In case you missed any or all of it the first time… Last week I completed a six-part series considering some significant critiques of Pietism by leading Mennonite scholars like Harold Bender and Robert Friedmann. We’ll pick up on some of the themes in a new series starting this week, asking whether Pietism provides a … More Anabaptist Critiques of Pietism: An Overview
Part four of our romp through The Pietist Impulse in Christianity raises another deceptively simple question, “Was John Wesley a Pietist?” Even if one accepts a definition of “Pietist” that encompasses people other than early modern German Lutherans, Wesley is a controversial figure. He is included in Carter Lindberg’s popular collection, The Pietist Theologians, and … More The Pietist Impulse: Wesley
Today we come to the end of a series that has looked at 20th century (neo)Anabaptist critiques of Pietism, starting with Harold Bender‘s influential “Anabaptist Vision” speech and Robert Friedmann‘s famously anti-Pietist “thesis.” After a pause to sum up that critique and look at its continuing influence, we examined how revisionist and post-revisionist Anabaptist historians … More What Pietists Can Learn from the Anabaptist Vision
As we’ve already heard from Roger Olson, Pietism is often caricatured as being anti-intellectual, and Pietists as being so concerned to avoid head-centered “dead orthodoxy” that they substitute heart-centered emotional subjectivism. In part three of our series previewing chapters in our new book, The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, we find that tension, but more importantly, … More The Pietist Impulse: Modernity
As I suggested in my weekly recap last Saturday, I’ve had a hard time convincing myself to write a second post about the man who committed the massacre in Norway last month: Anders Behring Breivik. Intending to analyze his targeting of “cultural Marxists” in addition to Muslims, I attempted to read through parts of Breivik’s … More Norway: “A Christian Fundamentalist”
In the first preview of chapters from our new book, The Pietist Impulse in Christianity, I made much of our volume’s affinity for expansive definitions of the “Pietist impulse,” by implication rejecting the “strict constructionist” take that Pietism properly construed was a certain segment of German Lutheranism in the early modern period. So it’s only … More The Pietist Impulse: Germans
A series of posts taking you day-by-day through a proposed travel version of my course HIS230L World War I. Read the introduction to the series here, or the previous post here. Friday, January 25, 2013 – to Minneapolis-St. Paul This is it: the last day of term; the day we fly home from Munich. I’ve … More Loving War, Seeking Peace
7/27/11 – Peace be to the memory of the Rev. Dr. John R. W. Stott, chief author of the Lausanne Covenant and the most important and widely respected evangelical leader in the world (according to the only man who could challenge him for that title, Billy Graham). I’ll collect several links for my Saturday recap, … More John Stott
When I associate with Pietists, I am convicted of our Anabaptist roots. When I am in a strong Anabaptist milieu, I want to espouse Brethren Pietism. (Dale Brown, 1994) For the fifth post in this series on Anabaptist critiques of Pietism, we hear from Dale Brown and other scholars associated with the Church of the … More Anabaptist AND Pietist
A series of posts taking you day-by-day through a proposed travel version of my course HIS230L World War I. Read the introduction to the series here, or the previous post here. Thursday, January 24, 2013 – Dachau Tomorrow we’ll hop a plane back to the States, but as a last experience of post-WWI Europe, we’re … More Pretending
The Pietist Schoolman 