(Ward) Early Evangelicalism. A Global Intellectual History Siglo XVIII

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Early Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism contributed to major changes of ideas in the modern

world. This book represents a pioneering attempt to trace the discus-
sions within the evangelical movements from Central Europe to the
American colonies about what constituted evangelical identity, and what
the basis was for the felt fraternity among leaders of strikingly different
backgrounds. Through a global study of the major figures and move-
ments in the early evangelical world, W. R. Ward aims to show that
down through the eighteenth century, the evangelical elite had coherent
answers to the general intellectual problems of their day, and that piety,
as well as Enlightenment, was a motor of intellectual change. However,
as the century wore on, the evangelicals lost the ability to state a
general intellectual setting for their case, and when they entered on
their period of greatest social influence in the nineteenth century their
former cohesion disintegrated into acute partisan wrangling.
.  .    is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University

of Durham. His recent publications include The Protestant Evangelical
Awakening (1992) and Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789
(1999).
Early Evangelicalism
A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789
W. R. Ward
cambridge university press
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© W. R. Ward 2006
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Contents
Acknowledgements page vi
Introduction 1
1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism 6
2 Spener and the origins of church pietism 24
3 The mystic way or the mystic ways? 40
4 The development of pietism in the Reformed churches 70
5 The Reformed tradition in Britain and America 85
6 Zinzendorf 99
7 John Wesley 119
8 Jonathan Edwards 140
9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism 156
Conclusion 184
Select and user-friendly bibliography 194

Index 214
v
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the Cambridge University Press for undertaking the

publication of this volume, and for the engaged attention given by their
readers to the original typescript. I am also grateful for the tolerance
of various evangelical friends to my utterances over the years, and hope
for their continued indulgence. My wife has nobly borne the demands
of (doubtless far too many) books for more than half a century. She is
unlikely to stretch her patience to the extent of reading any of them, but
this does not impair my gratitude for what she has done.
vi
Introduction
The great spate of historical inquiry into evangelicalism in the last gener-
ation has been curiously uninformative in three respects. It has not dated
the beginnings of the evangelical movement (in the Anglo-Saxon sense
of the word) early enough; what are called early evangelicals here are
those who originated in the first century of the movement from c.1670.
The new work has also said little about the evangelical identity that was
so apparent to the early evangelicals. And it has been overwhelmingly
devoted to the Anglo-American aspects of the movement to the neglect
of its global reference. For this reason there has never been an account of
the internal discussions in the movement about the nature of evangelical
identity. Jonathan Edwards thought that the millennial bliss was being
anticipated in this present age by labour-saving ingenuity which pro-
vided more time for ‘contemplation and spiritual employments’; indeed
‘the invention of the mariner’s compass is a thing discovered by God
to that end’.1 The objects of this book are to supply some Edwardsian
compass-bearings to the wider evangelical enterprise, and to present, not
a rounded discussion of its leading exponents, but an account of where
they stood in relation to the pool of common ideas to which they con-
tributed and from which they drew, or (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards)
to mitigate the tedium of the voyage to the other hemisphere. It aims to
offer not a potted account of Wesley, Edwards and the others of the
sort that has been well provided in recent editions of the theological
encyclopedias, but an approach to what they thought about evangelical
identity.
This will show at the least that evangelicalism contributed to major
changes of ideas in the modern world, even though it did not set out to be a
primarily intellectual movement. The non-intellectual or anti-intellectual
aspects of evangelicalism are not the business of the discussion here.
1 Jonathan Edwards, The Millennium, in The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards from His Private
Notebooks, ed. H. G. Townsend (Westport, Conn., 1955), pp. 207–8.
1
2 Early Evangelicalism
The ways in which Spener2 and Jonathan Edwards parted company with
popular evangelicalism have evoked some exciting narratives elsewhere;
the subject here is that of top-drawer evangelicalism, which in this period
always responded coherently to the world of thought as its adherents
perceived it. Incidentally the narrative will suggest ways in which the
history of piety casts light on the general movement of ideas. The defeat
of the Ancients by the Moderns was not the work of the Enlightenment
alone.
Confessionalisation and Orthodoxy

Chapter 1 discusses rather narrowly the thought-world of early evan-
gelicalism. What must be borne in mind is the background, only partly
intellectual, against which Pietism developed and reacted, which is often
referred to in short-hand terms such as confessionalisation and Ortho-
doxy. In the Lutheran world these movements developed in the second
and third quarters of the sixteenth century, and were born of the need
to delimit Lutheranism against the articulation of Roman Catholic doc-
trine by the Council of Trent on the one side and against the challenge of
Calvinism on the other. In Germany especially this process was generally
linked with the development of the territorial system and the increase
in the powers of princes over the churches and other forms of organisa-
tion in their states. Princely power did not change one of the important
legacies of Luther himself – the high prestige of academic theology –
though it led to the foundation of more universities. Here the standing
of theology, the number of theological students and the output of schol-
arly work remained unchallenged far down the seventeenth century. The
intellectual outcome of these processes was Lutheran Orthodoxy, and the
Orthodox became the dominant party in the Lutheran churches.
It is a calumny to maintain, as critics (including some Pietist critics),
ancient and modern, have maintained, that the Lutheran Orthodox were
interested in theological system-making and not interested in personal
holiness; but it became clear that the ordinary faithful needed some-
thing simpler and more devotional than the great theological systems. It
also became clear that, while the rise of princely power removed some
functions from the churches, it did not often subordinate church disci-
pline to the other forms of social discipline it introduced. All these were
questions to which the Pietist leaders, themselves of Orthodox stock, gave
2 How Spener and Francke parted company with popular Pietism has recently been charted
in detail in Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit
(Tübingen, 2004).
Introduction 3
their minds. One of the consequences of their efforts was an outcome

that hardly anyone wanted at the beginning, viz. that doctrinal pluralism
became the normal condition of the churches. It is a paradoxical mea-
sure of the success of the (usually) minority movements discussed here
in producing this pluralism that the nineteenth-century successors of the
Orthodox parties, the confessional theologians, were less plausible than
their predecessors. Kliefoth insisting in 1854 that ‘the church consists
only of teachers and listeners’3 , or American Lutherans maintaining that
there were no open questions in theology, but that the answers could
only be satisfactorily expounded in German, are examples of the silli-
nesses to which the more open ways of the early evangelicals had driven
the conservatives.
Reformed Orthodoxy
Because the process in the Reformed world was different and more com-
plicated, it is given fuller treatment in chapter 4 below; but the final
upshot was similar. Aristotelian logic was applied with precision to both
doctrine and ethics, especially in universities and academies; a series of
Reformed confessions was produced, of which one of the highest and
most familiar to English readers was the Confession of Westminster; and
an Orthodox party took power in some (though far from all) Reformed
churches. Reformed Orthodoxy left its mark on English Puritanism, but
the nearest English counterpart to the Orthodox parties on the continent
was the High Church. Evangelicals of Reformed stock were concerned
to bridge the gap between their own tradition and that of the Lutherans,
and, within the English fold, between themselves and other parties. On
the continent they had the sympathy of the house of Hohenzollern, the
Reformed rulers of an overwhelmingly Lutheran people; but even in
early nineteenth-century England the gap between the Calvinists and the
rest was the hardest to bridge. Eastern Orthodoxy is not treated in this
book.
By the early eighteenth century a recognisable evangelicalism had
emerged from different confessional starting points. Its most universal
characteristic was a violent, even venomous, anti-Aristotelianism, embod-
ied in a tremendous hostility to systematic theology, what Wesley was to
dismiss as ‘opinions’. The Orthodox parties had been at pains to achieve
these systems, believing them to be the proper response to the intellec-
tual demand of the world of knowledge as then organised. Particularly
in the Lutheran world, but also elsewhere, this anti-Aristotelian stance
3 Walter H. Conser Jnr., Church and Confession (Macon, Ga., 1984), p. 95.
increased the attractiveness of one particular strand of scientific investi-

gation that was connected with the name of Paracelsus. It was no accident
that an attempt to understand the world of nature in terms of ‘life’ was
adopted by Arndt, who reprocessed it with a great body of medieval mys-
ticism for Lutheran consumption. Paracelsian ‘life’, Arndtian mysticism
and affection for what was (not always very accurately) believed to be the
Jewish Cabbala became the defining characteristics of Lutheran evangel-
icals and were widely found elsewhere. To this mixture Spener added
two further ingredients of his own, a (temporary) belief in what might
be achieved by small-group religion, and ‘the hope of better times’, the
idea that the Last Things would not come till all God’s promises to the
church had been fulfilled; this implied a rejection of the recent obsession
of many Orthodox with the imminence of the end-time, and its post-
ponement to the middle distance. This displacement carried important
pastoral consequences and had also ethical implications.
Unlike the Lutherans, the Reformed had been used to employing small
groups for a variety of purposes, but had equally severe difficulties to over-
come with the Last Things; for many of them had been committed to an
elaborate historical scheme through the federal theology of Coccejus.
They had, however, plenty of experience in encouraging what became
famous as the ‘practice of piety’, and, especially in Puritan circles, a con-
siderable stock of experimental investigation into the understanding of
conversion. The Lutheran Pietists too were soon provided with a norma-
tive model of conversion of another kind by August Hermann Francke.
It was not immediately clear that his experience differed widely from that
of Luther, but it was a powerful tool for leaders of class meetings down
the eighteenth century. These themes – the close association with mysti-
cism, the small-group religion, the deferred eschatology, the experimental
approach to conversion, anti-Aristotelianism and hostility to theological
system, and the attempt to reinforce religious vitality by setting it in the
context of a vitalist understanding of nature or, as in the case of Jonathan
Edwards, supporting it by a typological reading of the natural world –
formed a sort of evangelical hexagon lasting until the original evangelical
cohesion began to fail. All these themes and the names associated with
them will be explained further below.
Intellectual history should ideally have a denser texture than the narra-
tive that follows. Scotland, Ireland and Hungary, for example, are omitted
in the interests of lucidity; but, given the total absence of a narrative of
this kind in the current scholarship, a set of compass-bearings has seemed
the most practicable and useful objective. What even the brief treatment
attempted here is able to show is that the early evangelicals were not suc-
cessful in replacing the general framework of the belief of their earliest
Introduction 5
predecessors, and this in the end contributed to the fragmentation of their

common corpus of doctrine. In their turn, nineteenth-century evangeli-
cals accomplished much, but their exaggerated notions of what was within
their grasp were, at least in part, related to the fact that they devoted them-
selves zealously to fragments of the original evangelical stock, and would
hardly have been recognised by the original pioneers.
1 The thought-world of early evangelicalism
Evangelicals, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, seem generally to

have found it easier to recognise each other than others have found it to
categorise them. Indeed Ernst Benz found this to be true even of evan-
gelical visions; these were strong in the discovery that God has his own
in every confession, and that the true church was built from true, i.e.,
regenerate, Christians who were to be found in every denomination.1
Divided by language and theological tradition (Lutheran, Reformed or
Anglican), separated by the Atlantic Ocean or (in the case of the Swedish
prisoners-of-war) by the huge land mass of Siberia, confronting differ-
ent problems (survival under the hammer of the Counter-Reformation,
reviving a decayed Protestant establishment, or creating religious soci-
ety from the ground up in America), evangelical friendship in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was as much an evidence of
the persisting cohesion of a much riven Protestant world as it was of a
desire to change it. The unlikely admiration in New England of Cotton
Mather and his son for August Hermann Francke and his son spoke of
an understanding on the fringes of the Protestant world for the problems
of the centre,2 of some regrouping of sentiment, of a willingness to try
new contractual methods of action.
And although evangelicals liked to think of themselves as conservative
in doctrine, they were looking to change, and put together a platform of
forces for change extending beyond the narrowly theological region, so
that their origins form a significant chapter in the history of European
thought. And because the great body-blow to the survival of Protes-
tantism had been delivered in Germany, that is where their story begins.
On the whole things had gone the way of the Protestant powers for a
century after the Reformation, as they were to go the way of the Catholics
1 Ernst Benz, Die Vision. Erfahrungsformen und Bilderwelt (Stuttgart, 1969), p. 609.
2 On the ways in which this understanding was created and maintained, see my Protestant
Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 1–15. Cotton Mather was an admiring
correspondent of Francke; Samuel Mather wrote a Vita B. Augusti Hermanni Franckei
(Boston, 1733) addressed in Latin to all at Harvard.
6
The thought-world of early evangelicalism 7
for a century from the beginning of the Thirty Years War in 1618. But,
even before the Protestant world had been narrowed by loss of territory to
the confessional enemy and a sorry trail of Protestant princes in the Holy
Roman Empire had been converted to Rome, there was a recognition
that much was wrong in Zion, that there was indeed a ‘crisis of piety’.3
This fit of the blues, this period of anxious introspection, was one of two
asymmetric levels on which the origins of Pietism, known in Britain as
evangelicalism, are to be sought. Had Catholic hopes of military success
in the Thirty Years War not been frustrated by French and Swedish inter-
vention, it would not quite have been the case that there would have been
no Protestantism left to renew; the position more generally would have
been that which actually faced Protestant minorities within the Habsburg
system. They had the choice between putting their faith in apocalyptic
pipedreams or pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps in revival-
ism. They did both, and in both they retained a relation to what became
Pietism, but were clearly not the same thing. It is also true that what
became the Pietist party of the later years of Spener and the early years
of Francke was the battered remnant left by ferocious Orthodox assaults,
notwithstanding its own Orthodox origins.
The Pietism which created its New Jerusalem out of unpromising mate-
rials at Halle was not the heir to all the ages, but the religion it offered
bore the marks of the anxieties of the crisis of piety a century earlier. The
resources on which it drew were freely available to others who used them
in other ways. Thus the history of Pietism as part of what Wallmann has
called ‘the movement for piety’,4 and the history of Pietism as a church
party defined by relations of antagonism to other church parties, are to
be sought on two quite different levels.
Johann Arndt
Of no writer is this more clear than of Arndt (1585–1621). Arndt’s
Four (later Six) Books of True Christianity, first published in 1605, went
through ninety-five editions up to 1740, including six in Latin, five in
English, four in Dutch, three each in Danish, Swedish and French, two
in Czech, and one each in Russian and Icelandic. Clearly Arndt was
read and prized well outside the German and Lutheran area, and oddly
3 This phrase was given much currency by the late Winfried Zeller, especially in his two
essays ‘Protestantische Frömmigkeit im 17. Jahrhundert’ and ‘Die “alternende Welt”
und die “Morgenrote im Aufgang” – Zum Begriff der “Frömmigkeitskrise” in der
Kirchengeschichte’, in Theologie und Frömmigkeit. Gesammelte Aufsätze, 2 vols. (Marburg,
1971, 1978).
4 Johannes Wallmann, Der Pietismus, 2nd edn (Göttingen, 2005), p. 26.
enough he achieved his maximum rate of republication in it during the

decade 1730–40, the decade in which Anglo-Saxon revivalism began its
continuous history.5 All the Pietist leaders except Francke wrote intro-
ductions to the True Christianity and other works of Arndt (Spener indeed
wrote his principal programmatic work, the Pia Desideria, as a preface to
Arndt’s lectionary sermons), and in Francke’s parish of Glaucha, out-
side the walls of Halle, Arndt was regularly read and preached on.6 In
Württemberg, where Pietism penetrated more deeply than anywhere else,
Arndt was highly prized, and it was reported that at Neckargröningen in
1735 there were more Arndts than Bibles.7 Even in the middle of the
seventeenth century Dannhauer had warned his congregation from the
pulpit of Strasbourg Minster not to forget Bible-reading for the delights of
Arndt.8
What was it that made Arndt important?
The answer to this question must be that it varied from reader to reader
among the host who took him up. Wallmann points out that even those
who regarded themselves as Arndt’s pupils were extraordinarily different.
Andreae9 and Comenius10 were not greatly interested in the diffusion of
medieval piety. Spener, the founder of Lutheran Pietism, adopted a quite
different eschatology. Francke’s plans for social reform owed nothing
to Arndt, no more than did Zinzendorf’s communitarian ideas.11 What
impressed them all was Arndt’s resolute turning away from doctrinal
polemic towards improvement of life. Arndt’s own generation had lost
touch with the hard-won insights of the first generation of Reformers, and
was finding that the apparently water-tight guarantees of the Formula of
Concord did not fill the void. That Arndt and others who wrote in similar
strain at the time had uncovered a huge vein of people whose problem
was not that of apprehending Christianity, but of appropriating it – of,
as Spener wrote later, ‘grasping it in the heart’12 – was made clear by his
publishing history. Moreover, to a Protestant public for whom sufficient
5 Hartmut Lehmann, Das Zeitalter des Absolutismus (Stuttgart, 1980), p. 116; Wilhelm
Koepp, Johann Arndt. Eine Untersuchung über die Mystik im Luthertum (Berlin, 1912),
p. 151.
6 Vier Briefe August Hermann Franckes, ed. G. Kramer (Halle, 1863), pp. 73–6.
7 F. Fritz, ‘Die evangelische Kirche Württembergs im Zeitalter des Pietismus’, Blätter für
Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 55 (1955), p. 73; 57 (1957), p. 48.
8 Johannes Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock (Tübingen, 1995),
p. 4.
9 See below, n. 39.
10 Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), educationalist, theologian, pansophist and devo-
tional writer. The last directing bishop of the old Unity of the (Bohemian) Brethren.
11 Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, pp. 5–6.
12 Philipp Jakob Spener. Briefe aus der Frankfurter Zeit (cited below as Spener, Briefe), ed.
J. Wallmann et al. (Tübingen, 1992– ), III, p. 112.
devotional literature had never been provided, Arndt reopened the door
to the mystical literature of the past.
He re-edited the Theologia Deutsch (c.1430) several times and trans-
lated the Imitation of Christ (1418). The True Christianity became the
standard work of Lutheran spirituality, and provided a Lutheran editing
for a rich vein of medieval mysticism. The Theologia Deutsch was of course
there; so were Angela da Foligno, Valentin Weigel, the Jesus-mysticism of
Bernard of Clairvaux (though he appears more fully in Arndt’s sermons),
Meister Eckart, and Tauler on a big scale. The power of these sources
was reinforced by Arndt’s own reputation for sanctity – his face in prayer
was said to be bathed in brilliant light like that of Moses and the saints –
and by his other best-seller, the Little Paradise Garden (1612), in which
he sought to establish a school of prayer.13
Arndt was by no means the only writer of this kind, but he was the
most important, and the market that he revealed drew in resources from
elsewhere, including that great flood of Puritan practical divinity mem-
orably described by Hans Leube as ‘the victory march of English devo-
tional literature in the Lutheran church’.14 And long before Bunyan’s pil-
grim progressed triumphally through north Germany and Scandinavia,
the medieval mysticism mediated by Arndt and the Puritan tracts had
become an essential part of the early evangelical makeup.
Arndt’s notion of devotional reading was a good deal broader than
would be favoured by spiritual writers today. Arndt’s first three books of
True Christianity correspond to the classical stages of the mystical way,
the via purgativa, the via illuminativa, and the via unitiva. Book Four,
however, was entirely different. Arndt commences:
Moses, the Prince of prophets, in his book of Genesis, produces two very strong
proofs of the Being of a God. The first is taken from the Macrocosm, or great
world. The second from the Microcosm, or lesser world, which is man. And
because by these the Maker and Preserver of all things is manifested, and in lively
characters engraved upon our hearts; therefore the Holy Scriptures do frequently
appeal to them both. I also intend in this book to follow the same method, and
by various reflections upon both the greater and the lesser world, endeavour to
show, that the creatures are as it were the Hands and Messengers of God, in a
sound and Christian sense, leading us to the knowledge of God and Christ.15
13 Walter Nigg, Heimliche Weisheit. Mystisches Leben in der evangelischen Christenheit (Zurich,
1959), pp. 127, 138; Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, II, pp. 45–7; Wallmann, ‘Johann
Arndt und die protestantische Frömmigkeit’, in his Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter
des Barock, pp. 1–19.
14 H. Leube, Die Reformideen in der deutschen lutherischen Kirche zur Zeit der Orthodoxie
(Leipzig, 1924), p. 169.
15 Johann Arndt, Of True Christianity, 2nd edn (London, 1720), vol. II, para.1. This trans-
lation is of peculiar interest for the theme of this book, as it was prepared by the
Arndt then confesses himself to the doctrines of Paracelsus, perceives

that the light which is in every man signifies the art of magic, and con-
siders the Cabbala, the Jewish medieval mysticism,16 to be a great effort
to recover the hidden mysteries under the letter of Scripture. ‘Where
magic ceases, the Cabbala begins, and where the Cabbala ceases, there
true theology and the prophetic spirit begins.’ In the end the two-fold
service of man and the creatures yields a wonderful union between the
visible world, man and God from which can be derived the obligations of
man.
On all these subjects explanation is required. Arndt had revealed his
commitment to a Hermetic kind of hierarchy of symbols, and revealed
also why the whole of nature and history was germane to his purpose, long
before Book Four. The science of symbols was based on the correspon-
dence between different orders of reality, the natural and the supernatu-
ral, the natural being perceived as the exterior form of the supernatural.
The golden rule of symbols was that reality of a certain order may be
represented by reality of a lower order, but the reverse is impossible since
the symbol must always be more readily comprehensible than the thing
it symbolises.17 Thus in Book Two, chapter 37 Arndt maintained that
‘God himself is the essential life and the life of all living things. Man’s life
is nobler than that of any creature; the angel’s life is nobler, Christ’s life
is the noblest. God’s goodness shines forth from all creatures as from the
book of nature,’ though his grace is revealed in Scripture. And in Book
Two, chapter 58:
The misuse of astrology is to be opposed but the heavenly bodies do have influence
on our life. God works through nature and Christ pointed to the signs of the
heavens. The great stars often bring great changes. Sicknesses come about for
the most part through the stars. It would be foolish to reject the workings of the
heavenly bodies on man for the whole firmament is in man. Nevertheless all the
activities of the stars are brought under the rule of faith and prayer.18
Hallensian A. W. Boehm, chaplain to Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen

Anne, for presentation to the Queen herself in 1712.
16 The Cabbala was the most important school of Jewish mysticism. It had its origin in
Provence in the 13th century, and spread widely in Spain where its most famous book,
Zohar (The Book of Splendour), was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.
The central idea of the cabbalistic systems was that of the ten Sefirot or emanations of
God which make up his fullness. The mystical knowledge of creation through these ema-
nations assisted the adept to fellowship with God by stepping back from the multiplicity
of creation to its original unity.
17 Luc Benoist, The Esoteric Path. An Introduction to the Hermetic Tradition (Wellingborough,
1988), p. 22.
18 Johann Arndt, True Christianity, ed. and tr. Peter Erb (London, 1979), pp. 213, 217.
Paracelsus
Arndt had at one time studied medicine at Basel, and there was noth-
ing singular in his view of the close connexion between theology and
medicine. So Orthodox a theologian as Johann Gerhard19 had empha-
sised the close relationship between salvation (Heil) and healing (Heilung);
in their objects both were practical sciences. Arndt’s own view of the
‘crisis of piety’ was that it flowed from the severance of polemical the-
ology and practical piety.20 Theophrastus von Hohenheim, profession-
ally known as Paracelsus (1493 or 1494–1541), was a doctor, born at
Einsiedeln in Switzerland and trained at Ferrara.21 After years as a wan-
dering scholar, and taking to writing on cosmological subjects, Paracel-
sus went through an inner crisis; he never left the Catholic Church, but
devoted himself to the intractable subject of the arcane cures. Starting
from the concepts of macrocosm and microcosm, the unity of the uni-
verse and its reflection in the small world, man, Paracelsus went back
to the earliest Greek philosophy, to Pythagoras and even Egypt. The
correspondences between the great and the small worlds were to be
found in Neoplatonism and in all the cabbalistic and Hermetic tra-
ditions. There was a basic life-force which was related to the ‘idea’
of Plato. It was the basic life-bearer in plants, animals and men, but
extended also to the elements of matter. The arcanum or secret was the
improver of all virtue in things; it was incorporeal and immortal; it had
the power to renew and restore. There were four kinds of arcane cures:
(1) prima materia; (2) lapis philosophorum; (3) mercurius vitae; (4) tinc-
ture. Paracelsus’s originality came in the discovery of a fifth, the quinta
essentia, which is in all growth and life, and separates them from impurity
and mortality.
The vitalism that characterised the whole alchemical tradition was a
clear attraction to men like Arndt and the Pietists of a later generation
who were seeking to recover religious vitality, but it had other virtues
as well. It seemed, as it seemed much later to Newton, to be an answer
to the perceived weaknesses of a mechanical or materialist philosophy.
Atoms in constant motion might influence each other like billiard balls,
but could hardly cohere, or combine to produce the immense variety of
19 Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), one of the most devout of Lutheran Orthodox theolo-
gians, studied first medicine and then theology at Wittenberg, continuing in theology at
Jena and Marburg. As a young man he had enjoyed pastoral support from Arndt.
20 Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, II, p. 8.
21 Johannes Hemleben, Paracelsus. Revolutionär, Arzt und Christ (Frauenfeld, 1973). On the
location of Paracelsianism in general thought about nature see Antoine Faivre, Philosophie
de la Nature. Physique sacrée et Théosophie, XVIIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1996).
living forms of the real world, or the apparently spontaneous processes

of fermentation, putrefaction, generation and so forth. Moreover, the
light that was God’s creative agent in the beginning could be identified
with the active alchemical agent.22 A typological exegesis of what the
stones became in Psalm 118:22, Isaiah 8:13–14, Acts 4:11 and 1 Peter
2:4–8 might identify this agent with Christ and clinch the whole matter.
Magic on this view was not witchcraft, but a harnessing of the divine
forces in nature. Luther himself had seen in alchemy a metaphor of the
resurrection.
The mutual reinforcement apparently provided by Scripture, by
ancient mythology, by the desire for a universal science, and by the
longing for the millennium gave this frame of mind remarkable dura-
bility. August Hermann Francke, the founder of the great Halle institu-
tions, possessed copies of old and rare Paracelsus MSS, strove valiantly
to secure the help of a laboratory chemist from London who under-
stood the manufacture of English secret medicaments, and, in succes-
sive editions of the Blessed Footsteps, his fund-raising tract, trumpeted
the miraculous cures worked by the secret tincture, the essentia dulcis,
the formula of which was known only to the Orphan House dispen-
sary.23 Lay Pietism was introduced into Sweden at the end of the sev-
enteenth century by Urban Hjärne, who became president of the Col-
legium Medicum, vice-president of the ministry of mines and physician
to Charles XI, and who was one of the first Swedes to become a fel-
low of the Royal Society. It was said at the time that ‘almost the whole
Hjärne family was devoted to the mystical theology and to alchemy, and
to research into the arcana of the kingdoms of grace and of nature’.24
Indeed, in publishing terms Arndt did not reach the peak of his Swedish
influence until the decade 1850–60 when he was upheld by the revival
movements. Power seemed to come through this compendium to the
last.25
22 On this theme see Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, ‘Alchemical Death and Resurrection: The
significance of alchemy in the age of Newton’, in Stephen A. McKnight (ed.), Sci-
ence, Pseudo-Science and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought (Columbia, Miss., 1992),
pp. 55–87.
23 Erich Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, 1663–1727. Zeuge des lebendigen Gottes
(Marburg an der Lahn, 1956), p. 169.
24 Harry Lenhammar, ‘Paracelsus, Dippel und die Familie Hjärne – zur Frage der Rezep-
tion pietistischer Gedanken’, in J. Wallmann and P. Laasonen (eds.), Der Pietismus in
seiner europäischen und aussereuropäischen Ausstrahlung (Helsinki, 1992), pp. 40–1.
25 Anders Jarlert, ‘Johann Arndt, die Erweckungsbewegungen und das schwedische
Frömmigkeitsleben’, in A. Jarlert (ed.), Johann Arndt – Rezeption und Reaktion im
Nordisch-Baltischen Raum (Lund, 1999), pp. 100–1.
Anti-Aristotelianism
If there was one more thing needed to complete the attractions of this style
of thought for Pietists and proto-Pietists, it was that it was Neoplatonic
and very hostile to the influence of Aristotle. Indeed, what they (and
especially the radical Pietists) tended to say was that there were two kinds
of theology: the first, scholastic theology, orientated to Aristotle, moved
the understanding only and had no power to move the heart; the second,
which had its seat in the will implanted by God, is all experience, reality
and practice: it is mystical theology. It is wisdom, not science; it casts
light on Scripture everywhere, and, independently of the latter, can be
experienced through the illumination of God himself.26
Philipp Jakob Spener, the leader of North German Pietism, cautious on
many things, maintained that he could not look back on Aristotle without
a shudder.27 A radical like Christian Hoburg could find no middle way
between the way of power (Kraftweg) of the mystical theology and the
scholastic way (Schulweg) of Orthodoxy and Aristotle.28 If a clinching
argument were needed it was provided by E. D. Colberg, a professor at
Greifswald, who rolled all the modern mystical heresies into one ball in a
celebrated treatise, Platonic-hermetic Christianity, comprising the historical
narrative of the origin and numerous sects of modern Fanatics, Rosicrucians,
Quakers, Behmenists, Anabaptists, Bourignonists, Labadists, and Quietists.29
If this was what the conservative reaction in the universities led to,30 then
Spener’s call for a religious appeal which did not have to wait on the
cooperation of public authorities became all the more urgent.
Radical mysticism
The heritage of Arndt and the crisis of piety could, of course, be appropri-
ated by very different parties, and a more radical form of mystical criticism
26 Erich Seeberg, Menschwerdung und Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1938), p. 107.

27 Paul Grünberg, Philipp Jakob Spener (Göttingen, 1893–1906), II, p. 14; Spener, Briefe,
II, pp. 86, 206; III, pp. 217, 221.
28 Martin Schmidt, ‘Christian Hoburgs Begriff der “mystischen Theologie”’, in FS Ernst
Benz, Glaube, Geist, Geschichte, ed. G. Müller and Winfried Zeller (Leiden, 1967), pp.
314–15.
29 Das Platonisch-hermetisches Christenthum, Begreiffend die Historische Erzehlung vom
Ursprung und vielerlei Secten der heutigen Fanatischen, Rosencreutzer, Quäker, Böhmisten,
Wiedertäuffer, Bourignisten, Labadisten und Quietisten (Leipzig, 1690–1). Colberg admit-
ted that there were dangers from the Aristotelian side which encouraged the rash to pit
reason against Scripture.
30 R. B. Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis. Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation
(Stanford, 1988), p. 247.
developed sustained by a really major figure, Jakob Böhme (1575–1624).

Spener’s ambivalent attitude towards him is reminiscent of that of Wesley
towards the mystical tradition as a whole, always alert for new sources
of religious vitality, but aware of the potential hazards, and especially
those of separatism. Spener felt able neither to condemn Böhme nor to
recommend that he be read, since he himself was unable to understand
a word.31 The radical critique was nevertheless of importance since it
was built into a general view of the history not only of the church, but
of the mystical theology; and, since the modern word ‘mysticism’ was
introduced by the French only in the seventeenth century, this was of
consequence, and this was what Colberg had firmly grasped.
Protestants always had to have some answer to the vexatious question
of Catholic polemicists as to where Protestantism had been before the
Reformation. The radicals, who had no interest in the defence of Protes-
tant scholasticism, had an answer. This conveniently circumvented the
need for written evidence by postulating an oral tradition, while at the
same time maintaining that a mystical understanding of Scripture pro-
vided written evidence of the extreme antiquity of the mystical theology.
And this orally transmitted theology is the mystical theology which is written by
the hand of many holy souls through the impulse of God in many books. That
this mystical theology is the common way of God to lead souls to union with him,
and to perfect them in it, is made as clear as daylight by the fact that the great and
holy fathers of the Old and the New Testament were led by this way; since it is
impossible to understand according to the truth and the deep sense of the spirit
of God the book of Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, the lamentations of
Jeremiah, the epistle of St Paul to the Romans, and the figures of the Revelation
of St John, indeed most of the sermons and parables of Jesus Christ, without a
mystical exposition and without experience in this way, this mystical experience
being imparted by the Spirit of God to hungry souls.32
Modern Roman Catholic scholarship has approached this view of the
matter with mixed sympathies. On the one hand it discounts much of
the modern German criticism of the radical position, which is based
on a forced distinction between mysticism and the mystical theology, a
distinction which could not be made before the term la mystique obtained
currency in the seventeenth century.33 St Theresa of Ávila had described
31 Spener, Briefe, III, p. 287. 32 Geistliche Fama no. 27 (1741).

33 See, e.g., Erich Seeberg’s criticism of Böhme and Arnold as theorists rather than practi-
tioners of mysticism (Menschwerdung und Geschichte, pp. 102, 106; Gottfried Arnold. Die
Wissenschaft und die Mystik seiner Zeit, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1964), pp. 379–83); and
Wallmann’s criticism of Arndt on similar grounds, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, p. 19. Cf.
Ferdinand van Ingen, ‘Die Wiederaufnahme der Devotio Moderna bei Johann Arndt
und Philipp von Zesen’, in Dieter Breuer (ed.), Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des
Barock (Wiesbaden, 1995), II, p. 471.
her own experience as ‘a consciousness of the presence of God of such a

kind that I could not possibly doubt that he was within me or that I was
wholly engulfed in him. This was in no sense a vision: I believe that it is
called mystical theology.’34
On the other hand the history of mysticism is quite largely the history
of texts and their transmission; and McGinn finds that a theory of explicit
mysticism was first fully laid out in the Christian tradition by Origen in
the third century and institutionally embodied in the new phenomenon
of monasticism in the fourth century. It is at this point that the series of
Platonic and Neoplatonic texts – Dionysius the Areopagite and others –
begins, to which Christian mystics appealed for a millennium and a half
or more.
The radical mystics of the seventeenth century were in one sense pre-
mature in finding scriptural warrant for their views, but it was true that,
before a Christian body of mystical literature existed, the Hebrew Scrip-
tures in both their Jewish form and as the Christian Old Testament
were treated as mystical books by many readers. Great figures, such
as Abraham, Jacob and especially Moses, were regarded as archetypal
mystics whose experience and life-histories became the models through
which others sought to achieve contact with God. Favoured texts, espe-
cially the Psalms and the Song of Songs, were thought to contain an
account of the soul’s journey to God. The same was true of the New
Testament. Paul and John were read selectively for this purpose, Paul’s
account of his rapture into heaven (2 Cor. 12:2–4) being an important
warrant for visionary experiences of this type. And the exegesis of the
Johannine writings on the union of Christ and the believer had been
central to Christian mysticism from almost the beginning.35 Thus some
of what the radicals believed was more true than they could have known.
They also knew, for this was part of the common stock of European
knowledge in this area, of the transmission of many of these ideas through
Plato (often believed to have picked up his best ideas from Moses) and
the Neoplatonists, Philo, Plotinus and Proclus.
Apocalyptic
There were, finally, two other matters with which the mystical theology
was connected from a very early date: the first was apocalyptic and the
second (which gives some credence to those modern German critics who
34 The Life of Teresa of Jesus: The Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila, tr. E. Allison Peers (New
York, 1960), p. 119.
35 Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (London,
1992– ), I, pp. 3–4.
seek to reduce the mystical theology to a form of reflection rather than the
practice of the presence of God) was a kind of speculation known as theos-
ophy. The first is something of a surprise since it might be thought that
mystical access to God, even union with him, involved a quite different
frame of mind from preoccupation with the Last Things. But the Jewish
apocalypses had been ways of making God accessible to the world as much
as the mystical interpretation of Scripture, and it is now recognised that
the apocalyptic frame of mind was in the immediate background to the
ministry of Jesus, who was a preacher not a writer. The presence of God,
which Jewish apocalypticists and early mystics realised in their ascent to
the divine realm and which the Platonists sought through a flight to the
contemplation of ultimate reality, Christians maintained could only be
attained through their Risen Lord. This indeed involved an ascent to the
heavenly realm, to be effected through Christ and the community that
formed his body. Access to all this was to be had through baptism and
the eucharist, and might entail martyrdom.
Jewish apocalypticism differed from the view of history to be found
in the old Hebrew prophetic tradition and also from that present in the
Wisdom traditions. It took a deterministic view of God’s control over
history, offering the conviction that present events, usually trials or dif-
ficulties of various sorts, formed the beginning of a three-fold drama of
the last time, conceived according to a pattern of present crisis, immi-
nent divine judgement, and the subsequent reward of the just. The divine
plan for universal history, hidden from the ages, was believed to have been
revealed by God through angelic intermediaries to the seers of old, and
recorded by them in the apocalypses. But once again there was a hidden
meaning in the text, as the Greeks had found hidden meanings in their
own mythic and poetic texts, and by the end of the second century 
Christian exegetes would be referring to such deeper meanings of the
Old Testament as ‘mystical’, the earliest usage of the term in Christian
literature.36
The association between mysticism and apocalyptic might not have
been expected to last, since mysticism had come to chart a path to God
which was independent of what happened to the historical process as a
whole. In fact, the late medieval German mystics like Eckhart and Seuse
had a powerful sense that the world was old and hastening to its end,
and in the sixteenth century a spiritualist writer like Sebastian Franck
(c.1499–1542) also had the conviction that inevitably even spirit-filled
lives turned into dead forms.37
36 Ibid., I, pp. 11–12. 37 Zeller, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, II, pp. 1–3.
Theosophy
Certainly the Lutheran Reformation was accompanied by a great flood of
magical, mystical and eschatological writing which was fully illustrated in
Arndt. The Reformed world escaped much more lightly. And there was
another twist to this tradition, which arose partly from a desire to recover
some wholeness of vision behind the conflict, and this was theosophy.
Apocalyptic and magic had in common the assumption of an underlying
universal purpose. Zeller quotes a MS verse from the beginning of the
seventeenth century which sounds this note:
O du wahre 3-falt O thou true Trinity
hilf aus allem 2-spalt help us out of our division into two
zu der wahren 1-falt to the true unity.38
As those who studied history and astrology sought to reveal the works
and purposes of God, so also the pansophist sought to reveal and glo-
rify the general wisdom of God. If he was a magician, demonic magic
was not his metier. The great object, in the words of the title of Jakob
Böhme, was to get to the bottom of the Mysterium Magnum, the secret of
the creation of the universe, and complete the work of the God-fearing
alchemists. When this was done, since this movement also was reform-
ing and anti-Aristotelian, it would be possible for an Andreae39 in his
Rosicrucian writings to thrash out plans for universal reform in politics
and education. How important this was to be for the German frame of
mind and for the pietist movement may be illustrated from the fact that in
the eighteenth century Pietism was to produce a theosophist of the first
importance in Oetinger,40 and that at the beginning of the nineteenth
century Jung-Stilling could declare that ‘the national spirit was up to
that time mystical-behmenist and occasionally Paracelsian’. Before then,
however, pansophism had to create a vast pedigree of its own.
There was something in common between the frame of mind and the
choice of texts in the ‘mystical theology’ and theosophy. The latter, like the
former, was a relatively recent intellectual fashion that claimed authority
on the basis of the hidden wisdom of ancient texts. It was not only Colberg
who saw it as a complex of modern heresies, the Encyclopédie did the same.
The story began in 1462 when Cosimo de’ Medici provided Ficino with
MSS containing all Plato’s surviving works and ordered him to translate
38 Ibid., I, p. 97.
39 Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654), the most important Württemberger theologian
of the seventeenth century. In satirical and paedagogical writings he advocated reform
in church and society based on the practice of piety.
40 On whom see below in ch. 9.
them into Latin. Ficino41 actually began with the Corpus Hermeticum,
which was believed to be Plato’s main source.42 The Hermeticum was
not the only treatise of importance to be restored to circulation at this
time; there were also, for example, the Orphica, the Sibylline Prophecies,
and the Pythagorean Carmina Aurea. All these pagan texts dated from
the first four centuries of the Christian era and were held to contain
vestiges of monotheism, the doctrine of the Trinity, creatio ex nihil and
so forth. It was usual to suppose that this theology derived from Moses
(which preserved a useful Egyptian connexion). But sometimes it was
held to go back to Noah and his two good sons, Shem and Japhet, or
to antediluvian patriarchs, such as Enoch or even Adam. This body of
literature was regarded as the source of the religious truths to be found
in Plato, and provided a field-day for anxious scholars seeking to bridge
the gap between their faith and what they knew of the universe.
What was problematic about the attempt was that, perceived or not, the
Hermetic doctrines were very different from what had been understood
as Christian orthodoxy. On the latter view the world was indeed created
by God, and declared his handiwork, but was not God himself; worse
than that, it was a fallen world, at best groaning after redemption. On
the view attributed to Hermes Trismegistus – and here the vitalism that
went into the mystical theology reappears – ‘the world is a living crea-
ture, endowed with a body which men can see and a mind which men
cannot see’. Creation did not declare the glory of God, it was an ema-
nation of God. The core of Hermeticism was that the world emanated
from the divine intelligence, and was a whole in which each part was
an essential component member; stated nakedly this was radically dif-
ferent from the hierarchical views of the universe which had hitherto
prevailed.
It was not easy to see through the haze, though what the Hermeticum
offered was a magical religion dominated by the stars, offering its initiates
the possibility of being transformed into powerful Magi. Indeed, by the
time of Giordano Bruno the magic religion of the ancient Egyptians had
swallowed up the younger Christian faith; Christ was only one of several
41 Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Italian philosopher, doctor and humanist.

42 The three great authorities for the following are the treatises by Will-Erich Peuckert,
Pansophie. Geschichte der weissen und schwarzen Magie, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1956); Das
Rosenkreuz, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1973); Gabalia. Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der Magia nat-
uralis im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1967). Useful and more accessible are: D. P.
Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958); D. P.
Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the 15th to the 18th
Century (London, 1972); Antoine Faivre, Philosophie de la Nature. Physique sacrée et
Théosophie, XVIIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1996); Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Avatars of
Thrice Great Hermes (Lewisburg, 1987).
preaching, wonder-working Magi in the Hermetic tradition and Bruno

was another.
In 1614 Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), the great Huguenot classical
scholar, destroyed the ancient dating of the Hermetic MSS accepted by
the adepts; and the direst enemies of theosophy were always Erasmian
Catholics and Calvinist Protestants who were trying to get the magic out
of Christianity. But their arguments counted for little with those who sus-
pected that these procedures offered a better science than materialism,
a liberating alternative later on to an Aristotelianised Protestant Ortho-
doxy, or even assistance to Jesuits facing unfamiliar missionary problems
in the Far East. For had not St Paul at Athens quoted from the pagan
Stoic poet Aratus, ‘For in him we live and move and have our being; as
certain also of your poets have said, “For we are also his offspring”’ (Acts
17:28)? To use pagan literature for apologetic purposes seemed to have
the highest authority. Indeed, Christian magic was really wisdom, and
before the end of the sixteenth century it was known in Germany that the
true wisdom of Moses was to be found in the Cabbala.
The Cabbala
The history of the Cabbala is one of the more extraordinary features
of the whole extraordinary story. The Cabbala, literally the ‘tradition’,
was the sum of Jewish mysticism, and as such eventually lost contact
with both the Jewish and the Christian traditions.43 In the Middle Ages,
however, a great body of mystical inquiry was built up by Jews seeking a
deeper understanding of their own traditional forms. The chief literary
work of this movement, the Zohar or ‘Book of Splendour’, was widely
revered as a sacred text of unquestionable value. This status it managed
to maintain among remote and isolated communities of Jews down to
the present time, despite the recurrent opposition of Jewish Orthodoxy.
But when in Western Europe in the late eighteenth century Jews began
to assimilate to European culture, this part of their tradition, with its
intricate symbolism, was lost.
Meanwhile several attempts had been made to put it to Christian use. In
the fifteenth century Jewish converts in Sicily produced a Latin version of
the Cabbala, still preserved in the Vatican archives. This proved still-born
43 On the following see Gershom Scholem, Alchemie und Kabbala. Ein Kapitel aus der
Geschichte der Mystik, n. pl. or d. [Berlin, 1927]; Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbala
and its Symbolism, tr. Ralph Mannheim (London, 1965; orig. German edn Zurich,
1960); Ernst Benz, Die Christliche Kabbala. Ein Stiefkind der Theologie (Zurich, 1958);
Otto Betz, ‘“Kabbala Baptizata”. Die jüdisch-christliche Kabbala und der Pietismus in
Württemberg’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 24 (1998), 130–59.
in terms of influence, but Faradsch, who made it, was the fountain-head
of much more than he knew, because he was the tutor in Hebrew and
Chaldean to the celebrated humanist Pico della Mirandola (1463–94).
In 1486 Pico published 900 theses on a Christian syncretism of all reli-
gions and sciences; in these the Cabbala played a considerable part,
and the assumption of the whole was that, contrary to the teaching of
the orthodox on either side, the core of the Jewish religion showed an
essential affinity with the Christian gospel. Pico made the fortunes of
the Christian Cabbala. Paracelsus claimed to have learned alchemy from
it; Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) in Germany was the founder of a
special Swabian branch of the Christian Cabbala which can be followed
through the famous doctrinal tablet (Lehrtafel) of the Princess Antonia
of Württemberg 44 to Oetinger in the eighteenth century. The attraction
to men like Reuchlin was that the doctrine of the Trinity seemed to har-
monise with the cabbalistic doctrine of the Sephirot or emanations from
the Godhead; and the emanations were familiar from the Hermetic doc-
trines. The Cabbala, indeed, made a decisive contribution to the develop-
ment of pietism in Württemberg, one of the areas where it struck deepest
root.
At the heart of it all there was a strange paradox. A large part of the huge
cabbalistic literature consisted in mystical commentaries on books of the
Bible, especially the Pentateuch, the Five Scrolls, the Psalms, the book
of Ruth and Ecclesiastes. In the effort to penetrate the divine emanations
in which God’s creative power unfolds, and to develop a symbolism for
processes not accessible to the direct perception of the human mind, the
cabbalists made the Torah a symbol of cosmic law and made the history
of the Jewish people a symbol of the cosmic process. This symbolism
was lost to the Jews during their long period of coming to terms with the
culture of the West, and was only recovered when that period ended in
fresh persecution.45
The Christian cabbalism, by contrast, was part of a process of com-
ing to terms with a strange culture derived from Neoplatonism and the
Hermetic traditions. The result of so much labour has been to earn the
derision of modern Jewish scholarship. As Scholem puts it, cabbalism
became a sort of flag under which, since there was no fear of control by
real Cabbala scholars, almost everything could be offered to the pub-
lic, from weak judaising meditations of deep Christian mystics up to
the latest annual market-products of geomancy and soothsaying with
cards.
44 On the Princess Antonia and her tablet see further below, ch. 2, pp. 37–8.
45 Scholem, Alchemie und Kabbala, pp. 1–2; On the Kabbala, pp. 1–9.
Even the natural sciences of the day, so far as they were in any sense
occult, like astrology, alchemy and nature-magic, became ‘Cabbala’.
Paracelsus was believed when he claimed to have learned alchemy from
cabbalistic sources, though in Jewish cabbalistic circles alchemy was never
practised, and in Hebrew cabbalistic books and MSS there are no instruc-
tions for it. Nevertheless the advocates of the Christian Cabbala believed
that they had found in it an esoteric philosophy and a basis for Christian
dogmatics. Their cause was given a fresh impetus in the seventeenth cen-
tury by the Rosicrucian movement, they themselves became very numer-
ous throughout Protestant Europe, and one of their slogans, the New
Birth, that perfection of the soul which might permit the discovery of the
philosopher’s gold, became the most pervasive cliché of the evangelical
movement.
Jakob Böhme
One of the characteristics of all the protests against systematic ortho-
doxy was eclecticism, and in Jakob Böhme (1575–1624) both the protest
and the eclecticism were embodied in such power as to echo violently
down to the nineteenth century. He entered into the Cabbala, though
his sources are not known; he rejected alchemy. What Böhme stood for,
like Zinzendorf a century later, was the independence of Upper Lusatia.
This independence was threatened by the leading orthodoxies of the day:
the Counter-Reformation as understood by the Habsburgs, Reformed
Orthodoxy as represented by the Elector Palatine and the Reformed
nobility of Bohemia, and the Lutheran Orthodoxy embodied in the
church of Electoral Saxony. Eventually the independence of Upper
Lusatia fell in 1621 to Saxony, and Böhme died shortly afterwards.
The political downfall of Upper Lusatia reproduced itself in Böhme in
a violent religious upheaval of a mystical kind, his account of which led
to his being silenced for a number of years by the Görlitz clergy. But the
Oberpfarrer of Görlitz (in the Lusatian manner) was a very offbeat kind of
Melanchthonian Orthodox, and there seems no support for the story that
at the end of his life Böhme was tried at Dresden against the Lutheran
confessional documents.46 The Böhme who was so cordially loathed by
the later Lutheran Orthodox, and who in fact became a rallying point for
all kinds of separatist tendencies, died a Lutheran.
There was indeed something very Luther-like about him. It is impossi-
ble to describe Böhme as anything but a mystic, but his mysticism was not
46 H. Obst, ‘Zum “Verhör” Jakob Böhmes in Dresden’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 1 (1974),
25–31; Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit, pp. 51–2.
a ladder to a unitive experience. The world as he observed it was admin-

istered through two competing principles, God’s love and his wrath, both
forms of God’s action. The life of nature was also the outcome of this
conflict. The opposed forces unfold in seven ‘nature-spirits’ taken from
the cabbalistic tradition. In God these form a play of harmonious forces,
but now, through Lucifer’s fall, they have entered into the inner strife of
the world and meet it in enmity. A first Trinity forms: the bitterness (also
equated with one of the three Paracelsian original materials, salt), the
sharp and prickly mobility (i.e., quicksilver), and the torment or Angst in
which the first two forces destroy one another in restless movement (i.e.,
the inflammatory sulphur).
To them is opposed a second Trinity: the light and fiery desire of love,
the clear sound in which the cosmic love rings out, and the putting
together of all seven in the eternal kingdom of heaven, the paradisal
archetype of nature. When these two trinities clash a fire like lightning is
kindled, the middlemost spirit of Nature which stands between the trini-
ties. Of course these Behmenist nature-spirits will never surrender their
secret to analytical observation; but Böhme’s tortured style is very apt to
generate a feeling for the cosmic struggle of love and wrath.47 This dual-
ism, this sense of conflict and movement, was in a measure smoothed out
by the English Behmenists at the end of the seventeenth century, but was
of course what attracted Hegel and the pioneers of dialectical philosophy
in the nineteenth.
What is very remarkable about the influence of Böhme is that though
his work had mostly to be published after his death, and for reasons of
censorship had to be published in the Netherlands and brought in sur-
reptitiously, he was speedily translated into other languages and became
the most important German literary figure before Leibniz. It has been
argued that Catholics and Protestants divided the heritage of the Renais-
sance between them.48 Each, looking for a knock-down argument in sup-
port of their general claim to authority, had appropriated its inheritance,
the Catholics taking miracles, the Protestants the notion of predictability
and vindication by the future. Neither of these very readily broken reeds
47 On the above see Heinrich Bornkamm, ‘Jakob Böhme, Leben und Wirkung’, in his Das
Jahrhundert der Reformation. Gestalten und Kräfte (Göttingen, 1961), pp. 291–307. The
literature on Böhme is endless and bemusing. The following are useful: W.-E. Peuckert,
Das Leben J. Böhmes (Jena, 1924); A. Koyré, La Philosophie de J. Böhme (Paris, 1929); J. J.
Stoudt, Sunrise to Eternity. A Study in J. Boehme’s Life and Thought (Philadelphia, 1957);
Erich Seeberg, ‘Zur Frage der Mystik’, in Menschwerdung und Geschichte, pp. 98–137.
See also Eberhard H. Pältz, ‘Jakob Boehmes Gedanken über die Erneuerung des wahren
Christenthums’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 4 (1977–8), 83–118.
48 R. J. W. Evans. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), pp.
394–5.
would bear the weight put upon it. But in spite of the reluctance of the
Protestant pundits to acknowledge chiliastic movements, Luther’s own
belief that Christ could not long delay rescuing his flock from the Papal
Antichrist and the Turks spread widely, especially among the persecuted.
Of this view, from which in the end even the Lutheran Orthodox were
unable to escape, Böhme also was a spokesman. There was no necessary
connexion between Renaissance science and mysticism, though the ven-
eration of both for ancient texts brought them together. But, as Böhme
showed very clearly, apocalypticism clamped them both together by cre-
ating the ultimate need for a unitary view of God, man, the universe and
history. Johannes Kelpius’s venture into the wilderness of Pennsylvania
in readiness for the millennium forecast for 1694, a venture equipped
with a telescope to put on the roof to observe the signs of the times,49 is
eloquent of a frame of mind shared by Böhme himself.
Meanwhile, although Böhme had died in the church, and had believed
that it was possible to build the temple of God within what he denounced
so vehemently as the Mauerkirche – the church of bricks and mortar –
his denunciations had provided a shelter for all those who, for whatever
reason, persecution or disillusionment – spiritualists, separatists, anti-
war prophets – found themselves outside of the church. By this time they
had acquired another powerful spokesman in Gottfried Arnold,50 and
were known as radical Pietists. All were attempting to draw upon various
aspects of the movement for piety, as indeed was another movement
intruding upon Germany: the Quakers, who came in quest of souls and of
settlers for real-estate improvement in their new colony of Pennsylvania.
This meant that Spener, an establishment man if ever there was one,
who stands at the head of the evangelical movement in the Anglo-Saxon
sense of the word, had, once the great clash with Orthodoxy began, to
campaign on two fronts. He too was indebted to the movement for piety,
and did not want to lose touch with whatever sources of spiritual vitality
might be disclosed by the radical pietists; but apart from the fact that his
faith in the church never failed, he had to be clear that his origin was in
Lutheran Orthodoxy. And the Orthodox continued to thunder that the
whole trouble with modern enthusiasm arose from an improper mixing
of philosophy and theology. Platonists tried to be clever beyond what
Scripture revealed; Aristotelians tried to be clever against Scripture and
flirted with becoming Hobbesians.51 How would Spener relate to these
various options?
49 Elizabeth W. Fisher, ‘“Prophecies and Revelations”: German cabbalists in early
Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine for History and Biography 109 (1985), 299–333.
50 On Arnold see below, ch. 3.
51 Colberg, Das Platonisch-hermetisches Christenthum, Preface.
2 Spener and the origins of church pietism
Arndt offered his own version of what the English Puritan Lewis Bayley
called the ‘practice of piety’ as a solution to the ills of the church; but
many who subsequently called on his name were sure that there was no
solution to the ills of the Babel that masqueraded as an ecclesiastical
establishment. There were Behmenists of various degrees of radicalism,
anti-war prophets, and spiritualists like Christian Hoburg who sought in
mysticism an alternative to the ‘school-way’ of confessional Word- and
Wind-theology with its Aristotelian methods and its passion for polemic.1
Mingled with these rather vociferous advocates of peace were assorted
mystics, Paracelsists, alchemists, cabbalists, and enthusiastic prophets of
judgement drawing in various proportions from the wells described in
the last chapter. Their history was recorded by Gottfried Arnold in his
Kirchen und Ketzerhistorie but has never as a whole been scientifically writ-
ten. They were nevertheless continually in the background to the work of
Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), himself the offspring of the impecca-
bly Orthodox university of Strasbourg. He it was who distilled the piety of
Arndt and the theology of Orthodoxy into a policy of church reform. And
he was never able to lose touch with such sources of spiritual vitality as the
radical underworld possessed or to escape the reproaches of the unyield-
ing Orthodox that what he proposed must lead to schism. It is indeed now
clear that the driving force behind the formation of the collegium pietatis
was Johann Jakob Schütz, converted from atheism through the reading
of Tauler, and hand-in-glove with the hotbed of Christian cabbalism at
the court of Sulzbach. He never shared the establishmentarian ideals of
Spener and finally led a separation from him.2
1 M. Brecht (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen, 1993), I, p. 226.

