Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism
- 2 Spener and the origins of church pietism
- 3 The mystic way or the mystic ways?
- 4 The development of pietism in the Reformed churches
- 5 The Reformed tradition in Britain and America
- 6 Zinzendorf
- 7 John Wesley
- 8 Jonathan Edwards
- 9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism
- Conclusion
- Select and user-friendly bibliography
- Index
4 - The development of pietism in the Reformed churches
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism
- 2 Spener and the origins of church pietism
- 3 The mystic way or the mystic ways?
- 4 The development of pietism in the Reformed churches
- 5 The Reformed tradition in Britain and America
- 6 Zinzendorf
- 7 John Wesley
- 8 Jonathan Edwards
- 9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism
- Conclusion
- Select and user-friendly bibliography
- Index
Summary
The formation of Reformed confessions
The pre-history of Pietism in the Reformed churches has been charted much less satisfactorily than in the Lutheran world, principally because it is much more difficult to chart. This was partly because the great Reformed expansion of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was halted by the Thirty Years War, leaving major reserves in Switzerland, France, the United Provinces and Hungary with a great diaspora across Germany and in Poland, and with the Church of England at one stage reckoned part of the Reformed world. Each of these communities felt the pressure to form its own confession, but the practical problems of each were different, and there was no constitutional mechanism to keep them in line doctrinally. Even the Synod of Dort did not produce a homogenised Reformed confession. Moreover, this situation had in practice existed from the beginning.
Calvin, himself a humanist as well as a theologian, had not created the kind of highly articulated Orthodoxy which came later; colleagues had worked in their own way at a variety of themes, and it is not useful to treat his successors as betraying his heritage because they continued to do the same. They wished to be regarded as Reformed theologians working in his tradition, even though their local problems varied enormously. Thus the Elector Frederick III commissioned the writing of the Heidelberg catechism and pushed its adoption, in the explicit hope of reducing tensions between Lutheran and Reformed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Early EvangelicalismA Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789, pp. 70 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006