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4 - The development of pietism in the Reformed churches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2009

W. R. Ward
Affiliation:
University of Durham
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Summary

The formation of Reformed confessions

The pre-history of Pietism in the Reformed churches has been charted much less satisfactorily than in the Lutheran world, principally because it is much more difficult to chart. This was partly because the great Reformed expansion of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was halted by the Thirty Years War, leaving major reserves in Switzerland, France, the United Provinces and Hungary with a great diaspora across Germany and in Poland, and with the Church of England at one stage reckoned part of the Reformed world. Each of these communities felt the pressure to form its own confession, but the practical problems of each were different, and there was no constitutional mechanism to keep them in line doctrinally. Even the Synod of Dort did not produce a homogenised Reformed confession. Moreover, this situation had in practice existed from the beginning.

Calvin, himself a humanist as well as a theologian, had not created the kind of highly articulated Orthodoxy which came later; colleagues had worked in their own way at a variety of themes, and it is not useful to treat his successors as betraying his heritage because they continued to do the same. They wished to be regarded as Reformed theologians working in his tradition, even though their local problems varied enormously. Thus the Elector Frederick III commissioned the writing of the Heidelberg catechism and pushed its adoption, in the explicit hope of reducing tensions between Lutheran and Reformed.

Type
Chapter
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Early Evangelicalism
A Global Intellectual History, 1670–1789
, pp. 70 - 84
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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