Finally, the educator prevails. And what we find in rationalism is largely a reduction of the fundamentals to the level of popular reasonableness. That was the beginning. Education has produced, partly, the coming of the Enlightenment; there it becomes a central concern of all great philosophers of that period. And even today the educational departments usually are more inclined towards a theology which is dependent on the Enlightenment than the other departments are. This is not general, but sometimes that is the case. And this has some good reason, one being that the educational needs are a limitation of content, and the theological needs are enlargements of content.
Now this was a short survey on Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy had one doctrine which was a transition to the next great movement, Pietism. In the Orthodox doctrine of the ordo salutis, the order of salvation, the last step was the unio mystica, the mystical union with God. For Luther this is the beginning of everything, namely the beginning of the faith in justification.. In the moment in which Orthodoxy accepted from the ecclesiastical tradition the unio mystica as a special point which can and must. be reached, the concept of faith became intellectualized. In Luther both are together; in Orthodoxy they are asunder: faith is the intellectual acceptance of the Orthodox doctrine, and communion with God is a matter of mystical experience. This is a splitting of Luther – especially the younger Luther – into two pieces: the mystical piece and the intellectual piece, one beside the other.
What is Pietism? The word is much less respectable in this country than in Europe. “pious,” “pietist” are words which can be used of people; but in this country it can hardly be used, having some connotations of hypocrisy or moralism or all kinds of disagreeable things. Now pietism does not necessarily have this connotation.
