Most of my early subscribers already know me pretty well. But even those of you who have read my books or blog posts, even family and friends I know in real life, may be as unsure as newcomers just what a “Pietist schoolman” is.
Let’s start with the Pietist part.
The history here is pretty straightforward: Pietists were German-speaking Protestants in the late 17th and early 18th centuries who sought to renew the church. To do so, they deemphasized doctrinal differences and instead stressed personal conversion and lived faith. Pietism started with the preaching and writing of Lutheran pastor Philipp Jakob Spener, then blossomed under the leadership of August Hermann Francke, who created institutions for education, health care, publishing, and philanthropy in the city of Halle.1
Easy enough. What’s harder to explain is what any of that has to do with Christianity in the 21st century.
Let alone what it has to do with being a “schoolman.” Or writing a blog or newsletter.
In 1988, historian Zenos Hawkinson contributed an essay on “The Pietist Schoolman” to a tribute for Karl A. Olsson. A long-serving professor at what’s now North Park University in Chicago, Hawkinson described a line of Christian educators that stretched from Francke to more recent figures: Olson, North Park’s president from 1959 to 1970, and North Park founder David Nyvall:
…the Pietist schoolman as a type necessarily reflected the character of Pietism as a Christian movement. The Pietist schoolman was usually a university graduate profoundly discontent with the state of the church and determined to see it reformed. He was mainline in theological conviction but hungry and thirsty for living faith experienced in the company of others. He tended to place less emphasis on creed than on Bible, less on erudition than on pastoral care, less on the authority than on the responsibility of the pastoral office. The Pietist schoolman was urgent about his responsibility to the children of common people. Francke loved to say that his duty was twofold: God’s glory and neighbor’s good.
I read Hawkinson’s essay not long before my starting The Pietist Schoolman blog, and am still drawn to it over a decade later.
First, it reminds me of my connections to North Park’s denomination: the Evangelical Covenant Church. While I now attend a congregation in my wife’s Lutheran tradition, I’m a fifth-generation Covenanter who still appreciates the generally pietistic witness of that denomination. Zenos’s brother Jim, a Covenant pastor, was a mentor of mine until his death in 2011; we got to know each other at Salem Covenant Church in New Brighton, Minnesota, whose senior pastor, Mark Pattie, later co-wrote my 2017 book, The Pietist Option.
Second, Hawkinson’s paragraph lays out several of the most distinctive features of Pietism — not just as a short-lived religious movement in early modern Germany, but as a religious ethos that endures to this day.
• Discontent may seem like an awkward starting point. But for better and for worse, Pietism starts with dissatisfaction with the way things are: the church, collectively, the individual, more personally; and the world itself. That discontent fuels dedication to reform. Not just reform(ation) as a historic accomplishment of Martin Luther et al., but reform as an ongoing process that moves the Christian, the church, and the world closer and closer to God’s intentions.
• By mainline, I don’t think Hawkinson means the older denominations usually pitted against evangelicalism in stories of modern American Christianity. Instead, he’s trying to underscore that Pietists tend to occupy the broadest point of the Protestant mainstream in their time.2 They seek to renew old institutions from within rather than engaging in sectarian experimentation, while avoiding what Spener called “needless controversy” over beliefs and practices about which Christians could reasonably disagree.
• In any case, it’s not enough for a Pietist to be “orthodox.” Faith must be lived out in the company of others. A creed, confession, or catechism could be a helpful encapsulation of what Christians believe. (Though there too, leave plenty of room for disagreement!) But no human summary can take the place of the Bible, which must be studied both individually and communally as a means of encountering God and being transformed. As a result, Pietists yearn to experience faith not as arid intellectual agreement, but as Luther once described it: a “living, busy, active, mighty thing,” found in the heart as much as the head and moving the work of our hands “to God’s glory and” — crucially — “our neighbors’ good.”3
Finally, Hawkinson helps me grapple with what it means for a scholar — a “schoolman” — to be committed to Pietism.
In some respects, I think Christian schoolmen and women should be naturally predisposed to Pietism. That combination of discontent and dedication ought to strike a chord with people whose basic instinct is to ask better questions, whose guiding purpose is to find better answers. While that kind of work isn’t always comfortable at colleges connected to churches, higher education — a site of exploration, discovery, and growth — is a natural workshop for those committed to the ongoing renewal of Christianity. And the irenic spirit of Pietism lends itself well to Christian learning communities that are often more theologically, politically, and culturally diverse than the churches that support them.
But it’s not always an easy fit, to be a Pietist and a “schoolman.” Less difficult, I think, to be a Reformed scholar raised to treasure “the life of the mind” than to grow up in a tradition that is ever wary of faith becoming too heady.
But for all the legitimate reasons that our Reformed cousins sometimes equate Pietism with Christian anti-intellectualism, a Pietist schoolman is also attuned to the ways that Christian higher education forms the whole person. Even as a history professor, I think of learning not just in terms of the intellectual growth that can certainly glorify God, but the spiritual, emotional, relational, and vocational growth that also prepare us to seek the good of our neighbors.
Unlike the university graduates Hawkinson had in mind, I’m not also an ordained minister. But precisely because I’m interested in something more holistic and transformative than mere knowledge acquisition, I try to translate his pastoral emphases — care over erudition, responsibility over authority — into my work as a teacher and writer.
At least, that’s long been my hope. We’ll see if it translates well to this newsletter!
Just kidding: it’s much more complicated than this. See this survey of German Pietism by Douglas Shantz to get a fuller, richer, less tidy version of a story that starts before Spener and continues after Francke.
Here too, if you look beyond Spener and Francke, things get more complex. You’ll find a Radical wing of Pietism that’s still a key influence on the Brethren tradition. Plus Moravianism, which I’m not going to try to get into here but is connected to Pietism and serves as another important source for Covenant Church history.
If I’ve accomplished anything in my time at Bethel, it’s that I’ve helped make this phrase — already a commonplace in the Covenant Church — something like our university motto.