2 This process is magnificently described in Andreas Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz
und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tübingen, 2002); cf. E. W. Fisher, ‘“Prophecies and Rev-
elations”. German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania’, Pennsylvania Magazine for History
and Biography 109 (1985), 306–7.
24
Spener and the origins of church pietism 25
The rise of Spener

Spener’s active life fell into three periods. In 1666 when he was apparently
preparing himself for an academic career he received an unexpected call
as Senior of Frankfurt. This was one of the most important Imperial
cities, with a complicated confessional makeup. Its Lutheran town council
strenuously kept a Reformed minority outside the walls, but was required
under Imperial law to leave the cathedral in the hands of the Roman
Catholics, this being where the Emperor himself was crowned. Frankfurt
was also home to the largest Jewish ghetto in Germany. There was in short
no German town less likely to solve its religious problems by the standard
prescription enforced by the peace settlements of Westphalia, viz. by a
monopolistic religious establishment chosen by public authority from
among the three permitted religions, Catholic, Evangelical (or Lutheran)
and Reformed. It was here that Spener became famous for a plan of
reform or renewal which did not require waiting for the action of public
authorities.
In 1686 he received his reward in a call to be Senior Court Chaplain to
the Elector of Saxony. This was in effect an invitation to be the informal
Primate of Lutheran Germany, for the Elector was perpetual head of
the Corpus Evangelicorum, the Protestant caucus in the Imperial Diet,
while the Saxon church regarded itself as the especial guardian of Luther’s
personal heritage. Here things began to go badly wrong. Spener did not
get on well with the Elector; the Orthodox attack upon his policies and
friends gathered force. In 1695 the Wittenberg faculty accused him of 284
errors, 263 of which were offences against the Confession of Augsburg.
By this time, however, Spener had concluded that he had no standing
ground in Saxony, and had accepted an invitation in 1691 from the Elec-
tor of Brandenburg to be Provost of the Nikolaikirche in Berlin. This was
not only an apparent demotion; it was for an Orthodox theologian an
ambiguous vocation to the service of a dynasty which, as the Reformed
rulers of an overwhelmingly Lutheran people, were full of devices for get-
ting round the legal division of the Protestant flock in Germany. Under
the tolerant Hohenzollern aegis, nevertheless, Spener reached the peak of
his achievement. He completed his enormous literary output;3 defended
what became the Pietist party against ferocious attacks and much legal
discrimination; watched over the creation of permanent bases for it in
the university and charitable institutions of Halle; and planted out its
3 The bibliography ascribed to Spener by his biographer, Paul Grünberg, Philipp Jakob
Spener (Göttingen, 1893–1906), III, pp. 205–388 runs to 323 items and is not complete.
alumni in the churches of Brandenburg and Prussia, the army and the
civil service, and in court chaplaincies all over Germany.4
What was it about the Orthodox son of an Orthodox university that the
Orthodox party became so ruthlessly determined to root out? Spener’s
master’s thesis was in the field of ethics and included one of the first
German attempts at a controversy with Thomas Hobbes,5 an achieve-
ment which could certainly do him no harm with the Orthodox; his doc-
toral thesis was written in the theological faculty under the ferociously
Orthodox Dannhauer. In view of what came later it is interesting that this
was on eschatology, more precisely on Revelation 9:13–21, the passage
in which the sixth angel blew the trumpet to release four avenging angels
with an army from the east who killed a third of the human race. The
traditional Orthodox construction of this passage had been to relate it to
the Turkish menace, and this Spener adopted. In the course of his work
he became acquainted with Reformed chiliasm – in fact he produced a
table of no fewer than 38 expositions of the Apocalypse6 – but adopted
no personal or unorthodox position. Just before his death Spener con-
fessed that he had never deviated from the doctrinal position he had held
under Johann Konrad Dannhauer (1631–75), a professor of theology at
Strasbourg and one of Spener’s teachers, except in one point, that of
eschatology. Clearly that deviation had not yet begun.
Spener’s Frankfurt years

Even in Frankfurt, where Spener produced his most famous program-
matic writing, trouble was relatively slow to brew. What made the dif-
ference was a year’s study of Luther from his own writings with a view
to producing a Life, further studies on the Apocalypse, and above all
the practical experience of pastoral difficulties in the wake of the Thirty
Years War. The Luther biography was never produced, but on the way to
it Spener acquired a knowledge of the Luther corpus which was unusual
in his day. Pastoral experience led him to doubt both the current policy of
the Orthodox party and the view of history that underlay its eschatology.
Orthodox policy was perfectly well known to Spener from his time in
Strasbourg, for the Strasbourg theologians had been called out by Duke
Ernst the Pious of Saxe-Gotha to carry through a reform in his territory.
Here reformation, initiated and carried through by princely authority,
4 For the biography of Spener, Grünberg is still useful; there is also an up-to-date short life
by Martin Brecht in his Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 281–389.
5 Johannes Wallmann, ‘Philipp Jakob Spener’, in M. Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der
Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1982), VII, p. 206.
6 Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 284.
had sought to tighten up religious observance and discipline, and to rein-

force the operation of church, state and law by education. Reformation
concerned the whole social body.
This was the style in which Spener began. Along with the rest of the
Frankfurt ministry he called on the magistrates to enforce Sunday rest
more rigorously, and to proceed more strictly against the Jews. The whole
operation could be gingered up by preaching, and Spener turned to the
text which down the generations has been a standing temptation to zealots
desirous of annoying their congregations, Matthew 5:20 – ‘For I say unto
you, That unless your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of
the Scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of
heaven.’ (Predictably Wesley was also unable to resist it).7 The attempt
to stir the lethargy (or overcome the prudence) of the magistrates, and to
prick the self-assurance of church-going by habit, proved equally ineffec-
tive. The magistrates, doubtless aware that attempts to enforce uniformity
of observance in a city as religiously divided as Frankfurt were doomed to
failure, did very little; the congregation, conscious that it was conforming
according to its lights, divided. A minority were open to Spener’s exhorta-
tion, the majority felt they were being robbed of evangelical comfort by a
sort of Popery. Certainly Spener had strengthened rather than overcome
the leaven of the Pharisees.
This double set-back left Spener with little option but to see what
could be done with the dévots of his congregation. The change from
bullying backsliders to encouraging the spiritual elite marked an impor-
tant shift from the pastoral strategy of the Orthodox, and it was slow to
come. The Lutheran churches lacked the experience which the Reformed
had built up in using small groups within the parish; in fact devotional
exercises outside the church and not under clerical leadership were for-
bidden. So Spener’s original proposal, made from the pulpit in the
autumn of 1669, bore little resemblance to what the class meetings or
collegia pietatis were to become. It was implied that after the Sunday
service friends might (convivially) sanctify the Lord’s Day by giving up
card-playing and wine-drinking, in favour of reading devotional litera-
ture or discussing the sermon they had heard. This was not very dif-
ferent from the student groups that Spener had known in his days at
Strasbourg, nor from the hymn-singing fellowships that were common
elsewhere. These housegroups came into existence, and by the following
summer began to ask for something much more radical than Spener had
proposed.
7 Works of John Wesley. Bicentennial edn. I Sermons, ed. A. C. Outler (Nashville, 1984),
p. 550.
The proposal now,8 from people who professed weariness with the
‘clubbiness’ that was coming in with the decay of corporately organised
society, was to form a society for devotional discussion, more intense
fellowship and works of charity. The people behind this request were
patricians and academics, and it was not lost on Spener that the degree
of separation from the world now proposed contained the political and
ecclesiastical risks of separation from the church. These risks, to much
Orthodox hand-rubbing, were ultimately realised, and raise the question
whether from the beginning there was not in Spener’s milieu an element
of mystic spiritualism. For the moment he secured an acceptable compro-
mise and the support of his clerical colleagues by the stipulation that he
should always take part, that meetings should be held in his study, and that
the aspiration to intense fellowship should be surrendered to the cause
of open membership. From August 1670 the meetings took place twice
a week, Spener introducing the discussion with a prayer and a devotional
or theological reading. The principal figure throughout was the lawyer
Johann Jakob Schütz (1640–1709). What perhaps nobody expected was
that these meetings attracted people of quite humble status, some dozens
of them, including eventually women, who were allowed to sit in an adja-
cent room and listen but not speak.
The difference in scale was itself sufficient to change the character of
the meeting, and after four years a change of substantial principle was
made, the business being now confined to the reading and exposition
of Scripture, a function restricted in the Lutheran order to the ministry.
A year later the more radical step was ventured of claiming that the col-
legium pietatis was a revival of the early Christian custom of congregational
meetings described in 1 Corinthians 14.9 This call for meetings in which
anyone could speak, whether in tongues or in prophecy, was quite alien
to the Lutheran tradition, though it had taken various forms among the
Reformed. What was ominous at the moment was that its most recent
advocate was Jean de Labadie, in his L’exercice prophétique (1669).
In his student years Spener had encountered Labadie (1610–74)10 in
Geneva, and he translated Labadie’s La Pratique de l’Oraison et Méditation
8 The story which follows has been traced in detail in Deppermann, Johann Jakob Schütz.
9 This is the passage in which Paul stresses the limitations of speaking in tongues, and
commends the superior usefulness of prophecy.
10 On Labadie see T. J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem. Jean de Labadie and the
Labadists, 1610–1744 (Dordrecht, 1987). Perhaps a bastard of Henry IV of France,
Labadie was raised by a Calvinist family on the make, and groomed for stardom by
the Jesuits; he broke with the Jesuits to join the Reformed church, was hunted from
both France and Orange by Louis XIV, and, after an uneasy pastorate in Geneva,
answered a call to Middelburg, where he never got going. Soon afterwards he left the
Reformed church with a select body of disciples, the most famous of whom was Anna
van Schurman. Expelled from the Netherlands, they were disappointed in their belief
Chrétienne into German in 1667. He also published some of Labadie’s

poems. But though Labadie enjoyed great prestige for sanctity and mys-
tical insight, he was clearly an ecclesiastical misfit, and precisely the sort
of man the Lutheran Orthodox loved to hate. The rediscovery in recent
years of correspondence between Anna van Schurman, the Labadist, and
Johann Jakob Schütz, the king-pin of the Frankfurt group, has shown
that contact between leading members of each group was close and not
merely literary. Eleonore von Merlau (1644–1724)11 was another of the
Frankfurt group in correspondence with the schismatic Labadists, and
among the presents from the latter was L’exercice prophétique. Moreover,
Labadie’s problem was very like that of Spener. Labadie had failed in an
attempt at general church reform in the Netherlands, and had responded
by secession and the attempt to gather the ‘true church’ and to live by
community of goods.
The press was agog, and Spener, the most loyal of friends to the estab-
lished church, had from the beginning of the collegium pietatis to be on
his guard against charges that he was going the same way as Labadie.
He made it clear that his ecclesiola, unlike Labadie’s ‘true church’,
was an ecclesiola in ecclesia; unfortunately some of the Frankfurt flock,
led by Schütz, insisted on behaving exactly as the Orthodox said they
would. Radical circles began to form not only among the Frankfurt
Pietists but elsewhere; anti-pietist legislation began in Hesse-Darmstadt;
Spener’s own brother-in-law, Johann Heinrich Horb, was expelled by the
Strasbourg Orthodox. Spener himself was attacked by the deacon Dilfeld
from Nordhausen, but managed to find support from Luther and almost
every significant evangelical theologian since for his view that the under-
standing of Holy Scripture required a special illumination by the Holy
Spirit, and emerged triumphant. But Christian Fende and Schütz had
been talking of the Lutheran church as Babel, accusing it of false doc-
trine, and urging separation. In 1682 Spener expelled them and drew the
line between church pietism and pietism of the radical-separatist brand.
Nor was Orthodox criticism all he had to bear. Quaker missions had
been coming into Germany, and everywhere they made for little groups of
religious virtuosi. Penn himself arrived in 1678 and held devotions with
Spener’s group of Pietists. The threat here was not just that of an alter-
native religious appeal. Penn was seeking to extract value from his new
real estate, the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, by recruiting colonists,
that they were inaugurating the millennial kingdom, and, after founding a number of
settlements, soon died out.
11 On whom see Markus Mathias, Johann Wilhelm und Johanna Eleonora Petersen
(Göttingen, 1993); Ruth Albrecht, Johanna Eleonora Petersen. Theologische Schriftstellerin
des frühen Pietismus (Göttingen, 2005).
and his chief recruiting agent, Franz Daniel Pretorius, was a member of
Spener’s collegium pietatis. In 1683 he emigrated to found the famous Ger-
man settlement at Germantown near Philadelphia. Others had preceded
him, though Schütz stayed at home and in 1690 was refused burial by the
Frankfurt ministers. Christian Fende died only at the age of ninety-five
in 1746, having become an eloquent defender of the rights of meetings
like the Frankfurt collegium and of chiliasm. In fact he was the means
by which the millennium calculations of Bengel reached a broad public.
Having acquired the chiliastic hopes of Schütz, Eleonore von Merlau left
Frankfurt, married Johann Wilhelm Petersen (Spener officiating),12 and
joined him in the energetic propagation of chiliastic doctrines.
Spener in Dresden
These calamities put paid to Spener’s original hopes for his class meeting.
In 1682 he moved the meeting out of his house into the Barfüsserkirche,
and from that time on few spoke apart from himself and theology students.
In the later phases of his life in Dresden and Berlin he bothered no more
with class meetings. He never gave up the theory of class meetings as he
expounded it in the Pia Desideria, and supported meetings that continued
elsewhere; but the wounds inflicted by the separations in Frankfurt never
healed.
Worse was to come. During Spener’s Dresden years the Orthodox
launched two violent assaults on the Pietists in Leipzig and Hamburg
which concerned Spener only indirectly; but they involved him in con-
tinuous defensive writing, and transformed Pietism from an aspect of
the Arndtian movement for piety into an organised party established in
Orthodox territory. Spener’s rival for the Dresden appointment had been
a Leipzig theologian of formidable polemical violence, Johann Benedict
Carpzov. The latter had actually encouraged two students, August
Hermann Francke and Paul Anton, when they created a Collegium Philo-
biblicum in the university to practise exegesis. But, when the movement
spread into the town and in the university began to turn students against
philosophy (i.e., Aristotle), Carpzov turned angrily against them and got
up a campaign throughout Germany against them as enemies of the truth
who substituted piety for faith. Certainly the class meetings that Spener
had devised as a means of church reform had in Leipzig got into the hands
of determined young men bent on using them as a means to Christian
perfection.13 In Hamburg Spener’s brother-in-law, Horb, was again in
12 On Petersen (1649–1727) see Mathias, Petersen.
13 Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit (Tübingen,
2004), pp. 22–4.
trouble as the ministry attempted to impose a new religious oath, a move,

according to Spener, to sacrifice the freedom of believers to a revived
papal tyranny.
The Pia Desideria

Fortunately Spener’s great policy document, the Pia Desideria or Heartfelt
Longings, was written well before these disappointments, and equally for-
tunately he never turned his back upon it. In 1675 a Frankfurt publisher
persuaded Spener to produce a new edition of Arndt’s gospel lectionary
sermons. The following year he brought out the book with a program-
matic preface of proposals for the ‘improvement of the true evangelical
church’. Spener took care to get the work approved by the Frankfurt
ministers in advance and sent offprints to numerous important theolo-
gians for discussion.14 He received nearly a hundred replies, most of them
favourable.15 A Latin edition and a separate publication as a pamphlet
under the famous title, Pia Desideria, served the same purpose. No order
of society escaped Spener’s lash. Princes were not the nursing mothers of
the church, they were Caesaropapists who used the church for their own
purposes. The clergy lacked a living faith, the root of their disorder being
their training in scholastic rather than biblical theology.
Indeed the key to the whole matter was to spread the word of God more
richly among men. Various devices were suggested by which lay people
were to be encouraged to study the Bible, including sessions where the
Bible was read to those who were not able to read it for themselves. But
the great thing was to dissuade lay people from the delusion that simple
attendance on the preaching and sacraments of the church was what was
required of them. They needed to take a degree of responsibility for each
other, to encourage, warn and convert each other. The ideal forum for
this was the collegium pietatis. Interior religion, the great prescription of
Arndt, would take root and turn the church into a society of living stones.
And here at least Spener diverged radically from the kind of prescriptions
familiar among the reforming Orthodox. The energetic exercise of the
spiritual priesthood of believers would transform the whole situation;
to this idea, sketched out by Luther and neglected ever since, Spener
devoted a treatise in 1677.
14 On this whole subject see Hyeong-Eun Chi, Philipp Jakob Spener und seine Pia Desideria
(Frankfurt, 1997) and the comprehensive bibliography it contains; also Martin Brecht,
‘Philipp Jakob Spener und das Wahre Christentum’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 4 (1977/8),
119–54, repr. in his Ausgewählte Aufsätze, II, pp. 177–214.
15 J. Wallmann, ‘Pietismus und Spiritualismus: Ludwig Brunnquells radikalpietistische
Kritik an Speners Pia Desideria’, in FS Reinhard Schwarz, Von Wittenberg nach Memphis,
ed. W. Homolka and O. Ziegelmeier (Göttingen, 1989), p. 230.
But was the church capable of improvement? Were the Last Days (as
the Orthodox had come round to thinking)16 so imminent that there was
no time left for long-term reform? And if the clergy were to be disabled
from threatening the flock that if they did not repent today tomorrow
might be too late, what leverage upon conscience would they have left?
At the stage of his doctoral work, as we have seen, Spener was still in
this matter in the Orthodox mould, but just before the publication of the
Pia Desideria he made a move. He became convinced that what the Bible
envisaged was that the end would not come until all God’s promises to the
church were fulfilled, and that one of the signs of this latter-day prosperity
would be the conversion of the Jews. Like most Lutherans Spener thought
this was promised in Romans 11. (Some of the Orthodox considered that
this was already past, others that it was still to come.) He further thought
that the reason why the conversion of the Jews still tarried was that the
decayed condition of the church offered them very little inducement to
come over. If therefore the prescriptions for the renewal of the church
that he was putting forward in the Pia Desideria could be made to work,
the great obstacle to the conversion of the Jews would be removed and
the glories of the end-time would be within reach.
Spener did not think that this period was very far away,17 and lifelong he
followed politics so as not to miss the hand of God;18 but he began the pro-
cess of putting off the Last Days into the middle distance which became
characteristic of evangelical Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic
throughout the eighteenth century. And in so doing he had provided
himself with a lever upon conscience to replace that of the Orthodox. For
in one sense not merely the renewal of the church, but the completion of
the historical process, was now in the grasp of the faithful. It was worth
while to labour for the renewal of the church because the ‘hope of better
times’ was promised and real improvement, perhaps much more, was the
reward.
One of the ways in which Spener sought lifelong to labour was in
catechising. He claimed to have learned from experience that the inner
man was more often reached by catechising than by the most challenging
16 On this process see J. Wallmann, ‘Zwischen Reformation und Pietismus. Reich Gottes
und Chiliasmus in der lutherischen Orthodoxie’, in E. Jüngel, J. Wallmann and
W. Werbeck (eds.), Verificationen. FS für Gerhard Ebeling zum 70. Geburtstag (Tübingen,
1982), repr. in Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit im Zeitalter des Barock (Tübingen,
1995), pp. 104–23. Cf. Martin Brecht, ‘Chiliasmus in Württemberg im 17. Jahrhundert’,
in his Ausgewählte Aufsätze, II, pp. 131–3.
17 He thought highly of the English apocalyptic interpreter Joseph Mede (1586–1638).
Spener, Briefe, III, p. 324; II, p. 162.
18 Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Pietismus im alten Reich’, Historische Zeitschrift 214 (1972), 73.
sermons,19 and he knew that much good preaching was robbed of its effect
by ignorance in the pew. He did not share the popular equation between
ignorance and simple faith. He sought to steer his instruction between
the New Testament on the one hand, and the inner response of the cate-
chumen on the other, avoiding the mechanical repetition of answers. He
was not free from a certain schoolmasterly pursuit of nostrums which
tended to frustrate his objects; the alchemist and theosophist Franciscus
Mercurius van Helmont (1618–99) attended one of Spener’s catechetical
examinations in Frankfurt in 1677, and summed up his impressions in the
question, ‘but how do we bring the head into the heart?’20 That at least
was the object of a lifetime of writing, preaching and practice devoted
by Spener to the field of catechesis. Modern critics have also found him
insufficiently attentive to the need to link catechism with confirmation.
Spener’s theology
In his general theology Spener remained loyally Orthodox, but in his
pursuit of inwardness there were occasional changes in emphasis. The
Orthodox relied heavily on the law of God to induce conviction of sin
and repentance. Spener could not possibly turn against this view, but
preferred to reach the heart of men from the standpoint of the gospel;
mercy was a more appealing concept than judgement. Here he had taken
a step which the theology of the Enlightenment was to take further. He
likewise sought to unite the notion of justification by faith with the practice
of an active Christianity. The living faith needed for this purpose was
not the dead consent to theological propositions, it was the personal
trust which led indeed to knowledge through divine illumination. Living
faith was inseparable from real appreciation of the work of Christ. Thus
faith was related in one mode to justification and in a second mode to
sanctification. He managed not merely to unite faith and activity, but to
reintroduce the notion of Christian perfection into theology; the evidence
of the needful living faith is the praxis pietatis in the active sense.21
Writing and speaking in this vein, Spener could not delimit himself
from the mystics with absolute clarity, a clarity further muddied by a
strong infusion of native caution.22 In addition, like Wesley later, he
retained a lively interest in whatever looked like sources of religious vital-
ity, and was loath to write them off. His judgements turned on the fact
19 Spener, Briefe, III, p. 608. 20 Grünberg, Spener, II, p. 65.

21 Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie, 5th edn (Gütersloh,
1975), II, pp. 142–50.
22 Christoph Kolb, ‘Die Anfänge des Pietismus und Separatismus in Württemberg’,
Württembergische Vierteljahresheft für Landesgeschichte 9 (1900), 63.
that, despite his criticisms of the status quo, Spener was not only an
ingrained Lutheran but also a stout establishment man as well. Thus
he would have no truck with avowed separatists such as Quakers,23 let
alone the native radical spiritualists for whom the establishment was Babel
or worse. Although much is obscured in this area by the censorship, it
appears that Spener had no contact with men of this kind before the
appearance of the Pia Desideria in 1675. Even then it is hard to find
evidence of replies from this quarter to his proposals. But in Spener’s
Theologische Bedencken24 there is an elaborate answer to something of
this sort from Ludwig Brunnquell, who was in trouble with the church
in Württemberg for chiliasm and for propagating the views of Jakob
Böhme.25
Of Böhme Spener has not much to say: he read little and understood
very little of what he did read, so why read more?26 Böhme’s erroneous
method of writing about the Holy Spirit in Scripture was bound to make
him suspect.27 He came round to advising inquirers not to read him.28
For Spener the norm of truth was not Böhme but Scripture, and, in a
recourse to the historical elements in Christianity, of which much more
was to be heard in the evangelical tradition, he would stick to preaching
the crucified and risen Christ and his grace in which men were born
again.29 Nor had Spener much use for the immediate revelations that
became only too common in the later seventeenth century. He did not
wish to limit what God might possibly do, but did not think that current
revelations could be a principle of faith or necessary to salvation.30 He
was cautious, even sceptical, about visions, and held no fellowship with
visionaries.31
Even a century later Jung-Stilling still looked for guidance to the section
in the first volume of the Last Theological Reflections in which Spener
offered his thoughts on visions. The crucial passage raises caution to an
art-form. The great thing is ‘not to be too hasty in forming a judgement’
so that the subject may not resist God’s message, if that is indeed what
the vision is; if on the other hand the vision is ‘the work of Satan desirous
of playing his tricks under such a disguise, he must not give way to his will
23 Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 256–7.

24 Theologische Bedencken (Halle, 1700–2), III, pp. 176–90; Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 1086–96.
25 Wallmann, ‘Pietismus und Spiritualismus’, pp. 229–43. See n. 10 above.
26 Spener, Briefe, III, p. 287. On the whole subject see Helmut Obst, ‘Jakob Böhme im
Urteil Philipp Jakob Speners’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 23 (1971),
22–39.
27 Spener, Briefe, III, p. 461. 28 Ibid., III, p. 902.
29 Ibid., III, pp. 785–6. Cf. II, pp. 402–3.
30 Ibid., II, p. 462. 31 Ibid., III, pp. 903, 834.
in the least, but cleave firmly to the Word of God alone’.32 Here Spener
was so safe as to be unhelpful to visionaries. With mystics he had more
sympathy. The mystical theology had come to much less harm in the
Middle Ages than had scholasticism, and the authority of Luther could
be used in favour of pre-Reformation mystics like Tauler.33 But in the
end these texts were of limited use in theological education.34
Spener and the mystics

Spener lived long enough to be required to give opinions on at least one of
the Quietists who exercised so strong an attraction upon the early Protes-
tant evangelicals. As we shall see later, their fortunes among Protestants
(and those of many Counter-Reformation mystics) were made by Pierre
Poiret. He began as a Reformed minister in the Rhineland, and became a
disciple of Antoinette Bourignon (1616–69), a mystic from the Spanish
Netherlands, published her works and then turned to collecting and pub-
lishing those of other mystics dead and alive.35 It did not help Bourignon’s
cause with Spener that he did not care much for Poiret; that universal
salesman of modern mysticism recommended the Huguenots to sacrifice
Protestant shibboleths in favour of the best compromise they could make
with the rampant government of Louis XIV.36 But the general curve of his
development bore a good deal of resemblance to his views on Böhme;37
he began with caution and the expression of doubts about his ability to
judge, and became steadily more hostile. What especially irked Spener
about Bourignon was her claim to be a prophet and the way she under-
mined the whole Lutheran doctrinal structure by insisting that only those
who had attained Christian perfection could be sure of salvation. Spener
thought that the tenor of Scripture prophecy was that any new prophets
were likely to be false ones, and was too firmly wedded to the doctrine of
32 J. H. Jung-Stilling, Theory of Pneumatology, Eng. tr. (London, 1834), p. 250.
33 Spener, Briefe, II, pp. 205–6, 103; I, pp. 549–50. 34 Ibid., II, p. 118.
35 On him see W. R. Ward, ‘Mysticism and Revival. The Case of Gerhard Tersteegen’, in
FS John Walsh, Revival and Religion since 1700, ed. Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew
(London, 1993), pp. 45–6; F. J. R. Knetsch, ‘Pierre Poiret und sein Streit mit Pierre
Jurieu über das Verhalten der Opfer der Zwangsbekehrungen nach der Aufhebung des
Edikts von Nantes’, in J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), Pietismus und Reveil
(Leiden, 1978), pp. 182–91. Cf. P. J. Spener, Letzte Theologische Bedencken (Halle, 1711),
I, pp. 93–100.
36 Whom Spener likened to Nebukadnezar, irresistible because appointed by God to carry
out his judgements (Nahum 3:11). Spener, Briefe, III, p. 541. On Spener’s objections to
Poiret see also Grünberg, Spener, I, p. 509.
37 The subject is usefully treated by Klaus vom Orde, ‘Antoinette Bourignon in der
Beurteilung Philipp Jakob Speners und ihre Rezeption in der pietistischen Tradition’,
Pietismus und Neuzeit 26 (2000), 50–80. Spener gave Bourignon full-dress treatment in
Letzte Theologische Bedencken, I, pp. 25–74.
justification in which the sinner could be justus ac peccator to be tempted

by perfectionism.38
Spener had a kind of esoteric theology of his own. Grünberg believed
that some of the mistrust that he encountered was again due to his cau-
tion in, for example, excluding certain things from his catechism on the
ground that they were not suitable for catechetical purposes. This was
partly a question of achieving simplicity but partly a question of propa-
gating only what was useful to the church. To Grünberg all this consti-
tuted Spener one of the people who undermined the ‘naı̈ve’ equating of
church doctrine and personal religious conviction.39 Yet Spener pointed
the way to Enlightenment in his openly confessed alienation from Book
Four of the True Christianity in which Arndt had set forth his Paracelsian
vision,40 and could be enthusiastically appraised in the relatively clear air
of early nineteenth-century England along with the Halle fathers; they
commendably discarded
the metaphysical mode of tuition and the jargon of the schools, where Aristotle’s
subtleties had been more often studied than the Bible; and a rage for controversies
of no real import to improve the understanding, or to affect the heart, occupied
the time and exalted the conceit of the captious disputants . . . [as compared with]
the visionaries, such as Petersen or the Theosophists, revived by Jacob Boehmen
and others, who, though for a time they glared as a meteor in the sky, and attracted
the eyes of gazing curiosity, suggested nothing tending to the revival of general
religion and piety; and . . . the tribe of prophets and prophetesses, who alarmed
the fears of the credulous, had their day, and were forgotten.41
Spener and the Cabbala

The case of Spener’s approach to the Cabbala is not quite so simple,
not least because the Cabbala itself changed markedly in Spener’s life-
time. The medieval Cabbala had been an esoteric doctrine for scholars
of historical bent, given to speculation about the origin of the world and
the image of man in God. The disaster of 1492 when the Spanish and
Portuguese Jews were expelled gave rise to a New Cabbala in which the
Jewish catastrophe could only be made bearable by being interpreted as
the birthpangs of the messianic era. Just when the pain that underlay
38 For examples of his views, see Briefe, III, pp. 288–9, 778.
39 Grünberg, Spener, I, pp. 398–400; Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 47, 310–11.
40 Oscar Söhngen, ‘Überlegungen zu den theologie- und geistesgeschichtlichen Vorausset-
zungen des lutherischen Pietismus’, in FS Erich Beyreuther, Pietismus – Herrnhütertum –
Erweckungsbewegung, ed. Dietrich Meyer (Cologne and Bonn, 1982), p. 3.
41 Thomas Haweis, An Impartial and Succinct History of the Rise, Declension and Revival of
the Church of Christ from the birth of our Saviour to the Present Time (London, 1800), III,
pp. 64–6, 75.
the messianic expectation might have been expected to dull, there were
pogroms in Poland in 1648 in which more than 200,000 Jews lost their
lives, and the hope of the coming of the Messiah flared up again. In
1665–6 the imminent expectation of the end was further fanned by the
movement of the Rabbi Sabbatai Zwi. A crisis of a different kind broke
out when in 1666 Sabbatai Zwi converted to Islam. Many Jewish congre-
gations, bereft of their hope, now entered upon a course of secularisation
that paved the way for the Jewish Enlightenment in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Others turned in on themselves and clung to their inherited rabbinic
faith and their eschatological ideas.42
Clearly Spener could not afford to fight off pressure from Christian
sources which urged the imminence of the end-time, only to succumb
to similar pressure from the Jewish side. On the other hand, if one of
the signs of the fulfilment of God’s promises to the church was to be
the conversion of the Jews; if that conversion was likely to wait on the
evidence of reform in Christendom; and if further, as Spener’s whole
milieu believed, the common ground between Christianity and Judaism
was the key to reform, then the Cabbala was a major pointer to the
hope of better times. Even here, however, the internal dynamics of the
Frankfurt collegium pietatis in a measure tied Spener’s hands. For Johann
Jakob Schütz and he were both great admirers of the Kabbala Denudata,
a Christian Cabbala produced by Knorr von Rosenroth (1636–89), a
prominent Lutheran minister in Bavaria. Schütz, indeed, was close to
Rosenroth, as he was also cousin to Andreae, the famous reformer in
Württemberg during the Thirty Years War. Schütz was also the leading
figure and disturbing spirit in the Frankfurt collegium, and wanted to use
the meetings to propagate cabbalistic ideas. He it was who led the refrac-
tory group in the meeting which Spener could not control, and finally
damaged the whole reputation of the institution by separating. Thus,
like the visions of servant girls, cabbalism was one of Spener’s problems.
He himself had been part of the cabbalistic circle at the court of the
Princess Antonia of Württemberg in the early 1660s. It is characteristic of
Spener’s methods of apologetic that he claimed not to have been deeply
involved out of sheer inability to understand the system.43 It is hard,
42 On all this see G. Scholem, Sabbat Sevi. The Mystical Messiah (London, 1973); E. G. E.
Van der Wall, ‘“A Precursor of Christ or a Jewish Impostor?” Petrus Serrarius and Jean
de Labadie and the Jewish movement around Sabbatai Sevi’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 14
(1988), 109–24; Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, ‘Einführung [zur jüdischen Existenz]’,
in Hartmut Lehmann and A.-C. Trepp (eds.), Im Zeichen der Krise (Göttingen, 1999),
p. 203. It is impossible to mistake the parallelism between the movements in the Jewish
and Christian worlds; more work is needed to elucidate it.
43 Wallmann, Philipp Jakob Spener und die Anfänge des Pietismus (Tübingen, 1970),
pp. 148–52.
however, to believe that he was not in some way influenced by the cele-
brated Lehrtafel or pictorial display (with notes) of the Princess Antonia
which the group erected in the Trinity church at Teinach.44
Württemberg had its own access to the Christian Cabbala through
Johannes Reuchlin who had known Pico personally. His publications led
the circle of the princess to read classic works of the Cabbala and perhaps
also inspired the pictorial representation of the system. Spener had a
powerful personal influence on the origins of Pietism in Württemberg,
but so did the strikingly Christianised doctrines embodied in the Lehrtafel.
Those who contrived it succeeded in combining the Lutheran doctrine
of the cross with the cabbalistic doctrine of the ten emanations of God in
such a way as to give an invitation to contemplative piety. The Cabbala
also offered a great inducement to the reading of the Old Testament in
Hebrew, and suggested ways in which the messianic prophecies in the law
and the prophets could be given a symbolic and speculative interpretation
and taken further. Thus from the very first word of the Bible there were
indications of the heavenly Adam and the Son of God. Christ was in the
Old Testament from the beginning.
Johannes Laurentius Schmidlin (1626–92), one of the experts who
designed the tablet, claimed that it was a ‘commentary on the secrets of
both testaments’ and a ‘summary of sacred philosophy and history’. The
theme which united both testaments was that of promise and fulfilment.
The concentration of Pietism on the Christ-event and the discipleship
of Jesus often led to a narrow neglect of the theology of creation and
a denial of thankful joy in nature. The Cabbala, however, persuaded
the Swabian fathers that the Book of Nature was a second source of
revelation alongside the Scripture. The emanations of God (Sephirot) in
the Cabbala showed the continuous creativity of God in nature and in
the basic components of creation, the four elements of water, fire, air and
earth.
All this was to bear remarkable fruit in the duchy in the next century.
Christ was equated with the pre-existent wisdom of God which according
to rabbinic and cabbalistic doctrine was the tool of creation. And Antonia
was by this means enabled to emphasise the restoration of the original
harmony and glory of the fallen world. The female form of the second
Sephirah with a water jug and cup stood for the sacraments of baptism
and communion. The Cabbala also inculcated the ‘piety of the heart’,
and it is impossible to miss the fact that Spener’s famous title, the Pia
44 On this see Otto Betz, ‘Kabbala Baptizata. Die judisch-christliche Kabbala und der
Pietismus in Württemberg’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 24 (1998), 130–59, which includes
a representation of the tablet at pp. 145–6. It is not suggested that Spener became as
professional a student of the Cabbala as the princess herself, or as Oetinger became later.
Desideria, is taken from Psalm 37:4, ‘the desires of the heart’, in quite
the cabbalistic style. In short, much of what entered into Württemberger
pietism through the Christian Cabbala also entered into Spener, whatever
his disclaimers of ignorance of the technicalities.
Spener had thus made his own selections from the thought-world of
early evangelicalism, and in doing so anticipated much of what was to
come. He drew from the heritage of Arndt a concern for the internal-
isation of the faith which could neither be separated from the mystical
tradition, nor yet unequivocally committed to it. He sought to activate
the dormant spiritual priesthood of believers, but, perhaps not surpris-
ingly, failed to solve all the problems either of catechising or of the class
meeting. Nevertheless he had written the virtues of small-group and lay
religion into the history of a church that had no tradition of them in
such a way that all the evangelical movements that followed found them
indispensable. He resumed the process of postponing expectations of the
Last Things (while keeping the expectations alive) which was to char-
acterise all the evangelical movements of the next century. He had also
begun the severance of the evangelical movements from the theosophi-
cal and Paracelsian traditions, notwithstanding the powerful temptations
they offered of reinforcing the drive against Aristotelianism. Spener had
also been forced into caution towards the Christian Cabbala, notwith-
standing the backing it could be made to offer to the biblical basis of
his position. Whether in practice his biblical basis or his ethical activism
could be combined in the long run with his residual mysticism, or whether
his evangelicalism could achieve a rounded shape without the theosophy,
were all questions that remained to be tested. These questions in turn
implied that it was still uncertain whether an evangelical identity could
be achieved.
3 The mystic way or the mystic ways?
If Spener was frequently caught between prudence and the desire to tap
sources of religious vitality on the one hand, and what could in practice
be kept within the bounds of the Protestant establishments on the other,
the problem was even more acute for his protégé and disciple, August
Hermann Francke (1663–1727).1 For at an early stage an ecclesiastical
career was closed to Francke, partly because he was more open to radical
and spiritualistic influences; and although, unlike the radical separatists,
Francke wanted the ‘true’ church of the faithful to retain its connex-
ion with the establishment, he was more concerned with the pursuit of
Christian perfection than with church reform. Much of his life’s work
was devoted to the support of Protestants in Moscow and Siberia, Silesia
and Bohemia, who had no established church system to cling to. More-
over, the great institutions at Halle which came to provide a badge of
evangelical orthodoxy as far away as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, South Wales
and Georgia were not institutions of church or state, but an applica-
tion, at the time unique, of the principle of contract to the work of the
kingdom of God. So long as Francke was able to retain the sympathy of
the Hohenzollern monarchy, as his son and successor, Gotthilf August
Francke, was not, he had in a sense a little more elbow-room than was
ever available to Spener. Yet the outcome of Francke’s conversion was to
narrow the options available to him, and to all who were spellbound by
his analysis of what conversion was.
August Hermann Francke

Francke was the son of Johannes Francke, a Lübeck jurist who spent his
last years in the service of Duke Ernst the Pious in Saxe-Gotha. He thus
began life in the most exalted circles of Lutheran Reform Orthodoxy. A
1 The biography of Francke by Erich Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, 1663–1727.

Zeuge des lebendigen Gottes (Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1956), is still useful. See also Martin
Brecht’s contribution to Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen, 1993), I, pp. 440–539.
40
The mystic way or the mystic ways? 41
studious young man, he gave early evidence of a vocation to be a theolo-

gian, and in the Collegium Philobiblicum, an academic Bible-study circle
which he joined as a student in Leipzig, it became clear that he would
become a biblical theologian. Various other patterns in Francke’s life
now took shape. The Collegium had been created by Johann Benedict
Carpzov, an Orthodox theologian of formidable violence, who, as we have
seen, turned against his creation when he perceived its anti-Aristotelian
bias and its popularity in the town. The resulting furore made it unreal-
istic for Francke to contemplate a church career.
Francke’s reading had hitherto been of a mainly Orthodox or Reform
Orthodox kind; but he had been raised also on Arndt, and the English
Puritan devotional literature, and had obtained some insight into the
mystical traditions on which they built. His first-hand acquaintance with
this field came in 1687 when a disputation was scheduled in Leipzig ‘De
Religione Quietistarum’. At that date Quietism was understood primarily
to mean the doctrines of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1628–
96), now resident in Italy, with a large following in Naples, and facing
the inveterate hostility of the Jesuits. His ‘true Christianity’ (as we shall
see later) consisted in mystical devotion to God, Christ and Mary, and
in radical Gelassenheit or tranquillity. What irked Francke was that this
academic exercise was to take place not on the basis of anything Moli-
nos had written (no texts being available) but on secondary works that
included only excerpts from the originals. With Spener’s encouragement
Francke (who in addition to the biblical and theological languages had
acquired English and Italian as well) translated Molinos’s Spiritual Guide
and Daily Communion from the Italian into Latin to make them available
for academic purposes.
In his own account of his conversion2 he strenuously denied calumnies
that he had become a Molinist; but the fact is that Molinos intensified
some of the contrasts that Francke had already encountered in Arndt.
Arndt emphasised that every man had two birth-lines in himself, one
from Adam and one from Christ, and contrasted them violently. God’s
image was destroyed in Adam and renewed only in Christ, our model.
Similarly, Arndt sharply contrasted knowledge and faith; the kingdom of
God consisted not in knowledge but in power. There was nevertheless
a human contribution to salvation. Everything must lose its old form if
it is to obtain a new one. Nature abhors a void, and when the heart of
man is empty God must fill the empty place with his love, wisdom and
2 August Hermann Franckes Lebenslauf [1690–1], in August Hermann Francke. Werke in

Auswahl, ed. E. Peschke (East Berlin, 1969), here pp. 21–3. See also the recent edn
by Markus Mathias, Lebensläufe August Hermann Franckes (Leipzig, 1999), pp. 5–32.
knowledge. The human part comes in true penitence which consists in

turning from the world, self-denial, mortification and death to worldly
desires. Of course temptations persist, for God withdraws comfort until
we are purified, and true repentance is brought nearer.
These contrasts were only intensified in Molinos. He opposed thought
and faith even more sharply, and was savage in his criticism of scholasti-
cism. The way to God for anyone who was not a beginner was by pure faith
and contemplation, and God would lead the believer beyond the knowl-
edge of the senses. Yet the element of synergism is greater in Molinos than
in Arndt. Man’s cooperation is essential to the whole process; particular
ascetic exercises are not required, but the humble acceptance of outward
tribulation is indispensable. Temptations, dryness, darkness, the sense
of abandonment, are God’s way of teaching men to shed hindrances
in his presence; Gelassenheit, humble acceptance, is the short route to
perfection.3
Francke’s conversion
That Francke’s conversion has much in common with all this is appar-
ent from his own account. Scholasticism never had much attraction for
him; his devotion in exegesis to philology had made him the target of a
vicious polemical campaign. However, in the autumn of 1687 he received
a scholarship to further his exegetical studies in Lüneburg with the Super-
intendent, Kaspar Hermann Sandhagen. Francke now believed that his
trouble from the beginning had been (in the phrase which had dogged
Spener’s catechetical exercises) that he found it hard to get his theological
studies out of his head and into his heart;4 now (in the best Arndtian or
Molinist manner) God took away all security from the Scriptures them-
selves. ‘Who knows whether the Holy Scripture is the Word of God, the
Turks insist their Koran is, and the Jews their Talmud, and who will say
who is right?’5 If the Scriptures went, God went; Francke prayed desper-
ately to a God he did not know. Quite suddenly (again in the Molinist
way) what Francke was to call ‘the breakthrough’ came. Having fallen to
his knees in great affliction and doubt, he rose ‘with unspeakable joy and
great certainty’, and could not sleep for his new-found happiness.6 The
3 On all this see E. Peschke, ‘Die Bedeutung der Mystik für die Bekehrung August Hermann
Franckes’, Theologische Literaturzeitung 91 (1966), 881–92, repr. in his Bekehrung und
Reform: Ansatz und Wurzeln der Theologie August Hermann Franckes (Bielefeld, 1977),
pp. 13–40. See also the discussions in Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 442–5 and
Horst Weigelt, Pietismus Studien (Stuttgart, 1965), I, pp. 60–2, who speaks of Francke’s
‘productive misunderstanding’ of Molinos.
4 Peschke, Werke in Auswahl, p. 13. 5 Ibid., p. 26. 6 Ibid., p. 28.
change came in a trice, but it was to last lifelong; it led to a major recon-
struction of personality, and issued in an unexampled power of work.
In Francke’s reflection upon his conversion there are a number of un-
Lutheran things. It was not just that his problem was not Luther’s moral
problem of how the unrighteous man could stand before God, how he
could be justus ac peccator. He had a sharp eye for things not in the
Lutheran tradition, the psychological stages of his conversion, and espe-
cially the total contrast between life before conversion and life afterwards;
everything before conversion had been a turning from God to the world,
even the Bible had been a means to worldly honour and a dead shell of
dead knowledge. The knowledge he had gained at the feet of Gamaliel
was dross compared with the overflowing knowledge of the living Christ.
Indeed he caps the whole account by quoting from the Luther Bible
Psalm 36:9:7 ‘They will be drunk with the rich goods of thy house, and
thou wilt give them to drink with delight as with a river.’ The doctrine of
spiritual drunkenness had a long history in the mystical literature, going
back at least to Catherine of Genoa, who recognised it as the second stage
of the spiritual experiences of love granted by God; and to Molinos also
it signified the second step on the spiritual ladder.8 But Francke’s efforts
to square all this with the doctrine of Luther’s Preface to the Romans,
which became the classical text for evangelical conversion, are not quite
acceptable. What he was going back to was the mystic-spiritualist contrast
between Adam and Christ. His attempt to establish visible signs distin-
guishing a child of God from a child of the world9 was very un-Lutheran,
and, while his analysis of the stages of salvation did yeoman service in the
hands of class-leaders down the eighteenth century, its implication that
turning away from worldly things was a presupposition for the work of
God was also very un-Lutheran.
Francke and the mystical theology

By 1704 Francke had come back to the subject in a Lectio Paraenetica, or
warning lecture, given in connection with a course on the Epistle to the
Romans. The claims made for the mystical theology were now enormous;
it was no less than the interior practice of Christianity, without which all
7 My translation. The AV differs from Luther at this point both in the translation and in
including the reference in verse 8.
8 Friedrich de Boor, ‘“Geistliche Trunkenheit” und “göttliche Wollust”. August Hermann
Franckes Beitrag zur Auslegungsgeschichte von Psalm 36, 8–10’, Pietismus und Neuzeit
28 (2002), 118–46.
9 Looking ahead in evangelical history one recalls the unhappy attempt of Jabez Bunting
to establish that this distinction was made clear by the operation of church discipline.
else is dead.10 On the other hand the treatment is narrow and rather slight.
It is done by a brief exposition of Arndt. The claim is that the third book
is a compendium of the whole mystical theology, and especially Tauler,
with the object of renewing man increasingly in the image of God and
enabling him to obtain a true and closer union and fellowship with God.
Even the fourth (Paracelsian) book, which had been too much for Spener,
is commended as showing man, now united with God, the way into God’s
garden, the created world, so that he may praise him rightly in all things
and apply the creation to proper use.11
But the key to the whole matter was a proper understanding of repen-
tance and faith; this was why Arndt had devoted so much of his first
book to human need, and why so many mystical books (unspecified) ‘put
the cart before the horse’.12 This limited treatment was evoked by what
Francke regarded as an unhealthy circulation of mystical writings among
his students. His own piety was much more strongly influenced by the
substance of the mystical tradition than this lecture suggests. He believed
that the whole idea of mystical theology had arisen in the dark centuries
before the Reformation as a middle way between ceremonies ex opera
operato and polemical theology. Tauler, Ruysbroeck, even Bonaventura
and Aquinas, ‘Theologi Scholastici und Mystici’, were in the succession.
Luther himself had ‘drawn more strength and sap from them than from
all the writings of the scholastics’. It had taken Arndt to rescue them from
another crisis of piety.
There were limits to how far Francke would go with the mystic-
spiritualists; and the Bible was the chief. Not for him the contrast between
the dead letter of Scripture and the living mystical meaning behind the
word. Those who scorned God’s Word and applied themselves only to
mystical books were merely fashion-mongers, who ‘fluttered about like
mosquitoes till they flew into the light and were burned up’. If the mystical
theology began with repentance and faith, speculative mystical spiritual-
ism, the mother of delusions of all sorts, was one of the evidences of the
Fall. Nevertheless Francke departed substantially from Luther because
he began with Arndt and Spener. The church was based, not on baptism,
but on the renewal of the baptismal covenant in conversion, on the per-
sonal appropriation of salvation and the priesthood of all believers. And
Francke was full of mystical words and ideas: Gelassenheit (tranquillity),
discipleship under the cross, the indwelling of Christ, the stages of salva-
tion, temptations and the withdrawal of grace. He shunned the ecstatic,
but the decisive transaction took place in the heart rather than the head.13
10 Peschke, Werke in Auswahl, p. 203. 11 Ibid., p. 206. 12 Ibid., pp. 207, 209.
13 E. Peschke, Studien zur Theologie August Hermann Franckes (East Berlin, 1964–6), I,
pp. 113–15, 133–5, 150–1.
There were two drawbacks to Francke’s enduring love affair with mys-
ticism. The first was that the very sharp contrast which he absorbed from
Arndt and Molinos between Adam and Christ, the world and grace,
knowledge and faith, underlay the coarse hostility later in the eighteenth
century between the Halle men and the Enlightenment; and even in
Francke himself this may well have been prefigured by his early turn from
philosophy to philology. For lesser men than himself this could be a wel-
come excuse for intellectual idleness, and it was a temptation from which
the evangelical movement never managed completely to free itself.14
Anna Magdalena Francke

The second ill consequence was of a more personal and paradoxical
nature. Relief from intellectual uncertainty had taken the brakes off
Francke’s entirely exceptional power of work, and enabled him to develop
into one of the greatest organisers of the whole of Christian history. The
personal dedication required to organise the theological teaching at Halle,
the famous charitable institutions, the politics of Protestant rescue in the
Baltic, Russia, Silesia and America, not to mention conceiving a Christian
Utopia for universal regeneration, could only come at a cost; and pre-
dictably that cost was partly borne by his wife. In 1694 Francke married
Anna Magdalena von Wurm, writing to Spener that ‘he who has the uni-
verse in his hands has powerfully guided my heart to look about for a
helpmate who may share with me the burden and the blessing’.15 This
she did up to a point; but the romantic hopes with which the marriage
began were hardly fulfilled.
There was always a streak of mysticism in Anna Magdalena, and
Francke himself put her in touch with radicals in Quedlinburg and
elsewhere; she took Greek lessons from none other than Gottfried Arnold.
After her marriage she began a sustained correspondence with the radical
spiritualist (and editor of Jakob Böhme) Johann Georg Gichtel, much of
whose life’s work consisted in devotional correspondences of this kind.
One of the great topics of this correspondence was the relation of the
new-born to the heavenly Sophia, a relationship, according to Gichtel,
only to be enjoyed at the price of renouncing normal marriage relations.
Even without this, to a person of Anna Magdalena’s views, her husband’s
14 Peschke, ‘Die Bedeutung der Mystik’, p. 891, repr. in Bekehrung und Reform, p. 40; F. de
Boor, ‘Erfahrung gegen Vernunft. Das Bekehrungserlebnis A. H. Franckes als Grundlage
für den Kampf des Hallischen Pietismus gegen die Aufklärung’, in FS Martin Schmidt,
Der Pietismus in Gestalten und Wirkungen, ed. H. Bornkamm, F. Heyer and A. Schindler
(Bielefeld, 1975), pp. 120–38.
15 Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, p. 137.
intense absorption in institutional management and politics could not

but appear a gross sacrifice of interior Christianity to outward church-
manship.
The Francke partners kept most of their disagreements to themselves,
but in 1715 differences became open. Anna refused to move with her hus-
band into the manse of the Ulrichskirche; she also refused to agree to the
marriage of her daughter (perhaps significantly called Sophia) to Johann
Anastasius Freylinghausen, and took no part in the wedding. Nor could
the new son-in-law reconcile his wife’s parents. This whole contretemps
showed not only how the innermost circles of church pietism were always
liable to infection by radical spiritualist views, but how hard it was to keep
extreme activism and interior religion together. Francke did more than
exemplify this to his evangelical successors at home and abroad; as their
unrivalled hero-figure he foisted the problem upon them.16 This side of
the matter was admirably put in a successful pamphlet by one of Francke’s
youthful Pietist colleagues in Leipzig, What do I still lack?. ‘Knowledge is
good. Action is still better . . . One thing you still lack, Action.’17 As minister
of the parish of Glaucha, Halle, Francke drove his parishioners merci-
lessly, using exclusion from confession and communion on a great scale
to get his way. Action was his watchword.18
Erhard Peschke, the most learned modern student of Francke, insists
outright that despite the importance of mysticism in Francke’s conver-
sion, and despite his own insistence on the significance of conversion as a
presupposition of theological study, he was no mystic.19 And unhappily
for Francke family relations the radical pietists recognised the fact and
substantially parted company with him round about 1700. It was also
about this time that the affairs of the greatest scholar and spokesman the
radicals ever had, Gottfried Arnold, were reaching a crisis; and to him
we must turn.
Gottfried Arnold
Arnold’s career, like the marital relations of the Francke family, illustrates
the way in which the activities of opposing wings of the Pietist movement
16 On all this see Gertraud Zaepernick, ‘Johann Georg Gichtels und seiner Nachfolger
Briefwechsel mit den Hallischer Pietisten, besonders A. H. Francke’, Pietismus und
Neuzeit 8 (1983), 74–118; and Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 460–1.
17 Johann Caspar Schade, Was fehlet mir noch? (Leipzig, 1690–1).
18 Veronika Albrecht-Birkner, Francke in Glaucha. Kehrseiten eines Klischees (Tübingen,
2004).
19 E. Peschke, ‘A. H. Franckes Reform des theologischen Studiums’, in Festreden und
Kolloquium über den Bildungs- und Erziehungsgedanken bei A. H. Francke . . . 1963 (Halle,
1964), p. 114.
were constantly interwoven. It is particularly important to bear this in

mind in relation to Arnold’s sudden changes of front. These seemed
to him less abrupt than they have generally seemed to commentators
because they took place within a fluid context. Arnold (1666–1714) was
the son of a grammar-school teacher, and educated in the fortress of
late-orthodoxy at Wittenberg. But his first appointment as a house tutor
at Dresden was obtained for him by Spener, who had lately become
the senior court chaplain there. Spener’s writings interested Arnold in
Pietism, and a correspondence between the two began in 1688 which led
to a close and lifelong acquaintance. Under Spener’s influence Arnold
became a Pietist and, when Arnold was again out of employment in 1693,
Spener once more found him a job in Quedlinburg.20
At this point, the beginning of the second phase of his career, it became
clear that Arnold was not going to become a second Francke. He fell
under the influence of mystic-spiritualism, became a radical critic of
the church, and rejected both the pastoral office and marriage. He also
revealed the historical learning that was the one positive thing he had
brought away from Wittenberg, reinforced now by patristic studies under
the influence of the Anglican, William Cave. But while Cave embodied the
Anglican quirk that the early church (or any other ecclesiastical exemplar)
bore a curious resemblance to the Church of England, Arnold derived
from the apostolic age the ideal of a Christian community without cler-
ical hierarchy, prescriptive doctrine or liturgy, without church buildings.
It was the time of the first love, the priesthood of all believers, the time
almost obliterated by the alliance with the state in the time of Constantine
which seemed so splendid to Cave.
The reputation of Arnold’s historical writings at this time secured him
an invitation to a chair at the pietistic university of Giessen, and led rapidly
to his most famous work, the massive Impartial History of Churches and
Heretics (1699–1700). This, perhaps the most influential work of church
history ever written, was not so much impartial as undenominational; its
object was succinctly described in the title of a later work, the History and
Description of the Mystical Theology or Secret Divinity, and of the Ancient and
Modern Mystics (1703), a book he himself described as ‘more an intro-
duction to the true knowledge and love of the invisible God than to mere
historical scholarship’.21 The venture to Giessen, however, had begun
dubiously with an inaugural ‘De corrupto historiarum studio’, and ended
20 On the peculiarities of Quedlinburg see J. B. Neveux, Vie Spirituelle et Vie Sociale entre
Rhin et Baltique au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1967), p. 12.
21 Gottfried Arnold, Historie und Beschreibung der mystischen Theologie oder geheimen Gottes-
gelehrtheit wie auch alten and neuen Mysticorum (Frankfurt, 1703), Preface, n.p.
six months later with Arnold’s resignation and return to Quedlinburg.

The Abomination of Desolation (Dan. 9:27; Mark 13:14) had risen to
such a point that flight from Babel was the only option; moreover, the
love of God and the denial of self which were the essence of the mystic
way required him to sell his books and forsake any pretence to literary
reputation.
Nevertheless he went on writing in much the same vein; he married in
1701 (the radical Gichtel affirming sagely that ‘Eve and Sophia could not
stand on the same ground’),22 and he took church office as royal Prussian
Inspector of Perleburg. Yet Arnold was hardly a renegade; like so many
of the mystics he had doubts about his guidance, and as a mystic he was
prepared to sacrifice to God even his separatist and individualist piety.
The ultimate freedom of the children of God was to bear institutional
churchmanship as a cross for the sake of weaker brethren, though not
of course to live by it. In its highly individual way Arnold’s course had
mirrored that of the Central European radicals as a whole.
Radical mysticism
Contemporaries insisted that there had always been a difference between
the church Pietists and the separatists and coined a variety of terms of
abuse to define it. On the one hand there were the moderate or ‘subtle’
Pietists; on the other the ‘hyper’ Pietists, enthusiasts or fanatics. Nor was
this emotive but hazy distinction improved on by the second distinction
between Pietists orthodox and Pietists heterodox. But the radicals, who
included remnants of the old anti-war protesters, Behmenists and critics
who despaired of the possibility of improvement in the church, tended to
come much more into the open with the rise of Spener in the Lutheran
and of Undereyck23 in the Reformed churches. Radical propaganda came
in not only from the United Provinces, but from the tiny principality of
Offenbach, which afforded a safe haven for radicals like Johann Heinrich
Reitz (1655–1720) and Heinrich Horche (1652–1729), and where a radi-
cal German press was established under a printer of Huguenot descent.24
Both the temper and the doctrine of the radicals began to change.
Behmenism became much more important than before. Gichtel pro-
duced the first Böhme edition in Amsterdam in 1682 and the works
of the English Behmenists, Jane Leade, Pordage and Bromley, so much
22 Erich Seeberg, Gottfried Arnold. Die Wissenschaft und die Mystik seiner Zeit. Studien zur
Historiographie und zur Mystik, 2nd edn (Darmstadt, 1964), p. 6.
23 On whom see further below in ch. 4.
24 On the radical press see Hans-Jürgen Schrader, Literaturproduktion und Büchermarkt des
radikalen Pietismus (Göttingen, 1989).
more comprehensible than Böhme himself, exercised enormous influ-

ence. There is no question but that to the radical mind the late 1690s
appeared to be an era of terrible break-up. Böhme might be obscure
but he spoke to just such a time, and offered it a deep speculative
understanding.
The other conventional response to such a time was apocalyptic; this
had played a small part in Böhme himself, but was very prominent in
the English Behmenists. Radical Pietism was strong among the social
groups that suffered in the later seventeenth century, and the apocalyptic
readings of the Thirty Years War were given a new twist by the widely
circulated writings of Bohemian and Moravian exiles, especially Drabik
and Comenius. The two great apocalyptic bogeys since the Reformation
had been the Turks and the Papacy. The Turks now appeared before
Vienna, and the Pope’s ally Louis XIV, not content with wreaking havoc
among the Huguenots and among the apocalyptically inspired rebels in
the Cévennes, was wielding the mailed fist in the west of the Empire
with scant regard to the guarantees to Protestants given in the Westphalia
settlements. The radical Pietists Horche and Reitz had had their fill of
these trials in the Palatinate. The Great Northern War with its threat to
the old saviour of German Protestantism, the Swedish monarchy, was
also bound to evoke apocalyptic speculation. Add to all this that the
church pietists were not delivering much of their programme of reform,
that they were subject to violent attacks by the Orthodox, that in 1697
Reitz, Philipp Jakob Dilthey and Horche were all dismissed from office,
and it is not surprising that Spener’s postponement of the apocalypse lost
its charm, or that Arnold could see no future in the church.
Both before and after the Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie Arnold was set-
ting forth not merely the historical pedigree of the mystical theology, but
the mystical theology itself; indeed, his History of Mystical Theology was
bound up with a Defence of the Mystical Theology. The reason for the con-
stant persecution of true believers was the fall of the church which was
complete by the time of Constantine. At both ends his study witnessed
to his special point of view. He was learned in patristic studies, but was
bound to see things going wrong at an early date, because the great word
mysticus or mysteriosus signified something arcane, secret and concealed.
In the precise sense the mystical theology concerned the vision of God, or
the most inward and essential union of the soul with God in which it sees
and enjoys God beyond all sensual perception and imagination. More
generally the word ‘mystical’ applied to the spiritual interior life (i.e., in
the real sense to active Christianity) as contrasted with spiritually out-
ward and sensual things. It meant especially the exposition of the veiled
spiritual sense of Scripture as distinct from its literal and historical sense.
The decline of the early church meant eventually that the Scripture was
further veiled by a great admixture of Aristotelian and Platonic doctrine
in the scholastic theology.
At the other end, Parts II, III and IV of the Unpartheyische Historie are
very heavily weighted in favour of the persecuted and disadvantaged of the
seventeenth century, Anabaptists, Socinians, Jansenists, Jews, atheists.
Spiritualists, Quakers, Behmenists, Quietists (and Poiret), not to men-
tion medical exponents of Paracelsianism, and many women, especially
visionaries. With the perspective of the modern end of the story so heavily
weighted in this direction Luther gets relatively short shrift. Finally the
story is brought to an end in 1688, presumably because Arnold expected
the historical process to be wound up at any time thereafter. For Arnold
did not have any sense of history as development – he divided his nar-
rative by centuries – and put all the weight on individual psychology. In
this respect he was an innovator; he was also unusual in that he was, in
addition to his other gifts, a lyric poet of merit; and he anticipated what
became a well-established pattern among the remaining radical Pietists
later in the eighteenth century, in that his principal monument was a
literary achievement.25
Pierre Poiret
Arnold’s return, however unreconstructed, to institutional Christianity
was prophetic of the sudden collapse of radical Pietism, and so was the
place allotted in his pedigree of the true believers to the Carmelites and
the Quietists. It was not so much Arnold who brought them back into
Protestant circulation as another true believer whom he admired, Pierre
Poiret (1646–1719). Poiret was born and educated in Metz and, after a
brief period as a language teacher in Alsace, studied theology at Basel from
1664 to 1667, and in 1672 became pastor of a French Reformed con-
gregation at Annweiler in the Palatinate. Poiret, however, soon changed
course. He early attempted a defence of Christianity on Cartesian lines,
25 This account is based on Arnold’s Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (Frank-

furt, 1699–1700); his Das Leben der Gläubigen (Halle, 1701); the edns of his Historie und
Beschreibung der mystischen Theologie (Frankfurt 1703 and Leipzig 1738); Seeberg, Got-
tfried Arnold; Jürgen Büchsel, Gottfried Arnold: sein Verständnis von Kirche und Wiederge-
burt (Witten, 1970); Hans Schneider in Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, pp. 410–
16. On the location of the Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie in ecclesiastical historiography,
see Klaus Wetzel, Theologische Kirchengeschichtsschreibung im deutschen Protestantismus,
1660–1760 (Giessen, 1983), pp. 175–209. For Arnold’s correspondence see Jürgen
Büchsel and Dietrich Blaufuss, ‘Gottfried Arnolds Briefwechsel: erste Bestandauf-
nahme’, in FS E. Beyreuther, Pietismus – Herrnhütertum – Erweckungsbewegung,
ed. D. Meyer (Cologne and Bonn, 1982), pp. 71–107.
but almost from the beginning gave up this style of reasoning as hopeless.
And having taken refuge in the United Provinces, he became involved
in controversy with a Huguenot, Pierre Jurieu, on the problem of con-
science faced by the Huguenots, and perpetually threatening all adherents
of the Reformed churches in the way of Louis XIV’s brutal drives to the
north-east.
Jurieu himself was not too distantly related to the Pietist outlook, being
the author of a successful Traité de la Dévotion (1675) and an advocate of
the praxis pietatis; but he was also an unyielding defender of the Huguenot
cause. The more desperate that cause became, the more Jurieu, a former
professor at the Protestant academy at Sedan, turned to apocalyptic for
encouragement. He looked to the collapse of the French church and the
conversion of Louis XIV himself to Protestantism within three years;
after Jurieu’s death his widow joined the French Prophets in England.26
Poiret’s ‘charitable advice’ to Huguenots exposed to compulsory conver-
sion was, on the other hand, to adapt to Catholic worship.27 Confessional
hostility was not the will of God; the essence of the faith was love of God
and denial of self; enough had already been sacrificed on the altar of
Reformed shibboleths. This argument (quite apart from the fact that
Poiret was in touch with J. J. Schütz, the leader of the secession in the
Frankfurt collegium pietatis) was sufficient to turn Spener against him;
and it showed the turn in Poiret’s thought which brought him close to
Gottfried Arnold.
As much as Jurieu, Poiret believed that the Last Judgement was immi-
nent, but the conclusion he drew was that Christians should strip down
their religious practice to the bare essentials, the love of God and the
denial of self, the ‘true Christianity’ which was independent of eccle-
siastical pretensions and conflicts. Nevertheless Poiret’s chief work, the
Divine Oeconomy, is anything but a lean and pared-down intellectual cre-
ation.28 It offers a complete sketch of Heilsgeschichte from the creation
of the world to the Second Coming with appropriate philosophical and
theological reflections. The date of the great event Poiret thought was
incalculable, for (in the quaint language of his English translator) ‘God
26 On this controversy see F. R. J. Knetsch, ‘Pierre Poiret und sein Streit mit Pierre Jurieu
über das Verhalten der Opfer der Zwangsbekehrungen in Frankreich nach der Aufhebung
des Edikts von Nantes’, in J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), Pietismus und
Reveil (Leiden, 1978), pp. 182–91.
27 P. Poiret, Avis charitable pour soulanger la conscience de ceux qui sont obligez de se conformer
au culte de l’église Catholique-Romaine . . . (1686), repr. in his La Paix de bonnes âmes dans
tous les Parties du Christianisme sur les Matières de religion . . . (Amsterdam, 1687).
28 P. Poiret, L’Oeconomie divine ou système universel et démontré des oeuvres et des dessins de
Dieu envers les hommes, 7 vols. (Amsterdam, 1687); Eng. tr. Divine Oeconomy, 6 vols.
(London, 1713).
purposely hid it from men, to keep ’em continually upon the Watch, and
from falling into security.’29 But the devil found means to make
these truths pass for ridiculous stories, and for Errours, and those that hold them
for Hereticks, and thus they are presently called Chiliasts or Millenaries, an odd
whimsical sort of people, and he has besotted most men to such a degree that
they foolishly go about to measure the greatness and magnificence of God’s works
by their own shallow apprehensions, and the silly and pedantick notions of the
schools.30
Like Arnold, Poiret believed that ‘true Christianity’ had not survived
in the church after primitive times, and that the total fall of the church
system had been completed under Constantine. The true practice had
survived among those who had left the fleshpots for the wilderness, the
hermits, Makarius the Egyptian and the like. Poiret and Arnold between
them put Makarius in the forefront of the Protestant discovery of the
mystics, and from the radicals of the Wetterau to Wesley and Law he
had his effect.31 Poiret’s Divine Oeconomy also left its mark in another
direction. The key assumption in the theosophies of the previous century
had been that there were correspondences between the microcosm, man,
and the macrocosm, the universe at large. What Poiret here achieved was
a synthesis between this kind of German theosophy and mostly Latin
mysticism, a bond between the individual seeking perfection within and
the cosmos without. This aspiration persisted; Oetinger and Baader32
were its most celebrated exponents in Germany, but there were also Saint-
Martin33 and various romantics in France. More immediately Poiret was
of service to others like Thomasius,34 the celebrated humanist of Halle,
who were trying to get round the religious conflicts of the period from
their own points of view.35
Poiret’s turn to the Latin mystics was brought about by his connexion
with Schütz and the schismatic members of Spener’s collegium pietatis,
known from their meeting-place as the Saalhof Pietists, who were also
connected with the Labadists. (Penn preached to them in the course
29 Divine Oeconomy, IV, pp. 248–9. 30 Ibid, IV, pp. 252–3.

