system-builder; his gift was for the cure of souls at scale.

Spener, whose pastoral counsel and collected correspondence shaped Pietism well beyond his lifetime — portrait, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Historians treat Pietism as one of the decisive forces in early modern Protestantism, and Spener’s reach extended well past his own lifetime. Francke built the movement’s institutional center at Halle, with its schools, orphanage, and missionary and publishing enterprises. Spener himself stood as godfather at the 1700 baptism of the infant Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who would grow up to found the Moravian community at Herrnhut; and through that Moravian channel the Pietist emphasis on personal experience reached the young John Wesley — first in the calm of a company of Moravians during a storm at sea, then in the warmed heart of his 1738 conversion — and so passed into the bloodstream of Methodism and the wider evangelical awakenings. By a different route the movement left its mark, by reaction and by inheritance, on the Enlightenment that grew up beside it, and on the German Romantic cult of inwardness that drew, often unknowingly, on the Pietist language of the awakened self. A more speculative current also bore the name — the Württemberg “Pietist theosophy” of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, which fused devotion with the cosmology of Jacob Boehme — but that offshoot belongs to a different world from Spener’s program of conventicle and conscience, as his own gathered piety stood at a deliberate remove from the ecstatic and absorptive wings of Quietist and mystical devotion.

The recurring scholarly question is how much of all this Spener intended. He wrote as a reformer who meant to renew the Lutheran church from within, not to leave it; the conventicle was to be a workshop of the parish, not a rival to it. What he set in motion outran the modest house meetings where it began.

→ Related: Pietism · John Wesley · Grace In Christianity · Christianity · Bible · Martin Luther · John Calvin · The Reformation · Scholasticism · Jacob Boehme · Quietism