Pietism and Community in Europe and North America, 1650–1850 (review)

Abstract

The final volume to appear from a series of three conferences begun in 2004, this set of essays reflects Fred van Lieburg’s attempt to “push scholarship on Pietism beyond narrow national and disciplinary boundaries” (preface). In eighteen chapters, the authors range over an expansive field providing examinations of Pietist understandings of the church that included experimental communities; efforts to found Jewish Christian communities; internalized notions of a hidden church; explicitly institutional reforms of the existing confessional traditions, and Pietism understood as a socially and politically critical indictment of existing Protestant customs and traditions. Three of the essays touch on the Moravian Brethren. The Moravians, however, appear without the authors tackling the question of whether and how Moravians should be identified as Pietists—a label they themselves seem to have rejected during the internal battles within this variegated reform movement. Wolfgang Breul’s essay singles out marriage as a key (and neglected) form of community in the Pietist writing of the major figures Philipp Jakob Spener, Gottfried Arnold, and Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. Both the Halle and Württemberg varieties of Pietism appear for examination, as do Swedish and Norwegian examples. Germanspeaking Pietists understandably enjoy pride of place on both sides of the Atlantic, but somewhat surprisingly, Dutch and Swedish Pietists in the North American context do not appear. Recent emphasis on the importance book reviews