31 Ernst Benz, Die Protestantische Thebais. Zur Nachwirkung Makarius des Aegypters im Protes-
tantismus des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts (Wiesbaden, 1963). For Poiret’s direct influence
on the English and Scottish mystics see Stephen Hobhouse, ‘Fides et Ratio. The Book
Which Introduced Boehme to William Law’, Journal of Theological Studies 37 (1936)
350–68, esp. 352–4.
32 B. F. X. von Baader (1765–1841), philosopher, Roman Catholic lay theologian and
scientist.
33 Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), called ‘the unknown philosopher’.
34 Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), jurist and exponent of natural law doctrine.
35 Antoine Faivre, Mystiques, Théosophes et Illuminés au Siècle des Lumières (Hildesheim,
1976), pp. 192–3, 229–30.
of recruiting for his American colony.) From this quarter in December

1675 Poiret received a present of Antoinette Bourignon’s book The Tomb
of False Theology. Poiret could hardly have made contact with a more reso-
lute group of aspirants to sanctity, and the contact changed the direction
of his life. He became convinced that the church was a Babel beyond
redemption, resolved to resign his clerical office, and, in the interests
of personal salvation, went off to Amsterdam to meet the prophetess
Bourignon herself. She persuaded him to give up philosophy and secular
scholarship and follow her teaching alone. Poiret was in a mood to prefer
experience to doctrine, but was in practice not able to forswear the intel-
lectual categories in which his mind had been shaped.36 His contact with
her was brief for in 1680 she died. It then became Poiret’s life-mission
to publish her works in nineteen volumes, including biographical and
apologetic material of his own on a very large scale.
Antoinette Bourignon
Antoinette Bourignon (1616–80) was as sad a case as Mme Guyon later,
and attracted the derision of Pierre Bayle. There is no consensus about
her among the modern commentators. They have seen her variously as
a sorry remnant of a dying race of wandering visionaries, a prophet of
a rationalistic approach to the Bible, the pathetic result of allowing an
untutored woman to interpret doctrine, or even as a prophetic mother-
figure.37 What remains mysterious is the capacity of a woman whose doc-
trine was inconsistent and whose personal relations were unpredictable to
acquire devoted followers who included some sensible people, not least
Poiret himself. That she said some things that some people wanted to
hear, such as that the church was a Babel and that family life could be
an oppressive fraud, does not go far towards revealing the secret of her
appeal.
Born in Lille, then a flourishing town with a vigorous local mysticism,
Bourignon was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of Italian descent
and a mother of Flemish extraction. She was born disfigured with black
hair down to her eyes, and with her upper lip attached to her nose. The
latter defect was put right by surgery, but her mother rejected her (as
36 On this see Gustav A. Krieg, Der mystische Kreis. Wesen und Werden der Theologie Pierre
Poirets (Göttingen, 1976), p. 223.
37 The fullest modern treatment is in Marthe van der Does, Antoinette Bourignon 1616–
1680: La vie et l’oeuvre d’une Mystique chrétienne (Amsterdam, 1974). An interpreta-
tion based on it is Phyllis Mack, ‘Die Prophetin als Mutter: Antoinette Bourignon’, in
Hartmut Lehmann and Anne-Charlott Trepp (eds.), Im Zeichen der Krise. Im Europa des
17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1999), pp. 79–100.
she also rejected a later sister). She made a congenial milieu for herself
by immersing herself in the lives of the saints and the history of early
Christianity. This escape was continually barred by the family and church
authority. They opposed her wish to enter a Carmelite convent; she had
visions that she should seek God in the wilderness, and in 1636 did in fact
light out ahead of a marriage arranged for her by her father. This time she
was sent home by the authority of the Bishop of Cambrai. In the 1640s
she took to writing hymns, two of which fetched up in Wesley’s collection
(and survived in successive English Methodist hymnbooks until recent
times). On the death of her father in 1646 she came into a considerable
fortune, which enabled her in 1648 to found a home for young girls under
her own direction. After a few years, however, reports that the girls were
all demon-possessed brought in the police, and at the trial in 1662 there
was evidence against her of physical and mental abuse; all the minors in
her care were set free. She herself had to flee.
For a few years she actually became a wandering prophetess, and an
attempt to gather a community of aspirants to Christian perfection on the
island of Nordstrand did not last long. She died in 1680, according to
Poiret, ‘the purest soul since Jesus was on earth’. Odd though Bourignon’s
personality was, her doctrine was still odder. Though generally classified
among the Quietists, she still had an animus against organised religion
which was not usual among them; the church, she held, was the Baby-
lonian whore, nor were other institutions much better, for the end of all
things was imminent. She had a view of the Trinity peculiar to herself;
Christ was the first man who brought forth Adam and was born a sec-
ond time through Mary. Sacraments were of no value to the regener-
ate. Contemporaries were as divided as the modern critics. She was sus-
pect to Roman Catholics and condemned by the Church of Scotland in
1710. Her writings were condemned by Quakers and Pietists, sympathet-
ically received by Philadelphians and Swedenborgians. Wesley included
her Traité de la Solide Vertu in his Christian Library. More immediately,
she set Poiret on his life’s course, beginning with the publication of her
works.
Poiret as a publisher of mystical texts

It may be, as Ernst Schering suggests, that Poiret’s hitherto chequered
course had been an effort to find peace of soul through the pursuit of
knowledge: that when his pastorate failed, he tried Cartesianism, and
when that failed he turned to the mystic way. He himself never had
the experience of melting into God. He certainly wanted a union of
knowledge and experience, but it was to be a union with God’s true

being and will. What he was seeking was the knowledge that corresponded
inwardly to the mystical experience. It should be possible to distil the psy-
chology of mysticism into theological propositions. At any rate Poiret’s
unique contribution to Protestant spirituality was to make the first-
hand literature of Catholic mysticism available again on an unparalleled
scale.38
One of Poiret’s early ventures in this direction was to publish the life
of Armelle Nicolas written by the Ursuline Johanna. Armelle was an
illiterate peasant girl who, precisely because of her educational handi-
caps, knew nothing of religious conflicts or theological speculations, and
thus became in Poiret’s view ‘a pattern of informative instruction’. As his
introductions to mystical writers of mostly romance origins multiplied, it
became plain that Poiret had become a Quietist himself, having grasped
the core principle that this kind of mysticism was altogether voluntarist.
He held that there were two chief forces in the soul, the understanding and
the will. The former might permit a few elect souls to achieve union with
God through visions, raptures or ecstasy – at, of course, the unacceptable
risk of untold diabolical illusions. What he now saw as the ‘true mystical
theology’ was ‘voluntarist and consists in purifying the heart from pride
and love of created things and self, and being imbued completely with the
will of God’. This union with God achieved by a union of wills was not
capable of rational demonstration, but could be experienced in a pure
heart, a heart bent on following Jesus.
Poiret had thus arrived at the Quietist prescription of the emptying
and crucifixion of the self; this was at once a presupposition of valid
religious experience and a recognisable fruit of faith.39 The curiosity of
this somewhat bleak doctrine in Poiret’s case was that it was so often
stated in defence of persecuted women as to achieve a somewhat libera-
tionist effect. Since the veneration of saints had died out in Protestantism,
male punditry had reigned unchecked in matters of doctrine; now, in an
almost Arnoldian way, the pattern of ‘true Christianity’40 was discovered
in harassed females.
38 Ernst Schering, ‘Pietismus und die Renaissance der Mystik. Pierre Poiret als Inter-
pret und Wegbereiter der romanischen Mystik in Deutschland’, in Meyer, Pietismus-
Herrnhutertum-Erweckungsbewegung, p. 51.
39 P. Poiret, La Théologie de l’Amour ou la vie et les oeuvres de Sainte Cathérine de Gênes
(Cologne, 1691), Preface.
40 For the title of his translation of the Theologie Deutsch (1700) Poiret adopted Real
Theology. His edition of the life of Wesley’s hero, the Marquis de Renty, was entitled
The True Christian (1701).
In Poiret’s later years no religious woman was more harassed, and

harassed in the full glare of Protestant publicity, than the celebrated
Mme Guyon whose story will engage us later. Suffice it now to say that
Poiret constituted himself a virtual counsel for the defence and ended
by producing a complete edition of her works as he had for Antoinette
Bourignon. This campaign elicited a warm expression of approval from
Mme Guyon herself,41 and brought Poiret into contact with her patron
Fénelon, the Chevalier Ramsay,42 and the group of Episcopalians from
north-east Scotland who gathered round her.43 The whole association
provided a touchstone as to how far Quietism might fulfil Arnoldian cri-
teria of ‘impartiality’.44 In fact, having brought about the conversion to
Rome of Ramsay, Mme Guyon’s secretary and his own disciple and future
biographer, Fénelon paid Poiret the compliment of assuming that he was
a far bigger fish in the Protestant pond than Ramsay, and attempting
to convert him too.45 In this exchange Fénelon attempted to persuade
Poiret that many of the mystical writers whom he loved were officially
commended by Roman Catholic authority, and (with scant foresight of
his own fate)46 that those who were condemned suffered for good reason;
Poiret, still convinced that the fall of Rome must come, softened only to
the extent of suggesting that judgement was providentially delayed in
order to permit mystics like Mme Guyon to complete their work. The
intervention of church authority in this case either prevented all parties
41 Mme J. B. de la Mothe Guyon, Lettres chrétiennes et spirituelles (London, 1767–8), IV,

p. 577.
42 On whom see G. D. Henderson, Chevalier Ramsay (Edinburgh, 1952).
43 On whom see G. D. Henderson (ed.), Mystics of the North-East (Aberdeen, 1934); W. R.
Ward, ‘Anglicanism and Assimilation; or Mysticism and Mayhem in the 18th Century’,
in W. M. Jacobs and Nigel Yates (eds.), Crown and Mitre (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 81–91.
44 There were times when the dévote Mme Guyon could sound very Arnoldian indeed: ‘The
establishment of all these ends [the conversion of sinners, etc.] which [Christ] proposed
in coming into the world, is effected by the apparent overthrow in that very structure
which in reality he would erect: for by means which seem to destroy his church, he
establishes it.’ The Exemplary Life of the pious Lady Guion, translated from . . . the original
French . . . (Dublin, 1775), p. 27.
45 For this affair and the surviving part of the correspondence see Jean Orcibal, ‘Une
controverse sur l’Église d’après une correspondance inédite entre Fénelon et Pierre
Poiret’, XVIIe Siècle 29 (1955), 396–430.
46 François de la Motte Fénelon (1631–1715), French theologian, was called by Louis XIV
to court in 1689 as tutor to the heir to the throne. Appointed Archbishop of Cambrai
in 1695, he seemed on the threshold of a brilliant career, but his connexion with Mme
Guyon was attacked by Bossuet and, despite his defence that views like hers had often
found acceptance in the church in the past, he was put down and silenced. The official
case against Quietism was and remains that the consequence of their self-abandonment
to God’s hands was the neglect of ordinary religious duties and an apologia for inaction.
J. Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A new view of the Counter-
Reformation (London, 1977), p. 54.
from yielding to their gentler feelings or brought to the surface the hard
rock of confessional differences.
Gerhard Tersteegen
If the defence of Bourignon and Guyon, the development of an interest
in Jakob Böhme and the publication of innumerable lives of the mystics
were not one life’s work enough, Poiret made two massive contributions
to the infrastructure of his theme: the collection of a great library of
mystical works, and the compilation of an index of mystical works almost
as complete as could be made at the time.47 The library passed to one
of Poiret’s disciples, Gerhard Tersteegen (1687–1769), who used it not
merely to continue the work of publication, but to sustain an independent
literary productivity, and to shape a mystical life so winsome as still to
attract disciples of his own.
Tersteegen was born at Moers in the north-west of the Empire while it
was still an Orange principality (it passed to Prussia in 1712). He grew up
with fluent Dutch and in later life regularly visited circles of his followers
there.48 Moers was a Reformed territory, and one of Tersteegen’s broth-
ers entered the ministry of the Reformed church; but it was surrounded
by Catholic lands belonging to the see of Cologne, and was always liable
to French invasion. Nearby the dependent lordship of Krefeld offered
an entirely opposed model of religious life. The town was active in the
history of both emigration and religious revival, partly because its Men-
nonite congregation, protected by both the Orange and the Hohenzollern
families, attracted Quakers, Baptists, Labadists, revivalists, visionaries
and sectaries of every kind. They formed a permanent opposition to the
official order in church and state, and one capable of exciting all the
towns in the Ruhr area. Their industries were said to recruit labour of a
higher intellectual calibre than the neighbouring countryside, and hence
to be susceptible to alternative religious appeals. And for a generation
the whole area had been worked over by revivalists like Hochmann von
Hochenau49 and Wilhelm Hoffmann. But there was in any case a long tra-
dition of artisan mysticism in this area, and already it possessed a degree
of organisation; for the area was full of class meetings. Some of these were
47 Printed in Max Wieser, Peter Poiret. Der Vater der romanischen Mystik in Deutschland
(Munich, 1932), pp. 226–38.
48 His Dutch correspondence is edited by Cornelis Pieter van Andel, Briefe in
niederländischer Sprache (Göttingen, 1982).
49 On whom see Heinz Renkewitz, Hochmann von Hochenau (1670–1721) (Witten, 1969).
Hochmann had given Francke trouble by holding ecstatic meetings in a private house
in Glaucha. Ryoko Mori, Begeisterung und Ernüchterung in christlicher Vollkommenheit
(Tübingen, 2004), pp. 225–39 passim.
part of the apparatus of the old Reformed church; some had been got up
in opposition to it by the Labadists, and some by the Reformed ministry
in competition with the Labadists. These meetings formed a constituency
when Tersteegen began to give himself to pastoral work, and eventually
drew him like a magnet into revivalism.50
From all this it is clear that Tersteegen fitted none of the standard
categories of the day or of our narrative so far. He was deeply indebted
to Poiret for inspiration and for the bequest of literary materials which
enabled him to put together his three huge volumes of Select Lives of
Holy Souls (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1733–54; 3rd edn Essen, 1784–6), thirty-
four lives, all of them Catholic and divided almost equally between
pre- and post-Reformation saints. This was an enormous contribution
towards continuing Poiret’s work of making the mystical literature avail-
able to the German and Protestant worlds; it neatly complemented one
of the standard Pietist compendia of mass biography, Reitz’s History of
the Regenerate.51 Yet confessional hostility even in the Rhineland made it
the most unsuccessful of Tersteegen’s major projects, even though he was
not a separatist in the sense that both Poiret and Reitz were.
He abstained from the sacraments, and appealed to a public that
wanted more than conformity. But his view was clear enough that ‘a
separatist can be or become a mystic, although a real mystic will not so
easily become a separatist: he has more important things to do. Mystical
theology is what we are accustomed to call among ourselves the interior
life or godliness of heart.’52 Those who argued in effect for open commu-
nion were apt to plead that Judas himself had received communion at the
hands of the Lord. Tersteegen’s reply, based on the words of institution
and John 13, was that Judas was admitted not to communion but to the
Passover. But his whole mission was devoted not to Babel-storming, but
to encouraging the practice of the presence of God. He did not hold his
house-meetings during the hours of church services, and in the long run
enormously enriched those services by his verse.
For like Arnold, but unlike Poiret, Tersteegen was a considerable poet
and a prolific one. He took over the Big Neander hymnbook, trebled
50 For Tersteegen see Max Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens in der rheinisch-
westphälischen evangelischen Kirche (Coblenz, 1849–52), III, pp. 289–438; Cornelis Pieter
van Andel, Gerhard Tersteegen. Leben und Werk – sein Platz in der Kirchengeschichte, German
edn (Düsseldorf, 1973); Brecht, Geschichte des Pietismus, II, pp. 390–410. There are
brief introductions by myself in FS John Walsh, Revival and Religion Since 1700, ed. Jane
Garnett and Colin Matthew (London, 1993), pp. 41–58; Christianity under the Ancien
Régime, 1648–1789 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 25–6, 128–30; The Protestant Evangelical
Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 232–7.
51 Johann Heinrich Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen . . . 5th edn (Berleburg, 1724).
52 Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens, III, p. 289.
its size (with, among others, 100 hymns of his own) and became one
of the most numerously represented hymn-writers in the books of the
Lutheran churches with which he never had any connexion. How quickly
Tersteegen’s influence began to spread beyond his constrained immedi-
ate circumstances is illustrated by the case of John Wesley. On his way
to Georgia in 1735 Wesley had to teach himself German from the only
available text-book, the Moravian hymnbook. The fruit of his labour was
in part realised in translations of thirty-three German hymns of varied
provenance;53 two of these were by Tersteegen, including the most pop-
ular hymn he ever wrote, Gott ist gegenwärtig; in Wesley’s version,
Lo, God is here! Let us adore,
And own how dreadful is this place!
This hymn has not only stood its ground against all the subsequent
changes of fashion, but perfectly encapsulates Tersteegen’s reply to both
the early Enlightenment which seemed to be exiling God from his uni-
verse, and the physico-theologians who could only bring Him back at the
end of a long argument.
Besides endless spiritual biography, Tersteegen also produced spiritual
verse, his Blumengärtlein, or Little Spiritual Flower Garden of Interior Souls
going through seven editions in his lifetime (and getting bigger all the
while) and at least thirty in all. The list of his work published posthu-
mously occupies a page and a half of print,54 including two major cat-
egories that were major tools of his pastoral and evangelistic work, his
correspondence and his Spiritual Addresses,55 which show him to have
been perhaps the best Bible expositor for a class meeting or revival there
has ever been.
In this last achievement there is an element of paradox. Tersteegen’s
outlook was based throughout on the contrast between interior and exte-
rior. The interior world was the world in which the relationship with God
was forged and hopefully consummated. Adam’s sin had been that he
had forfeited his relationship with God for the sake of exterior things.
Tersteegen was not optimistic about the external world, which might at
any time fall victim to the French if not to concupiscence from within.
Suffering was to be expected, indeed welcomed, for it was one of the
means which a Suffering Lord used to purify his followers; the redemp-
tive possibilities of suffering were one of the things that drew Tersteegen
53 John L. Nuelson, John Wesley and the German Hymn (Calverley, 1972).
54 In Hansgünter Ludewig, Gebet und Gotteserfahrung bei Gerhard Tersteegen (Göttingen,
1986), pp. 325–36. The book itself offers a useful if rather mechanical treatment of its
main theme.
55 Geistliche Reden, I, ed. A. Löschhorn and W. Zeller (Göttingen, 1979).
to Mme Guyon. The essence of the Christian faith for Tersteegen as

for Poiret was the love of God (the interior value) and the denial of self
(the exterior value), and in Tersteegen’s case this formula was not as
self-centred as it sounds; for part of the object in accepting an extremely
straitened life-style was to ensure that there would always be food and
medical assistance for the needy who queued at his door. He knew that
the poor would always be with us; the sufferings he shared with them
would not cure an insoluble social problem, but could redeem the denial
of self to the greater love of God.
When the inner man had been radically purified by this treatment, when
there was nothing left within but the vision of God, actual union with
God could take place. Because of the supreme importance of this inner
transaction institutional religion was really an irrelevance; Tersteegen did
not try to provide an alternative to a decayed church by organising a pure
sect. Yet in the end Tersteegen admitted that there were external helps to
enable frail men to tread their thorny path. The chief of these (and here
his Reformed heritage appears) were the Scriptures which he expounded
with such effect; but even the church might be regarded as a prop to the
weak. Without being anti-clerical (though he did not care for the Papacy)
Tersteegen shared Arnold’s view that church history was primarily a story
of the saints. And certainly the Christian should not lightly break with
the fellowship in which he was born and brought up. In God’s eyes there
were only two parties, the children of this world and the children of God
in whose hearts the love of God was poured out through the Holy Spirit.
Mercifully some of the latter were to be found in every communion.
Tersteegen had, however, put two question-marks against the early
parameters of the evangelical movement. Spener and his followers had
put off the Last Days until the middle distance. Tersteegen would occa-
sionally threaten the unconverted with the unscheduled Second Coming,
in almost the old Orthodox manner. But in his general theology, even in
what he had to say about death, eschatology played almost no role.56
How could it while the interior life was the scene of the crucial drama?
And as for mysticism, he blurted out what had been implicit in his work
and that of Poiret from the beginning: ‘I must openly say, that the works
of love, mortification, self-denial, and, in a word, discipleship of Christ,
are more strenuously pursued among the mystics of the Roman churches,
than among us Protestants.’57 The attempt to propagate meditation, even
56 Van Andel, Gerhard Tersteegen, p. 147.
57 Ibid., p. 163. Cf. Mme Guyon: ‘Someone asked Mme Guyon why so few saints were
found among Protestants, while there was so large a number among Catholics. She
replied, “It is because Protestants lack any focus of subordination, and everyone behaves
according to his own frame of mind.”’ J. F. von Fleischbein, quoted in Marie-Louise
Gondal, Madame Guyon (1648–1717). Un nouveau visage (Paris, 1989), p. 65.
mysticism, in a Protestant milieu had not been without its effect; but it
had never achieved the critical impetus which would enable it to make its
way independently of what happened to the mysticism of the Catholic
world that he and Poiret had done so much to open up. What hap-
pened to Catholic mysticism is our next inquiry, and it went far to justify
Tersteegen’s suspicions of the Papacy.
Molinism
For, quite largely under French pressure, a series of Popes in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made successive condemna-
tions of Jansenism and Quietism which confirmed the worst suspicions
of Protestants. Not that there was any great resemblance between the
two currents of opinion, nor very great consistency between what either
stood for over periods of time. The Jansenists had a programme for church
reform, and underpinned it by a strenuous spiritual programme in which
they reopened, in their own Catholic way, many of the questions which
had been taken up by the early Protestant reformers. Their Augustini-
anism led them to stress the great gap between the righteous God and
sinful mankind, and to pore over the mystery of grace. The Quietists
were Augustinians too, but envisaged a different Augustine; whereas the
Jansenists looked to grace to bridge the dualism between God and men,
the Quietist ideal was to restore the lost unity between man and his
Creator. Where the Jansenists were full of Christology, the Quietists
talked about creation; if Jesus appeared it was as the great model of child-
like abandonment to the will of the Father which formed the core of their
spirituality.
And whereas Augustine or Thomas, or even the Jansenists, could look
to the transformation of the creature by grace, to Fénelon or Mme Guyon
whatever in a man or woman was not ‘pure will’, ‘pure love’, must be
annihilated, must be replaced by the ultimate reality, the will of God,
obedience to which was the beginning and end of all spiritual life.58
Whatever their differences, however, Jansenist and Quietist were equally
anti-Jesuit, and each came under the hammer clearly because they chal-
lenged the dominant character imparted to the Counter-Reformation by
the Jesuit order. The early evangelicals were much more interested in
the Quietists than the Jansenists, but could not fail to be affected by the
general Protestant reaction to the condemnations of both.
58 Henk Hillenaar, ‘L’Augustinisme de Fénelon face à l’Augustinisme des Jansénistes’,

in Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, ed. H. Lehmann, Heinz Schilling, H.-J. Schrader
(Göttingen, 2002), pp. 40–53, here 41.
The tone was set at the beginning by the commentary of Gilbert

Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury, on the imprisonment of Miguel de
Molinos (1628–1717) even before his condemnation.59
The new method of Molino’s doth so much prevail in Naples, that it is believed
he hath above twenty thousand followers in this City; and since this hath made
some noise in the world . . . I will give you some account of him: He is a Spanish
priest that seems to be but an ordinary divine, and is certainly a very ill reasoner
when he undertakes to prove his opinions: He hath writ a book, which is intituled,
Il Guida Spirituale, which is a short abstract of the mystical divinity; the substance
of the whole is reduced to this, that in our prayers and other devotions, the best
methods are to retire the mind from all gross images, and so form an act of faith,
and thereby to present ourselves before God; and then sink into a silence and
cessation of new acts, and to let God act upon us, and so to follow his conduct.
This way he prefers to the multiplication of many new acts, and different forms
of devotion and he makes small account of corporal austerities, and reduces all
the exercises of religion to this simplicity of mind: He thinks this is not only to
be proposed to such as lie in religious houses, but even to secular persons, and
by this he hath proposed a great reformation of men’s minds and manners: He
hath many priests in Italy, but chiefly in Naples, that dispose those who confess
themselves to them, to follow his methods: The Jesuits have set themselves much
against this conduct, as foreseeing that it may much weaken the empire that
superstition hath over the minds of the people, that it may make religion become
a more plain and simple thing, and may also open a door to enthusiasms: they also
pretend that his conduct is factious and seditious that this may breed a schism
in the Church . . . [and because he says that the mind may in some devotions
rise to God immediately] without contemplating the humanity of Christ, they
have accused him as intending to lay aside the doctrine of Christ’s humanity,
tho it is plain that he speaks only of the purity of some single acts . . . Yet he
was much supported in the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily; he hath also many
friends and followers at Rome. So the Jesuits, as a provincial of the Order assured
me, finding that they could not ruin him by their own force, got a great King
[Louis XIV] that is extreamly in the interests of their Order to interpose, and to
represent to the Pope the danger of such innovations. It seems certain the Pope
understands the matter very little, and that he is possessed with a great opinion
of Molino’s sanctity, yet upon the complaints of some cardinals that seconded
the zeal of the King, he and some of his followers were clapt in the Inquisition,
where they have now been for some months . . .
In 1687 sixty-eight propositions from his works were condemned, and

Molinos remained in prison for the rest of his life.
59 G. Burnet, Some letters containing an account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland,
Italy &c. (Amsterdam, 1686), pp. 197–9. This account was updated for English readers
in M. Molinos, The Spiritual Guide, which Disentangles the Soul, and brings it by the inward
Way to the getting of perfect Contemplation, and the rich Treasure of internal Peace. Also the
substance of several letters sent from Italy concerning the Quietists (n.pl., 1699), pp. 167–80.
The condemnation of Molinos was immediately coupled with the first

episcopal condemnations of Mme Guyon, and an even greater stir was
created by the contests in which her patron and defender, Fénelon,
Archbishop of Cambrai, became involved. His high-profile conflict with
Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, supported by all the forces of the French
court, ended in 1699 with Innocent XII’s brief Cum alias condemning
twenty-three propositions drawn from Fénelon’s Explication des maximes
des saints (1697). The politics of this contest were clear at the time, and
have been laboriously elucidated by subsequent scholarship.60 Bossuet
was an avowed Aristotelian and Hobbesian on the make; Fénelon, a gen-
teel anti-Jansenist, ought to have been safe, but felt dedicated to speak
against the corruption that had got in French political life and was unwill-
ing to abandon Mme Guyon to a witch-hunt. Moreover in the Protestant
world it was believed that more than politics was at stake. Many believed
Fénelon’s defence that he held no views which had not been held by
approved church sources in the past. And in any case the intellectual
issues raised by the questions of pure love and annihilation of self had
been widely aired in the controversies to which Antoinette Bourignon
had given rise, and rehashed in scholarly reviews such as the Acta
Eruditorum.61
All the more shocking therefore when the brief Cum alias condemned
the idea of pure love devoid of all self-interest, hope of reward and fear
of punishment, and with it the idea of a habitual state of sublime con-
templation, innocent of the exercise of virtue. It was small wonder that
Gottfried Arnold at this point gave up his chair at Giessen to retire to
Quedlinburg to cultivate Quietistic mysticism away from the world, to
put the Quietist works into German (along with the classics of Theresa
of Ávila and John of the Cross) and to venerate Molinos as the type of per-
secuted witness to the truth.62 But while Protestant and especially proto-
evangelical writers wrote excitedly about the Quietist questions, Fénelon
submitted at once. One of the consequences of his condemnation was that
Catholic theologians were not able to take up the question of pure love
again.
60 Especially by Raymond Schmittlein, L’Aspect Politique du Différend Bossuet-Fénelon (Bade,

1954).
61 On this see Jacques Le Brun, ‘Echos en pays germaniques de la querelle du pur
amour’, in Lehmann et al., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, pp. 76–91; see also
H. Heppe, Geschichte der quietistischen Mystik in der katholischen Kirche (Berlin, 1975;
repr. Hildesheim, 1978), pp. 490–506.
62 His Molinos edition was very successful, being printed at least three times in his lifetime,
and twice more afterwards.
Mme Guyon
There remained Mme Guyon (1648–1717), persevering in a life of almost
unrelieved tragedy. Born Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe to well-to-do
parents, both of whom were in their second marriage, she was married at
fifteen to a man of thirty-seven, and at twenty-eight was left a widow with
three children. They, however, were the least of her troubles. M. Guyon
had, not surprisingly, been perplexed by a wife who in 1672 contracted a
spiritual marriage with the child Jesus, and endeavoured within marriage
to live the religious life in the technical sense; and after his death his
family did not take to the idea that the disinterested love of God justified
her abandonment of her children. If she took refuge in the reconstructed
diocese of Geneva, where the bishop was trying to convert Huguenots
and educate ‘new Catholics’, she found him unwilling to add a nest of
Quietists to his burdens. If she migrated to Paris there was more trouble,
violent attacks from Bossuet, and prison sentences (including a spell in
the Bastille); appeals to the king’s consort, Mme de Maintenon, who was
in the thick of the Quietist witchhunt, of course did not help.
But the big game in this contest was Fénelon; and in 1701, three years
after his condemnation, the French hierarchy decided there was no point
in imprisoning Mme Guyon further, and she soon settled in pious retreat
near Blois until her death in 1717. Here she regarded herself as a model
Catholic, communicating every three days, but execrated by conservative
Catholic opinion down to recent times.63 All the more remarkable that
she was immortalised (or embalmed) in a monster edition of her works
in thirty-nine volumes by Peter Poiret; that Tersteegen was her most dis-
tinguished adept (though he never got round to including her among his
Select Lives); that one of the curious images of the early eighteenth century
is of the elderly Mme Guyon holding court to Protestant episcopalian
Jacobites from the north-east of Scotland;64 that her letters, including
secret correspondence with Fénelon, should be published in England in
five volumes as late as 1767–8;65 that an English version of her Life should
appear at Dublin in 1775, complete with her most Arnoldian and anti-
institutional view of the church66 – ‘The establishment of all those ends
[the conversion of sinners &c.] which [Christ] proposed in coming into
63 A recent Carmelite writer has pointed out that only her Short and very easy method of
prayer (1685) suffered serious condemnation. Giovanna della Croce, Gerhard Tersteegen.
Neubelebung der Mystik als Ansatz einer kommenden Spiritualität (Bern, 1979), p. 124.
64 G. D. Henderson, Mystics of the North-East (Aberdeen, 1934).
65 Mme J. M. B. de la Mothe Guion, Lettres Chrétiennes et spirituelles sur divers sujets qui
regardent la vie intérieure ou l’esprit du vrai Christianisme (London, 1767–8).
66 The Exemplary Life of the pious Lady Guion . . . For the quotation see above, n. 44.
the world, is effected by the apparent overthrow in that very structure

which in reality he would erect: for by means which seem to destroy his
church, he establishes it’ – and was bowdlerised by Wesley himself in the
following year.67
Clearly much of Mme Guyon’s appeal rested on her role as a perse-
cuted witness of the truth, for the influential portion of her literary corpus
was quite small – The short and very easy method of prayer (1685), Spiritual
Torrents (1688), and her posthumously published Life – and not particu-
larly distinctive. God enjoyed perfect rest in himself and rejoiced in the
contemplation of his own beauty and glory. It was to share this joy that
he had created man for himself. The great grace of creation was not that
it was created out of nothing, but that man, being created in the image
of God’s son, must, like him, be the object of God’s perfect love, and
framed to enter God’s perfect rest. The highest stage of the life of prayer
was the wordless prayer of the heart, the pure effect of the spirit of God
within.
There was no single route to this state of grace, but Spiritual Torrents
envisaged three general stages of the spiritual pilgrimage. The first was
not specially passive: it embraced the active pursuit of religious truths,
strictness of life, and the exercise of works of mercy. The end-product
would be a religious life based on rule and method, not unlike that
of the young Wesleys. But some would penetrate by passive contem-
plation to the second stage, where they would be joined by those who
from the beginning had had the spirit of God in their hearts, with-
out recognising what the object of their love was. For the distinction
between divine and human love was that the latter was directed to exter-
nal things, while the former could be found within in the recognition of
the grace upon grace, the gift upon gift, which God had granted. In the
third stage, reached by some elect souls, God himself revealed within the
believer the distance separating him from the object of his desire; and
God finally ended the confusion and anxiety caused by this discovery
by revealing that the treasure sought by the believer was indeed within
him and not far away where he had sought it. Ecstatic astonishment
followed.
A judgement against Mme Guyon in 1694 found her guilty of four grave
errors in asserting that human perfection was attained by a continual act
of contemplation and prayer; that in this state resorting to acts of charity
was of no avail; that the state of total indifference to all that is not God
was legitimate; and that perfection consisted in extraordinary prayer, at
which every Christian should aim. Mme Guyon in short had given offence
67 John Wesley, An Extract of the Life of Madam Guion (London, 1776).

by breaking away too far from tried and trusted channels. According to
a bon mot of Innocent XII, Fénelon ‘perhaps sinned by excess of the
love of God’;68 perhaps Mme Guyon did so too. Scots Episcopalians
smarting against the high Westminster Orthodoxy of the Kirk, and proto-
evangelicals everywhere chafing against their own Orthodoxies, loved her
for it.
The Bull Unigenitus

The dramatic condemnation of Quesnel in 1713 seemed to be an alto-
gether simpler matter (though this time Fénelon was among the perse-
cutors). In 1671 Pasquier Quesnel, a Jansenist companion of Antoine
Arnauld in exile, had begun a collection of Moral Reflections on the New
Testament which had been warmly approved by Noailles, who was now a
cardinal and Archbishop of Paris.69 At this late date Quesnel was found
to be a moral and political danger, and in 1713 the Pope issued the noto-
rious Bull Unigenitus which condemned 101 propositions from Quesnel’s
hoary work, not least his doctrines of irresistible efficacious grace and
irreversible predestination. The Jansenists were not alone in objecting
to a document which had condemned a book without the author being
allowed to appear in its defence, by a Roman congregation, only one
member of which understood the language in which it was written. The
attack on Quesnel seems to have been launched by Jesuits hoping to dis-
credit Noailles; but the outcome was that Louis XIV compromised the
sacral character of the French monarchy by securing a condemnation
as part of an implied bargain to put down Gallicanism in the French
church.
Protestants everywhere regarded the Bull as an attempt to make people
affirm what they knew was not true, or repudiate what they knew was true.
The alliance of Pope and monarchy was now public, and Jansenism subtly
changed with it, becoming a rallying-point for those opposed to papal and
royal power, for parlementary Gallicans defending royal power against
the Pope and his royal ally, and of lower clergy resisting the bishops. It
is only of late years that the seriousness of this cantankerous issue has
been recognised. Half a century later the alliance of the Jansenists and
the Paris Parlement still formed the hard core of the opposition to the
Jesuits, and, contrary to every probability, was able to plot and preside
over the destruction of the Jesuit order in France.
68 Schmittlein, Différend Bossuet-Fénelon, p. 4.

69 He also has a tangential association with evangelical history as godfather of two of
Zinzendorf’s daughters.
Still worse, the Jansenist issue undermined the whole order of the
Ancien Régime in France.70 Nor was the matter simply one of high con-
fessional politics. On 1 May 1727 a Jansenist deacon of saintly reputation
named François de Pâris died in Paris, and at once crowds began to
flock to his grave in the cemetery of Saint-Médard. There were reports of
miraculous cures of illnesses of all kinds; the crowds became an unman-
ageable flood, and the cure became supplemented by frenzied convulsions
of people claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit through the interces-
sions of M. Pâris. Again the government applied brute force to suppress
an unauthorised cult, closed the cemetery, and contained the wave of reli-
gious enthusiasm that spread across the capital.71 What they could not
do was to repair the damage done to the reputation of the monarchy and
its relations with the Papacy, sometimes bullying, sometimes cooperative.
Wesley’s reaction, having read one of Montgeron’s Jansenist accounts
of Saint-Médard a generation later, was characteristic. One side of him
wished to condemn the hysterics as superstitious; but there were two
inhibitions to doing so. One was that the miracles of Scripture and the
early church had played a major role in the apologetic of both Catholic
and Protestant, and were now beginning to fit awkwardly into a well-
ordered Newtonian universe; it would not do to rubbish the miracles
of Saint-Médard too hastily. More to the point, ‘if these miracles were
real, they strike at the root of the whole papal authority, as having been
wrought in direct opposition to the famous Bull Unigenitus’, or (as he put
it when first reading Montgeron) ‘in opposition to the grossest errors of
popery and in particular to that diabolical Bull Unigenitus, which destroys
the very foundations of Christianity’.72
The Jansenist issue, was not the same as the Quietist issue, which
concerned the early evangelicals very much more; indeed Mme Guyon’s
influence in Germany and Switzerland was much greater than it ever was
in France.73 And the persecution of Jansenists could hardly lower the
repute of the French monarchy among Central European pietists who
70 This argument is developed in the works of Dale Van Kley, especially in The Religious
Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New
Haven, 1996).
71 Force against the cult was accompanied by renewed propaganda against the Quietists.
[J. Phélipeaux] Relation de l’Origine, du Progrès et de la Condemnation du Quiétisme répandu
en France (n.pl., 1732).
72 John Wesley, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester [Warburton]
(1763), ed. Gerald R. Cragg in Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley, XI, p. 479;
Journals and Diaries, ed. R. P. Heitzenrater and W. R. Ward, in ibid., XX 3, p. 318. On
the events in Saint-Médard see B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions and Ecclesiastical
Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1978).
73 Hans-Jürgen Schrader, ‘Madame Guyon, Pietismus und deutschsprachige Literatur’, in
Lehmann et al., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus, p. 191.
detested both its continual aggressions in the Empire and the lavish court
mores which it exported to relatively impecunious German princelings.
But it was a serious matter for Protestant evangelicals that the damage
which Louis XIV’s Jansenist policy did to French institutions of church
and state was repeated on an even bigger scale by his Quietist policy in the
world of Catholic spirituality at large. It was notable that the word mystique
disappeared from the titles of works that ventured upon this field, to be
replaced by the more general notion of oraison. After the Seven Years War,
when admittedly all the religious establishments, Catholic and Protestant,
went badly down the hill, the quantity of this sort of spiritual literature
diminished greatly.
This decline is the more striking as the word mysticisme (as distinct from
théologie mystique) had only been coined in seventeenth-century France,
and it marked the first return northward of mystical speculation on the
back of the dévot movement after a couple of centuries’ migration south.
Mysticism, more general religious revival, French power, doubtless for
different reasons, were all on an ascending curve together. Yet it is no
accident that a modern scholar, sympathetic to the official line, can call
the period that began with the condemnation of Molinos the Twilight of
the Mystics,74 and speak of passive prayer falling into discredit for two
centuries.75
What began in seventeenth-century France with an extraordinary cir-
culation of Dionysius the Areopagite continued with a new attempt to
envisage the spiritual life outside the traditional framework of general
treatises of theology. Most of what went into Mme Guyon and Fénelon
was already present in the early seventeenth century, and although for
defensive purposes Fénelon sought to draw support from the Fathers and
sixteenth-century Spanish writers, he viewed them through the spectacles
of more recent literature, and became interested in Mme Guyon because
he saw a continuity between her spirituality and what had grown up in
early seventeenth-century France.
This movement, however, always had its critics. There were those who
did not like its propaganda; the new mystics were surrounded by the ven-
eration of the faithful who seemed generally to find a benevolent secretary
(as Fénelon found the Chevalier Ramsay) to take notes of their ecstasies
and revelations. Nor was the atmosphere of the marvellous in which they
lived above reproach. There were sorcery trials, and even the achievement
74 L. Cognet, Crépuscule des Mystiques (Tournai, 1958).

75 Ibid., p. 6. It is noteworthy that the Second Vatican Council in the article Lumen Gentium
affirmed the call of all Christians to sanctity without reference to the mystical life, iden-
tifying sanctity with the perfection of charity.
of heroic virtue which Wesley so admired in M. de Renty76 (and which

influenced Mme Guyon) might be regarded as not altogether healthy.
And there were doctrinal difficulties. What these mystics wanted was
direct, immediate and total union with God which required complete
annihilation of the will of the self. But was not the condition of the absorp-
tion of the will of man into the will of God, viz. annihilation, a kind of
depersonalisation? Was not the demand for immediate union with God
a denial of the work of Christ? And although 2 Peter 1:4 undoubtedly
referred to believers as ‘partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the
corruption that is in the world through lust’, was not the claim that the
final absorption into God created a stable deiformity, a practical impos-
sibility of sin, to hang a desperate weight upon a single text? Whatever
the motives of Louis XIV and Mme de Maintenon in turning the biggest
of big guns against the Quietists, they could rely on the support of many
reasonable men.
Moreover there were things within the Carmelite tradition from which
so much recent mysticism stemmed that did not augur well for the future
once the tide turned. In the second half of the seventeenth century chairs
of mystical theology were created in Carmelite and other colleges. There
were endless ‘vocabularies’ of mystical theology that aimed to clear up
difficulties and inconsistencies in the terminology of the great mystical
writers.77 The attraction of the spiritual autobiographies produced by
Poiret and Tersteegen was that they gave first-hand accounts of religious
experience for readers who were weary of system and the polemical con-
flicts to which it led. To offer mysticism in systematic text-books was to kill
it stone-dead. And threatened from without and suffocated from within,
the mystical tradition died a slow death. From this the expenditure of
enormous scholarly labour in the twentieth century has not enabled it
to recover. By the same token one of the main pillars of the new evan-
gelical identity was beginning to crumble, and it was no wonder that the
evangelical pioneers were to become increasingly ambivalent towards it.
76 On whom see Maurice Souriau, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement de l’Autel. Deux Mys-

tiques normands au XVIIe Siècle, M. de Renty et Jean de Bernières (Paris, 1913). Little
is added in the same author’s later work, Le Mysticisme en Normandie au XVIIe Siècle
(Paris, 1923). Renty very early came into the English tradition through J. B. Saint-Jure,
The Holy Life of M. De Renty, a late nobleman of France, tr. E. S. Gent (London, 1657).
Wesley’s abridgement (London, 1741) went through 9 editions before 1830.
77 A swashbuckling compendium of information on all these matters is to be found in the
article ‘Mystique’ in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (Paris, 1932–95), X/2, Cols. 1889–
984.
4 The development of pietism in the
Reformed churches
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 Switzer-
land, 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 prac-
tice 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 work-
ing in his tradition, even though their local problems varied enormously.
Thus the Elector Frederick III commissioned the writing of the Heidel-
berg catechism and pushed its adoption, in the explicit hope of reducing
tensions between Lutheran and Reformed. In this he was not immedi-
ately successful, but the catechism’s view of relations between God and
man from the human end was in the long run to have an importance in
the history of Pietism. In the same way the French Reformed showed an
uncommon propensity to continuous reformation and to softening the
edges of the doctrine of predestination, until their very survival was put
at hazard by Louis XIV.1
1 On these points see the essays by Brian G. Armstrong, John Hesselink and Robert Letham
in W. Fred Graham (ed.), Later Calvinism. International Perspectives (Kirksville, Miss.,
1994).
70
Pietism in the Reformed churches 71
On one particular matter which we have seen to be of importance in

the Lutheran world, the Last Things, Calvin left the door unusually wide
open. Primarily a biblical theologian, he left no commentary on the book
of Revelation, and even asserted that if the apostle Paul had known by
a special revelation the date of the Last Day he would have had to deny
his knowledge to his flock to save them from a false sense of security.2
Too alarmed by the apocalyptic fanaticism of his time to suggest that the
end was near, his view was that the Second Coming of Christ was to
be characterised by Christ’s visible presence as distinct from His exalted
and risen omnipresence in the present age.3 Both instant millennialism
and caution were to mark different sections of the subsequent Reformed
movements at different times.
There were, however, general pressures, political and intellectual, that
drove the Reformed everywhere to attempt a greater precision of doc-
trinal statement than Calvin himself had achieved. In 1580 the French
Reformed theologian Antoine de Chandieu made the first urgent call
for the adoption of a ‘scholastic method’ in Reformed theology. In mak-
ing this call Chandieu was assuming that theology was a science in the
Aristotelian sense – that is, it had indemonstrable principles, drawn from
Scripture – and that by treating these using syllogism and analysis accord-
ing to the methods of Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics the theolo-
gian could reason his way by logical demonstration to conclusions of
great certainty. The attraction of this to a movement engaged in contin-
uous controversy to right and left is obvious; indeed, if Chandieu was
right that the only alternative was a rhetorical treatment of theology, i.e.,
a treatment of theology according to the methods of persuasion appropri-
ate to the pulpit, the Reformed had no option but to take the scholastic
route,4 and in so doing they remained loyal to the Reformers’ tradition
of teaching through at least some of the academic methods of the day.
At any rate this was the route taken by Reformed theologians gener-
ally in the age in which the Reformed confessions were produced. To no
church was the siren call more welcome than that of Bern. Confessional
fighting in the full military sense went on in Switzerland longer than any-
where else, right into the eighteenth century, affording an ideal opening
for major powers to fish in the troubled waters. And, within a generation of
the Protestant cantons establishing their supremacy in the Confederation
2 On Poiret’s appropriation of these views see pp. 51–2 above.

3 Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things (London, 1955), p. 110.
4 Donald Sinnema, ‘Antoine de Chandieu’s Call for a Scholastic Reformed Theology
(1580)’, in Graham, Later Calvinism, pp. 159–90. Richard A. Muller, After Calvin
(Oxford, 2003), makes a spirited plea that historians recognise both the continuity
between Reformation and Reformed Orthodoxy and the care of both for practical piety.
on the back of the Toggenburg wars, confessional warfare threatened to

break out on a much more serious scale; the great Catholic rivals on
the international stage, Habsburg and Bourbon, buried the hatchet of
their mutual animosity, and with it the main protection of Protestant
Switzerland. It is not surprising therefore that Bern felt the need for a
guaranteed platform on the international front. At the same time the Bern
patriciate suffered perhaps exaggerated anxieties at the double internal
threat to their position. They seemed always to believe that the Swiss
Anabaptists, who had withdrawn to an a-political stance and were not
more than stationary, were a prospective menace; and while their French
Reformed co-religionists who came flooding in, particularly after the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with their frills, furbelows, and fancy
notions about predestination, might be a necessary claim on charity, they
remained a menace to all things sacred. Thus the tone in Bern rose
steadily, and in 1675 the city authorities began the effort to enforce accep-
tance of the very high Formula Consensus as the sole Swiss Protestant
confession; 1675, be it noted, being the year in which Spener’s Pia Deside-
ria had issued its clarion call to Protestants to reduce their reliance on
the political arm of flesh.
Rational Orthodoxy
This proved to be a more Sisyphaean labour than Bern had calculated.
They stamped it hard on the ministry and academy of Lausanne, and
expelled more Pietists than any other canton. But Ostervald kept it out
of Basel, Neuchâtel abandoned subscription when it passed to Prussia
in 1709, Geneva bade farewell to subscriptions in 1725, and the general
dismay of the Protestant powers at the divisive effect of the Formula Con-
sensus ensured that Bern Orthodoxy would get no support from abroad.
Still more alarming was the speed with which the Formula seemed to lose
credibility in Switzerland. One of the great pillars of Reformed Ortho-
doxy in Geneva had been François Turretini (1623–87), but already his
nephew and colleague, Bénédict Pictet (1655–1724), began the move to
what became known as Rational Orthodoxy. The object now was to foster
a return to the biblical text unencumbered by the controversial language
of Reformed scholasticism and to promote a practical form of theology
acceptable in the parishes. If this helped to recover the vitality of Calvin’s
thought as well, so much the better. Pictet5 was professor of theology
at the academy in Geneva from 1687 to 1724 and served two spells as
rector.
5 Martin I. Klauber, ‘Reformed Orthodoxy in Transition: Bénédict Pictet and
Enlightened Orthodoxy in Post-Reformation Geneva’, in Graham, Later Calvinism,
pp. 93–113.
One of his great policies was the promotion of Protestant union, and
this was characteristic of his colleague Jean-Alphonse Turretini (1671–
1737), the son of François. He and the other pioneers of Rational
Orthodoxy, Jean-Frédéric Ostervald of Basel (1663–1747) and Samuel
Werenfels of Neuchâtel (1657–1740), were all international men sus-
taining great correspondences (with, among others, Archbishop Wake of
Canterbury).6 They could not stop Bern’s forays in the interest of the
Formula Consensus, but they vividly illuminated her self-chosen isola-
tion, and, as it proved, saved their own cantons from any serious trouble
with Pietism. Conservative as they all were, they had provided sufficient
lee-way for change.
Bern, on the other hand, had to cope with a very pertinacious Pietism
which continually spilled over into revivalism.7 In one sense her efforts on
behalf of Orthodoxy had been misconceived, for in spite of the severity of
the Bern censorship, Swiss publishers were alert to bring out translations
of the English Puritan classics, Perkins, Bayley, Hall and Baxter, so for
those who wished there was direct access to a piety characterised by
conversion, sanctification and self-observation; and these left their mark
on the locally produced literature of prayer and devotion. And no matter
how Bern tried to pull down the shutters on the outside world, it was not
possible to keep its subjects in.
Swiss Pietism
The pioneers of Pietism in Bern, Samuel Güldin, Christoph Lutz, Samuel
Schumacher and Samuel Dick, were all graduates of the Bern Hohe
Schule, who met in 1689 in Geneva on the first stage of their academic
travels.8 They formed a devotional group for prayer, the study of the Bible
and spiritual literature, apparently in innocence of the word ‘pietism’.
But the rest of their travels, singly or together, were directed to the great
names in the Pietism of that day – to Schütz in Frankfurt, the Labadist
community in Wieuwerd, Undereyck and his pupil de Hase in Bremen,9
Horb, Spener’s brother-in-law, in Hamburg, Spener himself in Berlin,
and followers of Francke in Leipzig. They came back to take service in
6 N. Sykes, William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1657–1737 (Cambridge, 1957), II,

pp. 27–8.
7 For a brief account of this story see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge,
1992).
8 For this story see Rudolf Dellsperger, Die Anfänge des Pietismus in Bern (Göttingen, 1984)
and ‘Der Pietismus in der Schweiz’, in M. Brecht and K. Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte
des Pietismus (Göttingen, 1995), II, pp. 588–616.
9 On Undereyck and de Hase see below, pp. 78ff.
the church of Bern enamoured of the world-wide movement of the Spirit

which they had perceived among the Lutherans, tarred with the mystical
brush, and with a mystical openness to possibilities of biblical interpre-
tation which went beyond Calvin and Zwingli. Nevertheless when they
reported back at length to Francke, one of the things they asked for was a
New Testament lexicon which should supply them with the precise mean-
ings of the basic words, and keep them au fait with philological exegesis
as then understood.
Of course this attempt to link Bern with the outside world from below
was vigorously contested by the city authorities, and Tauler, Thomas à
Kempis, Antoinette Bourignon and Pierre Poiret were added to the cen-
sorship list. And in spite of movements springing up in many places, espe-
cially in Bern’s restive French-speaking territories, Pietism was vigorously
suppressed. Güldin fetched up in America, and Samuel König (1670–
1750), the most broadly educated of them all, with the radical Pietists
in Germany, a chiliast in the wake of Jane Leade and the Petersens. One
consequence of the hammering which the early Bern Pietists received was
that subsequently Pietism took on a revivalist character, and became a
magnet for the Inspired and the Moravians from Germany; but the imme-
diate effect was that Pietism as an inner-church reform movement of the
Spenerite kind was defeated. Forcibly put down, there was little alterna-
tive for them but to turn in the first quarter of the eighteenth century to
separatism.
It was only in the second quarter of the century that integration began,
notably in the ministry of Samuel Lutz (1674–1750). Defying endless
professional setbacks he finally became a notable revivalist and pastor in
the Bernese Oberland, winning back for the church many who had pre-
viously separated. When Hieronymus Annoni (1697–1770) made a great
journey out from his pastorate in Basel to visit the pious in Switzerland
in 1730–1, he found that attempts to secure uniformity had largely been
given up. Indeed, in the next generation Pietism and Orthodoxy alike were
threatened by the spread of Enlightenment, and numerous Pietists were
seeking to deal with it by a large admixture of theosophy. Meanwhile there
was an abiding Pietist legacy of private meetings, devotional publishing
(including translations of floods of English literature), hymn-writing, and
good works which were eventually to issue in foreign missions.10 As was
to happen later in England, the Swiss Pietists brought a Reformed com-
munity closer to what was happening in the Lutheran world, and their
principal departure from their own Orthodox tradition was a considerable
10 P. Wernle, Schweizerischer Protestantismus im 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1923), I,

pp. 326–41, 441–68.
addiction to millennialism;11 and, for reasons which we shall see, this was
to become a feature of Reformed Pietism elsewhere.
Dutch scholasticism
The position of the Reformed churches in the United Provinces,
their second great reserve, was fundamentally different from that in
Switzerland. In Switzerland Protestant establishments had been created
out of Catholic ones with appropriate changes in doctrine and church
structure, and in some cases with a fight, but with not much change in
social structure. In Bern especially patrician government and the defence
of Reformed Orthodoxy went hand in hand, much as they would have
done had Bern retained allegiance to the Counter-Reformation. In the
Netherlands the Beggars had introduced Protestantism by violence from
the outside, and although the establishment of Reformed doctrine had
attracted support over the generations, it had not enabled the Reformed
churches to undermine a very large Catholic minority, a third of the whole
population, nor to make an impact upon that substantial Dutch under-
world which existed for fairs and riotous living. Dutch governments, in
short, were, in policy terms, like modern governments confronted with
hard liquor and hard drugs; never in a position of control, they experi-
enced the drawbacks of both hard and soft measures, and were bound
to be more attracted to persuasion than the Swiss. Like the latter they
afforded generous hospitality to French refugees, and, like the German
Reformed, did not want anything more radical from that quarter than
they got in Bayle.12
One solution to their problem was Nadere Reformatie, Further Refor-
mation. This name has a Puritan sound to it, and indeed Willem Teellinck
(1579–1629), who stood at the fountainhead of that tradition, was influ-
enced by Puritan as well as mystical traditions. But the Nadere Reformatie
aimed to unite pietas, the subjective religion of the heart, with praecisitas,
a conduct strictly in accordance with the biblical commandments, or, put
in another way, to unite the reformation in doctrine and church struc-
ture already achieved with the inner reformation of the believer. If this
union of piety and strict conduct could be undergirded by the certainty
apparently provided by Aristotelian scholasticism it would certainly find
followers in this quarter; and this was what was offered by Gisbertius
Voetius (1589–1676).
11 K. Guggisberg, Bernische Kirchengeschichte (Bern, 1958), pp. 398–9.

12 Sandra Pott, Reformierte Morallehren und deutsche Literatur von Jean Barbeyrac bis Christoph
Martin Wieland (Tübingen, 2002), p. 141.
Voetius embodied much of the affective side of English Puritanism

which was often recalled when the age of religious revivals began, and the
Voetians formed one of the main channels of English Puritan influence in
the United Provinces. Voetius began his career as a pastor, and though he
took a hard line against the Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort, and was
appointed to a chair at Utrecht in 1634, pastoral concerns remained dom-
inant throughout his career. Pietas remained a major object, and in the
Aristotelian manner he pursued it in every detail. Two of the five volumes
of his magnum opus, the Selectae disputationes theologicae (1648–69), were
devoted to practical theology including ethics; and ethics extended to
details like dancing, comedy, food and drink, luxury, hair-styles, jewellery
and ostentation. But the faith that was to underlie the conduct, prayer,
meditation, church-going, Bible-reading and so forth was treated in a
handbook of religious practice that developed from student disputations.
The formation of church life was treated in another four volumes, the De
Politica Ecclesiastica (1663–76), always with a view to promoting a lively,
personal, if pugnacious, piety. John Quick, an English Puritan, quotes a
Dutch pastor as saying that ‘before the Belgick churches were pester’d
with the Dogmes of Cocceius, the ministry of the Word was exceedingly
successful, many hearers would weep at sermons, proud sinners would
quake and tremble at the word preached, multitudes were converted &
reformed, religious worship was strictly and reverently celebrated in con-
gregations and families’ under pastors of the Puritan stamp.13 Voetius, in
short, was both an outstanding example of Reformed scholasticism and
a protorevivalist.
Coccejus
The ‘Dogmes of Cocceius’ would, alas! not go away, nor would the polit-
ical and social divisions round which Voetianism and Coccejanism crys-
tallised. Voetians affected the ‘language of Canaan’ and plain dress; the
Coccejans were modish and their ministers wore wigs. The Voetians were
strong in the lower middle class, went more directly for a result among
their more modestly circumstanced flock, and in politics were devotees
of the Orange family and strong central government; the Coccejans were
more notable in the world of wealth and scholarship, and stood for Patriot
opposition to Orange power. The Coccejans held that the Sabbath was
a ritual obligation now outdated, and Heppe reports how ladies of the
Coccejan party would sit in the window knitting on the Sabbath with a
13 G. F. Nuttall, ‘English Dissenters in the Netherlands, 1640–1689’, Nederlands Archief

voor Kerkgeschiednis, LIX, 37–8.
view to annoying their Voetian neighbours, and that in village congrega-

tions side by side, the Voetian congregation would preserve the silence
of the grave on the Lord’s Day, while the Coccejan congregation might
be a riot.14 Already at the end of Voetius’s life15 events suggested that
the issue between him and Coccejus might be inconclusive; in 1672 the
Orange Stadtholdership was re-established, a great political advantage;
on the other hand the Labadist schism carried a powerful suggestion that
the Dutch Protestant establishment was no place for zealots for sanctity.
Johannes Coccejus (1603–69) was, however, much more important
than a man who provided badges for people who could not stand
Voetianism; indeed, he has been reckoned the most important Reformed
theologian of his century. Born in Bremen, a free Hanse town and the
one great Reformed city of the Holy Roman Empire, he was the son of
the Town Clerk (he Latinized his name from Coch), and, on his mother’s
side, the descendant of a respected artisan family, and grandson of an
alderman. His brother Gerhard followed the law line, and became not
only a professor of law but a diplomat in the service of Bremen, East
Frisia and the Empire. Thus the social differences that irked the Voetians
were prominent from the beginning; but Coccejus and Voetius were alike
in two respects: both were Orthodox, and both were men of genuine
piety, who accepted that the promotion of piety was one of the ends of
theological labour.
Coccejus, however, by the intense scholarship in biblical philology
which attracted students to him from all over Reformed Europe,16 and
which in recent times has caught the interest of critics of the calibre of
the Erlangen school, von Rad and Karl Barth, sought to present from
Scripture a comprehensive overview of the saving intention of God in
Christ throughout history. Before the Fall God had established his rela-
tionship with men in a covenant of works. If men fulfilled their side of
this covenant, salvation was theirs. God, however, foresaw from eternity
that events would not issue thus happily. Even before the Fall, God had
announced his will in the so-called protogospel to lead man to a higher
stage of perfection in a covenant of grace.17 In the covenant of grace
the consequences of the Fall were overcome step by step. In the Old
Testament God concluded a covenant with his Chosen People through
14 H. Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus und der Mystik in der Reformierten Kirche (Leiden,
1879), pp. 234–6.
15 On Voetius see Aart de Groot, ‘Gisbertius Voetius’, in M. Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der
Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1982), VII, pp. 149–62; Aart de Groot, ‘Pietas im Vor-
pietismus (Gisb. Voetius)’, in J. van den Berg and J. P. van Dooren (eds.), Pietismus
und Reveil (Leiden, 1978), pp. 118–29. Muller, After Calvin, pp. 110–16.
16 He received chairs in Bremen in 1630, Franeker in 1636, and Leiden in 1650.
17 Genesis 1:26.
Moses; following the commandments would again bring the sinner under
God’s grace. In the New Testament Christ overcame the power of death
by taking all the consequences of the Fall upon himself, and opening the
way for everyone into God’s covenant of grace. Five covenants culmi-
nated in the general resurrection, but meanwhile the true believer could
see where he was in God’s great plan, and be led by grace infallibly to his
salvation in God’s presence.
Coccejus still employed the syllogistic method characteristic of the
Protestant Orthodoxy of his period; but his biblical scholarship was
admired by Spener, and he anticipated favourite themes of the Pietists,
rejecting calculations of the imminent end of this present age, talking
much of conversion and the New Birth and the way the Christian knows
himself to be included in the covenant. The federal (or covenant) theol-
ogy showed how in an apocalyptically minded age the faithful could infer
security from the Heilsgeschichte itself, and for this reason it was violently
assailed as a novelty if not a heresy by the Orthodox Voetians.18
Yet there was clearly a good deal in common between these two
Reformed schools. Both insisted on the connexion of piety and theology.
Voetius’s recommendation of reading in the mystics was widely accepted,
and he was esteemed as a renewer of catechetical exercises. Both men
promoted class meetings as a step to practical piety, and had kept them
free from the separatism of the Labadists. One of the most powerful things
separating them had been their differences respecting the political ambi-
tions of the Orange family, and these were of no immediate significance
to members of the great Reformed diaspora stretching from Bremen and
East Frisia round to the Lower Rhine area. It was here that the two out-
looks were first united to form a Reformed Pietism that in turn laid the
foundations of a Reformed revivalism. This became clear in the ministry
of Theodor Undereyck (1635–93).
German Reformed Pietism

Undereyck was a merchant’s son, born in Duisburg in 1635. He began
his education in philosophy and Greek at the new university of Duisburg
and then went on to Utrecht to work with Voetius and his colleagues.
18 On Coccejus see G. Schrenk, Gottesreich und Bund im älteren Protestantismus, vernehmlich

bei J. Coccejus (Gütersloh, 1923); H. Faulenbach, Weg und Ziel der Erkenntnis Christi. Eine
Untersuchung zur Theologie des J. Coccejus (Neukirchen, 1973), and his papers ‘Johannes
Coccejus’ in M. Greschat, Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte, VII, pp. 163–76, and ‘Die
christliche Persönlichkeit bei Johannes Coccejus’ in van den Berg and van Dooren,
Pietismus und Reveil pp. 130–40; W. J. van Asselt, Federal Theology of J. Cocceius (Leiden,
2001).
Here he acquired his master’s Orthodoxy and precisianism. He also sat

at the feet of Jodocus van Lodenstein, a preacher prized in retrospect as
one of the heralds of Pietism. He continued his education in Duisburg,
Frankfurt and Leiden, and on a tour to France, Switzerland and England.
Undereyck, in short, was like the protopietists of Switzerland in being an
international man and in touch with international movements of grace.
The English Puritans were heavily quoted in his works,19 but the influ-
ential figures were Voetius and Coccejus, and he determined to take the
best of each. In his first parish at Mülheim on the Ruhr he preached in
the Voetian manner, beating the drum about the gulf between the king-
dom of Christ and that of the world, rejecting every compromise, and
looking to turn every family into a house-church with a father exercis-
ing discipline. Preaching of this kind suited those tempted by Labadism
and sanctification; it also produced converts who responded to his stress
on the personal appropriation of salvation. He corresponded with Reitz
who was compiling his great History of the Regenerate, and drove some
sinners to suicide. After a brief court chaplaincy in Kassel he went on to
a generation’s work in the Coccejan town of Bremen. Already his pupils,
friends and converts were spreading his work all over Reformed Germany;
and of these the most important were the hymn-writer Joachim Neander,
whom he encountered at school in Bremen, and Friedrich Adolf Lampe
(1683–1729).
In Lampe Reformed Pietism came to full flower, and the transition to
another stage, that of revivalism, was also fulfilled. Lampe was brought up
in Detmold by his grandfather, Generalsuperintendent Johann Jacob Zeller,
a zealous Voetian who had been taken hostage by the French in 1672.
After the latter’s death in 1691, Lampe went on to Bremen where he was
educated at the Pädagogium and the Lycaeum, the Bremen theological
faculty. From here he migrated to Franeker and Utrecht to study under
a series of Coccejan professors who united the philological expertise of
Coccejus with currents of living piety that Lampe had known from his
youth up. Here he underwent a decisive conversion which he celebrated
in a hymn of praise in thirty-six stanzas.
Lampe was soon in Germany again in pastoral appointments near
Cleves and then in Duisburg. It here became apparent that the German
Reformed had to face some of the same problems that had already con-
fronted their brethren in the United Provinces. John de Labadie (1610–
74), born to an ex-Calvinist family in France, now on the make, had
entered the Jesuit order at the age of fifteen.20 Leaving the Jesuits in 1639,
19 Heiner Faulenbach, ‘Die Anfänge des Pietismus bei den Reformierten in Deutschland’,
Pietismus und Neuzeit 4 (1977–8), 219.
20 On Labadie see ch. 4, n. 10 above.
he worked in France as a secular priest, drawing closer to the Jansenists

the whole time. In 1650 he fulfilled the next stage in his pilgrimage,
being converted to the Reformed church, and serving congregations in
Geneva and elsewhere until he was called to Middelburg in 1666 by
the reform movement of which Voetius was the centre. While he was
in Geneva one of his devotional writings had attracted the attention of
Spener. His Middelburg appointment did not last long; he fell foul of the
Dutch authorities for his chiliastic tendencies and his biblical exegesis.
Expelled in 1669, he took refuge with a house-church he had collected
at the opulent convent of Herford under the protection of the Abbess,
Elizabeth of the Palatinate. This refuge lasted only a couple of years until
an expulsion order arrived from the Imperial courts. But even though
Labadie’s expectations that they would all be joined by the elect were far-
fetched, his movement showed the perils of an attempt rapidly to jack up
the level of devotion in a Reformed establishment, and how the fall-out
from the attempt might directly affect other Reformed areas.
Lampe had had direct experience of the repercussions of the Labadie
affair in the three years he served as a pastor in Duisburg before being
called back to Bremen in 1709. The Reformed congregation had been
badly divided, those who hungered and thirsted after righteousness
becoming separatists after the style of Labadie, leaving behind a very
secularised rump. Lampe did much to save the day by preaching in a
style to satisfy the one, and by energetic house-to-house visiting to keep
an eye on the other. This experience left its mark on him when he got to
Bremen. He now admitted at the outset that the church could not consist
entirely of the elect; it was bound to contain some of the lost for whom
Christ had not died. He therefore introduced another custom from the
Lower Rhine area. He addressed the conclusion of the sermon to the elect
who were required to stand and receive the word directed to them. This
was ‘discriminating’ preaching indeed and an example of the way in which
the revivalists were to contrive the application of moral pressure on their
congregations. On the other hand, he followed his teacher at Franeker,
Campegius Vitringa the Elder, in putting off the apocalypse.21 He was
an active hymn-writer, and his theological and pastoral works included
the first Reformed theological journal for Germany. He is credited with
originating, at any rate in that part of the world, ‘the language of Canaan’,
that bowdlerised form of biblical address that was taken up for theological
reasons by Zinzendorf and had a long run in English Methodism.22 In
21 J. F. G. Goeters in Brecht and Deppermann, Geschichte des Pietismus, II, p. 376.

