A serious question, Plotinus: what's this about Pietism? I was reading about Frederician Prussia and came across a mention of Pietist Lutheran-run schools, and was wondering about their doctrine, what happened to them, key figures, and so forth.
Pietism is pretty interesting. Here is a brief summary I wrote a while back:
The godfather of Pietism was a German Lutheran pastor named Johann Arndt, who in the first years of the seventeenth century wrote two books entitled
True Christianity and
The garden of paradise. Arndt insisted that Christianity is not really about the increasingly pernickety doctrinal disputes that were raging at this time between Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic. It is about having a personal relationship with Christ that changes the way you live your life. Union with Christ is the presupposition for the Christian life rather than its goal, and Arndt recommended that the Christian should spend some time every day meditating upon the person of Christ. Here, then, we have an emphasis away from doctrine and towards lifestyle, away from a corporate concern for the church as a whole and towards the individual. Christianity is a personal way of life.
Arndts ideas were controversial: many Lutherans argued that doctrine really did matter as much as personal piety, and that the life of the church was as important as the life of the individual. Where, in Arndts scheme, was there a role for the sacraments? But others were inspired by his ideas. Among them was the Spener family in Alsace. Philipp Spener, brought up on Arndts principles, became one of the foremost Lutheran pastors in Germany: in Frankfurt, he set up conventicles, small groups within the church which met for prayer, worship and discussion. These were enormously successful, and in 1675 Spener published
Pious wishes, setting out his ideas. Spener argued that Luther had left the Reformation only half completed. He had reformed the doctrine of the church, but not its lifestyle. Spener unleashed a ferocious attack upon the Lutheran orthodoxy of his day, accusing people of obsessing over points of doctrine when they should be putting Christ at the centre of their existence and living good lives. In particular, he argued that Lutherans insistence upon the doctrine of salvation by faith alone led to laziness. The argument was much like that used by Pelagius against Augustine in an earlier age, although Spener did not deny that faith alone saves; rather, he insisted that living a good life must be central to Christianity. Similarly, while Spener did accept that correctness of doctrine was important, he insisted that it was not an end in itself but a step towards cultivating a personal relationship with Christ.
Pietism took its name from the title of Speners book, and it remained controversial, as the theologians insisted that it undermined correct doctrine. The infighting became more bitter. In 1729, a notorious Pietist named Johann Dippel published
The true evangelical demonstration, in which he argued that organised religion was completely opposed to true faith and called for the church structures and authorities to be dismantled so that people could follow the law of love, as taught by Christ, in peace.
At the same time, however, Pietism became a major force within not only Lutheran religion but German culture and society as well. In particular, many Pietists felt that their ideal of living in the light of Christ meant trying to improve education, for education was seen as the training not only of the mind but of the character. The greatest experiment in Pietist education occurred at Halle, where a new university was founded in 1694. The professor of oriental studies was a friend of Speners called August Francke, who shared his emphasis on the inner life of the individual: Francke believed that taking on the Christian life meant taking on a whole new existential attitude, one which he described as inner struggle.
Like Spener, Francke dreamed of completing the Reformation. In his case, he believed that this could be done only when society, like the church, had been reformed, and he recognised the key role that education could play in this. Francke therefore set about reforming the education system of the whole of Halle, not simply the university. He founded new schools, including training colleges for teachers, and sought to integrate the whole system, so that, for example, students at the university would help out at the schools for children. At the same time, Francke was an important figure in the setting up of missionary expeditions overseas. Under the guidance of him and others like him, Halle became a major centre of Enlightenment thought, and Francke was joined by great thinkers such as the legal theorist Christian Thomasius, also a Pietist and great believer in the moral value of education. Here too was Christian Wolff, a thorough-going rationalist philosopher firmly in the mould of his mentor Leibniz. Thus, Pietism and rationalism rubbed shoulders and benefited from each other.
