Recently I concluded a series elaborating on a talk I gave last spring at Bethel University: “In Search of a ‘Usable Past’: Pietism in the Historiography of Christian Colleges and Universities.”
If you missed some or all of the series, you can find the entries indexed here, with sample quotations:
1. The Usable Past of Christian Colleges
“Coming to work at a Christian college after a thoroughly secular education, it’s been enriching to encounter Reformed, Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and other models of higher education. At the same time, it’s been dismaying and confusing to find that even ecumenists like [Richard] Hughes and the Jacobsens [Douglas and Rhonda] seem to find no ‘usable past’ in my own tradition: Pietism.”
2. Pietist Denominations and Their Colleges
“…I think it’s fair to identify several American denominations as possessing clear roots in Pietism. (Some of these denominations still exist; others have disappeared during the schisms and mergers of the 19th-20th centuries.) For each, I’d like to provide a quick summary of why it could be placed on the Pietist branch of the Christian family tree, and then an introduction to the present-day colleges and universities that it founded.”
3. Pietist Colleges: Quick Facts
“The vast majority of these schools were founded as seminaries between 1850 and 1900, and only later developed into four-year colleges. The two oldest predate the United States of America (Moravian and Salem); the two youngest were founded during or just after World War II (Fresno Pacific and Grace).”
4. The Unusable Past: Pietism and Christian Colleges (part 1)
“As we’ve discussed earlier on this blog, there’s no such thing as ‘The Pietist Church.’ The classical Pietist ambition is to cultivate ‘little churches [ecclesiolae] within churches [ecclesia],’ not to set up free-standing ecclesiastical structures. So the Pietist is usually participating in a conversation, not delivering a monologue. After years and years of interaction with Baptist, Anabaptist, Wesleyan, Lutheran, Reformed, and other traditions (plus mainline, evangelical, and fundamentalist Protestantism), how does one decide what in a church, or a church-founded school, is from Pietism and what’s not?”
5. The Unusable Past: Pietism and Christian Colleges (part 2)
“This head-heart tension is common to the historiography of many American Pietists, including Scandinavian-American immigrants like the Norwegian Lutherans and Swedish Mission Covenanters who founded Augsburg College and North Park University, respectively. But in the historiography of the latter school, we find examples of Pietist emphases being combined with a commitment to liberal learning and intellectual rigor.”
6. The Usable Past: Pietism and Bethel University
“Perhaps the most important attempt not only to name the BGC [Baptist General Conference] heritage as Pietist but to analyze how it shaped education at Bethel College came from history professor Dalphy Fagerstrom, in a 1956 address to his colleagues. Seeking ‘useable elements’ in European Pietism, Fagerstrom identified four characteristics most directly relevant to education at Bethel: concern for ‘the spirit rather than the forms of Christianity,’ and so personal experience over dogma; the expectation that Christian belief would bring about a changed life; an individualism that caused Pietists to stress the role of the laity; and ‘an inherent simplicity’ of belief and demeanor.”
And let me put in one more plug for an event particularly related to that last post: this Saturday morning’s discussion of “The Pietist Impulse at Bethel University,” part of Bethel’s Homecoming festivities. I’ll be on a panel with my Pietist Impulse co-editors G.W. Carlson and Christian Collins Winn.
The Pietist Schoolman 