22 Part of the field is covered by Mason I. Lowance, Jnr., The Language of Canaan
(Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
1720 Lampe was called back to a chair at Utrecht where he stayed until
his final call to Bremen in 1727 not long before he died. The union in
his own ministry of much of what had been divided between the Voetian
and the Coccejan parties now bore fruit in a wide-ranging literary output
for the service of the whole Reformed cause: a history of the Reformed
church in Hungary and Transylvania, very successful catechisms that
achieved a wide circulation, and of course the evidence that the necessi-
ties of the churches were driving part of the Reformed ministry towards
revivalism.23
Rhineland Reformed churches

I have shown elsewhere that this development of attitude was compacted
in the case of Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1692–1747), a village
pastor near Emden, who was tempted in 1719 by the Amsterdam classis to
accept an appointment in New Jersey, and there became a notable revival-
ist, acting in concert with the Tennent family, the celebrated revivalists
of the Middle Colonies.24 It is noteworthy, however, that the Reformed
communities of the Lower Rhine area had shown themselves capable of
developing in two other ways. They accepted Labadism as a genuine chal-
lenge, and, while resisting the attempts of some conventicles to appoint
their own teachers or get in the way of church services, knew that they
had too long a history in the Dutch Reformed church to be got rid of.
The Synod of Mark in 1676, and the Synod of Cleves and the General
Synod of the following year, resolved that every member of the synod
was bound not merely to orthodoxia, i.e., the Heidelberg confession and
other official standards, but also to the studium pietatis. A series of synod-
ical resolutions in subsequent years made it clear that the Lower Rhine
churches were to pursue sanctification and inwardness of spiritual life
with a quite new determination. What had been offered by Labadism
was to be cultivated within the church. Here they remained true to the
anthropological orientation of the Heidelberg catechism. Thus in 1687
the town council of Wesel published a resolution that ‘Almighty God is
to be served not only publicly in the congregations of the church, but also
privatim’, i.e., in class meetings or conventicles. Free prayer emerged from
the private gatherings to supplement the liturgy in church; congregations
were helped to internalise the Coccejan doctrine of the covenant of grace
23 On Lampe: Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus, pp. 236–40; A. Ritschl, Geschichte des
Pietismus (Bonn, 1880–6), I, pp. 427–54; G. Mai, Die niederdeutsche Reformbewegung
(Bremen, 1979), pp. 252–301; Gerrit Snijders, F. A. Lampe (Bremen, 1961); Walter
Hollweg, Die Geschichte des älteren Pietismus in Ostfriesland (Aurich, 1938), pp. 152–3.
24 Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening, p. 229.
in Christ, the work of the new race of preachers was underpinned, and
the movement for piety in its Reformed shape was kept under clerical
control.25
Two things, however, were not under control. The Huguenot intel-
ligentsia in Germany were in one sense restrained, fighting their own
battles in their own way against Reformed Orthodoxy on the one hand
and scepticism (which meant anything to the left of Bayle) on the other,
but almost inevitably drifting away from confessionalism into the pursuit
of a simple Protestantism resting on sola scriptura and sola fide. Common-
weal, freedom of conscience and toleration became their watchwords.
This programme was convenient for the Hohenzollerns to whom they
owed so much, and it seemed the only way to provide an ideological plat-
form for a Grand Alliance against Louis XIV and accomplish anything for
the Protestants abandoned to his tender mercies in France. A scholastic
Orthodoxy that got in the way of this would have no sympathy in that
quarter.26 So the Huguenot diaspora played its part not so much in the
origins of Pietism, as in weakening the Protestant enemies they had to
contend with.
Tersteegen
It was also fortunate for the church leaders that the most important
Reformed separatist (as we have seen) was an unaggressive character little
given to ecclesiastical or anti-ecclesiastical scruples. Gerhard Tersteegen
pressed upon a Protestant readership the spiritual odyssey not merely of
Catholic, but of Counter-Reformation, saints. This record might seem to
confirm Ritschl’s belief that, in the German Reformed Church, Pietism
(in his view a basically un-Protestant deviation) drew separatism after
it, even if in the Rhineland the two tendencies did something to keep
each other in check.27 It is remarkable, however, that despite attempts
by Carmelites28 and Benedictines29 to claim Tersteegen for themselves,
25 Dr. Rothert, ‘Die Minden-Ravensbergische Kirchengeschichte’, Jahrbuch des Vereins

für Westphälische Kirchengeschichte 28/9 (1928), 134; H. Heppe, Geschichte der evange-
lischen Kirche von Cleve-Mark und . . . Westphalen (Iserlohn, 1867), p. 243; J. Tanis,
‘The Heidelberg Catechism in the Hands of the Calvinistic Pietists’, Reformed Review
24 (1971), 156–7; W. Göbell, Die evangelische Lutherische Kirche in der Grafschaft Mark
(Bethel, 1961); M. Goebel, Geschichte des christlichen Lebens in der rheinisch-westphälischen
evangelischen Kirche, 3 vols. (Koblenz, 1849–52), vol. II.
26 Pott, Reformierte Morallehren, pp. 19, 43.
27 A. Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 482.
28 Giovanna della Croce, Gerhard Tersteegen. Neubelebung der Mystik als Ansatz einer kom-
menden Spiritualität (Bern, 1979).
29 Emmanuel Jungclaussen, ‘Gerhard Tersteegens kurzer Bericht von der Mystik’, Una
Sancta 1 (1988), 18–23.
he continues to appear not merely very Protestant but very Reformed.

Tersteegen went well beyond the claim that Protestants had generally
been willing to admit, that examples of the true seed could be found in
the Roman Catholic fold; justification by faith alone, or, as he epitomised
the gospel, ‘complete denial of the world, dying to oneself, . . . God’s
leadings over his elect, to purify them of their peculiarities’,30 was by
no means confined to the Reformed world. If there was one thing that
caused Tersteegen to lash out, it was the spectacle of that spiritual pride
that put its trust in ‘peculiarities’ whether confessional or spiritual. Given
his situation, it was Protestants who felt the brunt of this. ‘With what may
awakened souls in these days sustain themselves after they have made a
little progress on the first paths of repentance? [It is not] with immature
pursuit of conversion, with powerful Babel-storming, with singular opin-
ions of all kinds, or higher speculations . . . [still less with mounting] the
golden hermetic hills.’31
Having thus smartly dispatched the distinctive clan-badges of Halle,
Zinzendorf, the Inspired, the Behmenists and the Protestant Cabbalists,
Tersteegen was in no mood to bow before the shibboleths of the mystics.
Mystics form no particular sect, they have no principles differing from those
of other Christian parties . . . Visions, revelations, remonstrances, prophecies
and many other extraordinary things, a mystic may encounter without seeking
them, but they do not belong to the essentials of mysticism, indeed all experi-
enced mystics provide very important memorials in respect to such extraordinary
phenomena. Mystics are not gossips of superior spirituality . . . They say little,
they do and suffer much, they deny [themselves] everything, they pray without
ceasing . . . Theosophy and Mysticism are quite different.32
Thus a ‘Separatist can be or become a mystic, although a true mystic
finds it harder to become a Separatist: he has more important things to
do’. Although not personally conforming, Tersteegen was not a Babel-
stormer. He spoke little of mysticism, and (in Protestant style) he spoke
even less of the unio mystica. He wanted an experiential theology, but
believed that even first-hand religious experience must be tested by
Scripture. He was an example of what the piety of the Heidelberg cate-
chism might turn into.33 And, though ultimately a revivalist, in his feeling
30 G. Tersteegen, Auserlesene Lebensbeschreibungen heiliger Seelen, 3rd edn (Essen, 1784–5),
I, p. xiii.
31 Ibid., I, p. i. 32 Jungclaussen, ‘Gerhard Tersteegens kurzer Bericht’, pp. 20–1.
33 For reflections upon this theme see the essays by Dietrich Meyer, ‘Cognitio Dei Exper-
imentalis oder “Erfahrungstheologie” bei Gottfried Arnold, Gerhard Tersteegen und
Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf ’ and Hansgünter Ludewig, ‘Gerhard Tersteegen als
evangelischer Mystiker’, in Dietrich Meyer and Udo Sträter (eds.), Zur Rezeption mystis-
cher Traditionen im Protestantismus des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne 2002), pp. 223–
40, 241–82.
that there was not much to be done about the world in general until God
set about the conversion of the Jews in earnest, there was more than a
little of the Orthodox or Coccejan about him.34
Thus the experience of the great Reformed reserves on the continent
was that the strictest of the Reformed Confessions, the Formula Con-
sensus, was also the most ephemeral. In the Netherlands the decrees
of the Synod of Dort retained their hold and there was a marked lack of
adventurousness among the Dutch theologians in the eighteenth century.
But just as in Switzerland the hard edge of the Formula Consensus was
softened by the emergence of Rational Orthodoxy, so in the Netherlands
the stiff opposition of the Voetians to the Coccejans diminished as the
political differences between them disappeared; the concessions made by
both to piety were capable of being fanned into revival by the experience
of Reformed communities in New England and Scotland, and the gen-
eral change in the intellectual atmosphere, which made it more difficult
not to take an optimistic view of unfettered rational inquiry or to oppose
toleration, opened the way to evangelical as well as other views.35
34 Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, I, p. 493.

35 J. van den Berg, Religious Currents and Cross-Currents. Essays in Early Modern Protestantism
and the Protestant Enlightenment (Leiden, 1999), pp. 256ff., 267.
5 The Reformed tradition in Britain
and America
The Reformed tradition in Britain was singular without being insular. At

the end of the sixteenth century the Church of England was commonly
reckoned among the Reformed churches of Europe, though the party
in it wishing for further reformation on the lines of the best Reformed
churches in Europe was never in control. These Puritans were for the
most part establishment men. Thus the confessedly Reformed party in
the Church of England, whose literature was always influential abroad,
was not in the position of either of the main groups of Reformed churches
on the continent; it was neither setting the tone in a church establishment,
nor was it a persecuted minority.1 Under Scottish armed force the very
high Reformed Westminster Confession was adopted in 1643, but from
the beginning its supremacy was challenged by the power of the New
Model Army in which Independents and sectaries were strong, and the
hopes of the Presbyterians who contributed powerfully to the return of
Charles II in 1660 were badly frustrated by the duplicity of the King and
a sort of White Terror launched under the aegis of the Cavalier Parlia-
ment. The famous 2000 clergy expelled from the Church for refusing to
accept the Restoration Prayer Book formed the nucleus of a new kind
of nonconformity; and both they and the congregations they gathered
were subject to a good deal of persecution over the next generation. The
Puritan tracts continued to make their way in Europe but were passé at
home; and German commentators, who had been too ready to accept the
Church of England as a Reformed Church, concluded (also prematurely)
that the true English character had had to take refuge in the New England
colonies. If, however, the Reformed establishments in New England had
a more natural and unimpeded development than the Puritan minority
in England they were, down to 1688, still affected by the general religious
policies of British governments, by the wider policies of the Church of
1 There were of course periods when the Reformed churches in Scotland and Ireland were
subject to acute persecution.
85
England, and by their own persisting unwillingness to forfeit their heritage

in the English establishment.
The curiously ‘half-way’ situation of English Puritanism in the early
seventeenth century intensified one of its special characteristics and
strengthened its connexion with its lost sons in America. Safe but not
in control, early Stuart Puritanism became politically quiescent and spir-
itually introspective. It was now that the devotional literature that had an
enduring impact in Europe, the ‘practical divinity’, poured forth; and it
was backed up by supplementing the official diet of the church by lec-
tures and exercises, by sabbatarianism and efforts to achieve precision
of conduct and the internalisation of the covenant theology. Puritanism
as a devotional movement of the literate generated not only Bibles with
appropriate notes, but a great stock of devotional manuals; these were
taken to America by the emigrants, imported continually thereafter and
subsequently republished in Cambridge and Boston. Hambrick-Stowe
insists that these manuals are a fair index of Puritan piety in America; the
diary references to private devotion show them in use, and the battered
condition of the surviving copies bespeak their continued employment.2
The Puritans did for the Reformed tradition much of what Arndt did for
the Lutherans. They made good use of Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux
and Thomas à Kempis, and, like Arndt, were a vehicle of them to a wider
public. Also like Arndt they were eminent protagonists of the current
vogue of renewing Christianity by establishing meditation in the home
and heart; indeed ‘closet religion’ became one of their characteristics.
For this purpose the Puritans showed a curious fondness for the devo-
tional literature of the Counter-Reformation. The Reformed tradition
had tended to argue for a political and social policy as well as a reform of
the church; but, when all these were out of reach, and when in the later
seventeenth century the world of business was increasingly abandoned
by the state to laisser-faire, it was very important for the descendants of
the Puritans that the world of closet religion was left to them.
Nor were they modest about what could be achieved there. They
claimed mystical union with God in a way that would have horrified
many Lutherans, not least Jakob Böhme. We are implanted into Christ
by a lovely fruitful faith, says Robert Bolton, ‘and blessedly knit into Him
by His Spirit, as fast as the sinews of His Precious Body are knit into his
bones His Flesh to His sinews and His Skin to His Flesh’.3 Not only was
Jesus called the Christ, so were all the true members of his congregation.
2 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety (Chapel Hill, 1982), p. vii.

3 Quoted in G. S. Wakefield, Puritan Devotion. Its Place in the Development of Christian Piety
(London, 1957), p. 33.
The Reformed tradition in Britain and America 87
There is a certain irony in the fact that when the Quakers began to preach
Christian perfection, Presbyterians reverted to Protestant type, and (as
George Fox found) to ‘roare up for sinne in their pulpits. Itt was all their
workes to plead for it.’4 (Equally ironical was the fact that the spiritu-
alising tendency of the Quakers greatly increased the appeal of Jakob
Böhme.) Nevertheless there was a distinctive stamp to the Reformed
treatment of the mystical tradition of the past. As Francke analysed the
steps in Pietist conversion, so the Puritans analysed the stages in the mysti-
cal life. The traditional periodisation had been that of purgatio, illuminatio,
and unio; the Puritans scored an advantage over the Catholics by moving
mystical union, conversion, into the first stage of their doctrinally framed
scheme of justification, sanctification and glorification. Mystical union,
in the Catholic schemes the ultimate reward of a spiritual elite, was now
available to all the faithful, and available where it was most needed, at
the beginning of the saint’s pilgrimage, as encouragement for everything
ahead. For pilgrimage was emphatically the Puritan view of the Christian
life, and the pilgrim was the Puritan hero-type as much as the son of
toil, horny-handed but right with God, was that of the later Primitive
Methodists.
It did not need Bunyan to teach the Puritan that his pilgrimage was
likely to be a long and testing experience, that final perseverance was as
rare a quality in its way as that which enabled Catholic mystics to mount
the seven rungs on the ladder to God. Possessed of the need to penetrate
the allegories that he would encounter on the way, the Puritan knew that
he must realise within himself the pilgrimage of the people of God in the
Bible. Their journey through the wilderness was a type of the death and
resurrection of Christ, and the Puritan must prayerfully identify himself
with the whole story. Indeed for many Christians glorification was so dis-
tant from justification that they would be bound to wonder at some times
whether the journey they were on was actually the journey to the heavenly
kingdom, whether the faith they had was really the justifying faith which
they had claimed at the beginning. It was indeed one of the character-
istics of English Puritans that the doctrine of predestination seemed not
to convey the assurance that it brought to most of the Reformed world.
Bunyan was not alone in stressing ‘what I felt, what I did smartingly
feel’;5 more than most, the English Puritan needed to feel his election
sure, as well as to acknowledge the biblical promises and to recognise the
signs in himself. Despite Foxe’s Book of Martyrs England did not rival the
great compendiums of godly lives produced on the continent like Reitz’s
4 G. F. Nuttall, The Welsh Saints (Cardiff, 1957), pp. 59, 68.

5 Grace Abounding, para. 276.
History of the Regenerate, nor the attempt to produce a pedigree for the
radical Protestant mystic like Gottfried Arnold’s History of Churches and
Heretics, but a large part of exemplary Puritan reading was in fact consti-
tuted by the lives of godly men, often attached to their funeral sermons,
and the sheer quantity of autobiographical writing, never intended for
publication and only seeing the light of day in recent times, is a testimony
to the self-examination that went on.6
It was not only the failure of political hopes that aggravated the desire
for reassurance. The changes in English church life introduced by Charles
I and Laud marginalised the Calvinist mainstream into a position at once
unorthodox and subversive. This ‘hijacking’7 was so unpalatable to the
political nation that a united front formed against the king and rendered
him powerless. Inevitably a zealous minority among the Puritans saw the
opportunity to make the gains in church and state that had eluded them
for so long; equally inevitably, they divided the united front. The outbreak
of civil war marked an increase in the royal strength, and the check to that
increase by the New Model Army and the execution of the king himself
were all results unwelcome to the Presbyterians.
This was more than a political setback. The Puritans had shared the
apocalyptic language current in the England of their day; an England
in which since Thomas Brightman (1562–1607) apocalyptic study had
become a field of sophisticated investigation, and had been absorbed into
the national tradition. In the early 1640s the Clavis apocalyptica of Joseph
Mede (Milton’s tutor at Cambridge) attained European fame by its syn-
chronisation of apparently disparate events in the book of Revelation;8
indeed part of the spur to perseverance had been the happy vision of
Christ’s return, and the beatific prospect of completing reform in church
and state. What had actually occurred was the emergence of sects, many
with much more radical apocalyptic views; when it could be maintained
that the execution of Charles I was necessary because he was the tenth and
final horn of the fourth beast of the book of Daniel, and that, Babylon
having now fallen, the way was open for the monarchy of Christ him-
self, it was plain to the Presbyterians that the end-time afforded more
possibilities than they had reckoned on. The end of Puritan rule never-
theless seemed to afford the opportunity to realise the opportunity for
a reformed national church under a king restored under Presbyterian
auspices.
6 For a survey of all this literature see my introduction to the Bicentennial Edition of the
Works of John Wesley, XVIII: Journal & Diaries I, pp. 1–36, 105–18.
7 John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 11.
8 Katherine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1654 (Oxford,
1979), p. 179.
Alas! This opportunity disappeared even quicker than the last; to

their consternation the Presbyterians found themselves not only non-
conformists but persecuted nonconformists like the rest of the hated
sects. The tortured conscience of an expelled minister like Philip Henry,
who could not bring himself to gather congregations against the national
church, tells its own story. So does that of his son, the famous Bible com-
mentator Matthew Henry, for whom rural evangelism was life and breath,
and who preached a course of sermons on the Four Last Things – death,
judgement, hell and heaven – apparently without raising the question of
when Christ would appear in glory.9
With a Catholic on the throne and with a public tendency to panic at
fears of sectarian uprising enduring for many years after the Restoration,
both Puritan and non-Puritan inquirers into the Last Things (like
Newton) tended to keep quiet about their convictions. It appears, how-
ever, that Richard Baxter had reached settled convictions on this matter
before the imprisonment in 1685 that enabled him to give his whole
mind to the subject. During the previous twenty years Baxter had sought
repeatedly to secure an accommodation with the church establishment
with no success at all, and not unnaturally he became disillusioned at the
prospect. In the end, however, he came to the conclusion, abhorrent to the
Puritan tradition as a whole, that the Papacy was not Antichrist, that there
was to be no millennial rule of Christ, that God ruled through Christian
Emperors and national churches, that the date, 1697, pressed on him by
Thomas Beverley for the end of the world was blasphemous, perhaps even
that William III might bring off the coup which had eluded the Westmin-
ster Assembly, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell and General Monk
and establish the Christian Empire for which he now yearned.10 Under
the guise of expounding what the scriptural prophecies actually said, this
was to put off the apocalypse not, as in the contemporaneous case of
Spener, into the middle distance, but into oblivion.
Bunyan and for that matter Baxter were still capable of a ravishing
vision of the heavenly city, the pilgrim’s ultimate goal,11 but it is hard not
to feel that the grand panorama that had been held by so many with such
certainty in mid-century, of God’s blow at Antichrist at the Reformation
now being within sight of completion, and there being no clear limits
to what might be achieved by the pouring out of His Spirit in these
latter days, was losing its urgency and imminence. It fared rather better
9 The Works of Matthew Henry, ed. W. Tong (London, 1726), p. 42.

10 On all this see W. M. Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979); N. H.
Keeble and G. F. Nuttall (eds.), Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (Oxford,
1991), no. 1158.
11 G. F. Nuttall, Studies in English Dissent (Weston Rhyn, 2002), p. 76.
in America, partly because the laudable desire to rebut the Orthodox

calumny, that America was the outer darkness where the lost were cast
with weeping and gnashing of teeth, had favoured the exegesis that she
might well be the privileged site of the Second Coming; indeed there was
no reason why America should not host that great missing sign-post to
the end, the conversion of the Jews. For had not Thorowgood satisfied
himself that the native Indians were in fact Jews, and ‘the English nation in
shewing kindness to the aboriginal natives of America may possibly [have
been showing] kindness to Israelites unawares’. And given the glorious
abundance of God’s grace at the end-time, was it not actually America’s
turn?
Asia, Africa and Europe have, each of them, had a glorious gospel-day; none there-
fore will be grieved at anyone’s pleading that America may be made a coparcener
with her sisters in the free and sovereign grace of God . . . And when the Messiah
shall have gathered his sheep belonging to this his American fold; his churches
[sic] musick being then compleat in harmony, the whole universe shall ring again
with seraphical acclamations ONE FLOCK! ONE SHEPHERD!12
Sewall was even prepared to draw ammunition from the émigré Huguenot
apocalyptist in the United Provinces, Pierre Jurieu; he had correctly
located the slaying of the witnesses, another sign of the end, in the suf-
ferings of his own people in the Cévennes. Surely then a Second Advent
in New England could not be far behind.13
Samuel Willard, the great systematician of New England, was less opti-
mistic. It was clear to him in 1700 that the general calling of the Jews had
not yet taken place, and that there would be no dramatic developments
until it had: ‘It is night at present, and the terrors of it are apt to affright
us; but the day will break, and let us refresh ourselves with that consid-
eration . . . It will not be long before these days commence.’14 But when
he came to produce his Compleat Body of Divinity in two hundred and fifty
lectures15 he preserved a deafening silence about the Last Things. Sim-
ilarly Thomas Shepard could preach on the themes that ‘true believers
do with hope expect the Second Coming of Christ’, on ‘the certainty of
Christ’s Coming’ and that ‘Christ will not tarry once his time is come’
without attempting to ascribe a date to the drama.
12 Samuel Sewall, Phaenomena quaedam Apocalyptica ad Aspectum Novi Orbis configurata

(Boston, Mass., 2nd edn, 1727 [1st edn 1697]), Dedication.
13 Samuel Sewall, Proposals Touching the Accomplishment of Prophecies (Boston, Mass., 1713),
p. 10.
14 Samuel Willard, The Fountain Opened; or the admirable Blessings plentifully to be dispensed
at the National Conversion of the Jews (n.pl., 3rd edn, 1727), pp. 2, 11.
15 Boston, Mass., 1726.
The most important weather-gauge, however, was constituted by those

indefatigable propagandists, Increase and Cotton Mather. Both were full
of policy prescriptions and had inevitably to prescribe for New England
as well as for the churches. Increase (1639–1723) did not care too much
for New England, and seems to have outlived any conviction that his
prescriptions could possibly work. It is the more interesting therefore
that he represented a New England Reformed version of the Lutheran
Orthodox. Armed with the federal theology which the Puritans took to
America, he was a master of the jeremiad in its great days, interpreting
the troubles of New England as God’s judgements upon its sins, and
prescribing accordingly. The civil authorities should do what they could
by enforcing wholesome laws for moral behaviour and church attendance.
The churches should cooperate by getting the people to ‘own’ or renew
the local covenant with God. And the ministry should put the screw
upon the people by seeking to restore regeneration as the test for church
membership.
Increase Mather’s first prescription was to be undergirded by pri-
vate enterprise in the modish English manner. He had a copy of Josiah
Woodward’s Account of the Rise and Progress of the Religious Societies in the
City of London (1699) and both he and his son Cotton (1663–1728), who
in 1683 became his ministerial colleague, pushed societies of all kinds
both spiritual and law-enforcing. ‘Owning the covenant’ became one of
the characteristics of the New England scene, but it was a graft upon the
covenant theology they brought with them. To the original theology was
added the requirement that to qualify for church membership candidates
must give an acceptable testimony to a work of grace within, to what like
Bunyan they might ‘smartingly feel’. This requirement, appropriate when
saints were to be gathered out of the parish, created problems in America.
It put a barrier to church membership to the children of regenerate com-
municants who arrived already baptised, and put a stop to the baptism of
children of non-communicant adherents. Thus the small pool of church
members in New England had to be replenished from the very small
pool of candidates baptised in infancy. When in 1662 a Massachusetts
synod insisted that church membership be confined to ‘confederate vis-
ible believers . . . and their infant seed’, they at the same time created
a class of half-way members, subject to church discipline, and capable
of transmitting baptism, but excluded from the Lord’s Supper and from
voting in church affairs. No testimony of regeneration was required from
half-way members, simply the act of ‘owning’ the baptismal covenant
made for them by their parents. By this device the churches enlarged
their formal constituency, the ministry obtained a homiletic lever to use
on future occasions, and half-way members could secure baptism for their
children. The procedures for owning the covenant varied from parish to
parish, and on occasion evoked a community response reminiscent of
a revival.16 The war years of the 1670s brought a flurry of covenant
renewals, and in 1677 Increase Mather began a campaign to persuade
all the churches in Massachusetts to renew their covenants. Thus in the
hour of trial New England was taken back to its roots.
It was also taken on to a long-running controversy led by one of Cotton
Mather’s sharpest critics. Mather’s massive two-decker Magnalia Christi
Americana (1702) had been intended to establish the providential status
of New England against the denigration of the European Orthodox. From
a Puritan point of view, however, he got off on the wrong foot from the
start. The hand of God in the creation of New England he descried
in the simultaneity of the discovery of America, the Reformation and
‘the resurrection of literature’ or Renaissance. The invention of printing
had denied the devil any possibility of excluding the new settlers from
‘the two benefits, Literature and Religion’. Desperate to put American
culture on the map, he sought a foothold in the most energetic spiritual
movement of his middle years, that of Halle Pietism. He took up with
Arndt, corresponded strenuously with ‘the incomparable Dr Franckius’,
advocated his institutions, and asked A. W. Böhme, the Pietist chaplain
to Queen Anne’s consort, Prince George of Denmark, to get a copy of the
Magnalia to ‘our [Hallesian] friends in the Lower Saxony’, for it would ‘be
a little serviceable to their glorious intentions’, ‘the American Puritanism
[being] . . . much of a piece with the Frederician Pietism’.17 Mather’s self-
conscious Europeanism is hardly surprising; his father, Increase, who did
as much as anyone to shape the legend of New England as Immanuel’s
land, spent his life trying to get back to old England;18 his uncle Nathaniel
and his brother Samuel actually got back; while his son Samuel not only
continued the correspondence with Francke’s son, but published a life of
the great August Hermann, theologus incomparabilis,19 including material
by the pro-rector of Halle, and an account of religious events in the
Lutheran world down to the revival in Livonia, all addressed to the college
at Harvard. It is not easy to imagine the hand of friendship being extended
to Lutheran Pietism from the top drawer of any of the European Reformed
systems at that date, but Mather’s doctrine, the starting point of so much
16 J. M. Bunsted, The Great Awakening and the Beginnings of Evangelical Pietism (Waltham,
Miss., 1970), pp. 24–7. Cf. T. Prince, Christian History (Boston, Mass., 1743–5),
pp. 108–12.
17 Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. K. Silverman (Baton Rouge, La., 1971), pp. xvi, 89,
215.
18 M. G. Hall, The Last American Puritan (Middletown, Conn., 1988), pp. 61–2, 65, 76,
269, 272–3, 280–2.
19 S. Mather, Vita B. Augusti Hermanni Franckii (Boston, Mass. [1733]), p. 1.
later evangelical propaganda as to convince unwary critics that the whole

notion of the Great Awakening was a literary fiction, had a practical as
well as an ideological end. Massachusetts needed a better charter after
the ravages of James II, and it needed some shield against the constant
external pressure from France.
This shield was the more necessary to Mather as he thought that the
religious societies had done their work before the end of the War of the
Spanish Succession. Even the pure church, it seemed, would not save
New England. It now appeared to Mather that the pure church would
not usher in the millennium; the millennium would have to usher in the
pure church. Halle, with its plans for universal regeneration, its efforts to
convert the Jews, its missions, was less significant as empirical evidence
of the way the kingdom of God might be realised than it was as a sign of
the end-time. In the years after the peace of Utrecht, when in England
Archbishop Wake was seeking to dam the international tide of Popery
by negotiating Protestant Union, Mather in New England was pursu-
ing Christian union on the basis of the simple ‘MAXIMS OF PIETY’
(always in upper case) as a certain sign that the millennium was near.
This transformation in Mather was accompanied by a steady heightening
of the emotional temper. For all the Mathers’ championship of a pure
and narrow church, and of owning the covenant, it is not surprising that
the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to him the first use of the word
‘revival’ in the technical religious sense. Mather did not live to see it on
any great scale, and those who practised it on a small scale were his chief
critics. First among them was Solomon Stoddard (1643–1729).
Stoddard, minister of Northampton, Mass., from 1669, was a man
of abounding strength and vitality. Succeeding the first minister of the
town, he married his predecessor’s widow, added twelve children to her
three, and reinforced his spiritual influence by a great network of fam-
ily connexions in the Connecticut valley. He got the town meeting to
build a good road to Boston, and came down it annually until he was
eighty to preach at the Harvard commencement when most of the min-
isters were present; and when war broke out in 1675, he, almost single-
handedly, forced the magistrates to drop their intention of abandoning
the defence of Northampton. He thus acquired a singular resonance both
southwards down the Connecticut valley, and eastwards towards Boston,
the stronghold of the Mathers. He was also an innovator, and began to use
the half-way covenant when it was still a relative novelty. A standard state-
ment was prepared in which the individual acknowledged the teaching
and government of the church in return for instruction. In three months
105 people, virtually all the eligible children of the parish, had owned the
covenant; but over the next five years Stoddard admitted only nineteen
new communicants. As a preparatory stage towards church membership

the half-way covenant was a failure, and in 1677 Stoddard discarded it
and church covenants as well.20
Stoddard’s new broom did not stop there. He was not interested in the
millennial question, and was here sharply distinguished not only from the
Mathers but from his celebrated grandson, Jonathan Edwards. In con-
sequence Stoddard gave new prominence to another doctrine from the
Puritan treasury, that of ‘preparation’. From the beginning the Reformed
tradition, not least in New England, had found ways of softening the edges
of the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. The date of the final consum-
mation of all things was of course in the hands of God alone; but Cotton
Mather was not the only policy-maker fertile in suggestions for inducing
God to bring it about more quickly. Stoddard at least offered relief from
all this by giving his mind to the practical question of how to undo the
ruinous effects of what amounted to a Protestant Jansenism, which nar-
rowed the basis of the church at the very moment when it was on trial.
It was the same story with that other favourite topic of British Puritan
converse, conversion. Conversion, the ultimate spiritual prize, was also
the work of God alone, and the founding fathers had required candidates
for church membership to testify to this work of grace. But not only had
the Reformers thought of ways in which the heart might be prepared to
be grasped by grace, the Scripture itself had testified that the Law was a
schoolmaster to bring men to Christ. This raised a host of other questions.
How effective a schoolmaster was the Law? How long and impercepti-
ble was the progress from conviction under the Law to the assurance of
saving grace? And practical religion had its counterpart to the issue in
moral philosophy, whether ethics was primarily a matter of the will or
the understanding: if the study of the passions was part of ethics, how
far did regeneration involve the affective side of human nature?21 Puritan
thinkers had worked out their own morphology of the Christian life in
which a man’s pilgrimage from sin to salvation corresponded, hopefully,
with the three stages of God’s relation with man, viz. vocation, justifica-
tion and sanctification. Stoddard could not have repudiated this frame
of mind and got a hearing; when he came out in favour of permitting all
but the scandalous to partake of the sacraments, Stoddard was in effect
pushing sacramental observance forward from the period of assurance
into the period of preparation.
20 J. W. Jones, The Shattered Synthesis (New Haven, 1973), p. 106; R. G. Pope, The Half-Way
Covenant (Princeton, 1969), pp. 251–3.
21 N. Pettit, The Heart Prepared (New Haven, 1966), pp. 45–7; W. Walker, History of the
Congregational Churches in the U.S. (New York, 1894), pp. 252–3.
Stoddard, moreover, latched on to another discussion which was not

new, and which was to be revived in a strange context by Wesley: whether
the Lord’s Supper could be regarded as a converting ordinance. Proclaim-
ing that ‘all men of competent knowledge’ may partake of the sacrament,
‘though they know themselves to be in a natural condition’, he held that
‘this ordinance had a proper tendency of its own nature to convert men’.
Preparation might take a long time but conversion (and here Stoddard
almost anticipated the objections which the Moravians would make to the
Puritan as well as the Franckean scheme) was wrought in the twinkling
of an eye. For this reason, if for no other, to subject candidates for church
membership to an inquisition about the work of grace within could not
yield a useful result.22
In all these ways Stoddard was easing his path by reducing the burdens
that the New England Way had placed on the flock, but in the Reformed
manner he introduced some more by the back door: ‘the use of this dis-
course [he concluded a vast sermon on the Nature of Saving Conversion
(1719)] is of EXHORTATION to labor to be converted’. A further impli-
cation was unmistakable. If salvation was prepared by the ordinances of
the church, and if it was important to get as many people prepared as
possible, the rational ideal was that of a national church and not the
gathered community of visible saints. The ‘light of nature’ suggested to
Stoddard that the ideal polity was that of the Church of Scotland. All
this might be poison to the Mathers, and one of the objects of writing
the Magnalia Christi Americana was to show that Congregationalism was
the true New England tradition; but it became an orthodoxy in the Con-
necticut valley, and, as Jonathan Edwards related in a famous passage in
1736, by beating the drum of the Law, Voetian-style, Stoddard produced
results:23
he had five harvests, as he called them. The first was about 57 years ago; the
second about 53; the third about 40; the fourth about 24; the fifth and last about
18 years ago . . . Those about 53, and 40, and 24 years ago, were much greater than
either the first or the last: but in each of them, I have heard my grandfather say,
the greater part of the young people in the town seemed to be mainly concerned
for their eternal salvation.
Moreover, as he grew older Stoddard championed a charismatic min-

istry of a style that was becoming fashionable in the Church of Scotland,
even more than he championed the sacraments, and almost brought the
Mathers to terms. When he produced his Guide to Christ (1714), Cotton
22 Pettit, Heart Prepared, pp. 201–4.

23 Jonathan Edwards, Works, ed. S. E. Dwight and E. Hickman, 2 vols. (London, 1834;
repr. Edinburgh, 1974), I, p. 346.
Mather wrote a preface asserting that the two were in complete agreement
except on the matter of the use of communion. In 1716 Mather even
urged revivals right across the province on a European pattern designed
to secure the triumph of Protestantism over its Roman Catholic enemies.
And as preaching began to compress the familiar progress from sin to
assurance into the crucial phase of the New Birth, the revivals began,
most notably at Windham, Conn., in 1721.24
The most famous of Stoddard’s harvests, because it was described in
the most famous tract of the whole revival, A Faithful Narrative of the
Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton by his grandson and successor
in the parish, Jonathan Edwards (1737), occurred after his death. This
tract gave a classic account of the diffusion of revival by contagion, and
has often been regarded as the beginning of the Great Awakening. This it
was not. Stoddard had been no more able than the Mathers to generate
a great awakening as distinct from quite local revivals, and the outcome
of Edwards’s preaching in ‘Northampton and the neighbouring towns
and villages’ differed little in scale from that of his grandfather. More-
over the tract was first published in England with a commendation by the
eminent Congregationalists Isaac Watts and John Guyse; this showed,
as Steinmetz’s German edition showed still more clearly, that the signif-
icance of the pamphlet lay less in the importance of what it reported,
than in the way it corresponded to hopes and fears much more widely
held. Neither the impact on America of the constant reporting of devel-
opments in European Protestantism, nor the emigration there of men
like Frelinghuysen, had been sufficient to generate a really great awak-
ening. The heavy hand of the Reformed ministry needed to be loosened
before a dramatic result could be achieved. This happened with two sur-
prise arrivals from the Middle Colonies, George Whitefield and Gilbert
Tennent. Nevertheless, on the brink of the Revival the Reformed min-
istry in New England had argued itself through Puritan presuppositions
to a position characteristic of later evangelical attitudes that had not been
evident in those presuppositions, viz. that if the Christian life did not
begin with conversion it would probably not begin at all. They had also
managed to slough off a great heritage of the occult beliefs and prac-
tices that still clung round the Lutheran world.25 This was not altogether
their own achievement, for by about 1720 imports of occult literature
from England had more or less dried up; with the partial exception of
24 C. Mather, Menachem (1716), pp. 39–42; W. F. Willingham, ‘Religious Conversion . . . in

Windham, Conn., 1723–24’, Societas 6 (1976), 109–19; Prince, Christian History,
pp. 129–34.
25 Jon Butler, ‘Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600–1760’,
American Historical Review 84 (1979), 317–46.
almanacs, the English publishers were ceasing to find a market for this
kind of thing. To what had been happening there we must now turn.
Inside the English establishment many of the things that had accompa-
nied the development of Pietism in the Lutheran world made a brief but
spectacular entry in quarters that were to leave no mark on the develop-
ment of evangelicalism. Newton continued to play with Paracelsianism,
without committing himself to it, notwithstanding that there was now
little magic left in alchemy.26 The character that made Newton the butt
of Keynes’s description as ‘the last magician’ nevertheless provided him
with a link to his friends the Cambridge Platonists, and sustained his role
as ‘the last of the interpreters of God’s will in action, living on the eve
of the fulfilment of times’, at the moment when Paracelsianism received
a fresh impulse from van Helmont.27 Paracelsus had believed that the
Day of Judgement was fast approaching, and among Newton’s contem-
poraries there was a prevailing sense that the revolution of knowledge and
the unsealing of the prophetic books were two aspects of God’s plan for
the restoration of the world.
The full Renaissance programme of Hermeticism and magic was at this
time kept up in England by the curious group of Cambridge Platonists
gathered around Ralph Cudworth, Master of Christ’s, and one of his
fellows, Henry More. In 1670 More met the younger van Helmont
when he came to England, bringing as always the Cabbala with him.
More persuaded him to visit the young Anne, Viscountess Conway, who
suffered debilitating headaches. Van Helmont’s alchemy did no good at
all, but he persuaded Lady Conway to see her own suffering in cabbal-
istic terms as part of the divine redemptive process leading to universal
salvation. Henry More was dismayed at this, but the cabbalistic treatise
she eventually wrote, a refutation of Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza, was
the kind of thing the Cambridge Platonists stood for, and the kind of sci-
ence that Newton was anxious to rebut. More followed Joseph Mede in
his interpretation of the Last Things, which meant that he too expected
the end before long. Not surprisingly, ‘his temper was Sanguine; yet with
a due quantity of Noble Melancholy that was mix’d with it: As it was
Aristotle’s Observation, “That all persons eminent, whether in Philoso-
phy, Politicks, or any other Arts, do partake pretty much of the Melan-
cholick Constitution”.’28
26 F. E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 168–74.
27 Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 8, 11.
28 Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr. Henry More [1710], ed. M. F. Howard
(London, 1911), pp. 184, 230; Aharon Lichtenstein, Henry More. The Rational Theology
of a Cambridge Platonist (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. viii, 106–7; Allison P. Coudert,
The Impact of the Kabbalah Century. The Life and Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont,
1614–1698 (Leiden, 1999), pp. xv–xvi.
Yet brightly as shone the light of the Cambridge Platonists, their efforts
to simplify the religious understanding of the world were soon forgotten
in favour of other methods. In the same way, Newton’s expectation of the
approaching Last Things found fewer hearers, and though his disciple and
successor in the chair of mathematics at Cambridge, William Whiston,
tried to keep up the notion of a fairly prompt end to all things,29 even
this fell victim to a change of atmosphere and of scholarly fashion. In
1650 men had defined themselves by reference to the Scriptures, but
in the Augustan age the patterns were taken from Roman history and
politics. Satirists evoked not Jeremiah but Juvenal, legislators not Moses
but the Roman senate, moralists not Hebraic righteousness but Roman
virtue, not the end of all things but that epitome of short-termism, the
balance-sheet.30 And right on cue came the learned Anglican Dr Whitby
to explain that this change of perspective was what the Bible had all along
intended. The second volume of his Paraphrase and Commentary on the
New Testament (1703) contained31 ‘A Treatise of the true Millennium:
showing that it is not a reign of persons raised from the dead, but of the
Church flourishing gloriously for a thousand years after the conversion
of the Jews and the Flowing in of all nations to them thus converted to
the Christian Faith’. Daniel Whitby, in short, was the inventor of the
post-millennial scheme. The ordinary operations of divine grace would
on this view be enough, given the thousand years or so, to convert the
nations, destroy the Papacy, and get everything ready for the Second
Advent. The balance-sheet was perhaps a more attractive prospect than
this enervating perspective. As the doughty old hyper John Gill was to
complain in 1776, the millennial age was supposed to include the binding
of Satan, and of this there was no sign whatever. What was obvious was
‘the decline in the reformed churches both as to doctrine, discipline, and
conversation’.32 The anxieties generated by this decline were to initiate a
major change of tack and of inspiration, and to bring about the emergence
of evangelicalism in the West.
29 William Whiston, An Essay on the Revelation of Saint John, so far as concerns the Past and
Present Times (Cambridge, 1706). In the edn of 1744, p. 298, Whiston reckoned that the
battering which the Papacy suffered in 1736 at the hands of the kings of Spain, France
and the Two Sicilies was one of the worst years it had had since the Reformation, another
encouraging sign of the imminence of the end.
30 Stephen N. Zwicker, ‘England, Israel and the Triumph of Roman Virtue’, in Richard
H. Popkin (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–
1800 (Leiden, 1988), pp. 37–64.
31 II, pp. 247–78.
32 John Gill, An exposition of the Revelation of St John the Divine (London, 1776), p. 229.
6 Zinzendorf
Hostility to Zinzendorf
If the eccentric Lusatian Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–
60) was not an evangelical it would be hard to know how to classify him;
but he tested the boundaries of evangelical accommodation to the limit,
and the torrent of abuse that he encountered in the press, which amounted
to a major literary industry, was by no means all from predestined oppo-
nents on the side of Lutheran Orthodoxy. And all this notwithstanding
that the Renewed Unity of the Brethren which he launched from his
estate at Herrnhut acquired an honourable place in the history of Protes-
tant missions, and generated some of the most dramatic of all religious
revivals in the former Swedish territories east of the Baltic.1 For this
there were two main reasons. The first was that the great puzzle for the
count’s biographers was his extraordinary capacity to combine a great
ability to make a good first impression with an even greater inability to
keep the loyalty of men of independent mind. Even two of the men who
did come through this stringent test, Spangenberg, who at the end of
Zinzendorf’s life took control of the community and rescued something
from the spiritual and financial morass into which Zinzendorf got it, and
the Baron von Schrautenbach, one of his eighteenth-century biographers
and admirers, bore witness to the toll it took. Spangenberg admitted can-
didly that ‘I cannot deny that to me his addresses often appeared paradoxi-
cal and his methods of business extraordinary. I must also admit that I was
often reluctant towards them, and on this account not seldom let myself
out in my free way.’2 Schrautenbach was even more candid, comparing
1 For an account of these events see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge,

1992), pp. 144–55.
2 A. G. Spangenberg, Declaration über die Zeither gegen uns ausgegangen Beschuldigungen
(Leipzig and Görlitz, 1751), p. 18. Repr. in Olms edn of the works of Zinzendorf
(Hildesheim, 1962– ) (cited below as Zinzendorf Werke), here Ergänzungsband V.
99
Zinzendorf with Cromwell not just as a hero but as a hypocrite and

manipulator.3
As a target of friendly fire on this scale, the count might be thought
to need no enemies, but the long-running feud between him and his
old friends at Halle was probably the worst outbreak of bad blood in
the evangelical ranks in the eighteenth century. Hitherto this feud has
seemed sufficiently accounted for by Zinzendorf ’s rebellion against the
scheme of conversion advocated by Francke, the centrepiece of which was
the Busskampf or penitential struggle, in favour of rapid or èven instanta-
neous conversion, and by the hostilities generated by Spangenberg during
the brief period in which he enjoyed a half-appointment at Halle, 1731–3.
But it now appears that the young count had been something of a nuisance
when he had been a schoolboy at Halle, trading on his social standing to
report some misdemeanour by Gotthilf August Francke to his father, the
great Professor August Hermann Francke.4 It did not help that after the
death of the latter in 1727 the former became head of the Halle institu-
tions, and much preoccupied with the defence of his father’s heritage. It
has also become apparent that while still a boy Zinzendorf aspired not
merely to reconcile Halle and Wittenberg, but to play a leading role in
the active negotiations for church union that went on after the War of the
Spanish Succession, again a presumptuous intervention in policy which
was not well received by the elder Francke.5
An esoteric theology?
Thus the personal misjudgements which marked Zinzendorf ’s whole
career began early; but they were not the only cause for suspicion. He
was widely accused of teaching a secret or esoteric doctrine, or at least
of practising a disciplina arcani among the Brethren.6 It was a partic-
ularly sore point with Bengel that he would not have preaching about
the millennium,7 and certainly (as we shall see) did not want it in the
Litany of the Wounds. If the count had his secrets there was no saying
3 Ludwig Carl Freiherr von Schrautenbach, Der Graf von Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine
seiner Zeit (Gnadau, 1851); Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. IX,
p. 176.
4 For the full story see Hans Schneider, ‘Die “zürnenden Mutterkinder”. Der Konflikt
zwischen Halle und Herrnhut’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 19 (2003), 37–66.
5 This theme is explored by Thilo Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung an den Inner-
Protestantischen Einigungsbestrebungen des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts. Biographie und Theologie,
1716–1723 (Marburg, 2000).
6 Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III, pp. 328–9.
7 Johann Albrecht Bengel, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine in Zinzendorf Werke, Mate-
rialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. X, p. 266.
Zinzendorf 101
what might be going on behind closed doors in the Brüdergemeine. And

certainly the count kept secret the documents explaining why he could
not be appointed Abbot of St George in Württemberg, and, yet more
suspicious, held to the view that reading the whole Bible was danger-
ous for some people, that the Bible as a whole should not be printed
but circulated from hand to hand amongst the elect in manuscript, while
anthologies of important passages were published for the hoi polloi.8
Of course there were denials of the existence of any disciplina arcani,
and explanations why some things were better kept within the flock;9
but a French scholar has written a huge treatise on Zinzendorf ’s esoteric
doctrine10 without at the end quite clarifying what it was. His claim is
that this esoterism was not an institutionalised affair with initiating prac-
tices like freemasonry, but an anti-institutional spiritual conception, with
a long Christian tradition behind it.11 He maintained that Spangenberg
approved his master’s refusal to cast all his pearls before swine, but that,
when in the 1750s he began to push the Moravian community back
towards Lutheran Orthodoxy, he opted for the count’s theologia publica
which was more susceptible of general acceptance; he did not deny or
admit the arcane teaching preserved in the hearts of the elect to whom
alone and between whom alone it could be communicated.12 And it is
certainly true that the great nineteenth-century expositors of Herrnhut
like Plitt13 and Becker14 mention the existence of an arcane theology
without making anything of it.
Like Francke, Zinzendorf made an absolute distinction between the
unregenerate but baptised conformist and the regenerate Christian who
had received the spirit of God. This afforded grounds for treating the two
classes differently; yet Zinzendorf knew three things: (1) that the original
defensive reasons for a measure of secrecy in the early church no longer
applied; (2) that his own belief that the end of time was not too far off
might well be held to justify a change of policy; and (3) that Gottfried
Arnold had argued that with the invention of printing nothing was secret
any more, a fact peculiarly difficult for the original sense of the mystical
theology as access to hidden truths. Yet a whole section of his London
Sermons15 is devoted to esoteric theology.
8 Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III, pp. 529, 470.

9 Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, p. 177.
10 Pierre Deghaye, La Doctrine Ésotérique de Zinzendorf (1700–1760) (Paris, 1969).
11 Ibid., Avant-propos. 12 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
13 H. Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theologie (Gotha, 1869–74), I, p. 127; III, pp. 194–5.
14 Bernhard Becker, Zinzendorf im Verhältnis zu Philosophie und Kirchentum seiner Zeit
(Leipzig, 1886), pp. 398, 369.
15 Zinzendorf Werke, Hauptschriften V, pp. 256–76.
All this is true; it helps to explain the suspicion to which he was subject;
and it was no doubt an expression in Zinzendorf of a more general Pietist
desire to achieve a separation between the children of God and the chil-
dren of this world. This, however, hardly justifies the wider attempt of
Deghaye to argue that Zinzendorf ’s habitual inconsistencies, the nat-
ural fruit of an autodidact who scorned to speak precisely,16 form an
overarching totality of antithetical propositions which cannot be sepa-
rated.17 It may be, as Deghaye thinks, that in this matter Zinzendorf, like
earlier evangelicals, was influenced by the Cabbala, the emanatist prin-
ciples of which bore a resemblance to the Gnosis, starting from Noth-
ingness and multiplying itself in hypostases, each of which represents
the whole, which in the end would be glorified when manifested in the
Saviour. It can be shown that the count’s grandmother, under whom
he was brought up, collected cabbalistic works and that he knew them;
that on his Grand Tour he sought out Jacques Basnage (1683–1752),
a refugee Huguenot in the Netherlands, whose celebrated History of the
Jews gave a lengthy (unfriendly) commentary on the Cabbala; that the
minuscule court at Ebersdorf, from which he took his wife and which
certainly influenced him permanently, was in touch with the Christian
cabbalists;18 that Oetinger, who (as will transpire later)19 was the leading
cabbalist of his day, flirted briefly with the count in the early 1730s; and
that Zinzendorf ’s singular views of the parousia or Second Coming may
well have been influenced by the cabbalistic construction of the Matthean
text that where two or three are gathered together studying the words
of the Torah, the Chekhina or divine presence is with them: i.e., in his
view the parousia is in the hearts of the elect. But at the end Deghaye had
to admit that Zinzendorf was no true cabbalist.20 What he has actually
shown is that like all the other early evangelicals Zinzendorf was eclectic.
There are in fact simpler approaches to what he became.
Zinzendorf and Mysticism

Zinzendorf was not only a godson of Spener, and the grandson of one of
Spener’s favourite women, he retained much of Spener’s frame of mind
throughout his life: his hope of better times, his emphasis on fellowship,
his approach to the Jews, his belief that Christ was the subject of the
Old Testament. The Halle party hoped that he would become one of
the quintessential ‘pious counts’ who did so much for the support of the
16 Zinzendorf Werke, Hauptschriften I, p. ix. 17 Deghaye La Doctrine Ésotérique, pp. 671–2.

18 Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, p. 242. 19 In chapter 9 below.
20 Deghaye, La Doctrine Ésotérique, pp. 161–3, 168, 182, 184–6, 673.
Zinzendorf 103
Halle institutions. Their hopes were disappointed for other reasons. He

shared with them all that emphasis upon experience, interior appropri-
ation, which drew them all close to the mystics and kept them within
reach of the exponents of experimental science. The odd feature of all
this is that at any rate Bernardine mysticism had been largely appro-
priated by Lutheran Orthodoxy (which in this respect cannot be rightly
accused of teaching ‘dead’ theology); whereas radical criticism of the
church was a characteristic of what the Germans call the ‘spiritualist’ or
sharply anti-institutional tradition. The main tradition of what was known
as ‘the mystical theology’ tended towards what Gottfried Arnold called
the ‘impartial’ or undenominational view. By virtue of being impartial or
undenominational this view was also critical of the church in its measure,
though more for its denominational pretensions than for its institutional
existence. But all of them rebelled against the dominance of Aristotle
and of system in the Orthodox understanding of the faith, and put their
trust in ‘experience’. This was emphatically Zinzendorf ’s character from
an early age, and during his adolescent obsession with church union he
tried to base everything on experience.21 The problem with experience,
as he found, was not just that his own experience differed from that of
others in the field, but that it did not always seem quite trustworthy even
to himself.
One of Zinzendorf ’s unquestionable merits was that he was certainly
a cheerful Christian, and nothing in his experience corresponded to the
painful struggles of the Busskampf which (in the light of his own experi-
ence) Francke had built into the prescriptive Hallesian understanding of
conversion. The open breach between the two parties that came about in
1733 led to a good deal of abuse on this issue by both sides. Zinzendorf
did not mind admitting that on Hallesian principles he was an uncon-
verted person; the Halle reproach came back that his method of con-
version was so quick that it even preceded the acknowledgement of sins
to be forgiven. In no way nonplussed, Zinzendorf claimed that ‘a Pietist
is a man who cannot be converted in the cavalier way that we are, but
needs more circumstance, has to have his affairs in better order, and his
books in credit’; ‘we ride and the Pietists go on foot’.22 While conceding
that ‘Pietism is not an error, simply another method’, Zinzendorf did in
fact feel that a great principle was at stake. If, as he believed, Christ had
suffered the Busskampf representatively for all mankind, then to call for
men to go through the struggle again did them a double disservice: it
21 Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, p. 17.

