Whenever I get the chance to explain what makes Bethel University distinctive — unusual even among its dozens of Christian college peers — I tend to use two words: Pietist and irenic. Unfortunately, neither term is in common parlance nowadays, even in the church. So I appreciate that the website for our seminary offers a pair of nutshell definitions:
We are orthodox and evangelical, with roots in pietism—guided by a high view of Scripture and a focus on obedient, personal faith. We're also characterized by an irenic spirit—united on core doctrines but tolerant of differing evangelical viewpoints on lesser issues.
Today I thought I’d expand a bit more on the second term, which is about more than just tolerating difference, and explain what it has to do with the first term. Sometimes we use Pietist1 and irenic interchangeably or synonymously — but I think it’d be more accurate to say that what we call our irenic (or peaceable) spirit grows out of our participation in the Pietist tradition.
Maybe more like this: Because of Pietism, we are irenic.
To explain, let me organize a few thoughts around Paul’s famous triad of Christian virtues:
Faith
Why would Pietists be “united on core doctrines but tolerant of differing evangelical viewpoints on lesser issues”?
First, Christians whose faith is grounded in “a high view of Scripture” should have a correspondingly lower view of any particular interpretation of Scripture — including their own. To be faithful is to be humble, as open to Scripture facilitating transformative encounters with a God whose ways are not our ways as we are obedient to God’s written word when it speaks clearly.
Little is clearer in Scripture than the imperative of unity, whether it’s the psalmist trying to express just how “very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity!” (Ps 133:1), Jesus praying that his followers “may become completely one” (John 17:23), or Paul exhorting the first Christians to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3). Which is why Pietists going back to Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) have lamented the historic disunity of Christians who let their disputes over faith not only disintegrate the metaphorical Body of Christ but fuel social and political conflicts that wound literal human bodies.
The ecumenically-minded Spener counseled against theological disputation in part because that practice (highly popular in a religiously splintered Germany still recovering from the Thirty Years War) could do little more than produce “a convictio intellectus” that is “far from being faith.” So finally, Pietism reminds us that faith is about much more than the dogmas and doctrines that divide Christians. Ever wary of a “dead orthodoxy” that is both faithful and fruitless, Pietists are less concerned with knowing about God as an idea and more eager to know God as a person — and to know how to serve him by their actions. Seen in that light, Pietists will always err on the side of seeking devotional fellowship and missional partnerships that span theological differences.
Love
The “living faith” of Pietism is most vital when it is made active in love (Gal 5:6). First, of God, which is why our faith is not just “obedient” to ideas and arguments we believe to be true, but “personal” — reorienting our mind, but also our heart, soul, and strength, towards the God whose Son calls his followers his friends. That after having given them this commandment: “that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
So Christians in a community marked by the irenic spirit are committed to living out their love of all others who seek to love God, whatever their differences on relatively insignificant matters of belief, ethics, polity, etc. “We must help [students] till the soil diligently in the corner of the field where God has placed them,” wrote Bethel president Carl Lundquist in 1965, “but simultaneously feel deeply concerned about the work of God’s entire vineyard. This irenic spirit may well be one of the most important contributions that Bethel and the Baptist General Conference can make to the whole church today.”
But our faith is not made active only in our treatment of fellow Christians. What Spener called our “unalloyed love of our neighbors” must also extend to those who more deeply disagree with us, by thought, word, and deed. Even if a faith screen keeps them from being fully a part of our learning community, we are committed to engaging those neighbors — even those we want to call “enemies” — by extending hospitality in the texts we read, the speakers we listen to, and the service we offer to the world. In his contribution to The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education, theologian Christian Collins Winn argued that a Pietist approach to engaging “in controversy or argument is itself the practice of love of neighbor. For in both the practitioner assumes, affirms and embraces the humanity of the other, and sees their adversary as loved by God, and deserving of respect, care and hospitality.”
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To be irenic, then, is a commitment to see others with love. “Because of sin,” I argue in The Pietist Option, “we are prone to see God and everyone made in his image with fear and suspicion rather than awe and wonder.” But “because Jesus Christ ‘died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves,’ we, members of his body, ‘regard no one from a human point of view’ (2 Cor 5:15-16). With the eyes of Christ, we see everyone made in God’s image as a stranger to be welcomed (Mt 25:35). After all, Jesus asked, ‘if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others?’ (Mt 5:47). But speaking in his name, now we tell even our enemies, ‘It is well that you have come into our lives.”2
Hope
These are ideas I’ve expressed many times before, yet even I can hear how impossible they sound when spoken into a world that we all know to be irretrievably polarized and irreconcilably divided. So finally, let me reiterate Christian’s last, most important, comment about Pietism’s irenic spirit: that it is grounded in our “hopeful commitment to God’s peace.”
Everything Pietists do to revitalize Christianity is “not rooted in optimism, but in the conviction and hope that the work of God in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ was continuing to unfold in history in the power of the Spirit, and that this work was a work of healing.” To think humbly, keep an open mind, and welcome others into our love is also to trust that “God would act to bring about some measure of that shalom that will someday renovate the cosmos itself.” It is to hope for a future that we see even less clearly than our present and past — to continue to seek God’s peace knowing that we can’t fully recognize the good that God works through disagreement and conflict, to practice on Earth the unity that we’ll fully experience in Heaven, when an immeasurable multitude of unbounded diversity will praise God with one voice (Rev 7:9-10).
So I think Christian is still right to frame the irenic spirit more as “a challenge than a possession.” While we ought to celebrate irenicism as a distinctive legacy of Pietist history, what’s more important is that those who follow the Pietist impulse today continue to ask themselves:
Are we committed to God’s peace, God’s shalom? We all know only too well, and some of us perhaps more than others, that the practice of good faith, humility, and genuine neighbor-love is hard work, at which we fail daily and in which we are often afflicted by the failures of others. What hope does is call us to begin again at the beginning. To turn around, and to start over once more — to practice good faith, humility and love — in the hope that God’s peace may break into our common life now.
Note that I try to use Pietist (the name for a particular Christian tradition that is distinctive and influential, albeit scarcely institutionalized) rather than pietistic (a vague adjective that, if it carries any meaning for people these days, tends to carry connotations of anti-intellectualism, emotionalism, or legalism).