Tuesday, December 16, 2008

You're No Pietist!



Zinzendorf and Wesley were key players in Pietism.


I was talking to someone who identified himself as a Pietist. We discussed a number of authors, especially among the Pietists. He emphasized infant baptism and Biblical support for that, so I added another passage for him.

When we talked about what affects people, he said, "It's the Word, the Word, the Word. Only the Word."

I said, "You're no Pietist." He laughed about that.

I also asked him about UOJ coming from Pietism, which is his tradition, coming from Finnland. He never heard of everyone in the world declared righteous, without faith.

Another layman is intrigued with Knapp teaching Subjective and Objective Justification in his book of Halle Pietism, yet that double-justification language and content never infected the non-Lutheran Protestants who studied Knapp (a major doctrinal book in America for decades).

My tentative conclusion is that Knapp's mainline Protestant followers became Unitarian in their beliefs, at least at the leadership level.