22 Hans-Walther Erbe, Zinzendorf und der fromme hohe Adel seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1928), repr.
in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. XII, pp. 489–90.
not only piled misery unnecessarily upon them, but delayed conversion
by focussing their minds upon internal thresholds, when they should be
looking outwards upon the wounds of Christ.
There was a good deal in common between Zinzendorf and the great
Protestant mystic Tersteegen, but the count’s attempt to recruit him in
1741 broke down at precisely this point. The former maintained that
one could be freed lifelong from all self-righteousness in a quarter of an
hour; Tersteegen, who knew that Zinzendorf was much too much of an
activist ever to be a contemplative, and much preferred the Countess who
had been left quietly at home, would not have it.23 The sad thing about
this meeting, which ended courteously but unproductively, is that each
party believed the other was betraying a basic Protestant principle by
advocating a form of salvation by works, the Count by grabbing instant
salvation, the mystic by advocating some form of the mystical ladder to
God. It made no difference that each pleaded explicitly for experiential
religion, nor that Zinzendorf on another occasion came close to claiming
that the Beatitudes were the rungs on an even longer ladder to God.24
What was common to the two was that, because experience mattered, the
biographies of those who had it also mattered. Tersteegen inherited from
Pierre Poiret his unrivalled collection of Catholic lives of the saints, and
put them into the Protestant tradition in three huge volumes; while the
Herrnhut archive accumulated the testimonies of deceased Moravians by
the scores of thousands.
But the fact that throughout his life Zinzendorf distrusted scholarship
in favour of experience, apparently supposing that all scholarship was
Aristotelianism and that abstract thought would lead the faithful away
from contemplating the wounds, exposed him to slashing attacks from
men like Lessing25 and Bengel. Bengel indeed maintained in plain terms
that when the count accepted doctrine without a scriptural basis he was
a fanatic, and in any case did not have the capacity for the job he had
undertaken.26 Zinzendorf nevertheless continued to stand on experience
against all else, except in one curious instance. He once brought about
the healing of a sick English brother called Worthington by faith and the
laying on of hands. He did not, however, conclude that he had a gift of
23 The only record of this encounter is a letter by Tersteegen, printed by Dietrich Meyer in
‘Cognitio Dei experimentalis oder “Erfahrungstheologie” bei Gottfried Arnold, Gerhard
Tersteegen und Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf ’, in Dietrich Meyer and Udo Sträter
(eds.), Zur Rezeption mystischer Traditionen im Protestantismus des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts
(Cologne, 2002), pp. 235–6.
24 Otto Uttendörfer, Zinzendorf und die Mystik (East Berlin, 1950), pp. 117–18.
25 Hans-Christoph Hahn and Hellmut Reichel (eds.), Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder
(Hamburg, 1977), pp. 479, 487–90.
26 Bengel, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine, pp. 37, 286.
Zinzendorf 105
healing and the experiment was never repeated.27 This caution contrasts
curiously with his unconditional faith in the use of the lot.
Zinzendorf and the mystics

The tussle with Halle permanently soured Zinzendorf ’s attitude to mys-
ticism, to which he thought his opponents especially committed. It is
important therefore to try to sort this out, especially as it affects the way
one assesses his role in the Sichtungszeit, the ‘time of sifting’, in the later
1740s when, especially in the community at Herrenhaag, baroque devo-
tions with fireworks and feasting broke out unrestrained. This took the
whole community towards bankruptcy, financial and, in the view of many
critics, spiritual as well. This sorting-out is not made easier by the way
Moravian historiography has responded to ecclesiastical circumstances.
The upshot of Spangenberg’s rescue policies after the financial collapse
of the early 1750s was to push the community back towards Lutheran
Orthodoxy (at the expense of whatever ‘esoteric’ doctrine there was);
and this, combined with later developments, was to leave the Moravians
formally independent but in considerable practical dependence upon the
Protestant establishments, much as English Methodism has become tied
to the coat-tails of the Church of England to the profit of neither. The
result was that, when Hermann Plitt, Bernhard Becker and other good
scholars were opening up the Herrnhut archive in the nineteenth century,
they felt in duty bound to accommodate what they found to the long
reign of Ritschl and his pupils in the German theological schools. Ritschl
did enormous service to Pietist studies with his Geschichte des Pietismus
(1881–6), but to his hard mind Pietism was ultimately the re-emergence
of medieval wet rot, and no rot could be wetter than the exuberant
baroque enthusiasm of the ‘time of sifting’. This period therefore became
a prime embarrassment to the Moravian historians, who seized upon
Zinzendorf ’s repudiation of the use of sentimental diminutives and other
signs of retreat in the 1750s, and failed to account for the fact that in
the 1740s he reached the peak of his creativity in liturgy, preaching and
writing, or else regarded it as some kind of alien intrusion.
Clearly, however, mysticism formed an important part of the
Lutheranism in which Zinzendorf grew up, especially in its hymnbooks
and devotional aids. The mystical eroticism of the hymns appealed espe-
cially to the young count;28 the hymnbook that he published for his
own parish at Berthelsdorf in 1725 was based on the Freylinghausen
27 Schrautenbach, Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine, p. 84.

28 E. Beyreuther, Studien zur Theologie Zinzendorfs (Neukirchen, 1962), pp. 10–11.
(Hallesian) book and liberally featured mystical hymns by Gottfried

Arnold, the Petersens and Richter;29 and when on his Grand Tour
he made friendly contact with the Jansenist Archbishop of Paris, the
Cardinal de Noailles, it was perfectly natural for him to have Arndt’s
True Christianity translated as a present for him.30 By this date, how-
ever, Arndt was not at the forefront of the count’s mind. His disappoint-
ment at his early failures to secure the union of the theological schools at
Halle and Wittenberg, or that of the Protestant churches of the Empire,
moved him powerfully in a spiritualist direction; the influence of the court
at Ebersdorf, which had separated itself from its parish and pursued a
philadelphian and revivalist spiritualism, was a still more powerful influ-
ence in the same direction. This influence remained dominant until the
early or mid-1730s.31
For long enough it seemed compatible with Zinzendorf ’s simple trust
in experience; even in 1728 physica experimentalis was still his model for
theology. Zinzendorf ’s friendship with Noailles, however, had opened the
door to the works of Mme Guyon and Fénelon, and in 1731 he began
regularly to concern himself with Guyon’s discourses in his addresses to
the community. This was not just from the fascination with the victims of
ecclesiastical and political oppression which attracted so much evangelical
attention, but because his very favourite Moravian, Anna Nitschmann,
had become a fiery enthusiast for Mme Guyon and looked likely to
become a Moravian Bourignon as well. Not surprisingly Zinzendorf
dealt gently with Guyon, admitting the usefulness of her transcenden-
tal concepts;32 and saved the day with Anna Nitchsmann.
Soon afterwards, in trying to ward off accusations that the Moravians
were mystics who did not make the Bible the basis of their faith, he
had to admit that there were scholars in Herrnhut who were followers
of Poiret, that Reformed and universal salesman of mysticism, medieval
and modern.33 And by the time of the great breach with Halle in 1733–4
he had already begun to rehearse the arguments that would support his
breach with mysticism in general. In a claim that paid scant respect to
any notion of evangelical solidarity, he stressed the Brethren’s differences
29 Uttendörfer, Zinzendorf und die Mystik, pp. 55, 57.

30 Schrautenbach, Zinzendorf und die Brüdergemeine, p. 121.
31 The following discussion is based on Leiv Aalen, Die Theologie des jungen Zinzen-
dorfs (Berlin, 1966); Leiv Aalen, ‘Die Theologie des Grafen von Zinzendorf ’, repr.
in M. Greschat (ed.), Zur neueren Pietismusforschung (Darmstadt, 1977), pp. 319–53;
D. Meyer, ‘“Erfahrungstheologie”’; and the great mass of the Zinzendorf Werke, and the
MS resources of the Moravian archives at Herrnhut and Muswell Hill, London.
32 Uttendörfer, Zinzendorf und die Mystik, gives numerous excerpts from these addresses,
pp. 116–18.
33 Ibid., p. 129.
Zinzendorf 107
from Pietists, Methodists, Jansenists and Quietists, whom he lumped

together as ‘mystics’:
[T]hey press for the alteration of conduct or of personality or both, or for litur-
gical reform or for getting rid of everything outward. We preach nothing but the
crucified Christ for the heart, and think that whoever grasps this sheds everything
which is not good, and acquires all good things including the living and abiding
impression of the man of heart, whose name is the Lamb of God.
What now irked Zinzendorf was the idea that mysticism consisted in
the abominable fancy of setting up a ladder to God; the idea that ‘every-
thing must grow, mount to the heights, become clearer, more purified,
cleaner, more noble; for this in our view is pure moonshine [Träume]’.
Mysticism in short was the ultimate abomination of the deification of the
creature; it was worse than the Busskampf. Although, exactly like Terstee-
gen, Zinzendorf called for humility against this demonstration of pride,
he made something radically different from it. For Tersteegen the hum-
ble heart was the beginning of a long course of sanctification; when on
Maundy Thursday 1724 he signed his covenant with his Saviour in his
own blood, he concluded: ‘May thy death struggle support me. Amen.’
The support for which he called was for a life of self-denial and prayer,
the strenuous course which might, with perseverance, yield the experi-
ential theology that he, like Zinzendorf, required. For Zinzendorf Christ
on the cross had not only performed the Busskampf for all mankind,
he had done all that was necessary to connect men with God. Sin was
vanquished, grace was triumphant, there was joy in contemplating the
wounds. The Moravian commentators tend to describe this new position
as Zinzendorf ’s ‘turn to Luther’. Whether this theologia crucis was really
a turn to Luther is questionable, but the count certainly believed that it
was, and saw in the doctrine of justification by grace through faith, in the
status of the believer as justus ac peccator, relief from the burdens, from
the apparent self-centredness, of both the Busskampf and the mystic way.
At any rate by 1734 his mind was made up and from then on he battled
sturdily against what he took mysticism to be.34
Zinzendorf and theosophy

During this same period of the early 1730s Zinzendorf also closed the
door against another possibility, that of theosophy, or, in practical terms,
Jakob Böhme. The count claimed never to have read him,35 but in
34 See sources quoted in n. 31 above, especially Meyer, ‘“Erfahrungstheologı̀e”’, pp. 233–9.

35 August Gottlieb Spangenberg, Apologetische Schluss-Schrift (Leipzig, 1752); repr. in
Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III, p. 192.
1730 and 1733–4 a young Württemberger minister, Friedrich Christoph

Oetinger, had a lengthy stay in Herrnhut and theosophy was among the
things in which he tried to interest Zinzendorf. As we shall see, Oetinger36
obtained considerable repute in his own right, but he never had much luck
with Zinzendorf. Thus whether the count read Böhme or not he certainly
knew of him, particularly after the efforts of Oetinger. With Oetinger as
with Tersteegen, Zinzendorf shared some presuppositions but could not
accept the way they were developed. What Oetinger sought to do (as in his
own way the count did too) was to overcome the dualistic severance of the
modern outlook, ‘the falling apart of nature and spirit, physics and ethics,
matter and mind [Verstand]’. To these discomforts Oetinger opposed a
pansophic viewpoint derived from Böhme. God was the fount of all life
and from his love there streamed the groundless sea of all the forces on
which nature and mental life fed. The Fall had created a great rift through
this creation bringing with it inward and outward death. However, the
Bible, with a wonderful inner unity, countered this disaster with a great
central view of the creation, the Fall and the re-establishment of the unity
that had its origin in God. And because spirit and nature were the two
sides of the one reality which came from God, ‘physicality [Leiblichkeit]
is the end of God’s ways’.37 For Oetinger the devil was an idealist who
did not believe in matter.
Zinzendorf had his own grievances against Enlightenment and materi-
alism, and the cult of the wounds was among other things a prophylactic
against both; but the ‘great central view’ was system under another name.
‘You love opinion [i.e., system], I hate it. You honour knowledge, I despise
it. You seek to lead souls into speculation, reading, learning, and I seek
to hunt all souls out of it with war-cries.’ He believed indeed in the unity
of the Scriptures, but, following Spener, he found that unity in Christ
not in the theosophical panorama. Indeed ‘not Plato nor Socrates, not
Grotius nor Leibniz nor Newton, if they put together all their wisdom,
could bring it into a rational connexion with the love and righteousness
of God’.38
Thus by the mid-1730s Zinzendorf had turned his back upon system-
atic theology, theosophy and mysticism as represented by ‘the mystical
theology’. That his position was not quite simple is shown by his publica-
tion in 1735 of an article in his Freywillige Nachlese entitled ‘Brief Propo-
sitions on Mystical Theology’.39 This was a thoroughly Guyon-ish, even
36 In chapter 9 below.
37 E. Beyreuther, Zinzendorf und die Christenheit (Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1961), p. 59.
38 Hahn and Reichel, Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder, p. 192.
39 Repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband XII, pp. 809–61. For a commentary see
Uttendörfer, Zinzendorf und die Mystik, pp. 131–4.
Zinzendorf 109
Arnoldian, piece, and it was quite certainly not written by Zinzendorf

himself, but by Jeremias Josephi who died in 1729 as superintendent of
Sorau (Niederlausitz), written indeed before he attained that dignity.40
To cap all it was speedily followed in the same journal by another piece,
supposed to have originated from Paul Anton in Halle, entitled ‘Theo-
logical Circular on the Crimes of the Mystics’, which sharply contrasted
Luther and the mystics, whom it treated as forming a characteristically
Catholic movement of piety.41 What is to be made of all this? Zinzendorf
presumably edited and approved the inclusion of these articles; they could
not be consistent with each other, nor with what is known of his views at
the time; perhaps he was responding to the fact, already noted, that there
was a variety of views on mysticism within the community at the time.
Zinzendorf and St Bernard

Yet for all Zinzendorf ’s ranting against mysticism and the mystical theol-
ogy so beloved by the radicals, it is impossible to overlook his indebted-
ness to the Bernardine bride- and passion-mysticism with which he had
grown up and which had come to him out of the devotional traditions of
Lutheran Orthodoxy. No one emphasised more than he the experiencing
and feeling, the enjoying and tasting of the work and the body of Christ,
and if he now chose to regard this as biblical and Lutheran and nothing
at all to do with mysticism, it is difficult to see how his attitude can be
squared with the ordinary use of words; it simply exemplifies what differ-
ent uses the early evangelicals made of the same texts and traditions. The
specially personal element in all this is what Dietrich Meyer has called
Zinzendorf ’s ‘naı̈ve Biblicism’;42 i.e., the belief that Christ’s unseen pres-
ence in the world was a prolongation of his apparently bodily presence in
the forty days after the first Easter. Without this the cult of the wounds
could not have had the realism that Zinzendorf believed it had. Moreover
he had begun to ‘locate’ the place where this transaction went on in ‘feel-
ing’. Here it is impossible not to notice how in an unsophisticated way
he anticipated that later ex-Moravian, Schleiermacher,43 and anticipated
also the workings of his own imagination in the 1740s in ‘locating’ the
dramatic events of the apocalypse. At any rate it is clear enough that if by
the mid-1730s Zinzendorf had abandoned one kind of mysticism he was
deeply engaged in another, and clear too that the ‘time of sifting’ in the
1740s was not an aberration or the intrusion of some alien influence, but
40 For this argument see Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband XI, pp. L–LII.
41 Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband XII, pp. 891–938.
42 Meyer, ‘“Erfahrungstheologie”’, p. 239.
43 Cf. Aalen, ‘Die Theologie des Grafen von Zinzendorf’, p. 339.
the logical conclusion of what went before, and a fitting time for him to
reach the peak of his liturgical and literary creativity.
The ‘time of sifting’

The Sichtungszeit was that rather ill-defined period in the 1740s when
the overflow of Zinzendorf ’s baroque enthusiasms seemed to burst all
bounds, and was spectacularly exemplified in the feasting and fireworks
in the settlement at Herrnhaag. These contributed first to the expul-
sion of the Brethren from Herrnhaag in 1750, then to the financial col-
lapse of the whole Moravian enterprise, to Spangenberg’s assumption of
control and to the count’s abandonment of some of the characteristic
mannerisms of the previous period. Zinzendorf ’s productivity, published
and unpublished, in this period was immense. Pride of place perhaps
goes to the Litany of the Wounds of 1744 and the 32 Homilies on the
texts contained in it which he gave in 1747. It is a measure of how far
Zinzendorf ’s piety had penetrated the community that he did not him-
self write the Litany, which was the work of a number of other Brethren;
though of course he revised, corrected and authorised it, and, accord-
ing to Uttendörfer, stamped it with ‘his inimitable crass and yet genial
paradoxes’.44 The Litany begins with a solemn invocation of the Lamb
of God, his side-wound and the holy Trinity. Then follow petitions for
God to protect against all self-righteousness, all dryness of discipline, all
grace and beauty apart from the blood of Christ. There follow medita-
tions on the life of Christ and his physical manifestation, all designed, in a
litany to be performed weekly, to encourage a particular form of humility,
a particular kind of child-likeness towards the friend of children; ‘your
astonishing simplicity makes reason hateful to us’. The quasi-physical
contact between the Saviour and the faithful is further emphasised in the
addresses: ‘pale lips kiss us upon the heart’. If in the Old Testament to
see God was to die, now to feel the kiss of the pale (or dying) lips was
healing to the soul.
Endlessly encouraged, this yearning for a real, ‘tangible’ experience of
the Saviour gave rise to an intense chiliasm, a thing of which Zinzendorf
otherwise said little.45 This vivid sense of constant feeling and enjoyment
of the wounds betrayed the count into saying some very un-Lutheran
things about faith; the absolute sense of their living in Christ and he
in them made the general promises attached to faith seem rather passé;
‘the essential character of a child of God is to live, move, be in love, in
the Saviour on the cross’.46 For all his controversy with Mme Guyon,
44 Uttendörfer, Zinzendorf und die Mystik, p. 217.
45 Ibid., p. 221. 46 Ibid., p. 222.
Zinzendorf 111
Zinzendorf was now using the language of ‘pure love’ and treating faith
as simply a means of temporarily overcoming the imperfections of inward
vision. And the immediacy (in both senses) that had attached to conver-
sion now attached to the vision of the Saviour: ‘if anyone is a Christian,
the Saviour becomes personally present to him in a moment’.47 This view
of course involved Zinzendorf in the exegesis of the passage in which the
Saviour himself declared those blessed who had not seen and yet believed;
but by expanding on the difference between seeing and not seeing, he
believed he had got round the difficulty.
In any case he could always resume the usual evangelical rant against
‘system’, assured that the dear God had planted no theoretical system in
the Bible, and that to look for one was really rather provincial. When in
this mood, Zinzendorf oscillated between the acute and the obtuse. He
could counter approaches to the Scriptures of the fundamentalist kind by
the observation that the apostles could not have been fundamentalists or
they would not as a matter of habit have quoted the Old Testament from
the Septuagint, its Greek translation. On the other hand he almost gloried
in the reproach of Richard Rothe, the parish minister at Berthelsdorf,
that the Brethren had a new theology every year. If he found a word that
pleased a hundred Sisters it was right to speak of nothing else for a while,
without pretence that this was the whole truth of the matter. If they said
that faith was so-and-so, it did not mean that they implied it was nothing
else.48 It was no wonder that Zinzendorf’s critics found him slippery.
But he went on as before, maintaining even of ‘those Revelation- and
Prophesying-Whimsies which are in some countries & particularly at this
time so catching, from which nothing can keep one but an attachment
to our Saviour’s person & ye side’s dear hole’ that the one prescription
would cure all.49 And when in the 1750s Spangenberg was getting a grip
on the community, the count adapted in manner and vocabulary rather
than in substance.
Just as baroque enthusiasm led Zinzendorf, not to complete fantasy in
the way he used the Scriptures, but to a rather hit-and-miss practice, so his
devotion to the wounds did not betray him into a general susceptibility
towards the supernatural or even the extraordinary. He would give no
heed to alchemy or the schemes for making gold. His wealth was in Jesus
alone. Yet the Paracelsian background to early evangelicalism persisted
among some of the Moravians as it did among a few Methodists. The
young Goethe’s Moravian friend Suzanne von Klettenberg was an adept
47 Ibid., p. 225. 48 Ibid., pp. 229, 233.

49 The quaint English is that of the translation made for the English Moravian community:
Moravian Church House, Muswell Hill. MS Gemeinhaus Diarium, 31 May 1747.
of nature-magic, and he himself long afterwards kept up a form of it.50

Nor did Zinzendorf care for the trances of Rock and the Inspired, though
the piety of Rock impressed him. But he should stick to Scripture and
the wounds of Jesus. Prophecy which Rock claimed to utter when in
Inspiration was another problem; divination (Weissagen) was not the same
as prophecy, and meant the immediate impression of the Holy Spirit going
beyond usual understanding but yet being consonant with Scripture. This
was known among the Brethren, but made little of by them, and was
subject to examination and, in appropriate cases, to condemnation by
them. The possibility of visions was admitted on the authority of the
Saviour, but if a Brother claimed to have had a vision he was subject to a
careful examination, to find whether he had fallen under the influence of
some fanaticism or other. Here again the count’s influence was thrown
on to the side of caution.
In the congregation itself apostolic graces, miracles and powers of
insight were to be expected and accepted in a child-like spirit, but basi-
cally they were to be regarded as occasional gifts. As we have seen, healing
by faith and the laying on of hands happened, but was not attempted as
part of the spiritual armoury of the congregation. On the other hand,
doctors in the congregation needed prophetic gifts. Zinzendorf ’s caution
in all these matters was strengthened by his belief that one of the mistakes
of the Hallesian party was that they had confused a belief in miracles with
the saving faith, and he was not loath to tell in detail how Francke’s belief
in miracles had exposed him to the coarsest deception.51
He also had views on telepathy and second sight, that curious gift which
persisted among the Inspired for a century or more, and which they took
with them successfully to America. Telepathy, illustrated by the knowl-
edge that someone fifty miles away is dying, was not a prophetic gift, it was
an unusual natural gift the connexions of which are not known. Second
sight was more important than telepathy, but was also often not prophetic
but intuitive. He regarded it as a necessary quality, and did once wish that
the Sisters of the congregation would cultivate their interior feelings more.
He also wished for responsible leaders of the community to have the gifts
of genius they needed, and often went further than this, wishing for them
to have particular charismata. Thus servants of the Saviour, who had to
care for the organisation at a particular time, must have a revelation of
their plan and proceedings or they would fail in their object.
They required indeed prophetic personalities; they must have an insight
into the whole affair, know that they stood in a simple connexion with
50 The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed. K. J. Weintraub (Chicago, 1974),
I, p. 370.
51 On the above see Uttendörfer, Zinzendorf und die Mystik, pp. 383–4.
Zinzendorf 113
God, and know also from one day to the next what was the Lord’s mind
for his people. The seer must know and say what that mind was, but he
must not know how he attained the knowledge. The burdens of office
were real, but it was Zinzendorf’s belief that every period in the history
of the kingdom of God had a prophet or two to see it through, perhaps
not more, for there were not many with whom the Saviour could come to
an understanding on these things. Indeed it was beyond ordinary human
capacity to know when to speak and when to be silent about revelations
of this kind. But the Saviour equips those he chooses and makes sure they
retain their humility. Only God can bear the burden of both omniscience
and omnipotence, so foreknowledge is kept within bounds. The prophet
must obey the voice of God and keep his revelations to himself. At the
end of his life the count professed that the community would never have
got anywhere had it not had very precise prophecies from the Saviour.
He himself had frequently had advance knowledge of dates to travel, of
the trustworthiness of individuals, and the success or failure of particular
enterprises. But the lot remained a continuous miracle, by which his
revelations could be checked.52
One more oddity is worth a mention because it links Zinzendorf to an
intellectual fashion which came later and which contributed to the disin-
tegration of the original evangelical mix. That is magnetism. The count
recognised in Christ magnetic and magical properties. Those qualities
were magnetic which resembled the ability of a stone to attract iron;
those were magical which revealed a supernatural power in certain things
and circumstances. The scriptural test case was that of the woman who
touched the hem of Christ’s garment; although she denied it, he had felt
virtue go out of him.53 This signified to Zinzendorf a polemical blow to
the stiff Wittenberg insistence that Christ acted through the Word alone;
the episode showed clearly that there were forces in the soul and body
of the Saviour which acted sympathetically upon the soul and body of
another, without his even thinking about it. This implied in turn that
whoever came near him became wundenhaftig, attached to the wounds;
whoever approached his deceased body became jesushaft, one with Jesus.
Thus to Zinzendorf the Christian was a soul who ceaselessly represented
himself to his divine friend, and in his glance reliably studied the phys-
iognomy in which all good things were contained. He gave thanks that
this was actually attained in the community. ‘Among the first blessings
which he has given us is this, that we know him. This is the text which
was a dogma at least two thousand years ago, and is praxis with us at
this moment. We know him and are known by him.’ Moravians became
copies of the blessed original.
52 Ibid., pp. 385–7. 53 Ibid., p. 388.

Zinzendorf and the Last Things

Little has been said so far of Zinzendorf ’s understanding of the Last
Things, and it is a matter of some consequence that he said little on
this subject, and that most of what he did say was during the enthusi-
astic period of the ‘time of sifting’.54 But Zinzendorf had been reared
on Spener’s ‘hope of better times’ and clung on to this hope throughout
his life, distinguishing it clearly from the millennium;55 indeed in 1751
he claimed that ‘if there are still brethren besides us who have Spener’s
ideas, namely a hope of better times and so forth at heart, and they would
only compare how much H[errn]hut has for these thirty years past con-
tributed towards that matter, then they should have occasion to rejoice
with shame and humiliation’.56
This hope had been modified during the formative period he spent at
Ebersdorf, especially under the tutelage of Benigna, his future sister-in-
law.57 The Ebersdorf court, convinced that it was living in the evening of
time, had separated itself from the parish and established its own philadel-
phia, an undenominational foreshadowing of the church of the last age.
This too stayed with Zinzendorf to the end, complicated only by his need
to establish a case for toleration under the law of the Empire by professing
undying loyalty to the Augsburg Confession. During the ‘time of sifting’
he began to wonder whether the end might be longer postponed than he
hoped – ‘the flax must go through a great deal before it can be spun’58 –
but he continued to depend heavily on texts that had, or could be given,
an eschatological slant: Luke 14:7, ‘Come for all is prepared’; Revelation
19:8, ‘Happy are those invited to the wedding of the Lamb’; 1 John 2:18,
‘It is the last hour.’ This indeed was the reason for a missionary aposto-
late, and for avoiding the Lutheran Pietist mistake of preaching ‘within
the temple of religions’, the religious establishments;59 they were already
under the sign of the fall of Babel.
In 1733 (as we will see) Oetinger arranged for Zinzendorf to meet
Bengel in Württemberg, in the hope of promoting an understand-
ing between the two men. This enterprise was foredoomed to failure.
Zinzendorf was not much disposed to listen to a then little-known
Swabian schoolmaster, though he was prepared to help his efforts to
establish a better text of the New Testament. But Bengel had expended
immense labour in working out the salvation history implied in the book
54 Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theologie, II, p. 541.

55 Spangenberg, Apologetische Schluss-Schrift, p. 168.
56 Moravian Church House. MS Gemeinhaus Diarium 1751, 11 February 1751.
57 Daniel, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung, pp. 86–7.
58 Moravian Church House. MS Gemeinhaus Diarium 1747, 12 November 1747.
59 Deghaye, La Doctrine Ésotérique, pp. 69–73.
Zinzendorf 115
of Revelation, ending with a demonstration that the Last Age would open
in 1836. Zinzendorf was too consumed by venomous hostility to ‘system’
and too much under the influence of Pierre Bayle to give heed to any such
thing. He nevertheless, under the influence of Spener, philadelphianism,
and the practical experience of his community, continued to feel his way
towards an eschatology that was unlike any of those on offer among his
contemporaries.60
The essence of the chiliasm which Zinzendorf developed to the full
in the 1740s was constituted by his intense conviction of the real and
inseparable contact between his community and the crucified Saviour.
Christ was the Eldest of the community; an empty chair was kept for him
for when his physical presence returned; meanwhile the lot declared his
will. The Brüdergemeine was only the model of the house of God of the
latter days, but it was the ultimate model, and once it ceased to exist the
congregation of glory would be revealed. Thus much of what the churches
looked to in the Second Coming was already present among the Brethren.
Given the fact that Zinzendorf was able to envisage a presence of the Lord
in the style of his resurrection appearances before the Ascension, he found
no difficulty in conceiving a return visible only to the elect; so far from
being the triumphal return anticipated by the Protestant Orthodox, this
would be a return to the flock in silence and tears. This imagery owed
much to Matthew 25 which was full of stories of those who served the
Saviour, or did not serve him, without knowing of his presence.
Nevertheless the Second Coming would begin in the congregation
which had already anticipated the chiliasm by handing over the leadership
to Christ in 1741. Zinzendorf had of course to take care not to offend
against the eighteenth article of the Augsburg Confession which rejected
chiliasm in the flesh. So the spiritual presence, visible to the saints, would
initiate a millennium of comfort to them. Once Zinzendorf embarked on
the geography of the millennium his imagination had free rein. Sometimes
he thought the Saviour would create a hidden kingdom, like that of the
Incas. There he would create a great island like England, inaccessible with
rocks and sandbanks, and like Curaçao with no harbour penetrable by
alien ships. In this base there would be toleration and the influence of the
gospel would radiate abroad. But the publicly visible return of Christ in
the clouds to judgement (which the churches were expecting) would take
place at the end of the thousand years, when the great contest with Satan
would be fought out, the Jews would be converted, and the apokatastasis,
or the restoration of all things in the universe corrupted by Adam’s sin,
60 Useful material on this theme is to be found in Plitt, Zinzendorfs Theologie, esp. I,
pp. 591–6; II, pp. 541–60; Samuel Eberhard, Kreuzes-Theologie. Die reformierten Anliegen
in Zinzendorfs Verkündigung (Munich, 1937), esp. pp. 205–26; Gösta Hök, Zinzendorfs
Begriff der Religion (Uppsala, 1948), pp. 206–9.
would be achieved. Thus this second parousia was conceived with Zinzen-
dorf professing complete certainty about Christ’s resurrection body, and
complete uncertainty about the resurrection bodies of the saints.
Zinzendorf’s apocalyptic could not do without the conventional stage-
property of the conversion of the Jews; but it is worth noting that his
record of dealing with Jews, which went back to Spener, was not at all
conventional.61 For the immediately foreseeable future the Jews would
maintain their separate existence among the nations because under God’s
plan of salvation they still had work to do there. Jews were already being
grafted on to the Christian stock like wild olives, and in the period of
active mission before the Last Judgement Israel itself would proselytise
actively, and those Jews who did not reject this happy work would be
reconciled to Christ, who was actually the son of the God of Moses
come to earth. Indeed Zinzendorf’s ‘method with the Jews’ was ‘always
to presuppose that Moses and the prophets knew of no other God than
he who became man, and whom their fathers hanged on the tree: Hear,
O Israel, you have no other God than Jehovah, your God. Where is a
people whose God has gone down to become Jesus?’62 Zinzendorf had
the wit to appreciate that no appeal to the Jews was likely to succeed
as long as Christian powers treated them as shabbily as they normally
did. His early education at Halle had put him in touch with all the work
being done there upon the languages of the ancient Middle East, and
the significance they might have for Jewish missions.63 On his Grand
Tour he visited the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt, and gradually built up an
apologetic strategy for dealing with Jews, based on respect for Israel.
The United Provinces proved crucial for him. There he created settle-
ments and there he raised money cheaply for his projects and those of the
Saxon government. And it was there and in the Wetterau that his collab-
orator Samuel Lieberkühn sought relations with the Jews. His missions
extended to the Baltic, Zinzendorf ’s to America where he thought the
Indians were Jews. Their fruits were scanty and Zinzendorf came to dis-
agree with Lieberkühn as to the way that missions should be conducted.
Lieberkühn found that there was no way that Jews could be brought to
listen to the doctrine of the Trinity, which they found in conflict with their
monotheism. He believed that Jews won for Christianity must maintain
the full validity of the Law, and he shared the Jews’ hope for their national
61 The most useful single collection of material on this theme is Erich Beyreuther, ‘Zinzen-
dorf und das Judentum’, repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2,
Bd. XII, pp. 679–732. See also Hans Schneider, ‘Ein “Schreiben an die Juden”.
Hochmann, Zinzendorf und Israel’, Unitas Fratrum 17 (1985), 68–77.
62 Plitt, Theologie Zinzendorfs, I, p. 644.
63 On Halle and the Jewish mission see Christoph Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus und
Judenmission (Tübingen, 2004).
Zinzendorf 117
future. He might differ from the count, but the pair continued to main-
tain charitable relations with the Jewish community. Their mission to the
Jews was interrupted by the bankruptcy of the Moravian community in
the early 1750s; Zinzendorf was putting the best face on a bad job when
he concluded that his time was the time for the first fruits of the mission,
not the harvest.
Zinzendorf and Bengel

The differences between Zinzendorf and Bengel are worth a brief men-
tion in connexion with the eschatology of the former, partly because of the
rift they caused among evangelicals, but also because they illustrate very
clearly their different approaches to the Bible.64 Bengel was a remarkable
scholar,65 both broad and narrow. He became a philologist as part of
his equipment as a schoolmaster, and his German grammar appeared in
innumerable editions in Germany down to 1960, and in several English
editions published in Edinburgh and the United States in the course of
the nineteenth century. But he wrote it in Latin for a scholarly public.
This skill underlay Bengel’s massive contribution to almost every branch
of theological studies as then understood, philological, exegetical, escha-
tological, polemical. His salvation history was based on the idea of an
oeconomia divina, God’s housekeeping, which was constituted by a firm
plan for the world, worked out chronologically from the beginning to the
end. This scheme was deduced from the Bible which also taught profane
history and the arts of nature. But the Bible was the key source and its
evidence must be preferred to that of nature and history.
The great merit of this evidence was that it conferred an understanding
of the dealings of God with men not only in the past; it revealed the future,
not to gratify idle curiosity, but to enable men better to walk in God’s
ways. The details of Bengel’s arithmetic do not concern us; but in 1724 he
calculated that the 666 years of the beast ran from 1143 to 1809; in other
words the final dénouement was in sight. Making the necessary adjustments
he worked out that the end of the world and the Last Judgement were due
in the calendar year 3836, but that the millennial age would begin 2000
years before that, in fact in 1836.66 Before that again the ‘harvest’ and the
64 This question is well studied in two works by Gottfried Mälzer, Bengel und Zinzendorf.
Zur Biographie und Theologie Johann Albrecht Bengels (Witten, 1968); and Johann Albrecht
Bengel. Leben und Werk (Stuttgart, 1970).
65 To Martin Brecht, Bengel was ‘the great exegete of Pietism’. ‘Johann Albrecht Bengel
und der schwäbische Biblizismus’, in Kurt Aland (ed.), Pietismus und Bibel (Witten,
1970), p. 193.
66 Proper emphasis on the bimillennial nature of Bengel’s millennium has been recently
given in two essays by Martin H. Jung in his Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker
(Leipzig, 2003), pp. 75–116.
‘autumn’ when many good and wicked men would be taken away would
happen between 1734 and 1834. If the essence of Bengel’s message to the
Württemberger church was that there was no need to panic and secede
at the implications of a Catholic succession to the duchy, to the church
as a whole the message was that the evening of time was far gone, and
men must prepare to face the apocalyptic music.
When Oetinger arranged for Zinzendorf to meet Bengel in 1733, the
count’s views on the general question did not differ greatly from Bengel’s.
What he could not stand was, first, the imposition of a system, in this case
a chronological system, upon the Scripture, and, second, Bengel’s use of
the Scripture data. For although Bengel is commonly classed as a Pietist,
his use of Scripture was Orthodox in its method. Bengel assumed that
the biblical data were guaranteed valid by divine inspiration and could
therefore be worked on by a proper scientific method to produce far-
reaching and valid conclusions. He knew that Zinzendorf not only did not
have such a scientific method, but did not want one; he could not know
in 1733 that the count’s extraordinary religious imagination could secure
some good hits against Orthodox exegesis, and some misses. The results
of the failed conference of 1733 were striking. The two never met again,
but Bengel in his academic way read all the count’s output, and stalked
him relentlessly in the press. According to Bengel Zinzendorf was not up
to his undertakings, and could not bear the word millennium in ordinary
preaching.67 His influence helped to kill the hopes of Moravianism in
Württemberg until the nineteenth century, and he was so completely
adopted by local Pietists as one of their own that the book of Revelation
became their most read book for more than half a century. What none of
them could have foreseen was that his views on the book of Revelation
would make a distant convert in Wesley.
Is then (with hindsight) Zinzendorf to be regarded as an evangelical? It
seems to me that he is. He was like them all, violently anti-system and anti-
Aristotle; he thought the end was near but not imminent; he would have
nothing to do with the Paracelsian aura of Lutheran Pietism, and sooner
or later they all had to do without it, mostly without finding a substitute.
His Passion-mysticism led him into some odd views of the Bible and of
faith, but he was in his own way a man of faith and a strenuous Bible
expositor, at any rate to the elect. And if both his philadelphianism and
his personal relations were prickly he was not the only hedgehog in the
evangelical world.
67 Bengel, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine, p. 266.

7 John Wesley
Piety and government in the age of the young Wesley

Wesley was born into a family of the narrowest of Little England sympa-
thies. Both his parents had deserted a dissenting heritage for the Church
of England, and the political instinct of both was to prefer loyalty to an
English Catholic monarch in the person of James II to obedience to a for-
eign Protestant saviour in the shape of William III. Samuel Wesley made
his peace with the powers in possession earlier than his wife Susanna. But
according to John (much later) his father wrote one of the speeches for
the defence in the impeachment of Henry Sacheverell,1 that wild Tory
agitator on behalf of all those who damned foreign powers, and with
them the Whig generals and their foreign victories on behalf of foreign
powers. There is no doubt that this upbringing marked Wesley lifelong.
Born into a Jacobite milieu, the younger brother of a (non-Methodist)
collaborator of Bishop Atterbury,2 Wesley did not adopt the world as his
parish; indeed his one substantial trip abroad was to a nest of Jacobites
in Georgia, headed by General Oglethorpe, who had been christened
James Edward for the Old (Jacobite) Pretender. And Oglethorpe as much
as Wesley illustrated how difficult it was in a generation born to the
titanic struggle against Louis XIV actually to be Little Englanders; for
his service to Georgia was conditioned by the fact that he had served
under Prince Eugene, and knew all about Habsburg policies of frontier
settlement.
Equally, although it was still possible in Queen Anne’s reign to get up
mobs powerfully vociferating that the church was in danger, and that dis-
senters were covert Cromwellians, the thoughtful, like German Pietists,
were bound to react against the violence of Louis XIV’s religious policies
1 John Wesley, A Concise History of England (London, 1776), IV, p. 75.
2 Francis Atterbury (1662–1732), Bishop of Rochester 1713–23. A royal chaplain to
William III and Mary, Atterbury became famous early in the eighteenth century for
his championship of the powers of Convocation. Failing to make his way under George I,
he became involved in Jacobite conspiracy. He was imprisoned in the Tower in 1722,
impeached, deprived of his offices and banished in 1723.
119
and to sympathise with many of their victims. French Protestants were

in England in force, vexing all who had to deal with them. Wesley was
convinced lifelong that the Bull Unigenitus required Catholics to affirm
what they knew to be untrue and deny what they believed to be true,3
and the conviction that an unholy alliance between Rome and Versailles
had dealt roughly with the Quietists created an English market for them
and their publications.
There was indeed one group whose relations with the London govern-
ment and the Scottish church that it supported were not unlike those of
the Quietists across the Channel: the mystics among the Scottish Episco-
palians.4 Following the cue given in the seventeenth century by Robert
Leighton (1611–84), a former Presbyterian who became Archbishop of
Glasgow and took up with Port-Royal and the Jansenists, a group of
Episcopalians in north-east Scotland became devotees of the Quietists
and, as we have seen, gathered round the deathbed of Mme Guyon at the
end. James Garden (1647–1726), who was deprived of his divinity pro-
fessorship at Aberdeen for refusing to sign the Westminster Confession,
published a great attack on Reformed Scholasticism in Theologia Compar-
ativa. On the true and solid grounds of pure and peaceable theology in 1699,
a treatise given a European circulation by Pierre Poiret. George Garden
(1649–1733), the minister of St Nicholas, Aberdeen, who was deposed
in 1701 but continued to officiate, published and distributed most of the
works of Antoinette Bourignon. Finally deterred by some of her eccen-
tricities he turned to Mme Guyon in 1710, published her works, was
imprisoned as a Jacobite after the rebellion of 1715, and was among the
Scottish throng at Blois when she died.
In their intense reaction against the Westminster documents they went
back to older traditions: St Bernard, St Francis de Sales, Pascal, and that
hero both of old Samuel Wesley and young John, M. de Renty.5 They
also championed the work of another former Aberdeen divinity profes-
sor, Henry Scougal (1650–78), whose Life of God in the Soul of Man
(1677) became a classic dear to the young Wesley. English non-jurors
added their tithe to what the Scots had begun, as did the enormously
corpulent George Cheyne, an adherent of the Aberdeen circle, who con-
firmed his medical authority with John Wesley by reducing his own weight
from thirty stones to manageable proportions, and made mysticism a
matter of coffee-house chat among his Bath clientele. He linked up with
3 Wesley Works. Bicentennial Edition (cited below as Wesley Works), XX: Journals III, p. 318.
4 For the literature on this group see above, ch. 3, n. 43.
5 L. Tyerman, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley (London, 1866), p. 227.
John Wesley 121
the Manchester Jacobite John Byrom, who was a sales agent for Poiret.
Another non-juror, Francis Lee, son-law of Jane Leade, the philadelphian
who did much to make Jakob Böhme palatable to Germans, joined the
philadelphians and translated Fénelon.
Gradually German mysticism appeared in English dress. William Law,
another non-juror, discovered a preference for Tauler and the Theologia
Germanica, and by 1737 he had become a devotee of Böhme. So to the
Quaker irreconcilables of the pre-Revolution regime were added numer-
ous irreconcilables to the post-Revolution regime, in studying, translat-
ing and circulating works of modern mysticism, especially French and
Quietist. John Wesley’s milieu was predisposed in this direction, and it
was not long before he went with the tide.
This tide had been augmented by parental influence. That old cur-
mudgeon Samuel Wesley, whose reputation has suffered by his devotion
to a sort of scholarship in which no one has ever been interested, nev-
ertheless knew his Thomas à Kempis, Pascal and de Renty. His parting
advice to his son, that ‘the strongest proof of Christianity’ was the inward
witness, was well in the mystical tradition. Unfortunately for young John,
parental influences did not all operate in the same direction. Both Samuel
and Susanna preserved in themselves more of their Puritan heritage than
they knew; and when in 1725 John was confronted by the prospect of ordi-
nation, and beguiled by the kindly attentions of Sally Kirkham, he took
the sudden turn to seriousness in religion which some commentators have
regarded as his real conversion, and began meticulously to measure out
his hours and days. What he became, in short, was an example of Puritan
precisianism. Precisianism, as we have seen, was the ethical counterpart
of Reformed Orthodoxy in theology: that is, the application of a sort of
scientific method to biblical data, presumed to be inerrant, with a view
to establishing far-reaching (or minute) conclusions of great certainty. It
was at this point that even the old beacon of Thomas à Kempis seemed
to flicker:6
I was lately advised to read Thomas à Kempis over, which I had frequently seen,
but never much looked into before. I think he must have been a person of great
piety and devotion, but it is my misfortune to differ from him in some of his main
points. I can’t think that when God sent us into the world he had irreversibly
decreed that we should be perpetually miserable in it. If it be so the very endeavour
after happiness in this life is a sin, as it is acting in direct contradiction to the very
design of our creation.
6 Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 162–3.

Wesley and the mystics I

If it is one paradox that this was a repudiation of the Kempis of whom
the mature Wesley was to publish editions and extracts almost without
number, it is another that the course of life on which he now embarked,
pursued with the strenuousness with which he did everything, was sin-
gularly unsuccessful in producing happiness. Within a few months he
pronounced to his mother in his worst Oxford tutorial manner that ‘faith
is a species of belief, and belief is defined7 [as] an assent to a proposition
upon rational grounds. Without rational grounds there is therefore no
belief and consequently no faith.’8 Within a few weeks he had argued
himself out of that definition. It was possible, however, that the precisian
was not yet precise enough. Wesley took up with Jeremy Taylor’s Rules
for Holy Living and with à Kempis (again). Taylor was not in any great
degree a mystical writer, and, though The Imitation of Christ is a mystical
work, what appealed at this moment was that it sought to harmonise the
will of man and the will of God not through the methods of the Quietists
(who also were all voluntarists) but by devices of mortification based
on the example of Jesus. Mortification was one of old Samuel Wesley’s
prescriptions, and doubtless no more palatable to John for that. But the
self-examination for which it called opened at least potentially the door
to inward religion.
More importantly, however, he was deeply influenced by two works
of William Law, his Treatise on Christian Perfection (1726) and Serious
Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). Law9 was another non-juror, a
polemicist, not yet a mystic, but on his way. Given the present cast of
Wesley’s mind the insistence of these works that God must be the sole
object of human striving was bound to be attractive. Still more impor-
tant was Law’s friendship and the introduction that he gave Wesley to
the German mystics, Tauler and the Theologia Germanica. Law was by
this time well versed in Fénelon and Mme Guyon whose doctrines of
‘pure love’ he approved, but he found more philosophical rigour in the
Germans, and for this reason he became from 1737 increasingly devoted
to Jakob Böhme. Just as capable as Wesley of sudden changes of front,
7 By Richard Fiddes (1671–1725), whose Body of Divinity earned him an Oxford DD.
8 Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, p. 175.
9 Besides the modern literature referred to below, the student of Law is unable to avoid
Christopher Walton, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of . . . William Law
(London, 1854). This, perhaps the most disorderly book ever published, does indeed
contain ‘notes and materials’ for almost everything to do with William Law, not to mention
‘an indication of the true means for the induction of the intellectual “heathen”, Jewish
and Mahomedan natives into the Christian faith’.
John Wesley 123
he now turned against the Francophone mystics, including Antoinette

Bourignon of the Netherlands and Hector de Marsay, the Welsch-Swiss.
But the floodgates opened for Wesley. He not only took a shorthand
system from John Byrom, the Manchester poet and Jacobite, but also the
entrée to the mystical works edited by Pierre Poiret. Once embarked on
the French, Wesley turned to the Jansenist writers who lay behind his
old favourites Jeremy Taylor, Henry Scougal and Law. French writers
multiplied: Pascal; Quesnel’s Reflections on the New Testament, which had
encountered so much trouble in the church and was now available in an
English version by the non-juror R. Russell. He worked on the Introduction
à la vie dévote in Nichols’s version. He was also in regular touch with John
Heylin, ‘the mystic doctor’, a well-known Behmenist10 and a favourite
preacher of the members of the London religious societies, whose church
Wesley attended frequently till 1741. With him he collaborated to produce
a new edition of the Imitation.
The Georgia interlude

Caught up in the general Protestant rescue operation on behalf of the
Salzburgers Wesley arrived in Georgia in February 1736. Georgia proved
to be no context for a Desert Father (though Wesley had taken Makarius
the Egyptian and Ephraem Syrus with him), but it offered an educa-
tion of another kind. Intensive concern with Bourignon, Scougal, Tauler,
Fleury and à Kempis was backed up by discussions on mysticism with
Spangenberg. Makarius and Ephraem came to offer especial hope. Yet
in the end the outcome was disappointment once more. The flock whose
expectations were doubtless conditioned by an inherited Kulturprotes-
tantismus did not respond to Wesley’s new-fangled notions as he hoped;
the putative Indian mission never began; and his own innate genius for
making a mess of his relations with the fair sex led to his having to beat
a discreditable retreat back to England to avoid legal proceedings. And
when he got home he found that the last big policy-maker of the Church
of England, Edmund Gibson, had fallen out with the government and
had been passed over for the succession to the see of Canterbury. Not
all the Georgia experience had been negative; Wesley had been informed
first-hand of the great feud between Halle and Herrnhut that was divid-
ing continental evangelicalism, and he had greatly improved his stock of
modern languages; but a general reappraisal was now called for. What
would the new adept of the mystics make of this particular heritage?
10 Désirée Hirst, Hidden Riches. Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London,
1964), p. 183.
An ominous sign had been a letter written by John from Savannah to

his elder brother Samuel on 23 November 1736.
I think the rock on which I had nearest made shipwreck of the faith was in the
writings of the mystics, under which term I comprehend all, and only those,
who slight any of the means of grace. I have drawn up a short scheme of their
doctrines, partly from conversations I have had, and letters, and partly from
their most approved writers, such as Tauler, Molinos and the author of Theologia
Germanica.11
This reappraisal ‘may be of consequence not only to this province but

to nations of Christians yet unborn’. This rather eccentric definition of a
mystic was followed by a considerable diatribe which revealed how strong
the rock of churchmanship in Wesley was. Aimed mainly at Quietism,
Wesley’s notes deplored the mystic’s superiority to those aids to faith
sustained by religious institutions, public prayer, the sacraments, the
Scripture and so forth. The arrogance of the mystic came out in his
claim to have achieved union with God. ‘Having thus attained the end,
the means must cease. Hope is swallowed up in love. Sight, or something
more than sight, takes [the] place of faith.’ Faith, somewhat differently
expounded, was to be a key concept in Wesley’s ultimate exit strategy
from the impasse in which he found himself.
But his first manoeuvre on return from Georgia was to pick a quarrel
with William Law, who had led him into the quandary.12 His first letter
on 14 May 1738 begins rather bitterly by ascribing the outpouring to the
call of God, and proceeds to ascribe his vexation of soul to Law’s doing:
For two years (more especially) [I] have been preaching after the model of your
two practical treatises. And all that have heard have allowed that this law is great,
wonderful and holy. But no sooner did they attempt to follow it than they found
it was too high for man, and that by doing the works of this law should no flesh
living be justified.
Both parties had sought to overcome the impossibility by trying harder,

but ‘under this heavy yoke I might have groaned till death’, had not ‘an
holy man’ [Peter Böhler, the Moravian] advised him ‘to believe in the
Lord Jesus with all thy heart, and nothing shall be impossible to thee’.
11 Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 487–9. Wesley chose his correspondent care-
fully, as his brother Samuel had already written in verse against the ‘whims of Molinos,
lost in rapture’s mist’. Wesley Works, XVIII: Journals I, p. 135.
12 This conflict is treated at length in J. Brazier Green, John Wesley and William Law
(London, 1945); Eric W. Baker, A Herald of the Evangelical Revival (London, 1948);
and briefly by Robert Tuttle, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition (Grand Rapids, 1989),
pp. 113–19. The correspondence between Wesley and Law is given in Wesley Works,
XXV: Correspondence I, pp. 540–50.
John Wesley 125
Then the reproaches poured out in a torrent. Why had Law not told
him all this before? ‘Why did I scarce ever hear you name the name of
Christ? Never, so as to ground anything upon faith in his blood? . . . I
beseech you, sir, by the mercies of God, to consider deeply and impartially
whether the true reason of your never pressing this upon me was not
this, that you had it not yourself?’ Indeed was this not the reason for
his ‘extreme roughness, I might say, sourness of behaviour’ to Charles
Wesley and others? This totally unconfessional style of out-pouring did
not encourage Law to accept any responsibility for Wesley’s mishaps. He
could have derived all Law taught him from à Kempis whom Wesley had
lately edited. He refrained from adding that Wesley’s tirade was beside
the point, since he, Law, had also gone in fresh pursuit of spiritual power,
and was finding it in Jakob Böhme.
Wesley and the Moravians

What Böhler had spotted, and I think all Wesley’s biographers have
missed, is that the latter had reached the precise stage in his development
which Zinzendorf had reached with his so-called ‘turn to Luther’, and that
the full Zinzendorfian treatment applied. The prescription was entirely
to separate religion from philosophy, and to ease the burden of guilt and
failure by stressing that the sinner justified in the sight of God was both
justus ac peccator, and that this gift of grace required only acceptance by
faith in the blood of Christ. While Law had turned to the theosophy of
Böhme, which impressively brought together redemption and creation
in one great panorama though (in the best Lutheran manner) it did not
offer a unitive experience of God, Wesley was turned back towards his
Reformation heritage by the arguments of Peter Böhler, backed up by the
testimony of Moravian witnesses.
It came down to this; if Böhler was right, and true faith carried with
it ‘dominion over sin, and a constant peace from a sense of forgiveness’
Wesley did not have that faith; and if all he had to shelter behind was
the bogus High-Church history that the Scripture testimony to that faith
could be disregarded as ‘Presbyterian’,13 his condition was dire indeed.
Wesley, for want of all else, was on the brink of intellectual convic-
tion, but, like Zinzendorf, he needed to feel the force of this modernised
Lutheranism, emotionally to know the ‘constant peace’.
According to Wesley’s own famous account this actually happened on
24 May 1738 at the Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street. It happened
right on cue ‘where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the
13 Wesley Works, XVIII: Journals I, p. 248.

Romans’, which by this time was also the familiar preface to evangelical
conversion over much of Protestant Europe. ‘I felt my heart strangely
warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an
assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and
saved me from the law of sin and death.’14 The clear intention of the nar-
rative is to claim that Wesley’s emotional convictions, the ‘feeling’ and in
this sense the ‘knowing’, were now mobilised behind a rational conviction
of a sort of Lutheran doctrine of justification. Had not Zinzendorf dis-
posed of both the burden of sin and the burden of the Hallesian Busskampf
in short order, claiming that conversion could be achieved in a quarter
of an hour? On this time-scale Wesley was a laggard, but a conversion
period of about three months was speedy going by most standards. What
is the historian to make of it?
Wesley’s best biographer, Henry Rack,15 offers an acute summary of
what has become a classical Tom Tiddler’s ground for historians, theolo-
gians and propagandists of every hue. There can be no agreement as to
whether Wesley’s conversion experience was a conversion or not as long
as there is no agreement about what constitutes conversion. But histo-
rians have to assess what the practical effect of the experience was. To
give a slightly polemical edge to Rack’s argument (which he is careful to
avoid) Wesley’s conversion was a failed attempt to become a Moravian.16
For this view there is much to be said. It is usual in Methodism to put a
sentimental construction on ‘the heart strangely warmed’; but this is to
miss the point. If Wesley is compared with his contemporaries among the
Inspired in the Rhineland, who understood Paul’s injunction to be fervent
in prayer quite literally to be boiling hot, or even with the wilder shores of
enthusiasm at Herrnhaag on which the Moravians were shortly to fetch
up, his confession of a warmed heart is that of a rather cold fish whose
pulse-rate (whether in religion or love) could not be got up to the point
of letting himself go. (To do him justice he did in the literal sense let his
hair down.) Indeed a fortnight after Aldersgate Street he confessed ‘my
weak mind could not bear to be thus sawn asunder’.17 This is the crucial
14 Ibid., I, p. 250.
15 Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast. John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 3rd edn
(Peterborough, 2002), ch. 4.
16 It is worth comparing this blunt assessment with that of the editor of Wesley’s diaries,
R. P. Heitzenrater: ‘The irony of Aldersgate . . . is that its theological significance rests in
Wesley’s eventual modification of nearly every aspect of his perception and explanation
of the event at the time.’ This essay, ‘Great Expectations: Aldersgate and the Evidences
of Genuine Christianity’, in Randy L. Maddox (ed.), Aldersgate Reconsidered (Nashville,
1990), ably gathers all the literary evidence together in a volume generally devoted
to American blues about a historical fiction called ‘Aldersgate spirituality’: ‘Aldersgate
spirituality has hurt us’ (ibid., p. 22).
17 Wesley Works, XIX: Journals I, p. 254.
John Wesley 127
explanation why, just as Wesley carried much of his early precisianism

into his peak period of mysticism in the mid-1730s, he carried a great
deal of mysticism with him to the far side of an evangelical conversion.
To this we must shortly turn.
Meanwhile Wesley divided the Fetter Lane Society, behaved quite
abominably to friends in London who genuinely loved and cared for
him,18 and showed little evidence of the fruits of the Spirit promised by
Böhler. In the August following his ‘conversion’ Wesley, along with so
many others who wished to see whether Primitive Christianity had been
reborn in Herrnhut, made his pilgrimage there, and, on the return jour-
ney, was denied communion on the grounds, uncharitable but sharply
observed, that he was a man of disturbed mind.19 This was to set the offi-
cial seal on the fact that his failure to become a High-Church Pharisee,
and his failure to become a successful working mystic and Indian mis-
sionary, had been followed by a failure to undergo a Moravian conver-
sion. In the event this was no great loss, since it is impossible to imagine
Wesley and Zinzendorf cooperating in the same religious community for
long.20
Wesley’s real conversion

The final outcome could not have been foreseen by the most prophetic
formulation of religious policy. On 4 January 1739 Wesley wrote a rather
savage personal appraisal in his Journal: ‘A Christian is one who has
the fruits of the Spirit of Christ, which (to mention no more) are love,
peace, joy. But these I have not. I have not any love of God. I do not
love either the Father or the Son.’21 This was to be the last time he wrote
in this strain. On 3 March Whitefield, who had been pursuing open-air
evangelism in Bristol but now wanted to go on to South Wales preaching
and raising funds for his projected orphan house in America, wrote about
the ‘glorious door opened among the colliers. You must come and water
what God has enabled me to plant’; on the 22nd he wrote much more
insistently. Neither Wesley nor his circle knew what to do. They tried the
sortes biblicae; they tried the lot; they got different answers.22
18 Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, p. 184: Herrnhut MSS R13 A.7 fo.25, James Hutton to
Zinzendorf, 14 March 1739.
19 D. Benham, Memoirs of James Hutton (London, 1856), p. 40.
20 As was appreciated from the beginning by James Hutton. See MS ref. in n. 18 above.
21 Wesley Works, XIX: Journals II, p. 30.
22 Ibid., II, p. 37. For Whitefield’s correspondence see Luke Tyerman, Life of Revd. George
Whitefield (London, 1890), I, pp. 193–4. See also Wesley Works, XXV: Correspondence I,
pp. 611–12.
Wesley finally answered Whitefield’s summons with the utmost reluc-

tance, apparently believing that he was going to his death. On his way
to Oxford in October 1738 someone had given him a copy of Jonathan
Edwards’s famous tract, the Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton,
and the tract made a sufficient impression for him to send an extract
to a friend.23 When Wesley was put down, against all his inclinations of
propriety and prudence, in a religious revival initiated by someone else,
Böhler’s advice to preach faith till he had it was no longer relevant to his
problem. What he found was that if he preached in the style of Edwards
other people found faith, and then he not only had faith but kept it.
‘Experience’ reasserted itself. He had not only found a stable faith, but
a new profession, that of revivalist.
This was not the first time that evangelicalism and revivalism had
appeared together. The Pietism of Spener or Francke or Württemberg
had aspired to renew a decayed establishment; revivalism had been the
work of oppressed minorities in the Habsburg lands who had no church
structure to renew, and must pull themselves up by their own boot-
laces or go under. The Protestant establishments in the Empire man-
aged to make the kind of thing Wesley now undertook almost impossible;
the Habsburgs brutally succeeded in confining it to particular areas. Of
course Wesley had it all to learn. Some kind of administrative mechanism
must be created to support the newly awakened faith of the flock, for
which the Church of England offered no more promising patterns than
the Lutheran churches afforded Spener. Ebenezer Erskine of the Asso-
ciate Presbytery in Scotland offered (not altogether helpful) coaching
in how to deal with abnormal religious phenomena. The Anglo-Saxon
revival world, which, Wesley apart, was almost entirely Reformed, was
prepared to accept him as part of a putative Great Awakening.
Still more striking, Wesley, the stiff Oxford tutor, managed to establish
sufficient rapport with a variety of popular milieux to keep the supply
of converts going. More again, though no one really knows the rate of
turnover among Wesley’s assistants, it is plain that he managed to attract
and keep the loyal service of a great number of lay preachers, without
whom the work could not have continued steadily, more or less free of
the convulsive ups and downs of the revival in America. Wesley could
not avoid the Edwardsian effort to distinguish between true and false
religious experience, and he struggled with only limited success to create
a homespun sociology of religion; this might have explained why con-
gregations which at one time were full of life went dead at other times,
or why social groupings such as coal-miners, with whom he was often
23 Wesley Works, XIX: Journals II, p. 16.

