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.
Pietism is the reaction of the subjective side of religion against the objective side. In Orthodoxy the subjective side was dealt with, of course, in the order of salvation, but it, didn’t. mean very much. Actually, Orthodoxy lives in the objectivity of theological and ecclesiastical organization. But we shouldn’t overemphasize this.
We have the hymns of Paul Gerhard, for instance, in the highest development of Orthodoxy. There was always personal religious relationship to God. But for the masses of the people, it was the license to become licentious, in every respect; the state of things in moral respects was miserable, especially in the Lutheran countries, where the doctrinal element was decisive and no discipline existed.
So the pietists, and first of all the greatest of them, Spener, in Halle,. (my own home university), wrote in continuous reference to Luther. And he showed something which was certainly true, Church-historically, that especially in the early Luther all the elements which Pietism rediscovered were present, and that Orthodoxy didn’t preserve but removed them from the other side, namely the objective side of giving the contents of the doctrine to everybody. What Spener tried to do was that Orthodoxy grasped only the one side of Luther. Therefore Pietism had a justification on the soil of justification. And not only in theological respect – I come immediately to it – but also in other respects: it has a tremendous influence on the whole culture. It was the first to act in terms of social ethics. The Pietists in Halle founded the famous orphanage there, the first one; they were interested in missionary enterprises; the first missions came from them. Orthodoxy said that the nations who are not Christian are lost, because one of the twelve apostles had already gone there.
Each nation had received apostolic preaching immediately after the foundation of the Christian churches – e. g , St. Thomas in Asia, and many other legendary figures like that. But they rejected the apostles, and so are guilty; and so we should not go to them and try to renew the missionary enterprise. – The :Pietists had quite different feelings about it: they felt that everywhere human souls could be saved by conversion. So they began the first missions in foreign countries. This again gave them world- historical perspectives – a man like Zinzendorf, together with Wesley, looked at America, etc., while Orthodoxy was completely conventionally restricted in the orthodoxy of their provincial territorial churches.
