The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Puritans & Pietists
Philipp Jakob Spener
1635–1705German (Alsatian-born)Lutheran
The Lutheran pastor who put small Bible-study groups in people's homes and started a movement.
Summary
- Lived 1635–1705, German (Alsatian-born).
- Stood in The Puritans & Pietists (1600–1730).
- Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists.
- Tradition: Lutheran / Pietist.
The life
Philipp Jakob Spener was the senior Lutheran minister in Frankfurt when he concluded that his church had sound doctrine and cold members. In 1670 he began inviting people to his house twice a week to read the Bible together and talk about it, the collegia pietatis, or gatherings for piety, which put an open Bible in the hands of laypeople instead of leaving it in the pulpit.
Five years later he set out the program in Pia Desideria: more Scripture among ordinary Christians, real practice of the priesthood of all believers, Christianity as life rather than argument, gentleness in controversy, and preachers trained to build faith rather than display learning. It made him famous and it made him enemies; theologians accused him of undermining the church, and he moved on to Dresden and then Berlin under pressure.
The movement he started fed the Halle institutions, the Moravians, and through them the Protestant missionary era. He was godfather to Zinzendorf.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · 1600–1730
- 1636Harvard is founded to train ministersThe Massachusetts Bay colony votes money for a college because, as an early account put it, they dreaded leaving an unlearned ministry to the churches once the first pastors were in the dust. It is named in 1639 for John Harvard, who willed it his library.
- 1643–1646The Westminster Assembly meetsCalled by Parliament, some 120 ministers and 30 laymen sit in Westminster Abbey through the English Civil War. They produce the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms (1647).
- 1675Spener's *Pia Desideria*Philipp Jakob Spener, a pastor in Frankfurt, publishes six plain proposals: more Bible in laypeople's hands, believers meeting in small groups, faith that shows up in life, gentler argument, ministers trained for godliness, preaching aimed at the heart. The book names a movement: Pietism.
- 1678*The Pilgrim's Progress* is publishedBunyan had spent twelve years (1660–1672) in Bedford jail rather than promise to stop preaching, making shoelace tags to feed his family, including a blind daughter. Out of those years came the dream of a man with a burden on his back, running toward a distant light.
- 1679–1688Scotland's Killing TimeCovenanters who kept preaching in open fields after outdoor worship was outlawed are hunted across the moors of the southwest. Richard Cameron falls at Airds Moss in 1680; James Renwick, the last of them executed, dies in 1688.
- Oct 1685The Edict of Nantes is revokedLouis XIV cancels the protection French Protestants had held since 1598. Estimates vary, but somewhere around 150,000 to 200,000 Huguenots flee France for England, Holland, Prussia, Switzerland, the American colonies, and the Cape.
- 1698Francke's orphanage opens at HalleAugust Hermann Francke had started a school for poor children in 1695 with a few coins left in a parish box. Halle grows into orphanage, schools, hospital, and a Bible press that will put Scripture into ordinary German hands by the hundreds of thousands.
- 1707Watts publishes *Hymns and Spiritual Songs*Isaac Watts, a dissenting pastor with a weak body and an enormous ear, argues that Christians may sing new words and not only metrical Psalms. The book carries "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross" and effectively begins English hymn-singing.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Philipp Jakob Spener at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Started small Bible-study groups in his own house, and Pietism grew out of them.
Hangs on The Puritans & Pietists: The examined heart: the century that asked whether the opened Bible had opened you.
Standing beside himThe Puritans & Pietists · 17 on this stretch of wall
Gave refugees his estate and got back a hundred-year prayer meeting and the first Protestant missionary wave.
Wrote Pilgrim's Progress in the Bedford jail rather than promise the court he would stop preaching.
The Puritans' deepest thinker, who warned that you must be killing sin or it will be killing you.
Preached Christ's tenderness toward weak believers, in a small book that changed Richard Baxter's life.
Banned from preaching, he wrote his congregation letters so full of Christ that people still read them.
Asked what Christ feels toward struggling believers right now, and wrote a whole book answering from Scripture.