Pietist theology for civil discourse

Philipp Jakob Spener
Forefather of Pietism & neck braces
(Wikimedia)

There's a great piece over at Chris Gehrz's blog, The Pietist Schoolman, a guest post from Christian Collins Winn. Gehrz and Winn are both professors at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the post is Winn's address to the school's opening chapel service yesterday:

Pietism and Civil Discourse

In the piece, Winn identifies four characteristics from the Pietist tradition, specifically from its forefather, Philipp Jakob Spener, characteristics that comprise a Pietist theology for civil discourse. (Civil discourse being something that is sorely needed these days, and something I tried to model yesterday in my response to a piece by Michael Shank on Mennonites and politics.)

But here are the four characteristics with some commentary:

1. A spirit of good faith - In virtue terms, I'd call this "charity" in the more classical sense of caritas, which connotes "costliness, esteem, affection." A related virtue would be kindness.
2. A genuine openness to being taught - Winn rightly notes this requires the virtue of humility. We cannot assume beforehand that we are in the right, and we must always be open for the pleasant surprise of being wrong, learning something new, or understanding someone at a deeper level.
3. A love for one's neighbor - I'll note here the brilliant quote I came across from Jamie Smith the other day: "The neighbor could be a friend or an enemy, a foreigner or a brother. The call to love the neighbor is a call to love all of them - that is why all of Jesus' injunctions to love are taken up in the call to love the neighbor."
4. The hopeful commitment to God's peace - Hope and peace both being virtues/gifts/fruits of the Holy Spirit that, along with joy, ensure that we not become dour and spiritlessly duty-bound, where life becomes "just one damned thing after another."

Help me understand Pietism, brother Dale Brown!

Six years ago, at the age of 25, I went back to college. This move was brought about by a sense of calling to set-aside ministry that my faith community had helped me identify and discern. This calling process in congregational life is based on a tradition long-held in the Church of the Brethren, the stream of the Christian faith that raised me and continues to support me as a licensed minister. As I became immersed in the studies that would lead to a BA in English, my family and I also became more involved in congregational church life.

Six months after starting college classes while working full-time, my wife got a job at a Presbyterian church in central Iowa, where we served in various ministry roles – primarily musical – for three and a half years. Education and ministry quickly became intertwined for me as I practiced both often. It was around this time that I became more curious about the Church of the Brethren itself. Despite being immersed in a wonderful Brethren congregation until I was 18, there was never much education about the tradition itself, a non-practice which I've found to be typically Brethren. I can still picture myself sitting in my wife's office at the Presbyterian church, looking through a Wikipedia article on the Brethren while likely hiding out during choir practice. It was there that I first recall coming across the term “Pietist.” For Brethren, it was closely linked with another term that I had fairly little knowledge of or exposure to at the time: “Anabaptism.”

Thus began an odyssey spanning years, continuing to the very present, to dig deeper into the roots of my faith tradition and understand better what these terms mean, in their original historical-sociological contexts, and how they've been transmitted and transformed across time, geography, and changing cultures and societies. Now, after having spent nearly two years studying in a Mennonite seminary, deeply rooted in the Anabaptist tradition – and fairly loud and clear about that – I've begun to absorb what that term represents and have even come to internalize much of what it stands for in my approach to the Christian faith. Less clear to me, though, is the former term, “Pietism.” This is rarely uttered in the halls of the Mennonite seminary. So in the context of this class on the traditions broadly categorized as Believers' Churches, I finally have an opportunity to take a definitive text on the subject of Pietism and begin digging into “the other half” of my particular Brethren tradition. Enter: Understanding Pietism, by Dale W. Brown.

So read on at your own peril, for my lengthy reflection on this important (to me) book!