John Wesley 129
very successful, were in some parts of the country unresponsive to his

appeal.24 The evidence is that Wesley kept thinking about what he did,
and if he could not see to the bottom of some very difficult issues, he did
not rant about being misled by others as he had against Law. The sum of
all these changes is certainly enough to be described as a conversion and
the crucial changes were wrought quickly in the spring of 1739.
Wesley and the mystics II

What in the longer term happened to Wesley the mystic? The immediate
consequence of Wesley’s breach with both mysticism and Moravianism
was that the former became one of his charges against the latter. ‘You
receive not the ancients but the modern mystics as the best interpreters
of Scripture . . . You greatly refine the plain religion taught by the letter of
Holy Writ, and philosophize on almost every part of it to accommodate
it to the mystic theory,’ to which Zinzendorf returned the lie direct:
We concern ourselves not either with the ancient or modern mystics. That people
may mix nature with grace, . . . that nature may attempt to mimic grace in a
thousand ways . . . – all this we do not learn from the mystics, but sound reason
and daily experience can teach us, and if there was no other space in the Scriptures
but that . . .25 we should be warned enough.26
Wesley’s own comments continued in much the same vein. By 1749

he had managed (just) to find a gracious word for William Law, but
apparently only at the price of total rejection: ‘I read Mr. Law on the
Spirit of Prayer. There are many masterly strokes therein, and the whole
is lively and entertaining; but it is another gospel. For if God was never
angry (as this tract asserts) he could never be reconciled. And consequently
the whole Christian doctrine of reconciliation by Christ falls to the ground at
once.’27 Once again (as in Zinzendorf) mystical union had foundered on
the hard rock of justification by faith, and this in a Wesley who had lately
dealt roughly with a Newcastle society which he diagnosed as subject to
‘the spawn of mystic divinity’ and required ‘all who desired to remain
with us to justify themselves whenever they were blamed unjustly, and not
to swallow up both peace and love in their voluntary humility’.28
It could therefore hardly be a surprise, though there was no discernible
occasion, when on 6 January 1756 Wesley published a savage open
24 Many of these questions are discussed in my introduction to Wesley Works, XVIII: Journals
I, pp. 47–61.
25 Blank space in text. 26 Wesley Works, XXVI: Correspondence II, pp. 29, 40.
27 Wesley Works, XX: Journals III, pp. 292–3. 28 Ibid., III: p. 167.
letter to Law,29 attempting to pick holes in Law’s whole system partly

on the ground that Law had been tempted by Jakob Böhme to speculate
far beyond the letter of Scripture, and partly on the now well-established
basis that mysticism, by offering a ladder to God, undercut the doctrine
of justification by faith. Friends such as John Byrom attempted to medi-
ate, but it was no use, and Law suffered a smouldering resentment for
the rest of his days. What makes this latter episode hard to understand is
not the circumstance that Wesley was never attracted to theosophy and
could never either stand or understand Jakob Böhme. Nor that Law was
Böhme’s English spokesman, though perhaps not a very good one. The
puzzle is that after such an outburst Wesley published in 1768 an abridge-
ment of The Spirit of Prayer, in which he had found some merit in 1749,
in a two-volume Extract of the Rev. Mr Law’s Later Works (1768), which
he also included in the 1772 edition of his own works. The abridgement
was also reprinted as a tract for free distribution by Wesley and Coke
in 1782.
Moreover, in spite of turning his back on mysticism and Moravianism
as the embodiment of the mystical spirit, Wesley had continued to dabble
in the mystical literature. Poiret was read and material from him was
prescribed for use at Kingswood School. And when in the 1750s Wesley
began to bring out his multi-volume Christian Library, the mystics were
there in force – Ignatius, Makarius, Arndt, Pascal, Bourignon (two of
whose hymns survived in Methodist hymnbooks till quite recent times),
John of Avila, Miguel de Molinos – though not in quite such force as
the Puritans. This instability on questions of mysticism remained with
Wesley throughout his life. He was disappointed in the Life of Hector de
Marsay,30 but himself published a Life of Mme Guyon (1776). He is said to
have been reintroduced to the mystics by Fletcher of Madeley (1729–85),
whose funeral sermon he preached on the text ‘Mark the perfect man’
(Psalm 37:37). But he could still say that ‘the reading of those poisonous
writers the Mystics confounded the intellect of both my brother and Mr
Fletcher’,31 and one of the curious images of the eighteenth century is
the spectacle of the aged Wesley purging ‘mysticism’ from his brother’s
hymns.32
29 John Telford (ed.), Letters of John Wesley (London, 1931), III, pp. 332–70.
30 Wesley Works, XXII: Journals V, p. 458.
31 Telford, Letters, VIII, p. 93. John William Fletcher, Swiss-born but an Anglican divine
interested in Methodism, became vicar of Madeley in 1770. He assisted Wesley in the
work of replying to Calvinist polemic, and was nominated by him as his successor at the
head of the Methodist movement. However, he predeceased Wesley.
32 Ibid., XVIII, p. 122. He missed at least one, ‘Happy the man that finds the grace’, clearly
a hymn to the Divine Sophia, still in the current hymnbook, Hymns and Psalms, no. 674.
John Wesley 131
To the end of his life he was recommending the Quietist writers, espe-
cially to ladies, and especially in modest doses.33 Mysticism, it appeared,
was pardonable provided the subject did not inhale. Robert Tuttle34 has
argued that the mature Wesley was engaged in sifting the mystical gold
from the mystical dross. There is force in this argument, since, as we
have seen, the evangelicals were all engaged in drawing from and con-
tributing to a common pool of ideas; but Wesley’s reactions, pro-mystic
or anti-mystic, seem too arbitrary for this hypothesis to be very attractive.
There were, however, apart from the grand stumbling block of justi-
fication by faith, two practical factors at work. Jonathan Edwards came
to insist that holiness ‘consists not only in contemplation, and a mere
passive enjoyment, but very much in action’;35 and so did all the evangel-
icals. If there were two mystics to whom Wesley remained steadily faithful
they were the two activists M. de Renty and Gregory Lopez. It became
apparent to the evangelicals that professional mysticism was a product
of the leisure industry, and that a post-conversion diet of endless ‘dark
nights of the soul’ did no one any good. Yet the tradition died hard that
in the mystical literature, and, especially perhaps in the Quietists, who in
their own withdrawn way had stood up to the combined tyranny of Pope
and Louis XIV, there was red meat and nutriment.
So a Wesley whose ‘only relaxation was a change of employment’36
could speak (with an abandon unequalled even by Zinzendorf) of the
Sermon on the Mount that ‘the Son of God . . . is here showing us the
way to heaven . . . the Beatitudes are the successive steps on the ladder of
ascent to God’,37 an ascent he never completed to the level of assurance
he craved. And while he longed for the spiritual sustenance which the
mystical tradition seemed to give when he was a young man, he lived long
enough to know that that tradition had been largely crushed between the
upper millstone of political despotism and the lower millstone of internal
textbook-isation and routinisation. Despite the old appeals, Wesley must
have known in later life that they were not going to be answered. Some
of his accusations, that mysticism made Christianity a solitary instead of
a corporate profession, that it made men miserable instead of cheerful,
that it made men hide the graces God had given under a bushel, might be
33 Telford, Letters, VII, pp. 66, 126–7; V, p. 313; VI, pp. 39, 43–4, 115. The tenor of his
advice is very similar to that on novels (also given to a lady): ‘I would recommend very
few novels to young persons for fear they should be too desirous of more’ (ibid., VII,
p. 228).
34 Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition, e.g., pp. 184–5.
35 The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. S. E. Dwight and E. Hickman, repr. (Edinburgh,
1974), II, p. 3.
36 John Whitehead, Life of Rev. John Wesley (London, 1796), II, p. 467.
37 Tuttle, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition, p. 151, n. 54.
crude, but they embodied a rough-hewn perception that not much more
spiritual vitality would come by that route.
Wesley and other evangelical keynotes

Of two other familiar keynotes of evangelicalism, the willingness to prac-
tise small-group religion, and anti-Aristotelianism, there is, for different
reasons, little in Wesley’s case to be said. Wesley’s Methodism was in ori-
gin a religious society emerging from a context of religious societies. The
class meeting was built in as the unit of membership, and so remained
until Methodist ecclesiastical pretensions became embarrassed at the fact
that baptism was not the doorway to church membership. On the anti-
Aristotelian front the case is a little more complicated. Wesley fully shared
the venom of all the evangelicals against ‘system’ in theology,38 but the
alternative context of religious thought favoured by so many evangeli-
cals, Paracelsianism, was not influential in the Britain of Wesley’s day.
As a young fellow of Lincoln College, he had once borrowed the transla-
tion of a French satirical attack upon it from the college library,39 and he
later needed the psychology of Locke to say what he wanted to say. His
Zinzendorfian separation of religion and philosophy intensified his ani-
mosity against men like Böhme and Oetinger who provided theosophical
tools for evangelicals who wanted them.
He spoke with favour of Bridget Bostock, the celebrated white witch
of Sandbach who exercised a notable healing ministry by the practice of
nature-magic.40 In a letter of 175341 he declared he had ‘always approved
of the German method of practising physic far beyond the English’, a pref-
erence (possibly) patient of a Paracelsian interpretation, and certainly,
just as Zinzendorf against his will had the occasional follower who was an
adept of nature-magic, Wesley’s preacher Adam Clarke had an intimate
friend in East Cornwall as late as 1784 who was ‘deep in the study of
alchemy’.42
But while Wesley fully shared the concerns of the Central Europeans
that modern materialism might blot God out of the universe, and was pre-
pared to advertise his belief in witches to prove it, sophisticated literature
supporting this kind of spiritual view of the universe disappeared from
38 ‘The points we chiefly insisted upon [at the beginning of the revival] were . . . first, that
of orthodoxy or right opinions, is, at best, a very slender part of religion, if it can be
allowed to be any part of it at all.’ A Plain Account of the People called Methodists in a letter
to the Rev. Mr Perronet (1748). John Wesley, Works (London, 1872), VIII, p. 249.
39 The Count of Gablis, or the extravagant mysteries of the Cablists, tr. P. Ayres (London, 1680).
40 Wesley Works, XXVI: Correspondence II, p. 329. 41 Ibid., II, p. 529.
42 J. W. Etheridge, Life of the Rev Adam Clarke, 2nd edn (London, 1858), p. 81.
John Wesley 133
English publishers’ lists in the eighteenth century even faster than mys-
ticism disappeared in France.43 Thus for various reasons Wesley exem-
plified what came to be a characteristic of Western evangelicalism, an
inability to place the drama of redemption within a larger framework of
thought.44 What Methodists were to call ‘our doctrines’, i.e., doctrines
which Methodists did not invent, but which went well in the preach-
ing, were all about salvation and not creation. This tended to be left to
Unitarians and deists.
Wesley and the Last Things

The other characteristic of early evangelicalism was the displacement of
the Last Things into the middle distance, that Spenerite ‘hope of better
things’ of which the aged Zinzendorf had spoken as if he were the last
representative. Here Wesley wrote and spoke in a recognisably evangelical
mould, but over a long life manoeuvred almost as tortuously as he did with
mysticism. To the undisguised astonishment of his nineteenth-century
biographer, Wesley’s father, the elder Samuel, was a millenarian, and
advocated millenarian views in his own journal, the Athenian Oracle, in
the 1690s before Wesley was born.45
The saints [he wrote] shall reign with Christ on earth a thousand years; . . . this
reign shall be immediately before the general resurrection, and after the calling
of Jews, the fullness of the Gentiles, and the destruction of Antichrist, whom our
Saviour shall destroy by the brightness of his coming, and appearance in heaven; that
at the beginning of this thousand years shall be the first resurrection, wherein
martyrs and holy men shall rise and reign here in spiritual delights in the New
Jerusalem, in a new heaven and a new earth, foretold by the holy prophets.
These views were of course common to the High-Church Protestant

parties all over Europe; Tyerman does not let his readers into the crucial
secret of when these events were scheduled to take place, but to judge
by Samuel’s detailed certainties about the resurrection bodies ‘made of
the purest aether . . . [so that] every individual person in heaven or hell
shall see and hear all that passes in either state; these to a more extensive
aggravation of their tortures, by the loss of what the others enjoy; and
43 Despite the strength of the Behmenist cause at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Antoine Faivre, Philosophie de la Nature. Physique sacrée et Théosophie XVIIIe –XIXe siècle
(Paris, 1996), p. 13.
44 Though in Württemberg doctrines of animal protection were early developed and advo-
cated. Martin H. Jung, ‘Die Anfänge der Tierschützbewegung im 19. Jahrhundert’, in
his Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker (Leipzig, 2003), pp. 171–216.
45 Tyerman, Samuel Wesley, pp. 146–7.
those to a greater increase of their bliss, in escaping what the others

suffer’, the time could not have been distant.
This was the point from which Wesley began. As early as 1742, when
he preached a sermon before the University of Oxford notorious for its
rebukes to the congregation, he had worked out a three-stage eschatology.
In the first stage the Kingdom of God was established by the apostles in
Palestine; in the second stage this kingdom developed into Christendom,
in which the enormous geographical spread in Christian influence was
offset in part by the flourishing of the tares amid the wheat, ‘the still
increasing corruptions of succeeding generations’. Having thus made his
bow to radical Pietism, Wesley affirmed that the third age was dawning
in which ‘Christianity will prevail over all, and cover the earth’.46 At
this point Wesley seems to have advanced little beyond his Orthodox
predecessors, since the burden of his message was that the members of
the university showed little sign of awareness of the time in which they
lived, and should give more evidence of the fruits of the Spirit before it
was too late.
In one sense Wesley did not move from this position, though, when
he came to refer to this sermon late in life, his mood was not to hector
his congregation but to move them to enthusiastic gratitude at what the
Spirit had accomplished in his lifetime. In Sermon 63, preached in 1783,
he referred to the little band of original Methodists fifty years before
who testified ‘to those grand truths which were then little attended to’
but which had now spread not only across the United Kingdom but to
the whole of Protestant Europe and North America.47 This really was
the dawn of the latter-day glory. And in quite the old style (but rather
briefly), ‘all Israel too shall be saved’.48
By 1787 there seemed no doubt that ‘the latter-day glory’, meaning
the time wherein God would gloriously display his power and love in
the fulfilment of his gracious promise, ‘“that the knowledge of the Lord
shall cover the earth, as the waters cover the sea”’, was at hand.49 Of
course the hearts of the Jews seemed to be as hard as ever,50 but the
providential route to conversion had been discovered. It was not to be
the work of the godly prince, ‘a hero like Charles [X] of Sweden or Fred-
erick [II] of Prussia to carry fire and sword and Christianity through
whole nations at once’,51 not even of the Frederick II whom Charles
Wesley had three times hymned during the Seven Years War as God’s
46 Wesley Works, I: Sermons I, pp. 159–80. Wesley reprinted this sermon at least 15 times.
47 Sermons on Several Occasions by the Rev. John Wesley (London, 1872), II, pp. 319–22.
48 Ibid., II, pp. 325–6. 49 Ibid., II, p. 349 (Sermon 66 on the ‘Signs of the Times’).
50 Ibid., II, p. 352. 51 Ibid., II, p. 353.
John Wesley 135
champion;52 the key was for the household of faith to ‘proclaim the glad
tidings of salvation ready to be revealed, not only to those of your own
household, not only to your relations, friends and acquaintance, but to
all whom God providentially delivers into your hands’.53 And in almost
Spenerite language, ‘at that time [i.e., soon] will be accomplished all those
glorious promises made to the Christian church, which will not then be
confined to this or that nation, but will include all the inhabitants of the
earth’.54
This cheerful eventide glow had been foreshadowed for some years.
In 1781 Wesley had topped off the fourth volume of his abridgment of
Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History with a totally unconnected Short His-
tory of the People Called Methodists.55 This tail-piece would not have been
eccentric if Wesley were not leaning to the view that if Methodism was
not actually the latter-day glory, then it was probably a ‘trailer’ to it. How
cheerful the bent of his mind now was came out in December 1788. On
the same page of his Journal he denounced first the ‘poisonous mysti-
cism’ that had given ‘a gloomy cast first to his [brother’s] mind and then
to many of his verses’, and then the prophets of apocalypse. ‘For near
seventy years, I have observed that before any war or public calamity,
England abounds with prophets who confidently foretell many terrible
things. They generally believe themselves, but are carried away by a vain
imagination. And they are seldom undeceived, even by the failure of their
predictions, but still believe they will be fulfilled sometime or other.’56
Wesley and Bengel

On the way from using the apocalypse as a scourge to finding it a source
of hope and encouragement Wesley had made one major deviation, via
the great prophet of Württemberg, Bengel. Part of the attraction of this
rebarbative scholar was his surpassing learning, and part no doubt that
he was Zinzendorf’s most dogged foe. At any rate, when Wesley came to
prepare his Notes on the New Testament in 1754 he admitted:
I once determined to write down barely what occurred to my own mind, consult-
ing none but the inspired writers. But no sooner was I acquainted with that great
light of the Christian world (lately gone to his reward) Bengelius, than I entirely
changed my design, being thoroughly convinced it might be of more service to
52 The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. George Osborn (London, 1868–72),
VI, pp. 120–3.
53 Sermons, II, p. 355. 54 Ibid., II, p. 326.
55 A Concise Ecclesiastical History, from the Birth of Christ to the beginning of the Present Century
(London, 1781).
56 Wesley Works, XXIV: Journals VII, p. 117.
the cause of religion were I barely to translate his Gnomon Novi Testamenti than
to write many volumes upon it.
And when it came to the crucial text of Revelation, he explained again

that:
[I]t is scarce possible for any that either love or fear God not to feel their hearts
extremely affected in seriously reading either the beginning or the latter part of
the Revelation . . . but the intermediate parts I did not study at all for many
years; as utterly despairing of understanding them, after the fruitless attempts of
so many wise and good men: and perhaps I should have lived and died in this
sentiment, had I not seen the works of the great Bengelius . . . The following
notes are mostly those of that excellent man . . .
– though after his general vote of confidence, Wesley did not undertake
to defend Bengel in every detail.57
Bengel, however, to the confusion of both his pupils and most of the
commentators, combined great simplicity – that the final drama would
begin to unfold on 18 June 1836 (a date that would come back to haunt
Wesley) – with a complexity exceeding that of Zinzendorf.58 What would
happen in 1836 was that a time of prosperity for the church would begin of
the sort for which Spener had looked. Unfulfilled Old Testament prophe-
cies would now be fulfilled, especially those relating to the Jews. The end
of the Beast, i.e., the Papacy, would permit the gradual conversion of the
Jews, their return to Palestine, the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem,
and the creation of a new people of God embracing both Jew and Gentile.
The fact that Satan would be bound in this period did not mean that there
would be in a literal sense a Second Coming. For according to Revelation
20:4 a second millennium would then follow, introduced by the resurrec-
tion of the saints to rule with God in heaven; then, less comfortably, Satan
would be unbound for a little period (111 years according to Bengel’s
calculation). Only at the end of the second millennium (c.3836) would
there be the Last Judgement, the return of Christ to judge, the general
resurrection, the end of the world, the creation of a new heaven and a
new earth, and the heavenly Jerusalem. In short, while Bengel conformed
to the Pietist pattern in moving the commencement of the apocalyptic
drama to the middle distance, he postponed its consummation to a period
almost unimaginably remote to the devout mentalities of the early and
mid-eighteenth century, biblically conditioned as they were to a very short
time-scale.
57 John Wesley, Explanatory Notes on the New Testament (ed. London, 1958), pp. 7, 932.
58 A good recent commentary is given by Martin H. Jung, ‘1836 – Wiederkunft Christi
oder Millennium? Zur Eschatologie J. A. Bengels und seiner Schüler’, in Nachfolger,
Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker, pp. 93–116.
John Wesley 137
How did Wesley edit this for his British flock? He did his best to save the
two successive millennia with their distinct dramas, claiming reasonably
that ‘there is room enough for the fulfilling of all the prophecies’; but he
undermined what he had done by saying that ‘neither the beginning of the
first nor of the second thousand [years] will be known to the men upon
earth, as both the imprisonment of Satan and his loosing are transacted in
the invisible world’. And his carefully constructed chronology, based on
Bengel, contains no date later than 1836.59 What Bengel did for Wesley
was much what Spener did for the early Pietists. By getting him off the
hook of an early dénouement and by bidding him work for the promised
‘better times’, he provided a potential escape from the constrictions of
both time and place of the Orthodox eschatologies, and especially from
their obsession with Jewish questions.
Of course, for missions in a wider sense, the maritime nations did not
get really free access to the outside world till after the Seven Years War;60
but, before the opportunities then created could be taken, substantial
changes of mind needed to take place in the evangelical milieu. Empiri-
cism needed to displace Paracelsian and other intellectual frameworks of
evangelical belief. William Carey’s careful calculation of ends and means
based on commercial experience round the world revealed a very differ-
ent frame of mind from that of the old Orthodox.61 A double paradox
was of course concealed by the change. The missionaries who went out
in numbers from Britain at the end of the eighteenth century would never
have reached the mission field but for the triumph of empiricism at home;
but they would have been better equipped to understand the flock they
went to meet by the Paracelsian outlook of old. And of course no change
of mind, however profitable, was without its downside; and Wesley in par-
ticular was fortunate to reach the end of his long course about a decade
before it was discovered that the new empiricism posed special dangers
for the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
Meanwhile Wesley, the son of a speculative millenarian, who had begun
his own career by threatening the University of Oxford with the Last
Things,62 now used Bengel to ensure that his followers did not become a
millenarian sect.63 There were only two Methodists of note who were
59 Notes on the New Testament, pp. 1039, 1051–2.

60 On this see my paper on ‘Missions in Their Global Context in the Eighteenth Century’
in M. Hutchinson and O. Kalu (eds.), A Global Faith (Sydney, 1998), pp. 108–21.
61 William Carey, An enquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for the conversion of
the heathen (Leeds, 1793).
62 And even in the 1760s shared the pre-millennial views of Thomas Hartley. L. Tyerman
Life and Times of John Wesley, 6th edn (London, 1890), II, p. 523.
63 Kenneth G. C. Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium (Cambridge, 2000) shows that
there were often millenarian oddities in and about Methodism, and that in 1754 (when
captivated by the flood of apocalyptic speculation stimulated by the

French Revolution, and they were Thomas Taylor and Joseph Benson.
Wesley was immunised against a great deal of this by the conviction that
for practical purposes the Papacy had fallen long since, and his counsel
to Benson was application to Bengel, and a calling ‘to propagate Bible
religion through the land – that is, faith working by love, holy tempers
and holy lives’.64
And Bengel’s great time-scale provided release for Wesley himself. On
4 May 1788 Wesley preached to a packed congregation in Bradford parish
church on words from the epistle for the day, ‘The end of all things is
at hand; be ye therefore sober and watch unto prayer’ (1 Peter 4:7).65
In the course of his sermon he mentioned that Bengel had expected
the millennial age to begin in 1836, and was subsequently dunned by
correspondents whether that was his own belief. His replies could hardly
have been more laid back.
I said nothing, less or more, in Bradford Church concerning the end of the world,
neither concerning my own opinion. What I said was that Bengelius had given it
as his opinion, not that the world would then end, but that the Millennial reign of
Christ would begin in the year 1836. I have no opinion at all upon that head. I
can determine nothing about it. These calculations are far above out of my sight.
I have only one thing to do, to save my own soul and those that hear me.66
What I spoke was a citation from Bengelius who thought, not that the world would
end, but that the Millennium would begin about the year 1836. Not that I affirm
this myself, nor ever did. I do not determine any of these things: they are too high
for me. I only desire to creep in the vale of humble love.67
No wonder that Luke Tyerman was astonished to find that the elder
Samuel Wesley, John’s father, was a speculative millenarian!
Thus Wesley stands at an important turning-point in the history of
evangelical identity. At the practical level his work gave rise to a num-
ber of religious communions which together, and for a time, made up
the largest religious group of evangelical origin. Moreover American
Methodism came to offer a natural, though not always easy,68 home for
German evangelical sects in America, as their German character suf-
fered assimilation into American life. All the more striking then was the
John Wesley was in low spirits) Charles professed a full-blown pre-millennialism with
an imminent Second Coming; this will hardly explain why Methodism went against the
torrent of apocalyptic speculation at the end of the eighteenth century.
64 Telford, Letters, VI, p. 291. 65 Wesley Works, XXIV: Journals VII, pp. 80–1.
66 Telford, Letters, VIII, p. 63. 67 Telford, Letters, VII, p. 67.
68 Some indications of how it felt in the case of the Evangelical United Brethren are given
in the Epilogue to J. Steven O’Malley, ‘On the Journey Home’. The History of Mission of
the Evangelical United Brethren Church, 1946–68 (New York, 2003), pp. 187–9.
John Wesley 139
Methodist contribution to the disintegration of the original evangelical

mix in their virtually total repudiation of any interest in the millennium.
As late as 1814 the Methodist Magazine could complacently declare that
the old dissenters had ‘little but the form of godliness’ while affirming
their own solidarity with the new evangelical dissent, where ‘the holy
flame is burning . . . [and] increasing in strength and clearness. Holy
Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists (one in Christ) unite to teach to
warn all they can . . . Watched over by zealous and affectionate pas-
tors, they are instructed in relative duties with great minuteness.’69 This
affection for precisionism and ministerial authority was a prelude to the
Wesleyan attempt to break up the undenominational enterprise,70 and
to subject ministerial training for a century to a systematic theology of
their own (Richard Watson’s Theological Institutes, 1823–9, repr. in 4 vols.
1877). This marked ‘a change of focus from Wesley’s “distinctive mark
of practical theology” to a more deductive, systematic and propositional
approach underpinned by an emphasis on the authority of scripture’,71
the very thing from which the early evangelicals had sought to escape. At
the same time the residual Wesleyan connexion with the mystical tradition
was steadily eroded.72
69 Methodist Magazine 37 (1814), 376.

70 Following the example of the Church of England; the story is told in my Religion and
Society in England 1790–1850 (London, 1972).
71 Martin Wellings in the Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Leicester, 2003), p. 706.
72 Gordon S. Wakefield, an admirable man whose piety sometimes outweighed his historical
judgement, made the best of the residuum in Methodist Devotion (London, 1966).
8 Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) is a prime example of many things, not

least of the still persisting sense of evangelical fellowship; for no one could
have disliked his Calvinism more than the arch-Arminian John Wesley,
yet it was Wesley who went to considerable trouble to make versions of
Edwards’s works available to his own flock, and this at a time when his own
relations with the great representative of English evangelical Calvinism,
George Whitefield, were fractious. To the same sense of fellowship testi-
fied the publishing history of his most famous tract, the Faithful Narrative
of the Surprising Work of God . . . in Northampton . . . First published in
England in 1737, with a commendatory preface by the Congregational-
ist ministers John Guyse and Isaac Watts arguing that Edwardsian revival
was the old Baxterian middle way, it was almost never out of print for the
next century. If ever revival seemed to flag, someone somewhere would
reprint the Faithful Narrative as a classic analysis, description, and exhor-
tation to return not to seventeenth-century Puritanism but to the fires of
revival.
Edwards and ministerial authority

In this there was an element of paradox, for Edwards fought desperately
to preserve a sort of Reformed Orthodoxy, at a time when it was losing its
grip in his own country. And he retained an encyclopedic or systematic
mind familiar in the old Reformed tradition. Even in his own parish of
Northampton, Edwards found that young church members whom he had
admitted during the revival turned against him, and forced him out of
his living and away to the Indian mission at Stocksbridge. In other ways,
however, Edwards benefited by being born into the third generation of the
evangelical succession. New England followed European traditions at its
own distance, and by the time Edwards was in his prime the battle against
140
Jonathan Edwards 141
Aristotle had been won.1 If his dependence upon Locke now seems to
be much less than was once thought, Edwards felt the need to thunder
against system2 or ‘opinions in religion’ much less than the young Wesley.
It is also true that although Edwards’s loss of his parish showed what the
lay interest could accomplish in the Reformed system, he wrote and acted
for the most part in the character of the heavy hand of clerical leadership
which marked the whole history of revival in the Reformed world. It
is indeed very extraordinary how the concessions which the Reformed
churches made to small-group religion and to the lay interest seem to
have delivered them into clerical control more thoroughly than even the
Lutheran and Anglican systems.
Nevertheless if Edwards needed a testimony on this front it was pro-
vided by the way he prepared the revival in Northampton by persuading
the town to organise itself into smaller private meetings,3 and by the
Concert of Prayer. In 1744 a group of ministers in Scotland, including
Edwards’s ministerial friends there, commenced the Concert of Prayer, a
regular meeting to pray for an outpouring of God’s Spirit on the church.
Edwards became a leading advocate of the Concert in New England.
There was an obvious eschatological component to this scheme, and one
which made it particularly appropriate to the New England scene. For the
British colonies there were immediately exposed to the threat of French
military power, and that at a time when New England opinion had been
bitterly divided by the outbreak of revival. If New England could not
pray itself into a harmonious frame of mind the judgement might well be
severe.
The Concert of Prayer was begun by ministers, and, although Edwards
was in a mood of exalted clericalism at the time, it was apparent to him
that if this union in prayer was to fulfil William Ames’s requirement of ‘a
devout presentation of our will before God so that he may be, as it were,
affected by it’,4 or even to stop the disputatious rot at home, it would
be necessary ‘to engage, as far as we are able, all persons of distinction
and influence to unite with us in this work of reformation; e.g. justices,
school-masters, candidates for the ministry; and especially to assist us by
their example’.5 It was indeed the willingness of so many to cooperate
1 On this theme see Norman Fiering, Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard. A
Discipline in Transition (Chapel Hill, 1981).
2 Though as a young man ‘he had already discovered that much of what he found in systems
and commentaries was a mere mass of rubbish’. The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. S. E.
Dwight and E. Hickman, 1834 (repr. Edinburgh, 1974), I, p. xxxvii.
3 G. M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards. A Life (New Haven, 2003), p. 156.
4 Quoted in Jonathan Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, Yale edn, V (New Haven, 1977), p. 34.
5 Edwards, Works, I, pp. xci, cviii.
in ‘prayer for the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the
Redeemer’s kingdom, [which showed that the Concert was] from the
Lord’, and an earnest of greater things soon to come.6 There was here
nothing of the timidity of the Lutheran Orthodox at realising the spiritual
power of the laity.
Edwards and mysticism

What then of Jonathan Edwards the mystic? Here the waters have been
unusually muddied, partly because of the lack of agreement as to what
mysticism is, and partly because of the desire of commentators to box him
into the corner of their own specialisms. Thus, for example, Delattre, one
of the most sensitive of Edwards students, exalts his own perspective on
his hero’s aesthetics by contrasting it with his mysticism.7 This will hardly
do. Edwards was distinguished from most theologians in the Reformed
tradition by a clear relationship to the English Neoplatonists and to one
of the major strands of European mysticism, and by his willingness to use
the language about divine emanations that had so often been associated
with enthusiasm for the Cabbala; but his own description of his religious
experience could sound like the Catholic descriptions of the mystical
ladder to God. The saints, he found, may reach a feeling of ‘ecstasy,
wherein they have been carried beyond themselves, and had their minds
transported into a train of strong and pleasing imaginations, and kind of
visions, as though they were wrapped [sic] up even to heaven, and there
saw glorious sights’.8
Had Edwards not enjoyed a religious experience of this kind first-hand
he could not have failed to notice that his wife, Sarah, had it frequently,
sometimes triggered by reading a hymn.
Mr Buell then read a melting hymn of Dr Watts’s concerning the loveliness of
Christ, the enjoyments and employments of heaven, and the Christian’s earnest
desire of heavenly things; and the truth and the reality of the things mentioned
in the hymn, made so strong an impression on my mind, and my soul was drawn
so powerfully towards Christ and heaven, that I leaped unconsciously from my
chair. I seemed to be drawn upwards, soul and body, from the earth towards
heaven; and it appeared to me that I must naturally and necessarily ascend thither.
These feelings continued while the hymn was reading, and during the prayer of
Mr Christophers which followed. After the prayer Mr Buell read two other hymns,
6 Ibid., I, p. cvi.
7 R. A. Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven,
1968), p. vii. Marsden judges better that ‘Edwards’ experiences were not simply those of
a born mystic’, Jonathan Edwards, p. 45.
8 The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741), in The Great Awakening,
ed. C. Goen, Yale edn, IV, p. 237.
on the glories of heaven, which moved me so exceedingly, and drew me so strongly

heavenward, that it seemed as it were to draw my body upwards, and I felt as if
I must necessarily ascend thither. At length my strength failed me, and I sunk
down; when they took me up and laid me on the bed, where I lay for a considerable
time, faint with joy, while contemplating the glories of the heavenly world.9
Here, apparently freed entirely from the hang-ups about justification
by faith that had plagued Zinzendorf and even Wesley, is an account of
immediate union with God, which corresponds to many of the Catholic
characteristics of mystical experience generally. For example:
1◦ The mystical experience is above all an experience of radical passivity: it is
the transcendant, the mystery which invades human existence . . . This passivity
distinguishes mysticism from magic, the latter trying to dominate the Other or
to manipulate the mystery. The passivity of the mystic is not inertia nor the
absence of activity. The depth of man does not remain inactive; it is more active
than before; but now there is a distinct subject which dominates and guides this
activity . . . 3o Knowledge in mystical experience is not that of philosophy and is
not related to any form of ordinary knowledge . . . This new knowledge includes
a true type of certitude; it is both experimental and savoureuse [in the language of
Edwards, ‘sweet’].10
Edwards and beauty

It was the particular genius of Edwards to perceive experience of this
kind in such a way as to provide a new construct of Reformed Orthodoxy
without separating himself from any but the wilder forms of evangelical-
ism, a construct that circumvented some commonly felt difficulties in the
Reformed tradition. It was doubtless a calumny that coarse critics of the
Reformed tradition tended to maintain that the Reformed worshipped an
arbitrary God, electing and rejecting whom he would, and that what the
catechism enjoined about enjoying him for ever was simply a comfort-
able feeling of being on the right side of the electing decrees. Edwards
cut through all this in a way that was not characteristic of Reformed
theologians.11
Beauty ‘is what we are more concerned with more than anything else
whatsoever; yea we are concerned with nothing else’.12 This followed
inescapably from the perception that beauty is that ‘wherein the truest
idea of divinity does consist’. The God of the Reformed was not only, not
even primarily, power and justice, but beauty. Whoever shared Edwards’s
9 Edwards, Works, I, pp. lxii–lxviii, here lxiv.
10 Dictionnaire de Spiritualité (Paris, 1932–95), X, pt. 2. Art. ‘Mystique’, cols. 1895–7.
11 Though much later Karl Barth was to dabble in the idea in his Church Dogmatics.
12 Mind, quoted in Delattre, Beauty and Sensibility, p. vii. Cf. Edwards, Works, I, p. ccxvi.
vision of the ravishing beauty of God could not possibly remain unaffected
by it, could not but be grasped by its sweetness. The saints were not the
recipients of an arbitrary divine favour:
[T]hey do not first see that God loves them, and then see that he is lovely; but they
first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious; their hearts
are first captivated with this view, and the exercises of their love are wont, from
time to time, to begin here, and to arise primarily from these views; and then,
consequentially, they see God’s love, and great favour to them. The saints’ affec-
tions begin with God; and self-love has a hand in these affections consequentially
and secondarily only.13
Here Edwards sidestepped both the laborious demand of the Quietists

for ‘disinterested love’ and the preoccupation with justice that underlay
the Lutheran insistence on justification. Moreover the transforming effect
of the vision of divine beauty created the special sense, the ‘sense of the
heart’, which would be required if the process which he was analysing
were to be understood in terms of the psychology of John Locke.
More than this, while Edwards admitted that it was ultimately impos-
sible clearly to distinguish true from false religious affections, he had laid
the basis for a very fine-drawn analysis which would take the believer sub-
stantially along the road. The essence of it was not primarily that truly
gracious affections promoted love, forgiveness and mercy (what Wesley
might have called ‘holy tempers’), but that, partaking of the divine charac-
ter, they have ‘beautiful symmetry and proportion’.14 And should anyone
demand an example of this from contemporary life, it was to be found in
David Brainerd, the missionary to the Indians, whose well-proportioned
zeal ran off neither into pharisaism on the one hand nor antinomianism
on the other. The correlate of the divine beauty in man was sensibil-
ity, and so there was room for imagination, even for visions, though in
the conventional Reformed way Edwards did not go in for ikons. It was
indeed impossible in the ultimate sense to be miserable for God’s sake.15
The great aesthetic criteria of harmony, regularity, and proportion
would also do at a pinch to confute the atheist.
If the atheist will not acknowledge any great order and regularity in the corporeal
world he must acknowledge that there is in spirits, in minds, which will be as much
an argument for a contriver as if the contrivance was in bodies. He must acknowl-
edge that reason, wisdom, and contrivance are regular actions. But they are the
actions of spirits. Many of the works of men are wonderfully regular, but certainly
no more regular than the contrivance that was the author of them . . . Hence we
see that all man’s works and human inventions and artifices are arguments of the
13 Ibid., I, p. 276. 14 Ibid., I, pp. 303, 309.

15 Harvey G. Townsend (ed.), The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards (Westport, 1955), p. 204.
existence of God, as well as those that are more immediately the works of God,
for they are only the regular actings of God’s works.16
Typology
Edwards’s perception of the divine beauty and his efforts to find it a
long-overdue central place in Christian theology obviated some of the
conventional flaws in Reformed theology; but not all. Once embarked
on the quest for evidences of the divine beauty his enthusiasm knew no
bounds. In a certain sense the situation he inherited in his own theological
tradition invited this excess. As is well known, biblical exegesis before the
Reformation had commonly sought four levels of interpretation: the basic
literal or historical level, the allegorical (which commonly meant Chris-
tological) level, the tropological (or figurative and moral) level, and the
anagogical, which meant interpreting the text in an ultimate or spiritual
sense.
Luther himself found the whole Bible to be the cradle of Christ, but
the first reformers were distinguished less by exegesis of this kind than
by a powerful call for the literal or historical interpretation only. That
call was loyally maintained by their successors. They, however, began
to find exegetical literalism problematic in the case of Scriptures like
the Canticles, certain Psalms, the apocalypses. Everyone believed that
the birth of Christ had been foretold in the Old Testament, and, particu-
larly in Switzerland, a major intellectual industry developed in which Old
Testament passages could be understood as ‘types’ fulfilled in their ‘anti-
type’ which was Christ. And whenever men were tempted to see their
contemporary struggles foreshadowed, even illuminated, by the apoca-
lyptic writings, the same process began again.
Edwards leapt to take the whole process much further, with a view to
enlarging the evidences for the divine beauty. It was not now that types
of Christ were to be found in the Old Testament; it was that
[T]here is that wondrous universal harmony and consent and concurrence in the
Scriptures; such an universal appearance of a wonderful glorious design; such
stamps everywhere of exalted and divine wisdom, majesty and holiness in matter,
manner, contexture, and aim – that the evidence is the same that the Scriptures
are the word and work of a divine mind to one that is thoroughly acquainted
with them, as ’tis that the words and actions of an understanding man are from
a rational mind to one that has, of a long time, been his familiar acquaintance.17
16 Ibid., p. 77.
17 Ibid., p. 80. The modern reader is reminded forcefully of Quentin Skinner’s warning
against ‘the mythology of coherence’.
It was no longer that the Old Testament contained types of New Testa-
ment anti-types, it was that the whole Scripture embodied a coherence
that bespoke the beauty of its divine author.
Embarked on this route Edwards was prepared to use New Testament
passages and events in the life of the church to extract the information
apparently contained about the future in the apocalyptic passages. Even
this was not enough. He found types in the natural world as well, and
discovered that there were patterns of redemption in nature as well as
history. Of course this Christocentric interweaving of space and time
was only apparent to the man transformed as well as enlightened by
the divine beauty. By this stage this was another way of saying that it
had become so completely severed from the literal sense so dear to the
Reformers as to be completely arbitrary. Take for example his exegesis of
the texts Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:21. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like
unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal till
the whole was leavened.’ By ‘three measures’ it meant the whole world,
the progeny of the three sons of Noah, who settled the three parts of the
world: Shem, Asia; and Ham, Africa; and Japheth, Europe. To a later
generation raised on critical and historical studies such exegesis could
hardly be more arbitrary.18
The Scripture passages that apparently envisaged an imminent end to
the historical process were bound to present difficulties to Edwards as to
every other commentator; special difficulties in his case, as the tension
between an Orthodox desire to have the end early and an evangelical
impulse to put it off into the middle distance was aggravated by the new
evidence brought to bear by the Great Awakening. The effort to resolve
this question took as much of Edwards’s time and intellectual energy as
the struggle to distinguish between true and false religious affections, and
the posthumously published torso of his inquiries proved to be the most
influential part of his literary legacy in America.
Edwards and eschatology

Edwards could not be unaffected by the lively tradition of apocalyptic
speculation in New England. He was familiar with the work of Joseph
Mede which appeared to so many in Europe to put the whole question
18 This theme is discussed in several volumes of the Yale edn of Edwards’s works: Jonathan
Edwards, A History of the Work of Redemption, ed. J. F. Wilson, Yale edn, IX (New Haven,
1989), pp. 44–50; Jonathan Edwards, Typological Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson et al.,
Yale edn, XI (New Haven, 1993), p. 3; Jonathan Edwards, Notes on Scripture, ed. S. J.
Stein, Yale edn, XV (New Haven, 1998), p. 2 (Intr.), p. 49 (text); S. J. Stein (ed.),
Jonathan Edwards’s Writings: Text, Context, Interpretation (Bloomington, 1996), pp. 61–2.
on a scientific basis, and with the efforts of Newton and William Whiston
to bring it up to date. He was also deeply versed in the eighteenth-century
work of Daniel Whitby (1638–1726), the Anglican scholar who argued
that the millennium was not an actual reign of resurrected saints, but
a picture of a period in which the church would prosper in advance
of Christ’s return to earth; he was thus, in the technical jargon of the
day, a post-millennialist. In this matter Charles Daubuz (1673–1717),
a Huguenot exile, and Moses Lowman (1680–1752), an English dis-
senter, whose Paraphrase and Notes on the Revelation of St John (1737)
was meat and drink to Edwards, followed him. Apocalyptic speculation
had received two new impulses among the serious-minded from the man-
ifest failures of the radical interpretations during the civil wars and of the
Huguenot prophecies of the fall of the French church after the Revo-
cation of the Edict of Nantes. While the issue went largely dead during
the triumph of established vested interests in the Church of England in
the age of Walpole, for those with an active concern with the solution of
the apocalyptic riddle it was clear that there was much to be done.
Edwards was bound to be of this number. Not only was he heir to
the disappointments that had followed New England’s ambitions to be
an eschatological beacon on the hill, he could not evade the perennial
military and diplomatic challenge to his native land. One of his bedrock
convictions was that Revelation 17:18 showed without allegory that the
Papacy was Antichrist. Throughout his lifetime New England appeared
to be one of the most active fronts in the perennial struggle against that
force of evil. During what in Europe was known as the War of the Spanish
Succession, his father Timothy had been appointed chaplain to the Con-
necticut expedition against Canada, and a deep-rooted fear persisted
that French Jesuits in combination with Indian tribes would isolate New
England from the rear – perhaps even, as agents of divine wrath against
a New England faithless to its mission, overthrow the entire enterprise.
Antichrist was much closer to home than Rome. The best comfort that
Edwards’s studies afforded was that the Papacy would fall by 1866. Nev-
ertheless he continued to study, preach and make notes on the theme; the
end-time was glorious, it consoled and nerved the courage for struggles
to come. And he worked hard on the metaphysical implications of these
questions, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the absolute decrees
of God were not inconsistent with liberty, and that foreseen events were
necessary events.19
So far as the published word was concerned Edwards prudently held his
peace, but the outbreak of revival in his parish, what he himself described
19 Edwards, Works, I, pp. 36, 39.

as ‘the conversion of many hundred souls in Northampton and the neigh-

bouring towns and villages’, forced the question whether this was the
glorious outpouring of the Spirit, or at least the beginning of it, which
the post-millennialists expected to precede Christ’s return. In the Faithful
Narrative Edwards made no such claim; but in their preface to the first
edition published in England Watts and Guyse ended what was otherwise
a cautious assessment with the enthusiastic prayer:
[W]e entreat our readers in both Englands, to join with us in our hearty addresses
to the throne of grace, that this wonderful discovery of the hand of God in saving
sinners, may encourage our faith and hope of the accomplishment of all his words
of grace, which are written in the Old Testament and the New, concerning the
large extent of this salvation in the latter days of the world. Come. Lord Jesus, come
quickly, and spread thy dominion through all the ends of the earth. Amen.20
The revival problematic

The cat was now out of the bag. Charles Chauncy, the Boston minister
who became one of Edwards’s chief critics, appears not to have scrupled
to allege that Edwards had claimed that the revival was the beginning
of the latter-day glory, and that the Second Coming would take place in
Northampton;21 in fact even in his (second) Thoughts on the Revival of
Religion in New England (1740) Edwards went no further than to claim
that ‘it is not unlikely that this work of God’s Spirit, so extraordinary and
wonderful, is the dawning, or at least the prelude of that glorious work
of God, so often foretold in Scripture, which, in the progress and issue
of it, shall renew the world of mankind’, and that (on the basis of some
very contrived exegesis of Scripture) ‘there are many things that make it
probable that this work will begin in America’.22
The sad part of the whole affair from Edwards’s point of view was
that by the mid-1740s much of the revival had become unbearable both
to his exalted clericalism and to his fastidious perception of the divine
beauty. He would not turn his back on Spener’s formulation, but would
circumscribe it:
I suppose that all are agreed as to these two things, viz. 1. That all exhorting one
another by laymen is not unlawful or improper; but, on the contrary, that such
20 Ibid., I, p. 346.
21 Edwards, Apocalyptic Writings, Yale edn, V, p. 29. Chauncy’s main thrust was that the
revival represented a recrudescence of the irrationalism promoted within living memory
by the French Prophets in England. [Charles Chauncy], The Wonderful Narrative, or a
faithful Account of the French Prophets, their Agitations, Extasies and Inspirations . . . (Boston,
Mass., 1742).
22 Edwards, Works, I, pp. 381, 383.
exhorting is a Christian duty. And, 2. I suppose also, all will allow that there is
some kind or way of exhorting and teaching which belongs only to the office of
teachers.23
The depth of Edwards’s disappointment with the revival came out in a
private letter to John Erskine in Scotland in 1750:24
I suspect the follies of some of the Seceders, which you mention in both your
letters . . . , arise in a considerable measure from the same cause with the follies
of the Moravians, and the followers of the Wesleys, and many extravagant people
in America, viz. false religion, counterfeit conversions, and the want of a genuine
renovation of the spirit of their minds. I say as to many of them, not to condemn
all in the gross. The spirit seems to be exactly the same with what appears in
many, who apparently, by their own account have had a false conversion.
The numbers of conversions, which had once seemed ‘probably’ to herald
the millennium, now seemed to be a great mistake. Barring the final
disclaimer, the opinion might have come from Charles Chauncy.
The Work of Redemption

In the full flush of enthusiasm for the revival, however, Edwards launched
into a systematic investigation of the question in a series of thirty sermons
to his parish which was published posthumously in 1774 as A History of the
Work of Redemption. When he was invited to become President of Prince-
ton, he expressed hesitation on the grounds that he was contemplating ‘a
great work’ of divinity on a new historical method; this was the Work of
Redemption. When he died in 1758 of a failed inoculation, the work had
not been completed. Whether this was due to his early unforeseen death,
or to the fact that his estimate of the Awakening had changed so radically
since the sermons were first preached, or because the task was impossi-
ble, cannot be established with certainty. The difficulty of assessing this
his most influential book is increased by the fact that the materials he
left were in a rather ragged state and underwent considerable editing at
the hand of his son Jonathan Jnr. and also of John Erskine in Edinburgh.
Despite all these uncertainties, it remains the best guide to Edwards’s
views on eschatology.
Whatever the editing, the grandiose perspective of the Work of
Redemption is unmistakeably vintage Edwards. Redemption had formed
the common theme of Puritan theology for generations, but it had been
treated predominantly from the standpoint of pastoral theology, and
23 Ibid., I, p. 417.
24 Jonathan Edwards, Letters and Personal Writings, ed. G. S. Calaghorn, Yale edn, XVI
(New Haven, 1998), p. 349.
directed to the familiar case of Puritan pastoral care, that of the per-
son who had no difficulty in accepting the doctrine of justification by
faith independent of works, but who suffered agonies of uncertainty as to
whether the faith he had was the saving or justifying faith. This concern
with the application of redemption to the individual had led Puritans
into the study of the morphology of conversion, and of all those signs,
required particularly by the Congregational churches, of visible saint-
hood. Edwards had already contributed substantially to this genre in the
Faithful Narrative.25
In the Work of Redemption, however, he began boldly by establishing
the cosmic context of his theme. The work of redemption had indeed
its common limited sense of the purchase of salvation. ‘In this restrained
sense the work of redemption was not so long in doing; but was begun and
finished with Christ’s humiliation.’ But in a broader sense it includes ‘all
that God accomplishes tending to this end; not only the purchase itself,
but also all God’s works that were properly preparatory to the purchase,
and accomplishing the success of it’.
So that the whole dispensation, as it includes the preparation and purchase, the
application and success of Christ’s redemption, is here called the work of redemp-
tion. All that Christ does in this great affair as Mediator, in any of his offices, either
of prophet priest or king; either when he was in this world, in his human nature,
or before or since. And it includes not only what Christ the Mediator has done,
but also what the Father, or the Holy Ghost have done, as united or confederated
in this design of redeeming sinful men.26
Yet more: though Edwards was prepared to pursue this gracious design
from the fall of man to the end of the world, no one should consider that
the fall of man was the terminus a quo.
Some things were done before the world was created, yea from eternity. The
persons of the Trinity were, as it were, confederated in a design, and a covenant
of redemption . . . There were things done at the creation of the world, in order to
that work; for the world itself seems to have been created in order to it . . . The
creation of heaven was in order to the work of redemption; as a habitation for the
redeemed . . . this lower world . . . was doubtless created to be a stage upon which
this great and wonderful work of redemption should be transacted.
Nor would the work cease with the end of the world, for the glory
and blessedness of the saints would remain with them for ever.27 Thus,
while giving notice that he was confining himself to the huge tract of
time between the fall of man and the end of the world, Edwards made it
clear that gracious redemption was the key to the world at large, and that
25 Edwards, Works, I, pp. 350–64. 26 Ibid., I, p. 534. 27 Ibid.

the history of redemption could not be confined to the historical process

alone. But this great span of time divided itself up into three periods
simply enough:
I. That from the fall of man to the incarnation of Christ, God was doing those
things which were preparatory to his coming, as forerunners and earnests of
it.
II. That the time from Christ’s incarnation to his resurrection, was spent in
procuring and purchasing redemption.
III. That the space of time from the resurrection of Christ to the end of the world,
is all taken up in bringing about or accomplishing the great effect or success
of that purpose.28
The first period was one in which the assumptions behind the gen-
eral Christian view, that the Jewish Scriptures were an Old Testament to
Christ, was bolstered by pressing typology to the limit, and creating the
impression that there was a cohesion in God’s gracious purposes which
would not have arisen from reading the Scriptures simply as historical
documents or even as religious texts.
From what has been said, we may strongly argue, that Jesus of Nazareth is indeed
the Son of God, and the Saviour of the world; and so that the Christian religion
is indeed the true religion, seeing that Christ is the very person so evidently
pointed at, in all the great dispensations of Divine Providence from the very fall
of man, and was so undoubtedly in so many instances foretold from age to age,
and shadowed forth in a vast variety of types and figures.
The types having been so elaborately arranged to produce this result, it

was easy to brush aside the objections that cunning men might have con-
trived the prophecies, or that the divine authority of the Old Testament
was undermined by its propensity to ‘warlike histories and civil transac-
tions’.29 Having got his readers where they expected to be, Edwards was
able to analyse the work of Christ briefly. Though it lasted only between
thirty and forty years it was crucial, for ‘though many things had been
done in the affair of redemption, though millions of sacrifices had been
offered, yet nothing was done to purchase redemption before Christ’s
incarnation’.30
The Christian era

The completeness of Christ’s purchase was Edwards’s balm for fear-
ful souls, but more to his immediate purpose was to point out that
after Christ’s resurrection ‘established means of success’ were created
28 Ibid., I, p. 536. 29 Ibid., I, p. 569. 30 Ibid., I, p. 572.

by which the church was to complete the cosmic victory which he had
in principle won. The Jewish dispensation was abolished, the Christian
Sabbath and the gospel-ministry instituted with a world-wide mission-
ary commission. Doctrine was developed, the Scriptures written, church
councils summoned, and the familiar sacraments and agencies of the
church brought into being.31 It was now up to Edwards to get his readers
convincingly through the history of the Christian era, sacred and sec-
ular, to the point where they could contemplate the Last Things with
understanding.
The period from the destruction of Jerusalem to the time of
Constantine virtually put paid to the opposition of the Jews, and ‘though
the learning and power of the Roman empire were so great and both were
employed to the utmost against Christianity, yet all was in vain’.32 The
conversion and accession of Constantine delivered the church from per-
secution, but the survival of the gospel against such powerful persecution
‘plainly shows the hand of God’.33 Satan must now change his tactics and
try infesting the church with heresy. This had only limited success, but
given time Satan almost achieved success with the rise of Antichrist in
the west and of Muslim power in the east. The true church was like the
woman in the wilderness, ‘almost hid from sight and observation’. The
rise of Antichrist was gradual: creeping clericalisation, increasing super-
stition in worship, a concentration of power in the Papacy, the engrossing
of wealth in the hands of the church, the taking of the Scriptures out of the
hands of the laity. It was characteristic of this period that the emergence
of militant Islam on the eastern frontiers of Christendom was accom-
panied within the frontiers by the persecution of the Waldensians, who
preserved pure worship and a testimony against Rome in their Alpine
fastnesses. Otherwise the gloom was lit only by the morning stars of the
Reformation, Wycliffe and Hus. Both were burnt.
Edwards had now arrived at the period in which he could be sure of
taking his readers with him. Luther arose to unmask Antichrist, and about
half of Christendom threw off the yoke of Rome, though subsequently
‘the papists have gained ground, so that the protestants now have not
so great a proportion’.34 Nevertheless the Papacy was terribly shaken by
the outpouring of the vials of God’s wrath. But persecution, war and the
outbreak of internal heresy took their toll of the Protestant ranks. Yet in
the worst of times reformed doctrine proved its power by the propagation
of the gospel in Russia, among the American Indians, and on the Malabar
coast. And ‘revival’ (Edwards’s word) returned to Christendom in the
31 Ibid., I, pp. 588–9. 32 Ibid., I, p. 591. 33 Ibid., I, p. 593. 34 Ibid., I, p. 597.

work of the Halle institutions and in the ‘remarkable pouring out of the
Spirit of God . . . in this part of New England’.35 A balance sheet of
the present state of affairs showed, on the debit side, that the Reformed
churches had lost ground, most notably in France, that there was more
licentiousness and less of the power of godliness; on the credit side, that
there was less persecution, and, more ambiguously, more learning and
trust in reason, as prophesied by Daniel himself.
The final consummation

At the end of this vast narrative Edwards drew comfort from the capacity
of God’s work to survive so many trials, but had to admit that ‘we know
not what particular events are to come to pass before that glorious work
of God’s Spirit begins, by which Satan’s kingdom is to be overthrown’.36
What could be said with confidence was that the final dénouement would
be preceded by a dark time for religion, and then accomplished by a
tremendous revival and outpouring of the Spirit of God. This in turn
would be bound to provoke the last violent resistance of Satan, and ‘all
the forces of Antichrist, and Mahometanism, and heathenism will be
united’.37 The outcome of this dreadful Armageddon was, however, not
in doubt: the seventh vial would be poured out, and Christ would dash his
enemies in pieces. In practical terms, ‘heresies, infidelity and superstition
among those who have been brought up under the light of the gospel,
will then be abolished; and particularly deism, which is now so bold
and confident in infidelity, shall be driven away, and vanish to nothing’.
Antichrist (in the shape of the Papacy) will be overthrown, and the work
of the Reformation (in that sense) completed. ‘The Mahometan empire
shall fall at the sound of the great trumpet which shall then be blown.’
‘Jewish infidelity shall then be overthrown’; and the conversion of the
Jews and the salvation of the house of Israel will follow. Heathenism,
which now possessed a great part of the world, would also succumb to the
enlightenment of the gospel. A time of knowledge and peace, holiness and
prosperity would follow. After a thousand years of this happiness Satan
would be once more loosed from his captivity, and the great apostasy
would be the preface to Christ’s final return in judgement.38
The conclusion of Edwards’s argument had been implicit from the
start. The work of redemption had always been incremental, its slow
progress disguised by revolutions on the way. The whole history of the
church under the means of grace was to prepare it for ‘the bestowment of
35 Ibid., I, p. 600. 36 Ibid., I, p. 605. 37 Ibid., I, p. 606. 38 Ibid., I, pp. 609–11.

glory. The means of grace, and God’s grace itself is bestowed on the elect
to make them meet for glory. All those glorious things which were brought
to pass for the church while under the means of grace [i.e., during the
historical process] are but images and shadows of this.’39 The end, as the
beginning, of the whole tremendous work was the salvation, the glory, of
the elect.
Edwards and history

Although Edwards had referred to his study as a work upon historical
principles, he was under no illusion that these were the principles upon
which ordinary historians worked.40
What has been said may greatly serve to show us the consistency, order and
beauty of God’s works of providence. If we behold events in any other view, all
will look like confusion, like the tossing of waves; things will look as though one
confused revolution came to pass after another, merely by blind chance, without
any regular or certain end . . . All God’s works of providence, through all the ages,
meet at last, as so many lines meeting in one centre.41
It was, of course, impossible for Edwards to know the vast panorama

of global human history which could not be arranged around the short
thread to be inferred from the Scripture testimony, nor how high the
waves tossed in the human enterprise as a whole.
His vision of God’s work as consistency, order and beauty stemmed
from his vision of God as consistency, order and beauty. The need for
coherence had led him greatly to extend the typological interpretation
of Scripture, and to push it into the interpretation of profane history
and of nature as well. His achievement of coherence convinced him of
the providential nature of the entire work, and continued into the mid-
dle of the next century to give numerous American evangelicals a sense
of the ‘setting’ of their pilgrimage. But the loose ends remained. Was
the Salzburg emigration the sign of at least the beginning of the end?42
Or were the revivals in New England to which, despite all his distaste,
he remained loyal? Or did his observation of the millennia past and his
championship of David Brainerd mean that the slow progress of missions
39 Ibid., I, p. 612.
40 Edwards possessed many of the works by Enlightenment historians. Avihu Zakai,
Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of History (Princeton, 2003), p. 8.
41 Edwards, Works, I, p. 617.
42 Edwards, Works, II, p. 294. On the Salzburg case, see my Protestant Evangelical Awakening
(Cambridge, 1992), pp. 93–114.
was the only way to a relatively distant millennium?43 Edwards had not
been got off the hook of this dilemma as Wesley had been got off by digest-
ing Bengel. Or perhaps Edwards, the great hero of the English-speaking
Reformed evangelicals, had succumbed to the impossibility of combining
a revised cohesive Orthodoxy with the practical necessities of evangelical
existence. This was a question further to be explored outside America.
43 Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. N. Pettit, Yale edn, VII (New Haven,
1985), p. 1.
9 The disintegration of the old evangelicalism
It had been a question from the beginning whether the mutual charity
and the sense of being up against a systematic Aristotelian Orthodoxy
would be enough to keep the evangelical mix together and with it the
sense of fraternity among evangelicals of various stripes. Zinzendorf had
tested patience to the limit in one direction, and finally led his commu-
nity to financial disaster. Edwards had tried to reclaim evangelicalism for
Reformed Orthodoxy at the price of having to rewrite the Orthodoxy, to
disclaim the religious affections of much of what passed for evangelical-
ism, and to sustain the whole by an artificial typology of biblical harmon-
isation. In his later years Wesley successfully torpedoed even moderate
millennialism, but could not keep his American followers in line, and
bequeathed a community more prone to internal fragmentation than was
British society at large. Could anything be done? Friedrich Christoph
Oetinger (1702–82), a Württemberger, thought it could, and his pre-
scription was to abandon the old evangelical hostility to ‘system’, and to
create on conservative principles what no other evangelical had contem-
plated, a grand synthesis of Bible, history and science. The watchword
of this new system was that favourite slogan of early Central European
evangelicalism, ‘life’.
Oetinger
Oetinger was the son of the Town Clerk of Göppingen, and was given
the best education available at the monastic schools of Blaubeuren and
Bebenhausen, followed by university studies at Tübingen, with a view to
his entering the church. It was, however, never very clear where he would
fetch up. One of his teachers interested him in natural history, mystical
theology and poetry. August Hermann Francke visited Blaubeuren and
made a deep impression on him. Bilfinger1 put him on to mathematics
1 Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750) won fame in chairs of mathematics and ethics at
Tübingen. On him see Heinz Liebing, Zwischen Orthodoxie und Aufklärung (Tübingen,
1961).
156
The disintegration of the old evangelicalism 157
and philosophy, and especially Christian Wolff and Leibniz, who were
becoming dominant in the German schools; but he also studied Nicholas
Malebranche (1638–1715), the French Oratorian who greatly influenced
Edwards. Even at this early stage he made contact with the Cabbala and
with Jakob Böhme, who eventually provided him with weapons against
the philosophical enlightenment. He took up with patristic studies, for
he perceived the problem of how Christian truth was to be mediated
in different historical contexts. It appeared to him a similar question
to that of how the pure inner church could mediate itself to the outer
institutional church. As early as 1728 he took up the study of medicine
as an insurance against the real possibility that his views might make a
career in the established church of the duchy impossible for him.2 And
indeed his church career was one long course of public criticism. Before
this, however, Oetinger cast his bread on a variety of waters. He went
to Frankfurt where a celebrated Jew, Cappel Hecht, instructed him in
the Cabbala, told him that there was a better account of its implications
in Jakob Böhme than in any Jewish writer, and stressed the importance
of Plato. In Frankfurt he also came across a circle to which the English
Behmenists, Jane Leade and the Philadelphians, were live reading.
Nor, assuming that he followed the theology line, was it at all clear
where his church allegiances might lie. In the winter of 1729–30 he was
at Halle without either making an impression or getting what he wanted;
from 1730 to 1734 he was in close touch with Zinzendorf and, as we have
seen, arranged the ill-fated meeting between the count and Bengel in
1733. By the following year Oetinger had finally broken with Zinzendorf,
and Bengel had become the firmest prop of his intellectual existence for
the rest of his life. But he was still restless. He talked of going to France
to fight in the Protestant Cévennes; of picking up esoteric wisdom in
Constantinople or India; of realising the kingdom of God apart from the
institutional church among the sects in Pennsylvania. None of these ambi-
tions was fulfilled, but after more study journeys in Germany, 1735–7,
he put himself at the disposal of the consistory, which required him to
decide between medicine and theology, and finally in 1738 found him
a living. This decision and a further decision (supported by Bengel) to
marry marked Oetinger’s final breach with separatism. This in turn meant
2 Emanuel Hirsch indeed maintained that the fact that this passionate critic of the Enlight-
enment ultimately had a career in the state church, rising to be Prälat of Murrhardt, was
a tribute to the Enlightenment itself, he holding views on the restoration of all things that
had cost Spener’s friend J. W. Petersen his church office. Geschichte der neuern evangelischen
Theologie, 5th edn (Gütersloh, 1975), IV, p. 167. It perhaps illustrated something else,
that a Catholic dynasty which was a thorn in the side of the Protestant Württemberger
church thought that an adept of alchemy might make something of the salt-works near
Murrhardt.
that, against continuous public criticism and the blank incomprehension

of parishioners,3 Oetinger, whose devotion to Bengel committed him to
as intense a devotion to Heilsgeschichte as that of Edwards, had now to
realise that concept within the culture of the day and to make it his life’s
work within the institutional church.4
The bedrock of Oetinger’s mature mind was provided by Bengel, but it
was Bengel with a difference. He allowed himself to be portrayed, fiery-
eyed, with a heavy bookcase, a couple of phials and a globe, and in his
hand a Bible and a crucifix. If Bengel in his apocalyptic system conceived
history as the development of the kingdom of God on earth, Oetinger
broke free from the Leibnizian system to bring the whole of nature into
relation to that history. Not only did he deploy his medical studies, but
he endeavoured to keep up with French, English and German science,
laboured at Greek philosophy, the Fathers, the cabbalists and the mystics,
became a devotee of Böhme, and for a while at least was influenced by
Swedenborg. All the time he was studying Hippocrates, Paracelsus and
the adepts, and pursuing his own alchemical and chemical studies. Of
course he made contact with that other medically qualified theologian
and terror of the conventional, Conrad Dippel (1673–1734), and his
followers, who had fetched up among the radicals of Berleburg.
Oetinger’s system
Oetinger was clearly an eclectic to end all eclecticism; if he was to create
his system he had no alternative. Böhme and the Cabbala would do for
nature what Bengel had done for history. Both of them left their mark
upon his speculation about God and his interpretation of nature. But
both were held to account by the criterion of Scripture. And Oetinger
took over wholesale Bengel’s exposition of the Apocalypse and his peri-
odisation of history. To confess God’s order in salvation history meant
persevering with hope; it meant not being reconciled to the age, but say-
ing what was appropriate to the conditions of the age in the full hope of
the kingdom to come. What he aimed to produce was a philosophia sacra
3 Notwithstanding which Oetinger’s sermons proved to be the most frequently reprinted
of his works.
4 On Oetinger see: F. C. Oetinger, Selbstbiographie, ed. J. Hamberger (Stuttgart, 1845); F. C.
Oetinger, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. K. C. E. Ehmann (Stuttgart, 1852–64); C. A. Auberlen,
Die Theosophie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers nach ihren Grundzügen (Tübingen, 1847);
Hartmut Lehmann, Pietismus und weltliche Ordnung in Württemberg (Stuttgart, 1969);
Rainer Piepmayer, ‘Friedrich Christoph Oetinger’, in M. Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der
Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart, 1982), VII, pp. 373–90; Martin Brecht, ‘Der Württemberger
Pietismus’, in M. Brecht and K. Deppermann (eds.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen,
1995), II, pp. 269–86; Ernst Benz, ‘Die Naturtheologie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers’,
in A. Faivre and R. C. Zimmermann (eds.), Epochen der Naturmystik (Berlin, 1979),
pp. 256–77.
which should attain concrete shape in the explication of his concept of

life. This philosophia should not only include speculative problems of the-
ology and theoretical questions of philosophy, but should be essentially
a doctrine of the common sense, of the sensus communis. This common
sense Oetinger derived from the Wisdom literature of the Bible; it pro-
vided a meeting-point for biblical theology and the philosophia sacra. It
provided an escape from the rational knowledge of Christian Wolff; and
by seeking to develop a system out of ‘the idea of life’ in the old vitalist
style Oetinger hoped to unite not only nature and history, but also theory
and practice. The truth as it was revealed in Christ could not only be
presented in contemporary shape; this truth should create certainty of
moral action and be the basis for certainty of theory.
The whole thing was made more complicated by the fact that the cor-
relation of the book of nature with the book of Scripture was not simple
to recover. In principle the book of nature was as much revelation as the
events related in the book of the Bible; indeed nature was revelation before
there was any Bible. But the Fall had made nature more difficult to read,
and it now required the Bible to explicate. Thus the scientist Oetinger
now required the theologian Oetinger to find him principles of scientific
understanding from the Bible. So it was not surprising that Oetinger took
up with the traditions of alchemy. The key here was that all changes in
nature were to be interpreted organically. The self-unfolding of nature
followed physiological laws. This appeared to Oetinger to imply that the
Scriptures too were to be understood according to an organic model
where one thing grew from another like plants from seed and flowers
from plants. The Bible was an introduction not only to the understanding
of nature and vice versa, but to the interpretation of history, as history
points to the events of the Bible; there the events of past, present and
future are typologically to be found, though not always very clearly. In
this revival of typology Oetinger was better placed than Edwards as he
could rely explicitly upon the scholarship of Bengel.
The end of the argument was that Oetinger felt able to reject both the
mechanical understanding of the universe then prevalent in the German
schools, and what he believed was the application of the same frame of
mind to the interpretation of the Scriptures. He thus arrived at a unitary
science of reality, the main departments of which, nature and history,
were related to the Bible, while correlatively the exposition of the Bible
was directed to the interpretation of history and nature. On this view God
was a creator of emblems; creation was an image that was accompanied
by Scripture as an explanatory text. ‘Life’ underlay both, and was made
the basis of a systematic theology; from it were developed the concepts of
God, of man, the law, sin and grace, of the church and the Last Things.
Christ as life was the Word of God, a Word also revealed in nature. Life
was a union of many forces working upon each other. God was to be
thought of as such an indissoluble union; and his connexion with the
world was (contrary to the views of deists and materialists) also indissol-
uble. Drawing upon the theosophy of Böhme and of the Cabbala, and
even Newton’s conception of space, Oetinger trod a fine line between
Christianity and pantheism. And, at the end of an argument that could
hardly be exceeded for obscurity, Oetinger was very evangelical in his
conclusion; Protestant preaching, he complained, was far too intellectual.
Preaching and catechetical instruction must, in the light of the concept of
‘life’, concern themselves with the whole man, and especially the heart.
By the same token they must take account of the peculiarities of time and
place.
Oetinger ‘an outsider’?

