In his essay “Lutheran Pietism and Catholic Piety,” found in the collection The Catholicity of the Reformation, church historian Robert Louis Wilken argues that Lutheran pietism was in part an attempt to recover some of the features of medieval piety that had been swept aside by the Reformation. Johann Arndt, the grandfather of Lutheran pietism, was steeped in medieval spirituality and even published editions of the German mystic Johann Tauler’s Theologica Germania (which influenced Luther himself) as well as Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. Arndt’s own magnum opus, True Christianity was extremely influential on later pietists like Philip Jakob Spener and Wilken says that Lutheran immigrants were likely to have True Christianity along with a Bible, a hymnal, and a copy of Luther’s Small Catechism with them upon arriving in America.

Pietism was concerned to correct what it saw as the one-sidedness of Lutheran orthodoxy with its emphasis on doctrinal correctness and a strongly forensic view of justification. While the early pietists like Arndt and Spener strongly believed in justification by faith, they believed just as strongly that it should call forth a new life in the believer, marked by an alteration in the affections. The believer comes to actually love God:

In Arndt, as in all spiritual writers, the movement of God toward human beings is complemented by a movement of the believer toward God, a raising up, an ascent, which is propelled by love and longing for God. Love is the basis for fellowship and union with God. “The end of all theology and Christianity is union with God . . . marriage with the heavenly bridegroom Jesus Christ.” (p. 83)

Wilken says that the passions and affections have long had a positive role in Christian piety, in contrast with Stoicism which urged its followers to eliminate their passions and subordinate them to reason. For theologians like Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, eros, or desire, while prone to distortion, can lead us to God. This idea is more Platonic than Stoic; for Plato eros should prompt us to move beyond the material realm to contemplation of the Good and the Beautiful. For Gregory, meanwhile, desire and yearning lead us to cling to God and learn the “habit of loving the beautiful.” Maximus the Confessor says that desire can bring about a “yearning for divine things” and that the passions are necessary to motivate us to fix our minds on God.

The pietism of Arndt, Spener, and Johann Gerhard, Wilken contends, was in continuity with these ancient strands of Christian spirituality. For Gerhard, God’s love toward us isn’t simply a declaration of forgiveness, but also kindles the flame of love in our hearts for God in return. “Love is the chief thing that unites us to God because the one who loves and that which is loved become one” (quoted by Wilken, p. 89).

Whatever one wishes to call these strands of Lutheran spirituality, there can be no question that their piety grew out of a genuinely biblical and hence authentically Catholic impulse. In giving priority to the love of God in the Christian life, they set forth a vision of the Christian life, as did St. Paul and St. John, in which the Christ for us was perfected by the Christ in us, and not least, they inspired the faithful to pursue a life of holiness as does the Bible.

[…]

The spiritual world they presented to Lutheran readers was not the product of deformed late medieval piety (if there ever was such a thing); it was the fruit of centuries of Christian thought and experience based on the Scriptures and informed by the central articles of faith–namely, the two natures of Christ and the doctrine of the Holy Trinity–and by the sacraments. Indeed, one might press the point to argue that it was because they drew on the spiritual traditions of the medieval world, which were, of course, nurtured by the spiritual writers of the early church, that these early pietists were so biblical. (pp. 90-1)

Unfortunately, later pietism seems to have gotten detached from the firm commitment to Word and Sacrament that characterized men like Arndt and Spener and become more interested in spiritual introspection, looking for evidence of sanctification in the self, rather than looking to Christ for assurance. Some of the later pietist writings are filled with a morbid introspection and obsession with cleansing the self of any trace of sin. The genius of the Lutheran reformation, it seems to me, was that it boldly proposed that all of our righteousness rests in Christ, not in ourselves and comes as a sheer gift. Ideally this leads to a certain self-forgetfulness that expresses itself in gratitude toward God and love for neighbor.

Wilken says that Lutheran pietism was bound to peter out once it was no longer being nourished by catholic piety (a judgment that is not too surprising considering that Wilken has since gone over to Rome). He deems the Reformation a brilliant, but one-sided movement that needed Catholic substance and Protestant principle to maintain a sustainable piety.

He concludes:

The early Lutheran spiritual writers, Johan Arndt and John Gerhard, remind us that the first commandment is: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” From this they draw the obvious conclusion: loving God is the beginning and the end of the Christian life, and Christian life is about the ordering of one’s loves. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Christian faith is as much a matter of what one loves as it is of what one believes or what one does. For the gift that God desires is the gift of ourselves, and there is no giving of the self that is not a giving of the heart. St. Augustine wrote: “We offer to him, on the altar of the heart, the sacrifice of humility and praise, and the flame on the altar is the burning fire of love. To see him as he can be seen and to cleave to him, we purify ourselves from every stain of sin and evil desire and we consecrate ourselves in his name. For he himself is the source of our bliss, he himself is the goal of all our striving. . . . For we direct our course towards him with love so that in reaching him we may find our rest, and attain our happiness because we have achieved our fulfillment in him.” (pp. 91-2)

Obviously I’d like to be less pessimistic than Wilken about magisterial Protestantism’s ability to sustain the kind of piety that does result in the proper ordering of our loves (or at least a movement in that direction). Much of what passes for “spirituality” in bookstores and on TV, even supposedly Christian spirituality, is more about coping with stress or getting a better career than it is about learning to love God. And many of our churches seem wary of anything that doesn’t promise an immediate ethical or social payoff. The idea of loving God for his own sake, rather than as a means to some human project, seems to have fallen on hard times.