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So that's basically what Pietism is. One thing I didn't mention in that summary (because I couldn't find clear evidence one way or the other, and there are contradictory versions of the stories) is that Dippel was a rather mad alchemist who experimented upon bodies from the local graveyard, attempting to create life, and this was the inspiration for Mary Shelley's book
Frankenstein. It's also said that Dippel invented the dye Prussian Blue, but he unwisely drank it, with the result that his corpse was discovered sitting on his chair with a horrified expression, turned bright blue. If this isn't true, it should be.
As for what happened to Pietism, it became very influential. It filtered into the English-speaking world via groups such as the Moravians, set up by the Pietist Zinzendorf at his community at Herrnhut. These Pietists sent missionaries to the New World who helped to spread Pietist ideas there. In particular, they influenced the young John Wesley, at that time working rather ineffectually in America. So the eighteenth-century awakenings in Britain, and the rise of Methodism, were greatly influenced by Pietism. In America, meanwhile, the "First Great Awakening" was also inspired by basically Pietist ideas. Key figures such as Theodore Frelinghuysen, Gilbert Tennent, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield combined the traditional Puritan emphasis upon Reformed doctrine with the Pietist emphasis upon spirituality and moral living and founded what was effectively the forerunner of modern evangelicalism.
Pietist ideas are still influential today, quite apart from the huge influence of Pietism's offspring evangelicalism. In particular, I think that Arndt's and Dippel's belief in a sort of eternal struggle between spiritually-minded mystics and authoritarian clergy is still very pervasive. You often encounter the idea that mysticism is intrinsically somehow subversive or prone to formal heresy - from those who think this is a good thing and those who think it's a bad thing - and this is really a classic Pietist dogma.
Yes I have a serious question being brought up Christian and taught to follow the Bible to the letter, when did God create the Universe, 5 thousand or 6 thousand years ago?
I don't believe in God, so my answer would be that he didn't. If you mean, what do
Christians believe about that, the answer is that there have been many views, because as Eran pointed out, even if one were to take everything in the Bible to be literally true there isn't enough information to date creation precisely. In fact James Ussher's date of 4004 BC was just one of many suggestions; it became famous because his chronology was printed in some eighteenth-century editions of the Bible which became particularly widespread. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an interesting article about Ussher in which he pointed out, quite correctly, that although it's fashionable to ridicule him as a kind of simplistic, fundamentalist date-adder-up, his
Annals of the Old Testament were actually a sophisticated product of the new science of chronology and represented extremely thorough scholarship in all kinds of chronological records, not just the Bible. It might seem odd that that work was published in 1650 - the year the arch-rationalist Descartes died, and when Europe was supposedly getting all rationalist and Enlightened. In fact Ussher was just as rationalist as any philosopher; rationalism, at that time, generally operated within a Christian context rather than outside it.
Obviously most Christians today, at least in the western world, do not believe the biblical creation myth to be literally true and do not believe that the universe is only a few thousand years old, so the question would be viewed as meaningless or at least desperately naive in that context.
How would you define: religiosity, non-religiosity, atheism (yeah, discussed before, but not in this context methinks), and spirituality?
I'd define "religiosity" as following a religion to a considerable degree, and this would involve participating in its rituals, putting its moral teachings into practice in one's life, believing its doctrines to be true, and playing an active part in whatever social organisation was involved in the religion. I think these are probably the four key elements of a religion, although I've probably forgotten some, and all religions emphasise different aspects. So I suppose "non-religiosity" is just the absence of this. I would define "atheism" as the belief that God does not exist. I know that some people define it as the absence of belief in God, but I think that's too close to agnosticism, and leaves us without a word for the denial of God's existence. I'm not sure I have a good definition for "spirituality". It suggests to me an interest in, or an apparent awareness of, the world beyond what is perceptible to the senses, in a way that is emotionally engaging or profound. But that's a bit vague, perhaps.
nitpicking 