Here Oetinger exposed one of the risks he had undertaken. Viewing the
philosophy of Wolff and his contemporaries as the great current threat
to faith, he hazarded losing any significance at all when the contempo-
rary mind moved on. This was his fate. When Emanuel Hirsch classified
Oetinger as one of the ‘outsiders’ of the eighteenth century this was what
he meant. Oetinger was part of a substantial religious movement of mysti-
cism and illuminism which has only been recovered by scholars in the last
generation, although it was still strong enough to produce an Oetinger
edition in the middle of the nineteenth century. But to those theologians
who thought that the only fight in town worth joining in was that between
liberals and rationalists on the one side and conservative confessionalists
on the other, and who monopolised the later writing of theological his-
tory, Oetinger was nowhere, flattered even by the title of ‘outsider’. And it
was true that even in the popular Pietism of Württemberg, where the tra-
dition of Bengel, sustained by his sons-in-law and disciples like Oetinger,
remained dominant, successors could hardly be found, not even the cele-
brated mathematician and theologian Philipp Mathäus Hahn (1739–90),
whose astronomical world-machine displayed the movements of the plan-
ets and incorporated a brake timed to operate in 1836 when Bengel’s
millennial age was scheduled to begin. Moreover, whereas in the earlier
part of the century Pietism had been part of a ‘country’ opposition to the
duke, reviling the French court politics and mores of the ruling house,
Johann Jakob Moser5 was the last of the reforming Pietists; Bengel’s
5 J. J. Moser (1701–85), a celebrated public lawyer, who in two great compendia of 52 parts
(1737–54) and 24 volumes (1766–75) put the public law of the Empire on a new footing
in a marvellous combination of history, law and politics. See Mack Walker, Johann Jakob
Moser and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (Chapel Hill, 1981).
successors were quiescent, and by the time Oetinger died in 1782, torpor
might be excused by the steady approach of the millennial year 1836,
when God would begin to take things into his own hands.
From the standpoint of the present theme, however, the significant
thing was less the practical failure of Oetinger’s return to ‘system’ than
the evidence that exponents of parts of the evangelical mix were pulling
apart, going overboard on this or that item, and losing that mutual respect
which had been one of the better features of the movement in its earlier
days. It was therefore significant that both Oetinger and Wesley gave a
warm welcome to the Swedish seer, Swedenborg, and both turned bitterly
against him.
Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) aimed to be in the front rank of the
scientists of his age but ended as its leading visionary, reviled by churches,
denounced by evangelicals, and never able to develop a vocabulary in
which the substance of his extraordinary visions could be conveyed con-
vincingly to any great number of readers. He is nevertheless of more than
tangential importance to the story of what happened to the original mix
of evangelical attitudes in the later eighteenth century.6 Never himself
an evangelical, Swedenborg was always sufficiently near the evangelical
tradition to illustrate its problems. His father Jesper Svedberg was a min-
ister, and eventually a bishop, in the High-Church Orthodox tradition of
the Swedish church. He was, however, distinguished from many of his
colleagues by a familiarity with angelic spirits and an interest in both the
piety and the activism of the pietist movements. How close the two tradi-
tions could still come together he related in one of his conversations with
spirits. ‘God’s angel stood next to me and said: “What are you reading?”
I answered: “I am reading the Bible, Scriver, Lütkemann, Johann Arndt,
Kortholt, Grossgebau, J. Schmidt7 and others.” ’8 Emanuel’s develop-
ment in the long term owed much to Arndt.
He was, however, irked by his father’s strict upbringing and determined
to get abroad as soon as possible to places where science and philosophy
6 The best guide to Swedenborg is that by Ernst Benz, which has had a singular history.
Originally published at Munich in 1948, the book was deprived of its footnotes by order of
the Allied Control Commission. In 1969, not long before Benz’s death, it was republished
at Zurich by one of his pupils with a handful of footnotes. In 2002 it was republished
in Eng. tr. by Nı̀cholas Goodrick-Clarke from the 1969 edn as Emanuel Swedenborg.
Visionary Savant in the Age of Reason (West Chester, Pa., 2002) and in this dress deserves
the success it was denied by earlier circumstances.
7 A Bible translator of the Strasbourg Orthodox reform school.
8 Benz, Swedenborg, p. 5; cf. pp. 14, 106.
were being studied on modern principles. He left for London in 1710

and did not return for more than five years. His intellectual arrogance
in these years is more than breathtaking. He put himself forward in the
highest scientific circles in England, France and the Netherlands, learning
rapidly the whole time not only the science and technology, but also
the frequently fraught personal relations among the Western scholars.
Abrasiveness did nothing to ease relations with his father. To old Jesper
the boy seemed a soul lost to Western materialism, and he saw no reason
to continue to subsidise his claims to have invented a submarine or other
devices of little apparent usefulness. Relations between father and son
were never fully repaired, and Jesper mentioned the boy only twice in his
huge autobiography.
In fact neither party really understood the other. Swedenborg came
home with the same arrogance with which he left, claiming that the
salaries of professors in Sweden should be docked in order to produce a
chair for himself; but he had learned in the West that science was advanc-
ing by applying itself to technical projects approved by courts, and espe-
cially garden design, mining and navigation. He successfully won the
favour of Charles XII, and was appointed as a scientific researcher to
the Board of Mines with no obligation to work at the Board. The vice-
president of the board, Hjärne, was an opponent of royal absolutism as
well as of Swedenborg, and put on a great agitation against Emanuel’s
whole family. Charles XII was happy to demonstrate royal absolutism by
putting him down, and in Emanuel’s later visions Hjärne appeared in hell.
Emanuel, however, had acquired financial support for life. He used it to
pursue a two-pronged career, seeking a European reputation as a scien-
tist and working honestly at the scientific and technical problems of the
Swedish mines. He received leave from his official appointment of unex-
ampled generosity, going abroad for months or years on the grounds of
his need to study or get his books published elsewhere. Again he rewarded
Crown patronage with a long series of scientific works which earned him
European fame. He seemed to have grown into the scientific materialist
his father had feared all along.
Andreas Rüdiger
This view of the matter, however, ignored two tell-tale signs. One was
that on a visit to Halle in 1733 Swedenborg had become acquainted
with the professor of philosophy Andreas Rüdiger (1673–1731), a pupil
of Christian Wolff. He was the author of a famous work entitled Divine
Physics: a true way between superstition and atheism leading to the natural
and moral blessedness of men.9 Here Rüdiger fought on two fronts. The
first front was against superstition which idolised the things of this world
and abused them for sorcery and magic; the second was against modern
atheism which sought a comprehensive explanation of the world in terms
of mathematics and mechanics and left no room for God. Each had begun
from a true insight but had proceeded down a wrong path to a false con-
clusion. The task of ‘divine physics’ was ‘to link the mechanical principles
with the vital life-giving principles and thereby to understand nature’. In
practical terms this meant harmonising the natural philosophy of the
English theosophists such as Henry More and the disciples of Böhme
with the mathematics and mechanics of England and France. The same
intellectual process would enable the divine physics which Moses had
still possessed to be linked to the occult sciences of Egypt and Phoenicia.
Christ had restated the true physics, but then physics had passed to the
Arabs before coming back into the West as false physics; this had sunk
into the superstition against which modern science had arisen.10
Unfortunately, in thinkers like Descartes (1596–1655) and Gassendi
(1592–1655) mathematics had presumptuously claimed to be the sole
guiding principle of the universe. Against them Rüdiger played off
Newton and Henry More. He concluded that everything, even spirit,
had a spatial extension. God was universal space, comprising all finite
spaces in himself but simultaneously permeating all of them. There were
no empty spaces between the stars, for God was there. The difference
between mind and matter did not lie in extension but in the nature of
their substantiality; spirit required extension as a basis for its develop-
ment. The immortality of the soul could be proved from the fact that
the subtle, fine character of its substance precluded its destruction by a
natural cause. Rüdiger, in short, was grappling with problems that also
exercised Oetinger and even Jonathan Edwards; and he was just what the
young Swedenborg needed.
Swedenborg’s turn
For, like so many others, he had begun with the assumption that there
were two books of revelation, one in Scripture and one in nature; and he
had a curious yearning for a paradise lost, an age when ‘nature showed
her most friendly face’, an age before the earth had moved further from
the sun, when the seasons had become more extreme; an age before
the world entered its dotage, ‘in which we live with less joy, even if we
9 Göttliche Physik, ein rechter Weg zwischen dem Aberglauben und dem Atheismus, der zu der
natürlichen und sittlichen Seligkeit des Menschen führt (1716).
10 Benz, Swedenborg, pp.126–9.
are ourselves still young’.11 He also had a curious obsession with the
dead, the damned and the fires of hell; in later life he came to the view
that hellfire was not a physical flame, but the spiritual fire of conscience
that burned the damned without destroying them. He was still trying to
unravel these transcendental mysteries by scientific means, but, finding
this route increasingly impracticable, he would shortly see what intuition
would do.
By the early 1740s the influence of Rüdiger was making itself felt in
Swedenborg’s turn from geometrical, mathematical and physical stud-
ies to works on the animal kingdom. Here organic and vitalist thought
seemed more immediately applicable. By grounding all living forms in a
primal universal formative energy, he joined that long tradition of Natur-
philosophie which had been so close to the early Lutheran evangelicalism,
and which had been recently represented by the English Behmenists, van
Helmont and Henry More, whom Swedenborg frequently quoted. An
organic world-view, based on a metaphysical notion of life, thus replaced
the mechanistic picture. He came to feel that his earlier career based on
empirical research had reached the limits of what he felt mattered; he was
now seeking a higher type of knowledge, intuition, which might still yield
scientifically valid results. But after what he came to call his ‘vocation’
he ended by believing that he could dispense with empirical knowledge
altogether.
Swedenborg’s vocational vision, sudden and dramatic as it was in the
mid-1740s, seemed after the event, like many conversion experiences,
to have had a considerable pre-history, a pre-history of about a decade
of dreams of reassurance, which led him eventually to keep a diary of
dreams. Writing in retrospect in 1748 he recalled that ‘for several years,
I had not only dreams through which I was taught about the very things
I was just writing about, but I also experienced changes in my state while
writing, in that an extraordinary light appeared in things I wrote. Later
I had various visions with closed eyes and wonderful illuminations. I
experienced influences from spirits, so clear to the senses, as if it was
occurring bodily.’12 These visions and dreams assuring what he was doing
became more frequent, and seemed confirmed in authority by testimonies
ancient and modern.
Swedenborg believed that in the primeval age of human innocence
when the human mind was directly illuminated by the ray of divine truth
intuitive knowledge was predominant; and latterly ‘the famous Locke’
had supposed13 that in a future life the angels and spirits of honest men
11 Ibid., p. 114. 12 Ibid., p. 151.

13 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Bk 4, ch. 17, sect. 14.
would have an understanding resembling our intuition. But visionary

assurance, so different from the empirical research to which he had been
bred, inevitably produced severe inner conflicts. On the one hand science
began to seem a laborious impediment to the intuitive knowledge now
opening to him; on the other it was a question whether he was worthy
to receive flashes of divine illumination. His religious crisis came to a
head in 1743–4 as a conflict between his inner vocation and an outward
profession financed for other purposes by the board of mines.
Not only was Swedenborg reverting to a view of the world familiar
from childhood in Book Four of Arndt’s True Christianity, but the pietistic
elements in his upbringing enabled him to see his current predicament
as a conversion experience. His new vocation as a seer enabled him to
elucidate what the Church and Bible had taught him uncomprehendingly
in his youth. His late father, estranged in his lifetime, now appeared in his
dreams in radiant light as a guide to the new path. This inner struggle was
resolved in good evangelical style by a vision of Christ, grace personified.
Swedenborg was thrown to the ground, and the words he spoke were
not his words but a confession and plea for mercy put into his mouth by
Christ himself. His conversion led to a decision to devote himself to the
grace of Christ, and to another vision in London in the middle of 1745
in which he received a vocation to disclose the inner sense of Scripture,
and the opening of his vision into the world of spirits, heaven and hell.
Swedenborg the visionary

So far Swedenborg’s experience followed a pattern resembling that of oth-
ers in the Christian tradition, though it was not one to which institutional
churches ever took kindly. In more recent terms it could be said that as
far as the secrets of Scripture were concerned, he was trying to do by
prophecy what Jonathan Edwards tried to do by typology; and in trying
to fit scientific endeavour into a fully disclosed Christian revelation, he
was trying to do what Oetinger was attempting.14 For three years of his
visionary vocation he confessed to ‘a kind of dim sight’; but as the clarity
of his perception improved he abandoned the idea that his revelations
might need revision, and began to claim that he was the visionary of the
age, elect to proclaim the whole truth of heaven.
Some of what he had to reveal was in truth rather commonplace.
He had a major preoccupation with the Jews, who had a privileged but
14 Swedenborg’s difficulty in finding a vocabulary recalls John Banville’s description of the
young Copernicus’s ‘few notions that he had managed to put into words, gross ungainly
travesties of the impossibly elegant concepts blazing in his brain’. John Banville, Doctor
Copernicus (London, 1976), p. 49.
miserable place in the spiritual world; even their tongue was not what it
should have been, for although the angels affirmed that there were heav-
enly correspondences to the Hebrew letters or syllables, there were rough-
nesses in the language which had no correspondence.15 Self-important
theologians were packed like sardines in hell, and he had a special hos-
tility to Zinzendorf.16 Aristotelians were ‘much blinder and more stupid
in spiritual and celestial things than the most insignificant amongst the
crowd, or than any rustics’.17 These phobias were standard in the evan-
gelical movement everywhere.
Less easy to swallow was his solution to the enigma of the Second Com-
ing. All the Orthodoxies had been in trouble over the question of what
happened to the dead in the ever-extending period until Christ’s return.
Swedenborg boldly abolished the distinction between angels and men,
and with it the need for an eschatological cataclysm. In Heaven and Hell
he confidently affirmed that ‘it is completely unknown in Christendom
that heaven and hell consist of the human race’.
It is still believed that the angels were created at the beginning in heaven and that
the Devil or Satan was an angel of light. The angels are amazed at this. They
want me to confirm that I have it from them that there is not a single angel in
the whole of heaven who was created at the beginning nor a devil in hell who was
created as an angel of light and was expelled, but that all in heaven and hell are
of the human race.18
The evolution of the human being is not concluded with his earthly life
but continues immediately following physical death in another, more spir-
itual, form of corporeality.
The old idea of the Last Judgement, when the saints would be raised,
is altogether abandoned in favour of a notion immediately relevant to
life. If Spener had applied one kind of stimulus to living by displacing
the end-time to the middle distance, Swedenborg applied another by
spiritualising the concept. He was not, however, quite finished with the
Last Judgement. Ever since the Council of Nicaea ecclesiastical dogma
had been hardening, with the result that (according to his visions) the Last
Judgement upon the church took place in the spirit world in 1757. This
great transformation above paved the way for the earthly transformation
by which the New Church should emerge from the old through its prophet
and evangelist Swedenborg.19 He was not a schismatic and left the process
by which the New Church should emerge from the old sufficiently obscure
15 The Spiritual Diary of Emanuel Swedenborg, tr. G. Bush and J. H. Smithson (London,
1883), I, p. 11; IV, p. 478 et passim.
16 Ibid., e.g. IV, pp. 141–3. 17 Ibid., I, p. 284. 18 Benz, Swedenborg, p. 388.
19 Ibid., pp. 460, 482; Spiritual Diary, p. x.
to be a matter of conflict among his English disciples even in the early

nineteenth century; the Anglicans tending to say that the time was not
yet, while those of Methodist origin claimed that the New Church had
already left the womb and was in independent life.20
Swedenborg and the evangelicals

The later development of Swedenborg’s visions, not to mention the
famous slashing attacks of a Kant just shaking free of metaphysics, are
immaterial to the present theme of what was happening to evangelicalism.
Had Jonathan Edwards survived into Swedenborg’s maturity his hostility
would have been predictable. He had validated visions as a legitimate
function of the religious imagination, but hardly contemplated a vision-
ary almost permanently camped out in the geography of the other world,
and using his knowledge of that geography to displace typology as the key
for unlocking the secrets of Scripture.
Wesley proved capable of mastering the scholarship of Bengel, but,
having originally scented religious vitality in Swedenborg, felt that abuse,
not comprehension, was the answer to him. In 1770 he reports:
I sat down to read and seriously to consider some of the writings of Baron
Swedenborg. I began with huge prejudice in his favour, knowing him to be a
pious man, one of a strong understanding, of much learning, and one who thor-
oughly believed himself. But I could not hold out long. Any one of his visions
puts his real character out of doubt. He is one of the most ingenious, lively, enter-
taining madmen that ever set pen to paper. But his waking dreams are so wild,
so far remote, both from Scripture and common sense, that one might as easily
swallow the stories of Tom Thumb or Jack the Giant-killer.
Wesley did not quite give up on his lost hope, but he discovered the
grounds of his fall: ‘I can’t but think the fever he had twenty years ago,
when he supposes he was “introduced into the society of angels” really
introduced him into the society of lunatics. But still there is something
noble even in his ravings.’21 The problem for Wesley was, of course,
partly that he had a small amount of trouble with preachers who found
that Swedenborg’s doctrine of the New Church offered them a way of
rationalising their relations with the Church of England, and partly that
like most evangelicals he had so recently emerged from what on the con-
tinent would have been called the Orthodox stable that he could not bend
20 On this subject see W. R. Ward, ‘Swedenborgianism: Heresy, Schism or Religious

Protest?’, Studies in Church History 9 (1972), 303–9.
21 Wesley Works, XXII: Journals V, pp. 216–17, 301. Eight years later Wesley was still trying
and failing with Swedenborg: Works, XXIII: Journals VI, pp. 126–8.
his mind round what the seer did to the doctrine of the Trinity. But he
knew when he saw it that one element of the evangelical mix had been
magnified out of all relation to the rest.
Swedenborg’s fate in Germany was inevitably more complicated.
Oetinger saw so much more in him than Wesley did that he set out
to become his principal spokesman in that part of Europe.22 Before
Oetinger became acquainted with Swedenborg he had been prepared for
the encounter by a consumptive illness in his parish at Herrenberg which
was expected to be terminal. He used the time, however, to immerse
himself in Jakob Böhme and the Cabbala, and to give thought to the
questions of death and the after-life which were also at the forefront of
Swedenborg’s mind. One of the fruits of this period of reading and reflec-
tion was his book Theologia ex Idea Vitae deducta (Theology deduced from
the Idea of Life), in which he sought to pursue a middle course between
idealism and materialism. During his struggle for clarification as to the
Last Things occasioned by his expectation of imminent death, Oetinger
obtained a copy of Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, and experienced sur-
prise, astonishment and some scepticism. He said that the Swede had
developed from ‘the greatest philosopher’ into ‘the least of the apostles’.
As volume after volume of revelations appeared, Oetinger concluded
that enough was enough and sharpened his original criticisms. At the
heart of the matter was the fact that Oetinger adhered to Bengel’s tradi-
tions of realistic exegesis according to which everything promised in the
Bible had a real existence; if, for example, the Bible said that Christ would
return on the clouds in glory, that was exactly what would happen. Never-
theless Oetinger thought he could separate the exegesis from the visions,
and in 1765 he produced two books setting out the seer’s doctrines and
trying to present his philosophy, as he had been trying to present his own
in connexion with contemporary metaphysics and science. This he con-
ceived as a last effort to introduce Swedenborg in Germany before he
himself succumbed to consumption.
The story was further complicated by the fact that the Stuttgart consis-
tory, which had never cared for Oetinger, now saw a chance to put down
a man whom the Duke of Hesse had made a prelate. In other words, for
Oetinger, expounding Swedenborg now became part of his own defence;
indeed, exposition was part of the defence of Swedenborg also. He too
was in trouble with his own church, though his social standing put him in
a less exposed position. Part of Oetinger’s defence was that Swedenborg’s
22 For the following see Ernst Benz, Swedenborg in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1947); and
Michael Heinrichs, Emanuel Swedenborg in Deutschland. Eine kritische Darstellung der
Rezeption des schwedischen Visionärs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1979).
illumination of the nature of the soul and its condition after death was
urgently required because the English deists and the French materialists
were already beginning to deny the immortality of the soul, and new argu-
ments were needed for the defence. Swedenborg indeed seemed likely
to produce the evidence, for the Duchess of Brunswick got the Queen
of Sweden to put pressure on the seer to produce a message from the
duchess’s lately deceased brother and was overcome by his report.
So, shortly after the outbreak of Oetinger’s conflict with the consis-
tory he began a correspondence with Swedenborg which was courte-
ously received and proved to be the most important of the exchanges of
letters which the seer undertook.23 This contact did not, however, resolve
the differences between them, Oetinger being unwilling to abandon the
realistic exegesis he had learned from Bengel, and Swedenborg being
unwilling to describe his revelations about the New Jerusalem as simple
prophecies. Oetinger nevertheless produced a series of works expound-
ing Swedenborg for the German market,24 in December 1767 issuing a
direct challenge to him to say whether he accepted the Lutheran sym-
bols. But the decisive breach came in 1771 when Swedenborg published
his True Christian Religion, which appeared to Oetinger to be not true
at all, and especially not true in the spiritualising interpretation of the
book of Revelation which he had substituted for the careful calculations
of Bengel. The most sympathetic interpreter of Swedenborg from inside
the evangelical movement had found the Bible stood between them.
Lavater
This was not a problem for one of those who inquired anxiously of Swe-
denborg for news of a deceased friend now presumably in the spirit
world, and did not get an answer. The inquirer was Johann Kaspar
Lavater (1741–1801), pastor of the Orphan House Church in Zurich
1769–78, and subsequently of St Peter’s 1778–1801. Of Reformed stock,
Lavater was perhaps more of a hymn-writer and poet25 than a theolo-
gian, and more of a preacher than either. He added a dash of fire that
Swiss preaching has commonly lacked, which has led to his being placed
23 The other important collections being with Thomas Hartley in England, and Gabriel
Beyer in Stockholm.
24 The German prince most strongly impressed by Swedenborg’s visions was the Land-
grave Ludwig IX of Hessen-Darmstadt, who was himself prone to visionary and occult
experiences.
25 His one surviving hymn in the current British Methodist hymnbook, Hymns and Psalms
no. 742, ‘O Jesus Christ, grow thou in me’, admirably summarises the evangelical side
of Lavater.
among the pioneers of what the Germans are apt to call the revival move-
ment (Erweckungsbewegung) and Anglo-Saxon commentators generally
call the Second Great Awakening. His preaching attracted hearers from
as far away as England, and one of its characteristics illustrates the prob-
lem of ‘locating’ and describing him: that is his extraordinary capacity
for convincing his hearers (however various) that they agreed with him.
Lavater began life and ended it as a Patriot politician, first as a Patriot
against patrician rule in Zurich,26 later in the much more conservative
role as a Patriot against French invasion. He also began as a theologian
of the moderate enlightenment and much of this never left him.27
At the beginning he believed that the object of the Bible was to teach
virtue and to form men of active Christianity. But in 1768 he underwent
a major reorientation. Christ became the centre of his belief and prayer.
Moreover he felt that the divine powers that had been bestowed on the
disciples in the New Testament were still available to those who believed.
Indeed the core of Christianity was that men were raised from their nat-
ural impotence to the strength of God through faith in Christ and prayer
through him. Of this the Bible was the great witness. The age of mira-
cles was not dead; Christ had been a miracle-worker and had shown the
power of love. ‘Everything which Jesus knows and has and is is acces-
sible through the prayer of the believer.’ The intensity of Lavater’s new
Christocentric faith came close to magic. In October 1767 he had con-
ducted the wedding of his friend Felix Hess who was already very ill with
tuberculosis. The following 3 March Lavater was called to his sickbed; he
prayed powerfully for Hess’s recovery; but the invalid died the same day.
It was of course Hess’s fate in the spirit-world of which he inquired of
Swedenborg. Much leafing through the New Testament followed and the
conclusion, despite the disappointment in Hess’s case, was that: ‘Jesus
is a helper even in physical need, who deserves my faith and my whole
trust. He wishes not only that my soul be saved to eternity through him.
He is also mighty and willing to bless my faith, if in physical necessity
and danger I take refuge in him.’28
There was here clearly the basis for a bond between Lavater and ‘die
Stille im Lande’ who formed the bulk of his followers. His intense Bibli-
cism, his Christocentric piety, his rough rejection of neology, of Steinbart
26 For one of the less salubrious episodes in this career, related with enormous good
humour, see Jeffrey Freedman, A Poisoned Chalice (Princeton, 2002).
27 On the following see Paul Wernle, Der schweizerische Protestantismus im 18. Jahrhun-
dert (Tübingen, 1925), III, pp. 221–84; Horst Weigelt, Lavater und die Stille im Lande
(Göttingen, 1988); Horst Weigelt, J. K. Lavater, Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Göttingen,
1991): E. Benz, ‘Swedenborg und Lavater. Über die religiösen Grundlagen der
Physiognomik’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 57, 3s. 8 (1938), 153–216.
28 Weigelt, Lavater, p. 16.
and Lessing, his contacts across denominational borders, all endeared

him to them. But if there was one evangelical characteristic which Lavater
possessed in a wildly exaggerated degree it was eclecticism. His views
that ‘system is not the form of scripture’ and that ‘I hate theological lan-
guage because it appears to me largely anti-biblical’29 were commonplace
enough; less commonplace was his denial that ‘I have ever been under the
hands of Pietists, Ascetics and Enthusiasts, how much so ever I may have
been in danger to become one of them – although I was never inclined
that way longer than twice twentyfour hours’.30 What he meant by this
was that although in many ways he was a Pietist, he could not stand the
substitutionary theory of the atonement, the view that Christ reconciled
not us but God, which they commonly held; not ascetic because perhaps
more than anyone at the time he believed that true Christian faith was
actually good for mankind.
He did not forswear his original Enlightenment New Year wish:
Good God! how many inward and valuable pleasures do we chase away from our
soul, by banishing from it humanity, the most precious jewel of our nature . . . I
should force myself to wish you happy . . . wishing you, in the presence of the
omnipresent Father, the Father of all, happy days, health, new strength for being
virtuous, and everything that God himself calls blessings.31
Nor could he be an enthusiast since (as will be seen shortly) he was an

inveterate pursuer of evidence: ‘Observation . . . is my whole philosophy;
and non-observation but mastery of nature is the character of contempo-
rary philosophy which is hastening to its end. I have no system; but am
always ready to accept everything, provided it is correct observation.’32
It was this cheerful frame of mind which enabled Lavater to admire
Zinzendorf 33 but detest the Moravians and the ‘blood and wounds
theology’; to venerate Oetinger but to conclude that ‘in Scripture the con-
tent is simple; in Oetinger’s writings everything is manifold’;34 to make
Bengel his daily devotional reading with his wife, but to find him ulti-
mately too inhibited, philological and dry.35 Swedenborg remained ‘an
absolute puzzle’. And one thing which Lavater’s Reformed heritage seems
to have denied him altogether was the Puritan fund of labour upon the
morphology of conversion and the Christian life. With whatever defects
29 Briefwechsel zwischen Lavater und Hasenkamp, ed. K. C. E. Ehemann (Basel, 1870),

pp. 105, 68.
30 J. C. Lavater, A Secret Journal of a Self-Observer, tr. P. Will (London, 1795), II, p. 325.
31 Secret Journal, I, p. 11.
32 Lavater-Hasenkamp Briefwechsel, pp. 39–40.
33 Johann Kaspar Lavaters Ausgewählte Schriften, ed. J. K. Orelli, 3rd edn (Zurich, 1859–60),
I, p. 298.
34 Lavater-Hasenkamp Briefwechsel, p. 41. 35 Ibid., pp. 7, 20, 129.
in practice, this body of inquiry, which had provided such a support

for Jonathan Edwards, was supposed to enable the individual believer or
those to whose pastoral guidance he was submitted to tell where he was
in the Christian pilgrimage.
Lavater’s search for evidence

The evidence for which Lavater looked was not dovetailed into an
explanatory framework of this kind. He began by dunning his friends,
and especially Dr Obereit of Lindau, for evidence of the persistence of
New Testament miraculous gifts and especially for that of Lutheran mys-
tics and apocalypticists, Böhme and his disciples (including the English
followers), the Quietists and Reformed mystics like Hector de Marsay.
When this sort of task had been undertaken by Poiret and Tersteegen
they had been concerned to restore first-hand accounts of mystical expe-
rience to circulation among Protestants; but Lavater was once jarred by a
favourable reference to Tersteegen into insisting that despite his own high
estimate of mysticism, Protestant-apostolic Christianity rested on better
historical foundations than mysticism.36
The practical problem was that Lavater’s interest in man and espe-
cially the persistence of supernatural powers among men was never fully
controlled by his devotion to the Bible and his Christocentrism; it was
a sort of anthropocentrism which led him to try to base faith in Christ
upon religious experience, especially where it was coupled with evidence
of unusual powers. It was this which betrayed him in the 1780s into
foolish statements about Cagliostro37 and an unbounded keenness for
animal magnetism and physiognomy which he himself would earlier have
regarded as enthusiasm. Indeed Goethe, with whom he had had a warm
friendship, tired of his addiction to charlatans and came to regard him as
a common swindler and a target for his satires.
Magnetism
In the mid-1780s Mesmer and Puységur were known to be conducting
experiments in magnetism. Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) was a
Viennese physician who claimed to have successfully treated a woman
suffering from a hysterical condition with complex symptoms. Mesmer
gave his patient a solution containing traces of iron to drink, and then
attached magnets to her legs and stomach. She began to report waves of
36 Wernle, Schweizerischer Protestantismus, III, p. 275.

37 Cagliostro (1743–95) was summarily described by his biographer as ‘an adventurer’.
energy flowing up and down her body, which eventually produced a vio-
lent recurrence of her hysterical symptoms. With continued treatment
these crises diminished and finally disappeared; she was pronounced
cured. Other cures followed, and Mesmer, who was both a showman and
a salesman, pronounced in 1779 that ‘there is only one illness and one
healing’. Meanwhile in 1775 he had achieved a great triumph over a Swiss
priest, Joseph Gassner, a popular exorcist, before the German medical
academy. Mesmer did not inquire into patient psychology, nor even
attribute his success to magnets, with which he dispensed before long.
The curative agent was said to be an invisible energy, or fluid, called ani-
mal magnetism. This was the aetheric medium through which sensations
of every kind from light to electricity were able to pass from one physical
object to another. What the magnets did was to restore life-giving energy
to patients whose supply of animal magnetism was out of equilibrium.
Needless to say such a drastic simplification of their professional mys-
tery did not go down well with many doctors, and two governmental
commissions in Paris concluded that there was no proof of the existence
of animal magnetism, and therefore no need to investigate the alleged
cures. Mesmer had, however, stumbled upon an aspect of human expe-
rience that seemed impatient of interpretation by the mechanistic cat-
egories popular in the Enlightenment, and he retained some following.
It was Mesmer’s most capable pupil, the Marquis de Puységur (1752–
1807), who gave mesmerism a different and lasting shape. He magnetised
his patients only to have them fall into sleeplike conditions, and become
suddenly interesting. Some prescribed for the illnesses of others (adding
a timetable for recovery); some, in deeper states, were capable of telepa-
thy, clairvoyance and precognition. Puységur, in short, losing interest in
aetheric fluids, was a hypnotist and an amateur psychiatrist who had dis-
covered that below the level of ordinary consciousness, there was another
mental realm of which men were not often aware. What would Lavater,
pledged to the growth of the indwelling Christ, make of all this?
In 1785 he had an invitation to travel to Geneva with a scion of an old
evangelical house, Count Henry XLIII Reuss of Schleiz-Köstritz, and
his wife. His brother, a doctor, commissioned him to find out what was
going on in the field of magnetism, and it only needed the blessed word
‘experiment’ to set Lavater agog. A Bern doctor who was an enthusi-
ast indoctrinated him, and gave him Puységur’s book. In Lausanne he
found Tissot38 extremely sceptical. In Geneva he found many people
who had had happy experiences with magnetism in Lyons, and who tried
38 Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–97), a celebrated doctor who contrived to keep the friend-
ship of both Rousseau and Albrecht von Haller.
unsuccessfully to magnetise him. Clearly more experiment was required

and on his return Lavater set about magnetising his ailing wife.39 Under
hypnosis she produced divinations of all kinds including a cure for whoop-
ing cough in children (lactose and magnetising on the navel). This was
sufficient to overwhelm Lavater’s imagination.
It was really no problem that magnetism had been launched on to the
world by worldly persons. From Lavater’s point of view it was a blessed
gift of God to mankind in general and an example of the divine forces he
had been studying for so long. Moreover (and this must have surprised
the still-in-the-land), Jesus was the greatest of all magnetisers, and he
taught his disciples the art. The puzzle of the New Testament miracles was
solved, and a bridge established between the natural and the supernatural,
the bridge between human nature in general and God incarnate, Jesus
Christ. All men were created in the image of God, the perfection of which
was to be seen in Christ; the Bible teaching was that the Christian was a
God-man as Christ was, different not in essence but in degree. Magnetism
was a way, perhaps the way, for enabling men to realise that object. The
hymn-writer who had prayed that Christ might grow in him had now
humanised Christ in order to divinise man.
Physiognomy
These views naturally brought down on Lavater the hostility of all the
opponents of magnetism, and especially the Berlin Aufklärer, as well as
those replying from the standpoint of Protestant Orthodoxy. It is small
wonder that in later life Lavater felt a growing need for fellowship. How-
ever, the excursion into magnetism is easier to understand in the light
of the principles that underlay his great enthusiasm of the 1770s, that
of physiognomy.40 The principle involved here had been central to the
whole theosophical tradition (with which Lavater refused to have anything
to do), that of correspondence. The fact that man was made in the image
of God concerned not only his spiritual but his physical makeup. After the
Fall this image was desecrated but not entirely destroyed; it was capable
of being restored in Christ. In short there were correspondences between
the earthly and the spiritual world, between the spiritual archetype and
its earthly reflection. What happened in regeneration was that the earthly
39 In addition to the other sources cited see Gisela Luginbühl-Weber, ‘J. K. Lavaters
physikotheologische Sicht des animalische Magnetismus’, in Helmut Holzhey and Urs
Bosching (eds.), Gesundheit und Krankheit im 18. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam, 1995),
pp. 205–12.
40 For the following see Benz, ‘Swedenborg und Lavater’; J. C. Lavater, Essays on Physiog-
nomy, tr. Thomas Holcroft, 19th edn (London, n.d. [1885]).
mask crumbled and gradually the true face of the inner man appeared –
or, in the language of Swedenborg, a man was transformed into his angel.
Even now the this-worldly bent of Lavater’s thought becomes apparent.
The kingdom of God is a concrete reality inseparable from a particular
physical form. Nevertheless even the regenerate only know their mask,
which is gradually crumbling; the true face, the end-product of all their
inner development, appears only in the beyond, an event which consti-
tutes the Judgement upon them. Physiognomy, therefore, appeared to
be a scientific way of sharpening everyday perceptions of character by
observing body language. That, at least, was the aim of the One Hun-
dred Physiognomical Rules which Lavater confidently produced, and which
included the following valuable guidelines:41
VI General Rule
Of him whose figure is oblique –
Whose mouth is oblique –
Whose walk is oblique
Whose handwriting is oblique – that is, in an unequal irregular direction –
Of him the manner of thinking, character, and conduct are oblique, inconsistent,
partial, sophistic, false, sly, crafty, whimsical, contradictory, coldly-sneering,
devoid of sensibility.
Small wonder that such magnates as the Grand Duke of Russia (later
Tsar Paul I) and Prince Edward of England (later Duke of Kent) beat a
path to his door for the new wisdom. As usual, however, the theory of
correspondences was easier to state than to apply in practice. Lavater’s
attempts at historical application varied from the commonplace to the
silly. As we have seen, physiognomy made him shrewd about Spener,
silly about Frederick the Great’s horse.42 And it is noticeable that Lavater
himself seems to have derived little help during the period when he was
dunning friends to send him analyses of Christ’s physiognomy, so that he
might check experimentally how He was growing within.
Lavater as a superficial dabbler is clearly not very interesting. But
Lavater as a failed evangelical is very interesting indeed. As a member
of the Enlightenment Mittwochgesellschaft he kept an openness to culture
which Paracelsianism no longer provided for the pietists. He also kept
up the evangelical expectation of the coming of the kingdom of God,
but to give it concrete shape he had to transform it into an individual
hope, realisable in whole or in part by the unlikely mechanism of mag-
netism. Lacking the intense Puritan application to the morphology of
conversion and the Christian life, he tried to supply the need by studies
41 Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, pp. 461–91, here 463.

42 Lavaters Ausgewählte Schriften, I, pp. 295, 305.
in physiognomy which were on the whole less plausible. The extraordi-

nary thing is that his devotion to Christ and to the Bible, coupled with a
singular passionate enthusiasm, enabled him to make, through his circle
of friends, a genuine contribution to the next general revival. Perhaps in
this he did more than the next example of the difficulty in preserving a
balance in the evangelical mix, Jung-Stilling.
Jung-Stilling
Johann Heinrich Jung, generally known as Jung-Stilling (1740–1817),
had the most singular of careers, and it was a testimony not just to his
views that the head office of the Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft in
Basel reported of him to the London Missionary Society in 1799 that he
was ‘an especial monument of the providence of God and one of the most
candid confessors of the truth’.43 Born in a village in Siegerland where
a popular Protestant mysticism was strong, and where it was natural in
his circle to ascribe everything to the immediate action of God, he never
lost the marks of his upbringing. Many of the most vivid and entertaining
passages of both his fictional and autobiographical works describe this
special milieu. ‘I knew also a number of godly men who often sat in groups
together on a Sunday evening to hear [a book] read, and who seemed to
be transported to the skies, by the interesting nature of its aminathemes.
This book, if I mistake not, was called Spiritual Fame . . . Its author was a
Dr Carl, surgeon to the court of Baden.’44 In this company Jung-Stilling
underwent a conversion experience in 1762. He filled in several years with
appointments to village schoolmasterships and menial jobs, and even
when he left his native heath for the duchy of Berg he still ‘met with
immense numbers of minor sects, from whose sources flowed all those
numerous, ponderous disquisitions on metaphysical philosophy and the
natural history of man’.45 Somehow he scraped together enough money to
study medicine in Strasbourg, 1770–2, and this was the second turning-
point in his life.46 Here he came face to face with Enlightenment culture.
43 Ernst Staehelin, ‘Aus der Geschichte der Frankfurter Christentumsgesellschaft’, in FS

Martin Schmidt, Der Pietismus in Gestalten und Wirkungen, ed. Heinrich Bornkamm et al.
(Bielefeld, 1975), p. 438.
44 On Dr Johann Samuel Carl, his work among the Inspired and his journal, Geistliche
Fama, devoted to the history of revival and to discerning the signs of the times, see
my Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge, 1992), p. 168. For the quotation, see
Heinrich [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, or the Fanatic, tr. S. Schaeffer (Philadelphia, 1846),
pp. 76–7.
45 [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, p. 4.
46 On Jung-Stilling generally see Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Werke, 12 vols. (Stuttgart,
1841–60); Max Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung (Zurich, 1963); Ernst Staehelin, Die
Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit der Aufklärung und der beginnenden Erweckung (Basel,
He got to know Goethe and Herder, and through them obtained an entrée
into English literature and the German philosophical Enlightenment (and
especially determinism), and the emotional turmoil of the Sturm und
Drang.
For a man of Jung-Stilling’s upbringing, this encounter afforded a rapid
expansion of outlook and a severe spiritual burden which he never finally
shook off. The furniture of his mind, which had been created by Homer,
mysticism and alchemy, Paracelsus and Böhme, was now upset by mod-
ern medicine, mathematics and mechanics. The alienation had set in
before he got to Strasbourg with reading in Leibniz and Wolff, Jung-
Stilling’s evangelical anti-Aristotelianism now giving him a powerful push
towards Enlightenment:
In former centuries superstition and errors prevailed among men; the formation of
the spirit rested merely on the doctrines of the scholastic hair-splitting. The pow-
ers of understanding were by this means confused rather than developed . . . until
finally Leibniz arose and brought forth materials out of the deep fullness of his
soul from which Wolf [sic] brought to effect his excellent great philosophical
structure. The whole world now rejoiced, the whole scholastic firmament began
to disappear, there was light everywhere.47
Jung-Stilling’s struggle with Enlightenment

The new philosophy, however, was not all fun. Jung-Stilling’s original
conversion had been a surrender to the providence of God; the Aufklärer
were also spokesmen of the divine providence, but they perceived it in the
predictability of the stellar universe rather than in the daily mercies which
Jung-Stilling had not only been brought up to expect, but actually needed.
Two of his three wives were poor managers, and despite his reasonably
successful professional career his affairs were generally embarrassed. Had
not Wolff scoffed at this kind of dependence as inviting God to be self-
contradictory? Hoping against hope Jung-Stilling continued to pray. But,
as he recalled, it was a great burden:
Stilling, through the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, fell into the harsh imprison-
ment of determinism – for over twenty years he had struggled with prayer and
1970) and Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit von der Erweckung bis zur Gegenwart
(Basel, 1974); Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, ed. Gustav Adolf Benrath
(Darmstadt, 1984); Rainer Vinke, ‘Jung-Stilling-Forschung seit 1963’ in Theologische
Rundschau 48 (1983) 156–86; Rainer Vinke, ‘Jung-Stilling Forschung von 1983 bis
1990’, Pietismus und Neuzeit 17 (1991), 178–228. Portions of the autobiographical texts
were tr. into English by R. O. Moon, in Jung-Stilling: His Biography, 2nd edn (London,
1898).
47 Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung, p. 444.
weeping against this giant48 without being able to overcome him. In his writings
he had always maintained the freedom of the will and of human actions, and even
believed it against all the objections of his reason. He had also always prayed,
although that giant always whispered in his ear: your prayer does no good, for
what God has decreed will happen whether you pray or not.
In this frame of mind even apparent answers to prayer were comfortless,

‘for the giant said, it was mere chance’.49
When the whispers of the giant were on top Jung-Stilling felt he must
strike out against superstition. One of the early works of his successful
literary career was a novel with some autobiographical content, Theobald,
or the Fanatic: a true history (1785). The object was ‘to show my German
Fatherland that the way to true temporal and eternal happiness lies mid-
way between unbelief and religious delusion’. This largely boiled down
to a decision whether that great progenitor of delusionists, Jakob Böhme,
was one himself. The fanatic and the enthusiast were totally different
things. An enthusiast was one
who clothes, at least for the most part, the legitimate deductions of reason or the
authorised principles of truth in the light drapery of the imagination, and taking
those images for the truth itself, introduces them in the theatre of life in all the
warmth of animated action. A fanatic, on the contrary, is one who takes all the
glowing images of fancy for actual truth, and gives them out as evidences of divine
illumination. Delusionists of this latter class are in the highest degree dangerous.50
He was not sure in which class Böhme came, though many of his followers
were clearly fanatical, and he took refuge in the lack of a suitable word in
the German language. Thus he obtained some relief by demythologising
the tradition in which he had grown up and been converted.
The rest of Jung-Stilling’s career might well be taken as an illustra-
tion of what he conceived as Providence. From 1772 to 1778 he was
a (rather unsuccessful) doctor in Elberfeld, but achieved fame through
another avenue. A method of operating on cataracts came into his hands
from a Catholic priest, and from 1773 till a year before his death he
was in demand all over Germany to perform cataract operations, which
he carried out with a good measure of success. Nevertheless he con-
ceived that Providence was calling him into the field of political economy,
and from 1778 to 1803 he held chairs in that subject in Kaiserslautern,
Heidelberg and Marburg. Here he did not win the confidence of his aca-
demic colleagues, who were suspicious of a man principally celebrated as
a peripatetic surgeon and writer of novels and devotional literature. But
48 The literary reference is to Bunyan who came to be both a literary and a spiritual model
for Jung-Stilling.
49 Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 448–9. 50 [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, pp. 5, 11.
he retained the confidence of princes, and he was a court counsellor in

the Palatinate and later adviser to Karl Friedrich of Baden for a quarter
of a century from 1785. His literary output was enormous, and his rep-
utation as a man of letters became secure. But how successful was he in
solving a problem of conscience which induced a kind of schizophrenia?
Could the world be made to find room for the freedom of either God or
man?
Jung-Stilling and Kant

As usual in the case of a man like Jung-Stilling, books, friendships and
events all had a part to play. In 1788 he read Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason; he soon ‘grasped its meaning, and all of a sudden his strug-
gle with determinism was at an end: Kant showed there on irrefutable
grounds that human reason knew nothing at all outside the limits of the
world of sense – that in supernatural things always – as often as it judged
and reached conclusions from its own principles – it ran up against con-
tradictions’. In fact Kant’s Critique was ‘a commentary upon the words of
Paul: “the natural man understands nothing of the things which are of the
spirit of God” . . . Now was Stilling’s soul as it were winged upwards,’51
much as it had been when he first discovered the Enlightenment. The
bliss of instant relief did not prove a sign of total cure; but at least he
now had genuine intellectual ballast against the doubts engendered by
Wolff.
Then there was the example of others who had doubted. Even in
Theobald Jung-Stilling had commented that ‘Zinzendorf ’s system had
more plan, wisdom and practical policy than both the protestant churches
united’,52 and at the time of his encounter with Kant he began to read the
theology of Zinzendorf who had himself been a youthful doubter. What
he drew from this was, not surprisingly, what he had clung to for so long,
namely an emphasis on experience, which for him meant an emphasis
on providential leading, an emphasis which it seemed Kant had made
intellectually respectable again. Coming as it did in 1789 and 1790, this
new encounter coincided with other shattering experiences – the death
of his second wife, his marriage with Elise Coing, and the outbreak of the
French Revolution – and it came when he was unusually susceptible to
an appeal from the evangelical past. But it also ushered in close relations
with the Moravians as a body, and these, together with his similar close-
ness to the conservative evangelical Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft,
his new connexions with the Bible, tract and missionary societies at
51 Jung-Stilling, Lebensgeschichte, pp. 449–50. 52 [Jung-]Stilling, Theobald, p. 29.

home and abroad, and the encouragement he drew from the revival in
England, were what earned him the eventual title of ‘Patriarch of the
Awakening’.
Jung-Stilling and Lavater

Before, however, he had returned so far down the evangelical road, there
was another friendship which began in a meeting with Goethe and others
and generated considerable correspondence with another contemporary
who had solutions to some of his problems, namely Lavater.53 Lavater’s
doctrine of the ether seemed to soften the harshness of a mechanical
universe; his practice of animal magnetism seemed to open a door to
the world of spirits in which they were both interested, and seemed to
be independently confirmed by scientific friends of Jung-Stilling’s own;
Lavater’s death in 1701 in resisting the incursions of the French revo-
lutionary armies into Switzerland seemed to Jung-Stilling to create him
a patriot-martyr, and caused him to burst into verse on The Transfigu-
ration of Lavater. The whole subject was resumed in Jung-Stilling’s late
investigations into the spirit-world.
The combined effect of his reading, changes in his personal circum-
stances, and the outbreak of the French Revolution was to drive him back
upon the old evangelical programme with which he had begun; yet with
a difference. In his successful novel Heimweh (Homesickness, 1794–6) he
has his crusader seeking to lead sympathetic members of Solyman’s state
to Christianity, yet ‘through rational conviction, and bases the doctrine
of Christ not upon unconditioned faith alone, but shows that this faith
can subsist with sound reason’. Having gained this degree of confidence
Jung-Stilling proceeded to apply it round the circle of central doctrines,
dredging up evidence of varying kinds and applying it with greater or
lesser degrees of certainty to the divine character of the biblical truths,
the fall of man, Christology, reconciliation, the resurrection of Christ, the
biblical miracles, the immortality of the soul and the millennial kingdom,
the divine character of the apocalypse of John, and the biblical chronol-
ogy.54 In all this Jung-Stilling anticipated much of the future, for at the
bottom he based his faith on his own experience of divine mercy and
personal leading. Yet the necessities of his years of doubt remained with
him in the zeal with which he now sought to fortify the old faith with new
evidences.
53 An example of the degree to which Jung-Stilling was prepared to unburden himself to

Lavater by letter is given in an appendix to the Lebensgeschichte, pp. 659–66.
54 Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung, pp. 503–4.
Yet even his ‘old faith’ was the old faith with a difference.55 Like Wesley,
but unlike the early evangelicals, Jung-Stilling had taken the evangelical
animus against ‘system’ to the point of presenting a version of Christian-
ity based on central doctrines. Though of Reformed extraction, he found
no place for the doctrine of predestination, and so anxious was he to
preserve human freedom against determinism that he left the door open
to Pelagianism. The doctrine of the ‘restoration of all things’ which had
been dear to one group of evangelicals he had rejected when young, and
did not recover till much later when he found it in the English Behmenist,
Jane Leade, and then only with the ‘health warning’ that it must not be
coupled with moral indifference. Of the old Orthodox doctrine of the
verbal inspiration of the Bible he would have nothing. Even the wrath of
God was not to be understood literally. The anthropocentric ways of the
Enlightenment marked him deeply. The end of man (as in Lavater) was
improvement and happiness. The essence of sin was sensuality. The pur-
pose of Christ’s redemptive mission was the ‘improvement’ or ‘ennobling’
of man. In all these ways Jung-Stilling anticipated what would happen to
the mass evangelicalism of the West in the nineteenth century.
Jung-Stilling and the world of spirits

Moreover, he was still sufficiently insecure against the challenge of deter-
minism of the Wolffian kind to feel bound to resume the incursions of
Lavater and Swedenborg into the world of spirits in order to establish
that there were spiritual realities. He found much that was admirable in
both, but also claimed the support of a characteristically cagey passage on
apparitions in the first volume of Spener’s Last Theological Reflections.56
Spener’s problem was not the existence of apparitions, but the faculty
of distinguishing those that brought a divine message from those that
were the work of Satan. He could only advise that the recipient of appari-
tions take time and care in assessing them, in awareness of the consensus
which then existed that Satan undoubtedly mimicked the work of God.
Enlightenment left Jung-Stilling in a position to say both more and less
than Spener.
It is a divine and irreversible law that mankind, in the present state should be
guided with respect to temporal and sensible things by just and rational infer-
ences, the result of a sound understanding; but with respect to those things
which are above sense, by the Word of God, and in both together by divine
providence . . . When an advanced and enlightened Christian falls into this state,
55 Geiger, Ibid., pp. 505–7 gives Jung-Stilling’s credo from a long private letter.
56 P. J. Spener, Letzte Theologische Bedencken (Halle, 1711), I, pp. 209–21.
he attaches no value to it; on the contrary he humbles himself before his God,
and fervently implores wisdom and protection against the abuse of it . . . When an
unconverted, worldly-minded, man develops his faculty of presentiment, he falls
into the danger of idolatry and sorcery. Preachers and physicians ought therefore
to instruct the ignorant upon this important point.
Real presentiments (a ministry of angels) and real prophecies could be
distinguished from their merely human counterparts by the fact that they
have in view substantial objects for the good of mankind as distinct from
trivialities.57
Jung-Stilling and the French Revolution

Still more important was Jung-Stilling’s reaction to the French Revo-
lution. His attention had been drawn to the chronology of the apoca-
lypse established by Bengel in the 1780s, and especially to a reworking
and confirmation of it by ‘an unknown in Carlsruhe’.58 From all this it
appeared not merely that the millennial age would begin in 1836, but
that the Papacy would fall at a precise date in the 1790s. This was of
course the decade in which the age-old Protestant prophecies of the fall
of Rome came nearest to accomplishment. Jung-Stilling became hooked
on Bengel. And the apocalyptic question was given a fearful actuality by
the outbreak of the French Revolution. He now perceived the beginning
of the decisive struggle between light and darkness, between truth and
seduction, between Christ and Antichrist. The ultimate Judgements were
at hand.
Here once again Jung-Stilling picked up one thread of the evangelical
past only to break another. Ever since the time of Louis XIV the evangeli-
cal movements of the Rhineland and Württemberg had hated the French
as merciless aggressors, Papists who threatened the Westphalia settle-
ments, and upholders of a model of extravagant monarchy that was only
too attractive to the German princes of the West. But to move from this
to denouncing the French as the embodiment of Antichrist of the latter
days was to abandon the commonest platform of all the early evangelicals,
their postponement of the millennial age into the middle distance. And
like all prophets of imminent Judgement Jung-Stilling felt there was no
alternative to preaching this obsession by every means in his power.
The upshot was that the periodical instalments of his autobiography
and his stories declined in general interest, and a concentration upon
57 J. H. Jung-Stilling, Theory of Pneumatology, in reply to the question what ought to be believed
or disbelieved concerning Presentiments, Visions and Apparitions, according to Nature, Reason
and Scripture. Orig. edn 1808. Eng. tr. (London, 1834), pp. 43–57, 87–94, 375–8.
58 The Baden Hofrat Georg Friedrich Fein in a work of 1784.
apocalyptic signs, dates, events and materials set in. Three generations
later Albrecht Ritchl called it ‘dilettantism in religion’. In all this Jung-
Stilling was characteristic of the Erweckungsbewegung but out of line with
the great body of the early evangelical movement. Moreover, after his
meeting with Juliane von Krüdener (1764–1824), the prophetess from
Russia, in 1808, he was further distinguished from the evangelical past
by knowing whence salvation in the apocalyptic age would come; it would
come from the East, and especially from Russia. This conviction underlay
notable emigration from the south-west of the Reich in the years after the
Napoleonic wars, but it had not been part of the evangelical tradition.
Thus it happened that while believing he was going back to his evan-
gelical roots, Jung-Stilling, like Lavater and Swedenborg, illustrated the
disintegration of the tradition to which he appealed by grossly inflating
the importance of particular elements in it.
Conclusion
The difficulties of evangelical ‘system’ in the West

In the Anglophone world the difficulties encountered by evangelicalism
in Northern and Central Europe were repeated on a bigger scale as both
the repute and the real power of established institutions were diminished
by social change and by the impact of the French Revolution. Sweden-
borg and Oetinger in their different ways had tried to restore or remake
the general setting of evangelical thought that had once been provided by
Paracelsianism. The former, however, had been repudiated by evangeli-
cals in violent terms, and had in any case turned his back on the working
science on which he had made his name. Like his father Bishop Svedberg,
he had concluded that science and technology did not afford the neces-
sary key to meaning, but, by going over wholesale to a visionary activity
that was out of proportion to anything known in the Protestant world,
he had effectively closed the gates to any return. Would the Sweden-
borgian New Church descend from the heavens? Was it embodied in an
English Methodism gradually asserting its independence from the estab-
lished Church?1 Or was it still concealed in the womb of the Church of
England? Convincing negative answers were given to each of these three
questions within fifty years of Swedenborg’s death. As if this were not
enough, English Swedenborgianism now became characterised by veg-
etarian convictions; in other words it had been moved by its adherents
from a credo seeking to answer questions thrown up by European high
culture into a set of beliefs purporting to enable silk-workers and other
labouring men to cope with their daily problems.
In the case of Oetinger, not only had he no successors to continue the
gargantuan labours he had undertaken, but with every decade after his
death it became increasingly clear that he had backed the wrong scientific
tradition. There was still life in illuminism for Oetinger’s triad of Bible,
Böhme and Bengel, but not much life for those who wanted to be working
1 See my paper ‘Swedenborgianism: Heresy, Schism or Religious Protest?’, Studies in
Church History 9 (1972), 303–9.
184
Conclusion 185
scientists. And given the fact that Jonathan Edwards had not left behind a
living tradition of broadly based systematic theology, evangelicals tended
increasingly to follow the lead of Jung-Stilling and Wesley in offering a
Christianity based on a circle of central doctrines – not only a Christianity
without general intellectual context, but a Christianity without the further
reaches aspired to by the systematicians of old. Preaching nothing but
Christ and him crucified was satisfactory as long as the hearers found in
this an immediacy they did not find in broader structures of the faith.
Backing favourites among the persons of the Trinity would not, however,
always satisfy, and particularly not when ‘the quest of the historical Jesus’
proved a great deal more complicated than anyone expected at first.
The mention of Albert Schweitzer’s obsessional eschatological treatise2
serves to introduce the sad fate of the evangelical effort to displace the
millennium to the middle distance. As if it were not bad enough that the
Methodists, the largest of the new evangelical communities, had used
Bengel virtually to dispense with the millennium altogether, a large part
of the Anglophone Protestant world, upset by the French revolutionary
challenge, and unhinged by the spectacle of the Papacy in the 1790s
apparently on its last legs, began to clamour for an instant millennium –
which would have left no time for the manifold good works that the evan-
gelicals actually succeeded in accomplishing in the next century. Amidst
the huge upsurge of apocalyptic speculation, it became apparent that
even the millenarian wing of the evangelical movement was dividing, as
so often in the past, between an intellectual top-drawer and a popular
milieu that was sometimes not Christian at all. Southcottians,3 Richard
Brothers4 and the like cannot really be considered part of the evangelical
movement, but they operated in the same popular environment, catered
to many of the same needs, and, if anything went wrong, could always
take refuge in America. Moreover, given the curious fixation of historians
2 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: German edn Geschichte der Leben-Jesus
Forschung, 2nd edn (Tübingen, 1913); complete Eng. edn London, 2000.
3 Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), a Devonshire farmer’s daughter, and at first a Methodist;
in 1801 she began to attract notice and make converts. In 1802 she declared she was about
to bring into the world a spiritual man, ‘Shiloh’; she died of a brain disease. Her final
illness was widely understood to be pregnancy with Shiloh, but of this an autopsy could
find no trace.
4 Richard Brothers (1757–1824) early served in the Navy, and for years contested the
terms of the payment of his pension. In 1792 he wrote to the heads of state that the time
was come for the fulfilment of Daniel 7. In 1793 he regarded himself as ‘nephew of the
Almighty’, and in 1794 claimed the revelation that he was prince of the Hebrews to whom
King George must deliver up his crown. Placed in an asylum as a lunatic, he occupied
himself writing prophetic pamphlets, and drawing plans for the New Jerusalem to which
he would lead the Jews. He was buried at the opposite side of St John’s Wood cemetery
from Joanna Southcott.
of the last generation with the bizarre, their stories have dominated the
historiography.5 And since the Ottoman Turk was now figuring as ‘the
sick man of Europe’ it could not be denied that the old prophecies about
returning the Jews to their homeland had a startling actuality.
Apocalypse and system in Simeon

Nor was all this the uncultivated froth of simple people. On the eve
of the French Revolution there was a curious spirit of expectation that
looked to Böhme6 or to Swedenborg7 for meaning behind the surface
of events; indeed, in the 1790s Swedenborg reached the peak of his
influence in England. That pillar of the evangelical party in the Church
of England, Charles Simeon (1759–1836), abandoned the traditional
evangelical view, that the Last Things were to be located in the middle
distance, for the seventeenth-century Orthodox doctrine that they were
imminent. ‘The general scope of prophecy’, he proclaimed, ‘ . . . points
to this very age in which we live.’
The one thousand two hundred and sixty years of Daniel are, beyond all doubt,
near to their completion; and consequently the reign of Christ on earth, as its
universal monarch, is near to its commencement. Besides, among both Jews and
Gentiles there is a general expectation that some great change is at hand and that
God will shortly interpose to bring all nations to such an unity of religious faith
and practice as have never yet been seen upon earth.8
The evidence for this on the ground was the unprecedented effort that
had gone into missionary enterprise and the translation of the Scriptures
into many tongues. In many places there was a work of grace ‘where
nothing but darkness reigned till of late’; moreover, ‘even in the Apostles’
days females had their department of labour, and laboured too with good
success’ – as they were doing once more. Inevitably, a surprising amount
of Simeon’s preaching (not to mention his work with the Jews’ Society)
was taken up with Jewish questions, all with an empirically unjustifiable
enthusiasm. ‘The future conversion of the Jews is absolutely certain’, ‘the
Jews beyond all reasonable doubt will be restored to their own land’, and
5 See, e.g., W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists (Auckland, 1978); Clarke Garrett,
Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution (Baltimore, 1975); Clarke Garrett,
Spirit Possession and Popular Religion (Baltimore, 1987); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second
Coming. Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (London, 1979); Janet K. Hopkins, A Woman
to Deliver Her People (Austin, 1982).
6 Walton, Notes and Materials on William Law (London, 1854), pp. 575, 595–7.
7 Clarke Garrett, ‘Swedenborg and the Mystical Enlightenment in Eighteenth-century
England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984), 67–81.
8 C. Simeon, Horae Homileticae, 21 vols. (London, 1832–3), Sermon 901, VIII, pp. 22–6.
Cf. Sermon 1001, VIII, pp. 538–42.
Conclusion 187
these great events would be the signal for an outpouring of blessings on

the rest of mankind, and especially the church.9
If there was another evangelical group, the Eclectic Society, in which
the Last Things played a relatively small part,10 there was certainly in
the evangelical upper ranks a determination to add precision to the
apocalyptic timetable which had not characterised their forbears. The
Albury group were prominent in all this, but they were not alone. Pre-
millennialists, they believed like many before them that Christ would
return to lead his faithful before the millennium, and Bebbington notes
that they were in fact more interested in the Second Advent than they
were in the millennium.11 Their desperation to leave no text unturned
was well illustrated by Joshua Brooks, whose Dictionary of Writers on the
Prophecies (London, 1835) offered a catalogue of 114 double-columned
pages of authors and works in this field. In these circles speculation about
the Last Things was emphatically in vogue, even if the Last Things them-
selves, and the events expected to be their harbingers, obstinately failed
to turn up. More to the point, in the early 1850s the revolutionary steam
leaked out of British society, and with it the sense men had of living on the
cusp of great and astonishing events. This was death to the various forms
of religious and ethical heroism that had flourished in the first half of the
century, and especially in the 1830s and 1840s – evangelicalism and New-
manism, teetotalism and anti-war prophecy – and virtually total death to
obsession with the Last Things. Balleine reaches the comically pedes-
trian judgement that the millenarian issue was wound up for Anglican
evangelicals by Bishop Waldegrave’s Bampton Lectures in 1853.12
Undenominationalism
There was one cause with a great resonance in the evangelical past
to which Simeon gave vociferous backing, and which for a generation
seemed on the verge of triumph. In the 1770s the old differences between
Calvinist and Arminian had been given a ferocious airing as Wesley
and his friends clashed with the Calvinist evangelicals in the Church of
England; to both sides loyalty to the Thirty-nine Articles seemed to be at
stake. Quite suddenly these disputes seemed hardly to matter any more.
The Methodists dropped one red rag in the title of the connexional jour-
nal, the Arminian Magazine, and admitted that the old Calvinist system
9 Ibid., VIII, pp. 628–32, 648–54; IX, pp. 214–18, 248–55, 403–6, 433–40, 448–65.
10 J. H. Pratt, The Thought of Evangelical Leaders (repr. Edinburgh, 1978).
11 D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, 4th edn (London, 2002), p. 83.
12 G. R. Balleine, A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (repr. London,
1957), pp. 164–5.
had ‘been greatly improved in the last forty years’. System was evidently
the villain once again. Simeon, that luminary among the next genera-
tion of Anglican evangelicals, claimed to be ‘no friend to systematizers in
theology’.
. . . He has no doubt that there is a system in the Holy Scriptures (for truth
cannot at the same time be inconsistent with itself); but he is persuaded that
neither Calvinists nor Arminians are in exclusive possession of that system . . . the
Scripture system, be it what it may, is of a broader and more comprehensive
character than some very exact theologians are inclined to allow.13
And exemplifying the revived hostility to metaphysics, he supported his

view by an analogy from engineering; in a machine wheels turning in
opposite directions may serve a common end. ‘God has not revealed his
truth in a system: the Bible has no system as such. Lay aside system and
flee to the Bible . . . Be Bible Christians not system Christians.’14 Simeon
was here deploying a legitimate Christian argument for latitude; but he
was not quite redeemed. In his Old Testament sermon outlines he was
not above using typology to create a greater appearance of system than is
strictly warranted. But the contrast with Jonathan Edwards is striking.
The ‘improvement’ in the Calvinist system perceived by the Methodist
commentators was to be found as much in Dissent as in the Church. It
was not all one-way traffic. The more progressive intellectuals seemed to
reduce the barriers, the higher the conservatives piled theirs, transform-
ing high- into hyper-Calvinism. When rationalism made inroads among
the Presbyterians, the Independents stood out for orthodoxy; when the
Independents yielded to the new ways, the Baptists offered a refuge, and
produced great conservative stalwarts in Brine and Gill. It was there-
fore very significant that there was now a race of Baptists committed to
evangelism at home and abroad, and that improved Calvinism, ‘moder-
ate Calvinism’, ‘practical Calvinism’, Fullerism15 was their work; they
insisted with the Bible that God had elected the faithful to life, and were
content to leave the rest in its biblical obscurity. Fullerism and empiricism
greatly increased the pressure for open communion among the Baptists,
for theological modernism and popular appeal seemed to go hand in
hand. The truth was that the shibboleths of the old Dissent had never
13 Simeon, Horae Homileticae, I, pp. xiii–xiv.

14 A. W. Brown, Recollections of the Conversation Parties of the Rev. Charles Simeon (London,
1840), p. 269.
15 Andrew Fuller (1754–1815), Baptist theologian and secretary of the Baptist Missionary
Society. Fuller contested the resistance to missions of the hyper-Calvinists in The Gospel
Worthy of all Acceptation (1785). For the nature and importance of this kind of religious
appeal, see my paper ‘The Baptists and the Transformation of the Church, 1780–1830’,
Baptist Quarterly 25 (1973), 167–84, repr. in my Faith and Faction (London, 1993), pp.
202–22.
Conclusion 189
won a great popular following in England, but now that ‘the bigotry of
former times seems hastening to an extinction’, and ‘religion itself is now
much better understood than formerly’, the numbers were increasing by
leaps and bounds. In the bumper years, when the harvest seemed limited
only by the number of labourers in the field, it was hard to preserve an
existential attachment to the doctrine of a limited atonement.
For a generation the new anti-systematic empiricism seemed to carry
all before it at the growth points of the church order.16 The general
shaking of institutions, and the breach of many old loyalties, opened the
way to almost miraculous growth among the evangelical denominations
in the generation that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Methodists found that they expanded without Wesley far more rapidly
than they had ever done with him, and the fact that, with whatever jars
to the pretensions of the old connexion to be the guardians of Wesley’s
deposit, the American Methodists crossed the Alleghenies and were mov-
ing into the interior barely behind the pioneer settlers themselves, gave
rise to pipe-dreams that the old establishments might be displaced by
voluntary organisations.17 Undenominational voluntaryism seemed to
triumph everywhere. If it was a question of Sunday Schools, the new
movement began on a largely undenominational basis; when it came to
the formal organisation of overseas missionary work, the London Mis-
sionary Society appealed to, and at first received, the support of men
of good will of whatever stripe; with the Bible Society and, at first, the
schools, it was the same; in many parts of the country the work of mis-
sions overseas was replicated at home by village preaching societies, many
of them on an undenominational basis. In all this there was a good deal
of the pragmatism which the English evangelical world had derived from
the Enlightenment, and a recognition that the growth of population and
the commercialisation of agriculture had created problems which nei-
ther the parish system of the Church nor the gathered communities of
Dissent were well fitted to solve. But much of it also derived from the
great impetus given by the new social and intellectual circumstances to
the old evangelical hostility to Aristotle, to Orthodoxy and to system.
Anglo-German theological diplomacy

The great cry of Simeon and the Fullerites had been to ‘lay aside sys-
tem and flee to the Bible’, and the Bible indeed seemed to be liberation
theology in literary form when it came to numbers of the elect or offers
16 This theme is worked out in ch. 1 of my Religion and Society in England 1790–1850
(London, 1972).
17 The telling legend was that Methodism arrived in every frontier settlement by the time
the second saloon was opened.
of grace. But the nineteenth century was not far gone before it became
apparent that the Bible was part of the problem at least as much as it
was part of the solution. In the first generation of the nineteenth century
the English church entered on a period of increasing isolation from the
continent. To their credit the evangelicals were among the last to follow
this trend, and all during the years of the Napoleonic wars they had their
own means of breaking the Continental System and keeping in touch
with their continental counterparts. They owed much to the itinerant
labours of men like K. F. A. Steinkopf (1773–1859). He was pastor of
the German Lutheran congregation in the Savoy. His circle abroad was
based on the highly conservative Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft18
of Basel, of which he was secretary 1795–1801. This body spread the
ideals of the London Missionary Society, the Religious Tract Society
and the Bible Society abroad, establishing a cosmopolitan and uncon-
fessional model for the men of the Erweckungsbewegung in Germany. But
the English High-Church party was increasingly engaged in developing
a highly precarious church construct which should be national against
Rome and catholic against dissent. In their turn the evangelicals were
increasingly drawn into this warfare, and it was men of liberal bent who
looked to Germany for theological progress or university reform. As at the
beginning of the eighteenth century there was a pro-German and an iso-
lationist party in the English church; but the balance between them had
changed fundamentally – as it had not changed in America, whence stu-
dents continued to trek to German universities by their thousands.19 The
evangelicals (like the High-Church), concerned to preserve the English
Church against enemies within and abroad, and followed by too many
evangelical dissenters, went with the isolationist tide.
The Bible
The result was that what is sometimes melodramatically called ‘the
Victorian crisis of faith’20 was predominantly felt by a certain kind of
evangelical. Both the Bible as a whole and the centrality of Jesus in it
became suddenly much harder to use. Long before Darwin and the evo-
lution controversies, geologists had come to require a much greater time-
scale than the English Bible commentators had been accustomed to grant.
18 On this body see Ernst Staehelin, Die Christentumsgesellschaft in der Zeit der Aufklärung
und der beginnenden Erweckung (Basel, 1970).
19 Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship 1770–1870 (New Haven, 1978). Theolo-
gians declined both in absolute numbers and as a proportion of the whole after 1850.
20 For more on this see my paper ‘Faith and Fallacy: English and German Perspectives in
the Nineteenth Century’ in R. J. Helmstadter and B. Lightman (eds.), Victorian Faith in
Crisis (London, 1990); repr. in my Faith and Faction, pp. 49–72.
Conclusion 191
Still worse, David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus21 and the long trail of
successors that it provoked made it clear that fleeing to Christ, like fleeing
to the Bible, was, if not hazardous, at least less simple than evangelicals
had supposed. Evangelicals, once progressive in their use of Locke, were
now painfully caught in Locke’s assumption that knowledge was some-
thing external to man, perceived by sense impressions.22 In the nature
of the case revelation was external to man, though it was recognisable
by supporting evidences, and especially by miracles and the fulfilment
of prophecies. All these supporting evidences now began to seem inse-
cure. To the battering suffered by inner-church conflict, the evangelical
movement suffered further loss of confidence as a result of developments
elsewhere on which it had turned its back. Isolation was dramatically
exemplified all round. It took exile in Natal to save Colenso from English
isolation and make a scholar of him. It happened that the curator of the
museum and library in Cape Town was the son of the notable German
Old Testament scholar Friedrich Bleek, and he kept Colenso supplied
with good German work in the field that he would probably not have
obtained in England.23
Nor were evangelical nonconformists any better. When the Congrega-
tionalists created the British Quarterly Review in the 1840s, they included
valuable bibliographies of the current German output; but when Samuel
Davidson, professor of biblical literature and ecclesiastical history at Lan-
cashire Independent College, 1843–57, a friend of various German the-
ologians of relatively conservative views, contributed to the second vol-
ume of the tenth edition of Horne’s Introduction to the Sacred Scriptures
(1856), the college committee made him resign his chair. And the very
last extant letter of Jabez Bunting, the so-called ‘last Wesleyan’, was to for-
bid the teaching of German to voluntary classes in the Didsbury College
seminary; the ‘first Wesleyan’, John Wesley himself, had been a principal
channel of the influence in England of Bengel, Buddeus and the Pietists,
and a notable translator of German hymns.
Evangelicalism in America
What meanwhile had happened to the heritage of Jonathan Edwards in
America? The American situation was altogether singular. In the half-
century following Edwards’s death, independence was achieved, and
21 First German edn 1835–6; Eng. tr. from the 4th German edn 1866.
22 For Otto Pfleiderer’s polemic against this from the German side see his Development of
Theology in Germany Since Kant and Its Progress in Britain Since 1828 (London, 1890),
p. 307.
23 John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany
(London, 1984), p. 221.
achieved on a basis which made clear that the days of church estab-
lishment even on a state-wide basis were everywhere numbered. More-
over, as population began to pour into the interior, society had to be
constructed from the ground upwards, and this implied that the wider
functions of organised religion would differ greatly from those in Europe;
in the areas of new settlement there was no decayed establishment in need
of Pietist renewal; nor had the revivalist prescription for saving Protes-
tantism against a hostile state immediate relevance, though, as the event
proved, it was much nearer the mark than European notions of establish-
ment. Jonathan Edwards had stood for a restatement of New England
Orthodoxy in the hope of giving new life to community religious obser-
vance. Yet within a few years of his death the prospect of community
observance in New England had gone for ever, and many of the New
England clergy were preaching up a sort of millennial bliss as a reward
for resisting British imperial reorganisation. This was hardly achievable,
and was certainly not compatible with Edwards’s understanding of sin.
Yet in two quite different ways, and on a very narrow basis, his heritage
survived. Important parts of his work were not published in his lifetime;
indeed much of it was unavailable till given a scholarly editing by the Yale
factory in our own day. And the self-appointed guardians of his legacy,
the New Divinity school, were a very minuscule group. Samuel Hopkins
and Joseph Bellamy had studied with Edwards and became his personal
friends; Jonathan Edwards Jnr, only thirteen when his father died, was a
pupil of Hopkins and Bellamy and, in his own more limited way, dedicated
to the preservation of his father’s work. But not only were the epigone
lesser men, they divided the heritage they claimed to defend. Strong in
the Connecticut Valley, they had no Arminians to oppose, so they tackled
the old Calvinists in an increasingly metaphysical way, separating them-
selves informally from the evangelists remaining in the party. Underlying
Edwards’s doctrines had been his vivid perception of the divine beauty;
the penchant of the New Divinity men for system and intellectualisation
helped to empty their churches even as they multiplied their number.
Yet the recollection of religious awakening was there, and when the Sec-
ond Great Awakening began at the end of the century, it began in New
Divinity parishes.24
24 Hartmut Lehmann notes that it is difficult to know whether Claus Harms (1778–1855),
the celebrated preacher and writer of Schleswig, is to be classified to the revival move-
ment or to Neo-orthodoxy (Protestantische Weltsichten (Göttingen, 1998), p. 69). For all
the differences in the American situation, the similarity with the New Divinity men is
unmistakeable. The evangelicalism of each was no longer a force for liberation, and its
top-drawer was no longer addressing the intellectual problems of the contemporary elite.
Conclusion 193
By this time America was a different place from the time of Edwards.
It was not just that the Baptists and Methodists were better geared up
for evangelism in the back country than the apostles of New England
religion; they were bitterly hostile to establishment and cared not at all
for metaphysics. Within New England itself evangelical orthodoxy soon
faced an outright challenge from Unitarians arguing from the premises of
Enlightenment, and it divided into schools advocating dispensationalism,
millenarianism, even perfectionism. The Benevolent System, that great
interlocking network of societies for good works, based on a British model
but overshadowing denominational organisations and thought to a degree
not experienced in Britain, all showed how the evangelical heritage, with
all its pragmatic vigour, had splintered into often unharmonious frag-
ments. And if America was spared the divisive disputes about religious
establishment that complicated the nineteenth-century history of British
evangelicalism, it had shortly to face the even more contentious issue of
slavery.
To say this is to say more than that evangelicalism, like every other
religious movement, had a history; it is to say that the extraordinary
capacity of sections of the movement to reinvent themselves led to a
future with much less cohesion and mutual respect than early evangeli-
calism had summoned up. It was characteristic of that future that would-
be umbrella organisations like the Evangelical Alliance remained special
interest groups. Much the same was true of those who developed a fixation
on eschatology, or the canon of Scripture, or Christian perfection, and
there was warfare between those who gave themselves to the Benevolent
System and the denominations, not least the evangelical denominations
on both sides of the Atlantic. Evangelicals retained a power to straddle
denominations, but, in spite of the linkages, seemed unable to transmit an
understanding of new church problems across the continents in the old
style. America, loved or loathed, was no more understood in nineteenth-
century Europe than was Africa in the twentieth century. The evangelical
hexagon was no more. What could not have been foreseen at the end of
the eighteenth century was the energies which in the very long run could
be released by this process of re-forming around fragments of the evangel-
ical past, and which enabled evangelicalisms of various kinds (and mostly
new kinds) to establish themselves globally. Their history is part of the
successful rise of the lower social orders against the top-drawer which
occurred in piety as well as politics. To chart their progress a different
compass and a different method are required.
Select and user-friendly bibliography
Indispensable bibliographies on an international basis appear annually in the

German journal Pietismus und Neuzeit 1974– (abbr. below as PuN) now pub-
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of the movement may be found in my Protestant Evangelical Awakening, 3rd
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contributions in which are listed below: Martin Brecht, Ausgewählte Aufsätze
Bd. II Pietismus, Stuttgart, 1997; Hartmut Lehmann, Religion und Religiosität
in der Neuzeit, Göttingen, 1996; Johannes Wallmann, Theologie und Frömmigkeit
im Zeitalter des Barock, Tübingen, 1995.
CHAPTER 1
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CHAPTER 2
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74–118.
CHAPTER 4
Asselt, W. J. van, Federal Theology of J. Cocceius. Leiden, 2001.
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Tübingen, 1923.
CHAPTER 5
Ball, Bryan W., A Great Expectation. Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism
to 1660. Leiden, 1975.
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Reformation. New York, 1991.
Bercowitch, Sacvan, The American Jeremiad. Madison, 1978.
Bunsted, J. M., The Great Awakening and the Beginnings of Evangelical Pietism.
Waltham, Miss., 1970.
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Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E., The Practice of Piety. Chapel Hill, 1982.
Henry, Matthew, Works, ed. W. Tong. London, 1726.
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Lamont, William M., Richard Baxter and the Millennium. London, 1979.
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Cambridge, Mass., 1962.
Lowth, William, A Commentary upon the larger and lesser Prophets. 3rd edn,
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Lucas, Paul R., Valley of Discord. Church and Society along the Connecticut River,
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Manuel, Frank E., A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Mass., 1968.
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Selected Letters, ed. Kenneth Silverman. Baton Rouge, La., 1971.
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1946.
Richard Baxter and Philip Doddridge. A Study in a Tradition. London, 1951.
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Popkin, Richard H., Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and
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Pyle, Thomas, A Paraphrase with Notes on the Revelation of St John. 2nd edn,
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Pomfret. London, 1722.
[Romaine, William], An answer to a pamphlet entitled, ‘Considerations on the Bill
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Piety. London, 1957.
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1894.
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London, 1703.
Willard, Samuel, Compleat Body of Divinity in two hundred and fifty lectures. Boston,
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6 (1976), 109–19.
Young, Bryan W., Religion and Enlightenment in 18th Century England. Oxford,
1998.
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Richard H. Popkin (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature
and Thought, 1650–1800. Leiden, 1988.
CHAPTER 6
The student of Zinzendorf, who set out to ensure that he was the best documented
of all the religious leaders of his day, is confronted with an embarras de richesses.
The Olms Press of Hildesheim began to produce a reprint edition of Zinzendorf’s
works in 1962 under the editorship of Erich Beyreuther and Gerhard Meyer.
The original edition of the Hauptschriften (6 vols.) was followed by 13 vols., of
Ergänzungsbande (1964–72) and four vast series of Materialen und Dokumente
which include many scarce monographs relating to the subject. Then there are the
immense resources of the archive at Herrnhut, so rich that even the cash-strapped
government of the DDR thought it worthwhile to spend money on them; and the
English Moravian archives at Moravian Church House, Muswell Hill, London,
which contain the Count’s daily teachings translated into often quaint English
in the MS Gemeinhaus Diaries. All these resources have been ably exploited by
the Moravian historians, especially Plitt, Uttendörfer and Meyer. Confronted by
this overwhelming amount of material the student may take cautious note of Leiv
Aalen’s opinion that the Moravians seem not to have said in private anything very
different from what they published in the public domain.
Aalen, Leiv, ‘Die Theologie des Grafen von Zinzendorf’, in Gedenkschrift für
D. Werner Elert. Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, Berlin, 1955; repr. in
Martin Greschat (ed.), Zur neueren Pietismusforschung, Darmstadt, 1977.
Die Theologie des jungen Zinzendorfs. Berlin, 1966.
Becker, Bernhard, Zinzendorf in Verhältnis zu Philosophie und Kirchentum seiner
Zeit. Leipzig, 1886.
Bengel, Johann Albrecht, Abriss der sogenannten Brüdergemeine, repr. in Zinzendorf
Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2 XVI.
Beyreuther, Erich, Der junge Zinzendorf. 2nd edn, Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1957.
Zinzendorf und die sich allhier beisammen finden. Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1959.
Zinzendorf und die Christenheit. Marburg-an-der-Lahn, 1961.
Studien zur Theologie Zinzendorfs. Neukirchen, 1962.
‘Zinzendorf und das Judentum’, repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Doku-
mente, Reihe 2 XII.
Bräunung-Oktavio, Hermann, ‘Ludwig Carl von Weitalshausen, genannt
Schrautenbach’, Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 13 (1963), 223–79.
Brecht, Martin, ‘Johann Albrecht Bengel und der schwäbische Biblizismus’, in
Kurt Aland (ed.), Pietismus und Bibel. Witten, 1970.
Cranz, David, Ancient and Modern History of the Brethren, tr. Benjamin La Trobe.
London, 1780.
Bibliography 207
Daniel, Thilo, Nikolaus von Zinzendorfs Beteiligung an den Inner-Protestantischen

Einigungsbestrebungen des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts. Biographie und Theologie,
1716–1723. Marburg, 2000.
Deghaye, Pierre, La Doctrine Ésotérique de Zinzendorf (1700–1760). Paris, 1969.
Eberhard, Samuel, Kreuzes-Theologie. Die reformierten Anliegen in Zinzendorfs
Verkündigung. Munich, 1937.
Erbe, Hans-Walther, Zinzendorf und der fromme hohe Adel seiner Zeit. Leipzig, 1928;
repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2 XII.
Geiges, R., ‘Zinzendorf und Württemberg’, Blätter für Württembergische
Kirchengeschichte 17 (1913), 52–152.
‘Die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Oetinger und Zinzendorf’, Blätter für
Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 39 (1935), 131–48; 40 (1936), 107–35.
‘Württemberg und Herrnhut im 18. Jahrhundert’, Blätter für Württembergische
Kirchengeschichte 42 (1938), 28–88.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Autobiography, ed. K. J. Weintraub. 2 vols.,
Chicago, 1974.
Hahn, Hans-Christophe and Reichel, H., Zinzendorf und die Herrnhuter Brüder.
Hamburg, 1977.
Hök, Gösta, Zinzendorfs Begriff der Religion. Uppsala, 1948.
Jung, Martin H., Nachfolger, Visionärinnen, Kirchenkritiker. Leipzig, 2003.
Mälzer, Gottfried, Bengel und Zinzendorf. Zur Biographie und Theologie Johann
Albrecht Bengels. Witten, 1968.
Johann Albrecht Bengel. Leben und Werk. Stuttgart, 1970.
Meyer, Dietrich, ‘Cognitio Dei experimentalis oder “Erfahrungstheologie” bei Got-
tfried Arnold, Gerhard Tersteegen und Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf’, in
Dietrich Meyer and Udo Sträter (eds.), Zur Rezeption mystischer Traditionen
im Protestantismus des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts. Cologne, 2002.
Moravian Church House, London. MS Gemeinhaus Diary 1747–51.
Okeley, Francis, Memoirs of the Life, Death, Burial and Wonderful Writings of Jacob
Behmen. Northampton, 1780.
A Faithful Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with Hiel. . . Northampton,
1781.
Philipp, F.-H., ‘Zinzendorf und die Christusmystik des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts’,
in FS Ernst Benz, Glaube, Geist, Geschichte, ed. G. Müller and W. Zeller.
Leiden, 1967.
Plitt, Hermann, Zinzendorfs Theologie. 3 vols., Gotha, 1869–74.
Schneider, Hans, ‘Die “zürnenden Mutterkinder”. Der Konflikt zwischen Halle
und Herrnhut’, PuN 19 (2003), 37–66.
Schrautenbach, Ludwig Carl Freiherr von, Der Graf von Zinzendorf und die
Brüdergemeine seiner Zeit. (1851); repr. in Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und
Dokumente, Reihe 2 IX.
Spangenberg, August Gottlieb, Declaration über die Zeither gegen uns ausgegan-
gen Beschuldigungen. Leipzig and Görlitz, 1751; repr. in Zinzendorf Werke,
Ergänzungsband V.
Apologetische Schluss-Schrift. Leipzig, 1752; repr. in Zinzendorf Werke,
Ergänzungsband III.
Uttendörfer, Otto, Zinzendorf und die Mystik. East Berlin, 1950.
208 Bibliography
Ward, W. Reginald, ‘Enlightenment in Early Moravianism’, in C. Augustijn et al.

(eds.), Essays on Church History presented to Professor J. van den Berg. Kampen,
1987.
Zinzendorf Werke, Ergänzungsband III.
Zinzendorf Werke, Materialen und Dokumente, Reihe 2, Bd. XI.
Zinzendorf Werke, Hauptschriften I & V.
Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig von, Freywillige Nachlese (1735), repr. in Zinzendorf
Werke, Ergänzungsband XII.
CHAPTER 7
A modern edition of Wesley’s works is in progress at Nashville, Tenn., as the Bicen-
tennial Edition, and will eventually supersede all older editions in about 35 vols.
Some substantial contributions are already published, including the Sermons, ed.
Albert Outler, vols. I–IV in the series, and the Journal and Diaries, ed. W. Reginald
Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, vols. XVIII–XXIII. Meanwhile the edition of
the Works in 14 vols., London, 1872 is still useful.
Ayres, P. (tr.), The Count of Gablis, or the extravagant mysteries of the Cablists.
London, 1680.
Baker, Eric W., A Herald of the Evangelical Revival. London, 1948.
Benham, Daniel, Memoirs of John Hutton. London, 1856.
Carey, William, An enquiry into the obligation of Christians to use means for the
conversion of the heathen. Leeds, 1793.
Dreyer, Frederick, ‘Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley’, Amer-
ican Historical Review 88 (1983), 12–30.
English, John C., ‘John Wesley and his “Jewish Parishioners”. Jewish–Christian
Relationships in Savannah, Georgia, 1736–7’, Methodist History 36 (1998),
220–7.
Etheridge, John Wesley, Life of the Rev Adam Clarke. 2nd edn, London,
1858.
Green, J. Brazier, John Wesley and William Law. London, 1845.
Heitzenrater, Richard P., ‘Great Expectations: Aldersgate and the evidences of
genuine Christianity’, in Randy L. Maddox (ed.), Aldersgate Reconsidered.
Nashville, 1990.
Herrnhut MSS. R13 A7 fo.25: James Hutton to Zinzendorf, 14 March 1739.
Hirst, Désirée, Hidden Riches. Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake.
London, 1964.
Jung, Martin H., ‘1836 – Wiederkunft Christi oder Millennium? Zur Escha-
tologie J. A. Bengels und seiner Schüler’, in his Nachfolger, Visionärinnen,
Kirchenkritiker. Leipzig, 2003.
Larson, Timothy (ed.), Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals. Leicester, 2003.
Methodist Magazine 37 (1814).
Newport, Kenneth G. C., Apocalypse and Millennium. Cambridge, 2000.
O’Malley, J. Steven, ‘On the Journey Home’. The History of Mission of the Evangelical
United Brethren Church, 1946–68. New York, 2003.
Rack, Henry D., Reasonable Enthusiast. John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism. 3rd
edn, Peterborough, 2002.
Bibliography 209
Streiff, Patrick, Reluctant Saint? A Theological Biography of Fletcher of Madeley.

Peterborough, 2001.
Telford, John (ed.), Letters of John Wesley. 8 vols., London, 1931.
Tuttle, Robert, Mysticism in the Wesleyan Tradition. Grand Rapids, 1989.
Tyerman, Luke, The Life and Times of the Rev. Samuel Wesley. London, 1866.
Life and Times of John Wesley. 3 vols., 6th edn, London, 1890.
Life of Revd. George Whitefield. 2 vols., London, 1890.
Venn, John, Life and a Selection from the Letters of the late Henry Venn, ed. H. Venn,
London, 1834.
Wakefield, Gordon S., Methodist Devotion. London, 1966.
Walton, Christopher, Notes and Materials for an Adequate Biography of . . . William
Law. London, 1854.
Ward, W. Reginald, Religion and Society in England 1790–1850. London, 1972.
‘Missions in Their Global Context in the Eighteenth Century’, in Mark
Hutchinson and Ogbu Kalu (eds.), A Global Faith. Sydney, 1998.
‘“Putting off the Apocalypse”. Evangelical Identity and the Origins of Mis-
sions’, Humanitas 5 (2003), 25–42.
Wesley, John, A Plain Account of the People called Methodists in a letter to the Rev.
Mr Perronet (1748), in Works. (1878 edn), VIII; repr. also in Telford, Letters,
II, 292–311.
A Concise History of England. 4 vols., London, 1776.
[abr. from Mosheim], A Concise Ecclesiastical History, from the Birth of Christ to
the beginning of the Present Century. London, 1781.
A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester [Warburton], ed.
G. R. Cragg, in Bicentennial Edition, II.
Bicentennial Edition: Correspondence, ed. Frank Baker, XXV–XXVI.
Sermons on Several Occasions by the Rev. John Wesley. 3 vols., London, 1872.
Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, ed. London, 1958.
Wesley, John and Charles, Hymns and Sacred Poems. London, 1839.
The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, ed. George Osborn. 13 vols.,
London, 1868–72.
Whitehead, John, Life of Rev. John Wesley. 2 vols., London, 1796.
CHAPTER 8
The Works of Jonathan Edwards are being made available in their entirety for the
very first time in the great Yale edn, begun a quarter of a century ago and now
nearing completion in more than twenty vols. Nevertheless the old edition by
Dwight and Hickman listed below is still useful not only for being in much more
general circulation, but also for the original biographical materials it contains.
[Chauncy, Charles], The Wonderful Narrative, or a faithful Account of the French

Prophets, their Agitations, Extasies and Inspirations . . . Boston, Mass.,
1742.
Cherry, Conrad, Nature and the Religious Imagination from Edwards to Bushell.
Philadelphia, 1980.
Delattre, Roland André, Beauty and Sensibility in the Thought of Jonathan Edwards.
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Index
Aberdeen 120 Basnage, Jacques 102

Albury group 187 Bavaria 37
alchemy 12, 17, 21, 24, 97, 132, 157, 159 Baxter, Richard 73, 89, 140
America 45, 74, 90, 91, 92, 96, 112, 116, Bayle, Pierre 53, 75, 82, 115
127, 128, 134, 148, 149, 154, 185, Bayley, Lewis 24, 73
191, 192, 193 Bebbington, David 187
Ames, William 141 Becker, Bernhard 101, 105
Amsterdam 53, 81 Bellamy, Joseph 192
Anabaptists (including Baptists) 50, 57, Benedictines 82
72, 139, 188, 193 Bengel, Johann Albrecht 30, 100, 104,
Andreae, Johann Valentin 8, 17, 37 114, 117, 118, 135, 136, 137, 155,
Anne, Queen, of England 10, 92, 119 157, 158, 159, 167, 168, 169, 171,
Annoni, Hieronymus 74 182, 184, 191
Annweiler 50 Benson, Joseph 138
Anton, Paul 30, 109 Benz, Ernst 6, 161
Antonia, Princess, of Württemberg 20, 37, Berleburg 158
38 Berlin 30, 73
apocalyptic 7, 15, 16, 17, 26, 49, 51, 78, Bern 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 173
88, 89, 109, 116, 135, 138, 145, 146, Berthelsdorf 105, 111
158, 183, 186 Beverley, Thomas 89
Aquinas, St Thomas 44, 61 Beyer, Gabriel 169
Aratus 19 Bilfinger, Georg Bernhard 156
Aristotelian logic 3, 4, 13, 19, 23, 24, 30, Bleek, Friedrich 191
36, 39, 41, 50, 63, 71, 75, 103, 104, Boehm, Anton Wilhelm 10, 92
118, 141, 156, 166, 177, 189 Bohemia 40
Arnauld, Antoine 66 Böhler, Peter 124, 125, 127, 128
Arndt, Johann 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, Böhme, Jakob (including Behmenism) 14,
14, 17, 24, 31, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 45, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 35, 36, 45, 48, 49,
86, 92, 106, 130, 161, 165 50, 57, 83, 86, 107, 108, 121, 123,
Arnold, Gottfried 14, 23, 24, 45, 46, 48, 125, 130, 133, 157, 158, 160, 163,
49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 64, 164, 168, 172, 177, 178, 184, 186
88, 101, 103, 106, 109 Bolton, Robert 86
associate presbytery 128 Bonaventura, St J. F. 44
astrology 10 Bossuet, Bp Jacques-Bénigne 63, 64
Atterbury, Bp Francis 119 Bostock, Bridget 132
Augsburg, Confession of 25, 114, 115 Boston, Mass. 86, 148
Augustine, St 61, 86 Bourignon, Antoinette 35, 53, 54, 56, 57,
63, 74, 106, 120, 123, 130
Baader, B. F. X. von 52 Bradford 138
Balleine, G. R. 187 Brainerd, David 144, 154
Barth, Karl 143 Brandenburg, Elector of 25
Basel 11, 50, 72, 73, 74, 176 Brecht, Martin 40
214
Index 215
Breman 78, 79, 80, 81 Conway, Anne, Viscountess 97

Brightman, Thomas 88 Copernicus 165
Brine, John 188 Cromwell, Oliver 89, 100, 119
Bristol 127 Cromwell, Richard 89
Bromley, Thomas 48 Cudworth, Ralph 97
Brooks, Joshua 187
Brothers, Richard 185, 187 Dannhauer, Johann Konrad 8, 26
Brunnquell, Ludwig 34 Daubuz, Charles 147
Bruno, Giordano 18 Davidson, Samuel 191
Brunswick, Duchess of 169 Deghaye, Pierre 102
Buddeus, Johann Franz 191 Descartes, René 97
Bunting, Jabez 43, 191 Detmold 79
Bunyan, John 9, 87, 89, 91, 178 Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft 176,
Burnet, Bp Gilbert 62 179, 190
Byrom, John 121, 123, 130 Dick, Samuel 73
Dilfeld, Georg Conrad 29
Cabbala 4, 10, 11, 19, 20, 21, 22, 36, 37, Dilthey, Philipp Jakob 49
38, 39, 83, 97, 102, 142, 157, 158, Dionysius the Areopagite 15, 68
160, 168 Dippel, Conrad 158
Cagliostro 172 Dort, Synod of 70, 76, 84
Calvin, John 71, 72, 74 Drabik, Nikolaus 49
Calvinism 2, 3, 140 Dresden 30
Cambridge, Mass. 86 Duisberg 78, 79, 80
Cambridge, UK 98
Cambridge Platonists 97, 98 Ebersdorf 102, 106, 114
Carey, William 137 Eckart, Meister 9, 16
Carl, Johann Samuel 176 Eclectic Society 187
Carmelites 50, 54, 64, 69, 82 Edward, Duke of Kent 175
Carpzov, Johann Benedict 30, 41 Edwards, Jonathan 1, 4, 94, 95, 96, 128,
Casaubon, Isaac 19 131, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145,
Catherine of Genoa, St 43 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152,
Cave, William 47 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159,
Chandieu, Antoine 71 163, 165, 172, 185, 188, 191, 192,
Charles I, king of England 88 193
Charles II, king of England 85 Edwards, Jonathan, Jnr 149, 192
Charles X, king of Sweden 134 Edwards, Sarah 142
Charles XI, king of Sweden 12 Edwards, Timothy 147
Charles XII, king of Sweden 162 Einsiedeln 11
Chauncy, Charles 148, 149 Elizabeth, Abbess of Herford 80
Cheyne, George 120 Emden 81
Clairvaux, Bernard of 9, 86, 103, 109, 120 Encyclopédie 17
Clarke, Adam 132 England 79, 88, 135, 148, 162, 163, 169,
Class meetings (including collegia pietatis) 170, 180
4, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37, 43, 52, 57, Church of 70, 85, 97, 105, 119, 123,
59, 78, 132 128, 139, 147, 167, 184, 187, 190
Cleves 79, 81 Ephraem Syrus 123
Coccejus, Johannes (including Coccejans) Ernst the Pious, Duke, of Saxe-Gotha 26,
4, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 84 40
Coing, Elise 179 Erskine, Ebenezer 128
Colberg, E. D. 13, 14, 17 Erskine, John 149
Colenso, Bp John William 191 eschatology (including Last Things and
Cologne 57 ‘hope of better times’) 4, 8, 16, 17,
Comenius, Johann Amos 8, 49 26, 32, 37, 39, 51, 54, 60, 71, 89, 90,
Concert of Prayer 141, 142 97, 98, 102, 114, 115, 117, 133, 134,
Confessionalisation 2, 51, 70, 71, 82 136, 137, 141, 146, 147, 152, 159,
Connecticut 93, 147 166, 168, 187
216 Index
Evangelical Alliance 193 Grossgebauer, Theophil 161

evangelicals, Reformed 3 Grotius, Hugo 108
exegesis, principles of 145, 168 Grünberg, Paul 25, 36
Gülden, Samuel 73, 74
Fein, Georg Friedrich 182 Guyon, Mme Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la
Fende, Christian 29, 30 Mothe 53, 56, 57, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65,
Fénelon, François de la Mothe 56, 61, 63, 67, 68, 69, 106, 108, 110, 120, 122,
64, 66, 106, 121, 122 130
Ficino, Marsilio 18 Guyse, John 96, 140, 148
Fiddes, Richard 122
Fletcher, John W., of Madeley 130 Hahn, Philipp Mathäus 160
Fleury, Claude 123 Hall, Joseph 73
Foligno, Angela da 9 Halle 7, 8, 12, 36, 40, 45, 52, 83, 92, 93,
Formula Consensus (1675) 72, 73 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109, 112,
Formula of Concord 8 116, 123, 126, 153, 157, 162
Fox, George 87 Haller, Albrecht von 173
Foxe, John 87 Hambrick-Stowe, Charles E. 86
France 70, 79, 80, 82, 93, 133, 153, 163, Hamburg 30, 73
169 Harms, Claus 192
Franck, Sebastian 16 Hartley, Thomas 137, 169
Francke, Anna Magdalena 45, 46 Hase, Cornelius de 73
Francke, August Hermann 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, Hecht, Cappel 157
12, 30, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 22
57, 73, 74, 87, 92, 95, 100, 101, 103, Heidelberg 178
112, 128, 156 Heidelberg Confession and Catechism 70,
Francke, Gotthilf August 40, 100 81, 83
Francke, Johannes 40 Heitzenrater, Richard P. 126
Franeker 79, 80 Helmont, Franciscus Mercurius van 33,
Frankfurt-a.-M. 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 33, 97, 164
79, 116, 157 Henry XLIII, Count, Reuss von
Frederick II, king of Prussia 134, 175 Schleiz-Köstritz 173
Frederick III, Elector Palatine 70 Henry, Matthew 89
French Prophets 51 Henry, Philip 89
Frelinghuysen, Theodorus Jacobus 81, Heppe, Heinrich 76
96 Herder, Johann Gottfried 177
Freylinghausen, Johann Anastasius 46 Herford 80
Fuller, Andrew 188, 189 Hermeticism (including Hermes
Trismegistus) 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, 20,
Garden, George 120 97
Garden, James 120 Herrnhaag 105, 110, 126
Gassendi, Petrus 163 Herrnhut 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 108,
Gassner, Joseph 173 123, 127
Geneva 28, 72, 73, 80, 173 Hess, Felix 170
George, Prince, of Denmark 10, 92 Hesse, Duke of 168
George I, king of England 119 Hesse-Darmstadt 29
Georgia (Am.) 119, 123, 124 hexagon, evangelical 4, 193
Gerhard, Johann 11 Heylin, John 123
Germany 70, 74, 79, 157, 168, 178, 190 Hirsch, Emanuel 157, 160
Gibson, Edmund 123 Hjärne, family 162
Gichtel, Johann Georg 45, 48 Hjärne, Urban 12
Giessen 47, 63 Hobbes, Thomas 23, 26, 63
Gill, John 98, 188 Hoburg, Christian 13, 24
Glaucha 8, 46, 57 Hochenau, Hochmann von 57
glorification 87 Hoffmann, Wilhelm 57
Goethe, J. W. 111, 172, 177, 180 Hohenzollern, house of 3, 25, 40, 57, 82
Görlitz 21 Hopkins, Samuel 192
Index 217
Horb, Johann Heinrich 29, 30, 73 Lehmann, Hartmut 192

Horche, Heinrich 48, 49 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 22, 108, 157,
Hungary 70, 81 158, 177
Hutton, James 127 Leiden 79
Leighton, Robert 120
Independents 188 Leipzig 30, 73
Innocent XII, Pope 63 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 104, 171
Inspired, the 83, 112, 126 Leube, Hans 9
Ireland 85 Lieberkühn, Samuel 116
Italy 41, 62 Lille 53
Livonia 92
James II, king of England 93, 119 Locke, John 132, 141, 144, 164, 191
Jansenists 50, 61, 66, 67, 80, 94, 106, 107, Lodenstein, Jodocus van 79
120, 123 London Missionary Society 176, 189,
Jews 25, 27, 32, 36, 37, 50, 84, 90, 93, 98, 190
102, 116, 122, 134, 136, 137, 152, Lopez, Gregory 131
153, 157, 165, 186 Louis XIV, king of France 28, 35, 49, 51,
John of Avila 130 62, 66, 68, 69, 82, 119, 131, 182
John of the Cross, St 63 Lowman, Moses 147
Josephi, Jeremias 109 Loyola, Ignatius 130
Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich 17, 34, 176, Ludwig IX, Landgrave of
177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, Hessen-Darmstadt 169
185 Lusatia, Upper 21
conversion of 176, 177 Luther, Martin 2, 4, 12, 23, 25, 26, 29,
Jurieu, Pierre 51, 90 31, 35, 43, 44, 50, 107, 109, 125,
justification by faith 33, 35, 87, 107, 126, 145, 152
131, 144, 150 Lütkemann, Joachim 161
Lutz, Christoph 73
Kaiserslautern 178 Lutz, Samuel 74
Kant, Immanuel 167, 179
Karl Friedrich, Duke of Baden 179 magnetism (including animal magnetism)
Kassel 79 113, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180
Kelpius, Johannes 23 Maintenon, Mme de 64, 69
Kempis, Thomas à 74, 86, 121, 122, 123, Makarius the Egyptian 52, 123, 130
125 Malebranche, Nicholas 157
Keynes, J. M. 97 Marburg 178
Kirkham, Sally 121 Mark, Synod of 81
Klettenberg, Suzanne von 111 Marsay, Hector de 123, 130, 172
Kliefoth, Theodor 3 Marsden, G. M. 142
König, Samuel 74 Massachusetts 91, 93
Kortholt, Christian 161 Mather, Cotton 6, 7, 91, 92, 93, 95
Krefeld 57 Mather family 95, 96
Krüdener, Juliane von 183 Mather, Increase 91, 92
Mather, Nathaniel 92
Labadie, Jean de (including Labadists) 28, Mather, Samuel, I 92
29, 52, 57, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 Mather, Samuel, II 6, 92
Lampe, Friedrich Adolf 79, 80, 81 McGinn, Bernard 15
‘latter-day glory’ 135, 148 Mede, Joseph 32, 88, 97, 146
Laud, Abp William 88 Medici, Cosimo de’ 17
Lausanne 72 Merlau, Eleonore von (later Petersen) 29,
Lavater, Johann Kaspar 169, 170, 171, 30
172, 173, 174, 175, 180, 181 Mesmer, Franz Anton 172, 173
Law, William 52, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, Methodists 107, 111, 134, 137, 167, 184,
129, 130 187, 189, 193
Leade, Jane 48, 74, 121, 157, 181 conversion 126, 129
Lee, Francis 121 doctrines 133
218 Index
Meyer, Dietrich 109 Orthodoxy, Lutheran 2, 3, 11, 19, 21, 23,

Middelburg 28, 80 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 40, 43,
millennium 12, 71, 75, 89, 93, 98, 100, 91, 101, 103, 109, 115, 118, 142,
114, 115, 133, 137, 139, 147, 149, 161
182, 185, 192 Ostervald, Jean-Frédéric 72, 73
Milton, John 88
Mirandola, Pico della 20, 38 Paracelsus [Theophrastus von
Moers 57 Hohenheim] (including
Molinos, Miguel de 41, 42, 43, 45, 61, 62, Paracelsianism) 4, 10, 11, 12, 17, 20,
63, 68, 124 21, 22, 24, 36, 39, 44, 50, 97, 111,
Monk, General George 89 118, 132, 137, 158, 175, 177, 184
Moravians (including Renewed Unity of Pâris, François de 67
the Brethren) 74, 95, 99, 101, 104, Pascal, Blaise 120, 121, 123, 130
105, 106, 107, 111, 112, 113, 117, Paul I, Tsar of Russia 175
118, 124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 149, Penn, William 29, 52
171, 179 Pennsylvania 23, 29, 53, 157
conversion 111 Perkins, William 73
More, Henry 97, 163, 164 Peschke, Erhard 46
Moser, Johann Jakob 160 Petersen, Eleonore, see Merlau, Eleonore
Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von 135 von
Mülheim 79 Petersen, Johann Wilhelm 30, 36, 74, 106,
mystical theology, the 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 157
18, 35, 43, 44, 47, 49, 55, 58, 62, 68, Pfleiderer, Otto 191
69, 101, 103, 108, 109, 129 Philadelphians 54, 114, 115, 118, 121,
mysticism, medieval 4, 8, 9, 41, 48, 55, 57, 157
58, 105, 109, 120, 142 physico-theologians 59
mysticism, radical 13, 14, 15, 17, 23, 34, physiognomy 113, 174, 176
45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 74, 83, 88 Pia Desideria 31, 32, 34, 38, 72
Pictet, Bénédict 72
Nantes, Edict of 72, 147 Pietism, origins of 2, 7, 11, 17
Neander, Joachim 79 and conversion 4, 42, 43, 46, 78, 79, 87,
Neckargröningen 8 100, 103, 131, 149
Neoplatonism 11, 15, 142 hostility to Orthodoxy 2, 7, 25, 189
Netherlands 75, 123, 162 piety, crisis of 7, 11, 13
Neuchâtel 72, 73 Plitt, Hermann 101, 105
New England 84, 85, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, Poiret, Pierre 35, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55,
95, 140, 147, 153, 154, 193 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 69, 104, 106,
Newton, Sir Isaac 11, 67, 89, 97, 98, 108, 120, 121, 123, 130, 172
147, 160, 163 Poland 37, 70
Nicolas, Armelle 55 Pordage, John 48
Nitschmann, Anna 106 predestination 87, 181
Noailles, Cardinal 66, 106 Presbyterians 85, 87, 88, 120, 125, 139,
Northampton, Mass. 96, 140, 141, 188
148 Pretorius, Franz Daniel 30
priesthood of all believers, spiritual 31, 39,
Obereit, Dr Jacob Hermann 172 44, 47
Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph 17, 20, 38, Primitive Methodists 87
52, 102, 108, 114, 118, 132, 156, Prussia 26, 48, 57, 72
157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, Puritanism 3, 4, 9, 24, 41, 73, 79, 85, 86,
168, 169, 171, 184 87, 88, 89, 92, 94, 121, 130, 140,
Offenbach 48 149, 171
Oglethorpe, James Edward 119 Puritan conversion 87, 95, 96, 150, 175
Orange family 57, 76, 78 Puritan devotional manuals 86
Origen 15 Puységur, Marquis de 172, 173
Orthodoxy, Eastern 3 Pythagoras 11
Index 219
Quakers 23, 29, 34, 50, 54, 57, 87, Seeberg, Erich 14
121 Seuse, mystic 16
Quedlinburg 45, 47, 48, 63 Sewall, Samuel 90
Quesnel, Pasquier 66, 123 Shepard, Thomas 90
Quick, John 76 Siberia 40
Quietists 35, 41, 50, 54, 55, 56, 61, 63, 64, Siegerland 176
67, 68, 69, 107, 120, 121, 122, 124, Silesia 40, 45
131, 144, 172 Simeon, Charles 186, 187, 188, 189
Skinner, Quentin 145
Rack, Henry D. 126 Socinians 50
Ramsay, Chevalier 56, 68 Sorau 109
Rational Orthodoxy 72, 84 Southcott, Joanna 185
Reformed Orthodoxy 3, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, Spangenberg, A. G. 99, 100, 101, 105,
76, 77, 82, 84, 85, 91, 121, 134, 140, 110, 111, 123
146, 154, 156, 174 Spener, Philipp Jakob 2, 4, 7, 8, 13, 14,
Reformed Pietism 70, 75, 78, 79, 152 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33,
Reitz, Johann Heinrich 49, 58, 79 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44,
Remonstrants 76 45, 47, 49, 51, 60, 72, 73, 74, 78, 89,
Renty, M. de 55, 69, 120, 121, 102, 108, 114, 115, 116, 128, 133,
131 135, 136, 137, 148, 157, 166, 175,
Reuchlin, Johannes 20 181
revivalism 7, 8, 57, 59, 73, 78, 79, 80, 81, Spinoza, B. de 97
83, 92, 128, 152, 153, 192 spiritualists 50, 102, 106
Richter, Abraham E. 106 Steinbart, Gottlob Samuel 170
Ritschl, Albrecht 82, 105, 183 Steinkopf, K. F. A. 190
Rock, Johann Friedrich 112 Steinmetz, J. A. 96
Rosenroth, Knorr von 37 Stoddard, Solomon 94, 95, 96
Rosicrucianism 17, 21 Strasbourg 8, 24, 26, 27, 29, 161, 176
Rothe, Richard 111 Sulzbach 24
Rousseau, J. J. 173 Sunday schools 189
Rüdiger, Andreas 162, 163, 164 Svedberg, Bp Jesper 161, 162, 184
Russell, R. 123 Sweden, Queen of 169
Ruysbroeck, Jan van 44 Swedenborg, Emanuel (including
Swedenborgianism) 54, 158, 161,
Sacheverell, Henry 119 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,
Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de 52 169, 170, 175, 181, 183, 184, 186
Sales, St Francis de 120 conversion of 165
Salzburgers 123, 154 Swiss Pietism 73
Sandbach 132 Switzerland 70, 72, 75, 79, 84, 145
Sandhagen, Kaspar Hermann 42 systematic theology 4, 103, 108, 111, 118,
Saxony 25 132, 139, 140, 141, 156, 159, 161,
Schering, Ernst 54 171, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189
Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. 109
Schmidlin, Johannes Laurentius 38 Tauler, Johann 9, 24, 35, 44, 74, 121, 122,
Scholem, Gershom 20 123, 124
Schrautenbach, Baron von 99 Taylor, Jeremy 122, 123
Schumacher, Samuel 73 Taylor, Thomas 138
Schurman, Anna van 29 Teellinck, Willem 75
Schütz, Johann Jakob 24, 28, 29, 30, 37, Teinach 38
51, 52, 73 Tennent family 81
Schweitzer, Albert 185 Tennent, Gilbert 96
Scotland 84 Tersteegen, Gerhard 57, 58, 59, 60, 61,
Church of 85, 95, 120, 141, 149 64, 69, 82, 83, 104, 107, 108, 172
Scougal, Henry 120, 123 theosophy 16, 17, 19, 36, 39, 52, 74, 83,
Scriver, Christian 161 107, 108, 130, 132, 163, 174
220 Index
Theresa of Ávila, St 14, 63 Wesley, John 1, 3, 14, 27, 33, 52, 54, 55,
Thomasius, Christian 3, 52 59, 65, 67, 69, 95, 118, 119, 120,
Thorowgood, pamphleteer 90 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127,
‘time of sifting’ 110, 114 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135,
Tissot, Samuel Auguste 173 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 148,
Tübingen 156 155, 156, 161, 167, 168, 181, 187,
Turretini, François 72 189, 191
Turretini, Jean-Alphonse 73 Wesley, Samuel, the elder 119, 120, 121,
Tuttle, Robert 131 122, 133, 138
Tyerman, Luke 133, 138 Wesley, Samuel, the younger 119, 124
typology 12, 145, 146, 151, 154, 156, 159, Wesley, Susanna 119, 121
165, 167, 188 Westminster, Confession of 3, 66, 85, 120
Wetterau 116
Undereyck, Theodor 48, 73, 78 Whiston, William 98, 147
Unigenitus, Bull 66, 67, 120 Whitby, Daniel 98, 147
Unitarians 193 Whitefield, George 96, 127, 140
United Provinces 51, 70, 75, 76, 79, 84, Wieuwerd 73
90, 116 Willard, Samuel 90
Utrecht 76, 78, 79, 81, 93 William III, king of England 89, 119
Uttendörfer, Otto 106, 110 Windham, Conn. 96
Wittenberg 47, 100, 106, 113
visions, evangelical 6, 15, 34, 37, 50, 54, Wolff, Christian 157, 159, 160, 162, 177,
55, 112, 144, 161, 165 181
mystical 83, 164, 165, 168, 184 Woodward, Josiah 91
vitalism 18 Worthington, Br 104
Vitringa, Campegius 80 Württemberg 8, 17, 20, 34, 37, 39, 101,
Voetius, Gisbertius (including Voetians) 108, 114, 118, 128, 133, 135, 156,
75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 95 157, 160, 182
Wake, Abp William 73, 93 Zeller, Johann Jakob 79

Wakefield, Gordon S. 139 Zeller, Winfried 17
Waldegrave, Bp Samuel 187 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von
Waldensians 152 8, 21, 66, 83, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103,
Wallmann, Johannes 7, 8 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110,
Watts, Isaac 96, 140, 142, 148 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117,
Weigel, Valentin 9 118, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132,
Werenfels, Samuel 73 133, 135, 136, 143, 156, 157, 166,
Wesel 81 171, 179
Wesley, Charles 125, 134, Zurich 169
138 Zwi, Sabbatai 37

(Ward) Early Evangelicalism. A Global Intellectual History Siglo XVIII

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Evangelicalism contributed to major changes of ideas in the modern

.  .    is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University

Cambridge University Press

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of

First published in print format 2006

isbn-13 978-0-511-24565-7 eBook (EBL)

isbn-13 978-0-521-86404-6 hardback

Select and user-friendly bibliography 194

I am very grateful to the Cambridge University Press for undertaking the

Confessionalisation and Orthodoxy

their minds. One of the consequences of their efforts was an outcome

increased the attractiveness of one particular strand of scientific investi-

predecessors, and this in the end contributed to the fragmentation of their

Evangelicals, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, seem generally to

enough he achieved his maximum rate of republication in it during the

Arndt then confesses himself to the doctrines of Paracelsus, perceives

Hallensian A. W. Boehm, chaplain to Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen

living forms of the real world, or the apparently spontaneous processes

26 Erich Seeberg, Menschwerdung und Geschichte (Stuttgart, 1938), p. 107.

developed sustained by a really major figure, Jakob Böhme (1575–1624).

31 Spener, Briefe, III, p. 287. 32 Geistliche Fama no. 27 (1741).

her own experience as ‘a consciousness of the presence of God of such a

41 Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), Italian philosopher, doctor and humanist.

preaching, wonder-working Magi in the Hermetic tradition and Bruno

a ladder to a unitive experience. The world as he observed it was admin-

1 M. Brecht (ed.), Geschichte des Pietismus (Göttingen, 1993), I, p. 226.

The rise of Spener

Spener’s Frankfurt years

had sought to tighten up religious observance and discipline, and to rein-

Chrétienne into German in 1667. He also published some of Labadie’s

trouble as the ministry attempted to impose a new religious oath, a move,

The Pia Desideria

19 Spener, Briefe, III, p. 608. 20 Grünberg, Spener, II, p. 65.

23 Spener, Briefe, III, pp. 256–7.

Spener and the mystics

justification in which the sinner could be justus ac peccator to be tempted

Spener and the Cabbala

August Hermann Francke

1 The biography of Francke by Erich Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke, 1663–1727.

studious young man, he gave early evidence of a vocation to be a theolo-

2 August Hermann Franckes Lebenslauf [1690–1], in August Hermann Francke. Werke in

knowledge. The human part comes in true penitence which consists in

Francke and the mystical theology

Anna Magdalena Francke

intense absorption in institutional management and politics could not

were constantly interwoven. It is particularly important to bear this in

six months later with Arnold’s resignation and return to Quedlinburg.

more comprehensible than Böhme himself, exercised enormous influ-

25 This account is based on Arnold’s Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie (Frank-

29 Divine Oeconomy, IV, pp. 248–9. 30 Ibid, IV, pp. 252–3.

of recruiting for his American colony.) From this quarter in December

Poiret as a publisher of mystical texts

knowledge and experience, but it was to be a union with God’s true

In Poiret’s later years no religious woman was more harassed, and

41 Mme J. B. de la Mothe Guyon, Lettres chrétiennes et spirituelles (London, 1767–8), IV,

to Mme Guyon. The essence of the Christian faith for Tersteegen as

58 Henk Hillenaar, ‘L’Augustinisme de Fénelon face à l’Augustinisme des Jansénistes’,

The tone was set at the beginning by the commentary of Gilbert

In 1687 sixty-eight propositions from his works were condemned, and

The condemnation of Molinos was immediately coupled with the first

60 Especially by Raymond Schmittlein, L’Aspect Politique du Différend Bossuet-Fénelon (Bade,

the world, is effected by the apparent overthrow in that very structure